peole don't use MS products because they love them, they use them because they feel they have no choice . Apple users strive to own Apples, while MS users largely resent MS.
The geek resents Microsoft - and projects his anger on all the world. It is a peculiarly adolescent response.
Facts no longer seem to matter.
The bazaars of the third world are filled with pirated copies of Windows. Here at home, sales of the Linux netbook have tanked.
Walmart has pulled Linux off the shelves and off-line.
No one in the states tried longer or harder to make a go of Linux in deep discount retail.
For the Back-To-School trade, Walmart.com has 53 Vista desktops eligible for a free upgrade to Win 7 for sale - and God alone knows how many laptops.
The Win 7 RC has about 1/2 the global desktop share of Linux. It reached those numbers in less than six months.
The Stock ticker is merely a different telegraph. The Quadruplex telegraph was based on J. B. Stearns duplex telegraph. The incandescent lamp was invented by Swan. The phonograph was probably the only thing major invention in that list that he made a major contribution to.
The improved stock ticker.
Edison's improved stock ticker included his key contributions to printing telegraphy. His most significant improvement was a mechanism that enabled all of the tickers on a line to be synchronized so that they printed the same information. Because the printers frequently fell behind the transmitter by one or more letters, exchange companies had to send employees to the offices where printers were running out of "unison" to reset them.
One of the most effective and longest used devices was Edison's screw-thread unison. With Edison's device the transmitting operator could bring all the printers on a line into unison by sending electrical impulses to turn the shaft of each machine until a peg sitting in a screw-thread on the typewheel hit a stop. Edison also designed an improved typewheel-shifting mechanism and a paper feed so that his ticker required much less battery power. Edison also devised a transmitter for his stock ticker that used a keyboard like that of a typewriter. Edison's ticker was used on the stock exchange for several years before being replaced, but it continued to be used until about 1960 for many other purposes, including the transmission of sports scores.Stock Ticker
The improved stock ticker netted Edison $40,000.
Quadaplex telegraphy.
While working on duplex telegraphs, Edison realized that he could send four messages simultaneously by combining the duplex with a diplex for sending two messages in the same direction. The common approach to diplex was the use of weak and strong batteries to produce signals of different strengths, with relays at the receiving end designed to respond to one or the other signal. However, it proved difficult in practice to prevent the sensitive weak-signal relay from responding to the stronger signal current. In essence, Edison used a cascade of electromagnets to bridge over the time during which the reversed current regenerated the magnetic field in the main relay magnet. This solution represented an important approach that Edison often took when confronted by particularly intractable problems - rather than completely eliminate a defect he found a way to use its own effects to obviate the problem. The quadruplex continued to be used into the twentieth century.Quadruplex Telegraph
The incandescent lamp
In addressing the question "Who invented the incandescent lamp?" historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance lamp that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.
Thomas Hughes, has attributed Edison's success to the fact that he invented an entire, integrated system of electric lighting. "The lamp was a small component in his system of electric lighting, and no more critical to its effective functioning than the Edison Jumbo generator, the Edison main and feeder, and the parallel-distribution system. Other inventors with generators and incandescent lamps, and with comparable ingenuity and excellence, have long been forgotten because their creators did not preside over their introduction in a system of lighting."History of the light bulb
The common thread in these stories is Edison's ability to see the problem as a whole - and deliver a commercially viable solution to the problem as a whole.
So why the mod up to +5 with no working link to support the assertion?
Why the Fastest Chip Didn't Win" (Business Week, April 28, 1997) states that when Digital engineers noticed the similarities between VMS and NT, they brought their observations to senior management. Rather than suing, Digital cut a deal with Microsoft. In the summer of 1995, Digital announced Affinity for OpenVMS, a program that required Microsoft to help train Digital NT technicians, help promote NT and Open-VMS as two pieces of a three-tiered client/server networking solution, and promise to maintain NT support for the Alpha processor. Microsoft also paid Digital between 65 million and 100 million dollars.
