You find the CD buried in a box in the garden. You see the Microsoft logo. An old, long-dead company. You scrape some dust off the CD. You read through the logos and fine print on the CD. You see the logo 'PlaysForSure' (tm) You groan and throw the CD in the trash.
Yep, me too. Outside of my work email, everything comes to Google.
I did just log into my Yahoo! email account, and ooops!, there's a huge pink animated pig taking up 1/3rd of the screen.
Yahoo! isn't a bad portal but splashing a huge pig over the top of the screen isn't the way to make people feel they are being treated like first class citizens.
The unobtrusive, and often interesting, Google ads are a small price to pay for a great email service. Yahoo!'s garish huge graphic of some BS that I'm not interested in will keep me off their service.
I think people are looking at this the wrong way. It seems very very unlikely that google will market their own operating system, except as a gateway to something else.
If I was Google, I'd probably be looking at my resources (fiber, millions of virtual servers, smart people) and come up with something like Google Desktop, a distributed desktop, accessible from any think client. Here's the pitch:
- Use our portal (we already have GMail, and GoogleSearch) - Access local files (loadable in OpenOffice, Google are not shy of OpenSource) - Get your own customizable desktop, accessible from anywhere in the world - Guaranteed virus, spyware and hassle free, with great performance
Most of this is already in place. Google Desktop would just be a server hosted process on a farm somewhere. Google already know how to do this.
Open Office tweaked by Google staff would support loading most of the files that people care about. Printing might be tricky, but different flavors of local drivers would address this, much as Citrix can already do.
If they really wanted to, Google could market a Google-branded Mac Mini with a customized OS X that would be perfect for this.
In the statement, Thompson says, "Sims 2, the latest version of the Sims video game franchise... contains, according to video game news sites, full frontal nudity, including nipples, penises, labia, and pubic hair."
Sonnnnnn !!! This guy should have been born in the Victorian age, when this kind of sentiment was rife.
The Black Angus sub at Quiznos used to be fantastic, but the quality of the meat used by the local stores I go to dropped pretty obviously. I've also had the beef dip sandwich with beef that had very obvious shimmer (bacteria).
Both restaurants are still much better than eating at the bottom tier burger restaurants though. I can't even bring myself to type their names, they are so repulsive.
Nowadays, I'd much rather find a few decent cheap ethnic restaurants than eat at a major chain. There are many good Meditteranean type sandwich shops that offer good fresh food at fairly cheap prices.
When you rent a car, and it has XM, you find a decent station and enjoy listening to it. You don't really notice how great it is.
As soon as you lose XM, the incessant commercials and inane DJ chatter of modern US commercial radio become very oppressive. Try doing a 30 minute commute with 15 minutes of commercials for beer and haemorrhoid cream, and you'll never want to listen again.
FM radio sucks unless you want to listen to NPR or drive time news.
Yeah, this same comparison works with the computers too.
Unpacking a Powerbook is a real occasion. The attention to detail in the packaging is superb. There is a short setup procedure that is easy to go through, then you are free to play with all the great new toys like speech recognition and synthesis. The fabulous Omnigraffle, and like me maybe, installing Microsoft Office just by dragging one icon into applications. Sweeeeeeet!!
Unpacking almost any PC is pretty sucky in comparison. Lets gloss over that though and cut to the *long* initial run. The registering with MS. The clicking 'NO' to 'Do you want to purchase Norton anti-virus'. Suck. Suck. Suck.
Mod me down, but I am a great fan of Windows XP. Good solid system. BUT !! Mac OS X kicks ass. I run XP and Gentoo at home, and XP at work, but my Mac Powerbook is sooo much nicer to use than either one. Powerpoint is a good piece of software but Omnigraffle makes it look and feel like ass.
I think we are pretty near a turning point, where geeks will migrate en masse to OS X. I just did, and I'm loving it so far. No downsides.
Oh yeah, the 'Ditty' will sink without a trace. Well meaning parents will buy it for their now terminally ashamed children who will hide it in a drawer rather than be exposed to beatings at school. This ass stinky piece of crap will only accelerate the popularity of the properly designed and built iPod line.
People are going to start *caring* very very quickly as soon as programs start expiring automatically and can't be saved.
