I think you missed the "continued development" in my original post. I don't see Windows 8 as an end-product that Microsoft actually cares about - like it didn't care about ME or Vista. They don't care about end-user adoption. Pushing it out provides a costing point for the post-Windows-7 development, it increases income (think about all the people who bought a Windows 8 license when they buy new hardware and then go out and buy a Windows 7 license for actual usage), and it lets them claim OS-every-X years rather than OS-every-2X years.
A secondary factor in each case is the chance to push critical new tech (drivers in the case of ME/Vista, UI in 8) but again that's all about numbers.
As I see it - two possibilities: Nobody in engineering, design, creative or marketing at Microsoft could see or express the pending clusterfrak - even after ME and Vista - or the suits at the top saw something in the numbers that outweighed the potential harm. In any normal company, that would be crazy - even to the extremes of New Coke - but Coke weren't living in the same luxury boat that MS has quite managed to sink... yet.
Folk-wisdom is that these were all mistakes - because they were awful, and we ask ourselves "why would you sell this P.O.C"?
But I don't think people really stop to think about that. Yes - the Coca Cola company reversed course after less than 3 months, but not because of popular backlash, because of the bottom line.
And yet - here we are on Microsoft's 3rd "New Coke".
Not least because, while PC sales may be dry at the moment, MS has a cornered market there that ensures they're going to make most of cost back simply on people buying PCs, and even if those people don't actually use Windows 8, that doesn't hurt Microsoft; infact, if some portion of them go out and buy a replacement, older, MS operating system, that's still good on the bottom line.
If Microsoft have decided not to release Windows 8 and continued development to the next version, there would be this big gap on their books and the actual development cost of Windows 9 would appear much greater.
My take is that it's not a mistake, it was a calculated gamble to manipulate the books.
Bear in mind that it's the degradation of normally smooth artery walls by, e.g., high blood pressure that enables plaque build up. What happens if they impact a plaque deposit?
I ask because the treatments might start to get expensive if it's not quantified before people start using the treatment and J. Edgar Pure-Butter-Diet takes them to court over their "contribution" to the arterial furring that put his head in a jar.
I think it would be more accurate to say: Not enough like magic. People want a box they can say "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot" to, not a need to learn multiple new pieces of software and talents.
Frankly, anyone who says that you can be printing useful stuff within minutes of unpacking a 3D printer either (a) is a 3D cad expert, (b) has already found downloads of the things they want to print (c) works for a 3d printing company.
That's why, at shows like CES etc, 3d printing manufacturers show case... chess pieces, cups that they never put hot liquid in, and eifel towers.
When people get excited about 3D-Printing, it's because they are envisioning Picard saying "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot", or because they picture themselves inventing a thing that solves that problem that's always annoyed them, or because they see themselves upgrading the plumbing, wiring and gadgetry around the house. Or they're a parent with delusions of making cool stuff for their kids.
Then they find they have a friend who already got a 3D printer and discover that with do-overs and experiments, it costs more - in time, money and hair - to make whatever it is that you want to make than it would to just go take James Dyson to dinner and see if he would make one for you.
3D printing is not taking on because people have cognized that it's in it's infancy, pathetically pointless and utterly wasteful of time stage.
Affordable, extant desktop 3D printing lets you make PROTOTYPES, moulds, plant pots and coasters. It's useful for NOTHING unless you have some skill/talent as a design engineer (I don't!) and it also turns out that you kinda need to be a cad/graphics artist if you want a remote chance of designing anything that won't end the way of a digitally conveyed gorignak.
Today's 3D Printing tech is to accessible, open-source, desktop manufacturing what the IBM 402 is to accessible, end-user open source software development.
Microsoft's figures have always been... dubious, all these numbers demonstrate is that almost nobody actually/buys/ their software, especially their operating systems. Most of their historical sales figures are PCs sold, and the upgrade pressure just hasn't been there the last few years, people are busy upgrading their tablets, phones, media PCs, etc, and Microsoft don't have any of those eggs in their basket -- because nobody buys their operating systems.
