I like how people were more easily able to distinguish between 128kbps and 256 kbps AAC files using Apple ear buds than the Shure ear buds. This forced the writers to come up with an excuse for this anomaly by claiming that the Apple ear buds' inability to produce high frequencies masked the sounds that would make it easy to hear the difference between the 128 kbps and 256 kbps tracks.
They were so embarrassed by this result they had to add superfluous comments like how one listeners was amazed to hear a wood block sound in a song when listening to the Shures and how the Shures will allow you to lower the volume and thus save you from hearing loss.
How about an alternate, perhaps more straightforward explanation: the sound quality of the Apple ear buds is better than the sound quality of the Shure ear buds? I know that may seem ridiculous, but maybe it's not. Maybe it's really hard to produce great sound out of ear buds, making ear bud quality a crap shoot.
JavaFX is meant to compete with Adobe's Flex+Apollo and Microsoft's SilverLight. As such these kind of RIAs compete with AJAX, but indirectly. These techs can operate offline and each has some kind of multi-device support.
That being said, it does seem unlikely that people will choose Flex, Silverlight, or JavaFX over AJAX for a web-only application. Then again, imagine if you could use all of your Google apps offline. Once your throw in the desktop, AJAX has little answer. If it's easy to achieve desktop/web app transparency, then maybe AJAX becomes a poor option. Big if though.
This just in, Google offers stock options. Yes, it is true. So if their stock price tanks, the stock options of everyone, including senior management, could go underwater. So if you're in senior management, then you go from maybe having a six figure payout coming up in your future to nothing, all because the stock buying public is in some way unhappy. What are you going to do? Make them happy. Keep your stock up. Get paid.
The only thing different at Google is that maybe there is more control from the top, i.e. the Sergey, Larry, and Eric triumvirate. Those guys have already made fortunes and are possibly less sensitive to a decrease in future payoffs from stock options. I wouldn't count on that. A lot of people in the valley are curious to see what would happen at Google if they had a bad quarter, but a lot of people are also afraid that such an event could cause Bubble 2.0 to start bursting.
Clearly the RIAA is right. I used to pay $15 or so for CDs back in the 90's. Now I pay $10 or so when I buy a CD. Why? Because of competition from downloading and yes, piracy. The monopoly on the distribution of music has been broken. We aren't paying monopolist set prices anymore, so of course it's a lot cheaper.
Keyword analysis and Bayesian methods that depend on it, are useless. Most spammers are switching to image spam where they embed pictures of text instead of actual text.
Excellent point. It wasn't until 2004 that Apple's profits really took off as a result of the success of the iPod. It was really Christmas 2003 and the release of the Mini in January 2004 that started that meteoric rise, and that's a good two years after the iPod debuted.
However, there are some fundamental differences between the iPod and the iPhone. Very few people had portable MP3 players in 2001. How many iPod owners have owned any other MP3 player besides an iPod? So to get them to buy an iPod, they just had to be convinced that the value it brought to them justified the price they paid for it. Between 2001-2003, Apple steadily improved the value (increasing capacity, reducing size, improving user interface, adding photos, etc.) while also bringing down the price (original iPod cost $400 for a 5GB version, by Christmas 2003 it was $300 for a 15 GB, and the Mini was only $250 in January 2004.)
Most people already own a cell phone. So people don't just have to be convinced that an iPhone is worth $X, but also that it is a better value vs. their current phone and a huge slew of competitor phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, LG, etc. Jobs wants to claim that Apple is re-inventing cell phones because he does not want his iPhone compared to other phones. Sure it will have advantages over other phones in many areas, but it will also have disadvantages. And it's obviously a lot more expensive. These are much bigger obstacles than anything the iPod faced.
One last thing... A big part of why the iPod succeeded is that from 2001-2003, nobody really stepped up to compete with Apple. It really wasn't until last year that somebody (Microsoft) came up with a product (Zune) with a similar user experience as the iPod. It's really pretty amazing. I was fortunate enough to get an iPod in 2001, and I kept guessing that at some point somebody would come out with an MP3 player that did everything the iPod did, but cost $100-$150 less than an iPod. It never happened. It still hasn't happened. Apple can't expect the same kind of lack of competition for the iPhone.
