I think globalization requires some oversight laws, and they can revert back to sane IP laws. If the latest set of recalls of pretty much anything made in China has had any effect, it should be "don't buy made in china" items. The easiest way to encourage this is to make every imported container be inspected. Wait, that costs too much? Well, add a duty to the import to support its inspection. Why should anyone other than the importer pay for the import, after all? This would have 2 direct effects:
increases the costs of imports while increasing domestic employment
ensures that imports meet US guidelines for products, which will also probably increase the costs of imports, since current imports do not meet these standards in order to reduce costs.
Of course, we could also add a third levy that would add the associated costs to all imports not produced in accordance with US regulations so that items produced in the US to US regulations wouldn't be undercut due to regulation, but that requires a lot of political involvement which would render it inept. The first two would be easier to implement just by virtue of requiring inspection and testing of all imports.
To answer the critics, yes, this assumes some manufacturing would return to the US instead of merely resulting in increased prices for goods while supporting yet more "government". But it certainly would give pause to anyone considering moving out of country just to "save" money on production/labor.
You actually develop to standards with FF/Safari/Opera/whatever supports standards, then throw in the tweaks to get it to render properly in the various versions of IE. That way you don't inadvertently do something stupid like use a proprietary feature of IE to render something in a peculiar (wrong) way that will take forever to break in a standards compliant browser.
And yes, I have done development for a site that supported everything from Netscape 4.7+, IE 4.02+, Opera 7+ and Safari because anything representing even 1% of your potential revenue stream is important, especially when the profit from 1% will easily pay for 10 developers with change left over.
I skimmed over both patents, and they both relate to touch tone dialing and landline operation. I'm not sure how to re-apply that to "wireless" phones that work on digital systems.... The claims themselves are so broad that you would not be able to retrieve any information about your call without stepping on either patent. That would seem to make telephone testing equipment that pre-dates both of these patents by decades enough prior art to invalidate large portions of the patents, so much so, that there's not much left for the actual "patent".
For the speciation argument, check out this discussion of the evolution of corn as we know it today. Another story I can't find at the moment listed 3 gene mutations that caused corn to go from a small seeded multi-branched plant that resembled wheat to what we today know as corn. One gene caused multi-branch to become a single stalk, a second enlarged the seeded area and a third increased the grain size. They're all present in the still flourishing ancestor grass teosinte, but it requires all three to produce the corn we know today. The presence of the single stalk gene was enough to create slightly larger edible ears of corn, and selection beyond that brought out the other two traits.
Well, in the Mac Pro, the equivalent to a PC desktop system, you can upgrade up to 16GB of RAM if you want. You can also switch out the dual cores for quads, and replace the video, optical, and hard drives. About the only thing you must swap out with Apple specific hardware is the motherboard, as OSX (unhacked) is mated to EFI which isn't common yet. Granted, your selections in those components are somewhat limited with OSX out of the box, but if you're willing to play with Darwin drivers, you can get an entire slew of hardware working.
If you're willing to have a hacked OSX system, you can run on standard x86 motherboards, just don't expect support. So if you have an Apple motherboard and supported hardware, you can have a supported copy of OSX.
I've now been waiting 18 years for multi-casting to work on MS's network stack.
Is that long enough to say MS can't fix a bug and to put it far far far outside the Apple response timeframe? (Esp if you consider that the network stacks in both OSes share parentage, well, ok, MS's network stack in NT is a direct ripoff of the parent BSD stack with bugs introduced, but that's another story.)
Odds are that all of those would have resulted in a SP2 instead of an SP1A. IIRC, SP1A was done because they had to remove the JVM. I wasn't aware they threw that much extra into it, probably because I wasn't running OXP, trying to switch users, installing MS dependent software or DX9a, etc etc etc.