If I was TIVO, I'm not sure I would have made the entire screen red. That's really going to upset people. Maybe this will become the 'RED SCREEN OF DEATH' for TiVO.
I think it's about 30 bucks for a gallon of methanol. Any decent model shop will have it as this is what is used to power IC (internal combustion) radio controlled cars.
I bet this stuff isn't real pure, but it doesn't seem like methanol would be super expensive.
The thing that might kill this is the reaction of the airlines. I'm not sure they will want people carrying laptops full of flammable methanol onto airplanes. In fact, I'm still surprised that lithium batteries haven't been outlawed. They are pretty nasty when they short out.
Well, we generally run on app servers connected to a database cluster. We might have 3 or 4 app servers that run the main C++ modules that contain business logic and SQL queries. This setup interacts with the thick client through the database and has been proven to scale pretty well, even with most users creating and updating data, not just browsing.
You have a pretty good point about providing web services, but Citrix is a decent way to push an application to outside users. This has its own advantages, but, yeah, it's sure not web services.
New app servers can be added to a running system pretty easily, and in development locally, this is as easy as hitting CTRL-F5 in MSDEV.
I saw various examples like yours when I worked in an oil services company, and while it looks good to expose the same 'objects' from different databases, in practice, the semantic differences and hard to express rules made it very hard to get any kind of substantial example to work well. If you threw enough programmers at the problem, you could get it to work but then you have a slow, fragile mess of middleware over disparate databases.
I think object layers can be a good deal if you have a purpose built back end, but for industrial strength software that runs flight reservation systems, insurance claim adjustment and other huge systems, you need to be a bit nearer the metal, and maintain control over how the business logic implicit in your SQL is deployed against the data.
This is interesting, because the author essentially says that most professionally employed programmers are essentially slaves bonded to their employers.
That's a pretty strong point which would be interesting to see tested.
What he misses however, are that the main contributors to open source software are large companies such as IBM, SUN etc., who see open source as a way to win mindshare and promote their own platforms.
As far as professionalism goes, most closed-source companies have a *lot* to learn from the best practices in open source. Just think of the NT source code as an example.
Man, software guys are hilarious sometimes. I suppose you have people slaving away over some O/R diagramming tool for days on end coming up with data models and 'metadata' code.
Please don't mod me down, I spent years emailing 'data modelers' with suggested models for various business requirements. They would then plug them in to a tool and generate some goop that would be absorbed by a layer over an Oracle database, producing a new set of 'objects' that would be manipulated by my application, and hopefully serialized correctly by the Oracle layer.
To me this always seemed like a lousy approach, because code always had to suck in all the objects, show them in some interface, etc. This is much more suited to a proper object database, rather than a pseudo object layer in a relational database.
Against Oracle it was usually as slow as shit.
In my current job, we have dispensed with 'tools'. A datamodel is something you spec out into a requirements document, then just build straight into SQL tables. It might take a morning to build and test a table, with FK references, and initial cut at indexes.
Programmers can build a simple batch process in a few days, and if the SQL is good, then the process will be good. Much of our software runs against millions of records as a matter of course. If there are problems, then the approach is to have a DB guru look at the tables, indexes, SQL plans etc. I'm not sure how you could really optimize performance on a bunch of 'objects' that can't be optimized much beyond batching up the queries and using bind variables.
I think the simple approach is no muss, no fuss. Add comments if you agree or disagree.
The last decent Compaq desktop I used had a Pentium Pro 233 and a Matrox Millenium video card and a SCSI hard drive.
That was a kick-ass Flight Sim box. I bet that machine would do ok today.
Sadly the Pentium Pro wasn't hugely popular, as it was weak running 16 bit software, and in 1996, people still regarded Windows NT as dangerously resource hungry. It ran the 32 bit stuff great though.
Yeah, this whole multiple version deal seems crazy. It fair enough to have a high end server version, and a regular version, but that's about all I want to deal with.
My copy of XP Home sucks because I can't remote desktop to it. This is a completely artificial restriction that doesn't do *anything* except piss me off and make me think about switching to other operating systems.
OS X comes in two versions as far as I know. Standard with everything you need, hopefully, and a server version. I have a Powerbook now, and it kicks ass.
