Don't forget the additional cost of the requisite anti-virus system for every PC, and possibly a commercial anti-spyware solution too. Oh, and since the anti-virus slows the system down by X %, you'll need to buy all systems X% more powerful than you need.
Back seat? Well I have a double-bed. (Seriously, for anyone but kids with with nowhere else to fool about, the back seat of a car is a pretty overrated place to do so.)
I think one problem is that most people simply lack the imagination to be able to think "this could be better" when using any aspect of a system. When I use Windows, I am continually seeing all sorts of little things that make me think to myself, "gee, with just a little bit of effort from Microsoft, this could easily have been much better". It's not so much the big things in this case, but literally hundreds of little things, I could make a long list (in fact I have). But most people just take what they see as being 'how things are' - they don't take a moment to wonder how it could've been better. Perhaps my inclination to think "this could be better" comes mainly from being a software developer, I don't know, but even many software developers seem to lack this ability to 'imagine' up ideas, and mostly only clone other people's ideas that they've seen. In my mind, someone who sits and uses Windows and doesn't see any of the hundreds of things that 'could be better', simply lacks the imagination to see the broad potential for improvement.
Also there is a general lack of comparative knowledge in the public. When you have a depth and breadth of experience on lots of different systems going back at least a couple of decades, then it often happens when using some (possibly "new") feature in Windows that you are already aware of some other system that "did this better, ten years ago already". Most people don't have that knowledge, so when they see the feature on Windows the first time, they really do think it's new, and they really do think Microsoft came up with it. Having broad experience also helps one to 'see' that Windows is always lagging so far behind, slowing everyone down, and only copying from others. People who aren't familiar with other systems don't have the perspective to see this. For all they know, Windows is "state of the art". There are hundreds of examples, well-known amongst them are things like the "Recycle Bin". I remember a colleague raving about the ability to have skins when Windows XP came out, I think he'd never seen skins before, while I got "bored" already of playing with skins on various window managers on Linux five years earlier already (and by late 90's OpenSource replacement Win95 shells copying Linux window managers even allowed skins already on Windows systems). Remote desktop / terminal services is another example. File manager thumbnails. Even PaintBrush is obviously a really poor clone of MacPaint if you were one of the few who had experience on mid-80's Macs, but most people have never seen or used MacPaint.
I think part of the problem is that up-front capital switching costs are easy to quantify, but long-term cost savings of switching are much harder to quantify. E.g. it's easy to calculate the price of all the new computers and software. It's harder to put a $ figure on paper on the benefits from increased productivity, less downtime, fewer viruses/spam, and a happier workforce using a better platform that helps them do things quicker and in a more intuitive way.
Also in my experience management is usually short-sighted... a low up-front cost is usually chosen over a high up-front cost even when the longer-term savings if you choose the high up-front cost are obvious. Sometimes this is deliberate (e.g. "I want to maximize profits while I'm in charge so that I can get huge bonuses and get out of here"), but I think most times it's just short-sightedness.
At my previous company I used to often calculate the massive costs incurred whenever a new MS virus ran amok in the company (e.g. entire company except cleaning staff basically down for a full day or so), or when our Microsoft mail server or SourceSafe server went down, which they frequently did. It was thousands of $ worth of downtime each time. Every time I brought this up, and there were hardware problems on the server, so a relatively small amount of up-front $ getting decent hardware on the server would have saved us lots of $ downtime in the long run. But they never listened; to them, the up-front $ to upgrade the server was a visible, easily calculateable cost, while the perceived threat of downtime was distant and harder to quantify. Each time they seemed to blindly hope that "from now on the server will probably be stable". That went on for about five years.
(I know we should have been running up-to-date anti-virus, but the same mistake again: short-sighted management never wanted to spend up-front $ on an anti-virus when the perceived threat seemed "distant" and "unlikely". Each time a virus hit, they'd be all over the place afterwards with a "new policy" forcing everyone to install an anti-virus on their systems and keep it up to date (and blaming everyone for not having anti-virus on their systems, even though the employees had been begging for anti-virus software for months). But, six months later the policy would predictably be forgotten as the threat started to seem "distant" again... until the next virus hit, and so the pattern repeated.)
I used to like their fries, but lately (in my part of the world) they don't use fresh ingredients anymore and so they taste old and crappy. Now the only reason I buy McD's is convenience, i.e. when I just want something to eat quick 'n easy. Their nuggets used to be nice too, until they started pre-cooking, re-freezing and warming-up.
Windows crashing is obviously not so much of an inconvenience that they must storm Redmond. It's easier to push the reset button.
I used to wonder why things that annoyed me a lot about Windows, and the fact that it's crap, didn't seem to bother other people so much. Then I realised that, apart from the usual valid explanation that most have had their expectations lowered so much regarding computers that they're almost impossible to disappoint, only a small percentage of other users I know spend as much time on a computer as I do. Most people just spend maybe a few hours a day on a computer, e.g. do some simple tasks like e-mail and web, maybe a Word document or spreadsheet. So if something annoys them, it's for a short time and then they go about doing other things. But as a software developer, I basically spend nearly all my time behind the computer - a 40 hour week is rare relaxation, 60 hour week not uncommon. So when some little Windows bug annoys you, it annoys you 10 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, for months and sometimes years. I think this inherently puts a different perspective on it. It's one thing being annoyed for an hour or two then going back to what you enjoy and do all day. It's another if what you enjoy and do all day has become annoying all day due to the system you're using being crappy. Because you also 'explore' the system deeper, you also uncover far more bugs and annoyances. It's like, if I drive to work in a junky car, that sucks but only for 20 minutes a day. But if my job involves driving all day, then having a decent ride is going to make a world of difference.
You criticize an analogy by following up with an even more irrational one. Windows doesn't set itself on fire. It's other people writing the programs that set it on fire--essentially, it's vandalism by others.
Windows is vulnerable to these attacks because it has flaws. They are bugs, defects,,istakes in the design and implementation, holes, errors, the designers messed up and you're vulnerable only because they messed up. Computers are not supposed to be this vulnerable to attacks. Do you understand it yet or do I have to use more italics? The original analogy is far more accurate, although quite frankly none of these car analogies are a perfect fit.
Here's a better anology: you buy condoms from a manufacturer, except that you don't know the manufacturer has cut corners in the design and manufacturing to save money, and every third one or so has a few small holes in it big enough to let all sorts of nasties through. Soon you have a few STDs. Were you "stupid to have sex at all" (i.e. the "stupid to plug your computer into the Internet"?!? argument), or should the condoms have worked to a much high expectation of safety? Of course the condoms should have worked, and the manufacturer is liable, legally too.
Gosh, when did it get so bad that believe genuinely believe that "plugging your computer into the Internet" is inherently a "dumb thing to do"? This is entirely abnormal.
