Yes, it seems to be a valid idea that companies having the Dunning Kruger effect won't make it. Unfortunately since capitalism is more like a lottery than a way of rewarding effort and tallent, some of those companies actually make it. I have seen companies now celebrating their 15th aniversary which were founded on a patent for a perpetuum mobile. It is now even profitable.
Still I admire your dedication to try to weed out such companies, as in the long run having such companies around is bad for a society. However I do not think it matters from a business or profit perspective.
I am sorry, but you apparently haven't understood what a computer is. You are, unfortunately, not alone.
Just because many people don't need computers at their workplaces now get tablets doesn't mean that tablets (in their current unsophisticated form) are a replacement for computers. And even today most people don't need computers at their workplace as they aren't educated to use computers. What they actually would need are word processing systems.
However that might change. In a competitive workplace, those who can use computers will have a huge advantage over those who can't. Why should I spend hours doing something, when I can spend a few minutes programming a computer to do it for me? This is what we need to educate our children for. Programming is an important cultural skill. Tablets are, in their current unsophisticated form, not suitable for that.
I wouldn't say so, bash neither cares about the underlying OS, in fact you can even run it under Windows. To be honest I haven't tried Python myself yet. It does seem to have some advantages from what I hear, but I don't know how usefull it is in every day life.
What can a child do with an iPad at that age? If it's just "reading books" and "playing games", then you should consider cheaper alternatives since obviously your child could also use books and games. The even more pressing issue is of course that tablets don't give tactile feedback. Playing with bricks, for example, gives that feedback. They need to learn how strongly they need to grip such a block and they practice that since they want to learn how to use the blocks. That's an experience a tablet cannot give them.
Don't confuse the latest fad rich people have with something which will benefit your child.
Children want to understand the world. They want to shake something and have a sound coming out of it. They want to press the button of a typewriter for a letter to appear on the paper. They want to learn about cause and effect in order to understand the world around them. That is their basic instinct.
The older they are, the more complex those systems can be. However it is always important that the system behaves in a deterministic way, so the child can learn from it.
Unixoid operating systems provide that consistent behavior. They provide you with a command line and every time you type in those magic words, they will do the same. You can also combine them... just like Lego or other types of building blocks. While you can do the same on Windows, theoretically, the learning curve is much higher. People will need to learn complex non-interactive programming languages to do the same unixoid people simply do on a console.
If you put a child in front of a Windows Box, you are robbing them of the experience that computers are reliable deterministic tools used extend their minds. It's like giving them a box of crayons which for some invisible reason work differently every time.
Ignoring the point whether they actually need a laptop at that age, I'd go for a nice used Thinkpad X40 or something. That's more than enough processing power, they are small and light, durable and cheap.
The demands of little children and bank managers are fairly similar. They both are likely to damage "cheap" consumer notebooks (which often cost substantially more than a used Thinkpad) easily, so you need something durable.
What's more important than the hardware is the pedagogic framework behind it. It's no use giving a child access to a computer without helping it to learn how to program it.
They already had their own Eurovision Song Contest entry. Unfortunately they had to remove the word "Facebook". If you look for it, you'll find 2 versions, one with the name being replaced.
Actually given the current status it would be stupid for Facebook to do anything, people already do stuff for them for free. Just wait till someone else brings out a Facebook-Phone.
There are stores selling refurbished business laptops. Those are typically older and have broken batteries, but fully sufficient for the average consumer who doesn't need a battery anyhow.
Essentially there are lots of people who both believe that Windows is the correct operating system and have no idea what they are doing. That's why rating firms run on Excel spreadsheets. Huge Excel spreadsheets nobody can maintain.
Plus there is another thing which is more important than security, it's the social structure. You usually cannot questions others decisions, even if you have actual proof that you are right. That's not acceptable in most companies.
The combination is also common. You have some idiots starting with VBA and having half maintained Excel spreadsheets which only grow, but never shrink. Converting them would be near impossible, so even if you are able to change the consensus, there's nothing people can do about.
