Waiting occurs more when the product is either too expensive or lacks an excitement factor.
Except that the GP is more correct - I remember the MS Marketing Machine in action in about October 1995 (about Win 95 plus 2 months). In an interview, one of their marketdroids commented that "Win 95 is so much better than DOS and Win 3.11, that I can't understand why businesses aren't using it for mission critical systems". Win 95 certainly didn't lack the excitement factor, and (IIRC) it wasn't too expensive (I think it was the same price as Win 3.11), so the PHBs rushed to buy it. The problem was that Win 95 really was not good for any resilient system - it had a fatal flaw that rendered everything except the mouse inoperative 65536 seconds after power on (about 18 days), so "waiting" is worthwhile for checking for any security weaknesses.
(From Wikipedia entry:)The word "indication" is key as, like all opinion polls, exit polls do by nature include a margin of error. A famous example of exit poll error occurred in the 1992 UK General Election, when two exit polls predicted a hung parliament. In the event, the Conservative Party Government under John Major held their position with a reduced majority.
In this case the exit polls were flawed, as people were too embarrassed to admit to voting Conservative (the incumbent party, who had done a good job trashing the economy, but were still "the devil you know"), so told the pollsters one thing, but actually did another.
In the early days, Microsoft turned a blind eye to piracy in US / UK / Canada because "borrowing" the disks from work to install at home was the gateway drug that lead to the rise of Word as the dominant word processor. (WordPerfect Corp dropping the ball with WP for Windows didn't harm it either)
Actually there were plenty of 'all time' boneheaded ideas, not just those *obsoleted* by modern technology. Another one, of the zillions, I remember was a car with headlights that move when you turn the steering wheel.
Although pioneered by Citroen in the late 1960s with the DS, it is making a comeback. A quick google brought up a Lexus that has them, while I think even Ford (at least in Europe) is toying with the idea.
Bubble memory
Not exactly. The APTIS ticket issuing system (featuring 1Mb bubble memory), introduced 1982, is still in use today in many UK stations. So not exactly "obsoleted" technology. Just Old. Very Old.
I STILL have the same parallel port ZIP drive that I bought in 1992 to archive data when the 105mb hard drive in my 386SX16 filled up. And I still use it every weekend to back up a copy of my critical data for offsite (car trunk) storage. Other than wearing out a couple of disks, sufficiently that there weren't enough good sectors left to save 98mb of data it has performed flawlessly.
I realize that not everyone was that lucky, and maybe including ZIP in the list is reasonable. But in point of fact, I never encountered a ZIP drive that didn't work. I sort of think that what kept people from using ZIP was the relatively high cost of the media, not the occasional spectacular device failures.
Now if we want to talk about crappy data storage hardware, let's bring up the subject of CD drives....
CD is a teriffic medium for music where an occasional error is tolerable. For data, it sucks. With the possible exception of magnetic tape, CD has to be the most troublesome and least reliable data storage medium since paper tape.
And maybe we should add PC magnetic tape to the list of really bad technology products. I can't tell you how many magnetic tapes I have found to be unreadable after the unfortunate owner's hard drive had crashed or been eaten by a virus.
What about SyQuest drives (44Mb Hard Drive platter in a removable case, for the young:-) )? There was a time when SyQuest drives were used by publishing houses, as a way to transport big image files (and not have to span the file across multiple floppies, using PKZip or similar). Waht they never said was that once the it started hinting at dodgy sectors, it was time to ditch both the cartridge (which cost a significant amount, but only slightly less than 50 floppies), and usually also the drive (the two LEDs on the front had over 20 combinations of flashing to indicate drive failure of different types).
At least Zip drives were descended from the Bernouilli Drives, which used the Bernouilli effect to ensure that head crashes were unlikely. Indeed, I once saw at a computer show such a drive being bounced up and down to show how resilient it was. And then I noticed it was connected to a computer. A quick play with the machine, and not only was the machine (a Mac IIcx or similar) able to read from the bouncing drive, but it had actually been booted from it (and hence, in System 7 days, needed to access it constantly). As the bloke on the stand said, "try doing that with a SyQuest drive"
Never had any experience of tape drive failure (used QIC and the mini DAT size ones), although it was company policy to replace the 10 tapes used in a rolling backup every year (so each one would only have been used 26 times), so don't reckon they are any worse for reliability.
