ASUS and Acer have bailed on the ARM slate thing, and those are big wins for the evangelism team.
The thing is, if HP and Dell bail out also too soon, Google will go to market with their own-branded slate and win. You need to get those two to vaporware some products that never see market, and that's +1 difficulty level. It's easy to get them to bail early, it's entirely different to get them to lead us on with products they won't deliver. If Google has a first tier partner that's still pretenting to try to go to market then they'll hold off own-branded product until it's too late.
Can it be done? I doubt it.
If you can get them to fake products long enough to prevent a Google direct product for Christmas, then you have some hope of selling WiMo7 next year. Miss the window and WiMo7 is sunk. Miss the delivery date for WiMo7 and they'll roll with what they have. The risks are high, but those are the stakes.
I'm hiding the easy answer here deep in the thread under your question.
Google has Android slates (tablet format ARM-powered machines). If Google took 1000 of them ($400K worth) and just gave them to select Kernel developers (several each) to do with what they would, the problem would solve itself. The Kernel developers would adapt their preferred distro to work on the first slate they had, and they'd keep the rest to work as they were intended until it limited them - and then they'd want to break the limit by improving the Android code, which they would then want back in the Kernel tree because they would want their improvements to persist. It's all about motivation, and you motivate a Kernel geek with cool tech he wants to continue to use.
HP did this. Why do you think Kernel.org runs on HP servers and has for many years? It's because HP donates servers strategically, and yields huge benefits therefrom.
We've had no improvements in real productivity on the desktop in 15 years. It's long past time it was replaced with something else. Since we've tried WinTel, and that gave no progress, it's time we tried another path.
If it turns out that these new platforms deliver the same productivity or better on 1% of the watts and 10% of the capital cost, they'll drive a revolution in IT that shifts influence from the people who have unlimited watts (the US) to more fairly share influence with people who are Watt and capital challenged (India, Pakistan and others). That's an advantage to the new markets actually, since they leverage the volume production of innovations they haven't paid for. And then there's the side-effect that power efficient computing reduces the need for hydrocarbon fuels and carbon emissions, which is a good thing even if you don't believe in AGW because if you use it up, then it's gone.
The US can win this one by innovating, rather than milking the market they inherited. It's not that hard, and we have the experience advantage until we forfeit it.
Apple pushes the edge of innovation, but keeps control of their platforms to ensure a good user experience. This is good in that the edge keeps moving when WinTel would prefer it remain static. It's bad in that we're replacing one dependency for another if we choose this path.
Fortunately for the most part Google can shadow Apple and deliver the innovation without the leash - if you let them track you. And the Google tech is built on Linux so if you want to shake the tracking you can do that too.
So progress moves forward which is a good thing. Without Apple, Google and Linux geeks we'd have less of this bar-moving and more of the one-step-forward, two-steps back wormfest that is Windows.
It's a laser so the beam can be tight. That lends itself to geeking it to reflective targets mutually visible in outdoor applications. If people can get wifi at 237 miles, this tech may be capable of extending both the range and bandwidth of point to point communications. That would extend the reach of the Internet to a lot of people isolated by distance and infrastructure. That would be cool.
And then there's the neighborhood network thing. I can gather maybe 250 single family homes into a network with a fenceline network without crossing a right-of-way with a cable. Leveraging this tech I could probably extend that reach to 30,000 families. If you can build a 1 Gbps network that large in the US, the Internet will beat a path to you because you've got something they want: earners with eyeballs. Real bandwidth becomes free, which changes a whole bunch of things in a totally positive way
You see, the problem with DRM is that they keep using these customer-unfriendly methods that people hate - pumping millions and millions of dollars into the hands of technology providers that are just there to rake in their investment for technologies that the providers knew were doomed to fail from the start. What they need to do instead is to employ my patented customer-friendly DRM mechanism for a few measly tens of millions, that will also be doomed to fail from the start, but will at least enrich me rather than those other bastards.
That is indeed the ticket. Get that thing to an online store by the end of June for less than $500 and I'm buying several. I would rather have this than the iPad by a long shot.