Squeee! Microsoft have disc^H^H^H^Hinvented REPL! Now to enable it in IIS, Exchange, and - hell - Metro. Its not like it could have any security implications.
I held out until Feb of this year before finally having to install an ad-blocker. Sure, a site like demonoid was relatively good about it's allotment of ad-space. The trouble is that most of the ad vendors are coke-fiends; the coke is money-for-ad-space. They get you hooked, and then they dial back the revenue and "work with you" to find a way to drive revenue up again. Or rather, increase their margin and get you back to what they were originally paying you. Which is why it always involves more, bigger, more aggressive ads, and never toning it down.
One of the reasons I find myself needing a password vault is the bizzare array of password policies out there today. Take Chase Bank, for instance, who only allow alpha-numeric characters.
But the worst part is often the why: In an effort to assist you in securing your password, some sites want to perform password validation server-side. Just stop and think about that for a moment. Why would a website exclude characters like apostrophe, percent, semicolon, etc, from a password field?
Well done: In order to assist your security today, I'll be storing your information alongside a plain-text history of your passwords - you can trust us! Now, obviously, if we allowed funny characters into those passwords, all hell could break loose. But by restricting you to easier to crack passwords, and then storing them in plain text too, the only risk is if we screw something up in the code that checks incoming passwords. We just proved we're smart enough to have already thought of that!
The biggest threat to Windows RT / Windows 8 is Microsoft's recent destruction of developer (that is, the money people at dev houses) confidence in Microsoft's ability to "lead" any kind of technology drive.
I got my Windows Phone 7 phone because I could return it just in time for the phone I wanted. It took me by surprise and I got quite attached to it. You have to unlearn some bad habbits from years of working with UIs that came from keyboard and mouse toting designers. And then, Oh My Gosh.
My big issue was lack of any apps: People seemed reticent to jump into this untested pool. It turns out, developers target Windows because of the userbase and not because they think Microsoft employees poop magical and adorable APIs that are so cute, cuddly and just outright gorgeous that you just HAVE to develop with them.
WP7 had no userbase and no cross-over beyond... well beyond that it uses technologies that Microsoft had recently kinda poo-poohed like.NET. So yes! If you just blew a billion dollars on.NET, come to WP7 because that's about all it's useful for.
Developers started to hear Metro was influencing Windows 8, and there was a brief spike in app ports to WP7. There's a Garmin app, Yelp, and a handful of others.
Then W8/Windows RT were announced in a sort of arm flurrying of "don't worry about the money you've invested in what's on the market now because Windows 8 will make lots of money with all the new tech it's going to introduce". Because, yes, "new tech" doesn't impart the sense that OMG YOU'RE SAYING OUR WP7/METRO INVESTMENT IS A DEAD END?
So very few apps have matured into real Metro apps and the WP7 experience isn't everything it could be because the app store is just... crappy.
Windows 8 - and thus Windows RT - is very risky looking waters. I know it's not important in the grand scheme of things, but imagine a million bucks in your pocket, a pen in your hand ready to sign it off and... tell me that Microsoft -- MICROSOFT! -- futzing the name of their flagship UI redesign doesn't scream "EYES NOT ON THE BALL" as you evaluate the risks of committing resources to dedicated Windows-8-UI tech and development rather than simply making sure your existing userbase and Windows 8 adopters will be able to run app smoothly on the desktop...
IMHO: Windows 8 is the Vista/ME of this particular Windows phase-shift. And that's cool, but as it applies to phone/tablet, the OS immediately preceding it ALSO happens to be a Vista/ME.
1. [Re-]install the OS that came with your laptop - you already paid Microsoft once (both games run under Vista/XP) 2. Microsoft Security Essentials and Malware Bytes together are an excellent way to protect against malware etc,
But more importantly
"the kids have [...] their Nintendos, PS2/3's and mobile phones"
yet your kids have to forego traditional PC gaming or suck it up on a crappy laptop because you """"can't afford"""" to give them a reasonable gaming PC?
