I'd be concerned about high-temperature cooking of electronics under back yard conditions. Too many minute-quantity rare/hazardous materials go into their making.
Cook them, make them airborne, and you risk getting cancer for free.
I think MS going this way will be a much bigger landscape changer. Consider: 1. ARM is already powerful enough to run modern desktops (quad-core >1GHz parts). Nowhere nearly as zippy as core-based parts, but functionally sufficient. 2. Jan2007, the PHONE was a DEVICE. Dec2007, the PHONE was an APP. This is about to happen to many desktops. 3. MS announced metro will be underlying UI, but that a traditional desktop windows7-like interface can be launched as neccesary. 4. i. Apple stack: SoC->iDevice[MOSTREVENUE]->OS->App Store,Developer Community,Cloud App Package,Global Carrier Relations
ii. Google stack (inc. Motorola): stack: Baseband->SoC->Android Device->OS->App Store,Developer Community,Cloud App Package[MOSTREVENUE],Global Carrier Relations
iii. MS (inc. Nokia) stack in 2 years: Baseband->SoC->Win8 Device->OS->Cloud App Package,Global Carrier Relations,DESKTOP developer community brought over by unifying mobile/desktop platforms.
Microsoft has a one-up tho (on Google, not on Apple, Apple's doing their version of the same thing): desktop-in-an-app.
We will, of course, judge by execution (microsoft doesn't have a particularly good track record of doing NEW stuff), but it definitely hauls their powerhouse strengths - desktop & Office - straight in the middle where the battle is still raging. Might even make them relevant again.
Some points here - 1. A VERY substantial part of the productivity apps are made by microsoft. If they can compile Windows for ARM, they sure as hell can do so with Office, Project, Visio and what not. And once they move, well, vendors will too. Remember what happened when they turned UAC on by default on home PCs? Initially some chaos ensued, the vendors that were doing stuff outside your filesystem userspace miserably broke, and MS had to herd them all to step back in line, because Hey, grandma's computer now had permissions and sudo. They've managed this kind of thing in the past and can do so in the future.
1.5 When there's a windows for ARM, Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE has windows-arm compilation target and your clients want ARM variants of your software, why wouldn't you give it to them? (yes, more QA and another branch to maintain. Big whoop.)
2. I agree in that there won't be one UI to suit both touch and KB/mouse at the same time. It doesn't make sense.
3. The UI is not as thick a layer of the overall software as you imagine. You can have an ARM rig running an OS and/or a piece of software that has two UI's - one for touch, the other for KB/Mouse. KDE 4 has been doing this for a while. Your device will run the program, give you a (more cumbersome) UI if you're on a train and looking at your Win8 phone, but fire up into a UI that resembles Win7 once you slap it in its dock on your desk in front of the big screen and lay your hands on the keyboard. Like KDE, I think an OS will be able to switch to and deliver the appropriate UI on whatever device it runs and making it capable of switching depending on the hardware in play at any specific moment is not, as a colleague of mine likes to say, rocket surgery.
4. You can also get creative. Like have the OS vendor's IDE compile every program or library twice to both targets, lump them together in a single universal binary and ship that to be everywhere. And have the OS break it down at runtime and only load to RAM the appropriate part. Diskspace taken up by your binaries is the least of your concerns. Then you can be running on either ARM or x86, have hybrid rigs that carry one of each CPU, hybrid CPUs/Soc's that can be either big-rig x86 or ARM depending on the environment and all manner of other cool stuff.
The slave and master analogy is a bit misleading because it lumps document storage and processing together and creates this false dichotomy of dumb powerless nodes vs thick clients. Reality just doesn't look like that anymore.
The phone will have processing (needed for an acceptable snappy UI, and because we need some form of CPU to drive it and even the cheapest/smallest ones are plenty powerful and growing by the day), will have local storage for OS and cloud-cached local storage (needed because the device cannot be assured to always have connectivity) and have authoritative copies of their data backed up to a cloud backend (beacuse, as you rightly pointed out, people lose phones).
The trick is to offer the cloud not as a per-app thing (where my contact list app accesses and locally cache my google address book) but integrated below the filesystem access calls (tho perhaps above the filesystem itself, or perhaps not)
If you've watched the June Apple keynote, Apple is driving in exactly that direction - extending the local filesystem and file storage API's given to applications to extend to their cloud. Expect Google and MS to follow, both know about OS kernels, datacenters and pipes and can do this easily enough, and they'll need to feature-match it.
X is just a conduit to stream a console over a network. Doesn't actually which apps you intend to stream and where are they going to come from. Google docs is a decade behind.
The big question here is "can you meet, or at least approach, the 'WinXP, MS Office and misc X86 apps for windows' bar on Android running on ARM?" It's the hardware to drive it, the OS to drive it, the applications and in many cases a way to tie into legacy stuff.
So here's the thing. Big tech is all about the verticals nowadays. Here's my future.
Apple showed us how it's done - having the CPU, the iDevice, the OS, developing carrier relations, an app store, a lot of apps and a developer community, and now a cross-device cloud service. Apple makes most of its money from the devices by the way.
Google's not letting down. After Eric Shmidt and Larry Page had their disagreement on whether Google should be fleshing out its own stack or consolidating around its "core business" (see Yahoo for why I believe that's a BAD strategy), Eric left and Larry went to work. They thought about their stack - same stack as Apple only top-down and with only part of the components - the cloud services, the OS, the app store and developer community, and its minor foray into the device business.
So they bought all the stack components they were missing in one lean and mean acquisition of virtually all 'things' Motorola - the solid carrier relations worldwide, a device making capability, the "defensive" patent portfolio - and they even one-upped Apple - they got another rung down - they now make the baseband too.
And here's where the big surprise rolled in.
Microsoft Windows 8.
