Poor documentation? What do you think CSS is, a product? You have been using the spec as documentation? No wonder your suffering is great. There are plenty of decent books out there on CSS. My current favorite is Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer's Reference by Eric A. Meyer.
Most of my problems with CSS stem from poor browser implementation, not from faults inherent in the spec.
Now, while a lack of any sort of methodology is a disaster waiting to happen...
I don't know about that, but I firmly believe that anyone who uses the word "methodology" when he really means "method" should be summarily fed to rabid minks.
As an enthusiastic MMOPG (MMORP? MMPORG? sheesh, whatever) player, I can attest to the desirability of what might be called "virtual estate"--I'd love to own a house or an island in the game I play. However, there is no way I would spend real money on virtual estate. Why? Well, because the only value I would get out of virtual estate is transient fun, and transient fun is worth only so much. Moreover, the intrusion of the "real life" economy into my imaginary world would be jarring. If the people who are rich and powerful in real life are also rich and powerful in the game, then what's the point of playing the thing? They are the reason I play fantasy games, fer cryin' out loud!
Apart from esthetics, investment of real money in virtual estate is also a poor investment. A case in point is the game I am now playing--Everquest. EQ is dying because EQ2 is sucking away the customer base. There is no continuity between EQ and EQ2, so whatever I owned in EQ becomes worthless to me the moment I stop playing the game (and I doubt I could find a sucker now who would buy a 62 Enchanter on EQ).
Virtual purchases like this island would only make sense if the game has a high likelyhood of being persistent--that is, will the island still be in existence 20 years from now? Will anyone care?
Sure, the guy who just bought the island might be able to make money by selling off subdivisions over the next year or so, but if the virtual estate doesn't retain its value over the long term, then this is nothing but a con game. Once the game loses its popularity and no one wants to play any more, the people who invested last will be left holding the bag. They will have title to a worthless piece of virtual estate--and not even that once the last game server is powered down.
For that kind of money, a person could have bought real estate (real real estate) that would be guaranteed to persist over any power outages for the lifespan of the owner and his descendants.
From the sound of it, Entropia is nothing but a very clever pyramid scheme. What's more, since they advertise their product as imaginary, they are fairly safe from criminal prosecution--but not, I suspect, from lawsuits.
How about Serial ATA? I have nothing but SATAnic drives in my PCs because the cables are such a delight to deal with. Thin, as long as you like, don't obstruct airflow. I don't care if SATA is faster than EIDE or not--I just love them cables. Well, I do wish they'd made the connectors a bit more robust.
The reason they used marionettes wasn't to spoof special effects, it was because only marionettes could get by with the stuff they did in that movie. Even cartoon animations would have gotten an X rating. But seeing the Barbie doll-like joints in the puppets' legs kinda defused the sex scenes. Barely.
Truly, I was amazed at the amount of vitriol that got dumped on the movie industry, and particularly the F.A.G.s...er actors. Which reminds me... were those puppets that got devoured by the Evil Panthers of Kim-Il-Jung stuffed with liver, or not?
I don't believe a word of it. The guy just wanted to see how fast his new car could go.
Like, it's not possible to put this car into neutral? You can't pull the ignition "chip" out? Heck, even if it were Satanic RFID technology that works when the "key" is anywhere near the ignition lock, you could always hurl the damn thing out a window.
They provide a rudimentary design tool for free (only works with them, though)
Actually, that's not quite true...it can be...um...made more user-friendly. So far my circuit designs have been pretty simple; if I were serious I'd probably get some high-priced PCB design software. But then it would be work.
What I do is this:
Draw my circuit using the Express PCB software
Print the design to file using a PostScript printer driver
Open the PS file with PhotoShop
Clean up the artifacts that the software leaves in the image to prevent you from using it.
Save as TIFF or whatever
Print the image on a on an overhead "slide" (I've been using an inkjet, but have decided that it's too hard to get enough density that way, so I'm going to try a laser printer at work next time)
Use the resulting "artwork" to burn my PCBs.
Personally, I think it's cheating to pay people to make PCBs for you.
Well, "story ideas" are trivial. The hard part is turning the idea into an actual story...better yet, an actually interesting story. That is what writing is about: taking an idea and turning it around, twisting it a bit, so as to get a completely new perspective on it, so that the story sounds fresh and original. That's why you can't copyright ideas, only words. Originality doesn't consist of presenting ideas no one has ever heard of, it consists of envisioning familiar ideas in a new way.