There's a lot you can blame Microsoft for, but it's the companies that don't want to upgrade which is the problem here.
The companies stuck on IE6 are the very ones that want to upgrade to the next versions - they're "Microsoft shops" and have been for a decade. They're into Software Assurance bigtime. Unfortunately for them they got committed, and built their core mission critical apps on a platform with no compatible migration strategy. They were entitled to expect a compatible migration strategy, and they didn't get one. It's fair to blame Microsoft for that lack.
Unfortunately, they can and will eventually migrate to a newer version of the Microsoft browser and services which also lack a compatible migration strategy, thus getting stuck in the same trap more than once. You would think they would learn and embrace this novel concept of "standards", but no.
Hey! They donated $3M worth of software to the Library of Congress too! Fancy software that provides a really cool US Government website that people not using their tools can't use...
They have Mr. Gates' and Mr. Buffett's personal fortunes going into analyzing how to do the most good in the world.
And of course they have their multi-billion dollar Campus of Serene Giving in the heart of downtown Seattle to ponder the question in a tranquil collegiate environment well defended from the homeless people who used to live there by armed security guards.
The European economy did not boom during the plague.
During the Black Plague the world lost about 1/5th of its people. Immediately thereafter came the Renaissance. Perhaps this was a coincidence. Perhaps not. If someone were to suppose that there were a causal relationship, he would not be alone. We may as well blame the end of the Mideival Warm Period for both of them I think, but I'm not going to bash anybody for having a contrary opinion.
It's cool the guy is trying to get rid of the mass of coin he's piled up before it turns his offspring into the next generation of Paris Hilton and Casey Johnson. But let's not have any illusions here: he's doing it this way not because it's maximizing the benefit, but because it reduces the number of people killed in the dissipation of his cash. He's come to grips with the fact that you can't even give away a billion dollars without killing somebody somewhere, and he's got a lot of billions to be rid of. Hopefully more good than ill will come of it. Certainly I'm not doing anything to banish the evil that is Cholera, so I wish him luck in this endeavor.
I liked what you said, but you should dial the emphasis back just a skosh, k? I know it's important but you're not going to sway many minds if you're creeping people out.
Considering the negative effects of varous forms of Foreignaid on the recipients and the prevalence of skimming by graft, it wouldn't bother me if the US goverment hired some foreign codemonkeys instead. It's better for them and better for us.
The problem with your plan is that if a foreign corp contractor contracts to write code for the Navy, another foreign corp can't use that code for the CIA because they don't have the right to publish it Public Domain so they can't use it. Look - it's not the crown jewels of intellectual property, it's mostly minor applets or business intelligence for.gov organizations that are highly custom. But if it becomes a beautiful suite of APIs and frameworks that incidental to its main purpose advances the art, where's the problem?
I'm really quite a tightwad. But we're a technology family.
I actually need something like this for work. I have to have an obscene amount of information resources to flip out during presentations mostly in PDF format, and it matters if I have modern tech. I'm sure it will have a Citrix client available, and that will get me back to my real resources as well. My wife gets one if I do - she'll use it in the car to doublecheck the photos she takes and as a navi, maybe mount both of them to the back of the headrest for in-car video on long trips. Two high school students in the house need it for school. That's four.
I'd rather have Android slates for the freedom, but I can't wait forever and it's possible Apple has locked up the entire world's screen making capacity for the forseeable future.
I'm really not a big fan of Apple's PC products. But if the Android ARM slates don't top this on features and ship in time for Christmas I'm afraid I'll be buying four of these.
I think after this one fails the recording companies should pay me millions for my wild DRM idea that won't work out. Because all the rest of you have had your turn.
I wrote that post. It's a jerkwad post. It deserves to be modded down. I'd delete it if I could. Foredecker is a cool dude and deserves better treatment than that. He wasn't astroturfing - he's entitled to put his opinion here too.
If you're curious, here is how you win the first post thing. Getting in first is not enough. It's a grand start though, and I'm glad you've learned the trick. I'm looking forward to what you can do with it./. is on its way down, but the things you learn here will be useful elsewhere too.
