Elop gets in. He sits down, and writes a memo about how the company is sitting on a burning platform and needs to change or die. He'll then adopt a bold strategy of switching the entire company over to... what? QNX maybe?
Considering his track record, I find it hard to believe anybody thinks this is a good idea.
Lets be honest: 3d is a failure in this space. A huge nummber of 3DS users never turn the 3d on, and for a lot of the market it's not a selling feature. Making a cheaper unit without it is smart, as price is a huge factor in portable gaming sales.
But then they also stripped out a speaker (going to mono instead of stereo) and came up with this really awkward form factor. Why did they do that? This thing is going to be a lot more awkward to carry around because of that.
The situation is essentially that the base NuGet repository is a highly convenient way for Visual Studio users to get packages, and people want the Oracle.net provider to be there. Oracle says they can't put it there because it's not open source (it's free as in beer).
Hi. The.net product manager at Oracle recently responded to a request to have the Oracle.net provider put into a NuGet package by refusing over licensing reasons: https://forums.oracle.com/message/11149050#11149050
It's not the legal concerns around downloaders. It's the legal rights around how uploaded software is treated.
Outercurve does not want to receive confidential or proprietary information from User through the Web site. Any material, information, or other communication User transmits or posts ("Communications") to the Web site will be considered non-confidential and non-proprietary and Outercurve will be under no obligation of any kind with respect to such information. Outercurve will be free to reproduce, make derivative works from, use, disclose, and distribute the Communications to others without limitation. At our sole election, Outercurve may provide authorship attribution by listing User's name.
-----------------
As soon as I upload something to the Outercurve Foundation (via nuget.org), I've given them plenary rights to the software. That's a big problem for most commercial software distributions, including ODP.NET.
If you're an open source vendor, then this policy is fine. If Outercurve wants to distribute commercial software, it cannot co-opt ownership rights. This is the biggest issue, but there are others. For example, how can Oracle ensure that no one else on the site represents themselves as Oracle? There's no way to authenticate the "author", especially if you're downloading directly within Visual Studio.
Fundamentally, all these business issues can be boiled down to characteristics of open source (i.e. bazaar, torrents) distribution. If Outercurve introduced closed source/commercial-friendly (i.e. cathedral, iTunes) distribution, it would eliminate pretty much all of Oracle's business/legal concerns. But Outercurve is devoted to working with corporate developers in open source environments. If the component is closed source, then it doesn't fit within Outercurve's mission. That makes me skeptical they would ever support commercial distribution.
Essentially, Oracle would need to open source ODP.NET just for nuget.org distribution. That is like putting the cart before the horse.
Now, if somebody created a commercial software NuGet distribution channel, people could purchase, rent, or try out commercial software from it. That would be something Oracle would consider. That's why I asked about an alternative popular NuGet feed.
Since Outercurve is specifically mentioned here, do you have any comment on this? Is there plans to fix the situation for freely available (but commercial) tools like the Oracle provider?
I'd say we're making no progress because this is all that's required to break stuff. Again.
Companies are great at tacking needless wifi into things and not being able to protect them against the most basic of attack. But hey, it's not like you need your lights to work reliably, right?
I can't wait for the toilet that won't flush unless you pay the guy in Russia that infected it with malware. That's going to make all our lives better.
The problem is that workloads people regularly do simply don't use 8 cores. We've had this problem on PCs for a while, and it's one of the reasons the market is shrinking so fast. Once you have a dual core machine, more cores don't do anything for you given that most of your work is single threaded. There's nothing more annoying than waiting for something or seeing lag in a game with an i7 that never gets over 25% utilization (or 13% if you have hyperthreading enabled).
He's not wrong. An eight core phone serves no purpose right now.
The problems with Windows 8 go far beyond unhappy greybeards. Trying to point a mouse at invisible hot corners is just a fucking stupid idea for a desktop OS. Metro is a touch UI and it sucks with a mouse. It also sucks for multitasking productivity, multiple monitors, and really anything else that people doing real work are using a PC for.
You sound like the people who think that "innovation" is always good, even when it's just change for the sake of change that actually makes the product less usable.
I'm pretty sure they're too busy trying to make the Surface look like a success and doing Xbox One damage control to worry about a niche vanity phone like this one that will have no market impact.