Let's put it this way: if you had a truly original idea, something no one had ever thought of before, then no one could understand it.
My eminently reasonable, non-negotiable demands...
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
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· Score: 1
I have a Palm-OS device (Sony Clie) and a cell phone. I want to smoosh them together without increasing the thickness at all (the phone is about 1 inch--that should be enough) and maybe a little more width and height to accommodate a slightly bigger high-res display and miniature keyboard. I want the ease of synchronization, the plethora of cheap (or free) applications, and the stability of the Palm-OS, and I want to make phonecalls on the thing. Basic, simple things that make my life easier.
Right now, there are no PDA/phones out there that really satisfy me. The Treo seems way too flimsy--I want a clamshell that protects the works. The Kyocera 7135 comes close to what I want, but is a bit on the chunky side, has no keyboard, and the screen resolution isn't that great. (Though I guess I could live without a keyboard, since I can deal with the Clie.) I've also heard that they're not that great a phone...but hey if you offered me one for $150, I'd snap it up.
Can steady the muscular movements of my arm, project a HUD overlay into my optical nerve ir visual cortex, and grant me perfect pistol aim and targetting
I love it! But...
"I dunno officer. We were talkin' about how his wrist-top really rocks for sharing files and how music should be free, and suddenly he pulls his Glock and blows his own brains all over me."
"Hmm." The police offer lifts the dead man's arm, looks at the wrist-top screen and reads aloud: "This device has been seized pursuant to provisions of the DMCA, as amended in 2007. Permitted punitive action has been taken to terminate violation of copyright laws."
"Yep, another RIAA hack. Those boys are good. I'll call for the meat wagon." The officer looks at the ceiling and shakes his head. "Say, you got quit a mess to clean up in here.
Word is fine for what it does: Desktop Publishing. I believe that's what Word is supposed to be used for primarily. It's just that the majority are just using it for writing papers and memos, etc.
If you mean by "desktop publishing" what I mean by that phrase (laying out, writing and printing book-sized documents), then Word does an unequivocally poor job of it. I don't know what Word is good for, and I write and publish technical docs for a living (not under my own name). For that task, I use FrameMaker. As far as I know, there's still a UNIX version of FM; surely it will run under just about every flavor of LINUX out there. What's more, the documents produced by FM are completely interchangeable between UNIX and Windows platforms (if you transfer them in MIF format).
Um...there are already open standard document formats. They're called XML, CSS, XLS, etc. I don't think we need to invent yet another document format--if there's a problem with standards, it's that we already have too many of them, and they change too quickly. If users insisted on 100% portability of word processor to existing public standards ("portability" being defined as "validated by a parser"), then the problem would be solved. If you receive an XML document with a DTD and CSS (or better yet, pointers to a public CSS and DTD), then nobody would care what word processing program was used to produce the output.
I'm sure that I'm not the only person who doubts whether the palm has a future in its present form. I've got a Sony Clie that I use as an "organizer" and chess-opponent. The thing cost me $400...but I'd never pay that much for a palm device again. They've been around long enough that I expect to be able to buy a plain vanilla palm with a legible color screen for around $120 or less. I don't care about combining my organizer with a digital camera, wi-fi connection, waffle-maker, or MP3 player. All I want is something that keeps my personal information securely, reminds me of meetings, and plays chess. Eventually, I want to buy a combo cell phone and organizer (that plays chess) because it seems like a logical move to combine the two gadgets I always carry with me.
The floppy isn't dead, but I sure wish somebody would kill it. I feel really dumb whenever I build a new system and plug the floppy drive into it. (I never buy a floppy drive, you understand--I just take one from the heap in my garage.) I say to myself, "there must be a better way. But nevertheless, I know that very occasionally, I will need a floppy drive (like for loading the SATA drivers), so I don't dare leave the damn thing out.
It seems to me that someone (like the guy who made the floppy RAID) should make a floppy drive-shaped gizmo that takes a memory stick and fools the floppy interface into thinking it's a (very large) floppy. Then I could boot off my "floppy" really fast. Oh yeah, I'd still have to copy those SATA drivers onto the stick. Ugh.
I note that the web site claims to provide a downloadable "Foreward" for the book. Yaaaaagh! This is one of the word abuses that makes me think Western civilization is circling the drain. It's Foreword dammit!
