I agree. Even if it's true that there are no "billion dollar open source companies", so what? What are we trying to prove here?
The first question that pops into my head is, why isn't it enough that there are profitable open source companies? I mean, that's enough to prove that developing open source software can be a viable business. Oh, right, viable businesses that build good products aren't good enough. It's like, "Oh, you only provide a valuable service at a reasonable price, creating a win/win situation for both you and your customers while adding millions/billions of dollars in productivity to our economy, but you don't make $5 billion a year yet? Well screw you, buddy. You're a shoddy businessman. You should be doing a better job of screwing over your customers!"
I don't know if this is fair, but I often feel like everyone is looking for money-for-nothing get-rich-quick schemes where everyone walks away from every business deal with billions of extra dollars. This is the stuff that causes economic bubbles and leads otherwise smart people to invest with Bernie Madoff. The reality is that good businesses who don't screw anyone over are generally not going to make ridiculous profits forever. In a well functioning market and under fair conditions, successful businesses will usually make only modest profits relative to the investment they put in (excepting rare cases of extreme innovation). We should stop expecting otherwise.
Of course, I'm not a wildly successful businessman or a Nobel Prize winning economist, so... whatever.
Cross platform to Adobe means: Windows 7, Windows Vitsa, Windows XP, and Mac OS.
For their CS suite, yes. For the Flash player, MacOS isn't *much* better off than Linux. The Flash player on OSX stinks. Not only is performance bad, but it crashes constantly.
On the bright side, Apple includes a nice quick PDF viewer, so at least you don't need to install Acrobat Reader.
Apple has been well behind Microsoft Windows when it comes to providing third parties with APIs to do hardware acceleration
Ultimately, hardware acceleration should be a side issue. Flash has been a buggy bloated mess for years. It crashes. They shouldn't need special hardware acceleration APIs to keep Flash from crashing when watching YouTube movies.
It's really pretty simple: Adobe doesn't want to make the investment necessary to make the Flash player efficient, stable, secure, and bloat-free. On the other hand, they want to keep making money selling the Flash development tools.
So when Apple finally calls them on Flash's crappiness and starts pushing for standards, Adobe wages a PR war on Apple, including astroturfing to make it sound like techies and serious web developers all love Flash. Adobe claims they're just about to release some updates that will fix everything (and it doesn't matter if it's vaporware because it's all about PR) and tries to blame Apple for all of Flash's problems (even though it doesn't quite make sense).
In reality, Flash has never been well supported on any platform except Windows. However, if Adobe admits to that, then a lot of their pro-Flash anti-HTML5 arguments fall apart. They're trying to sell Flash as being ubiquitous and platform-independent, but it isn't.
Yeah, I know what you mean, and you're right to point that out. I thought about that before I posted, but I didn't really want to muddy the waters. If you read enough of my posts, you'd eventually pick up that when I say "You can't really..." I mean something like "For our purposes here, I'm going to say that you can't. You can, but I don't want complicate things right now." Otherwise, I'll say things like, "You absolutely cannot." You probably don't care about all that, and you're going to accuse me of making excuses for being wrong, but I put the word "really" into that sentence for a reason.
So anyhow, the thing is, you're still basically talking about viewing distance as an important part of the puzzle here. Whether people can discern pixels is abstractly a problem of resolution and viewing distance, but then at some point you also run into some limits of "possible viewing distance". I think my point is actually illustrated by the fact, in disputing me, you're forced to talk about the "average minimum focal distance of the human eye."
But in practical application, that's never what we're talking about because no display (at least no consumer display that I'm aware of) is close to that resolution. So we're always talking about the resolution needed for viewing from a certain distance. The article itself says that Apple claimed that the pixels couldn't be distinguished at about 12 inches, and the expert disputing the claim says it's more like 18 inches.
Even if the expert is completely right and Apple is exaggerating, it's not much of an exaggeration. The point stands: at estimated "normal" viewing distances, your eye will probably not be able to distinguish individual pixels at all. This is a very high resolution display.
