Back in Galileo's time, arguing that the Earth orbited the sun appeared to be antithetical to Christian beliefs. They got over it. If they understood Physics (which shows the Universe to be somewhat older than 6000 years no matter how you slice it) then Fundamentalists would be messing with Physics textbooks instead of Biology textbooks.
Perhaps we should start arguing for the word "Christianity" to be replaced with "Groundless Conjecture of Christianity" in all textbooks.
Actually, copying is a relatively cheap operation in modern CPUs unless the copy is huge, since most of the work is done in the caches. The mania for "zero copy" complicates systems considerably, makes them less reliable, and, in the end, usually doesn't speed up real work by much.
Let's see -- Linus's argument is that "we mustn't rely on our great hardware for performance and we should code the right way" -- fair enough. Here, you're defending his approach by saying that "even though copying may *seem* inefficient, it isn't, because we have caches (i.e. great hardware) that makes it fast.
Intuitively speaking, a zero copy approach makes sense. You ask for a duplicate copy of some information that (most likely) you won't want to change, so instead of copying it we point you at the original. If you decide you do actually want to change it, a page fault occurs, and we run off, make a copy, and give that to you instead.
Now a reliability argument is essentially specious. Every approach we're talking about here is superficially simple and underneath very complex. In one case we're relying on all kinds of cache magic to work properly; cache implementations are really quite complex, but they work reliably. In the other we're relying on all kinds of memory manager magic to work properly... ditto for them.
It's really quite disingenuous to label the other side "complex and unreliable" when both sides are complex (and, as far as we can tell, reliable). In the end it's the performance that counts, and here we have an argument that the zero copy approach either "isn't faster in the real world, only benchmarks" -- ok then create a better benchmark OR "is only a little bit faster". Well, a little bit faster is still faster.
A really interesting article, but his take on the whole "Microsoft is not evil" thing by looking at what it's like to be employed there reminds me of the Hank Scorpio episode of The Simpsons. Do you mind helping out with those enemy soldiers on your way out? They're trying to destroy the doomsday weapon we've been working so hard to finish.
Sure it's a fine place to work and the folks are all just family people trying to solve customers' problems... It's just that their customers are IT Managers who want to lock down Windows so that bonehead users can't email javascript files to each other (even as attachments) but apparently have no problem with embedded vbscript in email.
For years, Seinfeld had a Mac SE in his apartment. Why? It was actually his SE. Apple eventually provided him with a Duo (with dock and monitor) replacement so that a more current model would be placed.
Similarly, when we first saw a Powerbook on Sex and the City, its logo was taped over. Not product placement (by the way, that's a very handy clue). Likewise the ibook used by Buffy's friends in several episodes.
Apple even gets plenty of free advertising in advertisements for other companies. Almost every time you see a website on a TV ad it's either Safari + Aqua or a fake Safari with fake Aqua.
It seems to me that you don't *need* to buy a distro or own a distro, you need in-house expertise. There's no point "buying" an open source company if the engineers etc. leave, and if you hire the engineers then the company is basically dead.
It seems to me that the reason IBM isn't buying distros is that (a) it understands this, and (b) it doesn't need to (because it already has the expertise). What Ellison is revealing by making his statements is that either he doesn't understand this OR he does understand this but feels Oracle lacks the in-house expertise to build its own distros and needs to get it fast OR he's just saying random garbage to try to sound cool. Or perhaps he just wants to get sued by SCO!
Anyone notice how when everyone was saying global warming was [nonsense?] seven or eight years ago, Slashdot was all for the Kyoto protocol.
I think the consensus has been overwhelmingly that global warming is real and a significant concern for a lot longer than Slashdot has been around. Kyoto is an international initiative that has been decades in the works -- something like that doesn't get started overnight or with a lot of support from the scientific community.
Hint: Just because something is unpopular doesn't make it right. This is why people dislike nerds.
This statement makes no sense (at best it implies that nerds are unpopular, hence possibly wrong, and therefore not liked... which is both circular and bizarre), so its utility as a "hint" is negligible.
