..this is exactly what everyone does on iOS/Android. Certainly, accessibility isn't their reason for doing so, but if the current wave of mobile apps have proven anything, it's that rich clients aren't going anywhere.
Well, it certainly seems to apply in a number of areas. To wit:
- Clothing - Of course - Computer hardware - Apple, Alienware - Books - "Real Literature" - Food - French Cuisine - Music
Actually, there's probably a general market development pattern there that pretty much applies across most, if not all, areas of the economy. I think even financial investment instruments were affected by this (how else can anyone explain how Maddox, among others, did what he did?).
The world would probably appear to be much more sane to me if I hadn't (symbolically speaking) taken the blue pill a long time ago. As human beings, we're far too easily manipulated, and your observation along with my own over the years have demonstrated to me that capitalism needs an upgrade; that it's not the highest possible expression of/for human endeavor. The non-profit and creative commons models come closer, but those models seem to lack intrinsic motivators/reward mechanisms (e.g. greed in capitalism) and I'm assuming a good economic model needs one. Still looking I guess. Of course, there's lots I don't know, so if you know of better, I'm all ears.
Essentially, its retail as advertising. As capitalism ages everything essentially becomes the fashion industry. All style, perhaps a chance of substance.
Frankly, I find this idea for more interesting than anything else in this thread. Did this quote originate with you or someone else?
That's probably your own fault. Uninstall the add-ons, themes, turn down the cache size, etc. and it will speed up significantly. Barring that, enjoy your time with Opera. It's a great browser, but I dumped it once FF3 was out.
Go to the options for the Tree Style Tab add-on, click the "Auto hide" button at the top, then choose "Auto Shrink tab bar" or "Auto Hide tab bar". YMMV, but it's an option.
Install the Tree Style Tab add then switch your tabs to vertical orientation. With that in place on a wide screen monitor (or even not), plus being able to hide tabs by collapsing parts of the tree, my only complaint is the 300+ MBs of RAM Firefox 3 tab takes when I have 50+ tabs open.;+) (Oh, and Session Restore has to be very solid for this to work well - which is normally is).
Oracle's acquisition of BEA probably means that WebLogic is going to rule the Oracle JEE roost for the foreseeable future. Orion/OAS/OC4J is likely dead within 2 years; just as soon as they can incent customers onto WebLogic (which may well be renamed into the OAS brand). I don't know what they'll do with Glassfish; it's clearly redundant. However, as FOSS, it will surely live on perhaps as a fork.
If Applets are dead then so is client-side RIA. And it's not dead; just look at Adobe Flex then AIR. BTW - JavaFX deserves a place at the table no less than Adobe. Client-side RIA is at least as viable as HTML5 going forward; especially since client-side RIA is hand in glove architecturally speaking, which is something HTML can not achieve without a re-design.
Hopefully, someday it will just be common practice to stop abusing document oriented architectures for complex application creation. I saw it done with Lotus Notes, Microsoft Office automation, and on the web with HTML, etc. and I'm sick of these architectural abominations.
They could.. oh, I don't know, just ignore her? Now, if she were cheating on a test, that would be different, but this is just a school asserting a policy in the most totalitarian way possible. And, at the end of the day, what public good came out of this? Oh goody, so now she REALLY knows they don't want her to use a phone in school. Like she didn't know that already. It certainly isn't going to improve the educational environment.
I don't know why the hacker community keeps bothering with breaking these DRM schemes. It's clear that most people aren't going to use BlueRay unless it's significantly more accessible/cheap, more ubiquitous, and (by extension) much more open. You're just doing the hard work for them by enabling the dissemination of a technology which you actually oppose.
"Mother Nature" isn't a person, a consciousness, or even a cohesive force of nature. I too have to wonder about all the ways we have futzed around with our own longetivity, but I am hard-pressed to argue against it. Without our tinkering, we wouldn't even have vaccines. Without that, it's likely that you and I would not be here.
The long term impacts will sort themselves out and there really isn't anything to worry about. We are a part of nature after all, including our tinkering and if our machinations lead to our doom, then the wheel will still keep turning and "Mother Nature" will simply "try" again (oh good god how we love to anthropomorphize!).
