3 PCs. Broke twice. Once, a bad stick of memory. Once, a duff hard drive.
gets infected,
I run Firefox and a virus scanner. Costs me about £20 a year. Haven't ever had a virus.
or they start buying all the software that comes with the Mac out of the box.
Picasa: $0.
It isn't that they can't tell the difference. It is just that they're either short sighted (not really thinking of a computer as an several year investment) or simply don't care.
I've had the same PC case for 5 years. My last PC upgrade, I added some memory. One before that, I changed the monitor. One before that, I swapped out the motherboard, chip and power supply to make it run faster. The one before that, I added a hard drive. Next upgrade is to fit a DVI graphics cars. You can run that sort of long-term upgrade strategy with an iMac?
I'm a software developer who is largely platform-agnostic. I do some.net development as well as things like Wordpress/LAMP stack applications, for which I use Linux. "don't care"? If I thought Macs could do it better, I'd get one. But I see no reason.
Have computer OS makers kept the response of computers relatively constant by accident or design?
It is "by design", but that doesn't mean that there's some co-ordinated attempt to sell more hardware. As machines get faster, though, software makers put more into the software because there's power available. Look at media players and just how many pointless features they have. Which is in part driven by reviews comparing features.
I run a lot of basic software because whilst I sometimes really want to use the features of the latest and greatest editor, sometimes I know it's going to be a simple little operation and I fire up an editor from the last century that's less than 1mb in size because I'll be editing in less than a second, and when I tell it to close, it will be gone instantly.
This is just short-sighted. "You're making money off our content, so we want a piece of that".
I had a reasonably high-ranking UK blogger link to a blog entry of mine. He even cited a bit of it. So, he entertained some readers a little. At the same time, the hyperlink saw my traffic (and my tiny adwords revenue) double for about a week after.
What I could have done is taken the same stupid attitude as the papers "stop using my content" and sat back in the satisfaction that he wouldn't be leeching off my content. He'd have maybe had less to interest his readers. But I would have lost some revenue.
2) More PCs sold. How many copies of XP were sold last year. Extrapolate it to this period, and see if it's more. If not, Microsoft aren't "getting better". They're standing still or losing out whilst Linux and Mac are catching up on them.
Seriously, how many people do you know that have bought a copy of Vista? Either an off-the-shelf copy, or a new PC because they really wanted Vista? I know 1 person running Vista, and he likes it. Everyone else I know that's seen it running is sticking to XP.
I cannot believe that someone can be so negative about this.
If I can make Ubuntu run as stable as a rock on my 6 year old Dell laptop, I'm pretty certain that Dell, in conjunction with Canonical and various suppliers can make a rock solid Ubuntu machine.
We aren't going to see an overnight revolution with this, either. But it will mean more users. Each of those users strengthens open standards, encourages more businesses to take it seriously. And it's a virtuous circle. The more Linux users, the more business gets involved, the easier Linux gets to meet people's needs, the more users come on board.
Microsoft has enough CASH ASSETS to draw interest from that - BASED ON THE INTEREST, they could never sell another copy of office or windows or any other product ever again, and continue to pay all non-executive employees at their current payrate until their expected retirement date.
If you were a shareholder of Microsoft, would you be happy with that? "Oh, that money in the bank, we're not going to give it to you, or spend it on growing the company so you're stock improves in price. We're going to spend it on staff instead".
You know what, there used to be a saying that "no-one got fired for buying IBM". The first releases of Windows, this was still true.
And yes, there never is really a "year of Linux" - it's a slow, gradual shift (much like the rise of Toyota or the rise of Windows). But if I had to pick a single year where there were events that showed the start of a serious tip away from Microsoft, where the virtuous circle has reached the "serious" level, it would be 2007.
Until recently, the only people I knew who were running Linux were hardcore unix geeks. I'm seeing a change towards hobbyists - the sort of people who build their own PCs, often as a dual-boot. I know companies who are experimenting with it who weren't a few years ago.
