There will 10,000 athletes competing for 931 medals - most will see their picture on an American cereal box.
. Rarely, if ever, do any of these participants return for another try at Olympic glory after they have achieved -or failed to achieve- the brief stardom of the podium
Athletes do return to the games.
That is an extraordinary achievement in itself. It means, among other things, that there is training and financial support for the older athlete who wants to remain competitve in world competition.
Look at the ages of some of these men and women:
John Dale III. USA. 58, Sailing. The oldest athlete on the American team. His first Olympics.
Libby Callahan. USA 56. Shooting. The oldest US female Olympian ever.
Dara Torres. USA. 42. Swimming
Her fifth Olympics. U.S. record time in the Olympic. trials. Oldest swimmer ever to qualify for the games.
Hiroshi Hoketsu. 68. Japan. Equestrian. Retired Johnson & Johnson executive. Returning to the Olympics for the first time since Tokyo, 1964.
It interests me that when talking about Windows the Geek does not separate the kernel from the UI. The NT kernel of XP and Vista is fifteen years old. The LInux kernel seventeen.
The Mac's UNIX roots can be traced back to the NeXT system of 1985.
Can someone please explain what these guys have to offer? ,
The OEM Linspire PC has at least a minimal presence in big box retail.
It is close on to thirty years since the OEM system install became standard in the home market.
Linspire pioneered the "Click-N'Run" repository of free and non-free software for the user who will never give a damn about the ideology of free and open source.
What Linspire gave them was the comfort level of Download.com. Screen shots. Product reviews - from outside the geek community - reviews that could be etched in acid.
I'm surprised you mentioned Ma Bell, as AT&T seems to have almost all its pieces back together again. It seems that they aren't such a Humpty Dumpty after all. .
Standard Oil's operating companies prospered after the break-up.
The small independents faded out of the picture.
If for no better reasons than that the Standard product was available everywhere, familiar, trusted and cheap.
John D - richer than ever - found a new career as one of the world's great philanthropists. The elimination of hookworm in the American South. The purchase of colonial Williamsburg.
You do not have the right to torment an individual like this anymore than you have a right to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater or "I have a bomb" in an airport. .
Free speech in the American context is rooted in the notion that citizens should have the right to debate matters of public concern free of government interference.
There is a path from there to freedom of expression in the arts, to freedom of inquiry and publication in the sciences.
But there has always been no less strong and deeply rooted small-c conservative strain in American constitutionalism - call it a sense of civic responsibility or call it simply a sense of fair play. Respect for the rules. Respect for others.
-- a profound distrust of absolutes.
The western mind tends to see everything as polar opposites: Good and Evil. Life and Death. Pleasure and Pain.
The Geek may be uniquely vulnerable to this kind of binary thinking.
Vista sales have to make money -different ball game. Linux "penetration" means hardware manufacturers and software producers are forced to pay attention. Apple had MS Office at 3%, I wonder what Linux will have to hit before Microsoft ports? .
OEM Linux also has to make money.
The retailer has to market the product, manage his inventory, provide service and support, and so on. There isn't much to be expected from after-market sales.
Microsoft software development for Apple began with the Apple II. The Z-80 card was its first significant hardware product.
These companies have a long term symbiotic relationship:
That's just silly. The numbers are very good news for Linux, considering the bazillions of dollars MS has put into pushing Vista. Of course their numbers are higher! Besides, every customer who goes home with a Vista box is an excellent candidate for using Linux in the future. .
Looking at the world through a Penguin tinted lens?
In the states, OEM consumer Vista is 32 bit Vista Premium SP1. Dual core is a given. 2 GB RAM or better is a given. [You will find the single core Athlon LE at entry level]
64 bit Vista Premium 2.66 GHz Intel Quad CPU, 4 GB RAM, 1 TB of storage 512 MB NVIDIA 8600 GT graphics, Combo Blu-Ray Drive and Lightscribe DVD Burner, HDTV Tuner, Wireless multimedia keyboard and mouse, Remote Control...
Etc., etc. You get the idea - buy from Tiger and you might even save a few bucks.
The versatility and raw horsepower of a system like this does not strike me as a compelling reason to migrate to Linux. But you can go - far - down the food chain and the specs and performance will still look good.
Whereas when the same notion strikes in Linux, the results are all free software, and far more functional than the Windows shareware shite, because some hacker in the past has faced the same problem as me, and has published his solution to the community. .
He has also ported his solution to Windows - assuming it did not begin as a native Windows app.
It seems that the percentage of systems pre-installed with Linux has gone up 28 times since Vista shipped, from 0.1% in January 2007 to 2.8% last June .