Yes - reasonable gaming PC means Windows, not Wine. Suck it up cupcake. By all means, I encourage you to be angry about the matter and get to work on sponsoring/contributing to the Wine project, etc - but right now - they are NOT viable alternatives and those are your kids. If they turn out to be interested in programming/etc, then later on you can start holding the carrot of bigger/better gaming hardware for Linux boxes if they want to get involved in those projects. But for now - they just wanna play games, and that means a decent PC running some version of the MS OS. Quit trying to be a technohippie and let them play.
What is your expectation of how the drives will begin to fail - are you expecting bulk simultaneous failures or are you expecting to get plenty of degradation warning before you start to see failures?
I think that that is usually to avoid the same batch to avoid physical manufacturing defects. When you're dealing with corporate/industrial grade drives, you want the drives to be as similar to each other as possible.
SSDs and Spindle drives have finite life spans for very different reasons; and the reasons behind SSD lifespan seem like they would make matching a con rather than a pro.
I was in the last year not to have comp sci courses at our schools in Grimsby: 1987. I had to go out on a limb to get any formal computer courses by signing up for "adult education" at the local college. Our lecturer turned out to be a former oil-tanker pilot with no desire to answer the question "what programming experience do you have?" other than "I was an oil-tanker pilot".
We were taught that basic was a high level language that was the mainstay of business programming; that assembly language, like machine code, was being phased out; "C" outright didn't exist; it was physically impossible to connect two computers together.
So when he flat out refused to grade my programming project - I gave him the option of either a multi-player BattleShips or the BBC Basic terminal app that allowed the other player to participate, both of which were written, tested and documented - I decided not to take the exam.
Having done a lot of code maintenance - including Y2K certification of the "MMDF" code base (first comments/headers would have negative unix timestamps) - he needs to start by learning about code beautifiers and finding a style he finds easy to read.
Then, personally, I try to storyline the code. Some times, more creatively than others but those are extreme cases.
I almost want to call Time Warner Cable and offer the same zero-package deal to their sales staff, after all, they were always so perplexed by how I couldn't understand the value of the ~150 incomprehensible foreign language channels, 1/4 of the channels being the same channel at different resolution and the hundreds of "channels" which are actually just on-demand listings.
How are these companies selling DVRs and STILL not understanding that the consumer is DONE with the old-style TV channel.
When Vista was released, it backpedaled on its OpenGL claims, allowing vendors to create fast installable client drivers (ICDs) that restore native OpenGL support. The OpenGL board sent out newsletters proving that OpenGL is still a first-class citizen, and that OpenGL performance on Vista was still at least as fast as Direct3D. Unfortunately for OpenGL, the damage had already been done -- public confidence in OpenGL was badly shaken.
Solution: Reduce the advertising footprint on your site.
Problem:
Pervasiveness: the more ads you squeeze onto each page, the reduced opportunity each one has to catch the users eye. But it's also cumulative. More ads = less content space = increased selectivity by visitors. With so many ads everywhere, we just don't have TIME to click, compounded by the fact that with so many ads everywhere it takes a lot more time to get the stuff we actually came for.
Ad companies need to look not just at visitors and page impressions, but how much time visitors are spending on pages, more simply put: content value.
Here's a thought: put article bodies in a scrolling panel and provide a single, choice, ad space next to it. Don't rotate it, don't cycle it, and let me expand the article panel out over it if it doesn't appeal to me -- that piece of information is valuable to marketeers if coupled with which article I was viewing.
What you have now is an item to retain my attention alongside the ad. Put a second ad there, and you'll make twice as money for a couple of cycles. But more than one ad risks immunizing your readers by conditioning them to just close the ads before their eyes can get there.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, given their skill in escapology, how many mice actually managed to make it off the ship?
