> A careful reading of the directive finds that it lists some broad and imprecise criteria and requires senior officials to certify that these criteria have been met if systems are intended to target and kill people by machine decision alone. [emphasis mine]
(I think I've seen that movie...) What could possibly go wrong?
I wonder if they'd be running Windows for Killer Robots?
Anyone can miss a market the first time. That Ballmer failed to recognize the market when it emerged isn't the issue. That can happen to anyone. Microsoft had a chance for redemption, and the added advantage that they could see what people wanted and adjust their offering accordingly. Listen -> Design -> Build -> $$ Profit!
They also had an advantage (if you want to call it that) in that they already had a phone product out there (WinCE based) and (I imagine) a lot of feedback in the many various ways that product sucked. So they could see what worked, and they had direct experience in what didn't work. And they had a lot of cash on hand from their mainstream products. The market was theirs to lose.
And then they blew it again with Windows Phone 7. And then, instead of going back to the drawing board and trying to figure out what people would actually buy, they doubled down with Windows Phone 8, which is rapidly going, well, nowhere in particular. And then doubled down again by trying to force PC users to use the same touch-based interface as the phone. (Somewhere along the line, Nokia's cell division switched from a world leader to an also-ran. Congratulations.)
Point is, it wasn't the original miss that was significant, it was all the arrogance and missteps that happened afterwards. And Ballmer still doesn't understand this.
Manned space exploration is useful in that it drives development of technology for man to get to space, survive there, and return. This has little to do (at least in the short term) with the "putting the human race's eggs all in one basket" argument or even the "man is better than robots" argument. There's value to doing it to advance the art. The argument that we shouldn't do it because it's difficult and dangerous, is a circular one. If we insist on not doing it, it'll always remain difficult and dangerous, which continues to be an argument to not do it. Let's find ways to make man going into space easy and safe and economical. In the meantime, robots certainly have their purpose. But to abandon manned exploration because we are more suited to sit on the couch and have robots take all the risks seems like a dead end.
Yes, life can produce methane. Yes, some geological processes can produce methane. Mars has neither... So?
Well, that's the thing. Mars does have methane, we've detected it before. So the mystery is, what happened to the previously detected methane plumes? Why did they disappear?
So now not only do we not know what produced the methane in mars, we additionally don't know why it's no longer doing so. Mystery deepened.
I predict that Microsoft will find a reason to exit the phone market in two-three years, stating that hardware is not their core competency or something similar.
Sorry but no. The phones that are free/cheap are mostly the really old shit stock no-one wants so they cant even sell at any price any more. Even then they are still locked down and full of carrier-specific bloatware. In reality they still aren't actually free/cheap because they just build the hardware cost into the plan/usage cost (which btw is also on average quite a lot higher than in Europe because the US have also allowed their whole cell system to be collectively dominated by just 3 phone companies).
Ok, this is the part of "no" I don't understand. (I've always wanted to say that.) Seems to me that what you said is pretty much a paraphrase of what I said. (Or, at least, meant to say.) US customers don't realize that a portion of any phone -- not just the free and low end phones -- is subsidized by the plan. This is one of the reasons *why* plans in the US are higher than in Europe, and why phones in Europe are more expensive to buy. Not being able to lock a phone into a plan necessarily means that phones will be offered for sale at closer to their "real" price. The price of the plan should technically drop as a result, but I suspect carriers will find a way to make this business change revenue positive. ('s what "upward sticky" means -- once prices of certain things go up, they're very reluctant to go down again.)
2) Sell wireless SIP phones that connect to a massive VOIP server.
3) Profit.
Even if you only had service within city limits, you'd already be much more reliable than any cellular carrier I've ever tried. My android phone can run a SIP client and I've been kicking around the idea of just dropping the cellular contract and rolling my own solution with an asterisk server on a cloud service and a local wifi provider.
How about 2) sell phones that have wireless SIP capability but will still use conventional cell service when out of the city
Wait, don't most phones *already* have that capability?