Windows? In the mobile space? Weren't they late to the party? Aren't they dragging their feet with some distant relative of PocketPC? Wasn't their buddy Nokia about to be decimated and dismembered with cheaper ~350$ iPhone models and cheap Androids in some 100 countries with no carrier subsidies? You know, those places where Nokia still sells more phones than everyone else in the world combined? Those places where nobody buys 500$ phones? Apple and Google are still going to take them to pieces, right? You know, Apple driving a cloud software package and "Cord-free" in those same countries where many people don't have enough money for both a PC and a phone?
Well... just hang on for a second and let's think about it like rational geeks who pertain to understand why Android and iPhone changed the market. So don't sell your microsoft stock just yet. Looks like they've been thinking it through. REAL hard.
Remember how in 2007 a "phone" was a device? As was the music player, the GPS and to some extent the camera? Today, just like the others, the phone is an app. Sure, we call the device a "phone", but that's just legacy that stuck. Almost like calling a computer a typewriter. It's a rabidly multi-dimensional device. It's a web node, a tricorder, a content delivery platform and a bank terminal. And so much more. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
All this to say, a phone is an app.
So it's 2007 all over again, only now it's Microsoft actually doing something/different/ for the first time in 24 years. It's their defining iPhone moment.
It's all in the PC, stupid - it got commoditized, all but forgotten, but it still does al the heavy hauling of our actual work.
And on the new breed of mobile devices - "phones", tablets and whatever follows, it is, if Microsoft have their way, going to become, plain and simple, an app.
And not just any app mind you. It'll be the killer app that will allow a lot of people to drop their desktop or laptop.
You'll hook your phone or tablet up to a screen and a keyboard (with or without cables), or not, launch said app, and do your word, excel, visio and other work stuff. When you close this app, under it all will be a mobile OS UI on-par (one would hope) with iOS and Android.
Cute, but where's microsoft going to conjure the entire stack needed to pull this off? It ain't a single-layer market anymore where you can get by as a big player making just the OS or just the device....
Microsoft isn't as bad as you'd think in their stack. They have handsets, basebands and carrier relations covered by their now best buddy Nokia, both them and Nokia have access to CPUs, they have a mobile OS that unlike Blackberry, webOS etc is actually competent, with a new kernel and the
That's some good ideas. Hope Gabe gets around to reading this (I've emailed him, both with the original post quoted verbatim, and also linked this sub-thread and recommended he go through the comments as well).
One concern I had after reading your suggestions is 'scope of penalty in case of abuse'.
Let's say you manage one billing account, and three gamer accounts - you and your two kids. One of your kids does something seriously unsocial in an MMO - say he gets caught cheating or something similar.
The system should affect his gamer account adversely, but should NOT affect the billing account and the family library in a way that would impact the other gamers without giving some form of "slap-on-the-wrist" warning first (say, a three-strikes-and-you're-out system). Voiding/Cooloff on the kid's gaming account is useful for offenders who care about their account etc, but not so useful to the cheater that would just create another account under his billing one and go at it again. You do need to ultimately be able to penalize the billing account, but you also need to show consideration that there are other not-guilty people there too and let the guy who manages the account some room to maneuver, specifically if you're pitching to parents. If you want them to trust, respect and pay you, you need to convince them you're on their side.
If the store voids the entire billing account or the game library on a single offense (serious as it may be), and my other kid - a 5yo - comes back crying because he just had stuff taken away for something he did not do, you probably won't (ever) see me (the guy who pays) coming back to do more business because I'll perceive you as irresponsible and inconsiderate, not only towards my innocent kid, but to me by making my life as a parent harder than it needs to be. Sure, I'll take care of the offending kid, but creating an unnecessary front for me with the innocent kid means I don't respect the store anymore.
Flagging the billing account with a strike, and locking the account out only if you get more than so-many strikes inside a, say, 3-year period, seems reasonable enough to keep the "serial offender" billing accounts at bay while giving the families enough slack to retain them as satisfied paying customers over the long haul.
A friend microbiologist calls this an "evolutionarily stable strategy". Something you can do for a long time without the occasional statistical blip blowing you out of the water in an irreparable way.
It's not hard. Just have a look at how most first-world countries regulate driver-license suspension on traffic offenses.
>> How would steam prevent you handing that one family account to several households and letting 15 people play under it at once?
By limiting the number of steam accounts per billing account to a reasonable number (say, 5 or so, it's at their discretion), and having a fee (that would make it a same-benefit-with-more-hassle option for the public you named).
The whole model is a cross-industry standard. Just like, let's see: * Managing multiple cars under a toll-road family account via a web interface? * Managing multiple SIM cards under a cell company family account via a web interface? * Managing multiple bank accounts under a single "person" account? * Etc Etc Etc
Everyone everywhere has long since come to the realization that "in-family" micromanagement [a] Is a requirement and needs to happen, or else consumers will go get their service from someone else who does offer it [b] It's stupid to employ call center people and expensive/cumbersome mechanics to do it when you can just give people a web interface and reasonable freedom in managing their own corner of the world in a way that doesn't interfere with business. [c] If you respect consumer's time and make their life easy, they respect and like you. [d] A family account with multiple members, uninhibited by cumbersome mechanics, has less snags between wanting something and paying for it. It ultimately spends more.
Simple If everyone is selling a tomato for 1$, and historically it's been sold for 1$ (tho in the past with 5$ packaging now made obsolete by technology), making people pay 1$ for it multiple times based on an flakily-enforceable pseudo-honesty system is unrealistic and ultimately bad for your business.
1. Many people will opt not to pay you multiple times (in their mind, they paid for it once, they rightly deserve to be able to do with it what they can do with the 1$ offering from every other competitor). 2. If you somehow manage to semi-identify these users and allow them to still use the tomato but get a somewhat degraded user experience... that degraded user experience just became your de-facto product to every frugal parent who has more important things to do with his money.
It's just bad business.
Shai Agassi of Better Place fame made a good related point - that Coca-Cola is a 99% margin business. Some very bright individual in history decided to use bad sugar rather than good sugar in their secret recipe, saving a bit and making it a 99.3% margin business. That decision cost Coca-Cola mountains of popularity, with many people who could have been potential clients outright avoiding the drink altogether.