Interestingly, throughout the 1990s, Digital introduced many NT features to VMS, and Microsoft has added VMS developments to NT. For example, VMS featured native clustering support in 1984, and 64-bit memory and system APIs in 1996.Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story [1998]
Digital began spinning off bits and pieces of the corporation in 1992 - the last remnants going to Compaq in 1998. Digital Equipment Corporation You could argue that when the VMS team abandoned ship, Microsoft was there with a lifeboat.
More to the point, for the slashdot audience - Windows. It's crap. And yet, any efforts to end the lock-in are met with all sorts of fud, both from Microsoft, and teir partners, in an effort to continue to entrap and bilk and ass-rape their customers.
The geek came into the netbook market thinking that this time he held all the high cards.
But XP on the Atom platform cleaned his clock.
Vista and Win 7 RC have five times the market share of Linux in the W3Schools OS Platform Stats
It took Linux six long years to move from 2% to 4% in these stats.
I've seen estimates of Windows users that begin at around one billion.
That should tell the geek something about support for development, support for applications, support for hardware, the validity of the UI - and a hundred other things that a modern, technically competent, end-user oriented OS simply must have.
Menlo Park was in the business of invention. That in itself was a new idea.
1877 Phonograph
The most interesting thing about the phonograph is that no one saw it coming.
1880 Incandescent lamp.
Edison needed a lamp which could be wired in parallel. His team had to design every component - down to the wiring, fixtures, fuses and switches that would be safe for use in the home.
I'm actually surprised at how quickly some of these platforms like the iPhone have developed completely closed programming environments with barely a peep of protest from the normally pretty libertarian tech crowd.
It's a successful platform. The barriers to entry are low. It pays the rent. Next question, please.
The XO-1 is a cross between a computer and a fisher price toy, and I mean that in the best possible way
Lionel once tried to sell a robin's egg blue and pink train set to girls - who despised the thing as much as any boy.
The lime green designer laptop with a Sugar UI risks making the same mistake.
The most successful toys mimic what a kid sees in the adult world - and the most sophisticated of toys become a rite of passage - an entry into that world.
Traditionally, this is how book publishing worked in the 19th century - you'd circulate a prospectus advertising the work, you'd collect a certain number of subscribers, and then you'd go ahead and publish it.
There were many county histories published like this.
The illustrations and biographies paid for and edited by the original subscribers. The engravings I found of my own ancestors are alarmingly honest as their photographs - showing faces ravaged by smallpox. Farms that were prosperous, but never those of the country gentleman.
But it was still hack work - done strictly to formula - and if an subscriber chose to stretch the truth - a little more than his pastor would have approved - he could be accommodated if the price was right. He would never hear the end of it from his neighbors - but by then the salesman would be lone gone.
Back in those days pianos and organs were sold door-to-door. The farmer conned into letting a demo sit in his parlor for a week or two while he was double teamed by his wife and daughters.
It takes Pixar four years to produce a feature film from an story concept that has been kicked about for five to ten years - and even then there will be many false starts.
It is easy even for the pro to become enamored with an idea that isn't working or is fundamentally second-rate.
The fan will find it even harder to let go.
But the greater risk may be the fan-driven production: "Snakes on a Plane."
What Sugar did was try to lock them in a world of Fisher Price toy simplicity, as if they were intellectually retarded. None of the UI knowledge of Sugar would benefit them later. It thoroughly deserved to fail.
The third world education minister has very little time and very limited resources to get his kids on track for placement in the higher grades or the job market.
The problem isn't that Sugar is "retarded," the problem is that it has no place outside the elementary classroom.
Slashdot Mirror
It's because users of Microsoft services are more stupid than the general population. There, I said it!
and won another unearned mod-up to +5, Informative. Like I said, big whoop.
Microsoft's customers are the general population.
Google - and the Moz Foundation - are built on revenues from the add-click.
The more impressive the return from Bing the more advertising dollars move to Bing - and to Microsoft's other online services.
