For the last decade Microsoft stock has been dead money. No growth. Over the same span Apple stock has rewarded the investor with over 30x growth. Now Apple has a higher market cap than Microsoft, when a decade ago it was in comparison a tiny fringe company. There is some halo effect, but basically this boils down to the fact that Apple is doing more things right than Microsoft is. Apple is getting it done. Microsoft is not. It is reasonable for the investor to consider the liklihood that, absent sound evidence to the contrary, this decade-long trend will continue.
The Internet is designed to be a fault-tolerant network that routes around damage. To this network, censorship is damage.
It may take a bit, but the network will find a way to route around this.
Yes. Yes they will. Because it means they get iPads of their own for the pilot. And it does work well, so they buy it. We use Citrix though, which also works, and will add the Wyse Pocketcloud iPad app to access VMWare view when it's ready. I want to get one of the Tegra 2 Android slates (finally!) coming out next quarter in a decent size to use for this because I prefer Android to iOS. But I'm not a hater - the iPad definitely works and has the battery life advantage. When you're chatting about VDI, whipping out your iPad with a "let me show you how we do it" beats the heck out of that programmed elevator pitch, value building nonsense and death-by-powerpoint stuff they arm the salesmen with. You can walk through the basic office apps, manage a server, check the network health and schedule their engineer some of your engineer's face time on the Exchange calendar - all in about 90 seconds from go on the seventh floor of their building over cellular wireless.
Yeah, the PHBs love it because their reason for being isn't to wrangle the geek stuff - it's to enable their people to do their stuff the most effective way possible. Tech like VDI on an iPad is the epitome of inexpensive tech that does what you need it to do and stays out of the way the rest of the time. It's a major change, and it's only going to get better over the next year at a simply amazing pace.
Somehow explaining this is going to fit both the thread "autism" and the topic, street crime. You see, "Get a room" is a phrase yelled at hookers and their customers who are violating public morals in the street. As American slang it's used toward young people engaged in excessive public displays of affection, or sarcastically towards people who are bickering. None of which is going on here. It takes a lot more than one or two back-and-forths to be socially inappropriate.
On some blogs though you'll see ids follow each other from thread to thread, repeating the same idiotic chatter at each other as if there was some purpose to it other than to consume the maximum number of blog posts. It's not a dialog - each is just ranting - because neither is listening and their bickering is so heated nobody else is talking to them either. In that case the rare "get a room" can be helpful to get a climate where dialog can occur. You know - the fun stuff the rest of us are here for. People who find themselves trapped in a loop like that are better off stepping aside, crafting a couple longer and well-researched posts with great care, sharing those and letting go of the bickering - because then at least the greater audience will read what they wrote.
But/. has moderation, and doesn't really need that. When discussions get that inane here, both parties are modded to the point where their discussion doesn't bother everybody.
And explaining things like this probably means I should get checked out for a little ASD myself.
If you really are, slashdot posting is probably unhealthful for you. The social pressure here seems deliberately built to demand excessively precise expression. That's going to aggravate high-functioning asbergers' sufferers into an OCD state sometimes.
It's true there's lots of cruft in their architecture teams. They haven't killed Itanium yet. They try some stuff far too long. They aren't as bold about trying new things as I would like. Intel is a big boat that turns slow.
They still invest billions in constructing facilities to manufacture processors using processes that haven't been invented yet. As much as anybody they're driving Moore's law by sheer force of will. They're raising the bar on flash. There is a lot to be happy about in their efforts toward progress.
This is what happens when you sue Motorola over Cellular phone software patents. Motorola invented, among other things, the Cellular phone. They have tens of thousands of patents in real hardware. They haven't been playing this game because they're civilized and gracious. But if you're going to get that stupid, they're ready to take you to school. In the end this is going to rank in the top ten of the dumbest things Microsoft has ever done - probably above acquiring Danger, Inc.
There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
Diverse choices for end users worked out well for the WinTel epoch. It'll work out fine for the mobile epoch. "Android monoculture?" It is to laugh. There are lots of interesting, useful mobile operating systems and many of them are doing well. It just happens none of them come from Microsoft.