You need to know where you're saving and where your destructive bean-counting habit is costing you single or double digits in next year's growth. Sometimes, it just makes more financial sense not to.
Something you may be aware of is the increase in popularity in gaming over the past several decades. That translates into more households with more than one gamer, and more households with more than one gaming generation. I game, my kids game, I have many friends whose partner games.
As an individual steam user, I find your prices generally reasonable, your service adds enough value (ignoring ethics and judging strictly from a convenience perspective) to justify paying you and using it over the hassles of both piracy and retail. Good job to you and your team on getting (me) there.
However, I, like many geeks of my generation, have now evolved into a family of five, and am no longer an individual steam user.
This is where the problems start, and you push me, your customer, away. Why? Because I'm a dad, and my gang all play.
For the sake of making a point, I will ignore 'offline mode' because the games we care about are online.
Here are the options you give me:
Option 1. Have one steam account per person, and either buy many copies of each title (or, I am told, go through a cumbersome process that costs 10$ processing fee to have your support move the title between accounts, this option is too painful to be practical. ).
Insisting I have a separate per-game license for each kid makes sense and is fair if we will be playing concurrently (and it is A-OK for you to sell us a 'borderlands 4-pack'. I'll buy it.). This makes no sense if I'm done playing a game, uninstall it, and my kid wants to have a go. Realistically, you're dreaming if you think you'll get me to pay twice. You'll either give me a way to let my kid use it, or I'll take my business elsewhere to GOG or direct2drive or retail, because they will.
Option 2. Have one account for what I'll tell you is/me/, but what in reality will be the whole family. I won't tell, you won't know. Sadly, that means that two computers on my home network can't be "on steam" at the same time, and I can't play online game X while my kid plays online game Y. Plus, it'll get all my steam achievements gunked up with my kid's ones. I don't want that. Force me down this route and, again, I'll go.
Option 3. I'll create a separate steam account for every game I purchase. This will make your product into a very inconvenient one with a flaky user experience, no achievement history etc, and I'll take my business elsewhere. Too much hassle.
Here's the news. An entire gaming generation is now very busy having their children reach gaming age.
You can put some weight behind those brave words you said. The solution is dead obvious.
The recipe is: 1. One family "billing account" (that's a BILLING account, not an application account you sign into steam with) with a single billing method. If a single billing method isn't enough to deter most of the unrelated people from pooling into a "pretend family" account and costing you potential revenue (it probably would be enough, and while you may lose a bit of immediate revenue, you will make huge gains in customer loyalty by trusting them), then put your thinking cap on and figure out how to structure a plan to include real families that count money together and exclude most of the freeloaders. You have smart people working for you. 2. ONE family-wide game/license library. 3. Several "gamer" steam accounts, one per real person managed by the billing contact (the guy with the credit card who vets the games, aka the parent), without needing to involve you. That's what web interfaces (or your application) are for. These steam accounts should all be able to go online concurrently, and can all have their own (SEPARATE) steam achievements, and can be use different games at the same time. If they want multiple people to be playing the same game at the same time (that thing we call co-op play is very popular in families btw) they need to purchase and own multiple licenses. Keep 2-pack, 3-pack and 4-pack deals coming. Yes, this will mean you may have sev
The basic premises of the Matrix is fundamentally flawed. Why the ^%$^ would you grow humans when you can grow, you know, YEAST, for much more benefit at a fraction of a hassle?
Water is not addictive, and consuming it in ever increasing quantities doesn't irrationally affect human judgment on how much we should consume. I don't know of any cases of people who drowned because they got addicted to water. Sugar, OTOH, is VERY addictive, and as one consumes more of it, the common sense circuitry in (some) human brains shorts out (much like with what we term 'drugs') and instructs the body to consume ever more, to the point of radically shortened lifespan, radically-decreased mobility, extreme susceptibility to illness, and all other manners of self-harm.
This is a shared trait with, let's see, Cigarettes? Heroin? Alcohol? All of the above?
So while the linguistic nazis are right and it may not be a drug by the strict definition of the word (because it very much is a nutrient), it also most definitely shares the one key characteristic with drugs - the very one that makes us consider them dangerous to society, and subsequently vigorously regulate them.
Maybe we need to coin a new term to group substances that addict us, harm our judgement, cause us to overconsume them, and are detrimental to society, that will encompass both food and drugs. Maybe "Bad adictive shit".
But since "drugs" already carries the ethical weight of "bad addictive shit", expect it to be hijacked right left and center to depict non-drug-substances too. Kinda like using that carry the ethical weight & connotation of rape, murder and pillaging on the high seas to depict violating copyright (except in the sugar case, for a somewhat nobler cause).
Besides, anyone who thinks the linguistics meta-point is more important & discussion-worthy than "America, and the world in general, has an unhealthy abusive relationship with sugar" point seriously needs to have his priority-setting gray matter looked at by a professional.
... in the last 3 large organizations I've worked for (which have all been VERY linux-friendly), the midrange space (which, globally, is substantially larger than the supercomputer space as requiring such a fleet is a necessity for any large organization nowadays irrespective of industry or specialized number-crunching needs)... [a] The windows admin team was as large as the linux/UNIX team. [b] 66% of the server (1000's of servers) fleet was NT-based. This Linux-Windows spread is governed by commercial vendor support matrixes, in some casses vendor software performance, and nearly always bottom lines (with per-project varying results), not a pro-/anti- open-source religion, so there's a sweet spot it's gravitating to that's neither 100/0 or 0/100. [c] Specialist-quality in Windows-land (where the specialists are paid in the ballparks that we linux mob expect to be paid), they know their shit. They can script as well as we do, they understand LDAP, DNS, mail and file servers, they know their hardware, they know their comms, they can troubleshoot well and will pull a packet sniffer as quickly as we do, and they think the same (bad) things we do of ye olde server apps that run with a GUI in a logged-in console that needs to be checked every morning, they understand and can implement security on their platform, and if you throw something like ESX 3.x their way (with an underlying linux OS to manage the host) they don't shit a brick, they sit with the doco and figure the thing out. In my experience, with a pay-bracket as a basis for comparison, they're competent. [d] The OS platform itself, from a driving-forward maintained-project perspective, is alive and kicking - Server 2008 introduced clustering (from having spent nearly a year with pacemaker on SLES11 in the last place I worked, I daresay MS's in-OS clustering offering may very well be better than Novell's half-baked offering), an infiniband stack, etc etc.
