...the one I made in 2004. We will never see an interesting, competent or remotely innovative product from Microsoft, ever again. It's over, and they will continue to turn the money crank on bloated "enterprise" software for years to come as they slowly but certainly slip into irrelevance.
It's the business model. It doesn't matter what engineers they hire. And it's over.
Grown people still play shoot-em-ups? Seriously? Simulated violence is considered fun, and there is nothing better to do?
That anybody over the age of 14 cares I find amazing.
As a middle aged guy with teenage kids who (long ago) went to school with the geekiest of them, I find it hard to believe that anyone can maintain an interest in video games once adulthood sets in. I have seen very, very few games that are anything more than elaborate adolescent fantasies, and it's difficult to imagine that as still interesting once you have a life. I sure as hell don't wish to revisit my teens and twenties!
Really, go play outside and get some fresh air. And get off my lawn.
If MS had simply created a standards-compliant browser years ago, then this problem wouldn't exist. By buying into a Microsoft-dominated vision of the future of computing (which will never come to pass) the government agencies and other business simply hurt themselves.
A REAL browser upgrade is simply to one that meets standards. IE doesn't count in that regard.
Interesting. I have never, ever seen a SharePoint setup that worked for users very well, and seen a high abandonment rate. I would like to see what it is "supposed" to look like.
My current company's SharePoint site is a disorganized disaster that frankly serves very little purpose, really. The higher-ups try to use it, but it is rarely up-to-date or relevant. And the search is a mess. Count me as "don't get it" about any positive value to SharePoint.
I thought they simply arranged to be paid by hostages -er, I mean OEMs. Not exactly a regular marketplace, more like protection money.
Selling involves making product that offers users something useful for which they willingly pay. In the absence of meaningful competition (numerically speaking) MS hasn't "competed" for a very long time. They simply expect to be paid.
Oddly enough, it shows.
Ah, just another small piece of evidence that Microsoft is a culture completely lacking in imagination and spirit to pull off anything of any further importance.
The writing's been on the wall since 2001, but here it is again: there will never, ever be another significant product out of Microsoft. Profits from the legacy, yes. Entrenched backoffice tools (a la IBM), yes. But anything that the public cares about? No. The only direction left to go is slowly downward.
I am sure there are some talented folks at MS, but as a culture the company is finished. The truly creative are leaving for better places to shine. And drink beer.
... won't be bothered with Vista or even XP anytime soon, 64-bit or not. I have enough of that junk to deal with at work, and home I don't need one bit of it. If there was even one Windows application that truly mattered to me, perhaps - but there ain't. It is difficult to imagine why I would ever bother with a dual boot setup in order to get real things accomplished. That's just sad.
It is true that I don't play games on computers, and if I did I might want Windows for that (at least for the next couple of years until Windows is less common) - but there are plenty of other things to do in my life right now. I barely have time for all the people and projects in my First Life, and so there is no Second Life!
I have been using a Jansport "widescreen laptop" backback for about 8 months. I travel from the West coast to Europe for business several times a year with a widescreen Dell Inspiron 8600, and regular backpacks would not properly accomodate it. The Jansport was not as cheap as one might like ($100) but it works terrifically. I doesn't look unusual, and so does not call attention to itself. The machine is very well protected in a separate section of the pack with rigid reenforcements, and there are ample pockets and sections for everything (papers, electronics, sweater).
The Jansport is comfortable and appears very durable. It has enabled me to bike commute again as well. Certainly worth the $100!
As one who spent years diddling with tube amps and the like (long ago during my undergrad years at MIT in EE - NOT CS) I will add my $0.02 -
Recorded music - the great majority of it - is severely compromised right from the start due to the amount of data we capture and the manner in which our ears perceive that data. No amount of DSP quite overcomes this present limitation.
Remember mono, anyone? Will anyone seriously claim that a monorual recording sounds "realistic"? No, because the spatial components our ears use as cues are missing.
Why 2 channels for stereo? Simple - because that was practical in 1958. It has NOTHING to do with having 2 ears, and it too is insufficient to convey the spatial data required to truly simulate an acoustic event. Notice that I have not even yet touched upon issues of dynamic range, etc. as these arguments are not necessary for now.
Furthermore, most popular recordings do not use stereo to create a realistic soundfield, but rather a contrived one for effect.
