By the way, I still agree with the conclusions of the article. A 'problem' like Microsoft will never be solved with a 'solution' like more government intervention. Microsoft's tiny, agile competitors, including open source projects, will be their undoing. If the U.S. government ever took an interest in Microsoft, then Microsoft would probably cease to be profitable, but would never ever go away. See Bombardier and the Canadian government for an example of how not to do things.
Actually, that looks like a Mac in the background - those pics may not be from 1983 at all but from... 1984!
Bill Gates had early access to Macs. Maybe it was 1983 after all?
Re:Neoliberal Tyranny of Enforced Competition
on
Life Interrupted
·
· Score: 1
Ermmm... and what does the government do with that money? Make a huge stash and burn it?
Do you suppose that's what I was going to do with it? No. I would spend it too, except that I would spend it much more carefully than the government ever would. So what does that mean? Isn't a dollar spent a dollar spent?
No. I can buy a widget on sale for $5, but does the government shop around? No, they tender a contract for 1000 custom-made widgets for $50,000, meaning that government widgets cost $50 each, meaning that in order for the government to buy 1000 widgets, they have to prevent the purchase, by individuals of 10,000 widgets. That hurts productivity, which is a measure of our quality of life.
Of course not. It returns to your pocket, indirectly.
It is far better to leave it in my pocket, directly. See above rant.
In forms of unemployment/health benefits or pensions, or highways, or public transportation systems, or protection against crime or fire., or..
If any of the 'sacred' institutions you mentioned were absent, we could simply pay for them ourselves. Does your government supply you with cable TV, high-speed internet, fire insurance, magazine subscriptions, or pet food? No. But if they ever started, then about three months later you wouldn't even be able to imagine getting those things for your own sweet self.
And to boot, it might be a better allocation of resources.
And monkeys might fly out of my butt. Of course, I'd have to give 50% of said monkeys to the government.
Back in about 1992 I read a fascinating article about Spread Spectrum on a mailing list called the Fringe Report. (Sorry, I can find no links to archives.) In a nutshell, the article proposed that instead of divvying up the spectrum into channels, it is left wide open for everyone's use. Broadcasting and receiving, instead of happening in one narrow band of frequency, would be spread throughout the entire bandwidth, using a packet-like system. The broadcaster would send out packets wherever there was an opening, and receivers would monitor the entire bandwidth, pulling in the packets they wanted.
It turns out that bandwidth allocated in this way is unlimited. Bandwidth scarcity is simply due to the way we have allocated the spectrum into channels. The best explanation I have read is to think of a pinhole camera. All the light from the scene in front of the camera, visible or otherwise, has managed to squeeze through a pinhole without any picture degradation.
Imagine if every PC, phone, radio, iPod, etc., had wireless spread spectrum capability, along with some sort of peer-to-peer scheme. Except for the cost of electricity, we could have a free, world-wide wireless internet with unlimited bandwidth. It would be the end of paying for phone, cable, sattelite TV, ISP, pagers, etc.
On a totally different topic, can anyone explain to me one of the article's suggestions for new spectrum uses:
Imagine, for example... new games, such as three-dimensional hide and seek.
If there's any other way for people to play hide-and-seek, except in three dimensions, I'd like to see it!
Douglas Englebart first demoed a mouse in 1968. The original had a horizontal wheel and a vertical wheel, and you had to tip it so as to only move one wheel at a time.
For those too wrapped up in the Xerox-Parc-invented-everything fantasy, (because it makes them feel better when it's obvious Microsoft invented very little,) Jef Raskin has an excellent and short essay about the early days with the Macintosh.
You're absolutely right. I used a three-button optical mouse on an IBM XT in 1985. (It only worked on a special, metal mouse pad which had tiny red horizontal lines and green vertical lines.)
I should have said something like "years before mice were regularly used by the majority of Wintel machines." Especially since even Atari 800s and Commodore 64s were PCs, and had third-party mice available.
Note for inaccurate posters - it was actually ten months, the ST being released in January '85, Windows 1.0 being released in November '85.
In 1987, I worked for a company that built and sold their own line of PCs. There wasn't a mouse in the house.