In general, I think the reverse statement is more useful and also more likely to explain the unpopularity of nerds, i.e. being right can make you unpopular. This certainly helps to explain why nerds are unpopular in, say, high school.
It's hard to be a hardcore coder AND a hardcore World of Warcraft / EverQuest raider. 12h coding + 12h of grinding xp/pharming/raiding doesn't leave a lot of time in a day.
3D Studio Max Blitz3D (one day BlitzMax will supplant it) Ultimate Unwrap
That's about all I can think of. 3D Studio Max is the kicker. It's by far the best tradeoff in ease-of-use versus power in the 3D tools space (which is why it's continuing to gain market share even against its big name rivals despite their having undercut its price). Ironically, its scripting language seems to be inspired in large part by HyperTalk and overall it has a very Mac-like interface.
Re:Actually Woz was the more important Steve ...
on
I, Woz
·
· Score: 1
It seems to me that both Steves were important, and either alone wouldn't have achieved nearly as much.
On his own, Woz would have had a happy, successful career with HP and we'd be having CP/M vs. UNIX flamewars (both with, maybe, windowing interfaces for command lines).
Woz contributed a great deal to the early Apple (obviously) including designing the Apple I, the Apple II, and the floppy drive controller that made Apple a billion dollar company. But his involvement in the Lisa and Mac were negligible -- and that's where the true impact of Jobs lies. Without someone with the right combination of technical acumen, user-centered thinking, taste, charisma, and arrogance, the graphical but fundamentally unusable (no draggable icons or overlapping windows, three mouse buttons just to operate menus) and prohibitively expensive Xerox PARC GUI may well have become a forgotten dead end (just as Englebart's earlier demonstrations of prototype GUI had not found much fertile ground), and computer usability would probably have taken ten or twenty more years to move forward.
The problem for Woz, I think, is that producing computers became too complex for just one brilliant guy to figure out. As soon as that happened, Jobs's qualities came to the forefront. Is Woz a nice guy? Sure -- but very few nice guys are able to herd a bunch of brilliant, creative people towards a shared goal.
In a later post, you compare Jobs to MacArthur (why MacArthur of all people?) and suggest that unlike Jobs, MacArther was a genius. Both are leaders and not foot-soldiers. As to who is or isn't a genius -- choose your yardstick.
No. A euphemism is a weaker, more ambiguous term. E.g. "collateral damage" is a euphemism for "killing innocent bystanders" or "blowing up the Chinese Embassy". Universal is what's called a "lie". "Exclusive" or "Special" or "Unique" would be euphemisms.
It's pretty clear (for example from leaks about proposed Windows Vista SKUs in which the "Gamer" version of Windows would be more expensive than the "Professional" version) that Microsoft has decided that Gamers are idiots with too much money to spend. I would guess that there's ample evidence to support this given the success of $1000 paired video cards to get 0.5fps more in first person shooters, "collector's editions" of games which cost $20 more and contain a figurine or cloth map, or the actual existence of Alienware.
Everything about XBox 360 is about nickle-and-dime-and-dollaring every spare penny out of gamers. Remove every possible barrier to purchasing and then fill the gamer's world with impulse purchases.
Unlike most of the collectible crap you find in a typical comic book store, this stuff doesn't even require closet space...
First of all, he doesn't differentiate between the things that are good about email and not about (say) his product or (say) Lotus Domino. Second he misses a bunch of things.
Quotations below are from TFA.
"Email is Easy To Understand"
So should a collaboration system be. The fact that his is cluttered, doesn't render correctly in anything other than IE, looks too much like Outlook while not behaving like Outlook is probably a barrier to adoption.
"Email is Universal"
So is "the web". If people perceive your web-based app as being "the web" then there's no barrier to adoption. If they perceive it as being an application they need to learn, bye bye. This is a big problem with Web 2.0 advocates -- they need to lose "application envy" and build applications whose behavior is as transparent as using the web. If it were easy, anyone could do it.