So back to tubes - why do some people prefer them? My thesis is that tubes introduce some non-linearities that are simply put "pleasing" in the artificial environment of 2-channel music. The absence of proper spatial and dynamic information in most recordings leaves them open for a degree of interpretation by the listener without reference to any absolute criterion.
The upshot is this: current recording technology only allows for a reasonable facsimile of music to be reproduced in the home. Tubes add some color that, under the right conditions, may enhance that artifical experience in an aesthetically pleasing manner. They may make the artiface somewhat more bearable.
One could design DSP algorithms that also produce pleasing artifacts. But I think that a better solution is to increase the number of channels captured and reproduced (as Dolby 5.1 almost does, etc.). The problem is that it will take years and millions of $$ for the recording infrastructure and expertise to reach that goal. One cannot simply "generate" multiple channels from a 2 channel source and hope for nirvana. A likely minimum for realistic reproduction is 6 to 8 channels, properly recorded and placed.
BTW, I sold all the tube amps I built years ago, along with the tweaky speakers. Now there is a Bose Lifestyle 5 in the living room and it delivers music in an emotionally satisfying way without any fuss or bother. 'Nuff said for me.
Years ago, I graduated from MIT in EE. I did two projects of some relationship to this article - 1) a thesis on modeling of tube amp behavior and 2) a toy that would "improvise" classic blues endlessly.
I was amazed that Minsky in AI loved the blues toy. It was really very simple and drew upon my experience as a local professional guitarist around Boston at the time. I tried to tell them that in my mind it was really a dumb trick, but those experiment music types just couldn't get over it... I got a prize that year.
The tube amp was more fun. I used a 1960 Fender Tweed Vibrolux as my subject and created a "block model" of the time/function elements that required combination in a non-linear fashion and left it at that. It involved quite a few long time constants in the description, which is often an area where amp simulators fall apart. At the time, implementing the device in hardware would have been prohibitively expensive, and so I left it on paper and got out of school. I decided not to pursue engineering much after that, other things to do.
I have used the Line6 products, and they are very good as the technology progresses. However, they don't really sound or feel that much like my real old Fenders. Instead, they use certain preconceived notions of how people use the amps and cater to those tastes. For example: I don't like to overdrive my old Fender Deluxe Reverb much - that is for rock guys, and I don't do rock anymore. The Line6 products will do a good job of mimicing a "cranked" old amp, but fails to capture the subtlety of one that is instead turned up only to "4". I love that sound!
My $0.02
I feel like the inverse of what Mr. Graham describes - back in high school (26 years ago) I was a popular kid who aced AP physics and math tests. Science and tech was fun, it rolled off the tongue without effort, but I really thrived on social interaction. School plays, music and girls, etc.
Fast forward to college, MIT. I hated that place - not for the academics, which were more or less what I expected, but because I found the social environment so lacking. I felt alone and unwelcome - no less "smart", but definitely different from the MIT crowd. I got through the place by focusing on off-campus activities and work where I could find "normal" people with whom I could commiserate.
After school, I didn't go straight into engineering (I was a EE major - course 6.1) because as a profession it appeared filled with those same "nerds" that made me so uncomfortable! So I did other things, some technically related and others not. I have done just fine.
Now in my mid-forties, I certainly know myself better than I did as a young man and realize that we all have different areas of need and interest; ignore them at your peril. For me, I must rank social interactions above tech or I am unhappy, and that's fine. I make my living by understanding both and being very good as a liason between those two worlds.
Now if only those nerds would let me out of this locker...
Lay off the insults, all. Much of the reason that I went to MIT and majored in EE years ago was the difficulty of a "real" liberal arts education. Math and science had a rigor that was easy for my brain wiring, and so I didn't have to sweat too much to get my degree from the 'tute. I could take weekends off and still get a good grade. For someone whose gifts lie elsewhere, what I did might have seemed hard.
Now in my forties, I feel that I have been trying for years to make up that lost opportunity - yes, I wish I'd been willing to work harder and really get the grasp of history, literature and social sciences that I now see as critical. I've done alright - but when I look at my father's bookshelves (he was a writer by trade) I shudder at the volume of information he had absorbed as a "real" humanities major.
