To paraphrase Voltaire, if there was no Microsoft, if would have been necessary for the free market to invent one.
Exactly. But the fact is that MS was the one that did it. If Apple did it, the title would be: "Is It Wrong to Love Apple?" If IBM did it, the title would be: "Is It Wrong to Love IBM?" The fact is that MS was still the one that did it.
No other viable alternatives? Guess you've never used a Mac.
No, not in the past 10 years or so. None of my important apps run on them, and I can't afford one other than one that's 5+ years old, and of course, you can't upgrade 'em, so a 5+ year old Mac is pretty much a doorstop.
Most people are also struggling just to make ends meet. I'm that way. My employees are that way. Most people don't have any time or interest for computers. We use 'em to work, and that's it. To expect most of the population to be interested in how they work is simply not realistic. It's sad, I know. It'd be great if everybody was a computer guru. But, that ain't life. One day, if I have time, I'll tinker with Linux again, but I can tell you that I have no time to dick with it to get it working. If I can throw $200 at Windows and have it working out of the box... great. I can get on with the rest of my life. Kids and students don't have rent to pay, thus that's why you see most of the OSS coming from college kids. As soon as the real world hit 'em, most people (like myself) simply don't have the resources to be curious. It's simply a product of the fast paced, overpopulated society in which we live.
FREE and continually learn more about your computer and it's OS
Kid, most people don't care to know more about their computer. Did you assemble your own car from scratch so that you could learn more about it? Did you build your own microwave? This argument is tired and just plain wrong.
Only geeks are interested in how their computer works. For the rest of the world, a PC is just a tool.
It took the PC a good 10 years to catch up to the basic standard features of a 1985 era non-PC home computer. This includes the GUI.
So then people bought Windows 3.1 in droves because...? They bought Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 in droves (what I call the start of ubiquitous computing) because no other company had addresses consumer wants and needs the way that MS did. Even if they suposedly did, they didn't market it well, they didn't keep up with the competition, or they were simply too expensive. You can't point 20 years back in time and said "so-and-so" could've done it because "so-and-so" didn't actually do it. Microsoft did. The only company that came remotely close to making PC's as widespread as they are today was Apple, but they obviously either 1. never wanted to have Apple machines in every house or 2. were grossly incompetent in doing so. Facts are facts. You can play armchair time traveler if you want, but I'm looking at the facts and I don't see that anybody addresses the mass market like Microsoft did.
There may have been better, true. But just because a product is better doesn't mean that the general population will use it if A. They've never heard of it (OS/2, IRIX), or if it's too expensive (MacOS). Microsoft brought computing to the masses in a way that nobody else had done. Whether or not it's the best is irrelevant... it still offers better *value* than anything else out there. If people bought solely based on quality, then Wal-Mart wouldn't exist.
At this point in history, PC's were not anywhere near ubiquitous, so it's a moot point. They were still for hobbyists, business people, and rich people. PC's didn't start to be truly generic appliances until well into the Windows 3.1/95 days. By that time, all you had was overpriced Apple with their super-duper software/hardware lock-in combo, of course. Nobody else was actually bringing PC's to the masses.
Before and after windows came on the scene, there were plenty of OS's available that could easily have become the market leader. There was GEOS, OS2, Amiga , Apple OS, BeOS to name a few. Microsoft only rode the wave of off the shelf hardware. IBM published all the specs to 8086 and that spawned clones.
Exactly. And Microsoft is the only one that was able to offer a decent value on commodity hardware and end the compatibility battles, all while letting consumers know that they existed. That's why they're on top, and that's why we have PC's in virtually every household. There were no viable contenders. Apple was too expensive, OS/2 was not easy to use, and the other ones you're talking about would *never* have made it to the mass market because they didn't do any kind of advertising (ever I've never heard of GEOS, and I'm obviously older than you).
What you conveniently fail to mention is that we wouldn't be where we are in terms of ubiquitous computers everywhere if not for Microsoft. Microsoft made PC's cheap and easy to use. Without Microsoft, I'm guessing that you wouldn't have a job, since there wouldn't otherwise be a computer in every household in the developed world. You shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you. If Microsoft went away today (and somehow magically took all copies of their software with them), we'd see massive drop off in personal computer use since there are no other viable alternatives, even in 2005.