I suppose we can assume that they imply "at the typical distance at which you hold your iPhone" because otherwise the claim would be nonsense.
Yeah, that's the thing: You can't really talk about this sort of issue with pixel density alone. You can only talk about it as a function of both pixel density and viewing distance. So the first question is, what is the expected range of viewing distance for an iPhone?
If the claim becomes true when you hold the phone 18" from your eyes, then that doesn't seem like too much of an exaggeration to me. I'd estimate I usually hold my phone at about that distance. Regardless, the overall point is to say, "we put a really high-resolution screen in this phone", which is certainly true.
That may be the most obvious use, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be the most dominant use. It sounds like they're talking about how they can allow unmanned aircraft to be used by private enterprise without disrupting our current air travel. It may be that as the technology advances and the opportunity is opened to business that various uses are devised.
I guess I'm just arguing in favor of the idea that "I can't think of a good legitimate use of this technology" isn't the same as "there aren't good legitimate uses for this technology."
The anonymous OP is shilling too. "Is my company alone in wanting to stay in the 1990s or is Windows 7 the way forward?" That's a false dichotomy if I've ever seen one.
I'm staying with XP at my company. I've had a testing computer that I installed Vista on, then Windows 7. I've also tested Windows 2007 and 2010. They're pretty good. Overall, for my personal use, I think I'd prefer Windows 7 to Windows XP. However, there are a couple issues:
Cost: Licenses, retraining, whatever
"Activation": Sorry, I won't buy software that requires activation if I can avoid it at all. I use imaging and move images to different machines on a regular basis, and I've experienced problems with various activation schemes from many software developers. Yes, it includes problems with Windows activation and WGA. I absolutely will not use software that requires activation unless I have no other choice.
Not expecting significant benefits: Even though I'd say Windows 7 and Office 2010 makes a better desktop experience than WinXP and Office 2003, I don't see much of a business case. I don't see any features that will make us more efficient or productive. I don't see anything that it will allow us to do that we couldn't do before.
Now, if you notice, the first and 3rd issues essentially boil down to "I'm not sure it's worth it." The second issue is the one that has me saying, "over my dead body". Drop activation, Microsoft, and you might get some sales from me. Otherwise, I'm looking to Mac/Linux for my upgrade path.
Well I'm not an expert, but I think I remember reading that EFI allowed for more versatility and functionality, including that it was easier to get a GUI and mouse working. That doesn't mean that you have to use a GUI or even that you want to, just that it might be easier to do things like that.
But digging up a mouse? If you're talking about a desktop PC without a mouse already attached, I think you're talking about a relatively unusual situation these days.
Also, the EFI used in Macs has some kind of compatibility built in to emulate BIOS. That's why you can install Windows XP on your Intel Mac, even though Windows XP doesn't support EFI.
Yeah, I've had a little bit of a longstanding beef with drivers. I don't frequently have problems any more (Mac user) but it's always kind of stupid when you install a new OS and then realize you don't have a driver for your networking interface. Nice little catch-22.
Of course I've always imagined that there was something better that could be done. Your idea of including some sort of flash memory onboard had occurred to me and is actually feasible these days. Years ago, I was thinking about ROM chips with the most basic drivers possible. Even if they've have to be updated later, it'd be nice to have something to get you going.
But then of course in the current open-source atmosphere, it's disappointing that hardware vendors can't standardize a bit. Maybe I'm stupid, but does each ethernet card need totally different drivers from the other ethernet cards, or could we get them to present a standard interface to the OS in a way that made them essentially interchangeable? Or printers? Or, I don't know, monitors? Lots of these pieces of hardware seem pretty simple to me, and it doesn't seem like their functions are being revolutionized every 6 months.
There is more profit to be made in destruction than salvation.
More like it's easier to rape than to build. Not more profitable, just quicker and easier.