(And yes, similar things happen to Linux too, but that's also because Linux, although it has a better security track record than Windows, is still far from perfect, and rational Linux devs and users admit it's not supposed to be this way, and that you are supposed to ideally be able to plug a newly installed Linux distro straight onto the Internet without having to worry at all. The reason we currently have to worry is because developers of subsystems made mistakes, not because computers are inherently vulnerable. If there were no bugs, then by design the system would be 100% secure. The perfect condom.
Meanwhile the internet was created on unix, and was routinely hacked (sendmail anyone?)
Yeah, MS have somehow convinced a lot of people of this argument that Windows is insecure, that MS "have an excuse" and "couldn't have known", because it was designed in a "different time" where things like hackers and viruses were" virtually unknown". And it's complete, utter bollocks, these things preceded Windows development by a long time, were well-known and people have been warning that the situation we have now would come about since day one... just that nobody listened.
Windows is insecure because MS wanted to get their stuff out the door as fast as possible, knowing that it would result in major security/virus problems but with the idea that they could 'fix problems that crop up later, main thing is to secure that monopoly first'.
Actually, Garfield was not designed "from the ground up" as an advertising platform or for it's merchandising potential. I have a copy of the first garfield book (1978, IIRC) in my comics collection, and believe me, Garfield started out as a truly ugly, fat, unattractive, blobby, strong-armed comic cat, with not one bit of cuteness whatsoever... it had a grand total of zero merchandising potential as it stood, and the early strips were more humorous IMO. As the strip became successful, and it's creator and the syndicate began to realise the merchandising potential and other various "big business" opportunities, the Garfield character was slowly changed from the original fat, ugly, miserable cat to the "appealing, cute" one-dimensional character that we see now selling so many lunchboxes, t-shirts etc. This was another case of artist turned (very rich) commercial sell-out. In the Jim Davis' wrote and drew the strips himself, but nowadays it's just a hired team of replaceable artists trained to mimic a +/- mid-80's Garfield style as much as possible, the whole thing is approached as a "product" and as a vehicle for marketing other products. There is no room for creativity in this setup at all, as obviously the characters no longer become true "characters", as they cannot develop. The over-commercialization of comics seems to be similar to what happened to the the American movie, television and music industries. It's ironic that the country that invented movies, television and comics, that was the major global 'driving force' and thriving hub of cultural creativity in these fields until about the 50s or so, has now swung the opposite way, to a near complete "creative rut", as it all turned to big business and creativity is regarded as an unnecessary risk - genericness and well-worn formulas are "safe" as entertainment is produced factory-line style. If you follow the US comics industry from its birth, there were just so many 'brilliant icons' and role models (like Floyd Gottfredson, Walt Kelly etc.) that one could scarcely have imagined that it could ever end. I wonder if the "trend" will swing back again at some future generation, if America will once again 'become creative'. Or perhaps it will be only in newer media forms, such as computer games.
Of course, nowadays there is some creativity and innovation picking up "at the fringes", in the form of e.g. some rather brilliant Web comics, and the occasional good graphic novel. But there's an important different: pre-1960, the good stuff was popular media, while nowadays the good stuff is 'fringe' and barely known while in popular media we get crap like Garfield, Friends, boy bands, 17-year old "pop divas" who can't write any of their own songs, and a million text-book-formula 'genre-flicks', i.e. predictable romantic comedies etc. There are the odd exceptions though, at the fringes where few notice, e.g. Waking Life, Memento, and even some good popular ones like Fight Club, but it's gotten to the point where if I want to be even vaguely 'intellectually challenged' with something original and non-formula then I don't even bother to watch an American movie. Further, just about every American movie you can think of is just copied from either a novel (e.g. Fight Club was based on a novel by a *Russian* novelist), a comic, or another older movie (e.g. Manchurian Candidate, which I guess kids today haven't heard of so they'll think this movie is original).
OK, wondering even more off-topic now, so I'll stop there:)
I don't recall ever seeing any 'MetLife' adverts in a Peanuts comic strip.. could you elaborate on that?
You're right, and I'm fully aware, that so many cartoonists (and other artists) sell out... here's a quote from Bill Watterson: "Of course, to be fair to the syndicates, most cartoonists are happy to sell out, too." I still don't like it. In particular I don't like it when it's done deceptively, which is increasingly the case.. i.e. "product placement" vs. an obvious paid endorsement in an advert. Advertisers have long been trying to blur the lines that make regular advertising clearly distinct (so far with GREAT success because people are by and large incredibly naive and gullible). E.g. this site pretends to be a genuine blog, but is obviously written by an advertising firm. There are tonnes of fake blogs out there, and fake "fan sites" and such to drum up "ground level" "buzz". And it works. Companies like Microsoft hire people to write to forums like slashdot, pretending to be "regular IT guys" who 'chose Microsoft because it made sense'. I mean, we dismiss this sort of thing with "yeah that's guerilla marketing and companies need to make money", but surely all this deception and lies amounts to fraud, one surely has to draw the line somewhere and say "advertising should be obviously advertising".
Although GP has a point, forcing people to pay for software would encourage adoption of cheaper alternatives for now, you are right, this is the real danger: an installed base of DRM. Companies like Microsoft currently charge "monopoly prices", which are "what the market will bare". They aren't so stupid as to charge so much that people are forced to look at alternatives. So when the first "major" round of DRM comes, people will just accept it, rationalising the decision by saying "well, it doesn't cost THAT much more" and "at least we're doing things the legal way". That's 'fine and well', but once DRM-based PCs and OSs become widespread, the fundamental platform has changed, and the 'big cartels' will be able to (and WILL definitely) engage in highly anti-competitive behaviour by using their newfound massive control over the platform to lock out potential new competitors. This isn't tinfoil-hat, it's logical and inevitable and is the current direction things are moving - fast. And people will anyway also be locked in for the same reasons they are already "locked in" today (e.g. "everyone uses MS Word and we need to interchange files"), only it'll be worse.
If we can encourage enough adoption of alternatives, e.g. Linux, hardware manufacturers may still be "forced" to produce non-DRM hardware, but this seems unlikely. Most of the world is already hooked on Microsoft's 'heroin'.
Indeed, ouch, I find that very disappointing, I'll join the "Dilbert boycott". How patronising too, their lame psychological manipulation strategy: "As an engineer like you...".. isn't that how you try manipulate 6-year olds? The BSA's tactics disgust me in general.
I used to like Dilbert, but I cannot stand any comic strip that whores itself out to corporate interests in this way. A comic strip is not an advertising platform.