Bleeding edge hardware? Again, another classic Slashdot-ism: Assuming the entire world si populated by uber-geeks.
No, most people don't give a shit or even know what kind of hardware is in their console game thingy. They just want it to be easy to use and be fun and have pretty graphics.
Get rid of the "throw-away" atmosphere, and build some dignity in the market that products will keep their value. Only a shithole like China would think of such a bad idea, as buy-once throw-away computer hardware; because China values life of the people as verry cheap and replacable, just like the products they export.
It's not the Chinese throwing away perfectly good computers... it's the US. The Chinese just make what the US demands. By contrast, Chinese culture is such that people tend to use all kinds of things until they fall apart. I don't know where you get the idea that China is a "throw away" economy, and the US isn't.
Hell, I'm thrilled about this announcement, and every hardware "upgrade" announcement. I don't buy into the consumer culture, so all of our PC's come from the local thrift shop (generally $25 for a PC, $100 for a 17" monitor). This just means more stupid Americans throwing away perfectly good machines that I can snap up for peanuts. Schweet!
Too bad it doesn't mention 6.0. That's what I still use for everything. Completely compatible (that's what MS is good for), and it does everything I need it to do. No need to drop the $$ for anything newer...
The appropriate Slashdot response is that big companies (when it comes to software) are evil. However, these same Slashdotters won't bat an eye at shopping at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Circuit City, Fry's, Amazon.com, etc. What's up with that?
The best thing that I think that scientists (or anybody who is capable of rational throught) can do is to simply ignore it. Intelligent Design is not any more worth of any kind of discussion than my personal theory that the universe was created by Elvis, and stars were created to look like sequins. Scientists also don't consider discussing the whole "37 virgins after death" thing that Muslims believe. What scientists should do when approached by the media with this questions is to simply respond, "I'm a scientist. I deal in facts. I have no interest in religion. I will not debate facts vs. religion since that makes no sense to do"
True, evolution is not random, but the mutations that lead to differentiation and new evolutionary branches are most definitely random. That's why the vast majority of mutations in any organisms are failures. Depending on the species, and the severity of mutations and the frequency of mutations, you'll have different ratios of successful to unsuccessful (or beneficial to detrimental) mutations. But the mutations are generally pretty random unless they're caused by external elements which may or may not be random (ie: A large dose of, say, gamma radiation will produce lots of mutations that generally end up being various types of cancer).
So I guess that in the grand scheme of things, no, evolution most definitely isn't random, but that non-randomness, interestingly, arises from lots of randomness on the molecular level.
Evolution is based on SCIENCE. Creationism is based on FAITH (the lack of evidence). Creationism should NOT be taught in schools, or given any more time in classrooms than my personal theory of Tom Cruise actually being a human manifestation of God. It's complete and utter bullshit, and it should, in no way, be taught, or even debated in scientific circles. Leave Creationism to theology classes where it belongs.
I just re-read the article, and I've realized that this is one of the venture gapital guys that live in the happy-happy land where an idea to sell something online instantly qualifies you for a $10mil gift from one of these guys. Does anybody know how to get to this never-never land of slick marketing, lots of money, and no products? I've been working like a dog to scrape by with my real business for the past 3 years, and I'd like to cash in on some of this venture capital crap.
This guy is really insulting. He says that failing your own business "won't hurt as much." as having a real job? To say that investing every dime you own in a business, and spending every day for several years (most businesses fold in the 1-3 year range), only to see it fail "won't hurt as much" as working as a job that may not be 100% rewarding is pure bullshit.
Actually, I'd say it's this cavalier attitude about business that causes many startups to fail.
It sounds like he's suggesting that developers work at home, develop open source, and pay their rent with what? fairy dust? good will?
Another thing that keeps people away from starting startups is the risk. Someone with kids and a mortgage should think twice before doing it. But most young hackers have neither.
And as the example of open source and blogging suggests, you'll enjoy it more, even if you fail. You'll be working on your own thing, instead of going to some office and doing what you're told. There may be more pain in your own company, but it won't hurt as much.
