All depends upon what they cram into each of those credit hours. 18 hours as an undergraduate left all sorts of spare time, and I knew a few that were taking 21-24 credit hours. 13 hours of graduate classes damn near killed me. 60 hours of various basket and matt weaving courses a week might get a trifle boring. 60 hours of multi-variable partial differential equations, related topics, and applied physics/engineering courses will be slightly harder to pass, if not impossible, if the material is not already known to you.
2 things, I'm not trying to be insulting here - at my school, at least, every undergraduate hour was expected to require 1-2 hours per week of study for the target student to pass with a reasonable grade. Graduate level courses, on the other hand, required 5-8 hours each week. A slight difference, which is why an average full time graduate student usually only took 2 classes per semester with independent study time (ie, thesis/dissertation work) for the remaining hours to get to 9 hours.
That's what QuickSilver's primary function for me is, although it is much much more. Spotlight's hotkeys have been swapped out - doesn't do what I want 99% of the time I hit Cmd-Space.
But even if they fail and do get knocked out that still just shrinks them to:
-- consumer work from home PCs
-- enterprise desktops
-- 45+% of server sales
I'll note one item of interest - it's 45-48% of server sales revenue. There's a whole suite of linux servers out there with 0 revenue associated with them, e.g., lots of DNS, web, and application servers as well as appliances, which might not show up as Linux sales either. Every MS Server OS should be licensed, and therefore counted. As it is, with Linux at 20% of the revenue vs MS's 48%, the numbers wind up being very close, since Windows costs at least double the equivalent Linux licensing fees, and that's not counting all the other servers out there running CentOS and the like.
It's a sinking ship. It's a really really humongous ship, so it's taking a long time for it to be even noticed that it was taking on water. It will be a long time before it goes under water, but you're now seeing the realization that the ship really is sinking and there's little idea what to do about it. The pumps are working (Windows Vista/7) but aren't keeping up. The rescue brigade is coming in (Windows 8 and tablets/phones) but it's already apparent that it is probably not going to be enough. I expect them to start cordoning off sections soon (the shedding of unprofitable segments and/or spinoffs) as they continue sinking. It may or may not be enough to stabilize their ship, but it won't be the MS of the past 20 or even 10 years that comes out the other side.
Please demonstrate one area in which Microsoft has innovated. Buying a startup and putting the polish on doesn't count.
Microsoft's BlueTrack preceded Logitech's Darkfield for at least 2 years? To certain extent, I think Kinect too. Microsoft did not invent the sensor, but they did a quite a lot of work to make it feasible and cheap enough for the masses
The camera sensor pieces used in Kinect appeared in many things, ranging from mars probes to remote UAVs to video games in arcades to smart bombs and more. The video arcade games even had the same functionality. MS just took it and made it into a cheaper computer connected webcam. That is not innovation. That's applying the copy and make it cheaper strategy.
Not to mention that XP, Vista and 7, Office, etc all had features that were copied by competitors. Just because the final product isn't OMFGAMAZING!!! doesn't mean it didn't contain some good innovations.
Name them. Heck, name just two, since you claim plurality.
There is not a single item I can think of that wasn't copied or outright stolen from someone else.
Yep, OS/2 brought all that circa 92, with 2.11, I think it was. OS/2 2.0 was a pain in the rear to install, almost worse than a Linux download at the time. If you had the right hardware, it was relatively OK. The days of QEMM and Desqview, EM386, GEM... memories....
The only thing I disagree with is your statement about "shrink slowly but profitably". It may be neither if the Android/iOS duopoly for alternative devices continues on its current trend. Think a continuing drop in PC sales, and a large scale defection from Office, its second cash cow. Yes, they'll still make money, but making money on a shrinking pie is not a recipe for a desirable business to be in. They may wind up looking more like Adobe than anything else, which is a far cry from their current makeup.
Yep, you're right - should have googled it... sigh:
Kyocera VP-210 (1999), one of the first (if not the first) commercial cellular phones to offer video calling. Then we enter the 3G network era with the Sony Ericsson Z1010 (2003) and the NEC e606 (far right, 2003);
Because a touchscreen with a slide unlock is so ground breaking...
Blackberry's were extremely popular and became a government standard years after the iPhone was released on the market. The only reason the iPhone truly took off was because it integrated with iTunes which had major success. All the other features were no more ground breaking than any phone. They found something that stuck and went with it.
A) they found a plethora of phones with a slide to unlock feature prior to the iPhone?
B) touchscreens were common prior to the iPhone?
C) phones without keyboards were common prior to the iPhone?