After all, within the realm of nature, there really is no such thing as "man-made". We are a product of nature and therefore so is everything we create. It's a word game I know, but it's a useful one to keep in mind the next time someone prophesies doom at the hand of supposedly ill-intentioned humans. It's easy to forget that we, and the products of our best efforts, are nothing more or less than what nature "intended".
It just reports the amount of time that it was used. If you're going to build a trust relationship with your child, you have to give them the room to screw up and learn from their mistakes.
I wouldn't assume that your company would be put out of business anytime soon. I'm currently working with a customer that performed their own hedging calculations for years and they're just now converting to a package (might even be your company's or a competitor for all I know) because they finally figured out that they aren't accurate or consistent enough over the long haul. Regulations, changing trends, new models, etc. are all good reasons why that area will probably never be stable or easy enough for FOSS to address. It's kinda like using Quicken for your personal taxes: sure you can do it without the package and sure you could develop your own, but it's telling that there isn't a FOSS equivalent to Quicken (AFAIK anyway). It must be difficult enough to maintain that there's a reason the market has supported a proprietary package for this many years; despite the fact that it addresses a relatively well known domain.
When, and if, your company's products are ever obviated by FOSS, I'm sure you'll just plot a new product strategy that involves ever more complex instruments, calculations, and that are ever more sensitive in splitting the ROI hair. No worries man. You're set for life.:+)
I think your explanation is the best and simplest I've read in years as to why FOSS doesn't work for non-commoditized software markets. You're not selling an algorithm, a specially patented method, a trade secret or anything like that. Instead you're selling the sum total of your experience in the field as expressed in a software package. I understand where you're coming from entirely.
However, the same argument could be asserted against all of FOSS for exactly the same reasons. Why should an efficient and well written network stack be free? That also represents years of experience. The same could be said for word processors, web browsers, web servers, ray tracers, 3D engines, etc.
I think the key difference is in the business model and the evolution of the information-driven economy. As certain practices become common knowledge and relatively easy to implement, someone out there is going to scratch the itch and produce an open source version of that functionality; especially if they don't have a model or interest around leveraging that implementation for profit.
Specialized interests and non-commoditized areas require too much effort to support with too little help from the public at large to be good candidates for FOSS implementations over the long haul. So, they stay proprietary because someone needs to get paid to keep it alive.
Which brings me to my main point, and I think this is something I've always understood, but this line of thinking finally puts a finer point on it for me: FOSS is not about undermining the free market for software. The market forces after all are what has ultimately led to FOSS. At some point, it becomes my best interest to be open with commoditized implementations; why should I bear that burden alone when everyone needs it and could help with the package too?
So, FOSS is for the commoditized software market. Proprietary is for the software markets of competitive advantage.
Based on that reasoning then, I would have to say that using FOSS is never a competitive advantage for an enterprise, but not using FOSS can be a competitive disadvantage for an enterprise because I may in fact be bearing costs that my competitors do not because they have leveraged FOSS; where I may have opted for a more expensive option.
And vice-versa, if I wish to produce specialized software that is about producing a competitive advantage to companies that they can not already obtain with FOSS (in which case, that would be the new market baseline in order to say efficient and would not actually represent a competitive advantage because its presence as FOSS package proves that is is in fact commoditized already), then it stands to reason that I would have to develop a proprietary product.
Open sourcing a package that represents true competitive advantage would only ensure that I would bear the full cost of developing an expensive package (and developing anything that represents real competitive advantages is necessarily hard by definition), while potentially deriving no benefit from having done so, because as a FOSS effort I have no effective way to force my users to pay me for that effort. Because such an implementation is inherently difficult, my customers probably would not be able to "repay" me by helping with continuing development and maintenance.
And that finally clarifies for me everything that's been happening in the industry over the last 10 years or so. FOSS is a great thing, and I think everyone should support it. However it can not and will not ever be the cause of any particular software company's fall from power because unless those company's stop developing products with competitive advantages built in to them, FOSS can not consistently actually advance the state of the art beyond the commoditized baseline over the long haul.
Well, it worked. You seem open to discussion, so let me throw this at you.
First of all, I like your definition of faith. I looked up the word on Wikipedia earlier (yeah, that kind of frame of mind today) and found this quote you might like: "William Sloane Coffin counters that faith is not acceptance without proof, but trust without reservation."