Guess you should've spent more than 2 secs reading
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Blink
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· Score: 1
If you'd read a little more before hastily posting to/. you'd discover that this is one of the core themes and purposes of the book. Here's more of the authors "own words":
"... I think that's an example of bad rapid cognition: there is something going on in the first few seconds of meeting a tall person which makes us predisposed toward thinking of that person as an effective leader, the same way that the police looked at my hair and decided I resembled a criminal. I call this the "Warren Harding Error" (you'll have to read "Blink" to figure out why), and I think we make Warren Harding Errors in all kind of situations-- particularly when it comes to hiring. With "Blink," I'm trying to help people distinguish their good rapid cognition from their bad rapid cognition."
Re:Pee Cee price comparison weenies don't get it
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DIY Mac mini Overclocking
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Pee Cee price comparison weenies
While you do have a point, and I happen to agree with your underlying point, you're never going to convince anyone like that. Because starting off by calling the people you're trying to convince "weenies" just attacks and aggravates them and puts them on the defensive. Once you've put someone on the defensive, any hope of having a rational, constructive argument is gone, as well as any hope of convincing them to see your viewpoint. The question is do you want to just insult people who are wrong about something, or do you actually want to help those people see that they are wrong and introduce positive change? (That's not easy.) If the latter, you'll have to change your strategy. Calling people "weenies" and telling them they're "living in the wrong world" is no way to convince anyone of anything, except for people who already agree with you (perhaps you just want the affirmation from that group?). Anyway, a better strategy is to open by "giving" something to the listener that they would like to hear, a concession that doesn't make them feel stupid, e.g. start out by pointing out the perceived merits of their argument are not baseless, e.g. you could say "it's true that a Dell PC with similar performance can be obtained slightly cheaper", but then (rationally) add valid (backed up) counter-arguments for why that little saving is not worth it, in a non-offensive way that doesn't make you sound like a zealot, which results in having the opposite of the desired effect, because most people instinctively do the opposite of what zealots do even if the zealot happens (by coincidence) to be doing the right thing.
Ah, thank you, one of the first people who actually genuinely understands and knows what I'm talking about here.. we're on the same page. I can understand that it is difficult to explain it to people, it just seems to be one of those that unless you've gone through the process or realising it yourself, you don't 'grasp' it. Anyway, yes, there is both a 'computational' side to our experiences, and another more metaphysical aspect to our experiences. We have begun to recreate, to some degree, (presumably) only the computational aspect in machines - the computer that can see, just like us, and recognize blue, just like us. But we regard man and machine's experience in this task as "different" somehow, and you instictively perceive that the machine is still "unsensing", which I'm not so sure about.
You say that establishing such a metaphysical consciousness in a machine is something different, a 'separate project', a metaphysical project with a metaphysical goal over and above the computational one. My point was though, that since we don't know what creates that metaphysical experience, we cannot know if the machines we are creating would experience the same thing. If the metaphysical experience is purely the byproduct of a particular physical structure and/or computational process, then it may already be present in our machine creations, even if it wasn't placed there deliberately and wasn't the goal of the project, and even if in a very dim, limited form at this stage. Note I said "may" because I don't know, but it's a possibility, and until we know enough to use scientific techniques to measure this metaphysical thing (if ever?), how can we know i.e. measure if it's there in machines?
If of course one presumes that that 'awareness' of the experience of looking at and recognizing blue is also computational, but the result of a separate computation process that is watching and monitoring the first, then no, the machine remains "unsensing" (for now) - it doesn't have a subsystem analysing what the other subsystems are doing and 'putting it all together as a whole'. This is a possibility, i.e. perhaps it's a separate computational process in our brains (i.e. a section, with nerve cells, electronic impulses etc.) monitoring the other parts of the brain and nervous system looking at blue. But that still leads to a recursive definition... it's still just a purely physical computational subsystem, and why should that other computational system be any more "metaphysical" than another? We don't know where it starts.
Perhaps one day we'll discover a new kind of particle or something that we learn creates the metaphysical experience and why, and learn to detect if it's present, and only then will we be able to look back at the computer recognizing blue and "measure" if it had 'sentience'. But that's just one possible explanation.
Given no evidence, direct or indirect, the perfect answer is non-existence rather than existence.
Not really, the 'perfect' answer is "we don't know, but probably not, and we can't assume existence or non-existence". That's it. You don't NEED a yes or a no answer. This human need to absolutely have an answer even when there really isn't one available is annoying and an impediment to progress... it pops up on slashdot all the time, e.g. many people claiming somehow that they *know* that global warming *isn't* happening --- how do they know? It's impossible.
Anyway, of course to be practical, Occam's razor must kick in at some point, because it's not practical or economical to give consideration to every charlatan's junk science or snake oil. But theoretically one cannot reject an idea unless it is provably false. And Occam's razor doesn't outright reject anything... it just makes a purely practical decision to "ignore this for now as probably not being relevant".
I don't think any of these ideas are new at all, of course. My own opinion, I suspect that what we perceive as consciousness, or sentient awareness, is derived from our physical/chemical/molecular structure. I.e. if you had a magic "cloning device" that produced a perfect, functioning physical replica of me, that it would have it's own sentient awareness almost identical to mine (but diverging from that point onwards as the new being's brain develops separately to separate stimuli/experiences). It actually seems obvious that conscious awareness is derived from physical/chemical structure if you consider that the nature of, and our experience thereof, is highly and easily influencable by simple chemical alterations such as taking drugs. I have the ability to even almost "turn off" my sentience by simply consuming large amounts of a chemical called alcohol (or just sleeping).. (or, and this is unprovable, have I only turned off the phsyical *memory* capability temporarily and thus was sentient but can't recall it?). If our consciousness (and awareness) was a specific thing (what many call "soul" or "spirit") "attached" to our body, then our experience thereof should surely not be so subject to alteration, and clearly too, based on mind-altering chemicals, there are "degrees" of sentience. Presumably different people of different intelligence and with different experiences and brain structures experience this "sentience" in different ways too, likewise retarded people. This thing we regard as "spirit" seems to need a sensible medium structured in a certain way (like our brain) to reside in, and is somehow a "sum of all the chemical reactions" taking place therein.
Lastly, we create presumably sentient beings every day: by making babies. We effectively by and large know the chemistry involved every step of the way in the development of a new human. So the question is, at what point does the new human become 'sentient'? If one believes that a "spirit" could "enter" the baby, when does it do so? We can't measure it happening. I think it starts when brain activity starts. But again, I do not know, because we have no definition for it because we don't know what it is or what causes it. Religions aside -- religions make assumptions, because our ancestors didn't "know" either but also wanted answers.
WHAT!? Where did I say that? I believe I said "WE DON'T KNOW" about 150 times, it was even the subject of my post. You can't assume anything is either true OR false it you don't know. Please quote where I assumed anything to be true, or else re-evaluate your reading skills, seriously.
Humans can question their existence because they have the computational ability to do so. There is no reason why a silicon-based computer couldn't also have the same computational ability in future. It doesn't mean it's sentient, nor does it mean it's not.