You do realize that unlocked phones means we'd pay European style (higher) prices on the hardware. I personally don't think that's a bad deal, but just saying' it'd likely mean the end of "free phones" and heavily subsidized (cheap) phones. It *should* also mean cheaper service, as a portion of the cost of the phone isn't paid through the service, but I'd not bet on that. Service costs tend to be upward-sticky.
As a developer at IBM for 10+ years, doing Linux and PowerPC for a large portion of that time. I am wondering why I am laid off and working for HP now. One hand does not know what the other is doing it seems.
My experience at IBM was that often, not only does one hand not wash the other, but one hand is actively arm-wrestling the other. You can bet that the AIX group is plotting the overthrow of this upstart Linux thing, and the AS/400 group is plotting the demise of this microcomputer flash-in-the-pan thing, and the Z-series group is plotting the comeback of 3179's on the desktop.
> In short, we're about 3-6 applications away from dropping Microsoft Windows on the desktop. Any new technology added in the past few years has to be either platform-neutral (web-based solutions) or multi-platform (runs on Windows, OS X and Linux) and open source. We never bought into MS Exchange or MS SharePoint.
The technology is pretty much there, isn't it. Seems to me that this might be precisely the wrong time for Microsoft to try to show us how we have to accept whatever they want to release and like it.
nonsense, there are "traditional stoves" that look just like your 2nd picture. Designed by smart people who had a culture where they could pass good ideas along.
Wait. According to TFA, the first stove is an example of what the target audience is currently using, and the second is an artist's conception of what the new stove will look like. One of the design criteria is to look enough like the stoves they were used to that they would be mostly familiar with it's use, while being a significant improvement over what they were currently using. [1]
So, a Franklin stove (as others were suggesting) may not have as high adoption as something that looks like their current stove, but improved.
Now, I personally wonder about manufacture in third world countries in enough numbers to make a dent in the medical issues, but that's another story.
[1] This is what an improved design intended for non-technological people *should be*. Enough like something they're already used to that they could use it without a significant amount of instruction. It's a valuable criteria.
Android adoption is growing, that's Linux in a pocket or on a desktop. Deal with it.
Well, sort-of. Android is Linux in much the same way that OSX is BSD. (Neither of which are bad things.) And although I've heard rumors of Desktop Android, I've not seen a lot of adoption yet.
Don't get me wrong, I like Android. I think it's a very well thought out OS for touch devices. Wife, daughter and I all carry Android phones. Daughter wants a Samsung Note tablet. We own an ASUS convertible (currently running Win8) that might actually be usable with Android.
I'm just not convinced Android is appropriate on the desktop. In general, I'm not certain at all that there can be a paradigm that works effectively both on desktop and tablet. Microsoft certainly succeeded in proving that their vision doesn't work well in either environment.
...and now bands are doing it for different reasons. Reel Big Fish fired their producer and now self-produces their albums in a studio they built themselves. Cherry Poppin' Daddies ("zoot suit riot") did something similar. And didn't I hear a few years back that Nine Inch Nails fired their record company and went on their own? Didn't Radiohead? It's a combination of production and distribution (software and the internet) getting significantly cheaper, and a general fed-up-ness with the major record companies.
I've been thinking about this for awhile, and really, if most people are listening to the majority of their music through crappy earbuds, it becomes much less important for content providers to use million dollar equipment that can catch the delicate vibrato of the singer's nose hairs, when the end user is only going to catch 60% of the lyrics anyway.
Add the tendency to compress compress COMPRESS in the studio, and it comes down to using megabuck equipment filtered through trendy white but acoustically inferior buds to create music the quality of a ringtone, and (switch to frank zappa voice) You might be thinking "*I* could do that". And of course, you can. (/zappa)
...which, in combination with equipment and software getting cheaper, bands being fed up with getting three cents per CD from their distributor, and a general consumer fed-up-ness with the entire recording industry, and that leads us to, well, here.
And "here" is not necessarily a bad place. Yes, there's more content out there to choose from. (How is this a bad thing?) Performers who are *not* or no longer represented by mega-record-companies are getting the whole of a much smaller pie, and that's not necessarily a bad thing either.
Not everyone will have heard of Squall Above Little Doll Flipper, but they keep 100% of the proceeds for their very obscure CDs and downloads, and that might be enough to get by.