I think you missed the "continued development" in my original post. I don't see Windows 8 as an end-product that Microsoft actually cares about - like it didn't care about ME or Vista. They don't care about end-user adoption. Pushing it out provides a costing point for the post-Windows-7 development, it increases income (think about all the people who bought a Windows 8 license when they buy new hardware and then go out and buy a Windows 7 license for actual usage), and it lets them claim OS-every-X years rather than OS-every-2X years.
A secondary factor in each case is the chance to push critical new tech (drivers in the case of ME/Vista, UI in 8) but again that's all about numbers.
As I see it - two possibilities: Nobody in engineering, design, creative or marketing at Microsoft could see or express the pending clusterfrak - even after ME and Vista - or the suits at the top saw something in the numbers that outweighed the potential harm. In any normal company, that would be crazy - even to the extremes of New Coke - but Coke weren't living in the same luxury boat that MS has quite managed to sink ... yet.
Windows ME, Windows Vista, Windows 8.
Folk-wisdom is that these were all mistakes - because they were awful, and we ask ourselves "why would you sell this P.O.C"?
But I don't think people really stop to think about that. Yes - the Coca Cola company reversed course after less than 3 months, but not because of popular backlash, because of the bottom line.
And yet - here we are on Microsoft's 3rd "New Coke".
Not least because, while PC sales may be dry at the moment, MS has a cornered market there that ensures they're going to make most of cost back simply on people buying PCs, and even if those people don't actually use Windows 8, that doesn't hurt Microsoft; infact, if some portion of them go out and buy a replacement, older, MS operating system, that's still good on the bottom line.
If Microsoft have decided not to release Windows 8 and continued development to the next version, there would be this big gap on their books and the actual development cost of Windows 9 would appear much greater.
My take is that it's not a mistake, it was a calculated gamble to manipulate the books.
Bear in mind that it's the degradation of normally smooth artery walls by, e.g., high blood pressure that enables plaque build up. What happens if they impact a plaque deposit?
I ask because the treatments might start to get expensive if it's not quantified before people start using the treatment and J. Edgar Pure-Butter-Diet takes them to court over their "contribution" to the arterial furring that put his head in a jar.
I think it would be more accurate to say: Not enough like magic. People want a box they can say "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot" to, not a need to learn multiple new pieces of software and talents.
Frankly, anyone who says that you can be printing useful stuff within minutes of unpacking a 3D printer either (a) is a 3D cad expert, (b) has already found downloads of the things they want to print (c) works for a 3d printing company.
That's why, at shows like CES etc, 3d printing manufacturers show case ... chess pieces, cups that they never put hot liquid in, and eifel towers.
When people get excited about 3D-Printing, it's because they are envisioning Picard saying "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot", or because they picture themselves inventing a thing that solves that problem that's always annoyed them, or because they see themselves upgrading the plumbing, wiring and gadgetry around the house. Or they're a parent with delusions of making cool stuff for their kids.
Then they find they have a friend who already got a 3D printer and discover that with do-overs and experiments, it costs more - in time, money and hair - to make whatever it is that you want to make than it would to just go take James Dyson to dinner and see if he would make one for you.
3D printing is not taking on because people have cognized that it's in it's infancy, pathetically pointless and utterly wasteful of time stage.
Affordable, extant desktop 3D printing lets you make PROTOTYPES, moulds, plant pots and coasters. It's useful for NOTHING unless you have some skill/talent as a design engineer (I don't!) and it also turns out that you kinda need to be a cad/graphics artist if you want a remote chance of designing anything that won't end the way of a digitally conveyed gorignak.
Today's 3D Printing tech is to accessible, open-source, desktop manufacturing what the IBM 402 is to accessible, end-user open source software development.
Microsoft's figures have always been ... dubious, all these numbers demonstrate is that almost nobody actually /buys/ their software, especially their operating systems. Most of their historical sales figures are PCs sold, and the upgrade pressure just hasn't been there the last few years, people are busy upgrading their tablets, phones, media PCs, etc, and Microsoft don't have any of those eggs in their basket -- because nobody buys their operating systems.