Isn't it more accurate to compare the time line of Windows XP to Mac OS X? Both were released around the same time, both are their respective publishers most popular desktop OS, both are currently supported, etc. Yet one has received free updates since release, where as the other has had four $129 software updates since release. Since both companies stopped supporting the older versions of their OS, which would you go with? The OS with free updates, or the OS that has cost you over $500 to stay updated? I love this one: here's the easy answer: if.NET hadn't been a complete disaster as an OS framework, you'd probably be on your third $400 MS upgrade (ok, maybe third $200 upgrade if you're cheap). It wasn't for lack of trying, it was from lack of capability.
I believe Apple is still supporting Panther as they released a security update in July 2007.
Apple generally has an update about every 2 or 3 months. MS does 1 update about every 2 years on average. (we are talking the likes of service packs here, right, not hotfixes which aren't recommeded to be installed unless you're experiencing the problem?) Oh, and you can forget about Windows Update - I don't need MS rewriting my hard drive whenever they feel like it and rebooting my machine while I'm busy.
So I think I'll go with the system that's stable and works vs the one that "needs" daily patches and reboots (when all it really needs to be is configured properly by turning off a slew of "services" and installing some decent software)
To be fair to MS on that one, SP1A was the result of MS losing (thankfully) the legal battle against Sun and having to remove their corrupting JVM from the SP. While I'll bash MS any day of the week, we should only bash them for the things they've actually screwed up - that list is long enough that you won't finish by the time the next release of the OS comes out.
That's what happens when you skip checking update for a week or two...
Vista Similarity 2: Needless Graphics Glitz
Hmm... may be "needless" but people like them - when done right. Vista radically changed the interface in many areas, making things more confusing - while requiring most of a user's computing power to do so. OSX refined their user interface, and added to it in ways that didnt make doing simple things more confusing... and dont use nearly as much of the CPU/resources to do so...
Apple did make dock changes that I find... pointless, but then, I don't use the dock except as a signaling mechanism. If I only could hide the dock permanently so it didn't popup except via a mouse gesture combined with a key press, I'd be happy with it. Quicksilver is something Apple should just purchase and use instead of the dock or spotlight for launching apps. (Yeah, using spotlight to launch apps isn't the best solution in my book either)
Vista Similarity 3: Pointless User Interface "Fixes"
Then there's how Microsoft screwed up Vista's UI, reorganizing things that didn't need to be reorganized--like the networking screens... Under XP you can get to those with a single right-click on the desktop. Under Vista, it's three layers down for no good reason...
So, MS totally messed up the Vista interface, made it more complex to interact with, and made it more confusing... Apple added graphics to make it prettier (which Vista is just as guilty of).
First off, how do you get to networking screens with a single click under XP? (Hint: I just looked at my XP desktop - there's 1 icon on it - the recycling bin. Oh, he left all the crap icons on his desktop? Oops)
Second - with Quicksilver, the network panel is a simple 2 or 3 key strokes away, or a few more that intuitively and naturally follow as you continue typing "network" along with a helpful auto-updating suggest panel right next to your input field. Darn those Apple systems, it's so damn hard when they change things...
Vista Similarity 4: Nuked Networking
This one is just unacceptable (Vista). There's no justification that can possibly be made for this bug. Apple would have to do something along the lines of disconnecting your network every time you hit DNS to be worse than Vista's network stack. Security is a different issue. And honestly, when is MS going to fix their network stack? It's been broken since, well, I think their first shipped stack was somewhere around 88 or 89, and they still haven't ever had a working one. (Check out multi-cast, the answer to IPTV and other streaming media, if only the majority of the systems that could benefit from it weren't totally screwed.
Vista Similarity 5: Bundled Apps as New Features That Suck
Ummm... at least most of the apps that come with OSX are somewhat useful and will get used... unlike what comes on a Vista machine.
But in MS's defense, much of the crapware is installed by the computer OEM - not by MS.
Most OSX installed apps are pretty nice. What do you get with Windows? Well, calculator works half the time, and minesweeper, it's a hit. There's reputedly some solitaire games, and 3D pinball that had a DLL that would do an end run around MS sabotaging way back in the day (why you needed a pinball game DLL to run Word on OS/2 should boggle the mind, sadly, it doesn't). And then there's Paint, probably the most user unfriendly application penned by a college drop out, but widely used none-the-less because everything else for MS either costs a mint or has a learning curve that's just inappropriate for changing the color in 3 pixels twice a year.