D) Blackberry's came into being years after the iPhone?
E) the iPhone integrated with iTunes when it came out?
The answer to each of those is "No" btw, and I'm actually trying to recall when phones got cameras, I'm pretty sure that was prior to the iPhone, but front facing and video calling were iPhone firsts, I think. Also, IIRC, BES came into being quit a bit before the iPhone was released, and was one of the reasons BB was at the top of the smart phone heap.
China is supposed to be a trading partner; a fact acknowledged every time China turns to the WTO when something displeases it. Now, if China wants to make exceptions and withhold certain valuable products, that's fine. We should then withhold valuable parts of our market. It's ours after all — why shouldn't we keep it?
That's called a trade war, and usually results in tariffs and embargoes, and generally decimates trade, which is what WTO and free trade agreements are about preventing.
What exactly in the iPhone is new or novel? Everything done in it has been done in other phones before it, all they did was package up everyone else's innovations make it pretty and slap a logo on it and claim they invented the phone market.
Yep, that's why the iPhone sold like hotcakes and has been pretty much credited with jump starting the smart phone market, even at the supposed "premium" price for "substandard hardware" someone else claimed previously.
Slide to unlock was as obvious as it gets when your dealing with a touch screen. How would you propose you unlock a smart phone?
I guess they need to listen to their same line of not stealing others tech, because that's precisely what they did when they made the iPhone.
Yep, apparently everything in the iPhone was obvious, which is why so many different iPhone clones existed prior to the iPhone, since the smartphone market dates back more than a decade, and the iPhone was a late-comer.
App Store is not a package manager, it's an application distribution system.
I'm not seeing the difference. Applications come in packages, and a distribution system manages them. A claim of the form "X is not A; it's B" is easier to understand if you explain what essential difference you see between A and B. Otherwise, I call fallacy.
I guess it would be easier to state that while application are packages, packages are not necessarily applications. So a package manager might be an application distribution system, but an application distribution system is not a package manager. In simpler terms - an application distribution system incorporates a very specific set of functionality, removing several aspects of a general package management system, including things like dependency hierarchies which can cause problems cross-applications, especially regarding versioning, thus avoiding several potential problem areas by only deploying a self-contained application. (Just IMHO)
Maybe he does it because he's hugely reviled by significant sections of humanity that know or know of him? There's a bit about corporate tycoons and their charity efforts that was most enlightening. Too bad I don't have the link handy or I'd include it.
A fair amount of Microsoft's money is going to wipe out malaria and polio and shitloads of other diseases
Actually, none of Gates' money is going to wipe out malaria nor polio, nor any other disease. What they are doing is treating diseases. I had hoped this was different when they announced the super cool mosquito zapping laser, but after the initial announcement that they should be able to create these in quantity for less than $50/each, everything about this device mysteriously disappeared. Why weren't the blueprints made public? They're supposedly doing this for the betterment of humanity, right? Why didn't they push something that addresses the core problem - the mosquito transmission vector is certainly a viable link in the chain to break if the agent itself cannot be tackled directly.
My personal opinion is that Gates figured out a way to side step SEC and IRS regulations and taxes to keep and maintain a large portion of his fortune intact under his control before Ballmer runs MS into the ground.
In 1920 or so? Everything stated there was a special, one of a kind situation. Look at what the other companies at large were doing. There's a reason there were major pushes to unionize workers (Ford was not a cause) Workers were generally exploited. Lifespans were significantly less than today. Various diseases ran rampant, all cured or mitigated since the government got involved. (After all, under Ron Paul, vaccinations et al would be up to the individual - wouldn't want to get the government involved in that now, would we?) The one thing I have to give Ron Paul - I believe him when he says he believes in these statements, he did watch a campaign worker and close friend die of a treatable disease after all. The thing he hasn't answered is how he feels about someone involved in an accident who doesn't have proof of insurance readily available and needs immediate and expensive care: does he let them die or treat them? If they cannot provide proof of financial capability to pay, at what point do they kick them out of the hospital (during the operation?). What if they do have insurance and die because of refusal to provide care?
No matter how you slice it, care will be given, and some won't be able to pay, which leads us down the same road we're on now, perhaps at a different rate, but the same road none the less. Unless you advocate the full set of (hopefully) unpalatable options listed above, you're in favor of the mandated insurance clause, and would actually be a proponent of at least basic universal healthcare. There's a set of diseases IMNSHO that would require additional health insurance, and of course most of the cosmetic type things would be excluded, and undergoing them might require purchase of additional insurance (as part of the procedure cost) to cover the potential complications thereof.