Building something good takes time, effort, and know-how, but over the long-term it's much more profitable for everyone involved. The problem is that you have a bunch of MBAs with grand business theories (but who don't necessarily know what they're doing) trying to optimize profit for *this quarter*.
I think they're just wrong to put the stress on EFI being "a point and click interface". I was under the impression (correct me if I'm wrong) that the deal with EFI is that it was a design of firmware for the system that ditches a lot of old legacy stuff. Incidentally, by upgrading the design, it will allow manufacturers to create a GUI to configure this stuff. But the GUI isn't really the point.
That value seems out of range, considering that you could finance two wars, clean up the BP spill and probably have enough left over to coat New Orleans in gold leaf...
Exactly. So just think of all the hookers and blow that it can buy for record executives.
Yeah, I see that a lot, but I'm not sure the logic behind it. It seems like it'd be terribly easy to catch for a variety of reasons. My spam filters catch those every single time.
Oh, you mean the highly technical instructions, "yo mom, fix your shit" aren't actually going to be sufficient? Shoot, I was sure that would work. My post was supposed to be highly detailed instructions on how to fight spam.
Look, I'm not dumb and I do actually know what email spoofing is. In fact, half of the time if you got spam from your mom, it's not because your mom was compromised, it's because your uncle got hacked. When spammers get ahold of an address book, they'll sometimes email one person in the address book while spoofing another address in the book instead of the address book owner. It makes the email look more legitimate without making it obvious who has been compromised.
Still, if we could rely on whitelists and not worry about unexpected senders, then eliminating spam would be much easier and much more fool-proof. Spoofing isn't that big of a problem as it is, and if it were the main problem with email, it wouldn't be too hard to fix.
So they can find *a* whitelisted address... maybe. And once they have my mom's email address, I can take her off the whitelist. I can call her and say "Yo mom, fix your shit."
But generally the problem with whitelists is not that spammers are clever enough to spoof whitelisted addresses. The real problem with whitelists is that we all get a lot of email from random unexpected sources, so we usually can't only allow whitelisted email in. A whitelist on a printer like this would probably work fairly well, since you don't want it to receive print jobs from unexpected sources.
Toffler's theory was the middle class would become rich by taking lower-upper class type jobs and educations, leading to the stress of how to spend all that money on things they don't really culturally understand.
I'm not sure that sounds wrong to me. Sure, there are still a lot of poor people, but the "middle class" family has 3 cars. Each "middle class" person has a TV, a computer, a cell phone, and an iPod. Everyone goes to college. It seems to me that there is a stress of figuring out how to spend/invest money on things that they don't understand and don't necessarily "need", which is part of what's exacerbating the boom/bust economic cycle.
I'm sure your brain was remapping itself. Whenever I've gotten into programming, I can feel the verbal/emotional parts of my brain getting repurposed for other things. After spending a lot of time coding, I basically wouldn't be able to talk to people.
I think the brain is very malleable in certain ways. You can't make it do anything you want, but if you spend enough time thinking about certain kinds of problems, your brain will try to optimize itself for solving those problems, and learn to ignore everything else.
The original article, which seems to be somewhat based on scientific studies, suggests that our new technological "multitasking" is rewiring our brains to always give priority to newer incoming information.
Mr. Nass says the Stanford studies are important because they show multitasking’s lingering effects: “The scary part for guys like Kord is, they can’t shut off their multitasking tendencies when they’re not multitasking.”
In most of your examples, you are not engaging in the sort of "multitasking" being described. For example, you talk about setting up different desktops for different tasks, and ignoring anything going on with other desktops. You focus entirely on the task you're working on. That's not multitasking.
There are some very good strategies for achieving greater focus, but most of them come down to diminishing your attempts to multitask. Don't read email whenever it comes in. Set aside time to read your email, and deal with it then. Do one thing at a time. Don't surf the web or chat on IM or check Facebook while you're trying to complete a task. These are good strategies, but they are not examples of "being good at multitasking". They're examples of "coping with our always-connected culture by refusing to multitask".