Since I own stock in Apple, I sure hope this was because of tons of iPods being sold and overwhelming demand for ITMS downloads. However, it might have been caused by Apple's change in packaging. When I bought a Nano in October 2005, it came in a cardboard package, approximately the size of two CDs. It needed to be bigger than a CD because it contained a CD -- a CD with iTunes on it. If you buy a Nano or Shuffle (not sure about the video iPod) this year, they come in a clear plastic package that's a rectangular solid similar in size to a soda can. The packaging can be smaller because it does not contain a CD with iTunes on it. Instead, you have to download iTunes from Apple. So maybe that was the cause of the traffic in Christmas morning. Lots of first time iPod owners all trying to download iTunes. That's a 35 MB download, compared to the ~4 MB downloads for most songs on ITMS. Steve Jobs was touting that the smaller packaging was more environmentally friendly (maybe cheaper, too?)
Actually, I don't know if I could say that it is the best ever but it is a damn good virtual machine! It can run as well or even better of its equivalent JVM http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/compare/Benchmark_re sponse.pdf [gotdotnet.com].
What? The document you link to is a comparison of web service performance on.NET and J2EE. That has little bearing on the VM performance. Plus, it's more than two years old. So even if it was a valid VM comparison, it would have ceased to be valid a year ago, when major revisions were done to both technology platforms.
Bar none, VS is the best development tool that I have used.
Well I'm sure if you're doing.NET development, it's may be the best tool you've used. There's a pretty good chance it's the only tool you've used as well.
One of the things that YouTube could start doing is making a 3GP encoded version of the videos that are uploaded to it, along with the Flash version they already make. This should be noticeably higher quality than a video that was encoded to Flash first then to 3GP. Alternatively, they could make this "from source" encoding of the videos picked by Verizon, assuming they keep the original source around. Either way, this would seem like a value-add to Verizon, making the deal a lot more valuable to them.
You didn't RTFA, did you? (Yeah I know, it's Slashdot. Clearly the people who modded you didn't RTFA either.) From TFA:
current therapies treat colon cancer as a "homogeneous entity, not every colon cancer cell has the ability to keep that tumour going; only one in 60,000."
The math that should be taught in computer science should reflect the math used in computer science.
That sounds all well and good, but is completely false. With this kind of reasoning, nobody but mathematicians would have ever learned about imaginary numbers, and everything from electromagnetism to classical mechanics to molecular chemistry would be crippled compared to where they are today. If you only learn what is currently used, you'll never progress past that. I would surely hope that your education would at least enable you to do innovative things, even if you have no interest. It would seem dire if your education limited you instead.
Given Oracle just recently release a mammoth patch for their 9i and 11i products that, while containing more than 100 bug fixes, didn't manage to fix all known bugs, I seriously doubt they're in any way prepared to take on the responsibility of a full fledged Enterprise ready Operating System. This is going to kick them hard.
If they were writing a brand new operating system from scratch all by themselves, then you would have a point. However, they are not. They are instead doing the same thing that Red Hat does. They are cherry picking the work of the open source community, putting a bow on it, and selling support for it. They are probably tuning the out-of-the-box configuration to make sure their proprietary software installs and runs nicely on it, but they don't have to spend any time or effort on kernel development, etc. There are already a slew of open source developers doing that for them. They are out-Red Hatting Red Hat in a way. They can just take CentOS (a.k.a. Red Hat Enterprise), maybe install a few RPMs, remove a few others, call it "Unbreakable" and sell it with support.
As soon as there was a significant % of their customers installing their products on Linux, this became a no-brainer. Sure Larry Ellison can make inflammatory comments about Red Hat, he's always doing that. It's still a sound business decision. It's surprising IBM hasn't done the same thing already, though I guess they're still hoping for people to buy AIX...
Netscape is "it", the one with critical mass, the one everyone goes to first.
Calling Netscape's mass "critical" is a huge overstatement. The market for web browsers was in its infancy there because the internet was in its infancy. Microsoft didn't have to get lots of people to switch from Netsape to IE. They simply bundled IE tightly with Windows so that for most people, the first time they were online was with IE.