So what are the numbers for Vista?
The picture isn't quite as cheering for the geek if pre-installs are 97% Vista and 3% Linux
- - - that 3% gain is mostly at the expense of XP at End-of-Life and visible only at the very bottom of the OEM market.
To put it another way - the numbers look less impressive if pre-installs of Vista Premium are growing at the rate of 1% month and Linux BASIC 3% every 18 months.
It simply struck me that nothing much seems to happening Mac-side as we head into the fall - while MS Vista is posting gains of about 1% a month.
Because it's not being pre-installed on probably 99.9% of PCs consumers buy in stores, and most businesses still have "old guard" IT departments who will stick with buying Windows to the very bitter end
I think at some point you have to start questioning these arguments.
OLPC has comfirmed orders of about 700,000 units. Here and in the UMPC or netbook market Linux was supposed to be entering a level playing field - or one tilted in its favor.
It hasn't quite worked out that way.
The geek has been on the sidelines cheering whenever WalMart.com enters the lists with an OEM Linux econo-box. Six moths later all has been forgiven and the Vista product outnumbers Linux 50 to 1.
But what most people tend to forget is that there is a much larger pool of users that are not willing to memorize 200 commands, and read man pages for days and days in order to just use their computer .
"Oh, god, what do I do now?"
There is this simple fear of making a mistake. The fear of what will happen when you hit "Return." The command line argument can be complex, arcane and unforgiving.
So it's anti-social not to work for complete strangers, for free? .
The user will make a choice between your program and the commercial alternative. The chances are quite good that he will choose the commercial OS along with it. No one has the right to ask you to work for free. But everyone has the right to turn their back on your project and your open source ideals. That is also part of the bargain.
Poor usability? Is there really anybody who thinks that Internet Explorer 7's user interface is better than Firefox 3's? .
The problem is that the Moz Foundation began with a massive infusion of cash and has $70 million or so in new money coming in each year.
Moz is a full time professionally staffed organization with broad resources.
The problem is that funding and technical support from Big Daddy Warbucks - Google, Sun, IBM - all the usual suspects - is the exception. Sourceforge is the rule.
The problem is that as a client OS Linux has a 0.8% market share. Operating System Market Share I hope you can forgive me for saying so, but that isn't much to show for seven years hard work.
Vista should have a 20% share in the Net Applications stats before year's end.
Given the weakness in the world economy, that is a number Microsoft can live with. God knows its returns are looking better than Sun's, with profits down 73% last quarter, and no good news in prospect. The Mac appears to be stagnating, and its reputation as the "high priced spread" may be to blame.
But that just takes you back to the same old question.
If the problem isn't with the UI and isn't with the installer and isn't with the apps why isn't Linux on the desktop gaining any traction?
(2) "Designers" who can't code have absolutely no business "working" in software. .
This is lunacy.
Taken to its logical conclusion, it means that no one but a coder as any business playing any part in the development of a program.
Because human-computer interaction studies a human and a machine in conjunction, it draws from supporting knowledge on both the machine and the human side. On the machine side, techniques in computer graphics, operating systems, programming languages, and development environments are relevant. On the human side, communication theory, graphic and industrial design disciplines, linguistics, social sciences, cognitive psychology, and human performance are relevant. Engineering and design methods are also relevant.Human-computer interaction
While it would be nice to have someone with the perfect knowledge and perfect balance needed to navigate all these disciplines on your team, in the real world it doesn't happen --- and it is on the human side where FOSS fails.
(1) "Usability" is in the mind of the user. If you learned how to use some other system first and now expect that any other way of doing things isn't "usable" enough, that's just plain old resistance to change. It says more about you than it does about the usability of the software.
The geek can never quite forgive the user for being more intractable than the machine --- or the success of those who have profited from that simple truth.
Ok, what's your point? That's a story of fiction. You aren't trying to argue that a fictional story was somehow the impetus for license plates, are you? .
The The Hound of the Baskervilles is written as a memoir of events which happened twenty years before. Writing in 1901, Conan Doyle didn't have to explain what a license plate was or what use a detective could make it --- nor would anyone reading the serialized story or novel have found the use of a license plate as a clue in any way anachronistic.
Well, points for being poetic, but no points for disputing how license tags are not an abrogation of the 4th amendment.
In 1738 Benjamin Franklin began a campaign to reform and - in a sense - to professionalize the night watch in Philadelphia. The Life of Benjamin Franklin
In the colonial era any notion you might have had that you could use the public roads anonymously would have been dispelled very quickly.