If you work in any reasonably-large organization (think any big retail brand in any industry you care to mention) Microsoft is anything BUT "a puppy", even if in some smaller shops, specifically the subset of which have ready access to lots of cheap linux/unix admin capability (universities, technology startups that employ coders, websites and misc other IT companies a-la ISP's come to mind), windows is very visibly absent. I daresay that between companies that sell credit-rating services, shampoo, shelf-space in a supermarket, banking, camper-vans, insurance, auditing services or batteries (and everything in between) these are a small minority. The rest hire PM's, a wintel team, a UNIX team, a dba team, a comms team and a SAN team, and rely heavily on supported vendor software.
I daresay MS get amply compensated for every one of those server licenses they sell.
... and what would have happened then? The Lybian economy would have rocketed to outshine the Swedish one? Civil liberties would have been instated the next day? Or maybe one of Khadaffi's sons/henchmen would have just superceded him for a slightly-different flavour of the same despotic gunk?
Americans occasionally don't seem to get something. "Beatings will continue until morale improves" does NOT work. You can't liberate countries from their despots if you're an outside party. This needs to be driven and settled from within, by their own people, without help if at all possible (tho in the present 'damned if you do damned if you don't' situation, I reckon it's good they are helping tip it, but even more important that it's the Libyans themselves who are driving it.
When it gets driven from the outside, you end up standing in the middle of a civil war, and fully responsible for its outcome, with far-reaching reprecussions if you leave the task unfinished, and with both sides ultimately blaming you. (I think this concept is referred to as "Iraq" in American English). On the bright side, the current US president turned out to handle the current crisis much much better, galvanizing support from the world (especially noteworthy - the ARAB world) with what may end up much better results and much less collateral to US reputation and alienation in the business world. Good on'im (and ye'all).
Re:Similar Revolts Contrary to the "We don't know" answers you will get from people, I will give you a definitive one. Bahrain, Yemen and Saudi Arabia will not see similar revolts. They may not see revolts at all, but if they do, their revolts will be anything but similar. In a nutshell, the Northern African nations (Tunisia, Libya, Egypt) as well as Iran are nations where the revolutionaries genuinely want more freedom.
The Saudi peninsula, where the next rounds of revolution are cooking, are VERY different. The worst of the lot would probably be Yemen. The revolutionaries you're seeing there are extremist Shiites, in no small part being stirred by the fingers of the oppressive Iranian regime who want to extend their reach and establish like-minded regimes in the surrounding countries (like they did in Lebanon via their cooky foreign-sponsored-sovereign-political-party-with-its-very-own-army-inside-the-Lebanese-government-who-answers-to-foreign-interests Hezbollah).
In those countries, if revolutions happen, it's bad for everyone in the west, and not least for people in those very nations who genuinely want civil liberties (and will get their fair share of Iranian-flavored "civil liberties" were a shia-driven revolution would happen).
The US has done a very smart thing by pushing a policy that rewards current ("relatively OK" - read: not-religious-fruitcake) regimes with $$$ for applying social reforms, while keeping them in power so a wave of radical Islam doesn't wash over them.
Revolutions are a tricky thing. The vast majority end badly, with violent, autocratic, cleptocratic, despotic, dysfunctional regimes. I can only hope the three that were triggered so far not only destroy something bad - but replace it with something good.
There are (still) no truly-functional first-world democracies in the Arab world (I said Arab, not Muslim, before you jump at me) I'm hoping this sad reality changes soon. We could always use more sane regimes on this planet.
It's not just about letting forces communicate and/or let evidence of atrocities leak out.
It's about connecting these people with expectations from government. All that youtubing and facebooking and tweeting gets the word out about how governments of strong successful nations function.
It's the one big thing that *might* prevent these revolutions going down the same shithole most others, from Cuba to Iran to Lebanon to Libya 40 years ago - have gone. Straight into the hands of a just marginally different oppressive, violent and/or otherwise dysfunctional regime.
Continue letting people in there, even a marginal percentage of them, talk with the outside, communicate, let them know where the right paths and the wrong paths from where they are lead, allow them to sidestep the mistakes other emerging nations made and they might stand a chance. Send them weapons and they'll just end up with another four decades and two generations of backwards third world gunk that some irresponsible party instated with these weapons. Guns just don't solve everything.
.. so when 50 people cluster up to block a gate to a factory that is only 10-people-wide, causing disruption to the operation of the factory, it's an 'attack'?
-please- get off the sensationalist/alarmist bandwagon where everyone insists on applying martial vocabulary to anything-wikileaks related, irrespective of which side you're on. A parking offense is not 'an attack on a street corner' or an 'attack on a municipality'. It's a parking offense.
I tend to disagree. If the story is there, not only will said bloggers get through the door, the door will get through them (in a bid to get there before the competing door).
That's closer to an answer to my original question.
If it can be released truly anonymously and in a technically-unstoppable way, why (short of feeding JA's need for drama at the expense of personal risk etc) does anyone need WL's entire public front?
Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier for them to operate when there's nothing targetable?
I assure you the Guardian and Der Spiegel would pay the same amount of attention to those cables and comparable material if they had to sit down someone to manually un-translate it from Swahili, let alone obtain them through a more technically involved process.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be concerned about high-temperature cooking of electronics under back yard conditions.
Too many minute-quantity rare/hazardous materials go into their making.
Cook them, make them airborne, and you risk getting cancer for free.
I wrote a long post recently on this.
I think MS going this way will be a much bigger landscape changer.
Consider:
1. ARM is already powerful enough to run modern desktops (quad-core >1GHz parts). Nowhere nearly as zippy as core-based parts, but functionally sufficient.