The online video market may not be fully mature yet, but it's a lot more mature than the internet was in 1995. YouTube already serves up millions of videos daily. It is rapidly expanding. So a lot of YouTube users would have to switch to another service if another service was to usurp YouTube's position. They couldn't just tap into the non-YouTube users who have not yet tried online video.
Just ask Google about this. They tried to compete with Google Video. They failed. That's a big part of why they bought YouTube.
If your buddy at MS is making $160K in Redmond... that's like $200K in Mountain View. Most programmers at Google make half that or less.
I remember when I came out of college (1997) and MS was the king of low-ball offers. They basically said "you should be willing to work for less because you get to work for MS. Plus we give you stock options." Of course their stock has flatlined this century, so they've had to abandon that approach. That's meant paying a lot better.
Now, Google has taken over the crown as king of low-ball offers. Why? Because you should be willing to work for less because you get to work for Google. Plus they give you stock options.
Or friends. Or hobbies. Or interests. Or anything in your life other than work. Personal time is not just about wife and kids.
Now if you actually don't have any of those things... then yeah, go ahead and work 12 hrs/day, 7 days/week. Why not? You've got nothing else in your life.
You're right, and there are definitely companies out there taking this approach. My sister-in-law works for an medical billing company. The software she uses is a Java applet that runs from inside any browser. It requires the Java Advanced Imaging to be downloaded in addition to the JRE. It provides a very rich experience inside a browser. I think a lot of what it does could probably be done with AJAX, but it would be pretty hard. But as an applet, it's really straightforward.
And that's where the $ comes in. Even though it may be easier to get rich functionality using a Java applet than with AJAX, Java developers are much more expensive than DHTML/JS developers. Any AJAX site could be re-written with an applet, probably with minimal changes to the server side code. It would probably be less, and simpler code, but the devs would cost more. The server could also be re-written to make good use of the applet, but again this requires server side Java devs who also understand the Swing architecture. Those guys are pretty rare, and even more expensive.
So that's at least part of the reason why AJAX wins out over Java applets. You can make similar arguments for why AJAX wins out over Flash, another highly portable technology.
It's about Outlook. Yahoo is not trying to imitate GMail. They are trying make Yahoo Mail just like using Outlook or Thunderbird or Evolution or Eudora or whatever. That's why they have a preview pane. That's why you double-click to open the message in its own "window." This is how desktop clients do it. Yahoo simply used AJAX to produce the same kind of behavior. Probably the only webmail that would be similar would be Exchange/Outlook webmail (you know the product that introduced XmlHttpRequest before anybody had ever heard of AJAX...)
There are two things at work... First, is that Microsoft has some compettition. There's OpenOffice of course, as well as various online office apps like Writely, Google Spreadsheet, Google Calendar -- just to name the ones from Google. So they need to provide extra "value" to justify charging for their products when there are increasingly viable free alternatives. How do they provide the extra value? That's the second part of the equation. MS asked people what features they would like the Office apps to have. What they found out is that Office already had everything people were asking for. So why did people ask for already existing features? Well the obvious answer is that the existing UI made it difficult to access these features. So the only way for MS to improve Office was to change the UI so that it made these desired "hidden" features more accessible. Hence the "ribbon". Theoretically, people will use Office 2007 and think it has a lot of new, useful features not found in Office 2003, or compettitors like OpenOffice -- even though these features are in fact present in both Office 2003 and OpenOffice. Thus Office 2007 will have greater value than previous version and compettitive products, and people will happily plunk down their money to pay for it. I'm not saying that I buy into this, just that that's what the theory is behind the "new fashion."
I think you missed part of the point of the article. It's not as much about people running Firefox and Open Office on Windows XP as it is about people running PHP, Tomcat (funny that the article tries to push the WAMP acronym, but the people in their examples were all using Java, not PHP/Perl/Python), Apache, and MySQL on Windows server (2000/2003.) It's not that MS is endorsing this. In fact in the article, none of the quotes are from MS people. They are either from IT execs at downstream businesses or they are OSS advocates. It's pretty obvious that MS is going to say "use IIS/.NET/SQL Server." But that's not the point. The point is that people in the trenches are saying "I'm going to use PHP or Java with Apache and MySQL on Windows." That probably doesn't make MS real happy, and it probably doesn't make Red Hat real happy, but so what? Real people have to make decisions based on what works best for them, not based on techno-philosophy.