Working in a company which is like that, I can tell that this is extremely frustrating.
Are you the "grab as much money from investors and run" kind of startup? Then it doesn't matter.
If you are the "we want to build a sustainable business" kind of startup, then please as fast as you can, get rid of the cancer of "Office" software. Those packages probably are the biggest productivity robber you can have. Then make sure you have all your data in open, preferably text-based formats.
Believe me, in a few years you'll be thanking me when either smarter start-ups with automation compete with you, or when your current brand of office software isn't maintained any more.
As long as there still is DRM, the printed book certainly won't disappear, except in the homes of a bunch of idiots who will be left without those DRMed files after a few years. Postal mail still is essential to businesses as most of their workflows are paper based. In your usual company you have some computer system printing out some information on a sheet of paper. With e-mail you would have to scan that printout in before you can attach it, a process even harder than generating PDF files directly which is, if technically possible at all, quite difficult.
Diskettes may have died out in the world of web-design, but when it comes to manufacturing, many companies are stuck with some 1990s $100k piece of machinery getting its data via diskette only. In fact, every PC case I bought over the last few years still had a slot for a 5 1/4 inch diskette drive. They often even lack one of the front panels so you have to install it. Otherwise you'd have an empty space in your front.
Those things may all have long been gone in certain areas, but in the real world it's nothing like that.
At the place I work, we have some word processing systems named after a 1970s band. It looks fairly modern, it even has decent resolution colour screens and a semi-functional shell. It is programmed via macros in the word processing package. And unlike the Canon Cat, this one is really badly designed.
From Windows for Workgroups to Windows 2000, every version was able to join a domain. Only in Windows XP they deliberately took it out for some subversions.
Then ARM is the first non-x86 platform Windows is ported too without an Emulator. That makes those devices virtually useless in a serious enterprise environment, because none of your software will work on them. (Alpha had one)
Well, uhm, it currently has access to the hardware. If the hardware abstraction would move from the X-Server to the Kernel, it would actually probably be safer.
Nobody is talking about putting an X-Server into the Kernel, and even Plan9 with its filesystem based GUI doesn't. (On Plan9 normal programes can create virtual filesystem structures which can be mounted anywhere. It's the Plan9 way of providing an API)
Giving it a conspiracy look, one might interpret it as an attempt of the unwashed hordes trying to take over Linux. Instead of going the sane unix-like route of moving graphics into virtual filesystems, like it's done on Plan9, they want to essentially replicate X11, but without its good parts. Wayland is not network transparent. It still needs libraries to be linked with your software. What you get is a bit more gimicky graphics, but you loose a lot of important features.
It's perhaps not quite as bad as the proposed move to binary log files, but still it offers next to no advantage for quite a bit of cost.
Replication of functionality between the kernel and X11 could be elimnated easily, buy building an X11 server that accesses the kernel.
We are talking about _computers_ here, one of the greatest tool to man. We barely had a glimpse of what they could do in education. However for that you need computers the child itself can program. Kids are smart, give them a decent environment and they will learn. Xerox did some research on that in the 1970s. http://archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987_2
However tablets in their current form are just simple playback devices. They are dumbed down in dumb ways, by removing essential features like programmability.
Well compared to Plan9 there are some deficiencies, but compared to Windows it's like Lego, it just snaps together.
Well actually it's strictly Unix, not Linux. Although Linux is unixoid, it is lately ran over herds of idiots who haven't understood the Unix philosophy, think they can do it better, and fail. There's nothing wrong about trying to re-invent the wheel, but at least try to learn from past mistakes and try to understand why people did do things the way they did before, and try to understand where the strengths of weaknesses of that are.
I think the big difference is the learning curve. It's very simple to gradually make your way into Linux. You can go there step by step. You can easily look everywhere you want since (nearly) everything is text, including the bootup system.
On Windows many things are only accessible via APIs. Often you'll first have to write a program to get to the API to get to the data you want. That's slow and cumbersome. Then there are lots of basically unknown technologies like DCOM which nobody, not even the people deploying large DCOM installations know about, and only make sense if you see the decade long historical development behind it. Windows was made at a time when TCP/IP was exotic and computers were single-user systems with no outside connections apart from perhaps a terminal emulator.