I'm actually hoping some Intel exec is reading the thread and am feeding him some keyphrases to search Circuit (their internal publication) for, so they can find where they lost the thread six years ago. "Roddenberry" is an additional clue, as is "Star Trek". I wouldn't expect you to know that though. You may find more meaning in another part of the discussion. I'm being deliberately oblique because the competitive value of the information is diminished by being shared.
"Widget or gadget" is a keyphrase, as is "It's about the people". If he finds it, it has some guidance about how to fish a win out of this mess. It wouldn't surprise me if they had discarded it.
Yeah, to most slashdotters this post will make no sense at all and so it will be modded down. I'm OK with that.
Thank you. In addition to development tools there is a vast pool of software that's specific to x86 and non-specific to Windows. There's thirty years worth of programming contests, implementations of ACM Communications, free software projects, school projects, and just plain hobby stuff. There have been dozens of versions of BSD, hundreds of Linux distributions, and commercial apps to make those millions of lines of code look like scratches on a wall. That's a huge amount of human effort to just throw away.
On the other hand, re-implementing that stuff on Android for ARM with your own style and twist seems to be a legitimate and profitable business model. Who knew?
Non-sequitur: 35 design wins might be cool for Intel. Sweet. Good on ya Intel! But Freescale (Remember them? I thought they were dead, morphed to a patent troll by Blackstone Group) are bragging 23. Relatively speaking that seems to me a much bigger deal. I'm willing to bet not one of those is even trying to run Windows.
This would be a legitimate argument if the alternatives to Windows were not available for free. But they are free, or near enough as makes no difference. They also run well on cheaper hardware than Windows does because they're engineered to require fewer resources.
Intel isn't, as far as I know, driving this dynamic. No doubt the OEMs have been promising them to offer alternative platforms like Debian, BeOS, Ubuntu, Android, WebOS, Chrome and so on these past six years and then not delivering. Intel should get to the point where they stop believing these promises which, though doubtless sincere, don't follow through with actual shipping products in quantity. Once upon a time Intel benefited from this strategy, now they do not. They must overcome it or they will become a victim of it.
For Windows developers x86 is Windows and nothing else. They don't know about anything else and can't believe anything else could be significant. It's sad, really, that so many people go through life thinking they understand the whole world having never been further from their birthplace than the next county over.
The new Oak Trail and Moorestown processors look interesting from a raw technology point of view. Low watts, great power management, good performance, x86 compatible. A guy could make a lot of neat stuff with that. But a processor is not a platform. Intel has shown some shortsightedness in product positioning on netbooks by encouraging OEMs to stay within a platform definition for display size, memory configuration, and so on. They're afraid of "cannibalization". This limits the scope of creativity for the designer and prevents the creation of innovative systems that excite people. The fear of cannibalization is actually a fear that the new product will be overwhelmingly successful and sweep the field - which for any other chipmaker would be the ideal outcome, not something to be feared. The field needs sweeping, and I think the competitors are going to get her done by taking the field without these self-imposed hobbles.
That, and no current major PC vendor will ship a system that can run Windows with anything but Windows. That means that non-Windows systems with these processors will be made in low quantities, and Windows systems made with these processors will sell in low quantities no matter how many are made. The market has clearly spoken about the desirability of Windows tablets - screamed it in fact. So unless Intel can change the entire market dynamic of Windows and OEMs, these processors are going nowhere. Maybe Apple, Samsung and HTC will do the needful thing - otherwise this time next year we'll have forgotten these processors and be talking about the awesome iPad2 and other ARM tablets that continue to innovate and impress. There will of course be the usual number of indefatiguable fanboys for the Windows tablets product online - just like there are for WP7 and were for Vista - all of them posting from the same script, which is sort of creepy.
But the chips themselves? Yeah. Way cool tech. Way to go Intel! You guys sure know how to make chips. Congratulations on 35 design wins. I sure hope you manage to figure out how to sell chips into mobile and get people excited about your products in that space. But I'm not counting on it. It's not about the widget or the gadget. It's about the people and what they can do with it.
In Grant County Washington population density is 32 per square mile. They have gigabit fiber to the home at reasonable rates through the PUD. A common complaint is that they can tell which servers and regions on the Internet are on slow links by their local performance. We should all have such problems.
Grant County, Washington has a population density of 32 per square mile. 32. THIRTY TWO! They have gigabit fiber to the home through the public utility district at reasonable rates. If that doesn't thoroughly debunk your position I don't know what will.