It's not new technology for servers and people who buy servers aren't impressed with lame marketing terms like "4x4".
RoR -- Made for Java Devs
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Ruby For Rails
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· Score: 2, Insightful
For those of us who have developed web applications with Java, this is a welcome break.
People like to think that RoR came from the same spring that produced Python and PHP. That might be true of Ruby, but not RoR. Nope, RoR is made for Java devs. That's why they make such a big deal about the lack of configuration. Java frameworks have a notorious amount of configuration. RoR is very natural for Java devs who are also used to MVC frameworks for web apps. It is not as compelling to PHP and Python developers, even though Ruby is a lot closer to those languages than it is to Java.
Wikipedia doesn't just have problems with controversial people, but with any kind of controversial issue. Look at the whole Net Neutrality debate. Many people point to the common carrier status as to why ISPs should be regulated to enforce net neutrality. This has lead to the Wikipedia entry for common carrier to be obviously biased. It states that ISPs have succesfully argued that they should not be considered common carriers based on seemingly weak arguments ("we're information carriers, not communications carriers".) However, it fails to mention that ISPs were originally classified as common carriers. This lead to ISPs being more regulated than their cable and satellite compettitors. It made little sense for a telco to invest in infrastructure that it was going to have to turn around and share. It was to promote compettition between DSL and cable that ISPs were de-regulated and not classified as common carriers. In the wake of this de-regulation, DSL prices have been slashed. Cable prices have stayed high, but cable companies have been forced to provide greater service (my connection speed has quadrupled in the last three years) to justify the higher price.
The point is that you won't see any such statements in Wikipedia. Their "version" of things is clearly tilted to fit somebody's view point. This may be true of traditional reference books and even educational materials, but the dynamic nature of Wikipedia makes it much obvious and intrusive.
But in some cases, such as this, the government needs to step in a fill the primary reason for having a government: to protect those that cannot protect themselves
Funny, I don't see that in The Constitution. The only thing it says the government should do is protect the rights of all people, regardless if that person is a consumer, a Google executive, or a Verizon executive.
In the end, it is the consumers vs the telcos.
Wrong. It's telcos vs. internet companies. Both groups want the government to protect their business, and government protection of a business is always bad for consumers because it prevents other businesses from competing against the protected business.
The only way we, as consumers, could force the telcos to change their behavior is either cut off all access to the rest of the world (stop watching TV, making phone calls, using the internet, etc) or get the government to stand up for us.
This kind of thinking only leads to collectivist forms of government, where "somebody" is supposed to be all-knowing and able to make decisions for the greater good of all. The problem is that such a person does not exist, human nature takes over, and the people "looking out for the greater good" wind up just looking out for themselves.
Appealing to government to resolve any conflict is not the only way. Let's say no net neutrality is enacted, and AT&T starts screwing over consumers. You have more choices than you listed. Instead of demanding the government do more, demand them to do less. Demand them to remove regulation, thus enabling compettition for AT&T. If AT&T is really screwing you over, then you'll gladly switch services if given the choice.
Who cares what happens to YouTube? It's not the government's place to say "We need to make sure YouTube doesn't get screwed over by Verizon." This just in. Businesses compete for your dollars. Some win, some lose. If the government helps one over the other, the people who suffer are consumers.
What is needed is less regulation, not more regulation in the guise of "Net Neutrality." Less regulation would give people more of a choice so that if they are big YouTube fans and their current ISP is making it hard for them to watch videos on YouTube, then they could switch to some other ISP that is not doing that. If YouTube has such huge benefit to consumers, then it would be very profitable for a compettitor to offer YouTube enabled service.
The big problem is that there is already so much regulation that compettition is scarce. As consumer we should hope for less regulation instead of net neutrality. Of course big companies with vested interests like Microsoft and Google would rather seek government protection, but that's not what would be best for consumers.
WebOS is the future... but not for the reasons listed here. Portability, i.e. being able to access your files and programs from any computer, is nice, but not a killer feature. It's ridiculous to claim that most people's computers are too slow, when in fact they are more than adequate. That's why PC sales stopped seeing such growth after 2000. Most people who could afford a computer had one that could do everything they needed. Hence prices have dropped while computing power has continued to increase.