So, here is the question I have: For what reason do you place trust in Christianity?
Before you answer, consider that Christianity requires belief that Jesus Christ was God, died for our sins on the cross, and rose from the dead. And that doesn't even take into account all of the rest of the Gospels.
Every Christian I know gets rather uncomfortable when I mention the more supernatural aspects of Christianity. When asked, many of them will let on that don't believe those things literally themselves. They usually get hostile atthat point and change the subject. The ones who do believe in the supernatural aspects say "you just have to have faith" that those things happened. The sub-text to this is that "you have to have faith that those things happened because if they didn't we'd all be wrong and do you really think that the millions of people alive today and all of our ancestors would have passed this lie down to us if it weren't true?". All of that combined is a huge emotionally weight that people don't really know how to handle and so the questioner normally backs off at that point.
But, someone who has had time to become immune to those overtones still has questions. Why believe it?
Thanks! I'm starting to be very suspicious about Atari lately. I was on the beta for the Act of War expansion pack and I totally got the run around on issues I reported (yeah, like I'm really going to pick through a bureaucracy just to report bugs for free!). Next thing I know, the expansion is on store shelves. Ugh...
Looking at their games portfolio, I can see that they're mostly shilling mediocre games right now, but I sincerely hope they get it together and keep it together.
It reminds me of some managers I've known: lie like hell to get people on a project/to the meeting/to buy in to a plan. They under-deliver on those initial lies and everyone gets ticked. But since they're all there already, they just do what they came to do anyway. At the end of the project/effort, the chronic lier gets rewarded for being visionary.
Slashdot Mirror
..this is exactly what everyone does on iOS/Android. Certainly, accessibility isn't their reason for doing so, but if the current wave of mobile apps have proven anything, it's that rich clients aren't going anywhere.
Well, it certainly seems to apply in a number of areas. To wit:
- Clothing - Of course
- Computer hardware - Apple, Alienware
- Books - "Real Literature"
- Food - French Cuisine
- Music
Actually, there's probably a general market development pattern there that pretty much applies across most, if not all, areas of the economy. I think even financial investment instruments were affected by this (how else can anyone explain how Maddox, among others, did what he did?).
The world would probably appear to be much more sane to me if I hadn't (symbolically speaking) taken the blue pill a long time ago. As human beings, we're far too easily manipulated, and your observation along with my own over the years have demonstrated to me that capitalism needs an upgrade; that it's not the highest possible expression of/for human endeavor. The non-profit and creative commons models come closer, but those models seem to lack intrinsic motivators/reward mechanisms (e.g. greed in capitalism) and I'm assuming a good economic model needs one. Still looking I guess. Of course, there's lots I don't know, so if you know of better, I'm all ears.
Essentially, its retail as advertising. As capitalism ages everything essentially becomes the fashion industry. All style, perhaps a chance of substance.
Frankly, I find this idea for more interesting than anything else in this thread. Did this quote originate with you or someone else?
> One of my biggest regrets in 100 years of life is the things I didn't accomplish because of exuberant modesty
I've got to know - where did that sig come from? Google'd it with no luck.
TIA!
FireFox is bloated and crash prone
That's probably your own fault. Uninstall the add-ons, themes, turn down the cache size, etc. and it will speed up significantly. Barring that, enjoy your time with Opera. It's a great browser, but I dumped it once FF3 was out.
Go to the options for the Tree Style Tab add-on, click the "Auto hide" button at the top, then choose "Auto Shrink tab bar" or "Auto Hide tab bar". YMMV, but it's an option.
Install the Tree Style Tab add then switch your tabs to vertical orientation. With that in place on a wide screen monitor (or even not), plus being able to hide tabs by collapsing parts of the tree, my only complaint is the 300+ MBs of RAM Firefox 3 tab takes when I have 50+ tabs open. ;+) (Oh, and Session Restore has to be very solid for this to work well - which is normally is).
Oracle's acquisition of BEA probably means that WebLogic is going to rule the Oracle JEE roost for the foreseeable future. Orion/OAS/OC4J is likely dead within 2 years; just as soon as they can incent customers onto WebLogic (which may well be renamed into the OAS brand). I don't know what they'll do with Glassfish; it's clearly redundant. However, as FOSS, it will surely live on perhaps as a fork.