2. Jan2007, the PHONE was a DEVICE. Dec2007, the PHONE was an APP. This is about to happen to many desktops.
3. MS announced metro will be underlying UI, but that a traditional desktop windows7-like interface can be launched as neccesary.
4.
i. Apple stack: SoC->iDevice[MOSTREVENUE]->OS->App Store,Developer Community,Cloud App Package,Global Carrier Relations
ii. Google stack (inc. Motorola): stack: Baseband->SoC->Android Device->OS->App Store,Developer Community,Cloud App Package[MOSTREVENUE],Global Carrier Relations
iii. MS (inc. Nokia) stack in 2 years: Baseband->SoC->Win8 Device->OS->Cloud App Package,Global Carrier Relations,DESKTOP developer community brought over by unifying mobile/desktop platforms.
Microsoft has a one-up tho (on Google, not on Apple, Apple's doing their version of the same thing): desktop-in-an-app.
We will, of course, judge by execution (microsoft doesn't have a particularly good track record of doing NEW stuff), but it definitely hauls their powerhouse strengths - desktop & Office - straight in the middle where the battle is still raging. Might even make them relevant again.
If you can do it simply with air can you do it with liquids?
Some points here -
1. A VERY substantial part of the productivity apps are made by microsoft. If they can compile Windows for ARM, they sure as hell can do so with Office, Project, Visio and what not. And once they move, well, vendors will too. Remember what happened when they turned UAC on by default on home PCs? Initially some chaos ensued, the vendors that were doing stuff outside your filesystem userspace miserably broke, and MS had to herd them all to step back in line, because Hey, grandma's computer now had permissions and sudo. They've managed this kind of thing in the past and can do so in the future.
1.5 When there's a windows for ARM, Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE has windows-arm compilation target and your clients want ARM variants of your software, why wouldn't you give it to them? (yes, more QA and another branch to maintain. Big whoop.)
2. I agree in that there won't be one UI to suit both touch and KB/mouse at the same time. It doesn't make sense.
3. The UI is not as thick a layer of the overall software as you imagine. You can have an ARM rig running an OS and/or a piece of software that has two UI's - one for touch, the other for KB/Mouse. KDE 4 has been doing this for a while. Your device will run the program, give you a (more cumbersome) UI if you're on a train and looking at your Win8 phone, but fire up into a UI that resembles Win7 once you slap it in its dock on your desk in front of the big screen and lay your hands on the keyboard.
Like KDE, I think an OS will be able to switch to and deliver the appropriate UI on whatever device it runs and making it capable of switching depending on the hardware in play at any specific moment is not, as a colleague of mine likes to say, rocket surgery.
4. You can also get creative. Like have the OS vendor's IDE compile every program or library twice to both targets, lump them together in a single universal binary and ship that to be everywhere. And have the OS break it down at runtime and only load to RAM the appropriate part. Diskspace taken up by your binaries is the least of your concerns. Then you can be running on either ARM or x86, have hybrid rigs that carry one of each CPU, hybrid CPUs/Soc's that can be either big-rig x86 or ARM depending on the environment and all manner of other cool stuff.
The slave and master analogy is a bit misleading because it lumps document storage and processing together and creates this false dichotomy of dumb powerless nodes vs thick clients. Reality just doesn't look like that anymore.
The phone will have processing (needed for an acceptable snappy UI, and because we need some form of CPU to drive it and even the cheapest/smallest ones are plenty powerful and growing by the day), will have local storage for OS and cloud-cached local storage (needed because the device cannot be assured to always have connectivity) and have authoritative copies of their data backed up to a cloud backend (beacuse, as you rightly pointed out, people lose phones).
The trick is to offer the cloud not as a per-app thing (where my contact list app accesses and locally cache my google address book) but integrated below the filesystem access calls (tho perhaps above the filesystem itself, or perhaps not)
If you've watched the June Apple keynote, Apple is driving in exactly that direction - extending the local filesystem and file storage API's given to applications to extend to their cloud. Expect Google and MS to follow, both know about OS kernels, datacenters and pipes and can do this easily enough, and they'll need to feature-match it.
X is just a conduit to stream a console over a network. Doesn't actually which apps you intend to stream and where are they going to come from.
Google docs is a decade behind.
The big question here is "can you meet, or at least approach, the 'WinXP, MS Office and misc X86 apps for windows' bar on Android running on ARM?"
It's the hardware to drive it, the OS to drive it, the applications and in many cases a way to tie into legacy stuff.
So here's the thing. Big tech is all about the verticals nowadays. Here's my future.
Apple showed us how it's done - having the CPU, the iDevice, the OS, developing carrier relations, an app store, a lot of apps and a developer community, and now a cross-device cloud service. Apple makes most of its money from the devices by the way.
Google's not letting down. After Eric Shmidt and Larry Page had their disagreement on whether Google should be fleshing out its own stack or consolidating around its "core business" (see Yahoo for why I believe that's a BAD strategy), Eric left and Larry went to work. They thought about their stack - same stack as Apple only top-down and with only part of the components - the cloud services, the OS, the app store and developer community, and its minor foray into the device business.
So they bought all the stack components they were missing in one lean and mean acquisition of virtually all 'things' Motorola - the solid carrier relations worldwide, a device making capability, the "defensive" patent portfolio - and they even one-upped Apple - they got another rung down - they now make the baseband too.
And here's where the big surprise rolled in.
Microsoft Windows 8.
Windows? In the mobile space? Weren't they late to the party? Aren't they dragging their feet with some distant relative of PocketPC? Wasn't their buddy Nokia about to be decimated and dismembered with cheaper ~350$ iPhone models and cheap Androids in some 100 countries with no carrier subsidies? You know, those places where Nokia still sells more phones than everyone else in the world combined? Those places where nobody buys 500$ phones?
Apple and Google are still going to take them to pieces, right? You know, Apple driving a cloud software package and "Cord-free" in those same countries where many people don't have enough money for both a PC and a phone?