No, the reason a WebOS (err WebOSses hopefully) will come about is because computing needs have changed. Look at today's teenagers. Most of what they do with a computer is online. If you took their computer, and disconnected it from the internet, it would be practically useless to them.
There are a few exceptions. They still use the computer to transfer pictures from their digital camera to an online service, like Photobucket or Flickr. They still use the computer to transfer music to their iPods. The computer is just an intermediary in these cases, and it's not hard to imagine these things being done without it -- just add WiFi. Then their camera could upload their photos directly to Photobucket, and their iPod could download songs and videos from iTunes and YouTube.
Of course there is the need for office type apps, like word processing and spreadsheets. These things can also be handled online pretty easily. In the future they will be handled online not because it's better, but just because everything else is online. Right now these things listed so far: photo managment, music management, word processing, are small things to most young people. The big things are instant messaging, email, social networking, etc. The big things are online. The small things will follow.
And that's why WebOS will come about. It will not be an OS in the traditional sense. Traditional OSses were about providing the infrastructure for applications to run on a computer. The point of the computer was the applications, but you needed an OS to make the applications possible. Thus the OS had to manage memory allocation, device management, user input/output, etc. The point was still the apps. The apps are online now, and new infrastructure is needed for them. That's where WebOS comes in. That's what WebOS must be. It must provide the infrastructure for applications and allow these applications to interoperate.
Right now if I'm a developer writing a Windows-based application, I don't have to worry about low level machine code for writing bits to disk, but if I'm writing an application for the web, chances are that I have to worry about creating database connections and issuing SQL in some form to read/write data. A WebOS will eliminate the need for this. If I'm writing a Windows app, I don't have to worry about peeking and poking pixels to draw things on the screen. However, if I'm writing a web app, I have to not only know about HTML and JavaScript, but the quirks of how different browsers render different things (CSS box model for example.) A WebOS should eliminate the need for such arcane knowledge.
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I like how people were more easily able to distinguish between 128kbps and 256 kbps AAC files using Apple ear buds than the Shure ear buds. This forced the writers to come up with an excuse for this anomaly by claiming that the Apple ear buds' inability to produce high frequencies masked the sounds that would make it easy to hear the difference between the 128 kbps and 256 kbps tracks. They were so embarrassed by this result they had to add superfluous comments like how one listeners was amazed to hear a wood block sound in a song when listening to the Shures and how the Shures will allow you to lower the volume and thus save you from hearing loss. How about an alternate, perhaps more straightforward explanation: the sound quality of the Apple ear buds is better than the sound quality of the Shure ear buds? I know that may seem ridiculous, but maybe it's not. Maybe it's really hard to produce great sound out of ear buds, making ear bud quality a crap shoot.
JavaFX is meant to compete with Adobe's Flex+Apollo and Microsoft's SilverLight. As such these kind of RIAs compete with AJAX, but indirectly. These techs can operate offline and each has some kind of multi-device support. That being said, it does seem unlikely that people will choose Flex, Silverlight, or JavaFX over AJAX for a web-only application. Then again, imagine if you could use all of your Google apps offline. Once your throw in the desktop, AJAX has little answer. If it's easy to achieve desktop/web app transparency, then maybe AJAX becomes a poor option. Big if though.
This just in, Google offers stock options. Yes, it is true. So if their stock price tanks, the stock options of everyone, including senior management, could go underwater. So if you're in senior management, then you go from maybe having a six figure payout coming up in your future to nothing, all because the stock buying public is in some way unhappy. What are you going to do? Make them happy. Keep your stock up. Get paid. The only thing different at Google is that maybe there is more control from the top, i.e. the Sergey, Larry, and Eric triumvirate. Those guys have already made fortunes and are possibly less sensitive to a decrease in future payoffs from stock options. I wouldn't count on that. A lot of people in the valley are curious to see what would happen at Google if they had a bad quarter, but a lot of people are also afraid that such an event could cause Bubble 2.0 to start bursting.
Clearly the RIAA is right. I used to pay $15 or so for CDs back in the 90's. Now I pay $10 or so when I buy a CD. Why? Because of competition from downloading and yes, piracy. The monopoly on the distribution of music has been broken. We aren't paying monopolist set prices anymore, so of course it's a lot cheaper.