Vista crashes. Trust me on that one. It's the primary reason the last guy left out of all I know that tried it is now looking at finding XP drivers for his new HP laptop. Just because you don't have issues doesn't mean there aren't issues. As a counterpoint - my SP1 XP system runs wonderfully going into and out of S3 sleep daily for months while editing 150MB photos or working with 9GB or so worth of video. It's stable as a rock.
Lots of other people have issues with such a setup, but I'd be the last one to tell them they're wrong because mine works wonderfully. Mine only has 15 services running on it, which includes a MySQL instance. I don't have most of the crapware/bloatware many of them have running, and I certainly don't have most of the MS services, especially not that virus vector Windows Update.
From what little I've seen of Vista, trimming it down to such a level is impossible, because some of the problem services (DRM) have been intertwined with the kernel, thus making it impossible to remove. Hence your fubar'd network performance when playing audio files. Actually, that's a pretty interesting bug - what if I have a super long audio file, or one that loops, playing when I log in with a roaming profile? Do I go roam for a while? What if the audio file is on the network share?
is whether Apple will fix most of the issues with 10.5.1 and how long it will be until that's released as compared to Vista, and how long it will take MS to "fix" it.
Considering the levels of brokenness, this is merely a rant, as the summary correctly states.
I don't see this evolution until after Vista, so probably 2012 or 2015. After Vista may be in 2009.... ok, ok, I'm kidding, 2008...
... I believe by the start of 2010:
* Google will be making a "browser OS" much like Sun's Java Desktop and then we will no longer have an OS but a browser OS. Probably use Firefox at first and then other companies will follow ala Linux distro's. Linux small kernel will be underneath. The browser is already a platform. You could easily run some business systems on a linux kernel/X system that is in kiosk mode with a single browser instance serving as a VM.
* All apps will be running in a jailed VM environment and ram/flash will be 1TB range to store the vm apps. I think you're about 5-8 years early on the TB RAM. Why, because once you hit 64GB of RAM.... somehow a bad quote comes to mind... but once you hit 64GB of RAM, you pretty much have most user applications I can think of currently and even extended in 3 years in memory with room to spare. That includes HD editing of full movies, or even cutting and pasting between two movies. Yes, you can expand that to more movies and eat up a lot more RAM, but then you're not really talking standard or even geeky users anymore. But even that aside, generally such tech goes to servers first, and it really hasn't yet. It usually takes 2-4 years for server tech to hit standard PCs. So I think we may see some servers with that capability by then, but that's it. Then there's the cost issue. Even at $1/GB that is a lot of cash for RAM. It would have to be around $0.10 or less, and that's 2 orders of magnitude cheaper than anything today.
* Bootup will take less than 10 seconds because the "OS" files are stored in flash memory. I'd say it'll be less than 1s average, with an occasional 10s reboot.
* PC/Phone/TV/DVR/Radio/all media is now one unit if you want. We are just about there already, the only thing holding us back is that incredible law, the DMCA and it's badly promoted DRM. Without both of those corporate serving pieces, think how far we'd go.
* PC's are will be dirt cheap and/or bundled in TV's or the "phone system" or the "radio" for the people who don't watch TV's. They're already bundled more or less into your DVR and HD DVD players. Yes, I predict Blu-ray for HD playback will fail, purely based on the fact that the tech costs almost twice as much to implement. It will find incredible life in PC systems as the new optical storage standard, and the DVD burner replacement will be BR writers that double up as HD DVD burners for HD video.