I have produced several CDs at the local level. These are good quality productions of local rock and singer-songwriter artists with paid pro backup. I usually do arrangements and guitar parts. Typical costs: about $20 - $30K, which I get perhaps $5K. But here's the rub - in many many recording deals, the labels DO NOT put up these funds. Bands rely upon their own sources for production until they are truly a proven commodity. The costs can easily be much higher, depending upon location, studio and players (the top Nashville guns run over $300/hr each - and they are worth it).
The money spent at a music store on CDs is distributed in several different directions, so that path leads to long payoff times for artists. When a local sells off the bandstand at $12/pop, they might break even at about 2000 CDs. That's quite a bit in a local market in most cities. Most band lose more than they gain, but they have their product in their hand.
In other words, the studio costs are really just one factor in a complicated and highly varied chain of events. There is no monolithic conspiracy to keep prices high except perhaps at the very top where the really awful music is produced;-)
Actually, the local paper ran a detailed article about this (I live in Portland). This is not a phenomenon that is repeated in other cities; rather, due to Oregon's I-5 corridor being the conduit between San Francisco and Seattle (Redmond) it was assumed by dot-coms that there would be tons of traffic to handle and profit from.
Obviously it didn't pan out. And since those companies didn't provide the amps to light the cable, it will cost billions to fire it all up - and that ain't happening any time soon. But it does explain in part why OR/WA have been hit harder by the recession, with plain old unrealistic optimism.
When I graduated from MIT back in the late '80s, none of this was as yet thought up, of course. The coursework was straight ahead, you could goof off if you didn't care and get a B, or you could put in a few hours and ace your degree - pretty much like any other school. But for my money (and it was a LOT of my money...) there is still no substitute for the personalities involved on both sides on the podium. I worked the hardest for and learned the most from teachers I really liked, regardless of subject. Hence I cannot help but to see the move to online coursework as either a second rate substitute for or an addition to an existing real class - with real people, real competition, real ideas being discussed in real time.
Technical subjects benefit tremendously from peer review and interaction, two qualities difficult to find in the personalities drawn to MIT, CalTech, etc. Even in these rarified environments, one must work to seek out these beacons, for that is where the real action and learning occurs. The faculty at MIT knows this and tries to encourage interaction (however uncomfortably) among the undergraduate body.
I'd give it a C until I see another reason to cheer, thought it is a good move from a philosophical POV.
Slashdot Mirror
...the one I made in 2004. We will never see an interesting, competent or remotely innovative product from Microsoft, ever again. It's over, and they will continue to turn the money crank on bloated "enterprise" software for years to come as they slowly but certainly slip into irrelevance. It's the business model. It doesn't matter what engineers they hire. And it's over.
Grown people still play shoot-em-ups? Seriously? Simulated violence is considered fun, and there is nothing better to do? That anybody over the age of 14 cares I find amazing.
As a middle aged guy with teenage kids who (long ago) went to school with the geekiest of them, I find it hard to believe that anyone can maintain an interest in video games once adulthood sets in. I have seen very, very few games that are anything more than elaborate adolescent fantasies, and it's difficult to imagine that as still interesting once you have a life. I sure as hell don't wish to revisit my teens and twenties! Really, go play outside and get some fresh air. And get off my lawn.
If MS had simply created a standards-compliant browser years ago, then this problem wouldn't exist. By buying into a Microsoft-dominated vision of the future of computing (which will never come to pass) the government agencies and other business simply hurt themselves. A REAL browser upgrade is simply to one that meets standards. IE doesn't count in that regard.
Interesting. I have never, ever seen a SharePoint setup that worked for users very well, and seen a high abandonment rate. I would like to see what it is "supposed" to look like. My current company's SharePoint site is a disorganized disaster that frankly serves very little purpose, really. The higher-ups try to use it, but it is rarely up-to-date or relevant. And the search is a mess. Count me as "don't get it" about any positive value to SharePoint.
I thought they simply arranged to be paid by hostages -er, I mean OEMs. Not exactly a regular marketplace, more like protection money. Selling involves making product that offers users something useful for which they willingly pay. In the absence of meaningful competition (numerically speaking) MS hasn't "competed" for a very long time. They simply expect to be paid. Oddly enough, it shows.
Ah, just another small piece of evidence that Microsoft is a culture completely lacking in imagination and spirit to pull off anything of any further importance. The writing's been on the wall since 2001, but here it is again: there will never, ever be another significant product out of Microsoft. Profits from the legacy, yes. Entrenched backoffice tools (a la IBM), yes. But anything that the public cares about? No. The only direction left to go is slowly downward. I am sure there are some talented folks at MS, but as a culture the company is finished. The truly creative are leaving for better places to shine. And drink beer.