This is not a bad thing, really. But color me not surprised that the industry is trying to blame their lessening ear-deathgrip on bands illegally downloading audio production software.
...it occurs to me that "ear deathgrip" could be a cool name for a band...
Taking the 10,000 foot view for a moment, Apple has, sadly, lost their leadership, and appears to be starting to make the same kind of mistakes that a leaderless Microsoft has been making for some time. The backlash has been very entertaining. I may make popcorn.
I guess the real question becomes, what company is positioned to take advantage when the big two falter? (And has the intelligence to capitalize on it?)
We're also just starting (this year) to migrate from XP to 7, but more importantly, migrating (wherever possible) from fat clients to web based applications. Not that web is better (in many ways it isn't) but because web apps have a better chance of being platform neutral. After observing the debacles that were Vista and Win8, the decision has been made to start migration to an environment where we are not dependent on whatever hairbrained idea Microsoft wants to foist on us. This isn't "fear", it's self-defense. I'm sure MSFT has dandy reasons for promoting a radical new OS and force consumer adoption of what they think is a cool new slate-based GUI in order to drive a wedge into that marketplace, but sorry, our business is done on computers and we can't afford to play along.
When I started here years back, what webapps we had would only work reliably on some elderly version of IE. We now officially support Firefox, Chrome, Safari and the list of operations converting to web is growing.
The added advantage is that the back end also tends to be platform neutral. If Microsoft wants to play games with the user interface on their server products, well, we have a solution for that too.
In summary, it was the very act of trying to foist a radically different (and unsupportable in a large Enterprise environment) user interface that started the effort to migrate away from dependence on Windows. Good job, Microsoft. It needed to be done, and you've started it going.
No, there's probably not going to be Linux on the desktop (sorry, geeks). But I see a lot more Macbooks and ipads in our future. Not necessarily because they're the best for the job (especially the ipad, which has been a pain to support) but because people want them, and the thought at the moment is that a more varied ecosystem serves to protect us from Microsoft's product decisions.
In a company with thousands of users, a major change that causes said users to call the Helpdesk in substantial numbers when they should be working, is ill advised. Add that there is no reason to upgrade, and the decision is clear.
> I can well understand a company of 10,000 having more reservations. On the other hand, if you have a blessed copy of Win7, why don't you have a blessed copy of Win8 (yet)? What is actually holding things back?
Because nobody wants it. Because there is no overriding reason to do so. Because a smart company doesn't create churn in the organization just for the hell of it. Because regular non-geek users like stability in their work environment. Because nobody in their right mind adopts the first release of any Microsoft operating system. Because (and this is important so I'm saying it twice) nobody WANTS IT. The OS is not an app -- it loads apps. Making the OS sparkly and new is not a selling point to corporate. And most especially, forcing a touch-centric GUI on a KVM environment doesn't make a lick 'o' sense. (See "nobody wants it", above.) There are slates here, mostly used by execs, but they're ipads, and the execs specifically pushed for them. (We don't even use Android tablets -- I tried to get corporate to issue me one, was turned down.) The ipad has the following advantages over the Surface -- (1) People want the ipad. (2) The ipad has been out longer, has a healthy ecosystem, and fairly good support these days in a corporate environment. (3) People want the ipad. We have zero Windows slates here. We don't need a Windows touch-based GUI. We most especially don't need a touch-based GUI on thousands of non-touch PCs.
So why windows 7? Because a non-geek with Windows XP experience can sit down at a Win7 machine and immediately be productive. They may be annoyed that the menu no longer marches, but the conveyance is there -- it's obvious what to click. It's annoying that pushing a window up goes full screen and left or right goes half screen, but the conveyance is still there (the bar at the top) and it's easy to see what to do. It's annoying that the controls have all been rearranged, but regular non-geeks don't do much with them (can't really, per company policies) so it's not an issue for users.
But put a non-geek, non-slashdot-contributor, non-app-developer with XP or 7 experience in front of a Windows 8 box, and they call the help line. That's a profound fail.
Slashdot Mirror
BANG!