Your concept of "living" is a purely abstract concept which is almost impossible to define properly and non-arbitrarily. Current definitions revolving around DNA/RNA are arbitrary, because DNA is just another complex molecule like every other molecule in the Universe. BTW: Here is a small philosphical exercise for you, which I quarantee you will take you decades to solve if you actually think about it before assuming you know the answer and and actually ask yourself how you know the answer you think you know: How can you prove that "all humans have cognitive awareness"? How can you prove that anyone other than yourself is sentient? Good luck. You can't, and won't be able to until you come up with a more sensible definition (and way of measuring) sentience, that you don't confuse with "the ability to think".
You haven't really thought all this through very well, have you.
BTW, I have the same answer for aliens: WE DON'T KNOW. None of us know.
Wow, way to miss the point of the story. The lesson of the story, if you have the brains to understand it, is valid no matter what the person is selling, which is entirely incidental. You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, brainless moron.
Modern linguists take a so-called "descriptive" rather "prescriptive" approach. In other words, they merely describe and document how native speakers speak, and how the language changes over time. (In the old days we had a "prescriptive" approach where 'right' and 'wrong' were prescribed by 'experts', but it didn't stop language from evolving rapidly, although it can help in standardisation e.g. the Spanish Royal Academy still prescribes standard Spanish.)
Thus you are perfectly entitled to use your word froopsixac as much as you like, and if enough people like it, it will catch on, and soon it will be a "valid" English word that will be in the dictionary. So yes, you are perfectly "allowed" and able to change English in that way, and so the GP is 100% correct. You'll probably need to come up with more a catchy word than 'froopsixac' though.
The problem is not that we can't "re-create it". In fact we might have already. The problem is that we can't measure it.
We can't even measure it in each other, because we really don't know of any measurable physical properties that may determine the presence of consciousness. And because we don't know how to measure it, we cannot know if we've already created it. Not you, nor anyone here on slashdot or anywhere else. For all we know, modern silicon-based CPUs already have some (very) dim, glimmering cognitive awareness of sorts. We really do not know. It is completely unfounded for anyone to claim that it has not happened yet (or likewise that it has happened) if we don't even have a clue what it really is or how to measure its existence. Heck, it's so elusive we don't even have a rational definition for it.
We don't know what physical (or otherwise?) properties of the human brain result in sentience. At all. Therefore we cannot predict what physical properties (possibly already present) could give rise to sentience in man-made creations. We have no 'measuring device' to stick in the brain that 'detects' sentience. (Asking "are you sentient" is futile, because the answer to that is computational.)
In fact we probably never will know if our own creations have "consciousness" until we figure out how to measure if other humans have it.
(Unless you are referring to a computational ability to "compute" and consider the "self", but that is not related to consciousness, that is pure computational machinery, just 'nuts and bolts', the mechanics of processing the understanding thereof. This is most likely completely separate to consciousness; any self-diagnostic system is "aware" of itself in that sense, and an advanced one could conceivably answer questions "Do you exist" and "Are you thinking" purely computationally - with or without sentience.)
In order for it to work, MSN would have to be the default search engine from the desktop.
Of course, that is precisely what will happen, that is the idea. Also, I don't know if you have used Google's desktop search (very good BTW).. it will work the same way, it will quickly search both online and your own computer and show the results in the same page. It will be "the" computer's search box. (Again, not innovative, but copying.) Some more ideas that they could and probably will do is integrate it into other applications like MS Word.. want to search for more info on any word, just right-click and "Web search" and it'll open MSN (like Firefox's right-click "web search" function). Same with Outlook. By integrating a direct link into basically into every major application (which is not hard) it will be just too damn convenient to not use. And of course they'll make it technically hard to change the default search from MSN to Google, in a way that results in basically only 5% of people actually bothering to do it in the end.
Two problems - the first is that most people will just type "google" and reach the site that way.
I actually doubt it. By 2006, if MSN is producing "good enough" search results, most people will not do that extra step for 20 or 30% more accurate search results.
I think it's the whole reaosn MS is fighting spyware as hard as they are (buying that company) because it's actually threatening an aspect of lockin.
Yup! They are taking spyware seriously, because it's threatening them on multiple fronts at the moment. Longhorn, while it will have security problems still, will be more secure and resistant to spyware than today's rubbish. As usual with Microsoft it's a defensive, re-active move though, not a pro-active one, as they do not innovate. What bothers me about all of it is how far behind it holds computing, every time they do this, they effectively slow the whole industry down by 5 - 10 years. Windows is like a time-machine, when you're using it, you're basically using 10-year old tech, except somehow it requires a 100 times more powerful computer to do the same stuff that you could have done 10 years ago on a competitor's system (e.g. remote desktop, yay, brings, what, 15-year old tech to Windows XP?). I sometimes wonder how far we'd be by now if it weren't for them. When you use "integrated MSN search" in 2006/7/8, you'll be using something "nearly as good" as Google was in, say, 2000.
What Google should be doing today if they don't want to be 'the new Netscape' is already start implementing things like search from right-clicking on words in Word, Outlook etc., basically making it conveniently and quickly accessible from just about anywhere in Windows that anyone might want to search. Yet actually I don't think Google can succeed, sadly, because MS has too much power to lock anyone out of the areas of the system that they need to dominate.
Seems unlikely, as the MSN search has been under development and actively crawling for something like a year now at least. I've seen its bot crawling my own websites many months back.
Those of us who've been around a while know the well-worn pattern:
(1) MS sits on arse for years doing no innovation while another company produces an innovative, excellent, useful product and spends several years refining it and making it even better
(2) Start to take notice as another company starts to get a lot of limelight in some mainstream market "space" it never occurred to you to enter
(3) Announce intention to compete.
(4) Spend the next couple of years with half-hearted attempt to play catch-up, producing a mediocre equivalent that's not really even terribly good. After a few hit-and-miss betas, announce "version 1" with much fanfare and lots of fawning press releases, with a product that basically brings customers what was already available five years ago from the innovative competitor, blatantly copied down to detailed elements of the user interface but it 'feels' like 'just a poor clone'
(5) Spend another couple of years watching in frustration at low adoption rates of your product. Slowly improve product until it meets a "good enough" standard (still not as good as competitors, but "good enough"), and then...
(6)... shove it down customers' throats by abusing desktop OS monopoly: Integrate own product into the next version of Windows so tightly that people almost have to use it, e.g. put MSN search box right into taskbar thus making it far less convenient to use other search engines.
(7) Gain market share rapidly. Fawning press hails you as a great innovator. Ten years later, everyone thinks you practically pioneered Internet searching.
Will it work this time? Probably.
Mark my words, Longhorn will have an MSN search box built into the taskbar.