The announcement of open-source ATI drivers, the Dell PCs and the quality of Ubuntu Feisty means that no longer is Linux something that Microsoft can avoid. It's no longer something that's going to stay hobbyist for long. I know IT directors who are not too happy with how Microsoft treats them, and would gladly go for something else. But they need to know that it's going to be around, not some flash-in-the-pan, and pretty soon, word is going to get around that this serious stuff.
I worked for a long time on mainframes, and never heard of Richard Stallman or the GNU Manifesto during that time. Yet, I saw first hand how much easier it is to fix something if you've got the source code than not.
Richard may have an ethical or political view on this, but most businesses that use Free Software, do so because it's the practical solution. Because they think that the savings will outweigh the proprietary alternative.
That's why I like to use it (but I'm also nice enough to contribute my changes back!).
"The list of detractors is longer than other search providers, though; privacy experts, advertisers, startups, and Hollywood executives are all frustrated with the company for one reason or another. "
privacy experts - don't use it. You have other choices.
advertisers. Waaa waaaa. Sorry, someone came along and disrupted your business.
startups. What's their complaint? That Google does stuff better? I keep trying new search engines, and none of them are any better, so why would I switch?
Hollywood executives. Start to recognise that tools like YouTube are free PR.
It's Google that's with the consumer. They provide great search, great email, great maps. That's why they get lots of eyeballs. When they stop doing so, and just sit back and get complacent, they'll go down the tubes.
Look at Microsoft. It's hard to believe, but they were once considered as quite cool. They gave businesses a value proposition. Now, I know IT managers who only use them because of lock-in and legacy in-house applications (over time, as rewrites become inevitable, this will change). Google doesn't really have that. Their lock-in is the time it takes for someone to change their default browser URL.
If IBM had chosen to write its own OS, my guess is that we would have seen (for a very long time), a whole lot of vendors. IBM didn't see Gates vision, and would have kept prices high, outside the reach of hobbyists. And without a 3rd party OS that could be obtained, users would have chosen something else. My guess is that Apple, Commodore and Atari and UNIX options would have remained and grown in this market place.
Which would have led to less chance of a monoculture.
For one thing, I doubt that Dell are expecting gigantic sales from day 1. They know how enthusiastic consumers get.
I run a Dell laptop with Ubuntu for some wordpress stuff, and Feisty runs like a rock on it. But when it dies, I'll probably go for an Macbook that can run Wordpress as well as Windows/Ubuntu via Parallels.
Frankly, I'm looking forward to all the Apple Fanboys getting their ass handed to them over the iPhone. This is not going to be iPod mark 2. Where most MP3 players failed to be attractive to consumers and failed to have the integration required, that's not the case with phones.
This is a market that already has plenty of design and integration where phones are made to appeal to people with different needs. You want a smartphone, it's there. You want a pretty phone, it's there. You want a music phone, it's there. You want a real simple, do almost nothing phone, it's there.
iPod came along in a nascent market. Phones aren't. It's at saturation.
Oh, and touch screens suck. I had a phone with one, and it was horrible. Unless Apple have come up with something revolutionary to deal with the lack of feedback and fingermarks, the iPhone's touch screen will suck too.
He has not said, that I know of, that third parties could not develop apps and get them approved by Apple
So, I'm developing software for a smartphone. Just me and another guy. How much of our time is it going to take to get them approved by Apple?
If the answer is too much, we won't bother. We'll stick to Symbian OS.
Open the thing up... right now. Publish the SDK. Give away tools to develop on it, and get every man and his dog writing iPhone apps and dominate the smartphone platform. But Apple don't get it. They think they know best, that they should dominate the experience. This, and the web are the next battlegrounds. Apple are going to miss it, just like they did decades ago, when Microsoft understood exactly what to do.
Nokia have the N95 which has built in GPS, Wi-Fi, the whole lot, and they'll tell you how to code for it. There's already an SDK for it.
Well, the Nokia series 60 can have Symbian Apps (C++ or Java) as well as J2ME and Python programs. I've had my phone give me a traffic report via a python script. Can your iPhone do that?
What you're mistaking is that webapps work fine on phones. On a PC, it's less of a problem. High speed networks, plenty of memory/HDD for caching of pages/images and plenty of screen real-estate.