How do you know you are reading it correctly when you don't know which letters are supposed to be there?
He knows.
Text messaging rewards speed over precision.
Spell checking is built into Slashdot. The Google toolbar. It's a free add-on for IE.
But reading a Slashdot post you'd never know it.
Perhaps because a spell check would flag too many of the geek's favorite neologisms like "M$ -" and wouldn't that be a crime?
A successful antitrust suit is a pretty good indication that people are not using a company's product though choice.
After the break-up of the Standard Oil trust, customers went right on buying from Rockefeller's regional operating companies.
He prospered. They prospered. The small independents faded out of the picture.
peole don't use MS products because they love them, they use them because they feel they have no choice . Apple users strive to own Apples, while MS users largely resent MS.
The geek resents Microsoft - and projects his anger on all the world. It is a peculiarly adolescent response.
Facts no longer seem to matter.
The bazaars of the third world are filled with pirated copies of Windows. Here at home, sales of the Linux netbook have tanked.
Walmart has pulled Linux off the shelves and off-line.
No one in the states tried longer or harder to make a go of Linux in deep discount retail.
For the Back-To-School trade, Walmart.com has 53 Vista desktops eligible for a free upgrade to Win 7 for sale - and God alone knows how many laptops.
The Win 7 RC has about 1/2 the global desktop share of Linux. It reached those numbers in less than six months.
The Stock ticker is merely a different telegraph. The Quadruplex telegraph was based on J. B. Stearns duplex telegraph. The incandescent lamp was invented by Swan. The phonograph was probably the only thing major invention in that list that he made a major contribution to.
The improved stock ticker.
Edison's improved stock ticker included his key contributions to printing telegraphy. His most significant improvement was a mechanism that enabled all of the tickers on a line to be synchronized so that they printed the same information. Because the printers frequently fell behind the transmitter by one or more letters, exchange companies had to send employees to the offices where printers were running out of "unison" to reset them.
One of the most effective and longest used devices was Edison's screw-thread unison. With Edison's device the transmitting operator could bring all the printers on a line into unison by sending electrical impulses to turn the shaft of each machine until a peg sitting in a screw-thread on the typewheel hit a stop. Edison also designed an improved typewheel-shifting mechanism and a paper feed so that his ticker required much less battery power. Edison also devised a transmitter for his stock ticker that used a keyboard like that of a typewriter. Edison's ticker was used on the stock exchange for several years before being replaced, but it continued to be used until about 1960 for many other purposes, including the transmission of sports scores. Stock Ticker
The improved stock ticker netted Edison $40,000.
Quadaplex telegraphy.
While working on duplex telegraphs, Edison realized that he could send four messages simultaneously by combining the duplex with a diplex for sending two messages in the same direction. The common approach to diplex was the use of weak and strong batteries to produce signals of different strengths, with relays at the receiving end designed to respond to one or the other signal. However, it proved difficult in practice to prevent the sensitive weak-signal relay from responding to the stronger signal current. In essence, Edison used a cascade of electromagnets to bridge over the time during which the reversed current regenerated the magnetic field in the main relay magnet. This solution represented an important approach that Edison often took when confronted by particularly intractable problems - rather than completely eliminate a defect he found a way to use its own effects to obviate the problem. The quadruplex continued to be used into the twentieth century. Quadruplex Telegraph
The incandescent lamp
In addressing the question "Who invented the incandescent lamp?" historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance lamp that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.
Thomas Hughes, has attributed Edison's success to the fact that he invented an entire, integrated system of electric lighting. "The lamp was a small component in his system of electric lighting, and no more critical to its effective functioning than the Edison Jumbo generator, the Edison main and feeder, and the parallel-distribution system. Other inventors with generators and incandescent lamps, and with comparable ingenuity and excellence, have long been forgotten because their creators did not preside over their introduction in a system of lighting." History of the light bulb
The common thread in these stories is Edison's ability to see the problem as a whole - and deliver a commercially viable solution to the problem as a whole.