It's also the future of every US based cloud service provider. As much as US trade reps around the world want to whine about how unfair it is that people in other countries avoid American service providers, it's only going to get worse. The US government is the worst enemy of those companies.
If there's one thing we can't abide, it's that there might possibly maybe be Chinese backdoors in computers manufactured in China, unless they're from the Chinese factories of American companies. Those are okay, somehow.
While you're worried about it, pay no attention to the NSA backdoors in those American computers. Those are for your protection, unlike those evil Chinese backdoors.
Yeah, it's crazy that nobody will walk to get their mail. Except millions of Canadians do it every day, and have been for years. They don't get winter in Canada, do they?
The main difference between the two postal systems is that Canada Post is strongly discouraged to lose money. So when they saw mail volumes declining, they started acting to reduce costs. Every new neighborhood gets a community mailbox, where every house has a locked box in that larger group of boxes (what's called a cluster box in the summary). The mail goes there. The end result is that far fewer staff are needed to deliver the mail, which makes it cheaper. You can drop off letters to be delivered, and small packages are also delivered there (or delivered to the door, depending on the service level). In my small city, there's one big post office and two smaller ones inside pharmacies scattered around the city for if you want to mail parcels or pick up items too big for the boxes.
Because it's a Crown Corporation, management has some autonomy to enact changes like that, as the government can't step in as easily as Congress can (and has, in the case of blocking the end of Saturday delivery). The real problem here is less the USPS and more that the USPS isn't allowed to change anything without reactionaries in Congress interfering.
When they said "tumblr won't be changing", it's cute how ANYBODY believed them. Acquiring companies always say that. It's always a lie. In this case, most people even predicted it was a lie.
Don't worry, this is just step one. They'll totally wreck things later.
Microsoft has never made a case for why people would want to buy a Surface RT. What does it have going for it that makes it stand out against the competition? Lets take a look:
iPad - The brand name that made tablets mainstream, and that's a big help when selling a product. Also works well and has a ton of apps.
Android (Fire, Samsung, Nexus, etc) - The most popular ones seem to all have price going for them: they're the best game in town if you want a $250 or less tablet. Lots of people fit into that category. Has lots of apps.
Surface Pro - It runs x86 Windows apps. The market that really wants that in a tablet is niche, but still.
Surface RT - Not cheap, not blowing anybody away in hardware specs, not boasting any interesting unique apps. Aside from really wanting a Metro tablet, what's the point? (And no, the average joe doesn't really want a Metro or Windows tablet.)
There isn't a technical reason why they couldn't have made.net applications work on arm, or Surface RT. In fact, you can build Metro applications with.net and they'll run on the RT just fine.
The problem is that they only want Metro stuff on there (except for Office).
IIRC it was in the KGB vs CIA episode, and the KGB guy had it. (They had all kinds of wacky stuff in that one, with exploding cigars and video cameras that could fire a single bullet.)
Not that it means anything in particular, just thought it was neat.
At the end of the day, we just need fewer PCs than we used to:
- People can do their "consumption" media (browsing, videos, etc) on tablets or phones. Don't need a PC for that. - People who use PCs for work have no reason to upgrade them as often as they used to, as the machines last for years and real world performance gains in hardware have slowed to a trickle. When most of my software is single-threaded, upgrading from dual core to quad core (or more) does absolutely nothing for me. - Even gamers don't need to upgrade that often, as requirements have stopped going up unless you want the ultra quality mode. A three year old gaming PC can still play everything new at high quality, and that's never been the case in the past.
Add it all up, and we need fewer PCs today than we used to need. The ones we do need last longer than they used to. The market isn't going to go away, but it is going to become a lot smaller.
Seems like there's a cycle in this field where people forget everything that was already learned and have to learn it all over again by reinventing everything.
UI designers seem to be doing the same thing by throwing stuff away and giving all new everything instead. That gave us Metro. We'd have been better off if they hadn't bothered.
Slashdot Mirror
I can picture it now...
Elop gets in. He sits down, and writes a memo about how the company is sitting on a burning platform and needs to change or die. He'll then adopt a bold strategy of switching the entire company over to... what? QNX maybe?
Considering his track record, I find it hard to believe anybody thinks this is a good idea.
Lets be honest: 3d is a failure in this space. A huge nummber of 3DS users never turn the 3d on, and for a lot of the market it's not a selling feature. Making a cheaper unit without it is smart, as price is a huge factor in portable gaming sales.