The density was lower when they put it in, but apparently broadband is good for growth.
You may not be aware of this, but the "Appalachian Mountains" are what a Californian would refer to as "low hills". Back east they've never seen a proper mountain.
Generally speaking, even the folk in very rural areas generally live in clusters. This notion that because there are solitary family farmhouses surrounded by miles of open fields, that fiber can't be delivered to the metropolitan areas is just nonsense. In fact, there are so few homes like that statistically that the cost of digging their trench could be consumed in the general mass without significantly altering the cost for everybody else.
The ISPs aren't giving the broadband for a different reason: they don't have to. They lobbied congress and the state legislatures and so on to put up barriers to competition. They sue municipalities who try to run their own fiber.
More of the wrong thinking that goes into the prevention of broadband can be found in this pdf. Particularly dire is the notion that paying the incumbent telecoms vast sums to provide broadband to schools and libraries as "anchor tenants" will somehow translate to the availability of broadband for homes in general. That's just absurd. Also ridiculous is funneling more money to the incumbents by subsidizing broadband for the poor. The notion that engaging the telecoms in a "public - private ventures" will result in anything but a bonfire of public dollars ignores the history of such ventures.
All this in a state where two of the most rural counties offer gigabit fiber to the home at reasonable cost through the county government owned power utility district, and a fair-sized city offers both cable and broadband to 100mbps through the city-owned power utility. One county had a 2000 census of 11 people per square kilometer and the other was at 14. And they turn a profit doing it.
We will not have broadband that competes on a local, state, national or global level until we build it ourselves. The telecoms will not build it for us, no matter how much we pay them. We've already paid them billions for the empty promise.
Slashdot Mirror
For the last decade Microsoft stock has been dead money. No growth. Over the same span Apple stock has rewarded the investor with over 30x growth. Now Apple has a higher market cap than Microsoft, when a decade ago it was in comparison a tiny fringe company. There is some halo effect, but basically this boils down to the fact that Apple is doing more things right than Microsoft is. Apple is getting it done. Microsoft is not. It is reasonable for the investor to consider the liklihood that, absent sound evidence to the contrary, this decade-long trend will continue.
It's an innovative deduplication algorithm from Microsoft Labs soon to be patented: Zero Instance Storage.
The Internet is designed to be a fault-tolerant network that routes around damage. To this network, censorship is damage. It may take a bit, but the network will find a way to route around this.
Yes. Yes they will. Because it means they get iPads of their own for the pilot. And it does work well, so they buy it. We use Citrix though, which also works, and will add the Wyse Pocketcloud iPad app to access VMWare view when it's ready. I want to get one of the Tegra 2 Android slates (finally!) coming out next quarter in a decent size to use for this because I prefer Android to iOS. But I'm not a hater - the iPad definitely works and has the battery life advantage. When you're chatting about VDI, whipping out your iPad with a "let me show you how we do it" beats the heck out of that programmed elevator pitch, value building nonsense and death-by-powerpoint stuff they arm the salesmen with. You can walk through the basic office apps, manage a server, check the network health and schedule their engineer some of your engineer's face time on the Exchange calendar - all in about 90 seconds from go on the seventh floor of their building over cellular wireless.
Yeah, the PHBs love it because their reason for being isn't to wrangle the geek stuff - it's to enable their people to do their stuff the most effective way possible. Tech like VDI on an iPad is the epitome of inexpensive tech that does what you need it to do and stays out of the way the rest of the time. It's a major change, and it's only going to get better over the next year at a simply amazing pace.
Somehow explaining this is going to fit both the thread "autism" and the topic, street crime. You see, "Get a room" is a phrase yelled at hookers and their customers who are violating public morals in the street. As American slang it's used toward young people engaged in excessive public displays of affection, or sarcastically towards people who are bickering. None of which is going on here. It takes a lot more than one or two back-and-forths to be socially inappropriate.