I ran one app more useful than any other on 3.1 -- WordPerfect 5.1.
Pah! That's the fool's way! Win 3.1 and WP5.1 were just options from a DOS batch file; you ran one or the other, not one from within the other. (Windows was for those strange things like MS Excel 2.2 or MS Project 1.0);-)
In other words, they are setting a price point, and including extra features to suit. For reasons known only to Apple, they decided to raise the price point by $100 when they went from G4 to Intel, and hence needed a whole raft of additional features.
Old-age pensioners can't pay their fuel bills, countries are invaded to award oil contracts to the West, and meanwhile secretive parts of the secret government are sitting on suppressed technology for free energy.
Ok, that last bit about free energy, you can go ahead and call him a nut job.
If his story is, indeed, as flakey as you point out, then why is the US pressing for extradition and 60 years in prison?
So, Dell's sales slow down "because of allegience to Intel", and yet Apple's appear to be increasing for exactly the same reason. Sounds like Gartner have been taking lessons from John C. Dvorak in how to make random statements that do not reflect reality.
Of course, there is one Beatles track on iTMS featuring one of the members of the Fab Four - the http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?se ction=cm&id=2359>Paul McCartney / U2 version of "Sgt Pepper", so Apple music have already lost by allowing precedent. Since Apple Corps have also sued EMI (who only distributed all the music!), they have about as much sense as SCO, and deserve nothing (and that's without the/. anti-SCO meme).
While forward compatibility might well get the Blu-Ray / HD-DVD on the shelves, if there is no additional content over regular DVD, then people will lose interest (particularly if they are more expensive than DVD.
While many feature films either come packed to the gills with extra features, they are not always that worthwhile. I mean, once you've seen the trailer, is anyone other than a completist bothered about the "slightly different trailer"? I reckon that most BR/HD will end up left blank, but one or other format will end up succeeding as an archive format (unlike the limjited success of DVD-RAM)
Microsoft's Calculator is actually 2 distinct calculators (at least the XP one is)- the order of calculation varies depending on whether you have "Basic" or "Advanced" view:
4 + 2 * 6 evaluates left to right for the basic view, giving the answer 36. The advanced (scientific) view does it by algebraic hierarchy, so the multiplication is done first, giving 16.
(FWIW, the OS X calculator does it the algebraic way, but the calculator widget does it the left to right way)
Are not cosmic rays still cancerous and devilishly difficult to filter out. It seems like that more than anything else would put the brakes on long term space vacationing
Au contraire. Offer cheap 3 month trips for all those coming up to retirement age, and they likely won't live long enough to claim their pension. Will do wonders for the demographic pensions black hole that the western world seems to be looking forward to.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and our cores go all the way up to 11
Here
E.J Thribb
Waiting occurs more when the product is either too expensive or lacks an excitement factor.
Except that the GP is more correct - I remember the MS Marketing Machine in action in about October 1995 (about Win 95 plus 2 months). In an interview, one of their marketdroids commented that "Win 95 is so much better than DOS and Win 3.11, that I can't understand why businesses aren't using it for mission critical systems". Win 95 certainly didn't lack the excitement factor, and (IIRC) it wasn't too expensive (I think it was the same price as Win 3.11), so the PHBs rushed to buy it. The problem was that Win 95 really was not good for any resilient system - it had a fatal flaw that rendered everything except the mouse inoperative 65536 seconds after power on (about 18 days), so "waiting" is worthwhile for checking for any security weaknesses.
OK, so I wasn't totally clear.
The iPods were "released" (and hence available now / in a few days)
iTV was, by the MS definition, "launched" (not yet available, but coming Real Soon Now)
Since Steve held up a box, it seems as though it is the software, rather than the hardware, that makes it not yet available.