If Applets are dead then so is client-side RIA. And it's not dead; just look at Adobe Flex then AIR. BTW - JavaFX deserves a place at the table no less than Adobe. Client-side RIA is at least as viable as HTML5 going forward; especially since client-side RIA is hand in glove architecturally speaking, which is something HTML can not achieve without a re-design.
Hopefully, someday it will just be common practice to stop abusing document oriented architectures for complex application creation. I saw it done with Lotus Notes, Microsoft Office automation, and on the web with HTML, etc. and I'm sick of these architectural abominations.
They could.. oh, I don't know, just ignore her? Now, if she were cheating on a test, that would be different, but this is just a school asserting a policy in the most totalitarian way possible. And, at the end of the day, what public good came out of this? Oh goody, so now she REALLY knows they don't want her to use a phone in school. Like she didn't know that already. It certainly isn't going to improve the educational environment.
I don't know why the hacker community keeps bothering with breaking these DRM schemes. It's clear that most people aren't going to use BlueRay unless it's significantly more accessible/cheap, more ubiquitous, and (by extension) much more open. You're just doing the hard work for them by enabling the dissemination of a technology which you actually oppose.
God please let it be IBM.
In my case, I use a T-Mobile MDA, which has a slide-out keyboard. I've also been looking at the Wing, which is basically the next version of the MDA.
It won't access your USB sticks though. However, if the file in question is just a to-do list, you can keep that on the PDA anyway. YMMV
"Mother Nature" isn't a person, a consciousness, or even a cohesive force of nature. I too have to wonder about all the ways we have futzed around with our own longetivity, but I am hard-pressed to argue against it. Without our tinkering, we wouldn't even have vaccines. Without that, it's likely that you and I would not be here.
The long term impacts will sort themselves out and there really isn't anything to worry about. We are a part of nature after all, including our tinkering and if our machinations lead to our doom, then the wheel will still keep turning and "Mother Nature" will simply "try" again (oh good god how we love to anthropomorphize!).
After all, within the realm of nature, there really is no such thing as "man-made". We are a product of nature and therefore so is everything we create. It's a word game I know, but it's a useful one to keep in mind the next time someone prophesies doom at the hand of supposedly ill-intentioned humans. It's easy to forget that we, and the products of our best efforts, are nothing more or less than what nature "intended".
Jade Empire was a real surprise for me. If you like martial arts, (light) philosophy, and RPGs; it's a very good game.
It just reports the amount of time that it was used. If you're going to build a trust relationship with your child, you have to give them the room to screw up and learn from their mistakes.
I wouldn't assume that your company would be put out of business anytime soon. I'm currently working with a customer that performed their own hedging calculations for years and they're just now converting to a package (might even be your company's or a competitor for all I know) because they finally figured out that they aren't accurate or consistent enough over the long haul. Regulations, changing trends, new models, etc. are all good reasons why that area will probably never be stable or easy enough for FOSS to address. It's kinda like using Quicken for your personal taxes: sure you can do it without the package and sure you could develop your own, but it's telling that there isn't a FOSS equivalent to Quicken (AFAIK anyway). It must be difficult enough to maintain that there's a reason the market has supported a proprietary package for this many years; despite the fact that it addresses a relatively well known domain.
:+)
When, and if, your company's products are ever obviated by FOSS, I'm sure you'll just plot a new product strategy that involves ever more complex instruments, calculations, and that are ever more sensitive in splitting the ROI hair. No worries man. You're set for life.
I think your explanation is the best and simplest I've read in years as to why FOSS doesn't work for non-commoditized software markets. You're not selling an algorithm, a specially patented method, a trade secret or anything like that. Instead you're selling the sum total of your experience in the field as expressed in a software package. I understand where you're coming from entirely.
However, the same argument could be asserted against all of FOSS for exactly the same reasons. Why should an efficient and well written network stack be free? That also represents years of experience. The same could be said for word processors, web browsers, web servers, ray tracers, 3D engines, etc.
I think the key difference is in the business model and the evolution of the information-driven economy. As certain practices become common knowledge and relatively easy to implement, someone out there is going to scratch the itch and produce an open source version of that functionality; especially if they don't have a model or interest around leveraging that implementation for profit.