And vast numbers of PC users stuck with DOS, mouse-less, right up until 1995, when Windows 95 was released. I worked at Babbages until the summer of 1994, and there was a constant parade of people wanting to remove Windows 3 because they preferred DOS. Many others complained that Microsoft had ceased to update DOS versions of their favourite software.
On a 1980s computer, with a more limited set of functions, and a computing public with a lower level of computing knowledge, one mouse button was probably better than two.
Good point. There once was a time when you had to explain to people what double-clicking meant. (And if they had an Atari ST, they had to learn to double-click really really quickly.)
I would add that the day it made sense to have a two-button mouse over a one-button mouse was the day that contextual menus were invented, because that was the first time that a consistent meaning was applied to the second button. Not to pick on my poor old Atari ST, but the uses for the second mouse button varied so much between applications that it was more trouble to try and figure out what it did than use it.
Notes for MS Bigots: The Atari ST shipped with a two-button mouse years before PCs even had mice. IBM first introduced contextual menus with OS/2 Warp.
I'm not saying it's the number 1 invention, but the Sony Walkman was a huge deal over much of the last 25 years. Of course, it hasn't been a big deal for the last 5 - 10 years, and these sorts of surveys are always heavily weighted to more recent times. I would rank the Sony Walkman as either equal, or one notch below cell phones. (Or as we used to call them back in the prehistoric Walkman days, "Car Phones.")
Re:Neoliberal Tyranny of Enforced Competition
on
Life Interrupted
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
When our technological dreams began becoming reality, some pundits predicted we would be swamped by leisure time. That didn't happen. We're working longer and harder, and seem more stressed over downsizing and outsourcing and expectations than ever.
But why should that be so? The answer is not "globalization", which is just the latest leftist term for "capitalism." (I guess "neo-liberal" is an even newer term, since this is the first time I've seen it used.) The answer is much simpler: taxes. All productivity gains, and then some, are eaten up by excessive taxation.
It's simple math that explains why families changed from single-parent earners to double-parent earners. If you take away half of a family's income, then twice as many people in that family have to work. (Theoretically, one person could work twice as many hours, or get paid twice as much, but those alternate solutions are very unlikely.)
Stop blaming Wal-Mart, Boeing, McDonalds, etc. for the problems that are actually caused by the government, and we can start finding actual solutions to our problems.
That article makes a lot of sense, especially about the cultural differences. The extremely tight real estate market ensures that people live with their parents for a long time, and that guarantees a higher level of disposable income. I can relate to that myself. Back in the summer of 1994, while I was working at Babbages and living at home, I bought an Atari Jaguar, and practically every game released for it.
The store manager's wife asked me how I could afford all that, and I told her that I had 100% disposable income. She freaked, and hated me forever for that comment, but it was true! I couldn't afford my own place or even a car, but I could buy all the game cartridges I wanted.
This guy's not on the fence about Apple at all. In fact, he hates Apple. I think Apple kicked sand in his face, or something. Part way through a juvenile rant about the latest Survivor episode, he lashes out at Apple:
Inside a hut, the producers have set up a satellite dish, a laptop from a useless and worthless computer company that is more concerned with making nifty gadgets than stable, versatile computers and a Web cam.
I haven't seen random vitriol like that for years. I guess he simply forgot to predict Apple's imminent demise. Or maybe he's saving that for next week's rant about The Real Gilligan's Island?
In the end, the blacksmith and the bookkeeper are only convenient metaphors, not to be confused with inherently meaningful symbols. Any number of contrasting metaphors may have served just as well.
Umm, no. This essay purports to draw an analogy between blacksmiths and programmers, with a contrast to bookkeepers. In the end, the analogy better be as close to perfect as possible. You don't get to cop out in the last paragraph of a three-part essay! If the blacksmith isn't perfectly analogous to a programmer, then keep looking -- you haven't found your analogy yet!
The first thing those 500 hackers should do is figure out how to hack NASA and drop a spy satellite on Kim Jong Il's principal residence.
These are a few of my favourite Mac UI things...
on
The Ultimate MacDate
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have been using Macs at home since 1994, but also put in at least 40 hours per week on Windows 2000 at work, and before that, NT.
Here are the things I notice most when making the daily switch back and forth from Windows to Macs.