* Newspapers will be distributed via a thinner version of the Amazon Kindle so you can also get internet. I think newspapers will be an electronic subscription you read on your unrollable/unfoldable "book" that is wirelessly connected to your cell phone(PDA/PC/etc)
It should be fun unless we blow each other up or get sick and die by the Geese Flu of 2011.... We're certainly living in interesting times.
the.doc monopoly is broken. OOo works pretty well with.doc format. That's why there's a.docx format, and why it's such a pita (that'd be pain in the ass) to save a O2007 doc as a.doc You can't set it as a default, you have to manually change the settings every time, hence my OOo instance on my work laptop. I need to talk to people out in the world..doc is the de facto standard, and.docx just doesn't cut it, nor does the brain dead O2007 configuration and interface.
So, I think you're seeing more than a backlash merely against Vista at the moment. It's also O2007. For those that weren't paying attention, that'd be two strikes in the PC space. I've also been an unfortunate Sharepoint subject. I can attest that whatever anyone says, Sharepoint sucks. Ditto for Groove. And there's the nVidia Quadra drivers on a Dell - apparently they can never keep it straight whether you're attached to a dock or a monitor or standalone coming out of sleep and it's a total crapshoot whether you'll be up or not. (Love my Dell, I really do, why oh why didn't I insist on a mac? The cost was the same.)
You've got to be kidding me. Radio as a whole is the RIAA's member companies' abused puppy.
That's why you get to hear Britney Spears' monotonous raspy falsetto across 5 stations within a 5 minute time-span, even though those stations are supposed to be lite-country-rock (we still can't figure out our format, the RIAA hasn't told us what it is), rock, alternative, poppy-hip-hop, and top40.
But that is exactly the point. They're no longer just considering staying with XP, as that's not a long term solution, hence the change in stance about looking into alternatives outside of MS products. That alone is a huge shift. Whether it's merely an empty threat to brow beat MS into continuing XP support or the precursor of a massive switch in the OS desktop marketshare remains to be seen.
Mail: qmail pretty much rocks. Problems with Exchange start with the JET DB it is built on, and go downhill from there. (Note that this is from the view of operations/support, not so much users unless they need support)
Any iCal standard server is better as they're not running in the "integrated" Exchange JET DB. (did I mention that Exchange's problems start with the JET DB?)
Clients, that's MS's strong point. They managed to put some integration on the client side for proprietary (of course) data and create an interaction between calendaring, email, and address books (the lynch pin). No other client I'm aware of has combined LDAP (address book) with mail and iCal support that I'm aware of, except maybe Apple which still has separate apps.
Vista may actually fail. Businesses are pretty much refusing it to the extent that when asked a year ago about considering alternative OSes, less than 1% said yes. Today, it's roughly 45%. If businesses defect, MS is done.
You also need to consider that MS OSes only run on about one third the servers out there, so there's already a large contingent of IT folks that know *nix systems and how to work with them, making the switch on the desktop even less painful from an admin side. I'll predict Ubuntu's gains along with OOo will make the switch almost entirely painless for most.
Other than that, I agree with your cynicism about people buying MS because it's MS and they'll not get fired for buying MS for people's workstations. However, all my previous companies have either eliminated or are in the process of eliminating the last vestiges of MS software from their production, staging, and QA systems (all those things that support production).
It wasn't so much a tirade as a set of observations, backed by unlinked references (the latter probably hurt my god-hood...;)
The HUGE choir also happens to have a sizable pro-MS contingent that cannot bear anything resembling reasonable facts that throw their chosen system in a bad light, and another very sizable contingent that cannot bear a single sliver of comment showing MS in a "good" light. (The latter is quoted because the best you can say about my comments are that they're left-handed compliments regarding MS)
Actually, they did leverage their exclusive OS OEM contracts to deliver O95 which forced large-scale upgrades to O95 across the board because its proprietary saved file format was incompatible with all other office suites. Since a lot of bosses at the time were getting new machines (back when the maximum 2 year upgrade cycle was in strong force, along with lots of new adopters) all the rank and file had to update too, as there was no way to read the O95 created documents other than via O95. Add on to that that the other major office suites of the time all ran more slowly than O95 solely due to heavy use of undocumented API calls into the OS you'll be hard pressed not to say they cheated, as leveraging one monopoly to establish another definitely falls into the illegal arena.