You're assuming that you're talking to people who all work for mega-corporations with thousands of employees that can afford to let their emplyoees tinker on company time. I think that's a bit unrealistic. I know that when I hire somebody, I have a job for them to do. I simply cannot afford to have them playing around, hoping to come up with some great idea that's unrelated to my business.
This group of technical professionals are doing a hobby they enjoy. That's it. It really doesn't have anything to do with work. Would you like to explain how somebody who works in, say, insurance could be more inspired by his employer, given that his hobby is model trains? What they do on their own time is completely unrelated to work.
You pay one or several good developers to develop it in their extra time. They'll charge significantly less since you won't have insane deadlines. And you don't have to pay by the hour. You can say I want these features for this price, with a deadline of xx months out. Or, you pay people to work on various smaller parts of the whole as you have the money.
This may be the death of Vonage. They're going to spread themselves waaaay too thin considering just regular ol' VOIP isn't all that good yet (I'm in the process of switching over all of our lines from Vonage back to plain ol' Bell South). This is a classic case of overextension, from what I can tell. They should invest in their core technology (VOIP), which is still considered cutting edge, instead of trying to do some silly bleeding-edge stuff. I used to think that Vonage had the Next Big Thing, even if their current VOIP service isn't quite there yet. Now I think they're going to burn it (cash) on this silly, waaaay too new technology before they've perfected what pays their bills.
This decision is a relief. I've blocked *all* IP traffic from most of Asia. I was a tad worried that the entire continent of Asia would be able to sue me for closing my server to them. All right then, who's next? Eastern Europe? Former Soviet states? I'm an IP blocking fool! And only a written, signed apology from each and every citizen of every country I blocked is going to make it better.
In all seriousness, while doing this obviously has no impact on zombies that send spam, it did have a massive positive impact on our mail server. Hopefully, we'll see a decrease in zombie activity as Win XP SP2 continues to be more widely deployed.
Slashdot Mirror
To paraphrase Voltaire, if there was no Microsoft, if would have been necessary for the free market to invent one.
Exactly. But the fact is that MS was the one that did it. If Apple did it, the title would be: "Is It Wrong to Love Apple?" If IBM did it, the title would be: "Is It Wrong to Love IBM?" The fact is that MS was still the one that did it.
No other viable alternatives? Guess you've never used a Mac.
No, not in the past 10 years or so. None of my important apps run on them, and I can't afford one other than one that's 5+ years old, and of course, you can't upgrade 'em, so a 5+ year old Mac is pretty much a doorstop.
Most people are also struggling just to make ends meet. I'm that way. My employees are that way. Most people don't have any time or interest for computers. We use 'em to work, and that's it. To expect most of the population to be interested in how they work is simply not realistic. It's sad, I know. It'd be great if everybody was a computer guru. But, that ain't life. One day, if I have time, I'll tinker with Linux again, but I can tell you that I have no time to dick with it to get it working. If I can throw $200 at Windows and have it working out of the box... great. I can get on with the rest of my life. Kids and students don't have rent to pay, thus that's why you see most of the OSS coming from college kids. As soon as the real world hit 'em, most people (like myself) simply don't have the resources to be curious. It's simply a product of the fast paced, overpopulated society in which we live.
FREE and continually learn more about your computer and it's OS
Kid, most people don't care to know more about their computer. Did you assemble your own car from scratch so that you could learn more about it? Did you build your own microwave? This argument is tired and just plain wrong.
Only geeks are interested in how their computer works. For the rest of the world, a PC is just a tool.
I fail to see how comparing Microsoft (a company) to genocide (an action) is relevant or funny.
It took the PC a good 10 years to catch up to the basic standard features of a 1985 era non-PC home computer. This includes the GUI.
So then people bought Windows 3.1 in droves because...? They bought Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 in droves (what I call the start of ubiquitous computing) because no other company had addresses consumer wants and needs the way that MS did. Even if they suposedly did, they didn't market it well, they didn't keep up with the competition, or they were simply too expensive. You can't point 20 years back in time and said "so-and-so" could've done it because "so-and-so" didn't actually do it. Microsoft did. The only company that came remotely close to making PC's as widespread as they are today was Apple, but they obviously either 1. never wanted to have Apple machines in every house or 2. were grossly incompetent in doing so. Facts are facts. You can play armchair time traveler if you want, but I'm looking at the facts and I don't see that anybody addresses the mass market like Microsoft did.