1. On a Mac, when you start typing, the arrow cursor disappears, and doesn't reappear until you move the mouse. I was so used to this feature, that I really noticed its absence in Windows. I was constantly highlighting a word, typing, then having to reach over and move the arrow cursor away from what I had just typed, so that I could see if I typed it right. I watched Windows users in action, and found that they would use the mouse to place the text cursor, then instinctively move the arrow cursor out of their way.
2. With Macs, background windows are not live until after the first click. Mac people do this all the time: Highlight some text in Document A, then switch to Document B, highlight and copy some text, then switch back to Document A and paste the copied text, replacing the highlighted text. You can't do this in Windows, unless you are very very careful about clicking a non-clickable part of the window. Even then, some Windows apps lose their highlight no matter where you click. Interestingly, MS Excel works like Mac apps in this regard.
3. Navigating sub-menus. This demos best if you have your Recent Items set to a really high number. From the Apple Menu, you can pull down to Recent Items, then across and down to the item you want. Or you can go directly to the item you want, diagonally across 'open space.' The freaky part is this -- move the mouse straight up and down quickly, and the various sub-menus come and go -- or move the mouse diagonally, and quite slowly, to go directly to an item in Recent Items. Try it, and see how weirdly brilliant the Mac UI can be.
4. Single-click to get a text cursor. Double-click to highlight a word. Triple-click to highlight a line. Quadruple-click to highlight a paragraph. These shortcuts are almost universal in Mac applications. Unfortunately, recent versions of IE for Windows are so broken that you can't even highlight the text from part of one word to part of another. (This was the final straw that made me switch permanently to Firefox for Windows.)
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, I still agree with the conclusions of the article. A 'problem' like Microsoft will never be solved with a 'solution' like more government intervention. Microsoft's tiny, agile competitors, including open source projects, will be their undoing. If the U.S. government ever took an interest in Microsoft, then Microsoft would probably cease to be profitable, but would never ever go away. See Bombardier and the Canadian government for an example of how not to do things.
After, therefore because of.
Maybe Microsoft only markets software products whose prices are bound to drop?
Maybe it's just coincidence?
That hardly seems necessary.
Actually, that looks like a Mac in the background - those pics may not be from 1983 at all but from... 1984!
Bill Gates had early access to Macs. Maybe it was 1983 after all?
Ermmm... and what does the government do with that money? Make a huge stash and burn it?
Do you suppose that's what I was going to do with it? No. I would spend it too, except that I would spend it much more carefully than the government ever would. So what does that mean? Isn't a dollar spent a dollar spent?
No. I can buy a widget on sale for $5, but does the government shop around? No, they tender a contract for 1000 custom-made widgets for $50,000, meaning that government widgets cost $50 each, meaning that in order for the government to buy 1000 widgets, they have to prevent the purchase, by individuals of 10,000 widgets. That hurts productivity, which is a measure of our quality of life.
Of course not. It returns to your pocket, indirectly.
It is far better to leave it in my pocket, directly. See above rant.
In forms of unemployment/health benefits or pensions, or highways, or public transportation systems, or protection against crime or fire., or..
If any of the 'sacred' institutions you mentioned were absent, we could simply pay for them ourselves. Does your government supply you with cable TV, high-speed internet, fire insurance, magazine subscriptions, or pet food? No. But if they ever started, then about three months later you wouldn't even be able to imagine getting those things for your own sweet self.
And to boot, it might be a better allocation of resources.
And monkeys might fly out of my butt. Of course, I'd have to give 50% of said monkeys to the government.
Back in about 1992 I read a fascinating article about Spread Spectrum on a mailing list called the Fringe Report. (Sorry, I can find no links to archives.) In a nutshell, the article proposed that instead of divvying up the spectrum into channels, it is left wide open for everyone's use. Broadcasting and receiving, instead of happening in one narrow band of frequency, would be spread throughout the entire bandwidth, using a packet-like system. The broadcaster would send out packets wherever there was an opening, and receivers would monitor the entire bandwidth, pulling in the packets they wanted.