So they definitely "bundled" Office. They no longer do, because of legal action and the fact that they're already a monopoly and can now charge separately for it. If you doubt this, please explain the 142 copies of O95 certificates that came with Dell machines we used as file servers and ancillary domain controllers, on a GS contract no less. Couldn't get them without O95.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, we could also add a third levy that would add the associated costs to all imports not produced in accordance with US regulations so that items produced in the US to US regulations wouldn't be undercut due to regulation, but that requires a lot of political involvement which would render it inept. The first two would be easier to implement just by virtue of requiring inspection and testing of all imports.
To answer the critics, yes, this assumes some manufacturing would return to the US instead of merely resulting in increased prices for goods while supporting yet more "government". But it certainly would give pause to anyone considering moving out of country just to "save" money on production/labor.
You actually develop to standards with FF/Safari/Opera/whatever supports standards, then throw in the tweaks to get it to render properly in the various versions of IE. That way you don't inadvertently do something stupid like use a proprietary feature of IE to render something in a peculiar (wrong) way that will take forever to break in a standards compliant browser.
And yes, I have done development for a site that supported everything from Netscape 4.7+, IE 4.02+, Opera 7+ and Safari because anything representing even 1% of your potential revenue stream is important, especially when the profit from 1% will easily pay for 10 developers with change left over.
I skimmed over both patents, and they both relate to touch tone dialing and landline operation. I'm not sure how to re-apply that to "wireless" phones that work on digital systems.... The claims themselves are so broad that you would not be able to retrieve any information about your call without stepping on either patent. That would seem to make telephone testing equipment that pre-dates both of these patents by decades enough prior art to invalidate large portions of the patents, so much so, that there's not much left for the actual "patent".
Unless we've moved on... to Macs or Ubuntu for clients, and Linux/Solaris servers.
I know I'm not the only one that's done this, as I see a proliferation of mac book pros sprouting up everywhere among my colleagues.
discussion of the evolution of corn.
odd corruption.
For the speciation argument, check out this discussion of the evolution of corn as we know it today. Another story I can't find at the moment listed 3 gene mutations that caused corn to go from a small seeded multi-branched plant that resembled wheat to what we today know as corn. One gene caused multi-branch to become a single stalk, a second enlarged the seeded area and a third increased the grain size. They're all present in the still flourishing ancestor grass teosinte, but it requires all three to produce the corn we know today. The presence of the single stalk gene was enough to create slightly larger edible ears of corn, and selection beyond that brought out the other two traits.
All in all, very interesting.
Just ask any of those companies that made the news about losing laptops with sensitive data.
I'm sure they wish they could go back in time and hire that $350/hr technician for an entire year, paid in advance.
Well, in the Mac Pro, the equivalent to a PC desktop system, you can upgrade up to 16GB of RAM if you want. You can also switch out the dual cores for quads, and replace the video, optical, and hard drives. About the only thing you must swap out with Apple specific hardware is the motherboard, as OSX (unhacked) is mated to EFI which isn't common yet. Granted, your selections in those components are somewhat limited with OSX out of the box, but if you're willing to play with Darwin drivers, you can get an entire slew of hardware working.
If you're willing to have a hacked OSX system, you can run on standard x86 motherboards, just don't expect support. So if you have an Apple motherboard and supported hardware, you can have a supported copy of OSX.
I've now been waiting 18 years for multi-casting to work on MS's network stack.
Is that long enough to say MS can't fix a bug and to put it far far far outside the Apple response timeframe? (Esp if you consider that the network stacks in both OSes share parentage, well, ok, MS's network stack in NT is a direct ripoff of the parent BSD stack with bugs introduced, but that's another story.)
Odds are that all of those would have resulted in a SP2 instead of an SP1A. IIRC, SP1A was done because they had to remove the JVM. I wasn't aware they threw that much extra into it, probably because I wasn't running OXP, trying to switch users, installing MS dependent software or DX9a, etc etc etc.
I believe Apple is still supporting Panther as they released a security update in July 2007.