SS is a different boat, I didn't but lightly skim this one after the Libertarian diatribe. SS is not quite a Ponzi scheme, and it was never meant to be the sole source of income for retired folks. Why isn't it a full Ponzi scheme, because it actually tried to set up a partial pay ahead balance system. You might want to visit the SS site for some amusing facts about internet myths.
Or artificial diamonds, but they're still more expensive than real diamonds, last I heard, but I don't know how much of that is due to PR by the diamond industry.
passing classwork and the bar means you have the intellect to pass those tests -- you can still very well be an idiot* (depending on one's definition of 'idiot').
Technically, the phrase in dispute was complete idiot. The ability to finish law school and pass the bar shows a lack of idiocy in some domain. At worst, I don't think he can be called much more than 90% idiot.:)
Au contraire - it's quite possibly he wasn't 100% idiot when he passed law school and the bar, but what has happened since then (brain injury, alzheimer's, alcoholism, etc) can definitely reduce someone down to complete idiocy prior to being deemed a danger to themselves. Having witnessed such a degradation in mental capacity more than once (drugs, age, and illness and combinations - you will too with enough exposure to the elderly) makes me question whether we shouldn't have competency checks periodically for professions that required an examination to begin with, especially after certain types of injuries or illnesses.
And you stayed with them to document their screw ups, right? Yes, I have a FB account, only because they apparently never delete anything. I set it up to test business integration several jobs ago and haven't been there since except only to see if it was still there just recently, because, apparently, one of those wondrous changes you mentioned apparently started sending me updates (or was it a filter I accidentally deleted?)
Not necessarily true. They could have replaced items in the original computer one at a time until they had the "new" PC that they sold. The license would still be valid, but the computer would have 100% replaced parts. I've always felt OEM licenses with those restrictions were unenforceable.
Slashdot Mirror
All depends upon what they cram into each of those credit hours. 18 hours as an undergraduate left all sorts of spare time, and I knew a few that were taking 21-24 credit hours. 13 hours of graduate classes damn near killed me. 60 hours of various basket and matt weaving courses a week might get a trifle boring. 60 hours of multi-variable partial differential equations, related topics, and applied physics/engineering courses will be slightly harder to pass, if not impossible, if the material is not already known to you.
2 things, I'm not trying to be insulting here - at my school, at least, every undergraduate hour was expected to require 1-2 hours per week of study for the target student to pass with a reasonable grade. Graduate level courses, on the other hand, required 5-8 hours each week. A slight difference, which is why an average full time graduate student usually only took 2 classes per semester with independent study time (ie, thesis/dissertation work) for the remaining hours to get to 9 hours.
Isn't Dune a bit steampunk?
That's what QuickSilver's primary function for me is, although it is much much more. Spotlight's hotkeys have been swapped out - doesn't do what I want 99% of the time I hit Cmd-Space.
But even if they fail and do get knocked out that still just shrinks them to:
-- consumer work from home PCs
-- enterprise desktops
-- 45+% of server sales
I'll note one item of interest - it's 45-48% of server sales revenue. There's a whole suite of linux servers out there with 0 revenue associated with them, e.g., lots of DNS, web, and application servers as well as appliances, which might not show up as Linux sales either. Every MS Server OS should be licensed, and therefore counted. As it is, with Linux at 20% of the revenue vs MS's 48%, the numbers wind up being very close, since Windows costs at least double the equivalent Linux licensing fees, and that's not counting all the other servers out there running CentOS and the like.
It's a sinking ship. It's a really really humongous ship, so it's taking a long time for it to be even noticed that it was taking on water. It will be a long time before it goes under water, but you're now seeing the realization that the ship really is sinking and there's little idea what to do about it. The pumps are working (Windows Vista/7) but aren't keeping up. The rescue brigade is coming in (Windows 8 and tablets/phones) but it's already apparent that it is probably not going to be enough. I expect them to start cordoning off sections soon (the shedding of unprofitable segments and/or spinoffs) as they continue sinking. It may or may not be enough to stabilize their ship, but it won't be the MS of the past 20 or even 10 years that comes out the other side.
I haven't seen a BSOD in years.
I haven't either, for almost a decade.
Internet Explorer is getting much better at supporting the standards.
I wouldn't know, I'm not the one charged with making sure our products display properly in IE. My sanity was at least saved from that challenge.
Please demonstrate one area in which Microsoft has innovated. Buying a startup and putting the polish on doesn't count.
