I had a prof. who summed it up succinctly, he said that:
"College is a mechanism for rationing the good jobs".
He went on to elaborate that it wasn't terribly important what you learned. Rather, it proved to an employer that you had the "right stuff". That you could make a long-term commitment to something arduous which offered no short-term payoff.
This is a good character trait to have if you are an engineer (as opposed to a hacker). For example, the project I am heading now is huge, it's been in development for two years and still has about a year to go. This obviously requires focus and commitment to long-term goals.
Sure we need self-taught hackers to kludge up web pages and such. That's what the dot.com mania has been fueled by. But don't underestimate what a degree means in the scheme of things.
This is insightful? It totally misses the point! Palm is not the "handheld computer" of the future, it's the organizer of today! Sure the PocketPC (nee WinCE) might be a better handheld computer, but 70% of the people out there want an organizer now.
I read an interesting article about the design process that the Palm's founders went through. They focused on making the best organizer possible, they started by carring around various sized blocks of wood that simulated various form factors. They obviously did their homework.
Microsoft on the otherhand just assumes up front that the world wants "Windows Everywhere", somehow they'll figure out how to make it resemble an organizer. "If you give a 2 year old a hammer, everything looks like a nail to him"
Specialized devices will allways be better at the thing they were designed to do than general purpose devices. The only exception to this are where functions are complementary, i.e. they belong together.
IMO, Palm's real competition will come from the cell phone market. If someone figures out how to make a cell phone with a better organizer than Palm, it'll all be over for them. Why? Because cell phones and organizers are complementary technologys, they will converge. If Palm is not part of that convergence, they'll be just a footnote in tech history.
You are ignoring the fact that the chip geometry is also getting much smaller. Yes there are more transistors on the die, but the die is still small because you can get more of them in a given area. Thus, the yields on wafers is still good.
What makes them sheep is why they "choose" and OS, application, or computer. They do what everybody else does. In almost all cases it has nothing to do with "bang for the buck", or what application is best. If that were true, MS would have went bust years ago. For example, why do MS IE users outnumber Netscape users? Because IE is better ? Nope (allthough it is IMO), because it's what came configured on there PC when they bought it at CompUSA. This, near absolute, control that MS has gives them the resources to outlast everyone else and eventually produce decent products. People as a whole are sheep, and it follows that they buy computers, OSs, and applications, etc. like sheep (if sheep bought computers of course).
Your post is a random list of non sequiturs! You seem to be confusing a palm computer with a sub-laptop computer.
More RAM? yeah, you need it because Win CE is such a hog. Color? who cares? It's not a laptop! Win32? why does that matter? So I can run MS office in my palmtop?
People haven't bought into Win CE because it's a plain dumb idea born of Microsoft's need to expand into new markets. Palm OS outsells all Win CE computers combined by a large margin for a reason. It does exactly what it needs to do for a palm computer. It's simple, logical, and elegant. It's small, lightweight, runs for months on a set of batteries. In short, it doesn't try to be a little laptop computer. Win CE fails as a palmtop and as a laptop.
You can't be serious! If you are serious, obviously you think that: A) Nobody else is ever doing something important. and B) Everybody else is a moron.
The reason that you say "excuse me, are you busy?" to other people is maybe they are busy! Rude and arrogant people are a pain in the ass that normal people just have to tolerate.
Just because you (editorially speaking) lack social graces, you are not necessarily a genius.
Life is a balance of many conflicting things, truly intelligent people know what is important, and when it is important.
When you read these stats you have to ask yourself "what kind of users are these?". I use NT as my desktop OS at work, almost everyone I know does too. Almost every one also shuts there computer off every evening before going home. I don't have actual statistics supporting this, but I suspect that in most cases NT is deployed as a desktop OS. This is not a "mission critical" OS, although it was intended to by a server OS, it isn't used that capacity in many cases.
Unix machines on the other hand have much more expected of them. It's not unusual to have Unix servers that have been running continuously for years. There is an old Sun server I use at work that has never crashed in over 5 years.
My company sells products that are deployed on NT servers and we state that they must run only our server applications. We have found that if you pre-configure everything, and run just a small set of applications, NT works fine. You don't have to be a Unix zealot to understand that NT is not as robust of an OS as Unix.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a prof. who summed it up succinctly, he said that:
"College is a mechanism for rationing the good jobs".