Apple generally has an update about every 2 or 3 months. MS does 1 update about every 2 years on average. (we are talking the likes of service packs here, right, not hotfixes which aren't recommeded to be installed unless you're experiencing the problem?) Oh, and you can forget about Windows Update - I don't need MS rewriting my hard drive whenever they feel like it and rebooting my machine while I'm busy.
So I think I'll go with the system that's stable and works vs the one that "needs" daily patches and reboots (when all it really needs to be is configured properly by turning off a slew of "services" and installing some decent software)
To be fair to MS on that one, SP1A was the result of MS losing (thankfully) the legal battle against Sun and having to remove their corrupting JVM from the SP. While I'll bash MS any day of the week, we should only bash them for the things they've actually screwed up - that list is long enough that you won't finish by the time the next release of the OS comes out.
10.5.1 is already released.
That's what happens when you skip checking update for a week or two...Vista Similarity 2: Needless Graphics Glitz
Hmm... may be "needless" but people like them - when done right. Vista radically changed the interface in many areas, making things more confusing - while requiring most of a user's computing power to do so. OSX refined their user interface, and added to it in ways that didnt make doing simple things more confusing... and dont use nearly as much of the CPU/resources to do so...
Apple did make dock changes that I find... pointless, but then, I don't use the dock except as a signaling mechanism. If I only could hide the dock permanently so it didn't popup except via a mouse gesture combined with a key press, I'd be happy with it. Quicksilver is something Apple should just purchase and use instead of the dock or spotlight for launching apps. (Yeah, using spotlight to launch apps isn't the best solution in my book either)Vista Similarity 3: Pointless User Interface "Fixes"
Then there's how Microsoft screwed up Vista's UI, reorganizing things that didn't need to be reorganized--like the networking screens... Under XP you can get to those with a single right-click on the desktop. Under Vista, it's three layers down for no good reason...So, MS totally messed up the Vista interface, made it more complex to interact with, and made it more confusing... Apple added graphics to make it prettier (which Vista is just as guilty of).
First off, how do you get to networking screens with a single click under XP? (Hint: I just looked at my XP desktop - there's 1 icon on it - the recycling bin. Oh, he left all the crap icons on his desktop? Oops)Second - with Quicksilver, the network panel is a simple 2 or 3 key strokes away, or a few more that intuitively and naturally follow as you continue typing "network" along with a helpful auto-updating suggest panel right next to your input field. Darn those Apple systems, it's so damn hard when they change things...
Vista Similarity 4: Nuked Networking
This one is just unacceptable (Vista). There's no justification that can possibly be made for this bug. Apple would have to do something along the lines of disconnecting your network every time you hit DNS to be worse than Vista's network stack. Security is a different issue. And honestly, when is MS going to fix their network stack? It's been broken since, well, I think their first shipped stack was somewhere around 88 or 89, and they still haven't ever had a working one. (Check out multi-cast, the answer to IPTV and other streaming media, if only the majority of the systems that could benefit from it weren't totally screwed.Vista Similarity 5: Bundled Apps as New Features That Suck
Ummm... at least most of the apps that come with OSX are somewhat useful and will get used... unlike what comes on a Vista machine.
But in MS's defense, much of the crapware is installed by the computer OEM - not by MS.
Most OSX installed apps are pretty nice. What do you get with Windows? Well, calculator works half the time, and minesweeper, it's a hit. There's reputedly some solitaire games, and 3D pinball that had a DLL that would do an end run around MS sabotaging way back in the day (why you needed a pinball game DLL to run Word on OS/2 should boggle the mind, sadly, it doesn't). And then there's Paint, probably the most user unfriendly application penned by a college drop out, but widely used none-the-less because everything else for MS either costs a mint or has a learning curve that's just inappropriate for changing the color in 3 pixels twice a year.Vista crashes. Trust me on that one. It's the primary reason the last guy left out of all I know that tried it is now looking at finding XP drivers for his new HP laptop. Just because you don't have issues doesn't mean there aren't issues. As a counterpoint - my SP1 XP system runs wonderfully going into and out of S3 sleep daily for months while editing 150MB photos or working with 9GB or so worth of video. It's stable as a rock.