Well... just hang on for a second and let's think about it like rational geeks who pertain to understand why Android and iPhone changed the market.
So don't sell your microsoft stock just yet. Looks like they've been thinking it through. REAL hard.
Remember how in 2007 a "phone" was a device? As was the music player, the GPS and to some extent the camera? Today, just like the others, the phone is an app. Sure, we call the device a "phone", but that's just legacy that stuck. Almost like calling a computer a typewriter. It's a rabidly multi-dimensional device. It's a web node, a tricorder, a content delivery platform and a bank terminal. And so much more. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
All this to say, a phone is an app.
So it's 2007 all over again, only now it's Microsoft actually doing something /different/ for the first time in 24 years. It's their defining iPhone moment.
It's all in the PC, stupid - it got commoditized, all but forgotten, but it still does al the heavy hauling of our actual work.
And on the new breed of mobile devices - "phones", tablets and whatever follows, it is, if Microsoft have their way, going to become, plain and simple, an app.
And not just any app mind you. It'll be the killer app that will allow a lot of people to drop their desktop or laptop.
You'll hook your phone or tablet up to a screen and a keyboard (with or without cables), or not, launch said app, and do your word, excel, visio and other work stuff. When you close this app, under it all will be a mobile OS UI on-par (one would hope) with iOS and Android.
Cute, but where's microsoft going to conjure the entire stack needed to pull this off? It ain't a single-layer market anymore where you can get by as a big player making just the OS or just the device....
Microsoft isn't as bad as you'd think in their stack. They have handsets, basebands and carrier relations covered by their now best buddy Nokia, both them and Nokia have access to CPUs, they have a mobile OS that unlike Blackberry, webOS etc is actually competent, with a new kernel and the
The average gamer, as identified through PAID software demographics, is 37.
Put otherwise, the average PAYING gamer is 37.
That's some good ideas. Hope Gabe gets around to reading this (I've emailed him, both with the original post quoted verbatim, and also linked this sub-thread and recommended he go through the comments as well).
One concern I had after reading your suggestions is 'scope of penalty in case of abuse'.
Let's say you manage one billing account, and three gamer accounts - you and your two kids.
One of your kids does something seriously unsocial in an MMO - say he gets caught cheating or something similar.
The system should affect his gamer account adversely, but should NOT affect the billing account and the family library in a way that would impact the other gamers without giving some form of "slap-on-the-wrist" warning first (say, a three-strikes-and-you're-out system). Voiding/Cooloff on the kid's gaming account is useful for offenders who care about their account etc, but not so useful to the cheater that would just create another account under his billing one and go at it again. You do need to ultimately be able to penalize the billing account, but you also need to show consideration that there are other not-guilty people there too and let the guy who manages the account some room to maneuver, specifically if you're pitching to parents. If you want them to trust, respect and pay you, you need to convince them you're on their side.
If the store voids the entire billing account or the game library on a single offense (serious as it may be), and my other kid - a 5yo - comes back crying because he just had stuff taken away for something he did not do, you probably won't (ever) see me (the guy who pays) coming back to do more business because I'll perceive you as irresponsible and inconsiderate, not only towards my innocent kid, but to me by making my life as a parent harder than it needs to be. Sure, I'll take care of the offending kid, but creating an unnecessary front for me with the innocent kid means I don't respect the store anymore.
Flagging the billing account with a strike, and locking the account out only if you get more than so-many strikes inside a, say, 3-year period, seems reasonable enough to keep the "serial offender" billing accounts at bay while giving the families enough slack to retain them as satisfied paying customers over the long haul.
A friend microbiologist calls this an "evolutionarily stable strategy". Something you can do for a long time without the occasional statistical blip blowing you out of the water in an irreparable way.
It's not hard. Just have a look at how most first-world countries regulate driver-license suspension on traffic offenses.
Thank you.
Sent.
>> How would steam prevent you handing that one family account to several households and letting 15 people play under it at once?
By limiting the number of steam accounts per billing account to a reasonable number (say, 5 or so, it's at their discretion), and having a fee (that would make it a same-benefit-with-more-hassle option for the public you named).
The whole model is a cross-industry standard. Just like, let's see:
* Managing multiple cars under a toll-road family account via a web interface?
* Managing multiple SIM cards under a cell company family account via a web interface?
* Managing multiple bank accounts under a single "person" account?
* Etc Etc Etc
Everyone everywhere has long since come to the realization that "in-family" micromanagement
[a] Is a requirement and needs to happen, or else consumers will go get their service from someone else who does offer it
[b] It's stupid to employ call center people and expensive/cumbersome mechanics to do it when you can just give people a web interface and reasonable freedom in managing their own corner of the world in a way that doesn't interfere with business.
[c] If you respect consumer's time and make their life easy, they respect and like you.
[d] A family account with multiple members, uninhibited by cumbersome mechanics, has less snags between wanting something and paying for it. It ultimately spends more.
Simple
If everyone is selling a tomato for 1$, and historically it's been sold for 1$ (tho in the past with 5$ packaging now made obsolete by technology), making people pay 1$ for it multiple times based on an flakily-enforceable pseudo-honesty system is unrealistic and ultimately bad for your business.
1. Many people will opt not to pay you multiple times (in their mind, they paid for it once, they rightly deserve to be able to do with it what they can do with the 1$ offering from every other competitor).
2. If you somehow manage to semi-identify these users and allow them to still use the tomato but get a somewhat degraded user experience... that degraded user experience just became your de-facto product to every frugal parent who has more important things to do with his money.
It's just bad business.
Shai Agassi of Better Place fame made a good related point - that Coca-Cola is a 99% margin business.
Some very bright individual in history decided to use bad sugar rather than good sugar in their secret recipe, saving a bit and making it a 99.3% margin business.
That decision cost Coca-Cola mountains of popularity, with many people who could have been potential clients outright avoiding the drink altogether.
You need to know where you're saving and where your destructive bean-counting habit is costing you single or double digits in next year's growth.
Sometimes, it just makes more financial sense not to.