"Email is Accessible from Anywhere"
Well kind of. Email doesn't work superbly well offline; the web doesn't work at all offline. Web-based email (gmail, anyway) has gotten so good that for me its benefits (nearly always accessible) outweigh its downsides (not available offline). If your collaboration tool doesn't offer enough benefits to outweigh total unavailability offline (or somehow address this issue without becoming too complex) you lose.
"Email Can Be Personalized"
So can anything. So what? There's no skin you can put on FireFox that makes it look as good as random OS X dialog box.
"Email is Manageable/Configurable"
Again, duh. So is everything. Indeed, configuration and personalization are generally not as important as not sucking.
"Email is Searchable"
Kind of. Searching your email in Outlook/Exchange sucks canine gonads. Searching email in OS X prior to 10.4 sucked nearly as badly. Searching gmail is getting close to good. Again, why can't this be a feature of ANY system?
"Email is In Your Face"
Actually here he completely misses the point. He refers to email as being disruptive "like instant messaging" but effective. NO. WRONG.
Email is necessary. You need email, like you need mail. You can't just ignore your mailbox, because the law says that, for example, sending you a letter saying that if you don't pay a bill you will go to jail constitutes sufficient notice of that fact. Since email is taking over the role of mail (e.g. an offer of employment sent by email is basically just as binding as a physical letter) you need email. It doesn't matter HOW GOOD your product is, it won't stop folks checking their email. Similarly, if someone stops checking their project tool, chances are they won't stop checking their email unless they've basically stopped participating in life, in which case you weren't going to contact them anyway.
"Email Just Works"
No it doesn't. But because it's necessary (see above) folks will damn well get it working.
The fact you don't remember the model number somewhat undercuts the authenticity of your story. I think I'd remember the model number of a computer that caught fire in class...
AFAIK there were only two incidents nationwide of the problem with the PB5300, and the same problem occurred with other makes of bleeding edge laptop at the time.
I guess you prefer a company that produces consistently sucky, unoriginal machines consistently over one that produces awesome machines with occasional exceptions. Heck a few bad products in twenty years is actually very good going. Indeed, it's a rare product that Apple produces that is critically acclaimed OR commercially successful (the new $99 leather iPod case being such a product).
I had a Powerbook 5300 and it sucked in many ways (mainly the hinge that held the screen up was wonky, as was the case with numerous other laptops I've owned or used), but it never caught fire.
More's the point -- a scientific study showing religion doesn't work is about as useful as a bunch of religious people praying for guidance on science.
What we need is some kind of large scale prayer meeting that determines praying over sick people doesn't help. In any event, praying for a sick loved one may make you feel better and it's cheaper, healthier, and possibly less time-consuming than getting drunk.
Oddly enough I suspect that Nature is in a similar situation to Britannica.
Britannica started out attempting to provide definitive information on everything and then as this became increasingly impossible it settled on becoming an authoritative general reference, which is where it would like to continue to position itself.
Wikipedia attacks Britannica from below, by providing a generally more approachable style of content (Britannica tends to be exceedingly dry), covering "pop culture" and other things beneath Britannica's notice, and from above by being more timely, and able to (quickly) devote effort to topics of current interest.
Nature, and other scientific journals, are in a similar position. They are unable to cope with the deluge of research being performed and subject to attacks of bias (generally justified -- consider how many key scientific papers could not be published in the key journals of their day owing to challenging entrenched prejudices). We see blatantly fraud managing to slip through peer review processes while at the same time entire groups of scientists are unable to get published in leading journals because their area of research is out of favor with an editorial board.
Rotating media is mentioned as an obvious way of increasing capacity without increasing the number of reading devices.
Note that the experimental proofs of concept generally involve a non-moving read/write component and non-moving media.
Also note that it is possible to generate holographs on the fly, and it is possible (how's this for crazy) to create holographic mirrors... so you could "move" a read/write laser using a virtual (holographic) mirror and have a large capacity holographic storage device with no moving parts.
One of the greatest promises of optical storage was always to eliminate moving parts so that you could store huge amounts of stuff cheaply and reliably.