It turns out that bandwidth allocated in this way is unlimited. Bandwidth scarcity is simply due to the way we have allocated the spectrum into channels. The best explanation I have read is to think of a pinhole camera. All the light from the scene in front of the camera, visible or otherwise, has managed to squeeze through a pinhole without any picture degradation.
Imagine if every PC, phone, radio, iPod, etc., had wireless spread spectrum capability, along with some sort of peer-to-peer scheme. Except for the cost of electricity, we could have a free, world-wide wireless internet with unlimited bandwidth. It would be the end of paying for phone, cable, sattelite TV, ISP, pagers, etc.
On a totally different topic, can anyone explain to me one of the article's suggestions for new spectrum uses:
Imagine, for example ... new games, such as three-dimensional hide and seek.
If there's any other way for people to play hide-and-seek, except in three dimensions, I'd like to see it!
Douglas Englebart first demoed a mouse in 1968. The original had a horizontal wheel and a vertical wheel, and you had to tip it so as to only move one wheel at a time.
For those too wrapped up in the Xerox-Parc-invented-everything fantasy, (because it makes them feel better when it's obvious Microsoft invented very little,) Jef Raskin has an excellent and short essay about the early days with the Macintosh.
You're absolutely right. I used a three-button optical mouse on an IBM XT in 1985. (It only worked on a special, metal mouse pad which had tiny red horizontal lines and green vertical lines.)
I should have said something like "years before mice were regularly used by the majority of Wintel machines." Especially since even Atari 800s and Commodore 64s were PCs, and had third-party mice available.
I really like Smultron too.
.tpl files as text.
Apple's X-Code editor is also nice, but I mostly use it for PHP, and I have to constantly remind it that it should open my Smarty
Note for inaccurate posters - it was actually ten months, the ST being released in January '85, Windows 1.0 being released in November '85.
In 1987, I worked for a company that built and sold their own line of PCs. There wasn't a mouse in the house.
And vast numbers of PC users stuck with DOS, mouse-less, right up until 1995, when Windows 95 was released. I worked at Babbages until the summer of 1994, and there was a constant parade of people wanting to remove Windows 3 because they preferred DOS. Many others complained that Microsoft had ceased to update DOS versions of their favourite software.
I know you're probably joking, but could you build it in a 6.5" by 2" case?
On a 1980s computer, with a more limited set of functions, and a computing public with a lower level of computing knowledge, one mouse button was probably better than two.
Good point. There once was a time when you had to explain to people what double-clicking meant. (And if they had an Atari ST, they had to learn to double-click really really quickly.)
I would add that the day it made sense to have a two-button mouse over a one-button mouse was the day that contextual menus were invented, because that was the first time that a consistent meaning was applied to the second button. Not to pick on my poor old Atari ST, but the uses for the second mouse button varied so much between applications that it was more trouble to try and figure out what it did than use it.
Notes for MS Bigots: The Atari ST shipped with a two-button mouse years before PCs even had mice. IBM first introduced contextual menus with OS/2 Warp.
I'm not saying it's the number 1 invention, but the Sony Walkman was a huge deal over much of the last 25 years. Of course, it hasn't been a big deal for the last 5 - 10 years, and these sorts of surveys are always heavily weighted to more recent times. I would rank the Sony Walkman as either equal, or one notch below cell phones. (Or as we used to call them back in the prehistoric Walkman days, "Car Phones.")
When our technological dreams began becoming reality, some pundits predicted we would be swamped by leisure time. That didn't happen. We're working longer and harder, and seem more stressed over downsizing and outsourcing and expectations than ever.
But why should that be so? The answer is not "globalization", which is just the latest leftist term for "capitalism." (I guess "neo-liberal" is an even newer term, since this is the first time I've seen it used.) The answer is much simpler: taxes. All productivity gains, and then some, are eaten up by excessive taxation.
In Canada, almost 50% of every dollar we make goes to the government. (The U.S. is in a similar, although slightly better, situation.)
It's simple math that explains why families changed from single-parent earners to double-parent earners. If you take away half of a family's income, then twice as many people in that family have to work. (Theoretically, one person could work twice as many hours, or get paid twice as much, but those alternate solutions are very unlikely.)
Stop blaming Wal-Mart, Boeing, McDonalds, etc. for the problems that are actually caused by the government, and we can start finding actual solutions to our problems.