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Don't forget the additional cost of the requisite anti-virus system for every PC, and possibly a commercial anti-spyware solution too. Oh, and since the anti-virus slows the system down by X %, you'll need to buy all systems X% more powerful than you need.
Back seat? Well I have a double-bed. (Seriously, for anyone but kids with with nowhere else to fool about, the back seat of a car is a pretty overrated place to do so.)
I think one problem is that most people simply lack the imagination to be able to think "this could be better" when using any aspect of a system. When I use Windows, I am continually seeing all sorts of little things that make me think to myself, "gee, with just a little bit of effort from Microsoft, this could easily have been much better". It's not so much the big things in this case, but literally hundreds of little things, I could make a long list (in fact I have). But most people just take what they see as being 'how things are' - they don't take a moment to wonder how it could've been better. Perhaps my inclination to think "this could be better" comes mainly from being a software developer, I don't know, but even many software developers seem to lack this ability to 'imagine' up ideas, and mostly only clone other people's ideas that they've seen. In my mind, someone who sits and uses Windows and doesn't see any of the hundreds of things that 'could be better', simply lacks the imagination to see the broad potential for improvement.
Also there is a general lack of comparative knowledge in the public. When you have a depth and breadth of experience on lots of different systems going back at least a couple of decades, then it often happens when using some (possibly "new") feature in Windows that you are already aware of some other system that "did this better, ten years ago already". Most people don't have that knowledge, so when they see the feature on Windows the first time, they really do think it's new, and they really do think Microsoft came up with it. Having broad experience also helps one to 'see' that Windows is always lagging so far behind, slowing everyone down, and only copying from others. People who aren't familiar with other systems don't have the perspective to see this. For all they know, Windows is "state of the art". There are hundreds of examples, well-known amongst them are things like the "Recycle Bin". I remember a colleague raving about the ability to have skins when Windows XP came out, I think he'd never seen skins before, while I got "bored" already of playing with skins on various window managers on Linux five years earlier already (and by late 90's OpenSource replacement Win95 shells copying Linux window managers even allowed skins already on Windows systems). Remote desktop / terminal services is another example. File manager thumbnails. Even PaintBrush is obviously a really poor clone of MacPaint if you were one of the few who had experience on mid-80's Macs, but most people have never seen or used MacPaint.
I think part of the problem is that up-front capital switching costs are easy to quantify, but long-term cost savings of switching are much harder to quantify. E.g. it's easy to calculate the price of all the new computers and software. It's harder to put a $ figure on paper on the benefits from increased productivity, less downtime, fewer viruses/spam, and a happier workforce using a better platform that helps them do things quicker and in a more intuitive way.
Also in my experience management is usually short-sighted ... a low up-front cost is usually chosen over a high up-front cost even when the longer-term savings if you choose the high up-front cost are obvious. Sometimes this is deliberate (e.g. "I want to maximize profits while I'm in charge so that I can get huge bonuses and get out of here"), but I think most times it's just short-sightedness.
At my previous company I used to often calculate the massive costs incurred whenever a new MS virus ran amok in the company (e.g. entire company except cleaning staff basically down for a full day or so), or when our Microsoft mail server or SourceSafe server went down, which they frequently did. It was thousands of $ worth of downtime each time. Every time I brought this up, and there were hardware problems on the server, so a relatively small amount of up-front $ getting decent hardware on the server would have saved us lots of $ downtime in the long run. But they never listened; to them, the up-front $ to upgrade the server was a visible, easily calculateable cost, while the perceived threat of downtime was distant and harder to quantify. Each time they seemed to blindly hope that "from now on the server will probably be stable". That went on for about five years.
(I know we should have been running up-to-date anti-virus, but the same mistake again: short-sighted management never wanted to spend up-front $ on an anti-virus when the perceived threat seemed "distant" and "unlikely". Each time a virus hit, they'd be all over the place afterwards with a "new policy" forcing everyone to install an anti-virus on their systems and keep it up to date (and blaming everyone for not having anti-virus on their systems, even though the employees had been begging for anti-virus software for months). But, six months later the policy would predictably be forgotten as the threat started to seem "distant" again ... until the next virus hit, and so the pattern repeated.)
I used to like their fries, but lately (in my part of the world) they don't use fresh ingredients anymore and so they taste old and crappy. Now the only reason I buy McD's is convenience, i.e. when I just want something to eat quick 'n easy. Their nuggets used to be nice too, until they started pre-cooking, re-freezing and warming-up.
Windows crashing is obviously not so much of an inconvenience that they must storm Redmond. It's easier to push the reset button.
I used to wonder why things that annoyed me a lot about Windows, and the fact that it's crap, didn't seem to bother other people so much. Then I realised that, apart from the usual valid explanation that most have had their expectations lowered so much regarding computers that they're almost impossible to disappoint, only a small percentage of other users I know spend as much time on a computer as I do. Most people just spend maybe a few hours a day on a computer, e.g. do some simple tasks like e-mail and web, maybe a Word document or spreadsheet. So if something annoys them, it's for a short time and then they go about doing other things. But as a software developer, I basically spend nearly all my time behind the computer - a 40 hour week is rare relaxation, 60 hour week not uncommon. So when some little Windows bug annoys you, it annoys you 10 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, for months and sometimes years. I think this inherently puts a different perspective on it. It's one thing being annoyed for an hour or two then going back to what you enjoy and do all day. It's another if what you enjoy and do all day has become annoying all day due to the system you're using being crappy. Because you also 'explore' the system deeper, you also uncover far more bugs and annoyances. It's like, if I drive to work in a junky car, that sucks but only for 20 minutes a day. But if my job involves driving all day, then having a decent ride is going to make a world of difference.
You criticize an analogy by following up with an even more irrational one. Windows doesn't set itself on fire. It's other people writing the programs that set it on fire--essentially, it's vandalism by others.
Windows is vulnerable to these attacks because it has flaws. They are bugs, defects, ,istakes in the design and implementation, holes, errors, the designers messed up and you're vulnerable only because they messed up. Computers are not supposed to be this vulnerable to attacks. Do you understand it yet or do I have to use more italics? The original analogy is far more accurate, although quite frankly none of these car analogies are a perfect fit.
Here's a better anology: you buy condoms from a manufacturer, except that you don't know the manufacturer has cut corners in the design and manufacturing to save money, and every third one or so has a few small holes in it big enough to let all sorts of nasties through. Soon you have a few STDs. Were you "stupid to have sex at all" (i.e. the "stupid to plug your computer into the Internet"?!? argument), or should the condoms have worked to a much high expectation of safety? Of course the condoms should have worked, and the manufacturer is liable, legally too.
Gosh, when did it get so bad that believe genuinely believe that "plugging your computer into the Internet" is inherently a "dumb thing to do"? This is entirely abnormal.