I wouldn't be so sensitive about this if I didn't occasionally see "Foreward" and "Forward" in actual books. Really! I don't know about you, but when I am contradicted by real, bound paper books, it sometimes makes me momentarily doubt myself. (Nothing I read online ever has this effect on me). What's next--admitting I could be wrong ? Hah!
Happily, my infallibility is not threatened by this book--I downloaded the "Foreward" and was relieved to see that it's only a harmless "Foreword" after all.
Its never a good idea for government to compete with private capital sources in high technology.
Normally, I would agree with this. But remember that DARPA funded ARPANET, which eventually became the internet. Sometimes even government agencies accidentally do the right thing.
At least since Windows 98, Microsoft has had on its agenda a blurring of the lines between the local Windows desktop and all other resources (e.g., LAN, WAN, internet, etc.). Releasing a search engine that searches both the local disk and the internet is just another move in furthering that agenda. We're not supposed to care where our information--or our applications--are coming from. We're not supposed to care if they reside on our computer or somewhere out in the aether.
Why does MS want this? I can make some guesses. For one thing, it fits in with their long-term marketing goal of "we don't sell software, we just rent it." If you can't tell the difference between your desktop and the net (and many of the more naive computer users are already there), then you won't mind so much if every time you crank up Word it's actually downloaded from a server. Another reason is that if the line between the Windows desktop and the world is blurred, then all the world looks like Windows.
Probably, it won't work this time--any more than "channels" worked in Windows 98 (or was that 95? Jeez--my memory is really going). But--and this is the scary part--it doesn't matter very much to Microsoft. They don't have to get it right the first time (and they never do). They don't even have to get it right the fifth time. Once Bill decides on an agenda, he keeps right on pushing it until eventually the bloated bureaucracy known as Microsoft happens to produce something that does work. That's the advantage of having a de facto monopoly.
This is a useful suggestion. The problem I see with it is adjusting software companies' estimation of what they can charge for their products. See, if I have to pay $400 a year to use some word processor (assuming that someone writes one that I think is worth money at all)...well, I'm not going to pay. I would pay, say, $20 or maybe $30 a year.
Pricing in general is a problem with the software industry. They charge too much; as a result, people pirate the software. They'd probably make more money if they cut their prices drastically. I have no problem paying for software that costs what I consider to be a reasonable price. For example, Ultra Edit is a text/program editor that is enormously useful to me. I used it for months before I decided to pay for a license (I think it's about $20, but it's been a while). Why did I pay? Well, I want the author to keep putting out fixes and upgrades, for one thing. And it's the right thing to do. And his price is within reason. And I got tired of being nagged by the software. I've got about a dozen utilities like that--bought and paid for. All downloadable software made by individuals or small companies. Software that does a job, and does it well, and doesn't piss me off with a bunch of useless cruft.
The problem arises from the fact that you can't make money selling "classics". If software company XYZ publishes a simple, usable program that does something many people want to do, then XYZ can make some good money...for a year or two. But then what? Everyone who needs the program has a copy (or a pirated version). Sales drop to near zero, and everyone who used to work for XYZ is out looking for a new job.
There are two ways XYZ could stay in business: they could exercise their imagination, pay the development costs, and bring out a great piece of software that does something totally different than their first hit. Or they could just add new features to the "classic" and sell it as NEW! IMPROVED! MULTI-MEDIA Version 2.0!
Guess which approach most companies take. Sure, some of the additional features might actually be beneficial to (usually) a minority of users, but they also make the program more difficult to use and resource-hungry. After a while, the "classic" becomes so encrusted with "bells and whistles" that doing simple things makes your head explode. But that's the price of "progress" in the software world.
Are X terminals cheaper? It all depends on how you count the cost.
I've worked in a thin client/server environment and in a networked Windows PC environment, and I think that the first made a whole lot more sense than the second.
Back in 1990, we used a bunch of diskless Sun workstations connected to Convex C1s and C2s, running ConvexOS (a cousin of BSD) and X Windows. I loved this environment. The whole thing worked smoothly without major headaches, and gave me an amazing amount of flexibility in configuring my environment. In other words, the tools helped me get my job done, and otherwise stayed out of my way.