I can read Gmail on my phone in 3 different ways - via the main page, a dedicated mobile page, or using the java-based app. The java-based app is a much nicer experience than the other 2, and that's going via 3G. Try it on GPRS, and see how you like everything being a webapp.
I agree. I spent 10 years doing COBOL/Mainframe work. By the end, I could do it with my eyes closed.
The other problem is that it works against more business-orientated developers, and more towards geeks who like to play around (who don't necessarily have some of the more rounded skills of being a developer).
It occurred to me many moons ago that the sum total of knowledge one obtains using Windows systems (both as a "power user" (ridiculous word) and/or as a typical sysadmin) is a giant convoluted collection of trivia that spans registry edits, workarounds for things that don't work or work badly, memorisation of GUI layout du jour, and various methods of reinstalling borked systems, the value of which erodes as time goes by.
It is the constant cost of retooling that's the problem. And it takes much longer than people think. It's about all those times that something doesn't do what you thought it should, and knowing where to go look to resolve it. I've worked in Mainframe teams where it's just not an issue. People worked on the technology for 10 years, so even if a trainee arrived and got stuck, plenty of people had seen the problem and could quickly get them back on track.
Big corporations tend to be a touch conservative, which is how they last long enough to get big.
I disagree. They generally get big by taking risks that pay off. The conservatism kicks in when they get big, and is what ends up destroying many companies.
I've been developing for about 20 years, and I've seen what happens.
In the late 80s, managers were saying that the PC wouldn't replace the mainframe. Later, there were managers saying that Gateway PCs were not as good as those from the mainframe manufacturer. Then, managers who said that the internet is a toy, and that services couldn't realistically be delivered via a browser.
It's about conservative managers. Typically, what changes their attitude is when a bunch of young upstarts prove them wrong, show that something can be sustained. Eventually, they come around to it.
There are a lot of shills who are spreading FUD about open source software. There were shills suggesting that non-mainframe manufacturer PCs were somehow inferior, and so forth.
The good news is that these guys eventually lose. Their FUD gets found out. Typically, the small companies shift first, with large bluechips moving last. I know a company with a "no open source" rule. At the other end of the spectrum, I know someone in a small company where their experience with Linux webserver, mailserver and firewall means that open source is seriously addressed.
The Stern report isn't just pulling numbers out of their asses.
From what I understand, there are 4 approved climate models which predict different levels of damage. Which 2 models do you think Stern used? The best 2 or the worst 2? Give you a clue: The people who want lots of extra road taxes paid for this report.
Yeah, it might get Britain some positive attention, but I've always considered this to be overstated.
In the case of South Korea, it may have made sense. This was a new, modern economy, and hosting the Olympics focussed the worlds attention and perhaps changed peoples perceptions about that country.
But Britain isn't an unknown commodity. One of the largest economies in the world with the 3rd most visited city in Europe.
The whole thing is a giant waste of money. Billions spent on a 2 week event, and then what?
Slashdot Mirror
3 PCs. Broke twice. Once, a bad stick of memory. Once, a duff hard drive.
gets infected,
I run Firefox and a virus scanner. Costs me about £20 a year. Haven't ever had a virus.
or they start buying all the software that comes with the Mac out of the box.
Picasa: $0.
It isn't that they can't tell the difference. It is just that they're either short sighted (not really thinking of a computer as an several year investment) or simply don't care.
I've had the same PC case for 5 years. My last PC upgrade, I added some memory. One before that, I changed the monitor. One before that, I swapped out the motherboard, chip and power supply to make it run faster. The one before that, I added a hard drive. Next upgrade is to fit a DVI graphics cars. You can run that sort of long-term upgrade strategy with an iMac?
I'm a software developer who is largely platform-agnostic. I do some .net development as well as things like Wordpress/LAMP stack applications, for which I use Linux. "don't care"? If I thought Macs could do it better, I'd get one. But I see no reason.
It is "by design", but that doesn't mean that there's some co-ordinated attempt to sell more hardware. As machines get faster, though, software makers put more into the software because there's power available. Look at media players and just how many pointless features they have. Which is in part driven by reviews comparing features.