Keyword analysis and Bayesian methods that depend on it, are useless. Most spammers are switching to image spam where they embed pictures of text instead of actual text.
Excellent point. It wasn't until 2004 that Apple's profits really took off as a result of the success of the iPod. It was really Christmas 2003 and the release of the Mini in January 2004 that started that meteoric rise, and that's a good two years after the iPod debuted.
However, there are some fundamental differences between the iPod and the iPhone. Very few people had portable MP3 players in 2001. How many iPod owners have owned any other MP3 player besides an iPod? So to get them to buy an iPod, they just had to be convinced that the value it brought to them justified the price they paid for it. Between 2001-2003, Apple steadily improved the value (increasing capacity, reducing size, improving user interface, adding photos, etc.) while also bringing down the price (original iPod cost $400 for a 5GB version, by Christmas 2003 it was $300 for a 15 GB, and the Mini was only $250 in January 2004.)
Most people already own a cell phone. So people don't just have to be convinced that an iPhone is worth $X, but also that it is a better value vs. their current phone and a huge slew of competitor phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, LG, etc. Jobs wants to claim that Apple is re-inventing cell phones because he does not want his iPhone compared to other phones. Sure it will have advantages over other phones in many areas, but it will also have disadvantages. And it's obviously a lot more expensive. These are much bigger obstacles than anything the iPod faced.
One last thing... A big part of why the iPod succeeded is that from 2001-2003, nobody really stepped up to compete with Apple. It really wasn't until last year that somebody (Microsoft) came up with a product (Zune) with a similar user experience as the iPod. It's really pretty amazing. I was fortunate enough to get an iPod in 2001, and I kept guessing that at some point somebody would come out with an MP3 player that did everything the iPod did, but cost $100-$150 less than an iPod. It never happened. It still hasn't happened. Apple can't expect the same kind of lack of competition for the iPhone.
Since I own stock in Apple, I sure hope this was because of tons of iPods being sold and overwhelming demand for ITMS downloads. However, it might have been caused by Apple's change in packaging. When I bought a Nano in October 2005, it came in a cardboard package, approximately the size of two CDs. It needed to be bigger than a CD because it contained a CD -- a CD with iTunes on it. If you buy a Nano or Shuffle (not sure about the video iPod) this year, they come in a clear plastic package that's a rectangular solid similar in size to a soda can. The packaging can be smaller because it does not contain a CD with iTunes on it. Instead, you have to download iTunes from Apple. So maybe that was the cause of the traffic in Christmas morning. Lots of first time iPod owners all trying to download iTunes. That's a 35 MB download, compared to the ~4 MB downloads for most songs on ITMS. Steve Jobs was touting that the smaller packaging was more environmentally friendly (maybe cheaper, too?)
One of the things that YouTube could start doing is making a 3GP encoded version of the videos that are uploaded to it, along with the Flash version they already make. This should be noticeably higher quality than a video that was encoded to Flash first then to 3GP. Alternatively, they could make this "from source" encoding of the videos picked by Verizon, assuming they keep the original source around. Either way, this would seem like a value-add to Verizon, making the deal a lot more valuable to them.
As soon as there was a significant % of their customers installing their products on Linux, this became a no-brainer. Sure Larry Ellison can make inflammatory comments about Red Hat, he's always doing that. It's still a sound business decision. It's surprising IBM hasn't done the same thing already, though I guess they're still hoping for people to buy AIX...
Calling Netscape's mass "critical" is a huge overstatement. The market for web browsers was in its infancy there because the internet was in its infancy. Microsoft didn't have to get lots of people to switch from Netsape to IE. They simply bundled IE tightly with Windows so that for most people, the first time they were online was with IE.
The online video market may not be fully mature yet, but it's a lot more mature than the internet was in 1995. YouTube already serves up millions of videos daily. It is rapidly expanding. So a lot of YouTube users would have to switch to another service if another service was to usurp YouTube's position. They couldn't just tap into the non-YouTube users who have not yet tried online video.
Just ask Google about this. They tried to compete with Google Video. They failed. That's a big part of why they bought YouTube.