But then they also stripped out a speaker (going to mono instead of stereo) and came up with this really awkward form factor. Why did they do that? This thing is going to be a lot more awkward to carry around because of that.
The situation is essentially that the base NuGet repository is a highly convenient way for Visual Studio users to get packages, and people want the Oracle .net provider to be there. Oracle says they can't put it there because it's not open source (it's free as in beer).
Hi. The .net product manager at Oracle recently responded to a request to have the Oracle .net provider put into a NuGet package by refusing over licensing reasons: https://forums.oracle.com/message/11149050#11149050
It's not the legal concerns around downloaders. It's the legal rights around how uploaded software is treated.
-----------------
https://www.nuget.org/policies/Terms
User Submissions.
Outercurve does not want to receive confidential or proprietary information from User through the Web site. Any material, information, or other communication User transmits or posts ("Communications") to the Web site will be considered non-confidential and non-proprietary and Outercurve will be under no obligation of any kind with respect to such information. Outercurve will be free to reproduce, make derivative works from, use, disclose, and distribute the Communications to others without limitation. At our sole election, Outercurve may provide authorship attribution by listing User's name.
-----------------
As soon as I upload something to the Outercurve Foundation (via nuget.org), I've given them plenary rights to the software. That's a big problem for most commercial software distributions, including ODP.NET.
If you're an open source vendor, then this policy is fine. If Outercurve wants to distribute commercial software, it cannot co-opt ownership rights. This is the biggest issue, but there are others. For example, how can Oracle ensure that no one else on the site represents themselves as Oracle? There's no way to authenticate the "author", especially if you're downloading directly within Visual Studio.
Fundamentally, all these business issues can be boiled down to characteristics of open source (i.e. bazaar, torrents) distribution. If Outercurve introduced closed source/commercial-friendly (i.e. cathedral, iTunes) distribution, it would eliminate pretty much all of Oracle's business/legal concerns. But Outercurve is devoted to working with corporate developers in open source environments. If the component is closed source, then it doesn't fit within Outercurve's mission. That makes me skeptical they would ever support commercial distribution.
Essentially, Oracle would need to open source ODP.NET just for nuget.org distribution. That is like putting the cart before the horse.
Now, if somebody created a commercial software NuGet distribution channel, people could purchase, rent, or try out commercial software from it. That would be something Oracle would consider. That's why I asked about an alternative popular NuGet feed.
Since Outercurve is specifically mentioned here, do you have any comment on this? Is there plans to fix the situation for freely available (but commercial) tools like the Oracle provider?
Thanks.
I'd say we're making no progress because this is all that's required to break stuff. Again.
Companies are great at tacking needless wifi into things and not being able to protect them against the most basic of attack. But hey, it's not like you need your lights to work reliably, right?
I can't wait for the toilet that won't flush unless you pay the guy in Russia that infected it with malware. That's going to make all our lives better.
Sure, right up until your calls/data hit your ISP.
The problem is that workloads people regularly do simply don't use 8 cores. We've had this problem on PCs for a while, and it's one of the reasons the market is shrinking so fast. Once you have a dual core machine, more cores don't do anything for you given that most of your work is single threaded. There's nothing more annoying than waiting for something or seeing lag in a game with an i7 that never gets over 25% utilization (or 13% if you have hyperthreading enabled).
He's not wrong. An eight core phone serves no purpose right now.
The problems with Windows 8 go far beyond unhappy greybeards. Trying to point a mouse at invisible hot corners is just a fucking stupid idea for a desktop OS. Metro is a touch UI and it sucks with a mouse. It also sucks for multitasking productivity, multiple monitors, and really anything else that people doing real work are using a PC for.
You sound like the people who think that "innovation" is always good, even when it's just change for the sake of change that actually makes the product less usable.
I'm pretty sure they're too busy trying to make the Surface look like a success and doing Xbox One damage control to worry about a niche vanity phone like this one that will have no market impact.
Aren't videos already click to play in most browsers, in that you have to do something to make them start? How is this supposed to work?
And if it does, how long before the browser makers respond by not allowing autoplay video?
I'm assuming you've never been to Canada. It's entirely normal.
It's also the future of every US based cloud service provider. As much as US trade reps around the world want to whine about how unfair it is that people in other countries avoid American service providers, it's only going to get worse. The US government is the worst enemy of those companies.