I imagine many Slashdotters will have little idea what Lotus Domino does that anyone would care about. The simple version is this -- it behaves something like an organic content management system (i.e. like Wikipedia, say) which anyone with sufficient privileges can tack stuff onto (i.e. add or modify new nodes anywhere) AND you can store any chunk(s) of the tree on your hard disk and work with them offline and then merge back as appropriate. So, for example, you can synch some subtree dealing with a topic you're interested in to your laptop, work with and edit it offline while (say) flying from Sydney to New York, and then resynch when you're next online. This is definitely useful, non-trivial functionality.
Domino does a bunch of other stuff but the offline/remerge functionality is the fundamentally cool thing it does that other products don't do. As, say, an email client and calendar, Domino is a pretty horrible.
I used Lotus Notes for several years while working for a big consulting firm. It was one of the worst designed, ugliest programs ever. It had groundbreaking functionality (see above) but even then it was easy to imagine something better, easier to use, and easier to administer.
Domino can still do some very useful things (again, see above) Exchange can't do, or does very poorly (indeed Exchange is worse than either IMAP or POP at dealing with offline clients -- and Notes is substantially better). It seems to me that there ought to be web-based tools that do everything EXCEPT the offline component far better than Domino or Exchange do, and more cheaply and simply, but I don't think Domino has a significant competitor in terms of its offline functionality (more's the pity).
The estimated TCO for a laptop PC back in 1997 was somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000. The estimated TCO for a single Lotus Notes client was $9,000 -- Domino's functionality is great, but it ain't cheap. This would be of academic interest if Lotus Domino had improved substantially in usability or reliability in the nine years since, but by all accounts it is basically the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Fusion will lead to thermal pollution. Most of our problems can be reduced by (a) birth control and (b) energy conservation.
Back in Galileo's time, arguing that the Earth orbited the sun appeared to be antithetical to Christian beliefs. They got over it. If they understood Physics (which shows the Universe to be somewhat older than 6000 years no matter how you slice it) then Fundamentalists would be messing with Physics textbooks instead of Biology textbooks.
Perhaps we should start arguing for the word "Christianity" to be replaced with "Groundless Conjecture of Christianity" in all textbooks.
Actually, copying is a relatively cheap operation in modern CPUs unless the copy is huge, since most of the work is done in the caches. The mania for "zero copy" complicates systems considerably, makes them less reliable, and, in the end, usually doesn't speed up real work by much.
... ditto for them.
Let's see -- Linus's argument is that "we mustn't rely on our great hardware for performance and we should code the right way" -- fair enough. Here, you're defending his approach by saying that "even though copying may *seem* inefficient, it isn't, because we have caches (i.e. great hardware) that makes it fast.
Intuitively speaking, a zero copy approach makes sense. You ask for a duplicate copy of some information that (most likely) you won't want to change, so instead of copying it we point you at the original. If you decide you do actually want to change it, a page fault occurs, and we run off, make a copy, and give that to you instead.
Now a reliability argument is essentially specious. Every approach we're talking about here is superficially simple and underneath very complex. In one case we're relying on all kinds of cache magic to work properly; cache implementations are really quite complex, but they work reliably. In the other we're relying on all kinds of memory manager magic to work properly
It's really quite disingenuous to label the other side "complex and unreliable" when both sides are complex (and, as far as we can tell, reliable). In the end it's the performance that counts, and here we have an argument that the zero copy approach either "isn't faster in the real world, only benchmarks" -- ok then create a better benchmark OR "is only a little bit faster". Well, a little bit faster is still faster.
Your still here?
So now you're accussing Linux advocates of being illiterate?
A really interesting article, but his take on the whole "Microsoft is not evil" thing by looking at what it's like to be employed there reminds me of the Hank Scorpio episode of The Simpsons. Do you mind helping out with those enemy soldiers on your way out? They're trying to destroy the doomsday weapon we've been working so hard to finish.
Sure it's a fine place to work and the folks are all just family people trying to solve customers' problems... It's just that their customers are IT Managers who want to lock down Windows so that bonehead users can't email javascript files to each other (even as attachments) but apparently have no problem with embedded vbscript in email.
Having had a huge amount of experience with Thinkpads over the years, they may be good laptops and duarable, but they're butt-ugly.