Lots of other people have issues with such a setup, but I'd be the last one to tell them they're wrong because mine works wonderfully. Mine only has 15 services running on it, which includes a MySQL instance. I don't have most of the crapware/bloatware many of them have running, and I certainly don't have most of the MS services, especially not that virus vector Windows Update.
From what little I've seen of Vista, trimming it down to such a level is impossible, because some of the problem services (DRM) have been intertwined with the kernel, thus making it impossible to remove. Hence your fubar'd network performance when playing audio files. Actually, that's a pretty interesting bug - what if I have a super long audio file, or one that loops, playing when I log in with a roaming profile? Do I go roam for a while? What if the audio file is on the network share?
And it's successor is doomed to be merely reheated Vista leftovers and low-hanging fruit of Panther/Tiger, from the wishlist posted here last week.
is whether Apple will fix most of the issues with 10.5.1 and how long it will be until that's released as compared to Vista, and how long it will take MS to "fix" it.
Considering the levels of brokenness, this is merely a rant, as the summary correctly states.
...I believe by the start of 2010:
* Google will be making a "browser OS" much like Sun's Java Desktop and then we will no longer have an OS
but a browser OS. Probably use Firefox at first and then other companies will follow ala Linux distro's.
Linux small kernel will be underneath. The browser is already a platform. You could easily run some business systems on a linux kernel/X system that is in kiosk mode with a single browser instance serving as a VM. * All apps will be running in a jailed VM environment and ram/flash will be 1TB range to store the vm apps. I think you're about 5-8 years early on the TB RAM. Why, because once you hit 64GB of RAM.... somehow a bad quote comes to mind... but once you hit 64GB of RAM, you pretty much have most user applications I can think of currently and even extended in 3 years in memory with room to spare. That includes HD editing of full movies, or even cutting and pasting between two movies. Yes, you can expand that to more movies and eat up a lot more RAM, but then you're not really talking standard or even geeky users anymore. But even that aside, generally such tech goes to servers first, and it really hasn't yet. It usually takes 2-4 years for server tech to hit standard PCs. So I think we may see some servers with that capability by then, but that's it. Then there's the cost issue. Even at $1/GB that is a lot of cash for RAM. It would have to be around $0.10 or less, and that's 2 orders of magnitude cheaper than anything today. * Bootup will take less than 10 seconds because the "OS" files are stored in flash memory. I'd say it'll be less than 1s average, with an occasional 10s reboot. * PC/Phone/TV/DVR/Radio/all media is now one unit if you want. We are just about there already, the only thing holding us back is that incredible law, the DMCA and it's badly promoted DRM. Without both of those corporate serving pieces, think how far we'd go. * PC's are will be dirt cheap and/or bundled in TV's or the "phone system" or the "radio" for the people who don't
watch TV's. They're already bundled more or less into your DVR and HD DVD players. Yes, I predict Blu-ray for HD playback will fail, purely based on the fact that the tech costs almost twice as much to implement. It will find incredible life in PC systems as the new optical storage standard, and the DVD burner replacement will be BR writers that double up as HD DVD burners for HD video. * Newspapers will be distributed via a thinner version of the Amazon Kindle so you can also get internet. I think newspapers will be an electronic subscription you read on your unrollable/unfoldable "book" that is wirelessly connected to your cell phone(PDA/PC/etc) It should be fun unless we blow each other up or get sick and die by the Geese Flu of 2011.... We're certainly living in interesting times.
the .doc monopoly is broken. OOo works pretty well with .doc format. That's why there's a .docx format, and why it's such a pita (that'd be pain in the ass) to save a O2007 doc as a .doc You can't set it as a default, you have to manually change the settings every time, hence my OOo instance on my work laptop. I need to talk to people out in the world. .doc is the de facto standard, and .docx just doesn't cut it, nor does the brain dead O2007 configuration and interface.