If your buddy at MS is making $160K in Redmond... that's like $200K in Mountain View. Most programmers at Google make half that or less.
I remember when I came out of college (1997) and MS was the king of low-ball offers. They basically said "you should be willing to work for less because you get to work for MS. Plus we give you stock options." Of course their stock has flatlined this century, so they've had to abandon that approach. That's meant paying a lot better.
Now, Google has taken over the crown as king of low-ball offers. Why? Because you should be willing to work for less because you get to work for Google. Plus they give you stock options.
Now if you actually don't have any of those things
You're right, and there are definitely companies out there taking this approach. My sister-in-law works for an medical billing company. The software she uses is a Java applet that runs from inside any browser. It requires the Java Advanced Imaging to be downloaded in addition to the JRE. It provides a very rich experience inside a browser. I think a lot of what it does could probably be done with AJAX, but it would be pretty hard. But as an applet, it's really straightforward.
And that's where the $ comes in. Even though it may be easier to get rich functionality using a Java applet than with AJAX, Java developers are much more expensive than DHTML/JS developers. Any AJAX site could be re-written with an applet, probably with minimal changes to the server side code. It would probably be less, and simpler code, but the devs would cost more. The server could also be re-written to make good use of the applet, but again this requires server side Java devs who also understand the Swing architecture. Those guys are pretty rare, and even more expensive.
So that's at least part of the reason why AJAX wins out over Java applets. You can make similar arguments for why AJAX wins out over Flash, another highly portable technology.
It's about Outlook. Yahoo is not trying to imitate GMail. They are trying make Yahoo Mail just like using Outlook or Thunderbird or Evolution or Eudora or whatever. That's why they have a preview pane. That's why you double-click to open the message in its own "window." This is how desktop clients do it. Yahoo simply used AJAX to produce the same kind of behavior. Probably the only webmail that would be similar would be Exchange/Outlook webmail (you know the product that introduced XmlHttpRequest before anybody had ever heard of AJAX...)
There are two things at work... First, is that Microsoft has some compettition. There's OpenOffice of course, as well as various online office apps like Writely, Google Spreadsheet, Google Calendar -- just to name the ones from Google. So they need to provide extra "value" to justify charging for their products when there are increasingly viable free alternatives. How do they provide the extra value? That's the second part of the equation. MS asked people what features they would like the Office apps to have. What they found out is that Office already had everything people were asking for. So why did people ask for already existing features? Well the obvious answer is that the existing UI made it difficult to access these features. So the only way for MS to improve Office was to change the UI so that it made these desired "hidden" features more accessible. Hence the "ribbon". Theoretically, people will use Office 2007 and think it has a lot of new, useful features not found in Office 2003, or compettitors like OpenOffice -- even though these features are in fact present in both Office 2003 and OpenOffice. Thus Office 2007 will have greater value than previous version and compettitive products, and people will happily plunk down their money to pay for it. I'm not saying that I buy into this, just that that's what the theory is behind the "new fashion."
I think you missed part of the point of the article. It's not as much about people running Firefox and Open Office on Windows XP as it is about people running PHP, Tomcat (funny that the article tries to push the WAMP acronym, but the people in their examples were all using Java, not PHP/Perl/Python), Apache, and MySQL on Windows server (2000/2003.) It's not that MS is endorsing this. In fact in the article, none of the quotes are from MS people. They are either from IT execs at downstream businesses or they are OSS advocates. It's pretty obvious that MS is going to say "use IIS/.NET/SQL Server." But that's not the point. The point is that people in the trenches are saying "I'm going to use PHP or Java with Apache and MySQL on Windows." That probably doesn't make MS real happy, and it probably doesn't make Red Hat real happy, but so what? Real people have to make decisions based on what works best for them, not based on techno-philosophy.
It's not new technology for servers and people who buy servers aren't impressed with lame marketing terms like "4x4".