(From Wikipedia entry:)The word "indication" is key as, like all opinion polls, exit polls do by nature include a margin of error. A famous example of exit poll error occurred in the 1992 UK General Election, when two exit polls predicted a hung parliament. In the event, the Conservative Party Government under John Major held their position with a reduced majority.
In this case the exit polls were flawed, as people were too embarrassed to admit to voting Conservative (the incumbent party, who had done a good job trashing the economy, but were still "the devil you know"), so told the pollsters one thing, but actually did another.
But, but... MS have launched it, so it must be available soon. Maybe. Possibly. (Better not hold my breath)
From TFA: Microsoft still won't spill the beans on pricing and availability (other than a vague "this holiday season")
At least Steve Jobs gave a price ($299) and launch window (1st Q 2007, funnily enough when Leopard comes out) for his "launch" item (iTV).
Airfix also called it Orion, so it probably was called that.
Technically, Dresden was not the use of a Weapon of Mass Destruction, but rather the mass use of weapons of destruction.
In the early days, Microsoft turned a blind eye to piracy in US / UK / Canada because "borrowing" the disks from work to install at home was the gateway drug that lead to the rise of Word as the dominant word processor. (WordPerfect Corp dropping the ball with WP for Windows didn't harm it either)
Actually there were plenty of 'all time' boneheaded ideas, not just those *obsoleted* by modern technology. Another one, of the zillions, I remember was a car with headlights that move when you turn the steering wheel.
Although pioneered by Citroen in the late 1960s with the DS, it is making a comeback. A quick google brought up a Lexus that has them, while I think even Ford (at least in Europe) is toying with the idea.
Bubble memory
Not exactly. The APTIS ticket issuing system (featuring 1Mb bubble memory), introduced 1982, is still in use today in many UK stations. So not exactly "obsoleted" technology. Just Old. Very Old.
I STILL have the same parallel port ZIP drive that I bought in 1992 to archive data when the 105mb hard drive in my 386SX16 filled up. And I still use it every weekend to back up a copy of my critical data for offsite (car trunk) storage. Other than wearing out a couple of disks, sufficiently that there weren't enough good sectors left to save 98mb of data it has performed flawlessly. I realize that not everyone was that lucky, and maybe including ZIP in the list is reasonable. But in point of fact, I never encountered a ZIP drive that didn't work. I sort of think that what kept people from using ZIP was the relatively high cost of the media, not the occasional spectacular device failures. Now if we want to talk about crappy data storage hardware, let's bring up the subject of CD drives.... CD is a teriffic medium for music where an occasional error is tolerable. For data, it sucks. With the possible exception of magnetic tape, CD has to be the most troublesome and least reliable data storage medium since paper tape. And maybe we should add PC magnetic tape to the list of really bad technology products. I can't tell you how many magnetic tapes I have found to be unreadable after the unfortunate owner's hard drive had crashed or been eaten by a virus.
:-) )? There was a time when SyQuest drives were used by publishing houses, as a way to transport big image files (and not have to span the file across multiple floppies, using PKZip or similar). Waht they never said was that once the it started hinting at dodgy sectors, it was time to ditch both the cartridge (which cost a significant amount, but only slightly less than 50 floppies), and usually also the drive (the two LEDs on the front had over 20 combinations of flashing to indicate drive failure of different types).
What about SyQuest drives (44Mb Hard Drive platter in a removable case, for the young
At least Zip drives were descended from the Bernouilli Drives, which used the Bernouilli effect to ensure that head crashes were unlikely. Indeed, I once saw at a computer show such a drive being bounced up and down to show how resilient it was. And then I noticed it was connected to a computer. A quick play with the machine, and not only was the machine (a Mac IIcx or similar) able to read from the bouncing drive, but it had actually been booted from it (and hence, in System 7 days, needed to access it constantly). As the bloke on the stand said, "try doing that with a SyQuest drive"
Never had any experience of tape drive failure (used QIC and the mini DAT size ones), although it was company policy to replace the 10 tapes used in a rolling backup every year (so each one would only have been used 26 times), so don't reckon they are any worse for reliability.