What is he doing in his grave? Last thing I heard he was still alive.
We all have our dreams.
Yeah, they did.
So why the mod up to +5 with no working link to support the assertion?
Why the Fastest Chip Didn't Win" (Business Week, April 28, 1997) states that when Digital engineers noticed the similarities between VMS and NT, they brought their observations to senior management. Rather than suing, Digital cut a deal with Microsoft. In the summer of 1995, Digital announced Affinity for OpenVMS, a program that required Microsoft to help train Digital NT technicians, help promote NT and Open-VMS as two pieces of a three-tiered client/server networking solution, and promise to maintain NT support for the Alpha processor. Microsoft also paid Digital between 65 million and 100 million dollars.
Interestingly, throughout the 1990s, Digital introduced many NT features to VMS, and Microsoft has added VMS developments to NT. For example, VMS featured native clustering support in 1984, and 64-bit memory and system APIs in 1996. Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story [1998]
Digital began spinning off bits and pieces of the corporation in 1992 - the last remnants going to Compaq in 1998. Digital Equipment Corporation You could argue that when the VMS team abandoned ship, Microsoft was there with a lifeboat.
It happens in this business.
More to the point, for the slashdot audience - Windows. It's crap. And yet, any efforts to end the lock-in are met with all sorts of fud, both from Microsoft, and teir partners, in an effort to continue to entrap and bilk and ass-rape their customers.
The geek came into the netbook market thinking that this time he held all the high cards.
But XP on the Atom platform cleaned his clock.
Vista and Win 7 RC have five times the market share of Linux in the W3Schools OS Platform Stats
It took Linux six long years to move from 2% to 4% in these stats.
Win 7 six months from 0% to 2%. This is on a site which has Firefox at 47%. Browser Statistics Month by Month
I've seen estimates of Windows users that begin at around one billion.
That should tell the geek something about support for development, support for applications, support for hardware, the validity of the UI -
and a hundred other things that a modern, technically competent, end-user oriented OS simply must have.
The week at TigerDirect:
15.6" Acer Vista Premium Notebook. AMD Dual-Core. 3 GB RAM, Radeon HD3200 DX10 graphics, 320 GB HDD, DVD Burner. Etc. $450.
Windows isn't crap. It isn't an ass-rape.
That kind of trash-talk leads absolutely nowhere.
The Windows system is competitively priced. It runs everything in closed and proprietary software - everything free and open sourced.
This is what sucks the air out of the room.
Electrical pioneer my ass, he just got lucky once and was able to afford to hire good talent
Luck favors the prepared.
1869 Stock ticker
1874 Quadruplex telegraph [Polar modulation]
Rights sold to Western Union for $10,000. [about $170,000 in 2005 dollars Historical Value of U.S. Dollar]
Menlo Park was in the business of invention. That in itself was a new idea.
1877 Phonograph
The most interesting thing about the phonograph is that no one saw it coming.
1880 Incandescent lamp.
Edison needed a lamp which could be wired in parallel. His team had to design every component - down to the wiring, fixtures, fuses and switches that would be safe for use in the home.
I think the above changes might more accurately reflect reality.
The federal judge has decades of experience in asking the right questions and getting clear and meaningful answers.
The issue is the OEMs being strongarmed into forcing it into builds whether people want it or not.
The Linux netbook is dead and buried at Walmart.com.
It has a lot of company on Boot Hill.
The Sun Java System. Lindows/Linspire. gOS and God alone knows how many others.
The W3Schools stats have Vista at about 20% and the Win 7 RC at 2%.
That's five times the market share of Linux - on a site which shows a 50% share for Firefox.
Windows isn't the beaded seat cover. Its the god-damned engine that drives the entire market.
But the point is that we shouldn't be forced to choose hardware based on what OS we want, or pay $40 more than we needed to.
WalMart with its enormous - unprecedented - purchasing power has never been able to significantly undercut OEM Windows on price.
No deep discount retailer in the states has worked harder to make a go of OEM Linux - but nothing ever comes of it.