Wikipedia doesn't just have problems with controversial people, but with any kind of controversial issue. Look at the whole Net Neutrality debate. Many people point to the common carrier status as to why ISPs should be regulated to enforce net neutrality. This has lead to the Wikipedia entry for common carrier to be obviously biased. It states that ISPs have succesfully argued that they should not be considered common carriers based on seemingly weak arguments ("we're information carriers, not communications carriers".) However, it fails to mention that ISPs were originally classified as common carriers. This lead to ISPs being more regulated than their cable and satellite compettitors. It made little sense for a telco to invest in infrastructure that it was going to have to turn around and share. It was to promote compettition between DSL and cable that ISPs were de-regulated and not classified as common carriers. In the wake of this de-regulation, DSL prices have been slashed. Cable prices have stayed high, but cable companies have been forced to provide greater service (my connection speed has quadrupled in the last three years) to justify the higher price.
The point is that you won't see any such statements in Wikipedia. Their "version" of things is clearly tilted to fit somebody's view point. This may be true of traditional reference books and even educational materials, but the dynamic nature of Wikipedia makes it much obvious and intrusive.
Appealing to government to resolve any conflict is not the only way. Let's say no net neutrality is enacted, and AT&T starts screwing over consumers. You have more choices than you listed. Instead of demanding the government do more, demand them to do less. Demand them to remove regulation, thus enabling compettition for AT&T. If AT&T is really screwing you over, then you'll gladly switch services if given the choice.
Who cares what happens to YouTube? It's not the government's place to say "We need to make sure YouTube doesn't get screwed over by Verizon." This just in. Businesses compete for your dollars. Some win, some lose. If the government helps one over the other, the people who suffer are consumers.
What is needed is less regulation, not more regulation in the guise of "Net Neutrality." Less regulation would give people more of a choice so that if they are big YouTube fans and their current ISP is making it hard for them to watch videos on YouTube, then they could switch to some other ISP that is not doing that. If YouTube has such huge benefit to consumers, then it would be very profitable for a compettitor to offer YouTube enabled service.
The big problem is that there is already so much regulation that compettition is scarce. As consumer we should hope for less regulation instead of net neutrality. Of course big companies with vested interests like Microsoft and Google would rather seek government protection, but that's not what would be best for consumers.
WebOS is the future ... but not for the reasons listed here. Portability, i.e. being able to access your files and programs from any computer, is nice, but not a killer feature. It's ridiculous to claim that most people's computers are too slow, when in fact they are more than adequate. That's why PC sales stopped seeing such growth after 2000. Most people who could afford a computer had one that could do everything they needed. Hence prices have dropped while computing power has continued to increase.
No, the reason a WebOS (err WebOSses hopefully) will come about is because computing needs have changed. Look at today's teenagers. Most of what they do with a computer is online. If you took their computer, and disconnected it from the internet, it would be practically useless to them.
There are a few exceptions. They still use the computer to transfer pictures from their digital camera to an online service, like Photobucket or Flickr. They still use the computer to transfer music to their iPods. The computer is just an intermediary in these cases, and it's not hard to imagine these things being done without it -- just add WiFi. Then their camera could upload their photos directly to Photobucket, and their iPod could download songs and videos from iTunes and YouTube.
Of course there is the need for office type apps, like word processing and spreadsheets. These things can also be handled online pretty easily. In the future they will be handled online not because it's better, but just because everything else is online. Right now these things listed so far: photo managment, music management, word processing, are small things to most young people. The big things are instant messaging, email, social networking, etc. The big things are online. The small things will follow.
And that's why WebOS will come about. It will not be an OS in the traditional sense. Traditional OSses were about providing the infrastructure for applications to run on a computer. The point of the computer was the applications, but you needed an OS to make the applications possible. Thus the OS had to manage memory allocation, device management, user input/output, etc. The point was still the apps. The apps are online now, and new infrastructure is needed for them. That's where WebOS comes in. That's what WebOS must be. It must provide the infrastructure for applications and allow these applications to interoperate.
Right now if I'm a developer writing a Windows-based application, I don't have to worry about low level machine code for writing bits to disk, but if I'm writing an application for the web, chances are that I have to worry about creating database connections and issuing SQL in some form to read/write data. A WebOS will eliminate the need for this. If I'm writing a Windows app, I don't have to worry about peeking and poking pixels to draw things on the screen. However, if I'm writing a web app, I have to not only know about HTML and JavaScript, but the quirks of how different browsers render different things (CSS box model for example.) A WebOS should eliminate the need for such arcane knowledge.