(And yes, similar things happen to Linux too, but that's also because Linux, although it has a better security track record than Windows, is still far from perfect, and rational Linux devs and users admit it's not supposed to be this way, and that you are supposed to ideally be able to plug a newly installed Linux distro straight onto the Internet without having to worry at all. The reason we currently have to worry is because developers of subsystems made mistakes, not because computers are inherently vulnerable. If there were no bugs, then by design the system would be 100% secure. The perfect condom.
Meanwhile the internet was created on unix, and was routinely hacked (sendmail anyone?)
Yeah, MS have somehow convinced a lot of people of this argument that Windows is insecure, that MS "have an excuse" and "couldn't have known", because it was designed in a "different time" where things like hackers and viruses were" virtually unknown". And it's complete, utter bollocks, these things preceded Windows development by a long time, were well-known and people have been warning that the situation we have now would come about since day one ... just that nobody listened.
Windows is insecure because MS wanted to get their stuff out the door as fast as possible, knowing that it would result in major security/virus problems but with the idea that they could 'fix problems that crop up later, main thing is to secure that monopoly first'.
Actually, Garfield was not designed "from the ground up" as an advertising platform or for it's merchandising potential. I have a copy of the first garfield book (1978, IIRC) in my comics collection, and believe me, Garfield started out as a truly ugly, fat, unattractive, blobby, strong-armed comic cat, with not one bit of cuteness whatsoever ... it had a grand total of zero merchandising potential as it stood, and the early strips were more humorous IMO. As the strip became successful, and it's creator and the syndicate began to realise the merchandising potential and other various "big business" opportunities, the Garfield character was slowly changed from the original fat, ugly, miserable cat to the "appealing, cute" one-dimensional character that we see now selling so many lunchboxes, t-shirts etc. This was another case of artist turned (very rich) commercial sell-out. In the Jim Davis' wrote and drew the strips himself, but nowadays it's just a hired team of replaceable artists trained to mimic a +/- mid-80's Garfield style as much as possible, the whole thing is approached as a "product" and as a vehicle for marketing other products. There is no room for creativity in this setup at all, as obviously the characters no longer become true "characters", as they cannot develop. The over-commercialization of comics seems to be similar to what happened to the the American movie, television and music industries. It's ironic that the country that invented movies, television and comics, that was the major global 'driving force' and thriving hub of cultural creativity in these fields until about the 50s or so, has now swung the opposite way, to a near complete "creative rut", as it all turned to big business and creativity is regarded as an unnecessary risk - genericness and well-worn formulas are "safe" as entertainment is produced factory-line style. If you follow the US comics industry from its birth, there were just so many 'brilliant icons' and role models (like Floyd Gottfredson, Walt Kelly etc.) that one could scarcely have imagined that it could ever end. I wonder if the "trend" will swing back again at some future generation, if America will once again 'become creative'. Or perhaps it will be only in newer media forms, such as computer games.
Of course, nowadays there is some creativity and innovation picking up "at the fringes", in the form of e.g. some rather brilliant Web comics, and the occasional good graphic novel. But there's an important different: pre-1960, the good stuff was popular media, while nowadays the good stuff is 'fringe' and barely known while in popular media we get crap like Garfield, Friends, boy bands, 17-year old "pop divas" who can't write any of their own songs, and a million text-book-formula 'genre-flicks', i.e. predictable romantic comedies etc. There are the odd exceptions though, at the fringes where few notice, e.g. Waking Life, Memento, and even some good popular ones like Fight Club, but it's gotten to the point where if I want to be even vaguely 'intellectually challenged' with something original and non-formula then I don't even bother to watch an American movie. Further, just about every American movie you can think of is just copied from either a novel (e.g. Fight Club was based on a novel by a *Russian* novelist), a comic, or another older movie (e.g. Manchurian Candidate, which I guess kids today haven't heard of so they'll think this movie is original).
OK, wondering even more off-topic now, so I'll stop there :)
I don't recall ever seeing any 'MetLife' adverts in a Peanuts comic strip .. could you elaborate on that?
You're right, and I'm fully aware, that so many cartoonists (and other artists) sell out ... here's a quote from Bill Watterson: "Of course, to be fair to the syndicates, most cartoonists are happy to sell out, too." I still don't like it. In particular I don't like it when it's done deceptively, which is increasingly the case .. i.e. "product placement" vs. an obvious paid endorsement in an advert. Advertisers have long been trying to blur the lines that make regular advertising clearly distinct (so far with GREAT success because people are by and large incredibly naive and gullible). E.g. this site pretends to be a genuine blog, but is obviously written by an advertising firm. There are tonnes of fake blogs out there, and fake "fan sites" and such to drum up "ground level" "buzz". And it works. Companies like Microsoft hire people to write to forums like slashdot, pretending to be "regular IT guys" who 'chose Microsoft because it made sense'. I mean, we dismiss this sort of thing with "yeah that's guerilla marketing and companies need to make money", but surely all this deception and lies amounts to fraud, one surely has to draw the line somewhere and say "advertising should be obviously advertising".
Although GP has a point, forcing people to pay for software would encourage adoption of cheaper alternatives for now, you are right, this is the real danger: an installed base of DRM. Companies like Microsoft currently charge "monopoly prices", which are "what the market will bare". They aren't so stupid as to charge so much that people are forced to look at alternatives. So when the first "major" round of DRM comes, people will just accept it, rationalising the decision by saying "well, it doesn't cost THAT much more" and "at least we're doing things the legal way". That's 'fine and well', but once DRM-based PCs and OSs become widespread, the fundamental platform has changed, and the 'big cartels' will be able to (and WILL definitely) engage in highly anti-competitive behaviour by using their newfound massive control over the platform to lock out potential new competitors. This isn't tinfoil-hat, it's logical and inevitable and is the current direction things are moving - fast. And people will anyway also be locked in for the same reasons they are already "locked in" today (e.g. "everyone uses MS Word and we need to interchange files"), only it'll be worse.
If we can encourage enough adoption of alternatives, e.g. Linux, hardware manufacturers may still be "forced" to produce non-DRM hardware, but this seems unlikely. Most of the world is already hooked on Microsoft's 'heroin'.
Indeed, ouch, I find that very disappointing, I'll join the "Dilbert boycott". How patronising too, their lame psychological manipulation strategy: "As an engineer like you ..." .. isn't that how you try manipulate 6-year olds? The BSA's tactics disgust me in general.
I used to like Dilbert, but I cannot stand any comic strip that whores itself out to corporate interests in this way. A comic strip is not an advertising platform.