Why do it any other way, except to maximise profit at the expense of users.
Linux distros fall into a different area since it seems that most mainstream distros can at least support everything if you want to go to the trouble of learning apt or synaptic or portage. It's a shame that the pre-installed Linux's catch such a bad rap since they will be what really hurts Windows. I'm sure the pre-installed stuff will evolve towards what users actually get along with.
Re:Sad end to a Sad story - One developer's view
on
The End of PalmOS?
·
· Score: 1
I owned one of the first Amiga 1000s in the UK.
It couldn't succeed as a straight business machine because it couldn't even display a decent page of 80 column text, without giving the user a migraine. Interlacing ??? wtf??!??!
Yeah, I suspect my experience of anything UniChrome is pretty similar to everyone elses...
1. Pick two machines, one Unichrome, one Intel Extreme 2. Boot up Linux distribution 3. Play with OpenGL screen saver 4. ?!?!? wtf 5. Realize that Intel 'Extreme' kicks the ass of the VIA chip, seven ways til Thursday. 6. Buy a cheapo FX5200 card and enjoy the 3D goodness.
Use PCNFS to make Windows see the NFS shares as if they were S(a)MB(a). This worked 10 years ago just fine, so I'd be surprised if it didn't still work.
I think there also used to be a client for NFS that you could install, but my copy of XP Pro appears to be missing it.
Interesting. I ran into this problem formatting a drive on WinXP the other week. I think it was a 160 Gig or 250 Gig drive.
I think I kept another FAT32 drive in the machine for Linux, but left the NTFS drive for Win.
Man that sucks, and it's a really great way to edge people out of using Linux, seeing as the Linux NTFS support is either non-write, flaky, or non-existent, depending on what you read.
Anyone know if it is possible to format drives as FAT32 using Linux tools ?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I can just imagine ...
You find the CD buried in a box in the garden.
You see the Microsoft logo. An old, long-dead company.
You scrape some dust off the CD.
You read through the logos and fine print on the CD.
You see the logo 'PlaysForSure' (tm)
You groan and throw the CD in the trash.
Yep, me too. Outside of my work email, everything comes to Google.
I did just log into my Yahoo! email account, and ooops!, there's a huge pink animated pig taking up 1/3rd of the screen.
Yahoo! isn't a bad portal but splashing a huge pig over the top of the screen isn't the way to make people feel they are being treated like first class citizens.
The unobtrusive, and often interesting, Google ads are a small price to pay for a great email service. Yahoo!'s garish huge graphic of some BS that I'm not interested in will keep me off their service.
Team America: Global IP Police ....
I think people are looking at this the wrong way. It seems very very unlikely that google will market their own operating system, except as a gateway to something else.
If I was Google, I'd probably be looking at my resources (fiber, millions of virtual servers, smart people) and come up with something like Google Desktop, a distributed desktop, accessible from any think client. Here's the pitch:
- Use our portal (we already have GMail, and GoogleSearch)
- Access local files (loadable in OpenOffice, Google are not shy of OpenSource)
- Get your own customizable desktop, accessible from anywhere in the world
- Guaranteed virus, spyware and hassle free, with great performance
Most of this is already in place. Google Desktop would just be a server hosted process on a farm somewhere. Google already know how to do this.
Open Office tweaked by Google staff would support loading most of the files that people care about. Printing might be tricky, but different flavors of local drivers would address this, much as Citrix can already do.
If they really wanted to, Google could market a Google-branded Mac Mini with a customized OS X that would be perfect for this.
Sonnnnnn !!! This guy should have been born in the Victorian age, when this kind of sentiment was rife.
To be honest, both are pretty bad these days.
The Black Angus sub at Quiznos used to be fantastic, but the quality of the meat used by the local stores I go to dropped pretty obviously. I've also had the beef dip sandwich with beef that had very obvious shimmer (bacteria).
Both restaurants are still much better than eating at the bottom tier burger restaurants though. I can't even bring myself to type their names, they are so repulsive.
Nowadays, I'd much rather find a few decent cheap ethnic restaurants than eat at a major chain. There are many good Meditteranean type sandwich shops that offer good fresh food at fairly cheap prices.