Since the US government can use secret laws to get companies to do whatever they want anyway, who has ownership is meaningless.
There is no particular reason for anyone outside the US to trust the NSA more than they trust the Chinese.
If there's one thing we can't abide, it's that there might possibly maybe be Chinese backdoors in computers manufactured in China, unless they're from the Chinese factories of American companies. Those are okay, somehow.
While you're worried about it, pay no attention to the NSA backdoors in those American computers. Those are for your protection, unlike those evil Chinese backdoors.
Okay, and the author has expressed any of that... where, exactly?
All he did was make a comic. Other people turned it into a thing, and that somehow makes him a diva?
... wow, really? Yeah okay, that's totally insane too.
You could deliver the mail while losing far less money, though. Just because it's a necessary function doesn't mean that you have to do it badly.
Yeah, it's crazy that nobody will walk to get their mail. Except millions of Canadians do it every day, and have been for years. They don't get winter in Canada, do they?
The main difference between the two postal systems is that Canada Post is strongly discouraged to lose money. So when they saw mail volumes declining, they started acting to reduce costs. Every new neighborhood gets a community mailbox, where every house has a locked box in that larger group of boxes (what's called a cluster box in the summary). The mail goes there. The end result is that far fewer staff are needed to deliver the mail, which makes it cheaper. You can drop off letters to be delivered, and small packages are also delivered there (or delivered to the door, depending on the service level). In my small city, there's one big post office and two smaller ones inside pharmacies scattered around the city for if you want to mail parcels or pick up items too big for the boxes.
Because it's a Crown Corporation, management has some autonomy to enact changes like that, as the government can't step in as easily as Congress can (and has, in the case of blocking the end of Saturday delivery). The real problem here is less the USPS and more that the USPS isn't allowed to change anything without reactionaries in Congress interfering.
When they said "tumblr won't be changing", it's cute how ANYBODY believed them. Acquiring companies always say that. It's always a lie. In this case, most people even predicted it was a lie.
Don't worry, this is just step one. They'll totally wreck things later.
Microsoft has never made a case for why people would want to buy a Surface RT. What does it have going for it that makes it stand out against the competition? Lets take a look:
iPad - The brand name that made tablets mainstream, and that's a big help when selling a product. Also works well and has a ton of apps.
Android (Fire, Samsung, Nexus, etc) - The most popular ones seem to all have price going for them: they're the best game in town if you want a $250 or less tablet. Lots of people fit into that category. Has lots of apps.
Surface Pro - It runs x86 Windows apps. The market that really wants that in a tablet is niche, but still.
Surface RT - Not cheap, not blowing anybody away in hardware specs, not boasting any interesting unique apps. Aside from really wanting a Metro tablet, what's the point? (And no, the average joe doesn't really want a Metro or Windows tablet.)
There isn't a technical reason why they couldn't have made .net applications work on arm, or Surface RT. In fact, you can build Metro applications with .net and they'll run on the RT just fine.
The problem is that they only want Metro stuff on there (except for Office).
IIRC it was in the KGB vs CIA episode, and the KGB guy had it. (They had all kinds of wacky stuff in that one, with exploding cigars and video cameras that could fire a single bullet.)
Not that it means anything in particular, just thought it was neat.
I guess the dogs are too smart to watch the crapfest channels like TLC, so we need better channels to cater to them.
At the end of the day, we just need fewer PCs than we used to:
- People can do their "consumption" media (browsing, videos, etc) on tablets or phones. Don't need a PC for that.
- People who use PCs for work have no reason to upgrade them as often as they used to, as the machines last for years and real world performance gains in hardware have slowed to a trickle. When most of my software is single-threaded, upgrading from dual core to quad core (or more) does absolutely nothing for me.
- Even gamers don't need to upgrade that often, as requirements have stopped going up unless you want the ultra quality mode. A three year old gaming PC can still play everything new at high quality, and that's never been the case in the past.
Add it all up, and we need fewer PCs today than we used to need. The ones we do need last longer than they used to. The market isn't going to go away, but it is going to become a lot smaller.
Amen.
Seems like there's a cycle in this field where people forget everything that was already learned and have to learn it all over again by reinventing everything.
UI designers seem to be doing the same thing by throwing stuff away and giving all new everything instead. That gave us Metro. We'd have been better off if they hadn't bothered.