You deliver the Windows product or your sales go in the tank.
"Bare Bones" is the boutique product. Linux is the boutique product.
That is why you pay a premium - and - ultimately - it is the only reason why you pay a premium.
So you might as well buy from someone who understands the product - knows how to support it - and still make a decent living.
The reality check implies practical experience. The more the better. Things don't always work out the way you expect.
It would be more helpful if I knew about how much this was going to cost without having to e-mail for a quote.
Why is every Windows release candidate a Slashdot news?
Because in the W3Schools OS Platform Stats the Win7 RC has half the market share of Linux and Vista/Win7 five times that of Linux.
Tell me why it doesn't make sense to buy power at off-peak rates and store it locally to meet peak demands.
How much will it cost?
What does the "quick recharge" station look like to the guy who owns it?
What are his costs - and potential for profit?
The small gas station seems to need secondary sources of income: the mini-mart or pizzeria.
What does the station look like to his village zoning board?
There are going be to problems if he needs to draw down power on an industrial scale. If he needs a larger lot than the gas station he replaces.
The gas station buries the tank underground. The battery charge or exchange has to be on the surface.
It's a successful platform. The barriers to entry are low. It pays the rent. Next question, please.
The XO-1 is a cross between a computer and a fisher price toy, and I mean that in the best possible way
Lionel once tried to sell a robin's egg blue and pink train set to girls - who despised the thing as much as any boy.
The lime green designer laptop with a Sugar UI risks making the same mistake.
The most successful toys mimic what a kid sees in the adult world - and the most sophisticated of toys become a rite of passage - an entry into that world.
Plausible deniability!
The judge and jury get to decide what is plausible.
It won't look good if the erasure violates standard practice or professional guidelines, legal obligations or existing corporate policy.
In criminal law, a guilty verdict demands proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
That does not mean that every piece of evidence has to carry the same weight - only that the evidence when viewed as a whole is damning.
If the state's witness performs credibly on the stand, that will carry over to whatever documents he is asked to describe and identify.
"Plausible denial" is a world of hurt.
Traditionally, this is how book publishing worked in the 19th century - you'd circulate a prospectus advertising the work, you'd collect a certain number of subscribers, and then you'd go ahead and publish it.
There were many county histories published like this.
The illustrations and biographies paid for and edited by the original subscribers. The engravings I found of my own ancestors are alarmingly honest as their photographs - showing faces ravaged by smallpox. Farms that were prosperous, but never those of the country gentleman.
But it was still hack work - done strictly to formula - and if an subscriber chose to stretch the truth - a little more than his pastor would have approved - he could be accommodated if the price was right. He would never hear the end of it from his neighbors - but by then the salesman would be lone gone.
Back in those days pianos and organs were sold door-to-door. The farmer conned into letting a demo sit in his parlor for a week or two while he was double teamed by his wife and daughters.
Wasn't it a bit obvious after say 6-12 months that the guy either didn't have the money or wasn't going to ever hand it over?
If he has it - and refuses to pay - in jail he stays. You can't allow mule headed stubbornness to defeat the law.
It takes Pixar four years to produce a feature film from an story concept that has been kicked about for five to ten years -
and even then there will be many false starts.
It is easy even for the pro to become enamored with an idea that isn't working or is fundamentally second-rate.
The fan will find it even harder to let go.
But the greater risk may be the fan-driven production: "Snakes on a Plane."
Who wants a platform that is so locked down you can't screw it up hacking it? Boooorring
The guy who needs to make a phone call. The guy who wants everything to just work. The guy who shops at Apple.
What Sugar did was try to lock them in a world of Fisher Price toy simplicity, as if they were intellectually retarded. None of the UI knowledge of Sugar would benefit them later. It thoroughly deserved to fail.
The third world education minister has very little time and very limited resources to get his kids on track for placement in the higher grades or the job market.
The problem isn't that Sugar is "retarded," the problem is that it has no place outside the elementary classroom.