Or, better. Reboot your servers one at a time, a couple of times a year. That way, when a problem happens (may it be the RTC battery failing, bad init scripts or watever else) you'll catch it in a much more safe way.
Well, if MS is really that efficient in making companies hostage of their software, than yes, it makes sense. By the other side, Office is the main reason companies are locked into Windows, and pushing companies away from Windows will push them away from Office. Also, the main reason companies are hostage of MS Office* is because everybody uses MS Office, and I doubt even MS knows where the tipping point is for freeing them.
Also, no, it is not only because of lock-in that copanies use Windows. There also is a sheer stupidity component to it, and stupidity may go away quite fast when the press starts educating people in the downsides of your product. (Or at least it gets replaced fast by a different kind of stupidity, favoring other companies.) Well, I don't know exactly the size of this component, but from here it looks like this is the dominating factor at the long term (while data lock-in dominates the short term decisions).
About the market sizes, it is far from obvious what share of the desktop market is worth 10%-20% of the portable market. Currently, there is much less money in its software than in desktop software, but that may change. Also, currently there is much more money in its hardware than in desktop hardware, but that may also change.
And the mistery about why they think an uniform interface will help them persisits. Clearly MS has a lot of information I don't have... The only remaining question is if that information is true.
I am just saying I understand why they have done this, and what their long term strategy is.
That's great for you. I for one, don't understand it. There are a lot of non-obvious aspect on it. for example:
But they desperately want to get a bigger piece of the mobile operating system market
Yes, that's obvious. But why are they that desperate? They are risking alienating their current user base, or, in other words, they are betting the farm.
Everyone that's forced by work to become used to Windows 8 on the desktop and laptop will be more likely to purchase Windows 8 tablet or Windows Phone 8 device instead of an iPhone or Android device.
Or will hate them enough to not buy any single Windows device that has an alternative.
But the icing on the kake is the following:
they're trying to make one style of graphical interface everywhere.
Yes, they are. And yes, they think that'll help their objective of getting into mobile. I just don't have any idea why they think that way.
Whan read backwards it sounds like a foreign language and I can't understand a word. Thus, no change in that.
Now, seriously, the paper's abstract makes more sense than the article. And it is heavy in a jargon that I don't completely understand, while the article was arguably translated into normal english. What a bad translation!
At least, if it is the client demanding it, it is a non-problem.
Web designers get paid for hacking a page into a fixed design, their cleints are happy with the result they asked for, and users flock into pages invented by more competent clients.
Well, in my oppinion, the designer has a duty to clarify that pixel-fixed designs are a bad thing. If the client insists, no problem in making the site.
That. Why do web developers need pixel-perfect alignment so often? I've never seen a web user needing it.
Do the clients demand it? Is it because the clients come from the printed world? Is it because they don't understand usability? Or is it a problem that the development community created themselves?
the web developers are too fucking lazy to include the -o- prefix and later update the prefix
Everybody is implementing both Webkit and Gecko prefixes, because developers won't bother to support ninche browsers. And why would they? It is plenty of work adding specific support for IE, you want them to adapt to several other specificities?
But, once things become standard, developpers should drop the prefix. If they weren't doing that, you could blame them... What, of course isn't happening a lot, because W3C is slow, and it takes ages for things to enter the standard. Sites are rewriten way more often than W3C adds tags into CSS.
if someone told you they had a PhD in CS, would you assume they could design a maintainable or reliable software system?
Hum, no. And I wouldn't assume that if somebody told me he had an equivalent degree on software engineering either.
The ugly reality of IT is that nearly everybody in it don't have a minimum idea of how to code. Whatver dimension you choose, be it maintainability, number of bugs, complexity, actualy implementing the specs, discovering what the specs are, use of resources, whatever... You name it, nearly everybody working on IT doesn't know it.
Now, about the question at TFS, there is as much diversity between different courses of the same type ("computer science" or "software engineering") as there is between different courses of different types. The course type alone tells nothing.
A reliable enough (two nines aren't enough) electrical supply, a cooled room and bandwidth do not come for free. Add there the cost making your servers redundant, and soon the rent looks like a bargain for everybody that is not a big business.
You know, we should create some kind of consortium, so that we'd all contribute with a bit of money and it could make those things that are good for everybody, but nobody want's to pay alone.
They certainly have a huge imposed bureocracy over everything, and can't write a system inhouse in less than half a year (and when it comes, it is already wrong). People there probably compensate that by writting the needed code in the form of spreadsheets.