Squeee! Microsoft have disc^H^H^H^Hinvented REPL! Now to enable it in IIS, Exchange, and - hell - Metro. Its not like it could have any security implications.
I held out until Feb of this year before finally having to install an ad-blocker. Sure, a site like demonoid was relatively good about it's allotment of ad-space. The trouble is that most of the ad vendors are coke-fiends; the coke is money-for-ad-space. They get you hooked, and then they dial back the revenue and "work with you" to find a way to drive revenue up again. Or rather, increase their margin and get you back to what they were originally paying you. Which is why it always involves more, bigger, more aggressive ads, and never toning it down.
+++ATH0
LOAD "SKYNET", 8, 1
One of the reasons I find myself needing a password vault is the bizzare array of password policies out there today. Take Chase Bank, for instance, who only allow alpha-numeric characters.
But the worst part is often the why: In an effort to assist you in securing your password, some sites want to perform password validation server-side. Just stop and think about that for a moment. Why would a website exclude characters like apostrophe, percent, semicolon, etc, from a password field?
Well done: In order to assist your security today, I'll be storing your information alongside a plain-text history of your passwords - you can trust us! Now, obviously, if we allowed funny characters into those passwords, all hell could break loose. But by restricting you to easier to crack passwords, and then storing them in plain text too, the only risk is if we screw something up in the code that checks incoming passwords. We just proved we're smart enough to have already thought of that!
... you couldn't type either of those on it.
llàstima
Braben's back, Look who's back.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous
The biggest threat to Windows RT / Windows 8 is Microsoft's recent destruction of developer (that is, the money people at dev houses) confidence in Microsoft's ability to "lead" any kind of technology drive.
I got my Windows Phone 7 phone because I could return it just in time for the phone I wanted. It took me by surprise and I got quite attached to it. You have to unlearn some bad habbits from years of working with UIs that came from keyboard and mouse toting designers. And then, Oh My Gosh.
My big issue was lack of any apps: People seemed reticent to jump into this untested pool. It turns out, developers target Windows because of the userbase and not because they think Microsoft employees poop magical and adorable APIs that are so cute, cuddly and just outright gorgeous that you just HAVE to develop with them.
WP7 had no userbase and no cross-over beyond ... well beyond that it uses technologies that Microsoft had recently kinda poo-poohed like .NET. So yes! If you just blew a billion dollars on .NET, come to WP7 because that's about all it's useful for.
Developers started to hear Metro was influencing Windows 8, and there was a brief spike in app ports to WP7. There's a Garmin app, Yelp, and a handful of others.
Then W8/Windows RT were announced in a sort of arm flurrying of "don't worry about the money you've invested in what's on the market now because Windows 8 will make lots of money with all the new tech it's going to introduce". Because, yes, "new tech" doesn't impart the sense that OMG YOU'RE SAYING OUR WP7/METRO INVESTMENT IS A DEAD END?
So very few apps have matured into real Metro apps and the WP7 experience isn't everything it could be because the app store is just ... crappy.
Windows 8 - and thus Windows RT - is very risky looking waters. I know it's not important in the grand scheme of things, but imagine a million bucks in your pocket, a pen in your hand ready to sign it off and ... tell me that Microsoft -- MICROSOFT! -- futzing the name of their flagship UI redesign doesn't scream "EYES NOT ON THE BALL" as you evaluate the risks of committing resources to dedicated Windows-8-UI tech and development rather than simply making sure your existing userbase and Windows 8 adopters will be able to run app smoothly on the desktop...
IMHO: Windows 8 is the Vista/ME of this particular Windows phase-shift. And that's cool, but as it applies to phone/tablet, the OS immediately preceding it ALSO happens to be a Vista/ME.
Uhm, some of the headers had opening comments with dates that would require a negative value unix time...
http://web.opennet.ru/docs/FAQ/network/Mail/mmdf-faq.html
... (but can't afford $90 for Win 7 Home?)