If you'd read a little more before hastily posting to /. you'd discover that this is one of the core themes and purposes of the book. Here's more of the authors "own words":
"... I think that's an example of bad rapid cognition: there is something going on in the first few seconds of meeting a tall person which makes us predisposed toward thinking of that person as an effective leader, the same way that the police looked at my hair and decided I resembled a criminal. I call this the "Warren Harding Error" (you'll have to read "Blink" to figure out why), and I think we make Warren Harding Errors in all kind of situations-- particularly when it comes to hiring. With "Blink," I'm trying to help people distinguish their good rapid cognition from their bad rapid cognition."
I see where you're coming from now.
Pee Cee price comparison weenies
While you do have a point, and I happen to agree with your underlying point, you're never going to convince anyone like that. Because starting off by calling the people you're trying to convince "weenies" just attacks and aggravates them and puts them on the defensive. Once you've put someone on the defensive, any hope of having a rational, constructive argument is gone, as well as any hope of convincing them to see your viewpoint. The question is do you want to just insult people who are wrong about something, or do you actually want to help those people see that they are wrong and introduce positive change? (That's not easy.) If the latter, you'll have to change your strategy. Calling people "weenies" and telling them they're "living in the wrong world" is no way to convince anyone of anything, except for people who already agree with you (perhaps you just want the affirmation from that group?). Anyway, a better strategy is to open by "giving" something to the listener that they would like to hear, a concession that doesn't make them feel stupid, e.g. start out by pointing out the perceived merits of their argument are not baseless, e.g. you could say "it's true that a Dell PC with similar performance can be obtained slightly cheaper", but then (rationally) add valid (backed up) counter-arguments for why that little saving is not worth it, in a non-offensive way that doesn't make you sound like a zealot, which results in having the opposite of the desired effect, because most people instinctively do the opposite of what zealots do even if the zealot happens (by coincidence) to be doing the right thing.
Ah, thank you, one of the first people who actually genuinely understands and knows what I'm talking about here .. we're on the same page. I can understand that it is difficult to explain it to people, it just seems to be one of those that unless you've gone through the process or realising it yourself, you don't 'grasp' it. Anyway, yes, there is both a 'computational' side to our experiences, and another more metaphysical aspect to our experiences. We have begun to recreate, to some degree, (presumably) only the computational aspect in machines - the computer that can see, just like us, and recognize blue, just like us. But we regard man and machine's experience in this task as "different" somehow, and you instictively perceive that the machine is still "unsensing", which I'm not so sure about.
You say that establishing such a metaphysical consciousness in a machine is something different, a 'separate project', a metaphysical project with a metaphysical goal over and above the computational one. My point was though, that since we don't know what creates that metaphysical experience, we cannot know if the machines we are creating would experience the same thing. If the metaphysical experience is purely the byproduct of a particular physical structure and/or computational process, then it may already be present in our machine creations, even if it wasn't placed there deliberately and wasn't the goal of the project, and even if in a very dim, limited form at this stage. Note I said "may" because I don't know, but it's a possibility, and until we know enough to use scientific techniques to measure this metaphysical thing (if ever?), how can we know i.e. measure if it's there in machines?
If of course one presumes that that 'awareness' of the experience of looking at and recognizing blue is also computational, but the result of a separate computation process that is watching and monitoring the first, then no, the machine remains "unsensing" (for now) - it doesn't have a subsystem analysing what the other subsystems are doing and 'putting it all together as a whole'. This is a possibility, i.e. perhaps it's a separate computational process in our brains (i.e. a section, with nerve cells, electronic impulses etc.) monitoring the other parts of the brain and nervous system looking at blue. But that still leads to a recursive definition ... it's still just a purely physical computational subsystem, and why should that other computational system be any more "metaphysical" than another? We don't know where it starts.
Perhaps one day we'll discover a new kind of particle or something that we learn creates the metaphysical experience and why, and learn to detect if it's present, and only then will we be able to look back at the computer recognizing blue and "measure" if it had 'sentience'. But that's just one possible explanation.
Given no evidence, direct or indirect, the perfect answer is non-existence rather than existence.
Not really, the 'perfect' answer is "we don't know, but probably not, and we can't assume existence or non-existence". That's it. You don't NEED a yes or a no answer. This human need to absolutely have an answer even when there really isn't one available is annoying and an impediment to progress ... it pops up on slashdot all the time, e.g. many people claiming somehow that they *know* that global warming *isn't* happening --- how do they know? It's impossible.
Anyway, of course to be practical, Occam's razor must kick in at some point, because it's not practical or economical to give consideration to every charlatan's junk science or snake oil. But theoretically one cannot reject an idea unless it is provably false. And Occam's razor doesn't outright reject anything ... it just makes a purely practical decision to "ignore this for now as probably not being relevant".
I don't think any of these ideas are new at all, of course. My own opinion, I suspect that what we perceive as consciousness, or sentient awareness, is derived from our physical/chemical/molecular structure. I.e. if you had a magic "cloning device" that produced a perfect, functioning physical replica of me, that it would have it's own sentient awareness almost identical to mine (but diverging from that point onwards as the new being's brain develops separately to separate stimuli/experiences). It actually seems obvious that conscious awareness is derived from physical/chemical structure if you consider that the nature of, and our experience thereof, is highly and easily influencable by simple chemical alterations such as taking drugs. I have the ability to even almost "turn off" my sentience by simply consuming large amounts of a chemical called alcohol (or just sleeping) .. (or, and this is unprovable, have I only turned off the phsyical *memory* capability temporarily and thus was sentient but can't recall it?). If our consciousness (and awareness) was a specific thing (what many call "soul" or "spirit") "attached" to our body, then our experience thereof should surely not be so subject to alteration, and clearly too, based on mind-altering chemicals, there are "degrees" of sentience. Presumably different people of different intelligence and with different experiences and brain structures experience this "sentience" in different ways too, likewise retarded people. This thing we regard as "spirit" seems to need a sensible medium structured in a certain way (like our brain) to reside in, and is somehow a "sum of all the chemical reactions" taking place therein.
Lastly, we create presumably sentient beings every day: by making babies. We effectively by and large know the chemistry involved every step of the way in the development of a new human. So the question is, at what point does the new human become 'sentient'? If one believes that a "spirit" could "enter" the baby, when does it do so? We can't measure it happening. I think it starts when brain activity starts. But again, I do not know, because we have no definition for it because we don't know what it is or what causes it. Religions aside -- religions make assumptions, because our ancestors didn't "know" either but also wanted answers.
until it is proven false it must be true
WHAT!? Where did I say that? I believe I said "WE DON'T KNOW" about 150 times, it was even the subject of my post. You can't assume anything is either true OR false it you don't know. Please quote where I assumed anything to be true, or else re-evaluate your reading skills, seriously.
Humans can question their existence because they have the computational ability to do so. There is no reason why a silicon-based computer couldn't also have the same computational ability in future. It doesn't mean it's sentient, nor does it mean it's not.