On some blogs though you'll see ids follow each other from thread to thread, repeating the same idiotic chatter at each other as if there was some purpose to it other than to consume the maximum number of blog posts. It's not a dialog - each is just ranting - because neither is listening and their bickering is so heated nobody else is talking to them either. In that case the rare "get a room" can be helpful to get a climate where dialog can occur. You know - the fun stuff the rest of us are here for. People who find themselves trapped in a loop like that are better off stepping aside, crafting a couple longer and well-researched posts with great care, sharing those and letting go of the bickering - because then at least the greater audience will read what they wrote.
But /. has moderation, and doesn't really need that. When discussions get that inane here, both parties are modded to the point where their discussion doesn't bother everybody.
And explaining things like this probably means I should get checked out for a little ASD myself.
If you really are, slashdot posting is probably unhealthful for you. The social pressure here seems deliberately built to demand excessively precise expression. That's going to aggravate high-functioning asbergers' sufferers into an OCD state sometimes.
They can just trot down to the Azure lab and ask Dave Cutler how he got it to work last time.
It's true there's lots of cruft in their architecture teams. They haven't killed Itanium yet. They try some stuff far too long. They aren't as bold about trying new things as I would like. Intel is a big boat that turns slow.
They still invest billions in constructing facilities to manufacture processors using processes that haven't been invented yet. As much as anybody they're driving Moore's law by sheer force of will. They're raising the bar on flash. There is a lot to be happy about in their efforts toward progress.
This is what happens when you sue Motorola over Cellular phone software patents. Motorola invented, among other things, the Cellular phone. They have tens of thousands of patents in real hardware. They haven't been playing this game because they're civilized and gracious. But if you're going to get that stupid, they're ready to take you to school. In the end this is going to rank in the top ten of the dumbest things Microsoft has ever done - probably above acquiring Danger, Inc.
Robert A Heinlein, Life-Line, 1939.
Diverse choices for end users worked out well for the WinTel epoch. It'll work out fine for the mobile epoch. "Android monoculture?" It is to laugh. There are lots of interesting, useful mobile operating systems and many of them are doing well. It just happens none of them come from Microsoft.
You caught me. Generalizations are always wrong, including this one.
I'm actually hoping some Intel exec is reading the thread and am feeding him some keyphrases to search Circuit (their internal publication) for, so they can find where they lost the thread six years ago. "Roddenberry" is an additional clue, as is "Star Trek". I wouldn't expect you to know that though. You may find more meaning in another part of the discussion. I'm being deliberately oblique because the competitive value of the information is diminished by being shared.
"Widget or gadget" is a keyphrase, as is "It's about the people". If he finds it, it has some guidance about how to fish a win out of this mess. It wouldn't surprise me if they had discarded it.
Yeah, to most slashdotters this post will make no sense at all and so it will be modded down. I'm OK with that.
Thank you. In addition to development tools there is a vast pool of software that's specific to x86 and non-specific to Windows. There's thirty years worth of programming contests, implementations of ACM Communications, free software projects, school projects, and just plain hobby stuff. There have been dozens of versions of BSD, hundreds of Linux distributions, and commercial apps to make those millions of lines of code look like scratches on a wall. That's a huge amount of human effort to just throw away.
On the other hand, re-implementing that stuff on Android for ARM with your own style and twist seems to be a legitimate and profitable business model. Who knew?
Non-sequitur: 35 design wins might be cool for Intel. Sweet. Good on ya Intel! But Freescale (Remember them? I thought they were dead, morphed to a patent troll by Blackstone Group) are bragging 23. Relatively speaking that seems to me a much bigger deal. I'm willing to bet not one of those is even trying to run Windows.
Maybe it doesn't work if it's more than 12 inches from the RFID chip in your hand. Or goes into a degraded mode when personnel are compromised.
I think something like the new vector-based Google Maps, with locations of friendlies and maybe the Google Sky interface would be pretty wicked.
This would be a legitimate argument if the alternatives to Windows were not available for free. But they are free, or near enough as makes no difference. They also run well on cheaper hardware than Windows does because they're engineered to require fewer resources.
Intel isn't, as far as I know, driving this dynamic. No doubt the OEMs have been promising them to offer alternative platforms like Debian, BeOS, Ubuntu, Android, WebOS, Chrome and so on these past six years and then not delivering. Intel should get to the point where they stop believing these promises which, though doubtless sincere, don't follow through with actual shipping products in quantity. Once upon a time Intel benefited from this strategy, now they do not. They must overcome it or they will become a victim of it.