1. [Re-]install the OS that came with your laptop - you already paid Microsoft once (both games run under Vista/XP)
2. Microsoft Security Essentials and Malware Bytes together are an excellent way to protect against malware etc,
But more importantly
"the kids have [...] their Nintendos, PS2/3's and mobile phones"
yet your kids have to forego traditional PC gaming or suck it up on a crappy laptop because you """"can't afford"""" to give them a reasonable gaming PC?
Yes - reasonable gaming PC means Windows, not Wine. Suck it up cupcake. By all means, I encourage you to be angry about the matter and get to work on sponsoring/contributing to the Wine project, etc - but right now - they are NOT viable alternatives and those are your kids. If they turn out to be interested in programming/etc, then later on you can start holding the carrot of bigger/better gaming hardware for Linux boxes if they want to get involved in those projects. But for now - they just wanna play games, and that means a decent PC running some version of the MS OS. Quit trying to be a technohippie and let them play.
... and risk damaging my belief they use ice-pops.
-Oliver
What is your expectation of how the drives will begin to fail - are you expecting bulk simultaneous failures or are you expecting to get plenty of degradation warning before you start to see failures?
I think that that is usually to avoid the same batch to avoid physical manufacturing defects. When you're dealing with corporate/industrial grade drives, you want the drives to be as similar to each other as possible.
SSDs and Spindle drives have finite life spans for very different reasons; and the reasons behind SSD lifespan seem like they would make matching a con rather than a pro.
I was in the last year not to have comp sci courses at our schools in Grimsby: 1987. I had to go out on a limb to get any formal computer courses by signing up for "adult education" at the local college. Our lecturer turned out to be a former oil-tanker pilot with no desire to answer the question "what programming experience do you have?" other than "I was an oil-tanker pilot".
We were taught that basic was a high level language that was the mainstay of business programming; that assembly language, like machine code, was being phased out; "C" outright didn't exist; it was physically impossible to connect two computers together.
So when he flat out refused to grade my programming project - I gave him the option of either a multi-player BattleShips or the BBC Basic terminal app that allowed the other player to participate, both of which were written, tested and documented - I decided not to take the exam.
-Oliver
The links in the article are a bit ... odd
http :// www.taodyne.com.nyud.net / shop / en / blog / 42-showing-rss-feeds-in-3d
Whereas taodyne actually have their own site, www.taodyne.com/
200,000 measly lines of code?
Having done a lot of code maintenance - including Y2K certification of the "MMDF" code base (first comments/headers would have negative unix timestamps) - he needs to start by learning about code beautifiers and finding a style he finds easy to read.
Then, personally, I try to storyline the code. Some times, more creatively than others but those are extreme cases.
I almost want to call Time Warner Cable and offer the same zero-package deal to their sales staff, after all, they were always so perplexed by how I couldn't understand the value of the ~150 incomprehensible foreign language channels, 1/4 of the channels being the same channel at different resolution and the hundreds of "channels" which are actually just on-demand listings.
How are these companies selling DVRs and STILL not understanding that the consumer is DONE with the old-style TV channel.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX
Solution: Reduce the advertising footprint on your site.
Problem:
Pervasiveness: the more ads you squeeze onto each page, the reduced opportunity each one has to catch the users eye. But it's also cumulative. More ads = less content space = increased selectivity by visitors. With so many ads everywhere, we just don't have TIME to click, compounded by the fact that with so many ads everywhere it takes a lot more time to get the stuff we actually came for.
Ad companies need to look not just at visitors and page impressions, but how much time visitors are spending on pages, more simply put: content value.
Here's a thought: put article bodies in a scrolling panel and provide a single, choice, ad space next to it. Don't rotate it, don't cycle it, and let me expand the article panel out over it if it doesn't appeal to me -- that piece of information is valuable to marketeers if coupled with which article I was viewing.
What you have now is an item to retain my attention alongside the ad. Put a second ad there, and you'll make twice as money for a couple of cycles. But more than one ad risks immunizing your readers by conditioning them to just close the ads before their eyes can get there.