Societies forged on the frontiers of civilization simply don't think that way.
The real mission creep isn't these cameras. It is the license plates themselves. License plates should never have been designed. Their only purpose was to be a loophole for "unreasonable searches" since they are in public view .
The history of the license plate:
In The Hound of the Baskervilles [1902] by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are found unsuccessfully trying to catch a public hansom cab. Holmes, however, got close enough to the cab to spot its license number, which became a major clue in cracking the case.
You will find stories like these in every newspaper published in the last 100 years.
The license plate is not going to go away and it will be read by the neighborhood watch and the highway patrolman.
The policeman is first and last the successor to the watchman in the night. He needs to know who is out there. He needs to move quickly sometimes.
Now back to our story:
New York became the first state to require vehicle registration [1901] and California followed suit later that year. The first New York issues were homemade plates, bearing the initials of the owner without any numbers. Massachusetts was the first state to actually issue plates, beginning in 1903. By 1918, all 48 of the contiguous United States were issuing license plate. Although they were territories at the time, Alaska and Hawaii began issuing plates in 1921 and 1922.
License plates have changed significantly over the years. Early plates were not fancy -- just the state name or abbreviation, a registration number, and, more often than not, the year. Fancy lettering, reflectorization, slogans, county names, illustrations or logos peculiar to a particular state became more common.
Beginning in 1957, most types of North American plates have been a standard size, six by twelve inches. Prior to that, different sizes and shapes were not uncommon. Plates were normally rectangular, but oval, square, round, and triangular shapes were used. For a number of years, Kansas and Tennessee cut their plates to match the shaped of the state itself. The distinction for the most unusually shaped plates goes to Northwest Territories and Nunavut in Canada, which have their plates cut in the shape of a bear.Automobile License Plate Buying Guide
Well, geez, we're talking about Netcraft, and it is right there in the Netcraft announcements: .
and to quote from your own link: "While those parked domains were a major factor in Microsoft's gains, Windows also saw solid growth in active sites, hostnames that contain content and likely to represent developed web sites."
Why stop at 2006?
Microsoft's IIS web server grows by 2 million sites, boosting market share by 0.36%, [to 35%] but Apache remains in the lead with a total of 49.1%. June 2008 Web Server Survey
And if you Google around (you do know Google?)
Yes I know Google.
But why should I have to fact-check every post? Without so much as a starting point to begin?
Slashdot Mirror
.
many of the athletes arrive in Beijing knowing that their national team hasn't a prayer of returning home with a medal.
many compete in sports that have little visibility in the states beyond their exposure in the Olympics
.
Rarely, if ever, do any of these participants return for another try at Olympic glory after they have achieved -or failed to achieve- the brief stardom of the podium
Athletes do return to the games.
That is an extraordinary achievement in itself. It means, among other things, that there is training and financial support for the older athlete who wants to remain competitve in world competition.
Look at the ages of some of these men and women:
John Dale III. USA. 58, Sailing.
The oldest athlete on the American team. His first Olympics.
Libby Callahan. USA 56. Shooting.
The oldest US female Olympian ever.
Dara Torres. USA. 42. Swimming
Her fifth Olympics. U.S. record time in the Olympic. trials. Oldest swimmer ever to qualify for the games.
Hiroshi Hoketsu. 68. Japan. Equestrian.
Retired Johnson & Johnson executive. Returning to the Olympics for the first time since Tokyo, 1964.
.
MS Vista has twice the market share of OSX.
MX Vista has sixteen times that the market share of Linux.Top Operating System Share Trend
It interests me that when talking about Windows the Geek does not separate the kernel from the UI. The NT kernel of XP and Vista is fifteen years old. The LInux kernel seventeen.
The Mac's UNIX roots can be traced back to the NeXT system of 1985.
.
Chile has a population of 17 million and a per capita income of $14,000 a year. Chile
In 2006 Chile had 1 million broadband users - not bad for a country that didn't have DSL or cable Internet service before the year 2000.
The "e-business" potential of the country looks quite good.A Wired Country
,
The OEM Linspire PC has at least a minimal presence in big box retail.
It is close on to thirty years since the OEM system install became standard in the home market.
Linspire pioneered the "Click-N'Run" repository of free and non-free software for the user who will never give a damn about the ideology of free and open source.
What Linspire gave them was the comfort level of Download.com. Screen shots. Product reviews - from outside the geek community - reviews that could be etched in acid.
.
just so long as you remember that King's Quest was the first nail in the coffin for Infocom.
.
Standard Oil's operating companies prospered after the break-up.