Of course you save money when switching to Linux, since then you suddenly have a system you can actually own and control. They can precisely control what their systems will or wont do. You can even fix a Linux system when its broken. (Apart from re-installing) Plus since Linux distributions typically detect hardware on startup (to some extend) you can have a single image for many different hardware configurations. Plus everything is easily scriptable and designed to fit together. Something that Powershell promises, but won't be able to keep, since old software needs to be adapted for it.
There are of course more reasons, such as Win32 apparently being end of life and Microsoft trying to get rid of it. (It's already out of Windows8 for ARM, probably the first non-x86 plattform to run Windows on, without Win32, Windows NT for Alpha came with an x86 emulator to run Win32 software) And software moving to.net? That's not going to happen. There are a few new projects which use.net, but nobody ports software to that platform, not even Microsoft.
They replaced Office macros with something more portable self developed. They however still use Office products at all, which is something I cannot understand. I guess they have people who cannot use LaTeX or troff.
I mean that all would be trivial to solve if phones would boot from external memory. You could then have 2 micro SD cards, one with your unsuspicious OS, and the other one with an encrypted other operating system. Everything stored on the phone does not reside in Flash, but ROM so they cannot install some sort of keylogger into the bootloader.
That would also make replacing a broken phone just as simple as replacing a broken computer. Just pop out your storage and put it into the new one. (Works at least when you have the the same kind of hardware, and with common operating systems)
It's not like stock brokers somehow do something productive. All they _can_ do is to suck out money from somewhere or sometime else, sometimes even causing a _lot_ of damage doing so. So if we close the stock markets, or at least heavily regulate them, we'd all live better. Trim down the financial sector to the parts which actually benefit the population.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it seems to be a valid idea that companies having the Dunning Kruger effect won't make it. Unfortunately since capitalism is more like a lottery than a way of rewarding effort and tallent, some of those companies actually make it. I have seen companies now celebrating their 15th aniversary which were founded on a patent for a perpetuum mobile. It is now even profitable.
Still I admire your dedication to try to weed out such companies, as in the long run having such companies around is bad for a society. However I do not think it matters from a business or profit perspective.
Let's talk about it again in 5 years. It's good to try out things, but few of those actually turn out to be beneficial.
I am sorry, but you apparently haven't understood what a computer is. You are, unfortunately, not alone.
Just because many people don't need computers at their workplaces now get tablets doesn't mean that tablets (in their current unsophisticated form) are a replacement for computers. And even today most people don't need computers at their workplace as they aren't educated to use computers. What they actually would need are word processing systems.
However that might change. In a competitive workplace, those who can use computers will have a huge advantage over those who can't. Why should I spend hours doing something, when I can spend a few minutes programming a computer to do it for me? This is what we need to educate our children for. Programming is an important cultural skill. Tablets are, in their current unsophisticated form, not suitable for that.
I wouldn't say so, bash neither cares about the underlying OS, in fact you can even run it under Windows. To be honest I haven't tried Python myself yet. It does seem to have some advantages from what I hear, but I don't know how usefull it is in every day life.
What can a child do with an iPad at that age?
If it's just "reading books" and "playing games", then you should consider cheaper alternatives since obviously your child could also use books and games. The even more pressing issue is of course that tablets don't give tactile feedback. Playing with bricks, for example, gives that feedback. They need to learn how strongly they need to grip such a block and they practice that since they want to learn how to use the blocks. That's an experience a tablet cannot give them.
Don't confuse the latest fad rich people have with something which will benefit your child.
Children want to understand the world. They want to shake something and have a sound coming out of it. They want to press the button of a typewriter for a letter to appear on the paper. They want to learn about cause and effect in order to understand the world around them. That is their basic instinct.
The older they are, the more complex those systems can be. However it is always important that the system behaves in a deterministic way, so the child can learn from it.