Counterhint: Steam circumvents this by providing only a tiny 'seed' package, which will then download the whole steam application and all games to the user's home folder.
Turning the life of anybody that properly partitioned his disk into a hell. No wait, turning the life of EVERYBODY into a hell, since it will replicate Steam on everybody's home dir, and let several different versions of it installed at the same time.
Or maybe they'll be "smart" and make a setuid updater... That will open every computer running it to invasion, and will finaly turn virus into a everyday problem for Linux users. (That may have a silver lining, at least AV vendors will stop spreading FUD.)
I really hope Steam will be smart and do it the Linux way. Or they could be up to a serious awakening once the problems start appearing, and will be locked into Windows again.
Ok, you prefer that the spyware comes in an unverifiable binary proxied by your distro's servers. I just don't understand what is the difference (except for who pays the bandwidth bill).
If you don't want Valve to have access to your system, don't install Steam. Or that is too simple?
I believe that the application itself was supposed to have self-updating capabilities.
Or, if they really wanted to play nice, they could disable auto-updating on Linux. (They may keep it on if it was installed from a tarball. Just don't make a self-updating.deb or.rpm.)
Well, non-free and all that... Or maybe, the best way for Debian to handle it is to put a package at non-free that adds Valve's repository into apt.conf.d. That way they avoid any problem that may appear by redistributing Valve's software when their license changes, as it keeps doing. (Maybe Debian could create a few of those packages, including the keyring and sources.list of other repository - multimedia and backports, for example, could use that.)
Anyway, the main reason I cared to replay was to say: PLEASE STOP SAYING "BINARY BLOB". A BLOB IS BINARY, IF IT WERE TEXT IT WOULD BE A CLOB.
Desktop Linux was late to the party. All the computers already run DOS by the time it came out, and Windows 2k or XP by the time it become usable. Also, DosBox and Wine weren't available. Those two could have changed things.
Mobile Linux was on time, just a handful of people have put their money on smartphone software by the time it came out. Most are still to come.
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad then. I had some hope Curiosity could help solving that mistery.
But year 2120 is still far away...
Or, better. Reboot your servers one at a time, a couple of times a year. That way, when a problem happens (may it be the RTC battery failing, bad init scripts or watever else) you'll catch it in a much more safe way.
Either DNA or RNA would be earth-shaking.
As far as I know, nobody knows how those molecules appeared on Earth.
Well, if MS is really that efficient in making companies hostage of their software, than yes, it makes sense. By the other side, Office is the main reason companies are locked into Windows, and pushing companies away from Windows will push them away from Office. Also, the main reason companies are hostage of MS Office* is because everybody uses MS Office, and I doubt even MS knows where the tipping point is for freeing them.
Also, no, it is not only because of lock-in that copanies use Windows. There also is a sheer stupidity component to it, and stupidity may go away quite fast when the press starts educating people in the downsides of your product. (Or at least it gets replaced fast by a different kind of stupidity, favoring other companies.) Well, I don't know exactly the size of this component, but from here it looks like this is the dominating factor at the long term (while data lock-in dominates the short term decisions).
About the market sizes, it is far from obvious what share of the desktop market is worth 10%-20% of the portable market. Currently, there is much less money in its software than in desktop software, but that may change. Also, currently there is much more money in its hardware than in desktop hardware, but that may also change.
And the mistery about why they think an uniform interface will help them persisits. Clearly MS has a lot of information I don't have... The only remaining question is if that information is true.
Palm didn't have this problem.
That's great for you. I for one, don't understand it. There are a lot of non-obvious aspect on it. for example:
Yes, that's obvious. But why are they that desperate? They are risking alienating their current user base, or, in other words, they are betting the farm.
Or will hate them enough to not buy any single Windows device that has an alternative.
But the icing on the kake is the following:
Yes, they are. And yes, they think that'll help their objective of getting into mobile. I just don't have any idea why they think that way.
Well, KDE isn't dumbing down. There are several other simpler DEs that aren't either. You can't recommend Ubuntu, but you can recomment Mint.
Isn't diversity great?
Whan read backwards it sounds like a foreign language and I can't understand a word. Thus, no change in that.
Now, seriously, the paper's abstract makes more sense than the article. And it is heavy in a jargon that I don't completely understand, while the article was arguably translated into normal english. What a bad translation!
At least, if it is the client demanding it, it is a non-problem.
