When you have immediate access to information on practially anything -- and especially technical topics -- it becomes a lot less painful to fulfill that momentary impulse to learn.
"More than you want to know" makes it all the more difficult, not less. A Google search returns 100,000 hits. Which page do you open? Traditional encyclopedias like The World Book introduce information and ideas at the level of complexity a child, a student, would encounter them in a classroom. Which approach do you think is likely to be more productive for an inexperienced reader?
Microsoft's major customers are nerds not geeks and that's why MS is so wealthy, that's why they have been so successful.
The nerd is fad-driven, the geek a hobbyist, neither are a solid foundation on which to build a business.
Apple sells an upscale urban life-style, and is subject to the boom and bust cycles of that particular market niche. Microsoft, marketing middle-class value, tends to do well in good times and bad.
Hamilton and Clay were the enemies of the People, Jefferson and Washington were the enemies of the State. In the end, we're living in a world that Hamilton and Clay would have loved.
You would prefer the pre-industrial society of the southern planter?
It is an interesting twist in logic to define a member of a slave-owning elite as a friend of the people and an enemy of the state.
Last I checked it was legal to record off the radio. The AHRA covers this...
XM isn't broadcast radio. It is a private subscription service. The AHRA is irrelevant. You have the rights and only the rights defined in your contract. Don't like it, don't sign it.
Vista does look like it's going to be a helluva flop, because of a very simple reason: users don't need it!
Vista will appear in the consumer market as the successor to Win MCE, at a time when HDTV, the HTPC and on-line media services are becoming mass-market.
When you consider how many alternatives (often far cheaper, too) are available, it's a wonder that so many still choose to use software that leaves their systems wide open to exploitation
It's not such a wonder at all.
Open Sourceforge.net. Search for projects that are aimed at users without a trace of the Geek in them. The pickings can be mighty slim.
Turn to a site like Amazon.com for a look at what these users want. It is a very different world.
2006 (imho) actually does have the potential to be a great year for the linux desktop, assuming that a big hardware company (Dell, HP, anyone) gives it a chance (a novice-oriented linux desktop like Linspire has the potential to get users aquainted w/ OSS and GNU/Linux
Walmart has tried every varient of OEM Linux known to man and not one has caught fire. There is little or nothing out there to drive aftermarket sales, a poison pill in the retail market.
The key here is to offer no guarantees and only limited support, patterned on the kind you get for most Open Source packages -- a web site, forums, download section. and a wiki..
Windows users have no interest in looking under the hood. The hobbyist model sells OSX as an alternative to Linux, not Windows.
The media industry is about to die the same way the blacksmithing and wagonsmithing (?) industries died with the advent of the car
The Studebaker family built wagons for the California gold rush of 1849 and began moving into the automobile business as early as 1897. Studebaker There are other famous names from the horse and buggy era who went on to great success as custom coach (body) builders. In that sense, the trade is still very much alive and not greatly changed at all.
Some companies are very openly embracing the new reality and adjusting their business models-- Apple, for example
Apple is a vertically integrated company that maintains tight control over the production and distribution of its hardware, software and services. Its business model would be perfectly familiar to capitalist dinosaurs like John D. Rockefeller or Louis Mayer of MGM.
Apple *IS* digesting them
Apple isn't digesting anyone. It is not a media content provider, it is a licensed distributer with one commercially significant outlet in iTunes.
people buy the same computers for the home what they use at work and use the software they can steal at work)
The home is not the office. That segment of the market took its own direction when iD and Sierra demonstrated you could play console-quality games on the IBM and AOL began to introduce the mass consumer market to on-line services.
The strength of the open source solutions may well be the fact that they don't properly support DRM
Microsoft wants support for home file servers and downloads to portable media players. That has more or less been the sticking point in the HD media wars.
DRM isn't just about physical media, it's about iTunes, Rhapsody, Audible.com. On-line rental and subscription services of every sort. The migration to digital radio, AM/FM and TV. Myth TV offers a PVR solution for the Linux hobbyist, but an HTPC is potentially much more than a PVR.