... won't be bothered with Vista or even XP anytime soon, 64-bit or not. I have enough of that junk to deal with at work, and home I don't need one bit of it. If there was even one Windows application that truly mattered to me, perhaps - but there ain't. It is difficult to imagine why I would ever bother with a dual boot setup in order to get real things accomplished. That's just sad. It is true that I don't play games on computers, and if I did I might want Windows for that (at least for the next couple of years until Windows is less common) - but there are plenty of other things to do in my life right now. I barely have time for all the people and projects in my First Life, and so there is no Second Life!
I have been using a Jansport "widescreen laptop" backback for about 8 months. I travel from the West coast to Europe for business several times a year with a widescreen Dell Inspiron 8600, and regular backpacks would not properly accomodate it. The Jansport was not as cheap as one might like ($100) but it works terrifically. I doesn't look unusual, and so does not call attention to itself. The machine is very well protected in a separate section of the pack with rigid reenforcements, and there are ample pockets and sections for everything (papers, electronics, sweater). The Jansport is comfortable and appears very durable. It has enabled me to bike commute again as well. Certainly worth the $100!
As one who spent years diddling with tube amps and the like (long ago during my undergrad years at MIT in EE - NOT CS) I will add my $0.02 - Recorded music - the great majority of it - is severely compromised right from the start due to the amount of data we capture and the manner in which our ears perceive that data. No amount of DSP quite overcomes this present limitation. Remember mono, anyone? Will anyone seriously claim that a monorual recording sounds "realistic"? No, because the spatial components our ears use as cues are missing. Why 2 channels for stereo? Simple - because that was practical in 1958. It has NOTHING to do with having 2 ears, and it too is insufficient to convey the spatial data required to truly simulate an acoustic event. Notice that I have not even yet touched upon issues of dynamic range, etc. as these arguments are not necessary for now. Furthermore, most popular recordings do not use stereo to create a realistic soundfield, but rather a contrived one for effect. So back to tubes - why do some people prefer them? My thesis is that tubes introduce some non-linearities that are simply put "pleasing" in the artificial environment of 2-channel music. The absence of proper spatial and dynamic information in most recordings leaves them open for a degree of interpretation by the listener without reference to any absolute criterion. The upshot is this: current recording technology only allows for a reasonable facsimile of music to be reproduced in the home. Tubes add some color that, under the right conditions, may enhance that artifical experience in an aesthetically pleasing manner. They may make the artiface somewhat more bearable. One could design DSP algorithms that also produce pleasing artifacts. But I think that a better solution is to increase the number of channels captured and reproduced (as Dolby 5.1 almost does, etc.). The problem is that it will take years and millions of $$ for the recording infrastructure and expertise to reach that goal. One cannot simply "generate" multiple channels from a 2 channel source and hope for nirvana. A likely minimum for realistic reproduction is 6 to 8 channels, properly recorded and placed. BTW, I sold all the tube amps I built years ago, along with the tweaky speakers. Now there is a Bose Lifestyle 5 in the living room and it delivers music in an emotionally satisfying way without any fuss or bother. 'Nuff said for me.