He went on to elaborate that it wasn't terribly important what you learned. Rather, it proved to an employer that you had the "right stuff". That you could make a long-term commitment to something arduous which offered no short-term payoff.
This is a good character trait to have if you are an engineer (as opposed to a hacker). For example, the project I am heading now is huge, it's been in development for two years and still has about a year to go. This obviously requires focus and commitment to long-term goals.
Sure we need self-taught hackers to kludge up web pages and such. That's what the dot.com mania has been fueled by. But don't underestimate what a degree means in the scheme of things.
-- "I was as confused as a baby in a topless bar"
TTFN,
Rick D.
This is insightful? It totally misses the point! Palm is not the "handheld computer" of the future, it's the organizer of today! Sure the PocketPC (nee WinCE) might be a better handheld computer, but 70% of the people out there want an organizer now.
I read an interesting article about the design process that the Palm's founders went through. They focused on making the best organizer possible, they started by carring around various sized blocks of wood that simulated various form factors. They obviously did their homework.
Microsoft on the otherhand just assumes up front that the world wants "Windows Everywhere", somehow they'll figure out how to make it resemble an organizer. "If you give a 2 year old a hammer, everything looks like a nail to him"
Specialized devices will allways be better at the thing they were designed to do than general purpose devices. The only exception to this are where functions are complementary, i.e. they belong together.
IMO, Palm's real competition will come from the cell phone market. If someone figures out how to make a cell phone with a better organizer than Palm, it'll all be over for them. Why? Because cell phones and organizers are complementary technologys, they will converge. If Palm is not part of that convergence, they'll be just a footnote in tech history.
You are ignoring the fact that the chip geometry is also getting much smaller. Yes there are more transistors on the die, but the die is still small because you can get more of them in a given area. Thus, the yields on wafers is still good.
What makes them sheep is why they "choose" and OS, application, or computer. They do what everybody else does. In almost all cases it has nothing to do with "bang for the buck", or what application is best. If that were true, MS would have went bust years ago. For example, why do MS IE users outnumber Netscape users? Because IE is better ? Nope (allthough it is IMO), because it's what came configured on there PC when they bought it at CompUSA. This, near absolute, control that MS has gives them the resources to outlast everyone else and eventually produce decent products. People as a whole are sheep, and it follows that they buy computers, OSs, and applications, etc. like sheep (if sheep bought computers of course).
Your post is a random list of non sequiturs! You seem to be confusing a palm computer with a sub-laptop computer.
More RAM? yeah, you need it because Win CE is such a hog. Color? who cares? It's not a laptop! Win32? why does that matter? So I can run MS office in my palmtop?
People haven't bought into Win CE because it's a plain dumb idea born of Microsoft's need to expand into new markets. Palm OS outsells all Win CE computers combined by a large margin for a reason. It does exactly what it needs to do for a palm computer. It's simple, logical, and elegant. It's small, lightweight, runs for months on a set of batteries. In short, it doesn't try to be a little laptop computer. Win CE fails as a palmtop and as a laptop.
And since when did MS not marketing Win 98?
You can't be serious! If you are serious, obviously you think that: A) Nobody else is ever doing something important. and B) Everybody else is a moron.
The reason that you say "excuse me, are you busy?" to other people is maybe they are busy! Rude and arrogant people are a pain in the ass that normal people just have to tolerate.
Just because you (editorially speaking) lack social graces, you are not necessarily a genius.
Life is a balance of many conflicting things, truly intelligent people know what is important, and when it is important.
When you read these stats you have to ask yourself "what kind of users are these?". I use NT as my desktop OS at work, almost everyone I know does too. Almost every one also shuts there computer off every evening before going home. I don't have actual statistics supporting this, but I suspect that in most cases NT is deployed as a desktop OS. This is not a "mission critical" OS, although it was intended to by a server OS, it isn't used that capacity in many cases.
Unix machines on the other hand have much more expected of them. It's not unusual to have Unix servers that have been running continuously for years. There is an old Sun server I use at work that has never crashed in over 5 years.
My company sells products that are deployed on NT servers and we state that they must run only our server applications. We have found that if you pre-configure everything, and run just a small set of applications, NT works fine. You don't have to be a Unix zealot to understand that NT is not as robust of an OS as Unix.