I ran one app more useful than any other on 3.1 -- WordPerfect 5.1.
;-)
Pah! That's the fool's way! Win 3.1 and WP5.1 were just options from a DOS batch file; you ran one or the other, not one from within the other. (Windows was for those strange things like MS Excel 2.2 or MS Project 1.0)
Look, I know everyone says that Vista is copying features from OS X, but copying their trolls too is just too much!
In other words, they are setting a price point, and including extra features to suit. For reasons known only to Apple, they decided to raise the price point by $100 when they went from G4 to Intel, and hence needed a whole raft of additional features.
I should finish the quote, however:
Old-age pensioners can't pay their fuel bills, countries are invaded to award oil contracts to the West, and meanwhile secretive parts of the secret government are sitting on suppressed technology for free energy.
Ok, that last bit about free energy, you can go ahead and call him a nut job.
If his story is, indeed, as flakey as you point out, then why is the US pressing for extradition and 60 years in prison?
So, Dell's sales slow down "because of allegience to Intel", and yet Apple's appear to be increasing for exactly the same reason. Sounds like Gartner have been taking lessons from John C. Dvorak in how to make random statements that do not reflect reality.
Hmm.... Funny. Or Insightful. (Mod points would help....)
I'm pretty sure Apple Records is still doing a lot more business than most small-time indie labels
Business, maybe, but money, no:
The company hasn't posted huge profits: For the year ended Jan. 1, 2005, Apple Corps claimed a loss of nearly $950,000.
I'm pretty sure Apple Records is still doing a lot more business than most small-time indie labels
e ction=cm&id=2359>Paul McCartney / U2 version of "Sgt Pepper", so Apple music have already lost by allowing precedent. Since Apple Corps have also sued EMI (who only distributed all the music!), they have about as much sense as SCO, and deserve nothing (and that's without the /. anti-SCO meme).
I doubt it. They seem to have lost all business acumen lately. As for Apple Corps it is missing out on one revenue stream by not allowing Beatles music to be sold on iTunes., as well as any revenue from allowing sampling from Beatles tracks.
Of course, there is one Beatles track on iTMS featuring one of the members of the Fab Four - the http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?s
most people who ride with me think I'm just a crazy old music nerd and complain that I should get more bass
So, the fish diet improves your hearing, then?
I'll get me coat...
While forward compatibility might well get the Blu-Ray / HD-DVD on the shelves, if there is no additional content over regular DVD, then people will lose interest (particularly if they are more expensive than DVD.
While many feature films either come packed to the gills with extra features, they are not always that worthwhile. I mean, once you've seen the trailer, is anyone other than a completist bothered about the "slightly different trailer"? I reckon that most BR/HD will end up left blank, but one or other format will end up succeeding as an archive format (unlike the limjited success of DVD-RAM)
Microsoft's Calculator is actually 2 distinct calculators (at least the XP one is)- the order of calculation varies depending on whether you have "Basic" or "Advanced" view:
4 + 2 * 6 evaluates left to right for the basic view, giving the answer 36. The advanced (scientific) view does it by algebraic hierarchy, so the multiplication is done first, giving 16.
(FWIW, the OS X calculator does it the algebraic way, but the calculator widget does it the left to right way)
Are not cosmic rays still cancerous and devilishly difficult to filter out. It seems like that more than anything else would put the brakes on long term space vacationing
Au contraire. Offer cheap 3 month trips for all those coming up to retirement age, and they likely won't live long enough to claim their pension. Will do wonders for the demographic pensions black hole that the western world seems to be looking forward to.
Vista should have been either released much sooner or it should have been a revolutionary change as far as operating systems go.
They wanted both, but got neither. Vista is turning in to MicroSoft's Copeland ( meant to be out in about 1994, but finally abandoned in 1996.)
So who's OS will MS end up buying?
And it might be seen as motivational.
Yeah, right. Motivational as in "all leave is cancelled until morale improves", or "we'll keep firing people until you ship product"
Unless it's all part of the Linux master plan...