Your concept of "living" is a purely abstract concept which is almost impossible to define properly and non-arbitrarily. Current definitions revolving around DNA/RNA are arbitrary, because DNA is just another complex molecule like every other molecule in the Universe. BTW: Here is a small philosphical exercise for you, which I quarantee you will take you decades to solve if you actually think about it before assuming you know the answer and and actually ask yourself how you know the answer you think you know: How can you prove that "all humans have cognitive awareness"? How can you prove that anyone other than yourself is sentient? Good luck. You can't, and won't be able to until you come up with a more sensible definition (and way of measuring) sentience, that you don't confuse with "the ability to think".
You haven't really thought all this through very well, have you.
BTW, I have the same answer for aliens: WE DON'T KNOW. None of us know.
Wow, way to miss the point of the story. The lesson of the story, if you have the brains to understand it, is valid no matter what the person is selling, which is entirely incidental. You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, brainless moron.
Actually the original sentence is 100% correct as it is. "Their" may be used as a possessive for "his/her", and the word order was fine too.
Modern linguists take a so-called "descriptive" rather "prescriptive" approach. In other words, they merely describe and document how native speakers speak, and how the language changes over time. (In the old days we had a "prescriptive" approach where 'right' and 'wrong' were prescribed by 'experts', but it didn't stop language from evolving rapidly, although it can help in standardisation e.g. the Spanish Royal Academy still prescribes standard Spanish.)
Thus you are perfectly entitled to use your word froopsixac as much as you like, and if enough people like it, it will catch on, and soon it will be a "valid" English word that will be in the dictionary. So yes, you are perfectly "allowed" and able to change English in that way, and so the GP is 100% correct. You'll probably need to come up with more a catchy word than 'froopsixac' though.
The problem is not that we can't "re-create it". In fact we might have already. The problem is that we can't measure it.
We can't even measure it in each other, because we really don't know of any measurable physical properties that may determine the presence of consciousness. And because we don't know how to measure it, we cannot know if we've already created it. Not you, nor anyone here on slashdot or anywhere else. For all we know, modern silicon-based CPUs already have some (very) dim, glimmering cognitive awareness of sorts. We really do not know. It is completely unfounded for anyone to claim that it has not happened yet (or likewise that it has happened) if we don't even have a clue what it really is or how to measure its existence. Heck, it's so elusive we don't even have a rational definition for it.
We don't know what physical (or otherwise?) properties of the human brain result in sentience. At all. Therefore we cannot predict what physical properties (possibly already present) could give rise to sentience in man-made creations. We have no 'measuring device' to stick in the brain that 'detects' sentience. (Asking "are you sentient" is futile, because the answer to that is computational.)
In fact we probably never will know if our own creations have "consciousness" until we figure out how to measure if other humans have it.
(Unless you are referring to a computational ability to "compute" and consider the "self", but that is not related to consciousness, that is pure computational machinery, just 'nuts and bolts', the mechanics of processing the understanding thereof. This is most likely completely separate to consciousness; any self-diagnostic system is "aware" of itself in that sense, and an advanced one could conceivably answer questions "Do you exist" and "Are you thinking" purely computationally - with or without sentience.)
In order for it to work, MSN would have to be the default search engine from the desktop.
Of course, that is precisely what will happen, that is the idea. Also, I don't know if you have used Google's desktop search (very good BTW) .. it will work the same way, it will quickly search both online and your own computer and show the results in the same page. It will be "the" computer's search box. (Again, not innovative, but copying.) Some more ideas that they could and probably will do is integrate it into other applications like MS Word .. want to search for more info on any word, just right-click and "Web search" and it'll open MSN (like Firefox's right-click "web search" function). Same with Outlook. By integrating a direct link into basically into every major application (which is not hard) it will be just too damn convenient to not use. And of course they'll make it technically hard to change the default search from MSN to Google, in a way that results in basically only 5% of people actually bothering to do it in the end.
Two problems - the first is that most people will just type "google" and reach the site that way.
I actually doubt it. By 2006, if MSN is producing "good enough" search results, most people will not do that extra step for 20 or 30% more accurate search results.
I think it's the whole reaosn MS is fighting spyware as hard as they are (buying that company) because it's actually threatening an aspect of lockin.
Yup! They are taking spyware seriously, because it's threatening them on multiple fronts at the moment. Longhorn, while it will have security problems still, will be more secure and resistant to spyware than today's rubbish. As usual with Microsoft it's a defensive, re-active move though, not a pro-active one, as they do not innovate. What bothers me about all of it is how far behind it holds computing, every time they do this, they effectively slow the whole industry down by 5 - 10 years. Windows is like a time-machine, when you're using it, you're basically using 10-year old tech, except somehow it requires a 100 times more powerful computer to do the same stuff that you could have done 10 years ago on a competitor's system (e.g. remote desktop, yay, brings, what, 15-year old tech to Windows XP?). I sometimes wonder how far we'd be by now if it weren't for them. When you use "integrated MSN search" in 2006/7/8, you'll be using something "nearly as good" as Google was in, say, 2000.
What Google should be doing today if they don't want to be 'the new Netscape' is already start implementing things like search from right-clicking on words in Word, Outlook etc., basically making it conveniently and quickly accessible from just about anywhere in Windows that anyone might want to search. Yet actually I don't think Google can succeed, sadly, because MS has too much power to lock anyone out of the areas of the system that they need to dominate.
Seems unlikely, as the MSN search has been under development and actively crawling for something like a year now at least. I've seen its bot crawling my own websites many months back.
Those of us who've been around a while know the well-worn pattern:
(1) MS sits on arse for years doing no innovation while another company produces an innovative, excellent, useful product and spends several years refining it and making it even better
(2) Start to take notice as another company starts to get a lot of limelight in some mainstream market "space" it never occurred to you to enter
(3) Announce intention to compete.
(4) Spend the next couple of years with half-hearted attempt to play catch-up, producing a mediocre equivalent that's not really even terribly good. After a few hit-and-miss betas, announce "version 1" with much fanfare and lots of fawning press releases, with a product that basically brings customers what was already available five years ago from the innovative competitor, blatantly copied down to detailed elements of the user interface but it 'feels' like 'just a poor clone'
(5) Spend another couple of years watching in frustration at low adoption rates of your product. Slowly improve product until it meets a "good enough" standard (still not as good as competitors, but "good enough"), and then ...
(6) ... shove it down customers' throats by abusing desktop OS monopoly: Integrate own product into the next version of Windows so tightly that people almost have to use it, e.g. put MSN search box right into taskbar thus making it far less convenient to use other search engines.
(7) Gain market share rapidly. Fawning press hails you as a great innovator. Ten years later, everyone thinks you practically pioneered Internet searching.
Will it work this time? Probably.
Mark my words, Longhorn will have an MSN search box built into the taskbar.