The small independents faded out of the picture.
If for no better reasons than that the Standard product was available everywhere, familiar, trusted and cheap.
John D - richer than ever - found a new career as one of the world's great philanthropists. The elimination of hookworm in the American South. The purchase of colonial Williamsburg.
Does anything in this story sound familiar?
.
Free speech in the American context is rooted in the notion that citizens should have the right to debate matters of public concern free of government interference.
There is a path from there to freedom of expression in the arts, to freedom of inquiry and publication in the sciences.
But there has always been no less strong and deeply rooted small-c conservative strain in American constitutionalism - call it a sense of civic responsibility or call it simply a sense of fair play. Respect for the rules. Respect for others.
-- a profound distrust of absolutes.
The western mind tends to see everything as polar opposites: Good and Evil. Life and Death. Pleasure and Pain.
The Geek may be uniquely vulnerable to this kind of binary thinking.
.
I stopped reading right there.
If there is anything less "cool" on this world than the corporate desktop I have yet to find it.
.
OEM Linux also has to make money.
The retailer has to market the product, manage his inventory, provide service and support, and so on. There isn't much to be expected from after-market sales.
Microsoft software development for Apple began with the Apple II. The Z-80 card was its first significant hardware product.
These companies have a long term symbiotic relationship:
iTunes for Windows. Boot Camp for the MacIntel.
.
But a payroll system isn't simply about tech.
It is about accounting, the obligation of contracts, state and federal laws.
You validate everything because a single misplaced decimal point could send you into multi-million dollar litigation.
.
which, interestingly enough, was Microsoft's first hardware product.
.
Looking at the world through a Penguin tinted lens?
In the states, OEM consumer Vista is 32 bit Vista Premium SP1. Dual core is a given. 2 GB RAM or better is a given. [You will find the single core Athlon LE at entry level]
The $1500 HP Elite at Walmart.com:
64 bit Vista Premium
2.66 GHz Intel Quad CPU, 4 GB RAM, 1 TB of storage
512 MB NVIDIA 8600 GT graphics, Combo Blu-Ray Drive and Lightscribe DVD Burner,
HDTV Tuner, Wireless multimedia keyboard and mouse, Remote Control...
Etc., etc. You get the idea - buy from Tiger and you might even save a few bucks.
The versatility and raw horsepower of a system like this does not strike me as a compelling reason to migrate to Linux. But you can go - far - down the food chain and the specs and performance will still look good.
.
He has also ported his solution to Windows - assuming it did not begin as a native Windows app.
.
So what are the numbers for Vista?
The picture isn't quite as cheering for the geek if pre-installs are 97% Vista and 3% Linux
- - - that 3% gain is mostly at the expense of XP at End-of-Life and visible only at the very bottom of the OEM market.
To put it another way - the numbers look less impressive if pre-installs of Vista Premium are growing at the rate of 1% month and Linux BASIC 3% every 18 months.
.
It simply struck me that nothing much seems to happening Mac-side as we head into the fall - while MS Vista is posting gains of about 1% a month.
Because it's not being pre-installed on probably 99.9% of PCs consumers buy in stores, and most businesses still have "old guard" IT departments who will stick with buying Windows to the very bitter end
I think at some point you have to start questioning these arguments.
OLPC has comfirmed orders of about 700,000 units. Here and in the UMPC or netbook market Linux was supposed to be entering a level playing field - or one tilted in its favor.
It hasn't quite worked out that way.
The geek has been on the sidelines cheering whenever WalMart.com enters the lists with an OEM Linux econo-box. Six moths later all has been forgiven and the Vista product outnumbers Linux 50 to 1.
.
"Oh, god, what do I do now?"
There is this simple fear of making a mistake. The fear of what will happen when you hit "Return." The command line argument can be complex, arcane and unforgiving.
.
The user will make a choice between your program and the commercial alternative. The chances are quite good that he will choose the commercial OS along with it.
No one has the right to ask you to work for free. But everyone has the right to turn their back on your project and your open source ideals. That is also part of the bargain.
.
The problem is that the Moz Foundation began with a massive infusion of cash and has $70 million or so in new money coming in each year.
Moz is a full time professionally staffed organization with broad resources.
The problem is that funding and technical support from Big Daddy Warbucks - Google, Sun, IBM - all the usual suspects - is the exception. Sourceforge is the rule.
The problem is that as a client OS Linux has a 0.8% market share. Operating System Market Share I hope you can forgive me for saying so, but that isn't much to show for seven years hard work.
Vista should have a 20% share in the Net Applications stats before year's end.