So, I think you're seeing more than a backlash merely against Vista at the moment. It's also O2007. For those that weren't paying attention, that'd be two strikes in the PC space. I've also been an unfortunate Sharepoint subject. I can attest that whatever anyone says, Sharepoint sucks. Ditto for Groove. And there's the nVidia Quadra drivers on a Dell - apparently they can never keep it straight whether you're attached to a dock or a monitor or standalone coming out of sleep and it's a total crapshoot whether you'll be up or not. (Love my Dell, I really do, why oh why didn't I insist on a mac? The cost was the same.)
Yeah, but ACs don't get mod points... and see - I got modded overrated, so the one with mod points won't lose his mod ability.
You've got to be kidding me. Radio as a whole is the RIAA's member companies' abused puppy.
That's why you get to hear Britney Spears' monotonous raspy falsetto across 5 stations within a 5 minute time-span, even though those stations are supposed to be lite-country-rock (we still can't figure out our format, the RIAA hasn't told us what it is), rock, alternative, poppy-hip-hop, and top40.
But that is exactly the point. They're no longer just considering staying with XP, as that's not a long term solution, hence the change in stance about looking into alternatives outside of MS products. That alone is a huge shift. Whether it's merely an empty threat to brow beat MS into continuing XP support or the precursor of a massive switch in the OS desktop marketshare remains to be seen.
Mail: qmail pretty much rocks. Problems with Exchange start with the JET DB it is built on, and go downhill from there. (Note that this is from the view of operations/support, not so much users unless they need support)
Any iCal standard server is better as they're not running in the "integrated" Exchange JET DB. (did I mention that Exchange's problems start with the JET DB?)
Clients, that's MS's strong point. They managed to put some integration on the client side for proprietary (of course) data and create an interaction between calendaring, email, and address books (the lynch pin). No other client I'm aware of has combined LDAP (address book) with mail and iCal support that I'm aware of, except maybe Apple which still has separate apps.
Vista may actually fail. Businesses are pretty much refusing it to the extent that when asked a year ago about considering alternative OSes, less than 1% said yes. Today, it's roughly 45%. If businesses defect, MS is done.
You also need to consider that MS OSes only run on about one third the servers out there, so there's already a large contingent of IT folks that know *nix systems and how to work with them, making the switch on the desktop even less painful from an admin side. I'll predict Ubuntu's gains along with OOo will make the switch almost entirely painless for most.
Other than that, I agree with your cynicism about people buying MS because it's MS and they'll not get fired for buying MS for people's workstations. However, all my previous companies have either eliminated or are in the process of eliminating the last vestiges of MS software from their production, staging, and QA systems (all those things that support production).
It wasn't so much a tirade as a set of observations, backed by unlinked references (the latter probably hurt my god-hood...;)
The HUGE choir also happens to have a sizable pro-MS contingent that cannot bear anything resembling reasonable facts that throw their chosen system in a bad light, and another very sizable contingent that cannot bear a single sliver of comment showing MS in a "good" light. (The latter is quoted because the best you can say about my comments are that they're left-handed compliments regarding MS)
Actually, they did leverage their exclusive OS OEM contracts to deliver O95 which forced large-scale upgrades to O95 across the board because its proprietary saved file format was incompatible with all other office suites. Since a lot of bosses at the time were getting new machines (back when the maximum 2 year upgrade cycle was in strong force, along with lots of new adopters) all the rank and file had to update too, as there was no way to read the O95 created documents other than via O95. Add on to that that the other major office suites of the time all ran more slowly than O95 solely due to heavy use of undocumented API calls into the OS you'll be hard pressed not to say they cheated, as leveraging one monopoly to establish another definitely falls into the illegal arena.
So they definitely "bundled" Office. They no longer do, because of legal action and the fact that they're already a monopoly and can now charge separately for it. If you doubt this, please explain the 142 copies of O95 certificates that came with Dell machines we used as file servers and ancillary domain controllers, on a GS contract no less. Couldn't get them without O95.