Web designers get paid for hacking a page into a fixed design, their cleints are happy with the result they asked for, and users flock into pages invented by more competent clients.
Well, in my oppinion, the designer has a duty to clarify that pixel-fixed designs are a bad thing. If the client insists, no problem in making the site.
Every time I google some CSS command, I get out with this information. But I never stopped to see where I'm getting it from.
Well, directly from W3C's page about border-radius: The border-radius property is supported in IE9+, Firefox 4+, Chrome, Safari 5+, and Opera.
That. Why do web developers need pixel-perfect alignment so often? I've never seen a web user needing it.
Do the clients demand it? Is it because the clients come from the printed world? Is it because they don't understand usability? Or is it a problem that the development community created themselves?
Everybody is implementing both Webkit and Gecko prefixes, because developers won't bother to support ninche browsers. And why would they? It is plenty of work adding specific support for IE, you want them to adapt to several other specificities?
But, once things become standard, developpers should drop the prefix. If they weren't doing that, you could blame them... What, of course isn't happening a lot, because W3C is slow, and it takes ages for things to enter the standard. Sites are rewriten way more often than W3C adds tags into CSS.
Or, to sumarize it... Enter another business line, and use the DVD rentals to bootstrap that other business.
I agree, that seems to be the best option available for him.
Hum, no. And I wouldn't assume that if somebody told me he had an equivalent degree on software engineering either.
The ugly reality of IT is that nearly everybody in it don't have a minimum idea of how to code. Whatver dimension you choose, be it maintainability, number of bugs, complexity, actualy implementing the specs, discovering what the specs are, use of resources, whatever... You name it, nearly everybody working on IT doesn't know it.
Now, about the question at TFS, there is as much diversity between different courses of the same type ("computer science" or "software engineering") as there is between different courses of different types. The course type alone tells nothing.
That, and uptime.
A reliable enough (two nines aren't enough) electrical supply, a cooled room and bandwidth do not come for free. Add there the cost making your servers redundant, and soon the rent looks like a bargain for everybody that is not a big business.
They have. Libre Office has old style menus, that are plain better.
Or do you have a link for that "why the ribbon is A Good Thing" article the GP asked about?
You know, we should create some kind of consortium, so that we'd all contribute with a bit of money and it could make those things that are good for everybody, but nobody want's to pay alone.
That. Probably that.
They certainly have a huge imposed bureocracy over everything, and can't write a system inhouse in less than half a year (and when it comes, it is already wrong). People there probably compensate that by writting the needed code in the form of spreadsheets.
Turning the life of anybody that properly partitioned his disk into a hell. No wait, turning the life of EVERYBODY into a hell, since it will replicate Steam on everybody's home dir, and let several different versions of it installed at the same time.
Or maybe they'll be "smart" and make a setuid updater... That will open every computer running it to invasion, and will finaly turn virus into a everyday problem for Linux users. (That may have a silver lining, at least AV vendors will stop spreading FUD.)
I really hope Steam will be smart and do it the Linux way. Or they could be up to a serious awakening once the problems start appearing, and will be locked into Windows again.
Ok, you prefer that the spyware comes in an unverifiable binary proxied by your distro's servers. I just don't understand what is the difference (except for who pays the bandwidth bill).
If you don't want Valve to have access to your system, don't install Steam. Or that is too simple?
Or, if they really wanted to play nice, they could disable auto-updating on Linux. (They may keep it on if it was installed from a tarball. Just don't make a self-updating .deb or .rpm.)
Well, non-free and all that... Or maybe, the best way for Debian to handle it is to put a package at non-free that adds Valve's repository into apt.conf.d. That way they avoid any problem that may appear by redistributing Valve's software when their license changes, as it keeps doing. (Maybe Debian could create a few of those packages, including the keyring and sources.list of other repository - multimedia and backports, for example, could use that.)
Anyway, the main reason I cared to replay was to say: PLEASE STOP SAYING "BINARY BLOB". A BLOB IS BINARY, IF IT WERE TEXT IT WOULD BE A CLOB.
Desktop Linux was late to the party. All the computers already run DOS by the time it came out, and Windows 2k or XP by the time it become usable. Also, DosBox and Wine weren't available. Those two could have changed things.
Mobile Linux was on time, just a handful of people have put their money on smartphone software by the time it came out. Most are still to come.
Android is winning by the same single reson Windows won. Because it's open.
Of course, we have different standards for "open" nowadays. But claiming any other reason is delusional.