For years, Seinfeld had a Mac SE in his apartment. Why? It was actually his SE. Apple eventually provided him with a Duo (with dock and monitor) replacement so that a more current model would be placed.
Similarly, when we first saw a Powerbook on Sex and the City, its logo was taped over. Not product placement (by the way, that's a very handy clue). Likewise the ibook used by Buffy's friends in several episodes.
Apple even gets plenty of free advertising in advertisements for other companies. Almost every time you see a website on a TV ad it's either Safari + Aqua or a fake Safari with fake Aqua.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Wish I could mod something "needs whitespace"
It seems to me that you don't *need* to buy a distro or own a distro, you need in-house expertise. There's no point "buying" an open source company if the engineers etc. leave, and if you hire the engineers then the company is basically dead.
It seems to me that the reason IBM isn't buying distros is that (a) it understands this, and (b) it doesn't need to (because it already has the expertise). What Ellison is revealing by making his statements is that either he doesn't understand this OR he does understand this but feels Oracle lacks the in-house expertise to build its own distros and needs to get it fast OR he's just saying random garbage to try to sound cool. Or perhaps he just wants to get sued by SCO!
er ...without a lot of support from the scientific community...
Anyone notice how when everyone was saying global warming was [nonsense?] seven or eight years ago, Slashdot was all for the Kyoto protocol.
... which is both circular and bizarre), so its utility as a "hint" is negligible.
I think the consensus has been overwhelmingly that global warming is real and a significant concern for a lot longer than Slashdot has been around. Kyoto is an international initiative that has been decades in the works -- something like that doesn't get started overnight or with a lot of support from the scientific community.
Hint: Just because something is unpopular doesn't make it right. This is why people dislike nerds.
This statement makes no sense (at best it implies that nerds are unpopular, hence possibly wrong, and therefore not liked
In general, I think the reverse statement is more useful and also more likely to explain the unpopularity of nerds, i.e. being right can make you unpopular. This certainly helps to explain why nerds are unpopular in, say, high school.
It's hard to be a hardcore coder AND a hardcore World of Warcraft / EverQuest raider. 12h coding + 12h of grinding xp/pharming/raiding doesn't leave a lot of time in a day.
3D Studio Max
Blitz3D (one day BlitzMax will supplant it)
Ultimate Unwrap
That's about all I can think of. 3D Studio Max is the kicker. It's by far the best tradeoff in ease-of-use versus power in the 3D tools space (which is why it's continuing to gain market share even against its big name rivals despite their having undercut its price). Ironically, its scripting language seems to be inspired in large part by HyperTalk and overall it has a very Mac-like interface.
It seems to me that both Steves were important, and either alone wouldn't have achieved nearly as much.
On his own, Woz would have had a happy, successful career with HP and we'd be having CP/M vs. UNIX flamewars (both with, maybe, windowing interfaces for command lines).
Woz contributed a great deal to the early Apple (obviously) including designing the Apple I, the Apple II, and the floppy drive controller that made Apple a billion dollar company. But his involvement in the Lisa and Mac were negligible -- and that's where the true impact of Jobs lies. Without someone with the right combination of technical acumen, user-centered thinking, taste, charisma, and arrogance, the graphical but fundamentally unusable (no draggable icons or overlapping windows, three mouse buttons just to operate menus) and prohibitively expensive Xerox PARC GUI may well have become a forgotten dead end (just as Englebart's earlier demonstrations of prototype GUI had not found much fertile ground), and computer usability would probably have taken ten or twenty more years to move forward.
The problem for Woz, I think, is that producing computers became too complex for just one brilliant guy to figure out. As soon as that happened, Jobs's qualities came to the forefront. Is Woz a nice guy? Sure -- but very few nice guys are able to herd a bunch of brilliant, creative people towards a shared goal.
In a later post, you compare Jobs to MacArthur (why MacArthur of all people?) and suggest that unlike Jobs, MacArther was a genius. Both are leaders and not foot-soldiers. As to who is or isn't a genius -- choose your yardstick.