Something you may be aware of is the increase in popularity in gaming over the past several decades.
That translates into more households with more than one gamer, and more households with more than one gaming generation.
I game, my kids game, I have many friends whose partner games.
As an individual steam user, I find your prices generally reasonable, your service adds enough value (ignoring ethics and judging strictly from a convenience perspective) to justify paying you and using it over the hassles of both piracy and retail. Good job to you and your team on getting (me) there.
However, I, like many geeks of my generation, have now evolved into a family of five, and am no longer an individual steam user.
This is where the problems start, and you push me, your customer, away. Why? Because I'm a dad, and my gang all play.
For the sake of making a point, I will ignore 'offline mode' because the games we care about are online.
Here are the options you give me:
Option 1. Have one steam account per person, and either buy many copies of each title
(or, I am told, go through a cumbersome process that costs 10$ processing fee to have your support move the title between accounts, this option is too painful to be practical. ).
Insisting I have a separate per-game license for each kid makes sense and is fair if we will be playing concurrently (and it is A-OK for you to sell us a 'borderlands 4-pack'. I'll buy it.).
This makes no sense if I'm done playing a game, uninstall it, and my kid wants to have a go. Realistically, you're dreaming if you think you'll get me to pay twice. You'll either give me a way to let my kid use it, or I'll take my business elsewhere to GOG or direct2drive or retail, because they will.
Option 2. Have one account for what I'll tell you is /me/, but what in reality will be the whole family. I won't tell, you won't know. Sadly, that means that two computers on my home network can't be "on steam" at the same time, and I can't play online game X while my kid plays online game Y. Plus, it'll get all my steam achievements gunked up with my kid's ones. I don't want that. Force me down this route and, again, I'll go.
Option 3. I'll create a separate steam account for every game I purchase. This will make your product into a very inconvenient one with a flaky user experience, no achievement history etc, and I'll take my business elsewhere. Too much hassle.
Here's the news. An entire gaming generation is now very busy having their children reach gaming age.
You can put some weight behind those brave words you said. The solution is dead obvious.
The recipe is:
1. One family "billing account" (that's a BILLING account, not an application account you sign into steam with) with a single billing method. If a single billing method isn't enough to deter most of the unrelated people from pooling into a "pretend family" account and costing you potential revenue (it probably would be enough, and while you may lose a bit of immediate revenue, you will make huge gains in customer loyalty by trusting them), then put your thinking cap on and figure out how to structure a plan to include real families that count money together and exclude most of the freeloaders. You have smart people working for you.
2. ONE family-wide game/license library.
3. Several "gamer" steam accounts, one per real person managed by the billing contact (the guy with the credit card who vets the games, aka the parent), without needing to involve you. That's what web interfaces (or your application) are for. These steam accounts should all be able to go online concurrently, and can all have their own (SEPARATE) steam achievements, and can be use different games at the same time. If they want multiple people to be playing the same game at the same time (that thing we call co-op play is very popular in families btw) they need to purchase and own multiple licenses. Keep 2-pack, 3-pack and 4-pack deals coming.
Yes, this will mean you may have sev
The basic premises of the Matrix is fundamentally flawed.
Why the ^%$^ would you grow humans when you can grow, you know, YEAST, for much more benefit at a fraction of a hassle?
Water is not addictive, and consuming it in ever increasing quantities doesn't irrationally affect human judgment on how much we should consume.
I don't know of any cases of people who drowned because they got addicted to water.
Sugar, OTOH, is VERY addictive, and as one consumes more of it, the common sense circuitry in (some) human brains shorts out (much like with what we term 'drugs') and instructs the body to consume ever more, to the point of radically shortened lifespan, radically-decreased mobility, extreme susceptibility to illness, and all other manners of self-harm.
This is a shared trait with, let's see,
Cigarettes?
Heroin?
Alcohol?
All of the above?
So while the linguistic nazis are right and it may not be a drug by the strict definition of the word (because it very much is a nutrient), it also most definitely shares the one key characteristic with drugs - the very one that makes us consider them dangerous to society, and subsequently vigorously regulate them.
Maybe we need to coin a new term to group substances that addict us, harm our judgement, cause us to overconsume them, and are detrimental to society, that will encompass both food and drugs. Maybe "Bad adictive shit".
But since "drugs" already carries the ethical weight of "bad addictive shit", expect it to be hijacked right left and center to depict non-drug-substances too. Kinda like using that carry the ethical weight & connotation of rape, murder and pillaging on the high seas to depict violating copyright (except in the sugar case, for a somewhat nobler cause).
Besides, anyone who thinks the linguistics meta-point is more important & discussion-worthy than "America, and the world in general, has an unhealthy abusive relationship with sugar" point seriously needs to have his priority-setting gray matter looked at by a professional.
>> It's counter-productive and childish.
Clearly, you are not American.
... in the last 3 large organizations I've worked for (which have all been VERY linux-friendly), the midrange space (which, globally, is substantially larger than the supercomputer space as requiring such a fleet is a necessity for any large organization nowadays irrespective of industry or specialized number-crunching needs)...
[a] The windows admin team was as large as the linux/UNIX team.
[b] 66% of the server (1000's of servers) fleet was NT-based. This Linux-Windows spread is governed by commercial vendor support matrixes, in some casses vendor software performance, and nearly always bottom lines (with per-project varying results), not a pro-/anti- open-source religion, so there's a sweet spot it's gravitating to that's neither 100/0 or 0/100.
[c] Specialist-quality in Windows-land (where the specialists are paid in the ballparks that we linux mob expect to be paid), they know their shit. They can script as well as we do, they understand LDAP, DNS, mail and file servers, they know their hardware, they know their comms, they can troubleshoot well and will pull a packet sniffer as quickly as we do, and they think the same (bad) things we do of ye olde server apps that run with a GUI in a logged-in console that needs to be checked every morning, they understand and can implement security on their platform, and if you throw something like ESX 3.x their way (with an underlying linux OS to manage the host) they don't shit a brick, they sit with the doco and figure the thing out. In my experience, with a pay-bracket as a basis for comparison, they're competent.