When you rent a car, and it has XM, you find a decent station and enjoy listening to it. You don't really notice how great it is.
As soon as you lose XM, the incessant commercials and inane DJ chatter of modern US commercial radio become very oppressive. Try doing a 30 minute commute with 15 minutes of commercials for beer and haemorrhoid cream, and you'll never want to listen again.
FM radio sucks unless you want to listen to NPR or drive time news.
Yeah, this same comparison works with the computers too.
Unpacking a Powerbook is a real occasion. The attention to detail in the packaging is superb. There is a short setup procedure that is easy to go through, then you are free to play with all the great new toys like speech recognition and synthesis. The fabulous Omnigraffle, and like me maybe, installing Microsoft Office just by dragging one icon into applications. Sweeeeeeet!!
Unpacking almost any PC is pretty sucky in comparison. Lets gloss over that though and cut to the *long* initial run. The registering with MS. The clicking 'NO' to 'Do you want to purchase Norton anti-virus'. Suck. Suck. Suck.
Mod me down, but I am a great fan of Windows XP. Good solid system. BUT !! Mac OS X kicks ass. I run XP and Gentoo at home, and XP at work, but my Mac Powerbook is sooo much nicer to use than either one. Powerpoint is a good piece of software but Omnigraffle makes it look and feel like ass.
I think we are pretty near a turning point, where geeks will migrate en masse to OS X. I just did, and I'm loving it so far. No downsides.
Oh yeah, the 'Ditty' will sink without a trace. Well meaning parents will buy it for their now terminally ashamed children who will hide it in a drawer rather than be exposed to beatings at school. This ass stinky piece of crap will only accelerate the popularity of the properly designed and built iPod line.
People are going to start *caring* very very quickly as soon as programs start expiring automatically and can't be saved.
If I was TIVO, I'm not sure I would have made the entire screen red. That's really going to upset people. Maybe this will become the 'RED SCREEN OF DEATH' for TiVO.
Vodka powered laptop ... Maybe that's another thing my Powerbook can replace. A hipflask !!!
Where do I sign up?
I think it's about 30 bucks for a gallon of methanol. Any decent model shop will have it as this is what is used to power IC (internal combustion) radio controlled cars.
I bet this stuff isn't real pure, but it doesn't seem like methanol would be super expensive.
The thing that might kill this is the reaction of the airlines. I'm not sure they will want people carrying laptops full of flammable methanol onto airplanes. In fact, I'm still surprised that lithium batteries haven't been outlawed. They are pretty nasty when they short out.
Well, we generally run on app servers connected to a database cluster. We might have 3 or 4 app servers that run the main C++ modules that contain business logic and SQL queries. This setup interacts with the thick client through the database and has been proven to scale pretty well, even with most users creating and updating data, not just browsing.
You have a pretty good point about providing web services, but Citrix is a decent way to push an application to outside users. This has its own advantages, but, yeah, it's sure not web services.
New app servers can be added to a running system pretty easily, and in development locally, this is as easy as hitting CTRL-F5 in MSDEV.
I saw various examples like yours when I worked in an oil services company, and while it looks good to expose the same 'objects' from different databases, in practice, the semantic differences and hard to express rules made it very hard to get any kind of substantial example to work well. If you threw enough programmers at the problem, you could get it to work but then you have a slow, fragile mess of middleware over disparate databases.
I think object layers can be a good deal if you have a purpose built back end, but for industrial strength software that runs flight reservation systems, insurance claim adjustment and other huge systems, you need to be a bit nearer the metal, and maintain control over how the business logic implicit in your SQL is deployed against the data.
This is interesting, because the author essentially says that most professionally employed programmers are essentially slaves bonded to their employers.
That's a pretty strong point which would be interesting to see tested.
What he misses however, are that the main contributors to open source software are large companies such as IBM, SUN etc., who see open source as a way to win mindshare and promote their own platforms.
As far as professionalism goes, most closed-source companies have a *lot* to learn from the best practices in open source. Just think of the NT source code as an example.
Man, software guys are hilarious sometimes. I suppose you have people slaving away over some O/R diagramming tool for days on end coming up with data models and 'metadata' code.