"this is an example of Irony"
;)
I sense a bit of Sarcasm too
"Universal part is a euphemism"
No. A euphemism is a weaker, more ambiguous term. E.g. "collateral damage" is a euphemism for "killing innocent bystanders" or "blowing up the Chinese Embassy". Universal is what's called a "lie". "Exclusive" or "Special" or "Unique" would be euphemisms.
I also like DVDShrink for removing region codes from DVDs I bought (legally) when I (legally) lived in Australia but can't play on US DVD players.
It's pretty clear (for example from leaks about proposed Windows Vista SKUs in which the "Gamer" version of Windows would be more expensive than the "Professional" version) that Microsoft has decided that Gamers are idiots with too much money to spend. I would guess that there's ample evidence to support this given the success of $1000 paired video cards to get 0.5fps more in first person shooters, "collector's editions" of games which cost $20 more and contain a figurine or cloth map, or the actual existence of Alienware.
Everything about XBox 360 is about nickle-and-dime-and-dollaring every spare penny out of gamers. Remove every possible barrier to purchasing and then fill the gamer's world with impulse purchases.
Unlike most of the collectible crap you find in a typical comic book store, this stuff doesn't even require closet space...
First of all, he doesn't differentiate between the things that are good about email and not about (say) his product or (say) Lotus Domino. Second he misses a bunch of things.
Quotations below are from TFA.
"Email is Easy To Understand"
So should a collaboration system be. The fact that his is cluttered, doesn't render correctly in anything other than IE, looks too much like Outlook while not behaving like Outlook is probably a barrier to adoption.
"Email is Universal"
So is "the web". If people perceive your web-based app as being "the web" then there's no barrier to adoption. If they perceive it as being an application they need to learn, bye bye. This is a big problem with Web 2.0 advocates -- they need to lose "application envy" and build applications whose behavior is as transparent as using the web. If it were easy, anyone could do it.
"Email is Accessible from Anywhere"
Well kind of. Email doesn't work superbly well offline; the web doesn't work at all offline. Web-based email (gmail, anyway) has gotten so good that for me its benefits (nearly always accessible) outweigh its downsides (not available offline). If your collaboration tool doesn't offer enough benefits to outweigh total unavailability offline (or somehow address this issue without becoming too complex) you lose.
"Email Can Be Personalized"
So can anything. So what? There's no skin you can put on FireFox that makes it look as good as random OS X dialog box.
"Email is Manageable/Configurable"
Again, duh. So is everything. Indeed, configuration and personalization are generally not as important as not sucking.
"Email is Searchable"
Kind of. Searching your email in Outlook/Exchange sucks canine gonads. Searching email in OS X prior to 10.4 sucked nearly as badly. Searching gmail is getting close to good. Again, why can't this be a feature of ANY system?
"Email is In Your Face"
Actually here he completely misses the point. He refers to email as being disruptive "like instant messaging" but effective. NO. WRONG.
Email is necessary. You need email, like you need mail. You can't just ignore your mailbox, because the law says that, for example, sending you a letter saying that if you don't pay a bill you will go to jail constitutes sufficient notice of that fact. Since email is taking over the role of mail (e.g. an offer of employment sent by email is basically just as binding as a physical letter) you need email. It doesn't matter HOW GOOD your product is, it won't stop folks checking their email. Similarly, if someone stops checking their project tool, chances are they won't stop checking their email unless they've basically stopped participating in life, in which case you weren't going to contact them anyway.
"Email Just Works"
No it doesn't. But because it's necessary (see above) folks will damn well get it working.
The fact you don't remember the model number somewhat undercuts the authenticity of your story. I think I'd remember the model number of a computer that caught fire in class...
AFAIK there were only two incidents nationwide of the problem with the PB5300, and the same problem occurred with other makes of bleeding edge laptop at the time.
I guess you prefer a company that produces consistently sucky, unoriginal machines consistently over one that produces awesome machines with occasional exceptions. Heck a few bad products in twenty years is actually very good going. Indeed, it's a rare product that Apple produces that is critically acclaimed OR commercially successful (the new $99 leather iPod case being such a product).