You now have 5 seconds to comply. 4 3 2 1
Gotta love those mismanaged mutexes :)
It seems like some human police have already shifted to that algorithm.
(I think I've seen that movie...) What could possibly go wrong?
As long as the killbots have a preset kill limit, I think we'll be okay.
Unless there's a rounding error, or another FPU issue, or a counter rolls over.
> A careful reading of the directive finds that it lists some broad and imprecise criteria and requires senior officials to certify that these criteria have been met if systems are intended to target and kill people by machine decision alone. [emphasis mine]
(I think I've seen that movie...) What could possibly go wrong?
I wonder if they'd be running Windows for Killer Robots?
Anyone can miss a market the first time. That Ballmer failed to recognize the market when it emerged isn't the issue. That can happen to anyone. Microsoft had a chance for redemption, and the added advantage that they could see what people wanted and adjust their offering accordingly. Listen -> Design -> Build -> $$ Profit!
They also had an advantage (if you want to call it that) in that they already had a phone product out there (WinCE based) and (I imagine) a lot of feedback in the many various ways that product sucked. So they could see what worked, and they had direct experience in what didn't work. And they had a lot of cash on hand from their mainstream products. The market was theirs to lose.
And then they blew it again with Windows Phone 7. And then, instead of going back to the drawing board and trying to figure out what people would actually buy, they doubled down with Windows Phone 8, which is rapidly going, well, nowhere in particular. And then doubled down again by trying to force PC users to use the same touch-based interface as the phone. (Somewhere along the line, Nokia's cell division switched from a world leader to an also-ran. Congratulations.)
Point is, it wasn't the original miss that was significant, it was all the arrogance and missteps that happened afterwards. And Ballmer still doesn't understand this.
Manned space exploration is useful in that it drives development of technology for man to get to space, survive there, and return. This has little to do (at least in the short term) with the "putting the human race's eggs all in one basket" argument or even the "man is better than robots" argument. There's value to doing it to advance the art. The argument that we shouldn't do it because it's difficult and dangerous, is a circular one. If we insist on not doing it, it'll always remain difficult and dangerous, which continues to be an argument to not do it. Let's find ways to make man going into space easy and safe and economical. In the meantime, robots certainly have their purpose. But to abandon manned exploration because we are more suited to sit on the couch and have robots take all the risks seems like a dead end.
Yes, life can produce methane. Yes, some geological processes can produce methane. Mars has neither... So?
Well, that's the thing. Mars does have methane, we've detected it before. So the mystery is, what happened to the previously detected methane plumes? Why did they disappear?
So now not only do we not know what produced the methane in mars, we additionally don't know why it's no longer doing so. Mystery deepened.
Martians discovered Beano?
Elop shoulders his booty as he stepped over the rail onto the winning ship.
There is that.
I predict that Microsoft will find a reason to exit the phone market in two-three years, stating that hardware is not their core competency or something similar.
Money paid for value received. Microsoft got what they wanted, an artificially undervalued cell division, and paid accordingly.
Sorry but no.
The phones that are free/cheap are mostly the really old shit stock no-one wants so they cant even sell at any price any more. Even then they are still locked down and full of carrier-specific bloatware. In reality they still aren't actually free/cheap because they just build the hardware cost into the plan/usage cost (which btw is also on average quite a lot higher than in Europe because the US have also allowed their whole cell system to be collectively dominated by just 3 phone companies).
Ok, this is the part of "no" I don't understand. (I've always wanted to say that.) Seems to me that what you said is pretty much a paraphrase of what I said. (Or, at least, meant to say.) US customers don't realize that a portion of any phone -- not just the free and low end phones -- is subsidized by the plan. This is one of the reasons *why* plans in the US are higher than in Europe, and why phones in Europe are more expensive to buy. Not being able to lock a phone into a plan necessarily means that phones will be offered for sale at closer to their "real" price. The price of the plan should technically drop as a result, but I suspect carriers will find a way to make this business change revenue positive. ('s what "upward sticky" means -- once prices of certain things go up, they're very reluctant to go down again.)
1) Install WIFI nodes covering the entire USA
2) Sell wireless SIP phones that connect to a massive VOIP server.