When a strategy stops working, stop using it.
For Windows developers x86 is Windows and nothing else. They don't know about anything else and can't believe anything else could be significant. It's sad, really, that so many people go through life thinking they understand the whole world having never been further from their birthplace than the next county over.
The new Oak Trail and Moorestown processors look interesting from a raw technology point of view. Low watts, great power management, good performance, x86 compatible. A guy could make a lot of neat stuff with that. But a processor is not a platform. Intel has shown some shortsightedness in product positioning on netbooks by encouraging OEMs to stay within a platform definition for display size, memory configuration, and so on. They're afraid of "cannibalization". This limits the scope of creativity for the designer and prevents the creation of innovative systems that excite people. The fear of cannibalization is actually a fear that the new product will be overwhelmingly successful and sweep the field - which for any other chipmaker would be the ideal outcome, not something to be feared. The field needs sweeping, and I think the competitors are going to get her done by taking the field without these self-imposed hobbles.
That, and no current major PC vendor will ship a system that can run Windows with anything but Windows. That means that non-Windows systems with these processors will be made in low quantities, and Windows systems made with these processors will sell in low quantities no matter how many are made. The market has clearly spoken about the desirability of Windows tablets - screamed it in fact. So unless Intel can change the entire market dynamic of Windows and OEMs, these processors are going nowhere. Maybe Apple, Samsung and HTC will do the needful thing - otherwise this time next year we'll have forgotten these processors and be talking about the awesome iPad2 and other ARM tablets that continue to innovate and impress. There will of course be the usual number of indefatiguable fanboys for the Windows tablets product online - just like there are for WP7 and were for Vista - all of them posting from the same script, which is sort of creepy.
But the chips themselves? Yeah. Way cool tech. Way to go Intel! You guys sure know how to make chips. Congratulations on 35 design wins. I sure hope you manage to figure out how to sell chips into mobile and get people excited about your products in that space. But I'm not counting on it. It's not about the widget or the gadget. It's about the people and what they can do with it.
Pam Jones at Groklaw called it "Operation Kill Android". A very perceptive girl, that Pamela.
In Grant County Washington population density is 32 per square mile. They have gigabit fiber to the home at reasonable rates through the PUD. A common complaint is that they can tell which servers and regions on the Internet are on slow links by their local performance. We should all have such problems.
Grant County, Washington has a population density of 32 per square mile. 32. THIRTY TWO! They have gigabit fiber to the home through the public utility district at reasonable rates. If that doesn't thoroughly debunk your position I don't know what will.
The density was lower when they put it in, but apparently broadband is good for growth.
You may not be aware of this, but the "Appalachian Mountains" are what a Californian would refer to as "low hills". Back east they've never seen a proper mountain.
Generally speaking, even the folk in very rural areas generally live in clusters. This notion that because there are solitary family farmhouses surrounded by miles of open fields, that fiber can't be delivered to the metropolitan areas is just nonsense. In fact, there are so few homes like that statistically that the cost of digging their trench could be consumed in the general mass without significantly altering the cost for everybody else.
The ISPs aren't giving the broadband for a different reason: they don't have to. They lobbied congress and the state legislatures and so on to put up barriers to competition. They sue municipalities who try to run their own fiber.
More of the wrong thinking that goes into the prevention of broadband can be found in this pdf. Particularly dire is the notion that paying the incumbent telecoms vast sums to provide broadband to schools and libraries as "anchor tenants" will somehow translate to the availability of broadband for homes in general. That's just absurd. Also ridiculous is funneling more money to the incumbents by subsidizing broadband for the poor. The notion that engaging the telecoms in a "public - private ventures" will result in anything but a bonfire of public dollars ignores the history of such ventures.
All this in a state where two of the most rural counties offer gigabit fiber to the home at reasonable cost through the county government owned power utility district, and a fair-sized city offers both cable and broadband to 100mbps through the city-owned power utility. One county had a 2000 census of 11 people per square kilometer and the other was at 14. And they turn a profit doing it.
We will not have broadband that competes on a local, state, national or global level until we build it ourselves. The telecoms will not build it for us, no matter how much we pay them. We've already paid them billions for the empty promise.
You can subscribe to many sites like slashdot, and pay them directly.
The roads must roll.