First, capture their attention by twisting a common meme or modern topic in the subject.
In the body, capture their attention again with a concept that challenges the common thread, and close the first paragraph with a short intellectual call. Don't use the subject line as the introductory sentence as some people really hate that and will mod you down for it no matter how good your post is.
Once you have their attention you can push your meme without let as long as you are carefully correct or obviously intentionally incorrect to push the humor. Don't switch from humor to serious or vice versa - it doesn't work. If you have advanced trolling skills you can leave an opening here for correction so that you can amplify your message amongst the replies - but be right because these folks will school you. This is not the CNet crowd. Limit yourself to three or four paragraphs, or the Wall-O-Text haters will mod you down (I'm well over their limit here but I don't care because I have near perfect Karma. I can afford to school you).
Nowhere in your post vary from the thread topic. You can do that deep in the thread but you can't get away with it in a first post.
Close with an action item, because if you've entertained them they want to reward you with forward action. The "I Am Foredecker" tagline is awesome but it's not an action item. Jive?
Oh, and you have about 180 seconds to get all that done if you're good, or 12 if you're not. It helps to have some copypasta handy, but if you can't tailor it in time it's just wasted because they'll tear you up.
IT Administrator who saved millions in licensing fees involved in scandal! Students used open source operating system to compile and publish their own unauthorized applications, which were of course sophomoric in character. Students were permitted to render mathematical constructs wihout let. Mandelbulb porn sighted!
The new administrator has promised to nip this in the bud: "Students will invent things within in the scope of propriety with the help of the new Microsoft systems that limit the scope of their endeavors." Further: "We'll have no more of this open scope nonsense. Our job is to teach them what to think, not to think" he said. "We'll have no more of this exploring the crevices of obscure mathematical constructs. It's obscene."
When asked, Timmy Blake responded "it's just a standard torus warped by budget figures. I didn't mean for it to look like a vagina. This is serious science."
Said IT Director Clemmons, "I didn't think it would be controversial to let the kids learn about the bare truth. My bad."
The tight time frame -- two weeks for evaluation, one week for design and two weeks for implementation -- didn't create too much disruption, Brennan said. "Although everything wasn't as polished as it could have been, when the school opened all of the core functionality was there. And it's been running for a year with no significant intervention. It hasn't really been touched in any fundamental way since then."
Clearly these are minds that have been warped by the freetards to measure things like Return On Investment and Time To Recover Investment in the scope of free software. It's not fair to measure commercial software in that context.
Nice. I'm sure you'ld prefer to have something closer to the Windows core than this, but nice first post. If you're going to advocate it pays to have front billing.
Now if you're going to drive off course from source code formatting to operating system adoption I can be forgiven for also going wide afield.
How's that Window Mobile thing working out for you? Have they canned Roz Ho yet for the Danger debacle? Will she have to extrapeneur to a startup and bring back its corpse to prove her loyalty, or will she choose to spend more time with her family? Is September a solid date for WinMo7, and even then how do you expect phone vendors to personalize their experience and ship product for Christmas?
Frankly I think two team reboots in the last year means you've got nuthin' for Christmas '10, and Christmas '11 is looking like less than even money. That's a long time for iSlates and Android tablets to be walking all over you. Of course I've got it being any good at 30:1 against.
And what about Ballmer? Is an off 40% decade while Apple grew 7x and Google grew 4x not enough evidence that he's not getting it done? You would figure with all of the leverage and cash he's got he could do better if he was any good. Hell, I think I could do better than that even if I gave half the gross profits away to get some global love. With the money Ballmer has wasted on obvious dead ends over the last decade we could buy each Haitian refugee his own quake-proof palace.
Agreed. He would do his thing and let the mice try to bell the cat. He'd find a way to win no matter what the mass did. Lazarus Long was a projection of himself. A grand bastard he was. I miss him.
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ASUS and Acer have bailed on the ARM slate thing, and those are big wins for the evangelism team.