Years ago, I graduated from MIT in EE. I did two projects of some relationship to this article - 1) a thesis on modeling of tube amp behavior and 2) a toy that would "improvise" classic blues endlessly. I was amazed that Minsky in AI loved the blues toy. It was really very simple and drew upon my experience as a local professional guitarist around Boston at the time. I tried to tell them that in my mind it was really a dumb trick, but those experiment music types just couldn't get over it... I got a prize that year. The tube amp was more fun. I used a 1960 Fender Tweed Vibrolux as my subject and created a "block model" of the time/function elements that required combination in a non-linear fashion and left it at that. It involved quite a few long time constants in the description, which is often an area where amp simulators fall apart. At the time, implementing the device in hardware would have been prohibitively expensive, and so I left it on paper and got out of school. I decided not to pursue engineering much after that, other things to do. I have used the Line6 products, and they are very good as the technology progresses. However, they don't really sound or feel that much like my real old Fenders. Instead, they use certain preconceived notions of how people use the amps and cater to those tastes. For example: I don't like to overdrive my old Fender Deluxe Reverb much - that is for rock guys, and I don't do rock anymore. The Line6 products will do a good job of mimicing a "cranked" old amp, but fails to capture the subtlety of one that is instead turned up only to "4". I love that sound! My $0.02
I feel like the inverse of what Mr. Graham describes - back in high school (26 years ago) I was a popular kid who aced AP physics and math tests. Science and tech was fun, it rolled off the tongue without effort, but I really thrived on social interaction. School plays, music and girls, etc. Fast forward to college, MIT. I hated that place - not for the academics, which were more or less what I expected, but because I found the social environment so lacking. I felt alone and unwelcome - no less "smart", but definitely different from the MIT crowd. I got through the place by focusing on off-campus activities and work where I could find "normal" people with whom I could commiserate. After school, I didn't go straight into engineering (I was a EE major - course 6.1) because as a profession it appeared filled with those same "nerds" that made me so uncomfortable! So I did other things, some technically related and others not. I have done just fine. Now in my mid-forties, I certainly know myself better than I did as a young man and realize that we all have different areas of need and interest; ignore them at your peril. For me, I must rank social interactions above tech or I am unhappy, and that's fine. I make my living by understanding both and being very good as a liason between those two worlds. Now if only those nerds would let me out of this locker...
Lay off the insults, all. Much of the reason that I went to MIT and majored in EE years ago was the difficulty of a "real" liberal arts education. Math and science had a rigor that was easy for my brain wiring, and so I didn't have to sweat too much to get my degree from the 'tute. I could take weekends off and still get a good grade. For someone whose gifts lie elsewhere, what I did might have seemed hard. Now in my forties, I feel that I have been trying for years to make up that lost opportunity - yes, I wish I'd been willing to work harder and really get the grasp of history, literature and social sciences that I now see as critical. I've done alright - but when I look at my father's bookshelves (he was a writer by trade) I shudder at the volume of information he had absorbed as a "real" humanities major.
I have produced several CDs at the local level. These are good quality productions of local rock and singer-songwriter artists with paid pro backup. I usually do arrangements and guitar parts. Typical costs: about $20 - $30K, which I get perhaps $5K. But here's the rub - in many many recording deals, the labels DO NOT put up these funds. Bands rely upon their own sources for production until they are truly a proven commodity. The costs can easily be much higher, depending upon location, studio and players (the top Nashville guns run over $300/hr each - and they are worth it). The money spent at a music store on CDs is distributed in several different directions, so that path leads to long payoff times for artists. When a local sells off the bandstand at $12/pop, they might break even at about 2000 CDs. That's quite a bit in a local market in most cities. Most band lose more than they gain, but they have their product in their hand. In other words, the studio costs are really just one factor in a complicated and highly varied chain of events. There is no monolithic conspiracy to keep prices high except perhaps at the very top where the really awful music is produced ;-)
Actually, the local paper ran a detailed article about this (I live in Portland). This is not a phenomenon that is repeated in other cities; rather, due to Oregon's I-5 corridor being the conduit between San Francisco and Seattle (Redmond) it was assumed by dot-coms that there would be tons of traffic to handle and profit from. Obviously it didn't pan out. And since those companies didn't provide the amps to light the cable, it will cost billions to fire it all up - and that ain't happening any time soon. But it does explain in part why OR/WA have been hit harder by the recession, with plain old unrealistic optimism.
When I graduated from MIT back in the late '80s, none of this was as yet thought up, of course. The coursework was straight ahead, you could goof off if you didn't care and get a B, or you could put in a few hours and ace your degree - pretty much like any other school. But for my money (and it was a LOT of my money...) there is still no substitute for the personalities involved on both sides on the podium. I worked the hardest for and learned the most from teachers I really liked, regardless of subject. Hence I cannot help but to see the move to online coursework as either a second rate substitute for or an addition to an existing real class - with real people, real competition, real ideas being discussed in real time. Technical subjects benefit tremendously from peer review and interaction, two qualities difficult to find in the personalities drawn to MIT, CalTech, etc. Even in these rarified environments, one must work to seek out these beacons, for that is where the real action and learning occurs. The faculty at MIT knows this and tries to encourage interaction (however uncomfortably) among the undergraduate body. I'd give it a C until I see another reason to cheer, thought it is a good move from a philosophical POV.