There may have been better, true. But just because a product is better doesn't mean that the general population will use it if A. They've never heard of it (OS/2, IRIX), or if it's too expensive (MacOS). Microsoft brought computing to the masses in a way that nobody else had done. Whether or not it's the best is irrelevant... it still offers better *value* than anything else out there. If people bought solely based on quality, then Wal-Mart wouldn't exist.
They origianlly wanted CPM/86 instead of QDOS.
At this point in history, PC's were not anywhere near ubiquitous, so it's a moot point. They were still for hobbyists, business people, and rich people. PC's didn't start to be truly generic appliances until well into the Windows 3.1/95 days. By that time, all you had was overpriced Apple with their super-duper software/hardware lock-in combo, of course. Nobody else was actually bringing PC's to the masses.
Before and after windows came on the scene, there were plenty of OS's available that could easily have become the market leader. There was GEOS, OS2, Amiga , Apple OS, BeOS to name a few. Microsoft only rode the wave of off the shelf hardware. IBM published all the specs to 8086 and that spawned clones.
Exactly. And Microsoft is the only one that was able to offer a decent value on commodity hardware and end the compatibility battles, all while letting consumers know that they existed. That's why they're on top, and that's why we have PC's in virtually every household. There were no viable contenders. Apple was too expensive, OS/2 was not easy to use, and the other ones you're talking about would *never* have made it to the mass market because they didn't do any kind of advertising (ever I've never heard of GEOS, and I'm obviously older than you).
What you conveniently fail to mention is that we wouldn't be where we are in terms of ubiquitous computers everywhere if not for Microsoft. Microsoft made PC's cheap and easy to use. Without Microsoft, I'm guessing that you wouldn't have a job, since there wouldn't otherwise be a computer in every household in the developed world. You shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you. If Microsoft went away today (and somehow magically took all copies of their software with them), we'd see massive drop off in personal computer use since there are no other viable alternatives, even in 2005.
Bleeding edge hardware? Again, another classic Slashdot-ism: Assuming the entire world si populated by uber-geeks.
No, most people don't give a shit or even know what kind of hardware is in their console game thingy. They just want it to be easy to use and be fun and have pretty graphics.
Well, then maybe I have that backwards. It's been a few months. Maybe it was $100 for a PC and $25 for a monitor. I don't remember.
Get rid of the "throw-away" atmosphere, and build some dignity in the market that products will keep their value. Only a shithole like China would think of such a bad idea, as buy-once throw-away computer hardware; because China values life of the people as verry cheap and replacable, just like the products they export.
It's not the Chinese throwing away perfectly good computers... it's the US. The Chinese just make what the US demands. By contrast, Chinese culture is such that people tend to use all kinds of things until they fall apart. I don't know where you get the idea that China is a "throw away" economy, and the US isn't.
Hell, I'm thrilled about this announcement, and every hardware "upgrade" announcement. I don't buy into the consumer culture, so all of our PC's come from the local thrift shop (generally $25 for a PC, $100 for a 17" monitor). This just means more stupid Americans throwing away perfectly good machines that I can snap up for peanuts. Schweet!
Too bad it doesn't mention 6.0. That's what I still use for everything. Completely compatible (that's what MS is good for), and it does everything I need it to do. No need to drop the $$ for anything newer...
Big companies.
The appropriate Slashdot response is that big companies (when it comes to software) are evil. However, these same Slashdotters won't bat an eye at shopping at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Circuit City, Fry's, Amazon.com, etc. What's up with that?