Specialized interests and non-commoditized areas require too much effort to support with too little help from the public at large to be good candidates for FOSS implementations over the long haul. So, they stay proprietary because someone needs to get paid to keep it alive.
Which brings me to my main point, and I think this is something I've always understood, but this line of thinking finally puts a finer point on it for me: FOSS is not about undermining the free market for software. The market forces after all are what has ultimately led to FOSS. At some point, it becomes my best interest to be open with commoditized implementations; why should I bear that burden alone when everyone needs it and could help with the package too?
So, FOSS is for the commoditized software market. Proprietary is for the software markets of competitive advantage.
Based on that reasoning then, I would have to say that using FOSS is never a competitive advantage for an enterprise, but not using FOSS can be a competitive disadvantage for an enterprise because I may in fact be bearing costs that my competitors do not because they have leveraged FOSS; where I may have opted for a more expensive option.
And vice-versa, if I wish to produce specialized software that is about producing a competitive advantage to companies that they can not already obtain with FOSS (in which case, that would be the new market baseline in order to say efficient and would not actually represent a competitive advantage because its presence as FOSS package proves that is is in fact commoditized already), then it stands to reason that I would have to develop a proprietary product.
Open sourcing a package that represents true competitive advantage would only ensure that I would bear the full cost of developing an expensive package (and developing anything that represents real competitive advantages is necessarily hard by definition), while potentially deriving no benefit from having done so, because as a FOSS effort I have no effective way to force my users to pay me for that effort. Because such an implementation is inherently difficult, my customers probably would not be able to "repay" me by helping with continuing development and maintenance.
And that finally clarifies for me everything that's been happening in the industry over the last 10 years or so. FOSS is a great thing, and I think everyone should support it. However it can not and will not ever be the cause of any particular software company's fall from power because unless those company's stop developing products with competitive advantages built in to them, FOSS can not consistently actually advance the state of the art beyond the commoditized baseline over the long haul.
Free as in "free speech", not "free beer".
This site is really slow right now, but at a mere 68 KB, this old gem is worth a look.
d v_crowther_win.zip
Have a look:
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/unprocessed/a
Not my work BTW. Credit goes to the crew on rec.arts.int-fiction.
Well, it worked. You seem open to discussion, so let me throw this at you.
First of all, I like your definition of faith. I looked up the word on Wikipedia earlier (yeah, that kind of frame of mind today) and found this quote you might like:
"William Sloane Coffin counters that faith is not acceptance without proof, but trust without reservation."
So, here is the question I have: For what reason do you place trust in Christianity?
Before you answer, consider that Christianity requires belief that Jesus Christ was God, died for our sins on the cross, and rose from the dead. And that doesn't even take into account all of the rest of the Gospels.
Every Christian I know gets rather uncomfortable when I mention the more supernatural aspects of Christianity. When asked, many of them will let on that don't believe those things literally themselves. They usually get hostile atthat point and change the subject. The ones who do believe in the supernatural aspects say "you just have to have faith" that those things happened. The sub-text to this is that "you have to have faith that those things happened because if they didn't we'd all be wrong and do you really think that the millions of people alive today and all of our ancestors would have passed this lie down to us if it weren't true?". All of that combined is a huge emotionally weight that people don't really know how to handle and so the questioner normally backs off at that point.
But, someone who has had time to become immune to those overtones still has questions. Why believe it?
Faith is a rational response to faithfulness.
Errr.. just a quick question, what the heck does your sig mean?
Thanks! I'm starting to be very suspicious about Atari lately. I was on the beta for the Act of War expansion pack and I totally got the run around on issues I reported (yeah, like I'm really going to pick through a bureaucracy just to report bugs for free!). Next thing I know, the expansion is on store shelves. Ugh...
Looking at their games portfolio, I can see that they're mostly shilling mediocre games right now, but I sincerely hope they get it together and keep it together.
Do you have any idea why that was the case? Did they have the same publisher? If so, then why were they given so much less time?
Just out of curiosity, how would you define that niche?
It reminds me of some managers I've known: lie like hell to get people on a project/to the meeting/to buy in to a plan. They under-deliver on those initial lies and everyone gets ticked. But since they're all there already, they just do what they came to do anyway. At the end of the project/effort, the chronic lier gets rewarded for being visionary.
And no, I'm not gonna name names.