The thing is, if HP and Dell bail out also too soon, Google will go to market with their own-branded slate and win. You need to get those two to vaporware some products that never see market, and that's +1 difficulty level. It's easy to get them to bail early, it's entirely different to get them to lead us on with products they won't deliver. If Google has a first tier partner that's still pretenting to try to go to market then they'll hold off own-branded product until it's too late.
Can it be done? I doubt it.
If you can get them to fake products long enough to prevent a Google direct product for Christmas, then you have some hope of selling WiMo7 next year. Miss the window and WiMo7 is sunk. Miss the delivery date for WiMo7 and they'll roll with what they have. The risks are high, but those are the stakes.
We live in interesting times.
I'm hiding the easy answer here deep in the thread under your question.
Google has Android slates (tablet format ARM-powered machines). If Google took 1000 of them ($400K worth) and just gave them to select Kernel developers (several each) to do with what they would, the problem would solve itself. The Kernel developers would adapt their preferred distro to work on the first slate they had, and they'd keep the rest to work as they were intended until it limited them - and then they'd want to break the limit by improving the Android code, which they would then want back in the Kernel tree because they would want their improvements to persist. It's all about motivation, and you motivate a Kernel geek with cool tech he wants to continue to use.
HP did this. Why do you think Kernel.org runs on HP servers and has for many years? It's because HP donates servers strategically, and yields huge benefits therefrom.
We've had no improvements in real productivity on the desktop in 15 years. It's long past time it was replaced with something else. Since we've tried WinTel, and that gave no progress, it's time we tried another path.
If it turns out that these new platforms deliver the same productivity or better on 1% of the watts and 10% of the capital cost, they'll drive a revolution in IT that shifts influence from the people who have unlimited watts (the US) to more fairly share influence with people who are Watt and capital challenged (India, Pakistan and others). That's an advantage to the new markets actually, since they leverage the volume production of innovations they haven't paid for. And then there's the side-effect that power efficient computing reduces the need for hydrocarbon fuels and carbon emissions, which is a good thing even if you don't believe in AGW because if you use it up, then it's gone.
The US can win this one by innovating, rather than milking the market they inherited. It's not that hard, and we have the experience advantage until we forfeit it.
I think this is a question we should all ask of our goverments - loudly - until we get an answer.
We use these at work and they're great! I was looking for something more consumer grade and cost.
Thanks though.
Apple pushes the edge of innovation, but keeps control of their platforms to ensure a good user experience. This is good in that the edge keeps moving when WinTel would prefer it remain static. It's bad in that we're replacing one dependency for another if we choose this path.
Fortunately for the most part Google can shadow Apple and deliver the innovation without the leash - if you let them track you. And the Google tech is built on Linux so if you want to shake the tracking you can do that too.
So progress moves forward which is a good thing. Without Apple, Google and Linux geeks we'd have less of this bar-moving and more of the one-step-forward, two-steps back wormfest that is Windows.
Are we worried now about the math results of people who can't figure out a calculator? Why?
It's a laser so the beam can be tight. That lends itself to geeking it to reflective targets mutually visible in outdoor applications. If people can get wifi at 237 miles, this tech may be capable of extending both the range and bandwidth of point to point communications. That would extend the reach of the Internet to a lot of people isolated by distance and infrastructure. That would be cool.
And then there's the neighborhood network thing. I can gather maybe 250 single family homes into a network with a fenceline network without crossing a right-of-way with a cable. Leveraging this tech I could probably extend that reach to 30,000 families. If you can build a 1 Gbps network that large in the US, the Internet will beat a path to you because you've got something they want: earners with eyeballs. Real bandwidth becomes free, which changes a whole bunch of things in a totally positive way
You see, the problem with DRM is that they keep using these customer-unfriendly methods that people hate - pumping millions and millions of dollars into the hands of technology providers that are just there to rake in their investment for technologies that the providers knew were doomed to fail from the start. What they need to do instead is to employ my patented customer-friendly DRM mechanism for a few measly tens of millions, that will also be doomed to fail from the start, but will at least enrich me rather than those other bastards.
They paid good money for it.