Now I work in a place that has a bunch of silly PCs running Windows 2K, and the environment is chaotic, consumes gobs of administrative resources (and of my time, trying to cope with it), is constantly down either because of viruses transmitted across the company network, or because of "emergency" pushes of anti-virus patches. The sysadmins are constantly trying to police all the PCs to make sure nothing unauthorized is running on them (or trying to make the authorized stuff run). I, for one, would love to go back to 1990 (with upgraded processors and GPUs, naturally 8^).
As some of the responders pointed out, it may indeed be possible to buy cheap X terminals "these days". In fact, any cheap PC will do as a client, as long as it will run Linux/X Windows--you will need to decide how much GPU, CPU and memory you need. But since the server can provide a lot of the number-crunching power, disk storage and interface with the WAN, that might be less than you would need for a standalone PC.
However, by far the greatest advantage I see for the thin client/server architecture is the lower administration cost. In effect, the sysadmin only has to maintain _one_ machine, the host. This means:
Backups are greatly simplified, because permanent disk storage takes place on the host, not the client (which uses its disk mainly for swap and other temporary files.
Applications are loaded onto the host, and clients execute them from the host. No questions about whether user X has access to application Y, or whether he has a license to run it. The fact that it's on the server means that the answer to both questions is "Yes".
If you need to update some application or system files, or maybe deploy a security patch (not that Linux has vulnerabilities! 8^), then it only has to be done once.
Creating a collaborative environment is much easier when the users "live" on a shared server. Using file privileges, file locking, and SCCS, the same source and data can be shared in a safe and convenient way.
If I had the opportunity to furnish my own office, I'd set up tents. That's right, workers each get their own colorful pavilion. You know, those tents you can stand up and stretch in, but not much further across than a standard cube. Workers can have privacy, but the tents can easily be rearranged. Considering what high-end office furniture costs, tents should be cheaper.
Tents would be good for morale--they convey a feeling of informality. They are translucent, so they let in ambient light (and can, of course, be lit from within if that's your preference). Tents come in many colors, so there's variety, instead of the monotony of cubes or offices.
Yes, the fabric has to be flameproof. You'd have to get the kind with "windows" or ventilation would be a problem. (Then again, the guy in the next tent who never bathes could be forced to hermetically seal his tent.) The fabric would help deaden sound, but wouldn't be soundproof of course.
Write tech documents with Word? One of my current job responsibilities is to maintain a 2,500 page document. Would you use Word for this? I'd prefer to use an application that does one thing well--in this case, FrameMaker--than one that keeps track of my boss' calendar.
I haven't checked lately, but Word used to crash regularly on manuals that exceeded 200 pages, never did a good index, and couldn't handle multiple chapters in separate files. You'd think they'd fix this stuff before they added frills. (I'd be surprised, but maybe they did...I never do real work with Word anymore.)
For me, the most loathsome feature of Word is style inheritance. Unless you are really good at designing Word styles (and who is?), you wind up with a bunch of styles that are mutually related in some mysterious way so that when you make a little change to one style, another style suddenly morphs into Greek, or all your numbered lists turn to bullets. I hear people mention this phenomenon frequently, but they usually think that word processors are supposed to act like this.
This is so true--I've long thought that many of the major software applications have passed their peak. Once you have a mature product that performs all the necessary functions for a particular purpose, how do you justify charging obnoxious sums of money for it? --Well, you "improve" it. Then you release the new "improved" version with much fanfare and charge obnoxious amounts of money.
But the only way you can, with some plausibility, claim that a product is "improved" is by adding new features. Maybe they're features that some small subset of users might conceivably want, but since this is mature software, all the important features are already present. By adding new non-essential features, you make the interface more complex, the product more difficult to learn and use, and introduce new bugs. (Which can be fixed in the next "improved" version.)
As a result, all the most common applications have grown bloated to the point where they are nearly unusable. Some examples of this are word processors (MS Word), image manipulation software (Photoshop), and CD burning software.
The other day, I wanted to burn a CD. I just wanted to put some photos on the darn thing and give it to my daughter. Turned out that my last CD software was locked to work only with the drive it came with, and the new (ultra cheap OEM) CD/DVD drive I bought didn't come with software. So I looked around for a package that would do what I wanted: burn a CD. I found packages that cost over $60 (Roxio and Nero), claimed to do everything but massage my gluteus maximus, and got horrible user reviews. Indeed, lots of people said that the previous releases of both these packages were better than the new "improved" version! --But of course, the previous release was no longer to be had. I finally found a place on the web that sells old software, and got an early OEM copy of Nero for $5 or so. Works great--it puts stuff on CDs.