Safari does too. And if you have a .Mac account, you can iSync your bookmarks across multiple computers.
That article makes a lot of sense, especially about the cultural differences. The extremely tight real estate market ensures that people live with their parents for a long time, and that guarantees a higher level of disposable income. I can relate to that myself. Back in the summer of 1994, while I was working at Babbages and living at home, I bought an Atari Jaguar, and practically every game released for it.
The store manager's wife asked me how I could afford all that, and I told her that I had 100% disposable income. She freaked, and hated me forever for that comment, but it was true! I couldn't afford my own place or even a car, but I could buy all the game cartridges I wanted.
I wonder, with every miracle, there's always some downside.
Only in the movies, (and literature.) Science and technology have provided untold numbers of miracles, and many have no downside whatsoever.
No subscription required for the story here, either.
This guy's not on the fence about Apple at all. In fact, he hates Apple. I think Apple kicked sand in his face, or something. Part way through a juvenile rant about the latest Survivor episode, he lashes out at Apple:
Inside a hut, the producers have set up a satellite dish, a laptop from a useless and worthless computer company that is more concerned with making nifty gadgets than stable, versatile computers and a Web cam.
I haven't seen random vitriol like that for years. I guess he simply forgot to predict Apple's imminent demise. Or maybe he's saving that for next week's rant about The Real Gilligan's Island?
The fact that you bought an iPod and not some of the more feature rich players shows that you wanted something that did the job with little fuss.
Name 3 features which are missing from the iPod, but are available in a competing product.
For a bonus point, prove that doing a job "with little fuss" is not an important feature.
Once you try Mac...
18 billion GB, or 18 exabytes, huh? That ought to be enough for everyone.
In the end, the blacksmith and the bookkeeper are only convenient metaphors, not to be confused with inherently meaningful symbols. Any number of contrasting metaphors may have served just as well.
Umm, no. This essay purports to draw an analogy between blacksmiths and programmers, with a contrast to bookkeepers. In the end, the analogy better be as close to perfect as possible. You don't get to cop out in the last paragraph of a three-part essay! If the blacksmith isn't perfectly analogous to a programmer, then keep looking -- you haven't found your analogy yet!
The first thing those 500 hackers should do is figure out how to hack NASA and drop a spy satellite on Kim Jong Il's principal residence.
I have been using Macs at home since 1994, but also put in at least 40 hours per week on Windows 2000 at work, and before that, NT.
Here are the things I notice most when making the daily switch back and forth from Windows to Macs.
1. On a Mac, when you start typing, the arrow cursor disappears, and doesn't reappear until you move the mouse. I was so used to this feature, that I really noticed its absence in Windows. I was constantly highlighting a word, typing, then having to reach over and move the arrow cursor away from what I had just typed, so that I could see if I typed it right. I watched Windows users in action, and found that they would use the mouse to place the text cursor, then instinctively move the arrow cursor out of their way.
2. With Macs, background windows are not live until after the first click. Mac people do this all the time: Highlight some text in Document A, then switch to Document B, highlight and copy some text, then switch back to Document A and paste the copied text, replacing the highlighted text. You can't do this in Windows, unless you are very very careful about clicking a non-clickable part of the window. Even then, some Windows apps lose their highlight no matter where you click. Interestingly, MS Excel works like Mac apps in this regard.
3. Navigating sub-menus. This demos best if you have your Recent Items set to a really high number. From the Apple Menu, you can pull down to Recent Items, then across and down to the item you want. Or you can go directly to the item you want, diagonally across 'open space.' The freaky part is this -- move the mouse straight up and down quickly, and the various sub-menus come and go -- or move the mouse diagonally, and quite slowly, to go directly to an item in Recent Items. Try it, and see how weirdly brilliant the Mac UI can be.
4. Single-click to get a text cursor. Double-click to highlight a word. Triple-click to highlight a line. Quadruple-click to highlight a paragraph. These shortcuts are almost universal in Mac applications. Unfortunately, recent versions of IE for Windows are so broken that you can't even highlight the text from part of one word to part of another. (This was the final straw that made me switch permanently to Firefox for Windows.)