I had a Powerbook 5300 and it sucked in many ways (mainly the hinge that held the screen up was wonky, as was the case with numerous other laptops I've owned or used), but it never caught fire.
More's the point -- a scientific study showing religion doesn't work is about as useful as a bunch of religious people praying for guidance on science.
What we need is some kind of large scale prayer meeting that determines praying over sick people doesn't help. In any event, praying for a sick loved one may make you feel better and it's cheaper, healthier, and possibly less time-consuming than getting drunk.
Oddly enough I suspect that Nature is in a similar situation to Britannica.
Britannica started out attempting to provide definitive information on everything and then as this became increasingly impossible it settled on becoming an authoritative general reference, which is where it would like to continue to position itself.
Wikipedia attacks Britannica from below, by providing a generally more approachable style of content (Britannica tends to be exceedingly dry), covering "pop culture" and other things beneath Britannica's notice, and from above by being more timely, and able to (quickly) devote effort to topics of current interest.
Nature, and other scientific journals, are in a similar position. They are unable to cope with the deluge of research being performed and subject to attacks of bias (generally justified -- consider how many key scientific papers could not be published in the key journals of their day owing to challenging entrenched prejudices). We see blatantly fraud managing to slip through peer review processes while at the same time entire groups of scientists are unable to get published in leading journals because their area of research is out of favor with an editorial board.
So by your reasoning the US should have no say in the development of HTML since it was invented at a European university?
I could garentee that their own people would revolt when they flicked off the switch to the rest of the world who would stay with the EU
If "flicking off the switch" were a meaningful threat then it wouldn't be the internet.
But Lotus never effectively integrated it with anything, so Notes largely just became a proprietary island
You can attach arbitrary documents to any node. It's not elegant, but it's still quite useful.
Again, think Wikipedia with the ability to take any part of the tree offline, edit it, and merge it back in.
Rotating media is mentioned as an obvious way of increasing capacity without increasing the number of reading devices.
... so you could "move" a read/write laser using a virtual (holographic) mirror and have a large capacity holographic storage device with no moving parts.
Note that the experimental proofs of concept generally involve a non-moving read/write component and non-moving media.
Also note that it is possible to generate holographs on the fly, and it is possible (how's this for crazy) to create holographic mirrors
One of the greatest promises of optical storage was always to eliminate moving parts so that you could store huge amounts of stuff cheaply and reliably.
I imagine many Slashdotters will have little idea what Lotus Domino does that anyone would care about. The simple version is this -- it behaves something like an organic content management system (i.e. like Wikipedia, say) which anyone with sufficient privileges can tack stuff onto (i.e. add or modify new nodes anywhere) AND you can store any chunk(s) of the tree on your hard disk and work with them offline and then merge back as appropriate. So, for example, you can synch some subtree dealing with a topic you're interested in to your laptop, work with and edit it offline while (say) flying from Sydney to New York, and then resynch when you're next online. This is definitely useful, non-trivial functionality.
Domino does a bunch of other stuff but the offline/remerge functionality is the fundamentally cool thing it does that other products don't do. As, say, an email client and calendar, Domino is a pretty horrible.
I used Lotus Notes for several years while working for a big consulting firm. It was one of the worst designed, ugliest programs ever. It had groundbreaking functionality (see above) but even then it was easy to imagine something better, easier to use, and easier to administer.
Domino can still do some very useful things (again, see above) Exchange can't do, or does very poorly (indeed Exchange is worse than either IMAP or POP at dealing with offline clients -- and Notes is substantially better). It seems to me that there ought to be web-based tools that do everything EXCEPT the offline component far better than Domino or Exchange do, and more cheaply and simply, but I don't think Domino has a significant competitor in terms of its offline functionality (more's the pity).
The estimated TCO for a laptop PC back in 1997 was somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000. The estimated TCO for a single Lotus Notes client was $9,000 -- Domino's functionality is great, but it ain't cheap. This would be of academic interest if Lotus Domino had improved substantially in usability or reliability in the nine years since, but by all accounts it is basically the same.