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Even if it's true that there are no "billion dollar open source companies", so what? What are we trying to prove here?
The first question that pops into my head is, why isn't it enough that there are profitable open source companies? I mean, that's enough to prove that developing open source software can be a viable business. Oh, right, viable businesses that build good products aren't good enough. It's like, "Oh, you only provide a valuable service at a reasonable price, creating a win/win situation for both you and your customers while adding millions/billions of dollars in productivity to our economy, but you don't make $5 billion a year yet? Well screw you, buddy. You're a shoddy businessman. You should be doing a better job of screwing over your customers!"
I don't know if this is fair, but I often feel like everyone is looking for money-for-nothing get-rich-quick schemes where everyone walks away from every business deal with billions of extra dollars. This is the stuff that causes economic bubbles and leads otherwise smart people to invest with Bernie Madoff. The reality is that good businesses who don't screw anyone over are generally not going to make ridiculous profits forever. In a well functioning market and under fair conditions, successful businesses will usually make only modest profits relative to the investment they put in (excepting rare cases of extreme innovation). We should stop expecting otherwise.
Of course, I'm not a wildly successful businessman or a Nobel Prize winning economist, so... whatever.
Cross platform to Adobe means: Windows 7, Windows Vitsa, Windows XP, and Mac OS.
For their CS suite, yes. For the Flash player, MacOS isn't *much* better off than Linux. The Flash player on OSX stinks. Not only is performance bad, but it crashes constantly.
On the bright side, Apple includes a nice quick PDF viewer, so at least you don't need to install Acrobat Reader.
Apple has been well behind Microsoft Windows when it comes to providing third parties with APIs to do hardware acceleration
Ultimately, hardware acceleration should be a side issue. Flash has been a buggy bloated mess for years. It crashes. They shouldn't need special hardware acceleration APIs to keep Flash from crashing when watching YouTube movies.
It's really pretty simple: Adobe doesn't want to make the investment necessary to make the Flash player efficient, stable, secure, and bloat-free. On the other hand, they want to keep making money selling the Flash development tools.
So when Apple finally calls them on Flash's crappiness and starts pushing for standards, Adobe wages a PR war on Apple, including astroturfing to make it sound like techies and serious web developers all love Flash. Adobe claims they're just about to release some updates that will fix everything (and it doesn't matter if it's vaporware because it's all about PR) and tries to blame Apple for all of Flash's problems (even though it doesn't quite make sense).
In reality, Flash has never been well supported on any platform except Windows. However, if Adobe admits to that, then a lot of their pro-Flash anti-HTML5 arguments fall apart. They're trying to sell Flash as being ubiquitous and platform-independent, but it isn't.
Yeah, I know what you mean, and you're right to point that out. I thought about that before I posted, but I didn't really want to muddy the waters. If you read enough of my posts, you'd eventually pick up that when I say "You can't really..." I mean something like "For our purposes here, I'm going to say that you can't. You can, but I don't want complicate things right now." Otherwise, I'll say things like, "You absolutely cannot." You probably don't care about all that, and you're going to accuse me of making excuses for being wrong, but I put the word "really" into that sentence for a reason.
So anyhow, the thing is, you're still basically talking about viewing distance as an important part of the puzzle here. Whether people can discern pixels is abstractly a problem of resolution and viewing distance, but then at some point you also run into some limits of "possible viewing distance". I think my point is actually illustrated by the fact, in disputing me, you're forced to talk about the "average minimum focal distance of the human eye."
But in practical application, that's never what we're talking about because no display (at least no consumer display that I'm aware of) is close to that resolution. So we're always talking about the resolution needed for viewing from a certain distance. The article itself says that Apple claimed that the pixels couldn't be distinguished at about 12 inches, and the expert disputing the claim says it's more like 18 inches.