Word processors are the worst of the lot, I think. I once used an early version of Word that ran under DOS and that did everything I wanted--in fact, I used it in my job: tech writing. That version of Word (whatever it was) didn't need more features--it just needed cleaning up. (Better interface, more intuitive use of stylesheets--ditch the concept of style inheritance.)
Remember MacWrite? It was a Word processor that you could give your 8 year old, with the reasonable expectation that she would be up and running with it in a few hours. Yeah, MacWrite could have used one or two features--such as the notion of paragraph formatting, page templates and a style catalog, but it was beautifully simple and did what it was supposed to do.
I've fantasized about the notion of starting a company that produces simple software--simple useable versions of the applications that drive everyone nuts. But I quickly realized why that can't be done: if you make simple software, then you'll get sued, since everything that's useful and simple has been patented.
Slashdot Mirror
Poor documentation? What do you think CSS is, a product? You have been using the spec as documentation? No wonder your suffering is great. There are plenty of decent books out there on CSS. My current favorite is Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer's Reference by Eric A. Meyer.
Most of my problems with CSS stem from poor browser implementation, not from faults inherent in the spec.
I don't know about that, but I firmly believe that anyone who uses the word "methodology" when he really means "method" should be summarily fed to rabid minks.
Apart from esthetics, investment of real money in virtual estate is also a poor investment. A case in point is the game I am now playing--Everquest. EQ is dying because EQ2 is sucking away the customer base. There is no continuity between EQ and EQ2, so whatever I owned in EQ becomes worthless to me the moment I stop playing the game (and I doubt I could find a sucker now who would buy a 62 Enchanter on EQ).
Virtual purchases like this island would only make sense if the game has a high likelyhood of being persistent--that is, will the island still be in existence 20 years from now? Will anyone care?
Sure, the guy who just bought the island might be able to make money by selling off subdivisions over the next year or so, but if the virtual estate doesn't retain its value over the long term, then this is nothing but a con game. Once the game loses its popularity and no one wants to play any more, the people who invested last will be left holding the bag. They will have title to a worthless piece of virtual estate--and not even that once the last game server is powered down.
For that kind of money, a person could have bought real estate (real real estate) that would be guaranteed to persist over any power outages for the lifespan of the owner and his descendants.
From the sound of it, Entropia is nothing but a very clever pyramid scheme. What's more, since they advertise their product as imaginary, they are fairly safe from criminal prosecution--but not, I suspect, from lawsuits.
Article wouldn't open for me--told me to go get Flash. (I'm running Firefox .9.3)
Blech.
How about Serial ATA? I have nothing but SATAnic drives in my PCs because the cables are such a delight to deal with. Thin, as long as you like, don't obstruct airflow. I don't care if SATA is faster than EIDE or not--I just love them cables. Well, I do wish they'd made the connectors a bit more robust.
Truly, I was amazed at the amount of vitriol that got dumped on the movie industry, and particularly the F.A.G.s...er actors. Which reminds me... were those puppets that got devoured by the Evil Panthers of Kim-Il-Jung stuffed with liver, or not?
Like, it's not possible to put this car into neutral? You can't pull the ignition "chip" out? Heck, even if it were Satanic RFID technology that works when the "key" is anywhere near the ignition lock, you could always hurl the damn thing out a window.
Actually, that's not quite true...it can be...um...made more user-friendly. So far my circuit designs have been pretty simple; if I were serious I'd probably get some high-priced PCB design software. But then it would be work.
What I do is this:
Personally, I think it's cheating to pay people to make PCBs for you.
Let's put it this way: if you had a truly original idea, something no one had ever thought of before, then no one could understand it.
Right now, there are no PDA/phones out there that really satisfy me. The Treo seems way too flimsy--I want a clamshell that protects the works. The Kyocera 7135 comes close to what I want, but is a bit on the chunky side, has no keyboard, and the screen resolution isn't that great. (Though I guess I could live without a keyboard, since I can deal with the Clie.) I've also heard that they're not that great a phone...but hey if you offered me one for $150, I'd snap it up.
I love it! But...
"I dunno officer. We were talkin' about how his wrist-top really rocks for sharing files and how music should be free, and suddenly he pulls his Glock and blows his own brains all over me."