3) Profit.
Even if you only had service within city limits, you'd already be much more reliable than any cellular carrier I've ever tried. My android phone can run a SIP client and I've been kicking around the idea of just dropping the cellular contract and rolling my own solution with an asterisk server on a cloud service and a local wifi provider.
How about 2) sell phones that have wireless SIP capability but will still use conventional cell service when out of the city
Wait, don't most phones *already* have that capability?
You do realize that unlocked phones means we'd pay European style (higher) prices on the hardware. I personally don't think that's a bad deal, but just saying' it'd likely mean the end of "free phones" and heavily subsidized (cheap) phones. It *should* also mean cheaper service, as a portion of the cost of the phone isn't paid through the service, but I'd not bet on that. Service costs tend to be upward-sticky.
You guys still have CDMA?
Not as much, but yeah.
As a developer at IBM for 10+ years, doing Linux and PowerPC for a large portion of that time. I am wondering why I am laid off and working for HP now. One hand does not know what the other is doing it seems.
My experience at IBM was that often, not only does one hand not wash the other, but one hand is actively arm-wrestling the other. You can bet that the AIX group is plotting the overthrow of this upstart Linux thing, and the AS/400 group is plotting the demise of this microcomputer flash-in-the-pan thing, and the Z-series group is plotting the comeback of 3179's on the desktop.
> In short, we're about 3-6 applications away from dropping Microsoft Windows on the desktop. Any new technology added in the past few years has to be either platform-neutral (web-based solutions) or multi-platform (runs on Windows, OS X and Linux) and open source. We never bought into MS Exchange or MS SharePoint.
The technology is pretty much there, isn't it. Seems to me that this might be precisely the wrong time for Microsoft to try to show us how we have to accept whatever they want to release and like it.
NSA... star-trek like command center... Who else immediately thought of the Dreadnought bridge from Into Darkness?
nonsense, there are "traditional stoves" that look just like your 2nd picture. Designed by smart people who had a culture where they could pass good ideas along.
Wait. According to TFA, the first stove is an example of what the target audience is currently using, and the second is an artist's conception of what the new stove will look like. One of the design criteria is to look enough like the stoves they were used to that they would be mostly familiar with it's use, while being a significant improvement over what they were currently using. [1]
So, a Franklin stove (as others were suggesting) may not have as high adoption as something that looks like their current stove, but improved.
Now, I personally wonder about manufacture in third world countries in enough numbers to make a dent in the medical issues, but that's another story.
[1] This is what an improved design intended for non-technological people *should be*. Enough like something they're already used to that they could use it without a significant amount of instruction. It's a valuable criteria.
Android adoption is growing, that's Linux in a pocket or on a desktop. Deal with it.
Well, sort-of. Android is Linux in much the same way that OSX is BSD. (Neither of which are bad things.) And although I've heard rumors of Desktop Android, I've not seen a lot of adoption yet.
Don't get me wrong, I like Android. I think it's a very well thought out OS for touch devices. Wife, daughter and I all carry Android phones. Daughter wants a Samsung Note tablet. We own an ASUS convertible (currently running Win8) that might actually be usable with Android.
I'm just not convinced Android is appropriate on the desktop. In general, I'm not certain at all that there can be a paradigm that works effectively both on desktop and tablet. Microsoft certainly succeeded in proving that their vision doesn't work well in either environment.
I've been thinking about this for awhile, and really, if most people are listening to the majority of their music through crappy earbuds, it becomes much less important for content providers to use million dollar equipment that can catch the delicate vibrato of the singer's nose hairs, when the end user is only going to catch 60% of the lyrics anyway.
Add the tendency to compress compress COMPRESS in the studio, and it comes down to using megabuck equipment filtered through trendy white but acoustically inferior buds to create music the quality of a ringtone, and (switch to frank zappa voice) You might be thinking "*I* could do that". And of course, you can. (/zappa)
And "here" is not necessarily a bad place. Yes, there's more content out there to choose from. (How is this a bad thing?) Performers who are *not* or no longer represented by mega-record-companies are getting the whole of a much smaller pie, and that's not necessarily a bad thing either.