I run a lot of basic software because whilst I sometimes really want to use the features of the latest and greatest editor, sometimes I know it's going to be a simple little operation and I fire up an editor from the last century that's less than 1mb in size because I'll be editing in less than a second, and when I tell it to close, it will be gone instantly.
I had a reasonably high-ranking UK blogger link to a blog entry of mine. He even cited a bit of it. So, he entertained some readers a little. At the same time, the hyperlink saw my traffic (and my tiny adwords revenue) double for about a week after.
What I could have done is taken the same stupid attitude as the papers "stop using my content" and sat back in the satisfaction that he wouldn't be leeching off my content. He'd have maybe had less to interest his readers. But I would have lost some revenue.
Don't these people get this?
SCO will claim that he sold the world to them.
2) More PCs sold. How many copies of XP were sold last year. Extrapolate it to this period, and see if it's more. If not, Microsoft aren't "getting better". They're standing still or losing out whilst Linux and Mac are catching up on them.
Seriously, how many people do you know that have bought a copy of Vista? Either an off-the-shelf copy, or a new PC because they really wanted Vista? I know 1 person running Vista, and he likes it. Everyone else I know that's seen it running is sticking to XP.
If I can make Ubuntu run as stable as a rock on my 6 year old Dell laptop, I'm pretty certain that Dell, in conjunction with Canonical and various suppliers can make a rock solid Ubuntu machine.
We aren't going to see an overnight revolution with this, either. But it will mean more users. Each of those users strengthens open standards, encourages more businesses to take it seriously. And it's a virtuous circle. The more Linux users, the more business gets involved, the easier Linux gets to meet people's needs, the more users come on board.
If you were a shareholder of Microsoft, would you be happy with that? "Oh, that money in the bank, we're not going to give it to you, or spend it on growing the company so you're stock improves in price. We're going to spend it on staff instead".
And yes, there never is really a "year of Linux" - it's a slow, gradual shift (much like the rise of Toyota or the rise of Windows). But if I had to pick a single year where there were events that showed the start of a serious tip away from Microsoft, where the virtuous circle has reached the "serious" level, it would be 2007.
Until recently, the only people I knew who were running Linux were hardcore unix geeks. I'm seeing a change towards hobbyists - the sort of people who build their own PCs, often as a dual-boot. I know companies who are experimenting with it who weren't a few years ago.
The announcement of open-source ATI drivers, the Dell PCs and the quality of Ubuntu Feisty means that no longer is Linux something that Microsoft can avoid. It's no longer something that's going to stay hobbyist for long. I know IT directors who are not too happy with how Microsoft treats them, and would gladly go for something else. But they need to know that it's going to be around, not some flash-in-the-pan, and pretty soon, word is going to get around that this serious stuff.
I worked for a long time on mainframes, and never heard of Richard Stallman or the GNU Manifesto during that time. Yet, I saw first hand how much easier it is to fix something if you've got the source code than not.
Richard may have an ethical or political view on this, but most businesses that use Free Software, do so because it's the practical solution. Because they think that the savings will outweigh the proprietary alternative.
That's why I like to use it (but I'm also nice enough to contribute my changes back!).
privacy experts - don't use it. You have other choices.
advertisers. Waaa waaaa. Sorry, someone came along and disrupted your business.
startups. What's their complaint? That Google does stuff better? I keep trying new search engines, and none of them are any better, so why would I switch?
Hollywood executives. Start to recognise that tools like YouTube are free PR.
It's Google that's with the consumer. They provide great search, great email, great maps. That's why they get lots of eyeballs. When they stop doing so, and just sit back and get complacent, they'll go down the tubes.
Look at Microsoft. It's hard to believe, but they were once considered as quite cool. They gave businesses a value proposition. Now, I know IT managers who only use them because of lock-in and legacy in-house applications (over time, as rewrites become inevitable, this will change). Google doesn't really have that. Their lock-in is the time it takes for someone to change their default browser URL.
Which would have led to less chance of a monoculture.