Unixoid operating systems provide that consistent behavior. They provide you with a command line and every time you type in those magic words, they will do the same. You can also combine them... just like Lego or other types of building blocks.
While you can do the same on Windows, theoretically, the learning curve is much higher. People will need to learn complex non-interactive programming languages to do the same unixoid people simply do on a console.
If you put a child in front of a Windows Box, you are robbing them of the experience that computers are reliable deterministic tools used extend their minds. It's like giving them a box of crayons which for some invisible reason work differently every time.
Ignoring the point whether they actually need a laptop at that age, I'd go for a nice used Thinkpad X40 or something. That's more than enough processing power, they are small and light, durable and cheap.
The demands of little children and bank managers are fairly similar. They both are likely to damage "cheap" consumer notebooks (which often cost substantially more than a used Thinkpad) easily, so you need something durable.
What's more important than the hardware is the pedagogic framework behind it. It's no use giving a child access to a computer without helping it to learn how to program it.
They already had their own Eurovision Song Contest entry. Unfortunately they had to remove the word "Facebook". If you look for it, you'll find 2 versions, one with the name being replaced.
Actually given the current status it would be stupid for Facebook to do anything, people already do stuff for them for free. Just wait till someone else brings out a Facebook-Phone.
There are stores selling refurbished business laptops. Those are typically older and have broken batteries, but fully sufficient for the average consumer who doesn't need a battery anyhow.
Essentially there are lots of people who both believe that Windows is the correct operating system and have no idea what they are doing. That's why rating firms run on Excel spreadsheets. Huge Excel spreadsheets nobody can maintain.
Plus there is another thing which is more important than security, it's the social structure. You usually cannot questions others decisions, even if you have actual proof that you are right. That's not acceptable in most companies.
The combination is also common. You have some idiots starting with VBA and having half maintained Excel spreadsheets which only grow, but never shrink. Converting them would be near impossible, so even if you are able to change the consensus, there's nothing people can do about.
Working in a company which is like that, I can tell that this is extremely frustrating.
Are you the "grab as much money from investors and run" kind of startup? Then it doesn't matter.
If you are the "we want to build a sustainable business" kind of startup, then please as fast as you can, get rid of the cancer of "Office" software. Those packages probably are the biggest productivity robber you can have.
Then make sure you have all your data in open, preferably text-based formats.
Believe me, in a few years you'll be thanking me when either smarter start-ups with automation compete with you, or when your current brand of office software isn't maintained any more.
As long as there still is DRM, the printed book certainly won't disappear, except in the homes of a bunch of idiots who will be left without those DRMed files after a few years.
Postal mail still is essential to businesses as most of their workflows are paper based. In your usual company you have some computer system printing out some information on a sheet of paper. With e-mail you would have to scan that printout in before you can attach it, a process even harder than generating PDF files directly which is, if technically possible at all, quite difficult.
Diskettes may have died out in the world of web-design, but when it comes to manufacturing, many companies are stuck with some 1990s $100k piece of machinery getting its data via diskette only. In fact, every PC case I bought over the last few years still had a slot for a 5 1/4 inch diskette drive. They often even lack one of the front panels so you have to install it. Otherwise you'd have an empty space in your front.
Those things may all have long been gone in certain areas, but in the real world it's nothing like that.
At the place I work, we have some word processing systems named after a 1970s band. It looks fairly modern, it even has decent resolution colour screens and a semi-functional shell. It is programmed via macros in the word processing package. And unlike the Canon Cat, this one is really badly designed.
As if anybody still cares for Office. If you see Office in a company, that's usually a sign of bad management.
From Windows for Workgroups to Windows 2000, every version was able to join a domain. Only in Windows XP they deliberately took it out for some subversions.
Then ARM is the first non-x86 platform Windows is ported too without an Emulator. That makes those devices virtually useless in a serious enterprise environment, because none of your software will work on them. (Alpha had one)
This is deliberate.
Well, uhm, it currently has access to the hardware. If the hardware abstraction would move from the X-Server to the Kernel, it would actually probably be safer.