Microsoft's BlueTrack preceded Logitech's Darkfield for at least 2 years? To certain extent, I think Kinect too. Microsoft did not invent the sensor, but they did a quite a lot of work to make it feasible and cheap enough for the masses
The camera sensor pieces used in Kinect appeared in many things, ranging from mars probes to remote UAVs to video games in arcades to smart bombs and more. The video arcade games even had the same functionality. MS just took it and made it into a cheaper computer connected webcam. That is not innovation. That's applying the copy and make it cheaper strategy.
Not to mention that XP, Vista and 7, Office, etc all had features that were copied by competitors. Just because the final product isn't OMFGAMAZING!!! doesn't mean it didn't contain some good innovations.
Name them. Heck, name just two, since you claim plurality.
There is not a single item I can think of that wasn't copied or outright stolen from someone else.
Actually, the searchable menu for OSX is QuickSilver
Apple Research
Yep, OS/2 brought all that circa 92, with 2.11, I think it was. OS/2 2.0 was a pain in the rear to install, almost worse than a Linux download at the time. If you had the right hardware, it was relatively OK. The days of QEMM and Desqview, EM386, GEM... memories....
The only thing I disagree with is your statement about "shrink slowly but profitably". It may be neither if the Android/iOS duopoly for alternative devices continues on its current trend. Think a continuing drop in PC sales, and a large scale defection from Office, its second cash cow. Yes, they'll still make money, but making money on a shrinking pie is not a recipe for a desirable business to be in. They may wind up looking more like Adobe than anything else, which is a far cry from their current makeup.
After opening with a false premise like "storied history of leadership", do you really want to read more?
it is storied, as in mythological....
Kyocera VP-210 (1999), one of the first (if not the first) commercial cellular phones to offer video calling. Then we enter the 3G network era with the Sony Ericsson Z1010 (2003) and the NEC e606 (far right, 2003);
It was supposed to be self-financing, and would have been had 2 things not happened:
1) The lifespan increased significantly beyond projections
2) The birthrate dropped significantly in proportion to the population
I agree that currently, it would be considered a Ponzi scheme. When it was instantiated, it was more like an insurance pool.
Because a touchscreen with a slide unlock is so ground breaking... Blackberry's were extremely popular and became a government standard years after the iPhone was released on the market. The only reason the iPhone truly took off was because it integrated with iTunes which had major success. All the other features were no more ground breaking than any phone. They found something that stuck and went with it.
A) they found a plethora of phones with a slide to unlock feature prior to the iPhone?
B) touchscreens were common prior to the iPhone?
C) phones without keyboards were common prior to the iPhone?
D) Blackberry's came into being years after the iPhone?
E) the iPhone integrated with iTunes when it came out?
The answer to each of those is "No" btw, and I'm actually trying to recall when phones got cameras, I'm pretty sure that was prior to the iPhone, but front facing and video calling were iPhone firsts, I think. Also, IIRC, BES came into being quit a bit before the iPhone was released, and was one of the reasons BB was at the top of the smart phone heap.
China is supposed to be a trading partner; a fact acknowledged every time China turns to the WTO when something displeases it. Now, if China wants to make exceptions and withhold certain valuable products, that's fine. We should then withhold valuable parts of our market. It's ours after all — why shouldn't we keep it?
That's called a trade war, and usually results in tariffs and embargoes, and generally decimates trade, which is what WTO and free trade agreements are about preventing.
What exactly in the iPhone is new or novel? Everything done in it has been done in other phones before it, all they did was package up everyone else's innovations make it pretty and slap a logo on it and claim they invented the phone market.
Yep, that's why the iPhone sold like hotcakes and has been pretty much credited with jump starting the smart phone market, even at the supposed "premium" price for "substandard hardware" someone else claimed previously.
Slide to unlock was as obvious as it gets when your dealing with a touch screen. How would you propose you unlock a smart phone?
I guess they need to listen to their same line of not stealing others tech, because that's precisely what they did when they made the iPhone.
Yep, apparently everything in the iPhone was obvious, which is why so many different iPhone clones existed prior to the iPhone, since the smartphone market dates back more than a decade, and the iPhone was a late-comer.
App Store is not a package manager, it's an application distribution system.
I'm not seeing the difference. Applications come in packages, and a distribution system manages them. A claim of the form "X is not A; it's B" is easier to understand if you explain what essential difference you see between A and B. Otherwise, I call fallacy.