That is indeed the ticket. Get that thing to an online store by the end of June for less than $500 and I'm buying several. I would rather have this than the iPad by a long shot.
There's a lot you can blame Microsoft for, but it's the companies that don't want to upgrade which is the problem here.
The companies stuck on IE6 are the very ones that want to upgrade to the next versions - they're "Microsoft shops" and have been for a decade. They're into Software Assurance bigtime. Unfortunately for them they got committed, and built their core mission critical apps on a platform with no compatible migration strategy. They were entitled to expect a compatible migration strategy, and they didn't get one. It's fair to blame Microsoft for that lack.
Unfortunately, they can and will eventually migrate to a newer version of the Microsoft browser and services which also lack a compatible migration strategy, thus getting stuck in the same trap more than once. You would think they would learn and embrace this novel concept of "standards", but no.
Hey! They donated $3M worth of software to the Library of Congress too! Fancy software that provides a really cool US Government website that people not using their tools can't use...
They have Mr. Gates' and Mr. Buffett's personal fortunes going into analyzing how to do the most good in the world.
And of course they have their multi-billion dollar Campus of Serene Giving in the heart of downtown Seattle to ponder the question in a tranquil collegiate environment well defended from the homeless people who used to live there by armed security guards.
The European economy did not boom during the plague.
During the Black Plague the world lost about 1/5th of its people. Immediately thereafter came the Renaissance. Perhaps this was a coincidence. Perhaps not. If someone were to suppose that there were a causal relationship, he would not be alone. We may as well blame the end of the Mideival Warm Period for both of them I think, but I'm not going to bash anybody for having a contrary opinion.
It's cool the guy is trying to get rid of the mass of coin he's piled up before it turns his offspring into the next generation of Paris Hilton and Casey Johnson. But let's not have any illusions here: he's doing it this way not because it's maximizing the benefit, but because it reduces the number of people killed in the dissipation of his cash. He's come to grips with the fact that you can't even give away a billion dollars without killing somebody somewhere, and he's got a lot of billions to be rid of. Hopefully more good than ill will come of it. Certainly I'm not doing anything to banish the evil that is Cholera, so I wish him luck in this endeavor.
I liked what you said, but you should dial the emphasis back just a skosh, k? I know it's important but you're not going to sway many minds if you're creeping people out.
Considering the negative effects of varous forms of Foreign aid on the recipients and the prevalence of skimming by graft, it wouldn't bother me if the US goverment hired some foreign codemonkeys instead. It's better for them and better for us.
The problem with your plan is that if a foreign corp contractor contracts to write code for the Navy, another foreign corp can't use that code for the CIA because they don't have the right to publish it Public Domain so they can't use it. Look - it's not the crown jewels of intellectual property, it's mostly minor applets or business intelligence for .gov organizations that are highly custom. But if it becomes a beautiful suite of APIs and frameworks that incidental to its main purpose advances the art, where's the problem?
I'm really quite a tightwad. But we're a technology family.
I actually need something like this for work. I have to have an obscene amount of information resources to flip out during presentations mostly in PDF format, and it matters if I have modern tech. I'm sure it will have a Citrix client available, and that will get me back to my real resources as well. My wife gets one if I do - she'll use it in the car to doublecheck the photos she takes and as a navi, maybe mount both of them to the back of the headrest for in-car video on long trips. Two high school students in the house need it for school. That's four.
I'd rather have Android slates for the freedom, but I can't wait forever and it's possible Apple has locked up the entire world's screen making capacity for the forseeable future.
I'm really not a big fan of Apple's PC products. But if the Android ARM slates don't top this on features and ship in time for Christmas I'm afraid I'll be buying four of these.
I think after this one fails the recording companies should pay me millions for my wild DRM idea that won't work out. Because all the rest of you have had your turn.
I wrote that post. It's a jerkwad post. It deserves to be modded down. I'd delete it if I could. Foredecker is a cool dude and deserves better treatment than that. He wasn't astroturfing - he's entitled to put his opinion here too.
You could be right. If I were sure you were wrong, then you would be right.