Not everyone will have heard of Squall Above Little Doll Flipper, but they keep 100% of the proceeds for their very obscure CDs and downloads, and that might be enough to get by.
This is not a bad thing, really. But color me not surprised that the industry is trying to blame their lessening ear-deathgrip on bands illegally downloading audio production software.
Taking the 10,000 foot view for a moment, Apple has, sadly, lost their leadership, and appears to be starting to make the same kind of mistakes that a leaderless Microsoft has been making for some time. The backlash has been very entertaining. I may make popcorn.
I guess the real question becomes, what company is positioned to take advantage when the big two falter? (And has the intelligence to capitalize on it?)
No, don't say Linux on the Desktop. Just don't.
We're also just starting (this year) to migrate from XP to 7, but more importantly, migrating (wherever possible) from fat clients to web based applications. Not that web is better (in many ways it isn't) but because web apps have a better chance of being platform neutral. After observing the debacles that were Vista and Win8, the decision has been made to start migration to an environment where we are not dependent on whatever hairbrained idea Microsoft wants to foist on us. This isn't "fear", it's self-defense. I'm sure MSFT has dandy reasons for promoting a radical new OS and force consumer adoption of what they think is a cool new slate-based GUI in order to drive a wedge into that marketplace, but sorry, our business is done on computers and we can't afford to play along.
When I started here years back, what webapps we had would only work reliably on some elderly version of IE. We now officially support Firefox, Chrome, Safari and the list of operations converting to web is growing.
The added advantage is that the back end also tends to be platform neutral. If Microsoft wants to play games with the user interface on their server products, well, we have a solution for that too.
In summary, it was the very act of trying to foist a radically different (and unsupportable in a large Enterprise environment) user interface that started the effort to migrate away from dependence on Windows. Good job, Microsoft. It needed to be done, and you've started it going.
No, there's probably not going to be Linux on the desktop (sorry, geeks). But I see a lot more Macbooks and ipads in our future. Not necessarily because they're the best for the job (especially the ipad, which has been a pain to support) but because people want them, and the thought at the moment is that a more varied ecosystem serves to protect us from Microsoft's product decisions.
In a company with thousands of users, a major change that causes said users to call the Helpdesk in substantial numbers when they should be working, is ill advised. Add that there is no reason to upgrade, and the decision is clear.
> I can well understand a company of 10,000 having more reservations. On the other hand, if you have a blessed copy of Win7, why don't you have a blessed copy of Win8 (yet)? What is actually holding things back?
Because nobody wants it. Because there is no overriding reason to do so. Because a smart company doesn't create churn in the organization just for the hell of it. Because regular non-geek users like stability in their work environment. Because nobody in their right mind adopts the first release of any Microsoft operating system. Because (and this is important so I'm saying it twice) nobody WANTS IT. The OS is not an app -- it loads apps. Making the OS sparkly and new is not a selling point to corporate. And most especially, forcing a touch-centric GUI on a KVM environment doesn't make a lick 'o' sense. (See "nobody wants it", above.) There are slates here, mostly used by execs, but they're ipads, and the execs specifically pushed for them. (We don't even use Android tablets -- I tried to get corporate to issue me one, was turned down.) The ipad has the following advantages over the Surface -- (1) People want the ipad. (2) The ipad has been out longer, has a healthy ecosystem, and fairly good support these days in a corporate environment. (3) People want the ipad. We have zero Windows slates here. We don't need a Windows touch-based GUI. We most especially don't need a touch-based GUI on thousands of non-touch PCs.
So why windows 7? Because a non-geek with Windows XP experience can sit down at a Win7 machine and immediately be productive. They may be annoyed that the menu no longer marches, but the conveyance is there -- it's obvious what to click. It's annoying that pushing a window up goes full screen and left or right goes half screen, but the conveyance is still there (the bar at the top) and it's easy to see what to do. It's annoying that the controls have all been rearranged, but regular non-geeks don't do much with them (can't really, per company policies) so it's not an issue for users.
But put a non-geek, non-slashdot-contributor, non-app-developer with XP or 7 experience in front of a Windows 8 box, and they call the help line. That's a profound fail.