Given the weakness in the world economy, that is a number Microsoft can live with. God knows its returns are looking better than Sun's, with profits down 73% last quarter, and no good news in prospect.
The Mac appears to be stagnating, and its reputation as the "high priced spread" may be to blame.
But that just takes you back to the same old question.
If the problem isn't with the UI and isn't with the installer and isn't with the apps why isn't Linux on the desktop gaining any traction?
.
This is lunacy.
Taken to its logical conclusion, it means that no one but a coder as any business playing any part in the development of a program.
Because human-computer interaction studies a human and a machine in conjunction, it draws from supporting knowledge on both the machine and the human side. On the machine side, techniques in computer graphics, operating systems, programming languages, and development environments are relevant. On the human side, communication theory, graphic and industrial design disciplines, linguistics, social sciences, cognitive psychology, and human performance are relevant. Engineering and design methods are also relevant. Human-computer interaction
While it would be nice to have someone with the perfect knowledge and perfect balance needed to navigate all these disciplines on your team, in the real world it doesn't happen --- and it is on the human side where FOSS fails.
(1) "Usability" is in the mind of the user. If you learned how to use some other system first and now expect that any other way of doing things isn't "usable" enough, that's just plain old resistance to change. It says more about you than it does about the usability of the software.
The geek can never quite forgive the user for being more intractable than the machine --- or the success of those who have profited from that simple truth.
It sticks in his craw even more when it is the enemy who moves forward first and most successfully. The Microsoft Office Fluent user interface overview
.
These aren't engineering documents - but they do give you some sense of the resources available through NASA:
NASA History Series
.
The The Hound of the Baskervilles is written as a memoir of events which happened twenty years before. Writing in 1901, Conan Doyle didn't have to explain what a license plate was or what use a detective could make it --- nor would anyone reading the serialized story or novel have found the use of a license plate as a clue in any way anachronistic.
Well, points for being poetic, but no points for disputing how license tags are not an abrogation of the 4th amendment.
In 1738 Benjamin Franklin began a campaign to reform and - in a sense - to professionalize the night watch in Philadelphia. The Life of Benjamin Franklin
In the colonial era any notion you might have had that you could use the public roads anonymously would have been dispelled very quickly.
Societies forged on the frontiers of civilization simply don't think that way.
.
The history of the license plate:
In The Hound of the Baskervilles [1902] by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are found unsuccessfully trying to catch a public hansom cab. Holmes, however, got close enough to the cab to spot its license number, which became a major clue in cracking the case.
This is the reality:
Deputy charged in assault on prostitute, [Aug 1], Mom pleads for daughter's safe return [Aug 1], Police say Sciota man tried to burn bar
You will find stories like these in every newspaper published in the last 100 years.
The license plate is not going to go away and it will be read by the neighborhood watch and the highway patrolman.
The policeman is first and last the successor to the watchman in the night. He needs to know who is out there. He needs to move quickly sometimes.
Now back to our story:
New York became the first state to require vehicle registration [1901] and California followed suit later that year. The first New York issues were homemade plates, bearing the initials of the owner without any numbers. Massachusetts was the first state to actually issue plates, beginning in 1903. By 1918, all 48 of the contiguous United States were issuing license plate. Although they were territories at the time, Alaska and Hawaii began issuing plates in 1921 and 1922.
License plates have changed significantly over the years. Early plates were not fancy -- just the state name or abbreviation, a registration number, and, more often than not, the year. Fancy lettering, reflectorization, slogans, county names, illustrations or logos peculiar to a particular state became more common.
Beginning in 1957, most types of North American plates have been a standard size, six by twelve inches. Prior to that, different sizes and shapes were not uncommon. Plates were normally rectangular, but oval, square, round, and triangular shapes were used. For a number of years, Kansas and Tennessee cut their plates to match the shaped of the state itself. The distinction for the most unusually shaped plates goes to Northwest Territories and Nunavut in Canada, which have their plates cut in the shape of a bear. Automobile License Plate Buying Guide
.
and to quote from your own link: "While those parked domains were a major factor in Microsoft's gains, Windows also saw solid growth in active sites, hostnames that contain content and likely to represent developed web sites."
Why stop at 2006?
Microsoft's IIS web server grows by 2 million sites, boosting market share by 0.36%, [to 35%] but Apache remains in the lead with a total of 49.1%.
June 2008 Web Server Survey
And if you Google around (you do know Google?)
Yes I know Google.
But why should I have to fact-check every post? Without so much as a starting point to begin?
.
The geek places too much trust in logic and rationality. There is a reason why they call some folks "mad bombers."