Please don't mod me down, I spent years emailing 'data modelers' with suggested models for various business requirements. They would then plug them in to a tool and generate some goop that would be absorbed by a layer over an Oracle database, producing a new set of 'objects' that would be manipulated by my application, and hopefully serialized correctly by the Oracle layer.
To me this always seemed like a lousy approach, because code always had to suck in all the objects, show them in some interface, etc. This is much more suited to a proper object database, rather than a pseudo object layer in a relational database.
Against Oracle it was usually as slow as shit.
In my current job, we have dispensed with 'tools'. A datamodel is something you spec out into a requirements document, then just build straight into SQL tables. It might take a morning to build and test a table, with FK references, and initial cut at indexes.
Programmers can build a simple batch process in a few days, and if the SQL is good, then the process will be good. Much of our software runs against millions of records as a matter of course. If there are problems, then the approach is to have a DB guru look at the tables, indexes, SQL plans etc. I'm not sure how you could really optimize performance on a bunch of 'objects' that can't be optimized much beyond batching up the queries and using bind variables.
I think the simple approach is no muss, no fuss. Add comments if you agree or disagree.
The last decent Compaq desktop I used had a Pentium Pro 233 and a Matrox Millenium video card and a SCSI hard drive.
That was a kick-ass Flight Sim box. I bet that machine would do ok today.
Sadly the Pentium Pro wasn't hugely popular, as it was weak running 16 bit software, and in 1996, people still regarded Windows NT as dangerously resource hungry. It ran the 32 bit stuff great though.
"You'll make a grown man cryyyyyy ..."
Yeah, this whole multiple version deal seems crazy. It fair enough to have a high end server version, and a regular version, but that's about all I want to deal with.
My copy of XP Home sucks because I can't remote desktop to it. This is a completely artificial restriction that doesn't do *anything* except piss me off and make me think about switching to other operating systems.
OS X comes in two versions as far as I know. Standard with everything you need, hopefully, and a server version. I have a Powerbook now, and it kicks ass.
Why do it any other way, except to maximise profit at the expense of users.
Linux distros fall into a different area since it seems that most mainstream distros can at least support everything if you want to go to the trouble of learning apt or synaptic or portage. It's a shame that the pre-installed Linux's catch such a bad rap since they will be what really hurts Windows. I'm sure the pre-installed stuff will evolve towards what users actually get along with.
I owned one of the first Amiga 1000s in the UK.
It couldn't succeed as a straight business machine because it couldn't even display a decent page of 80 column text, without giving the user a migraine. Interlacing ??? wtf??!??!
It *was* a kick-ass games machine though.
RIP.
Yeah, I suspect my experience of anything UniChrome is pretty similar to everyone elses ...
1. Pick two machines, one Unichrome, one Intel Extreme
2. Boot up Linux distribution
3. Play with OpenGL screen saver
4. ?!?!? wtf
5. Realize that Intel 'Extreme' kicks the ass of the VIA chip, seven ways til Thursday.
6. Buy a cheapo FX5200 card and enjoy the 3D goodness.
Developers, Developers, Developers !!!!!!
All we had was the letter 'o'.
Use PCNFS to make Windows see the NFS shares as if they were S(a)MB(a). This worked 10 years ago just fine, so I'd be surprised if it didn't still work.
I think there also used to be a client for NFS that you could install, but my copy of XP Pro appears to be missing it.
Interesting. I ran into this problem formatting a drive on WinXP the other week. I think it was a 160 Gig or 250 Gig drive.
I think I kept another FAT32 drive in the machine for Linux, but left the NTFS drive for Win.
Man that sucks, and it's a really great way to edge people out of using Linux, seeing as the Linux NTFS support is either non-write, flaky, or non-existent, depending on what you read.
Anyone know if it is possible to format drives as FAT32 using Linux tools ?
That is kick-ass. Congrats on getting the phone back. More power to the interweb !!!
Yeah, if anyone wants to take a shot at my laptop, all the AV software is now disabled.
I did this to fix (and fix it did) my ping times to a remote machine. They were reduced from 1.9 secs or so, to a more reasonable 100 ms.
That's the difference between getting work done on a remote network from a hotel room, or tossing the machine out the window and heading for the bar.