My wife called me today to try to recover a couple of hours work she lost when her computer crashed
You haven't said anything about what program she was running, why an auto-save was not enabled or what caused the crash. To say "that's just Windows" is a bit of a cheat.
Three words that have given Microsoft 97% of the home PC market.
MediaPortal
Dell has all but made Win MCE its default consumer install. With Win MCE being folded into Vista, I don't see much future for the open source alternative.
In this market, you have to support DRM'd media and subscription services.
The only reason for Mac not running on 95% of world PCs is the different processor.
Now that is just plain loopy.
It isn't the processor that gives Microsoft ninety-five percent of the market. It is a twenty-five year presence on the home and office desktop. It is the $600 Dell home-delivered with DVD burner snd flat-panel monitor that competes with a headless MacMini.
I'd be more impressed if I could buy bare metal from their retail locations rather than pay the M$ tax.
Retail is all about selling ready-to-run office machines and home appliances. Customers don't spell Microsoft as M$ and they don't think of the OEM install as a tax.
Digital Restrictions Management (along with constantly-lengthening copyright terms) is being used to shortchange the public domain
Public domain status doesn't give you access on demand to primary sources.
It doesn't even quarantee that a source will survive. Simple conservation costs money. Restoration to a state suitable for public distribution costs more.
Companies and users with the need/obligation to run Windows applications but without the time/skill/resources to replace it with another OS bought those PCs and didn't have much of a choice in what OS to use at that point
In short: Mac users migrate within the Mac family, Windows uaers within the Windows family and 2006 won't be the year of Linux on the desktop.
For all we know computing as we know it would be years ahead if it wasnt for Microsoft and Bill Gates.
"Computing as we know it" begins with the IBM PC in 1980, no company was better positioned than IBM to market the PC as an office machine as essential as the typewriter.
Gates understood that perhaps more clearly than anyone, and, as anyone with an old Remington Upright will tell you, it is not a great leap from there to adoption in the home and other markets.
Osama bin Laden is worth about $250 million US. The seventeenth child of fifty, his family grew rich in construction work for the Saudi royal family. Osama bin Laden But never as rich or as prized as even the most insignificant of Saudi princes.
I actually loved LD, but the hard facts of the matter are that it didn't catch on with the mass market because they were satisified with VHS.
LD's were as big as LPs, heavy, and needed fairly careful handling. Not ideal for casual, family room, play. 60 minutes of analog video per side meant flipping discs or buying a more expensive player. High-resolution TV sets with composite or S-video inputs were rare.
HD sets are on the market now, and, adjusted for inflation, can be found selling for less than what your parents paid for their first color TV set. They are taking hold fast.
The point is, it's not just all about market share. But I don't know what it *is* about.
"Google Tools" targets Windows, because that is 94% of the home market. You want a cut of the enterprise market, you have to establish a presence elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
"More than you want to know" makes it all the more difficult, not less. A Google search returns 100,000 hits. Which page do you open? Traditional encyclopedias like The World Book introduce information and ideas at the level of complexity a child, a student, would encounter them in a classroom. Which approach do you think is likely to be more productive for an inexperienced reader?
The nerd is fad-driven, the geek a hobbyist, neither are a solid foundation on which to build a business.
Apple sells an upscale urban life-style, and is subject to the boom and bust cycles of that particular market niche. Microsoft, marketing middle-class value, tends to do well in good times and bad.
You would prefer the pre-industrial society of the southern planter?
It is an interesting twist in logic to define a member of a slave-owning elite as a friend of the people and an enemy of the state.
XM isn't broadcast radio. It is a private subscription service. The AHRA is irrelevant. You have the rights and only the rights defined in your contract. Don't like it, don't sign it.
Vista will appear in the consumer market as the successor to Win MCE, at a time when HDTV, the HTPC and on-line media services are becoming mass-market.
To me, this looks like money in the bank.
We are talking New York here. Buffalo. Northern winters. Gray and cold. Morale sinks when the lights are dimmed.
It's not such a wonder at all.