The best thing that I think that scientists (or anybody who is capable of rational throught) can do is to simply ignore it. Intelligent Design is not any more worth of any kind of discussion than my personal theory that the universe was created by Elvis, and stars were created to look like sequins. Scientists also don't consider discussing the whole "37 virgins after death" thing that Muslims believe. What scientists should do when approached by the media with this questions is to simply respond, "I'm a scientist. I deal in facts. I have no interest in religion. I will not debate facts vs. religion since that makes no sense to do"
True, evolution is not random, but the mutations that lead to differentiation and new evolutionary branches are most definitely random. That's why the vast majority of mutations in any organisms are failures. Depending on the species, and the severity of mutations and the frequency of mutations, you'll have different ratios of successful to unsuccessful (or beneficial to detrimental) mutations. But the mutations are generally pretty random unless they're caused by external elements which may or may not be random (ie: A large dose of, say, gamma radiation will produce lots of mutations that generally end up being various types of cancer).
So I guess that in the grand scheme of things, no, evolution most definitely isn't random, but that non-randomness, interestingly, arises from lots of randomness on the molecular level.
Evolution is based on SCIENCE. Creationism is based on FAITH (the lack of evidence). Creationism should NOT be taught in schools, or given any more time in classrooms than my personal theory of Tom Cruise actually being a human manifestation of God. It's complete and utter bullshit, and it should, in no way, be taught, or even debated in scientific circles. Leave Creationism to theology classes where it belongs.
I just re-read the article, and I've realized that this is one of the venture gapital guys that live in the happy-happy land where an idea to sell something online instantly qualifies you for a $10mil gift from one of these guys. Does anybody know how to get to this never-never land of slick marketing, lots of money, and no products? I've been working like a dog to scrape by with my real business for the past 3 years, and I'd like to cash in on some of this venture capital crap.
This guy is really insulting. He says that failing your own business "won't hurt as much." as having a real job? To say that investing every dime you own in a business, and spending every day for several years (most businesses fold in the 1-3 year range), only to see it fail "won't hurt as much" as working as a job that may not be 100% rewarding is pure bullshit.
Actually, I'd say it's this cavalier attitude about business that causes many startups to fail.
It sounds like he's suggesting that developers work at home, develop open source, and pay their rent with what? fairy dust? good will?
Another thing that keeps people away from starting startups is the risk. Someone with kids and a mortgage should think twice before doing it. But most young hackers have neither.
And as the example of open source and blogging suggests, you'll enjoy it more, even if you fail. You'll be working on your own thing, instead of going to some office and doing what you're told. There may be more pain in your own company, but it won't hurt as much.
You're assuming that you're talking to people who all work for mega-corporations with thousands of employees that can afford to let their emplyoees tinker on company time. I think that's a bit unrealistic. I know that when I hire somebody, I have a job for them to do. I simply cannot afford to have them playing around, hoping to come up with some great idea that's unrelated to my business.
This group of technical professionals are doing a hobby they enjoy. That's it. It really doesn't have anything to do with work. Would you like to explain how somebody who works in, say, insurance could be more inspired by his employer, given that his hobby is model trains? What they do on their own time is completely unrelated to work.
You pay one or several good developers to develop it in their extra time. They'll charge significantly less since you won't have insane deadlines. And you don't have to pay by the hour. You can say I want these features for this price, with a deadline of xx months out. Or, you pay people to work on various smaller parts of the whole as you have the money.
You can have your application built cheaply, quickly, or well. Pick two.
This may be the death of Vonage. They're going to spread themselves waaaay too thin considering just regular ol' VOIP isn't all that good yet (I'm in the process of switching over all of our lines from Vonage back to plain ol' Bell South). This is a classic case of overextension, from what I can tell. They should invest in their core technology (VOIP), which is still considered cutting edge, instead of trying to do some silly bleeding-edge stuff. I used to think that Vonage had the Next Big Thing, even if their current VOIP service isn't quite there yet. Now I think they're going to burn it (cash) on this silly, waaaay too new technology before they've perfected what pays their bills.
This decision is a relief. I've blocked *all* IP traffic from most of Asia. I was a tad worried that the entire continent of Asia would be able to sue me for closing my server to them. All right then, who's next? Eastern Europe? Former Soviet states? I'm an IP blocking fool! And only a written, signed apology from each and every citizen of every country I blocked is going to make it better.
In all seriousness, while doing this obviously has no impact on zombies that send spam, it did have a massive positive impact on our mail server. Hopefully, we'll see a decrease in zombie activity as Win XP SP2 continues to be more widely deployed.