If you're curious, here is how you win the first post thing. Getting in first is not enough. It's a grand start though, and I'm glad you've learned the trick. I'm looking forward to what you can do with it. /. is on its way down, but the things you learn here will be useful elsewhere too.
First, capture their attention by twisting a common meme or modern topic in the subject.
In the body, capture their attention again with a concept that challenges the common thread, and close the first paragraph with a short intellectual call. Don't use the subject line as the introductory sentence as some people really hate that and will mod you down for it no matter how good your post is.
Once you have their attention you can push your meme without let as long as you are carefully correct or obviously intentionally incorrect to push the humor. Don't switch from humor to serious or vice versa - it doesn't work. If you have advanced trolling skills you can leave an opening here for correction so that you can amplify your message amongst the replies - but be right because these folks will school you. This is not the CNet crowd. Limit yourself to three or four paragraphs, or the Wall-O-Text haters will mod you down (I'm well over their limit here but I don't care because I have near perfect Karma. I can afford to school you).
Nowhere in your post vary from the thread topic. You can do that deep in the thread but you can't get away with it in a first post.
Close with an action item, because if you've entertained them they want to reward you with forward action. The "I Am Foredecker" tagline is awesome but it's not an action item. Jive?
Oh, and you have about 180 seconds to get all that done if you're good, or 12 if you're not. It helps to have some copypasta handy, but if you can't tailor it in time it's just wasted because they'll tear you up.
You're doing fine - keep it up.
IT Administrator who saved millions in licensing fees involved in scandal! Students used open source operating system to compile and publish their own unauthorized applications, which were of course sophomoric in character. Students were permitted to render mathematical constructs wihout let. Mandelbulb porn sighted!
The new administrator has promised to nip this in the bud: "Students will invent things within in the scope of propriety with the help of the new Microsoft systems that limit the scope of their endeavors." Further: "We'll have no more of this open scope nonsense. Our job is to teach them what to think, not to think" he said. "We'll have no more of this exploring the crevices of obscure mathematical constructs. It's obscene."
When asked, Timmy Blake responded "it's just a standard torus warped by budget figures. I didn't mean for it to look like a vagina. This is serious science."
Said IT Director Clemmons, "I didn't think it would be controversial to let the kids learn about the bare truth. My bad."
The tight time frame -- two weeks for evaluation, one week for design and two weeks for implementation -- didn't create too much disruption, Brennan said. "Although everything wasn't as polished as it could have been, when the school opened all of the core functionality was there. And it's been running for a year with no significant intervention. It hasn't really been touched in any fundamental way since then."
Clearly these are minds that have been warped by the freetards to measure things like Return On Investment and Time To Recover Investment in the scope of free software. It's not fair to measure commercial software in that context.
/ Reading the whole article is recommended.
Nice. I'm sure you'ld prefer to have something closer to the Windows core than this, but nice first post. If you're going to advocate it pays to have front billing.
Now if you're going to drive off course from source code formatting to operating system adoption I can be forgiven for also going wide afield.
How's that Window Mobile thing working out for you? Have they canned Roz Ho yet for the Danger debacle? Will she have to extrapeneur to a startup and bring back its corpse to prove her loyalty, or will she choose to spend more time with her family? Is September a solid date for WinMo7, and even then how do you expect phone vendors to personalize their experience and ship product for Christmas?
Frankly I think two team reboots in the last year means you've got nuthin' for Christmas '10, and Christmas '11 is looking like less than even money. That's a long time for iSlates and Android tablets to be walking all over you. Of course I've got it being any good at 30:1 against.
And what about Ballmer? Is an off 40% decade while Apple grew 7x and Google grew 4x not enough evidence that he's not getting it done? You would figure with all of the leverage and cash he's got he could do better if he was any good. Hell, I think I could do better than that even if I gave half the gross profits away to get some global love. With the money Ballmer has wasted on obvious dead ends over the last decade we could buy each Haitian refugee his own quake-proof palace.
Agreed. He would do his thing and let the mice try to bell the cat. He'd find a way to win no matter what the mass did. Lazarus Long was a projection of himself. A grand bastard he was. I miss him.