Open Sourceforge.net. Search for projects that are aimed at users without a trace of the Geek in them. The pickings can be mighty slim.
Turn to a site like Amazon.com for a look at what these users want. It is a very different world.
Walmart has tried every varient of OEM Linux known to man and not one has caught fire. There is little or nothing out there to drive aftermarket sales, a poison pill in the retail market.
Windows users have no interest in looking under the hood. The hobbyist model sells OSX as an alternative to Linux, not Windows.
The Studebaker family built wagons for the California gold rush of 1849 and began moving into the automobile business as early as 1897. Studebaker There are other famous names from the horse and buggy era who went on to great success as custom coach (body) builders. In that sense, the trade is still very much alive and not greatly changed at all.
Some companies are very openly embracing the new reality and adjusting their business models-- Apple, for example
Apple is a vertically integrated company that maintains tight control over the production and distribution of its hardware, software and services. Its business model would be perfectly familiar to capitalist dinosaurs like John D. Rockefeller or Louis Mayer of MGM.
Apple *IS* digesting them
Apple isn't digesting anyone. It is not a media content provider, it is a licensed distributer with one commercially significant outlet in iTunes.
The home is not the office. That segment of the market took its own direction when iD and Sierra demonstrated you could play console-quality games on the IBM and AOL began to introduce the mass consumer market to on-line services.
Microsoft wants support for home file servers and downloads to portable media players. That has more or less been the sticking point in the HD media wars.
DRM isn't just about physical media, it's about iTunes, Rhapsody, Audible.com. On-line rental and subscription services of every sort. The migration to digital radio, AM/FM and TV. Myth TV offers a PVR solution for the Linux hobbyist, but an HTPC is potentially much more than a PVR.
You haven't said anything about what program she was running, why an auto-save was not enabled or what caused the crash. To say "that's just Windows" is a bit of a cheat.
Three words that have given Microsoft 97% of the home PC market.
MediaPortal
Dell has all but made Win MCE its default consumer install. With Win MCE being folded into Vista, I don't see much future for the open source alternative.
In this market, you have to support DRM'd media and subscription services.
Now that is just plain loopy.
It isn't the processor that gives Microsoft ninety-five percent of the market. It is a twenty-five year presence on the home and office desktop. It is the $600 Dell home-delivered with DVD burner snd flat-panel monitor that competes with a headless MacMini.
Royalties are capped at $250,000 per manufactuer . You know anyone in this business for whom that would be a problem?
Retail is all about selling ready-to-run office machines and home appliances. Customers don't spell Microsoft as M$ and they don't think of the OEM install as a tax.
Your so-called freedom is inconvenient...when it means your O/S of choice never gains mass-market acceptance in recognizable form.
Public domain status doesn't give you access on demand to primary sources.
It doesn't even quarantee that a source will survive. Simple conservation costs money. Restoration to a state suitable for public distribution costs more.
In short: Mac users migrate within the Mac family, Windows uaers within the Windows family and 2006 won't be the year of Linux on the desktop.
"Computing as we know it" begins with the IBM PC in 1980, no company was better positioned than IBM to market the PC as an office machine as essential as the typewriter.
Gates understood that perhaps more clearly than anyone, and, as anyone with an old Remington Upright will tell you, it is not a great leap from there to adoption in the home and other markets.
Osama bin Laden is worth about $250 million US. The seventeenth child of fifty, his family grew rich in construction work for the Saudi royal family. Osama bin Laden But never as rich or as prized as even the most insignificant of Saudi princes.
LD's were as big as LPs, heavy, and needed fairly careful handling. Not ideal for casual, family room, play. 60 minutes of analog video per side meant flipping discs or buying a more expensive player. High-resolution TV sets with composite or S-video inputs were rare.
HD sets are on the market now, and, adjusted for inflation, can be found selling for less than what your parents paid for their first color TV set. They are taking hold fast.
"Google Tools" targets Windows, because that is 94% of the home market. You want a cut of the enterprise market, you have to establish a presence elsewhere.
It's the curse of the typo.
I gave an extra percentage point to W2K as well.