I guess it would be easier to state that while application are packages, packages are not necessarily applications. So a package manager might be an application distribution system, but an application distribution system is not a package manager. In simpler terms - an application distribution system incorporates a very specific set of functionality, removing several aspects of a general package management system, including things like dependency hierarchies which can cause problems cross-applications, especially regarding versioning, thus avoiding several potential problem areas by only deploying a self-contained application. (Just IMHO)
Maybe he does it because he's hugely reviled by significant sections of humanity that know or know of him? There's a bit about corporate tycoons and their charity efforts that was most enlightening. Too bad I don't have the link handy or I'd include it.
A fair amount of Microsoft's money is going to wipe out malaria and polio and shitloads of other diseases
Actually, none of Gates' money is going to wipe out malaria nor polio, nor any other disease. What they are doing is treating diseases. I had hoped this was different when they announced the super cool mosquito zapping laser, but after the initial announcement that they should be able to create these in quantity for less than $50/each, everything about this device mysteriously disappeared. Why weren't the blueprints made public? They're supposedly doing this for the betterment of humanity, right? Why didn't they push something that addresses the core problem - the mosquito transmission vector is certainly a viable link in the chain to break if the agent itself cannot be tackled directly.
My personal opinion is that Gates figured out a way to side step SEC and IRS regulations and taxes to keep and maintain a large portion of his fortune intact under his control before Ballmer runs MS into the ground.
Running health care as a business worked out really well for USA before the government got involved, I don't want to repeat it, so here is the argument I wrote down some time ago.
In 1920 or so? Everything stated there was a special, one of a kind situation. Look at what the other companies at large were doing. There's a reason there were major pushes to unionize workers (Ford was not a cause) Workers were generally exploited. Lifespans were significantly less than today. Various diseases ran rampant, all cured or mitigated since the government got involved. (After all, under Ron Paul, vaccinations et al would be up to the individual - wouldn't want to get the government involved in that now, would we?) The one thing I have to give Ron Paul - I believe him when he says he believes in these statements, he did watch a campaign worker and close friend die of a treatable disease after all. The thing he hasn't answered is how he feels about someone involved in an accident who doesn't have proof of insurance readily available and needs immediate and expensive care: does he let them die or treat them? If they cannot provide proof of financial capability to pay, at what point do they kick them out of the hospital (during the operation?). What if they do have insurance and die because of refusal to provide care?
No matter how you slice it, care will be given, and some won't be able to pay, which leads us down the same road we're on now, perhaps at a different rate, but the same road none the less. Unless you advocate the full set of (hopefully) unpalatable options listed above, you're in favor of the mandated insurance clause, and would actually be a proponent of at least basic universal healthcare. There's a set of diseases IMNSHO that would require additional health insurance, and of course most of the cosmetic type things would be excluded, and undergoing them might require purchase of additional insurance (as part of the procedure cost) to cover the potential complications thereof.
Of-course same thing applies to SS, etc.
SS is a different boat, I didn't but lightly skim this one after the Libertarian diatribe. SS is not quite a Ponzi scheme, and it was never meant to be the sole source of income for retired folks. Why isn't it a full Ponzi scheme, because it actually tried to set up a partial pay ahead balance system. You might want to visit the SS site for some amusing facts about internet myths.
Or artificial diamonds, but they're still more expensive than real diamonds, last I heard, but I don't know how much of that is due to PR by the diamond industry.
passing classwork and the bar means you have the intellect to pass those tests -- you can still very well be an idiot* (depending on one's definition of 'idiot').
Technically, the phrase in dispute was complete idiot. The ability to finish law school and pass the bar shows a lack of idiocy in some domain. At worst, I don't think he can be called much more than 90% idiot. :)
Au contraire - it's quite possibly he wasn't 100% idiot when he passed law school and the bar, but what has happened since then (brain injury, alzheimer's, alcoholism, etc) can definitely reduce someone down to complete idiocy prior to being deemed a danger to themselves. Having witnessed such a degradation in mental capacity more than once (drugs, age, and illness and combinations - you will too with enough exposure to the elderly) makes me question whether we shouldn't have competency checks periodically for professions that required an examination to begin with, especially after certain types of injuries or illnesses.
And you stayed with them to document their screw ups, right? Yes, I have a FB account, only because they apparently never delete anything. I set it up to test business integration several jobs ago and haven't been there since except only to see if it was still there just recently, because, apparently, one of those wondrous changes you mentioned apparently started sending me updates (or was it a filter I accidentally deleted?)
Not necessarily true. They could have replaced items in the original computer one at a time until they had the "new" PC that they sold. The license would still be valid, but the computer would have 100% replaced parts. I've always felt OEM licenses with those restrictions were unenforceable.