"Hmm." The police offer lifts the dead man's arm, looks at the wrist-top screen and reads aloud: "This device has been seized pursuant to provisions of the DMCA, as amended in 2007. Permitted punitive action has been taken to terminate violation of copyright laws."
"Yep, another RIAA hack. Those boys are good. I'll call for the meat wagon." The officer looks at the ceiling and shakes his head. "Say, you got quit a mess to clean up in here.
If you mean by "desktop publishing" what I mean by that phrase (laying out, writing and printing book-sized documents), then Word does an unequivocally poor job of it. I don't know what Word is good for, and I write and publish technical docs for a living (not under my own name). For that task, I use FrameMaker. As far as I know, there's still a UNIX version of FM; surely it will run under just about every flavor of LINUX out there. What's more, the documents produced by FM are completely interchangeable between UNIX and Windows platforms (if you transfer them in MIF format).
So what did you say Word was good for?
Um...there are already open standard document formats. They're called XML, CSS, XLS, etc. I don't think we need to invent yet another document format--if there's a problem with standards, it's that we already have too many of them, and they change too quickly. If users insisted on 100% portability of word processor to existing public standards ("portability" being defined as "validated by a parser"), then the problem would be solved. If you receive an XML document with a DTD and CSS (or better yet, pointers to a public CSS and DTD), then nobody would care what word processing program was used to produce the output.
It seems to me that someone (like the guy who made the floppy RAID) should make a floppy drive-shaped gizmo that takes a memory stick and fools the floppy interface into thinking it's a (very large) floppy. Then I could boot off my "floppy" really fast. Oh yeah, I'd still have to copy those SATA drivers onto the stick. Ugh.
I wouldn't be so sensitive about this if I didn't occasionally see "Foreward" and "Forward" in actual books. Really! I don't know about you, but when I am contradicted by real, bound paper books, it sometimes makes me momentarily doubt myself. (Nothing I read online ever has this effect on me). What's next--admitting I could be wrong ? Hah!
Happily, my infallibility is not threatened by this book--I downloaded the "Foreward" and was relieved to see that it's only a harmless "Foreword" after all.
Normally, I would agree with this. But remember that DARPA funded ARPANET, which eventually became the internet. Sometimes even government agencies accidentally do the right thing.
Why does MS want this? I can make some guesses. For one thing, it fits in with their long-term marketing goal of "we don't sell software, we just rent it." If you can't tell the difference between your desktop and the net (and many of the more naive computer users are already there), then you won't mind so much if every time you crank up Word it's actually downloaded from a server. Another reason is that if the line between the Windows desktop and the world is blurred, then all the world looks like Windows.
Probably, it won't work this time--any more than "channels" worked in Windows 98 (or was that 95? Jeez--my memory is really going). But--and this is the scary part--it doesn't matter very much to Microsoft. They don't have to get it right the first time (and they never do). They don't even have to get it right the fifth time. Once Bill decides on an agenda, he keeps right on pushing it until eventually the bloated bureaucracy known as Microsoft happens to produce something that does work. That's the advantage of having a de facto monopoly.
Pricing in general is a problem with the software industry. They charge too much; as a result, people pirate the software. They'd probably make more money if they cut their prices drastically. I have no problem paying for software that costs what I consider to be a reasonable price. For example, Ultra Edit is a text/program editor that is enormously useful to me. I used it for months before I decided to pay for a license (I think it's about $20, but it's been a while). Why did I pay? Well, I want the author to keep putting out fixes and upgrades, for one thing. And it's the right thing to do. And his price is within reason. And I got tired of being nagged by the software. I've got about a dozen utilities like that--bought and paid for. All downloadable software made by individuals or small companies. Software that does a job, and does it well, and doesn't piss me off with a bunch of useless cruft.
There are two ways XYZ could stay in business: they could exercise their imagination, pay the development costs, and bring out a great piece of software that does something totally different than their first hit. Or they could just add new features to the "classic" and sell it as NEW! IMPROVED! MULTI-MEDIA Version 2.0!
Guess which approach most companies take. Sure, some of the additional features might actually be beneficial to (usually) a minority of users, but they also make the program more difficult to use and resource-hungry. After a while, the "classic" becomes so encrusted with "bells and whistles" that doing simple things makes your head explode. But that's the price of "progress" in the software world.
Are X terminals cheaper? It all depends on how you count the cost.
I've worked in a thin client/server environment and in a networked Windows PC environment, and I think that the first made a whole lot more sense than the second.