I run a Dell laptop with Ubuntu for some wordpress stuff, and Feisty runs like a rock on it. But when it dies, I'll probably go for an Macbook that can run Wordpress as well as Windows/Ubuntu via Parallels.
Works equally well here.
This is a market that already has plenty of design and integration where phones are made to appeal to people with different needs. You want a smartphone, it's there. You want a pretty phone, it's there. You want a music phone, it's there. You want a real simple, do almost nothing phone, it's there.
iPod came along in a nascent market. Phones aren't. It's at saturation.
Oh, and touch screens suck. I had a phone with one, and it was horrible. Unless Apple have come up with something revolutionary to deal with the lack of feedback and fingermarks, the iPhone's touch screen will suck too.
So, I'm developing software for a smartphone. Just me and another guy. How much of our time is it going to take to get them approved by Apple?
If the answer is too much, we won't bother. We'll stick to Symbian OS.
Open the thing up... right now. Publish the SDK. Give away tools to develop on it, and get every man and his dog writing iPhone apps and dominate the smartphone platform. But Apple don't get it. They think they know best, that they should dominate the experience. This, and the web are the next battlegrounds. Apple are going to miss it, just like they did decades ago, when Microsoft understood exactly what to do.
Nokia have the N95 which has built in GPS, Wi-Fi, the whole lot, and they'll tell you how to code for it. There's already an SDK for it.
Well, the Nokia series 60 can have Symbian Apps (C++ or Java) as well as J2ME and Python programs. I've had my phone give me a traffic report via a python script. Can your iPhone do that?
I can read Gmail on my phone in 3 different ways - via the main page, a dedicated mobile page, or using the java-based app. The java-based app is a much nicer experience than the other 2, and that's going via 3G. Try it on GPRS, and see how you like everything being a webapp.
Right now, Vista is at a weak point. The machines aren't big enough for it, there are driver problems and so forth.
Apple could have generated some noise for Leopard in the meantime.
4 months from now? Driver problems will be solved, machines will be beefier and there will be enough things fixed that Vista will be far more stable.
The other problem is that it works against more business-orientated developers, and more towards geeks who like to play around (who don't necessarily have some of the more rounded skills of being a developer).
It is the constant cost of retooling that's the problem. And it takes much longer than people think. It's about all those times that something doesn't do what you thought it should, and knowing where to go look to resolve it. I've worked in Mainframe teams where it's just not an issue. People worked on the technology for 10 years, so even if a trainee arrived and got stuck, plenty of people had seen the problem and could quickly get them back on track.
I disagree. They generally get big by taking risks that pay off. The conservatism kicks in when they get big, and is what ends up destroying many companies.
In the late 80s, managers were saying that the PC wouldn't replace the mainframe. Later, there were managers saying that Gateway PCs were not as good as those from the mainframe manufacturer. Then, managers who said that the internet is a toy, and that services couldn't realistically be delivered via a browser.
It's about conservative managers. Typically, what changes their attitude is when a bunch of young upstarts prove them wrong, show that something can be sustained. Eventually, they come around to it.
There are a lot of shills who are spreading FUD about open source software. There were shills suggesting that non-mainframe manufacturer PCs were somehow inferior, and so forth.
The good news is that these guys eventually lose. Their FUD gets found out. Typically, the small companies shift first, with large bluechips moving last. I know a company with a "no open source" rule. At the other end of the spectrum, I know someone in a small company where their experience with Linux webserver, mailserver and firewall means that open source is seriously addressed.
From what I understand, there are 4 approved climate models which predict different levels of damage. Which 2 models do you think Stern used? The best 2 or the worst 2? Give you a clue: The people who want lots of extra road taxes paid for this report.
Irrelevant. All the matters is whether he's right or wrong in this one.
In the case of South Korea, it may have made sense. This was a new, modern economy, and hosting the Olympics focussed the worlds attention and perhaps changed peoples perceptions about that country.
But Britain isn't an unknown commodity. One of the largest economies in the world with the 3rd most visited city in Europe.
The whole thing is a giant waste of money. Billions spent on a 2 week event, and then what?