Nobody is talking about putting an X-Server into the Kernel, and even Plan9 with its filesystem based GUI doesn't. (On Plan9 normal programes can create virtual filesystem structures which can be mounted anywhere. It's the Plan9 way of providing an API)
Giving it a conspiracy look, one might interpret it as an attempt of the unwashed hordes trying to take over Linux. Instead of going the sane unix-like route of moving graphics into virtual filesystems, like it's done on Plan9, they want to essentially replicate X11, but without its good parts. Wayland is not network transparent. It still needs libraries to be linked with your software. What you get is a bit more gimicky graphics, but you loose a lot of important features.
It's perhaps not quite as bad as the proposed move to binary log files, but still it offers next to no advantage for quite a bit of cost.
Replication of functionality between the kernel and X11 could be elimnated easily, buy building an X11 server that accesses the kernel.
We are talking about _computers_ here, one of the greatest tool to man. We barely had a glimpse of what they could do in education. However for that you need computers the child itself can program. Kids are smart, give them a decent environment and they will learn. Xerox did some research on that in the 1970s.
http://archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987_2
However tablets in their current form are just simple playback devices. They are dumbed down in dumb ways, by removing essential features like programmability.
Well compared to Plan9 there are some deficiencies, but compared to Windows it's like Lego, it just snaps together.
Well actually it's strictly Unix, not Linux. Although Linux is unixoid, it is lately ran over herds of idiots who haven't understood the Unix philosophy, think they can do it better, and fail. There's nothing wrong about trying to re-invent the wheel, but at least try to learn from past mistakes and try to understand why people did do things the way they did before, and try to understand where the strengths of weaknesses of that are.
I think the big difference is the learning curve. It's very simple to gradually make your way into Linux. You can go there step by step. You can easily look everywhere you want since (nearly) everything is text, including the bootup system.
On Windows many things are only accessible via APIs. Often you'll first have to write a program to get to the API to get to the data you want. That's slow and cumbersome. Then there are lots of basically unknown technologies like DCOM which nobody, not even the people deploying large DCOM installations know about, and only make sense if you see the decade long historical development behind it. Windows was made at a time when TCP/IP was exotic and computers were single-user systems with no outside connections apart from perhaps a terminal emulator.
Of course you save money when switching to Linux, since then you suddenly have a system you can actually own and control. They can precisely control what their systems will or wont do. You can even fix a Linux system when its broken. (Apart from re-installing) Plus since Linux distributions typically detect hardware on startup (to some extend) you can have a single image for many different hardware configurations.
Plus everything is easily scriptable and designed to fit together. Something that Powershell promises, but won't be able to keep, since old software needs to be adapted for it.
There are of course more reasons, such as Win32 apparently being end of life and Microsoft trying to get rid of it. (It's already out of Windows8 for ARM, probably the first non-x86 plattform to run Windows on, without Win32, Windows NT for Alpha came with an x86 emulator to run Win32 software) And software moving to .net? That's not going to happen. There are a few new projects which use .net, but nobody ports software to that platform, not even Microsoft.
They replaced Office macros with something more portable self developed. They however still use Office products at all, which is something I cannot understand. I guess they have people who cannot use LaTeX or troff.
I mean that all would be trivial to solve if phones would boot from external memory. You could then have 2 micro SD cards, one with your unsuspicious OS, and the other one with an encrypted other operating system. Everything stored on the phone does not reside in Flash, but ROM so they cannot install some sort of keylogger into the bootloader.
That would also make replacing a broken phone just as simple as replacing a broken computer. Just pop out your storage and put it into the new one. (Works at least when you have the the same kind of hardware, and with common operating systems)
It's not like stock brokers somehow do something productive. All they _can_ do is to suck out money from somewhere or sometime else, sometimes even causing a _lot_ of damage doing so. So if we close the stock markets, or at least heavily regulate them, we'd all live better. Trim down the financial sector to the parts which actually benefit the population.
I mean I'm all for cutting network latency, but do we have to give it to banks so they will destroy our lives?