Back in 1990, we used a bunch of diskless Sun workstations connected to Convex C1s and C2s, running ConvexOS (a cousin of BSD) and X Windows. I loved this environment. The whole thing worked smoothly without major headaches, and gave me an amazing amount of flexibility in configuring my environment. In other words, the tools helped me get my job done, and otherwise stayed out of my way.
Now I work in a place that has a bunch of silly PCs running Windows 2K, and the environment is chaotic, consumes gobs of administrative resources (and of my time, trying to cope with it), is constantly down either because of viruses transmitted across the company network, or because of "emergency" pushes of anti-virus patches. The sysadmins are constantly trying to police all the PCs to make sure nothing unauthorized is running on them (or trying to make the authorized stuff run). I, for one, would love to go back to 1990 (with upgraded processors and GPUs, naturally 8^).
As some of the responders pointed out, it may indeed be possible to buy cheap X terminals "these days". In fact, any cheap PC will do as a client, as long as it will run Linux/X Windows--you will need to decide how much GPU, CPU and memory you need. But since the server can provide a lot of the number-crunching power, disk storage and interface with the WAN, that might be less than you would need for a standalone PC.
However, by far the greatest advantage I see for the thin client/server architecture is the lower administration cost. In effect, the sysadmin only has to maintain _one_ machine, the host. This means:
Tents would be good for morale--they convey a feeling of informality. They are translucent, so they let in ambient light (and can, of course, be lit from within if that's your preference). Tents come in many colors, so there's variety, instead of the monotony of cubes or offices.
Yes, the fabric has to be flameproof. You'd have to get the kind with "windows" or ventilation would be a problem. (Then again, the guy in the next tent who never bathes could be forced to hermetically seal his tent.) The fabric would help deaden sound, but wouldn't be soundproof of course.
I haven't checked lately, but Word used to crash regularly on manuals that exceeded 200 pages, never did a good index, and couldn't handle multiple chapters in separate files. You'd think they'd fix this stuff before they added frills. (I'd be surprised, but maybe they did...I never do real work with Word anymore.)
For me, the most loathsome feature of Word is style inheritance. Unless you are really good at designing Word styles (and who is?), you wind up with a bunch of styles that are mutually related in some mysterious way so that when you make a little change to one style, another style suddenly morphs into Greek, or all your numbered lists turn to bullets. I hear people mention this phenomenon frequently, but they usually think that word processors are supposed to act like this.
But the only way you can, with some plausibility, claim that a product is "improved" is by adding new features. Maybe they're features that some small subset of users might conceivably want, but since this is mature software, all the important features are already present. By adding new non-essential features, you make the interface more complex, the product more difficult to learn and use, and introduce new bugs. (Which can be fixed in the next "improved" version.)
As a result, all the most common applications have grown bloated to the point where they are nearly unusable. Some examples of this are word processors (MS Word), image manipulation software (Photoshop), and CD burning software.
The other day, I wanted to burn a CD. I just wanted to put some photos on the darn thing and give it to my daughter. Turned out that my last CD software was locked to work only with the drive it came with, and the new (ultra cheap OEM) CD/DVD drive I bought didn't come with software. So I looked around for a package that would do what I wanted: burn a CD. I found packages that cost over $60 (Roxio and Nero), claimed to do everything but massage my gluteus maximus, and got horrible user reviews. Indeed, lots of people said that the previous releases of both these packages were better than the new "improved" version! --But of course, the previous release was no longer to be had. I finally found a place on the web that sells old software, and got an early OEM copy of Nero for $5 or so. Works great--it puts stuff on CDs.
Word processors are the worst of the lot, I think. I once used an early version of Word that ran under DOS and that did everything I wanted--in fact, I used it in my job: tech writing. That version of Word (whatever it was) didn't need more features--it just needed cleaning up. (Better interface, more intuitive use of stylesheets--ditch the concept of style inheritance.)
Remember MacWrite? It was a Word processor that you could give your 8 year old, with the reasonable expectation that she would be up and running with it in a few hours. Yeah, MacWrite could have used one or two features--such as the notion of paragraph formatting, page templates and a style catalog, but it was beautifully simple and did what it was supposed to do.
I've fantasized about the notion of starting a company that produces simple software--simple useable versions of the applications that drive everyone nuts. But I quickly realized why that can't be done: if you make simple software, then you'll get sued, since everything that's useful and simple has been patented.