Even if the expert is completely right and Apple is exaggerating, it's not much of an exaggeration. The point stands: at estimated "normal" viewing distances, your eye will probably not be able to distinguish individual pixels at all. This is a very high resolution display.
I suppose we can assume that they imply "at the typical distance at which you hold your iPhone" because otherwise the claim would be nonsense.
Yeah, that's the thing: You can't really talk about this sort of issue with pixel density alone. You can only talk about it as a function of both pixel density and viewing distance. So the first question is, what is the expected range of viewing distance for an iPhone?
If the claim becomes true when you hold the phone 18" from your eyes, then that doesn't seem like too much of an exaggeration to me. I'd estimate I usually hold my phone at about that distance. Regardless, the overall point is to say, "we put a really high-resolution screen in this phone", which is certainly true.
Not my copy. I have volume licensing.
The main obvious use is domestic spying.
That may be the most obvious use, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be the most dominant use. It sounds like they're talking about how they can allow unmanned aircraft to be used by private enterprise without disrupting our current air travel. It may be that as the technology advances and the opportunity is opened to business that various uses are devised.
I guess I'm just arguing in favor of the idea that "I can't think of a good legitimate use of this technology" isn't the same as "there aren't good legitimate uses for this technology."
The anonymous OP is shilling too. "Is my company alone in wanting to stay in the 1990s or is Windows 7 the way forward?" That's a false dichotomy if I've ever seen one.
I'm staying with XP at my company. I've had a testing computer that I installed Vista on, then Windows 7. I've also tested Windows 2007 and 2010. They're pretty good. Overall, for my personal use, I think I'd prefer Windows 7 to Windows XP. However, there are a couple issues:
Now, if you notice, the first and 3rd issues essentially boil down to "I'm not sure it's worth it." The second issue is the one that has me saying, "over my dead body". Drop activation, Microsoft, and you might get some sales from me. Otherwise, I'm looking to Mac/Linux for my upgrade path.
Well I'm not an expert, but I think I remember reading that EFI allowed for more versatility and functionality, including that it was easier to get a GUI and mouse working. That doesn't mean that you have to use a GUI or even that you want to, just that it might be easier to do things like that.
But digging up a mouse? If you're talking about a desktop PC without a mouse already attached, I think you're talking about a relatively unusual situation these days.
Also, the EFI used in Macs has some kind of compatibility built in to emulate BIOS. That's why you can install Windows XP on your Intel Mac, even though Windows XP doesn't support EFI.
Yeah, I've had a little bit of a longstanding beef with drivers. I don't frequently have problems any more (Mac user) but it's always kind of stupid when you install a new OS and then realize you don't have a driver for your networking interface. Nice little catch-22.
Of course I've always imagined that there was something better that could be done. Your idea of including some sort of flash memory onboard had occurred to me and is actually feasible these days. Years ago, I was thinking about ROM chips with the most basic drivers possible. Even if they've have to be updated later, it'd be nice to have something to get you going.
But then of course in the current open-source atmosphere, it's disappointing that hardware vendors can't standardize a bit. Maybe I'm stupid, but does each ethernet card need totally different drivers from the other ethernet cards, or could we get them to present a standard interface to the OS in a way that made them essentially interchangeable? Or printers? Or, I don't know, monitors? Lots of these pieces of hardware seem pretty simple to me, and it doesn't seem like their functions are being revolutionized every 6 months.
Can't this stuff be made simpler?
What is that, Sealab?
Part of what makes the cleanup difficult is that there's enough churn in the water that the oil and water don't separate very well.
If you pour oil and water into a glass, then yes, they'll separate. If you constantly shake that glass, then they won't separate very well.
There is more profit to be made in destruction than salvation.
More like it's easier to rape than to build. Not more profitable, just quicker and easier.
Building something good takes time, effort, and know-how, but over the long-term it's much more profitable for everyone involved. The problem is that you have a bunch of MBAs with grand business theories (but who don't necessarily know what they're doing) trying to optimize profit for *this quarter*.