[d] The OS platform itself, from a driving-forward maintained-project perspective, is alive and kicking - Server 2008 introduced clustering (from having spent nearly a year with pacemaker on SLES11 in the last place I worked, I daresay MS's in-OS clustering offering may very well be better than Novell's half-baked offering), an infiniband stack, etc etc.
If you work in any reasonably-large organization (think any big retail brand in any industry you care to mention) Microsoft is anything BUT "a puppy", even if in some smaller shops, specifically the subset of which have ready access to lots of cheap linux/unix admin capability (universities, technology startups that employ coders, websites and misc other IT companies a-la ISP's come to mind), windows is very visibly absent. I daresay that between companies that sell credit-rating services, shampoo, shelf-space in a supermarket, banking, camper-vans, insurance, auditing services or batteries (and everything in between) these are a small minority. The rest hire PM's, a wintel team, a UNIX team, a dba team, a comms team and a SAN team, and rely heavily on supported vendor software.
I daresay MS get amply compensated for every one of those server licenses they sell.
May the fan-boy mod-me-down commence ;)
... and what would have happened then?
The Lybian economy would have rocketed to outshine the Swedish one? Civil liberties would have been instated the next day? Or maybe one of Khadaffi's sons/henchmen would have just superceded him for a slightly-different flavour of the same despotic gunk?
Americans occasionally don't seem to get something. "Beatings will continue until morale improves" does NOT work. You can't liberate countries from their despots if you're an outside party. This needs to be driven and settled from within, by their own people, without help if at all possible (tho in the present 'damned if you do damned if you don't' situation, I reckon it's good they are helping tip it, but even more important that it's the Libyans themselves who are driving it.
When it gets driven from the outside, you end up standing in the middle of a civil war, and fully responsible for its outcome, with far-reaching reprecussions if you leave the task unfinished, and with both sides ultimately blaming you. (I think this concept is referred to as "Iraq" in American English). On the bright side, the current US president turned out to handle the current crisis much much better, galvanizing support from the world (especially noteworthy - the ARAB world) with what may end up much better results and much less collateral to US reputation and alienation in the business world. Good on'im (and ye'all).
Re:Similar Revolts
Contrary to the "We don't know" answers you will get from people, I will give you a definitive one.
Bahrain, Yemen and Saudi Arabia will not see similar revolts.
They may not see revolts at all, but if they do, their revolts will be anything but similar.
In a nutshell, the Northern African nations (Tunisia, Libya, Egypt) as well as Iran are nations where the revolutionaries genuinely want more freedom.
The Saudi peninsula, where the next rounds of revolution are cooking, are VERY different. The worst of the lot would probably be Yemen.
The revolutionaries you're seeing there are extremist Shiites, in no small part being stirred by the fingers of the oppressive Iranian regime who want to extend their reach and establish like-minded regimes in the surrounding countries (like they did in Lebanon via their cooky foreign-sponsored-sovereign-political-party-with-its-very-own-army-inside-the-Lebanese-government-who-answers-to-foreign-interests Hezbollah).
In those countries, if revolutions happen, it's bad for everyone in the west, and not least for people in those very nations who genuinely want civil liberties (and will get their fair share of Iranian-flavored "civil liberties" were a shia-driven revolution would happen).
The US has done a very smart thing by pushing a policy that rewards current ("relatively OK" - read: not-religious-fruitcake) regimes with $$$ for applying social reforms, while keeping them in power so a wave of radical Islam doesn't wash over them.
Revolutions are a tricky thing. The vast majority end badly, with violent, autocratic, cleptocratic, despotic, dysfunctional regimes.
I can only hope the three that were triggered so far not only destroy something bad - but replace it with something good.
There are (still) no truly-functional first-world democracies in the Arab world (I said Arab, not Muslim, before you jump at me)
I'm hoping this sad reality changes soon. We could always use more sane regimes on this planet.
If your iWhatever isn't an open platform with all attached Cupertino strings long since severed, your geek license is hereby revoked.
It's not just about letting forces communicate and/or let evidence of atrocities leak out.
It's about connecting these people with expectations from government. All that youtubing and facebooking and tweeting gets the word out about how governments of strong successful nations function.
It's the one big thing that *might* prevent these revolutions going down the same shithole most others, from Cuba to Iran to Lebanon to Libya 40 years ago - have gone. Straight into the hands of a just marginally different oppressive, violent and/or otherwise dysfunctional regime.
Continue letting people in there, even a marginal percentage of them, talk with the outside, communicate, let them know where the right paths and the wrong paths from where they are lead, allow them to sidestep the mistakes other emerging nations made and they might stand a chance. Send them weapons and they'll just end up with another four decades and two generations of backwards third world gunk that some irresponsible party instated with these weapons. Guns just don't solve everything.
As a sideinote, Iran is serving a positive purpose, in a grim kind of way:
http://www.despair.com/mis24x30prin.html
.. so when 50 people cluster up to block a gate to a factory that is only 10-people-wide, causing disruption to the operation of the factory, it's an 'attack'?
-please- get off the sensationalist/alarmist bandwagon where everyone insists on applying martial vocabulary to anything-wikileaks related, irrespective of which side you're on. A parking offense is not 'an attack on a street corner' or an 'attack on a municipality'. It's a parking offense.
And this is activism. A protest.
Hacker (noun): One who makes furniture with an axe.
I tend to disagree.
If the story is there, not only will said bloggers get through the door, the door will get through them (in a bid to get there before the competing door).
That's closer to an answer to my original question.
If it can be released truly anonymously and in a technically-unstoppable way, why (short of feeding JA's need for drama at the expense of personal risk etc) does anyone need WL's entire public front?
Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier for them to operate when there's nothing targetable?
I assure you the Guardian and Der Spiegel would pay the same amount of attention to those cables and comparable material if they had to sit down someone to manually un-translate it from Swahili, let alone obtain them through a more technically involved process.