I think they're just wrong to put the stress on EFI being "a point and click interface". I was under the impression (correct me if I'm wrong) that the deal with EFI is that it was a design of firmware for the system that ditches a lot of old legacy stuff. Incidentally, by upgrading the design, it will allow manufacturers to create a GUI to configure this stuff. But the GUI isn't really the point.
That value seems out of range, considering that you could finance two wars, clean up the BP spill and probably have enough left over to coat New Orleans in gold leaf...
Exactly. So just think of all the hookers and blow that it can buy for record executives.
Nope, that's not going to work on my mail server.
Yeah, I see that a lot, but I'm not sure the logic behind it. It seems like it'd be terribly easy to catch for a variety of reasons. My spam filters catch those every single time.
Oh, you mean the highly technical instructions, "yo mom, fix your shit" aren't actually going to be sufficient? Shoot, I was sure that would work. My post was supposed to be highly detailed instructions on how to fight spam.
Look, I'm not dumb and I do actually know what email spoofing is. In fact, half of the time if you got spam from your mom, it's not because your mom was compromised, it's because your uncle got hacked. When spammers get ahold of an address book, they'll sometimes email one person in the address book while spoofing another address in the book instead of the address book owner. It makes the email look more legitimate without making it obvious who has been compromised.
Still, if we could rely on whitelists and not worry about unexpected senders, then eliminating spam would be much easier and much more fool-proof. Spoofing isn't that big of a problem as it is, and if it were the main problem with email, it wouldn't be too hard to fix.
So they can find *a* whitelisted address... maybe. And once they have my mom's email address, I can take her off the whitelist. I can call her and say "Yo mom, fix your shit."
But generally the problem with whitelists is not that spammers are clever enough to spoof whitelisted addresses. The real problem with whitelists is that we all get a lot of email from random unexpected sources, so we usually can't only allow whitelisted email in. A whitelist on a printer like this would probably work fairly well, since you don't want it to receive print jobs from unexpected sources.
Ok. You have my email address. It's public. What email addresses do I have whitelisted?
Toffler's theory was the middle class would become rich by taking lower-upper class type jobs and educations, leading to the stress of how to spend all that money on things they don't really culturally understand.
I'm not sure that sounds wrong to me. Sure, there are still a lot of poor people, but the "middle class" family has 3 cars. Each "middle class" person has a TV, a computer, a cell phone, and an iPod. Everyone goes to college. It seems to me that there is a stress of figuring out how to spend/invest money on things that they don't understand and don't necessarily "need", which is part of what's exacerbating the boom/bust economic cycle.
I'm sure your brain was remapping itself. Whenever I've gotten into programming, I can feel the verbal/emotional parts of my brain getting repurposed for other things. After spending a lot of time coding, I basically wouldn't be able to talk to people.
I think the brain is very malleable in certain ways. You can't make it do anything you want, but if you spend enough time thinking about certain kinds of problems, your brain will try to optimize itself for solving those problems, and learn to ignore everything else.
The original article, which seems to be somewhat based on scientific studies, suggests that our new technological "multitasking" is rewiring our brains to always give priority to newer incoming information.
Mr. Nass says the Stanford studies are important because they show multitasking’s lingering effects: “The scary part for guys like Kord is, they can’t shut off their multitasking tendencies when they’re not multitasking.”
In most of your examples, you are not engaging in the sort of "multitasking" being described. For example, you talk about setting up different desktops for different tasks, and ignoring anything going on with other desktops. You focus entirely on the task you're working on. That's not multitasking.
There are some very good strategies for achieving greater focus, but most of them come down to diminishing your attempts to multitask. Don't read email whenever it comes in. Set aside time to read your email, and deal with it then. Do one thing at a time. Don't surf the web or chat on IM or check Facebook while you're trying to complete a task. These are good strategies, but they are not examples of "being good at multitasking". They're examples of "coping with our always-connected culture by refusing to multitask".