It gets echoed a lot here on Slashdot, but an awful lot of people simply will not travel to the US again. But not enough to make those people re-think. Heck, I've turned down an invitation to speak in front of a bunch of oil companies top-execs. You'd think the current administration would listen if they complain that people don't want to visit them. No, I guess they didn't have too many troubles finding someone else.
But the number of people putting the US on their personal "do not go there" list is increasing rapidly, at least from what I hear all around. Maybe a few years down the road it'll start to hurt. You know, as usual, when the damage is done and all that.
Actually, in a large corporation, decentralized IT might work, because the corp is large enough to have several specialized IT departments.
What TI did was doing away with the IT department and replacing it with, essentially, help-desks, outsourcers and, to put it bluntly, idiots.
For all I have seen in my life, you need an IT department the way you need financials, legal and human resources. You can dream about decentralizing it, you can fantasize about having each department take care of their own finances, legal and HR needs, but in the real world that'll simply not work. Same with IT.
Mod me down all you want, but the truth still is that MS is a company of promises and "next version" dreams, while other companies out there (and by far not only Apple) actually deliver.
Hot air may drive a wind-energy power generator, but it doesn't drive technology, IT or even a single website, home-business or enterprise.
I think the book's author missed a step in his logic. The centralization of power utilities didn't obsolete electricians. He missed an even more important step: Electrical power is a simple, homogeneous commodity. IT isn't. You can't run a tube into someone's house and provide them with "IT". IT is more like the hundred of electrical devices we have in our homes than the power that's coming from the wall socket.
In this sense, the "IT" he speaks about are providers of basic services - hosting companies, ISPs, hardware leasing, etc. - well, we have all of them already.
I know one large corporation from the inside that has, more or less, abandoned the IT department: Telecom Italia. Here, IT is considered an "add on" and what's there of IT is tacked on to the departments it is supposed to support, or is outsourced (usually to Acenture).
TI has the worst IT that I have ever seen, by a wide margin. I have never met so many so incompetent fools before. I have never seen such a shoddy network, such crappy software, and such a low quality in general. Run an IT project within TI and you have dozens of consultants running around, most producing work that is so shitty you have to completely rewrite it from scratch before you can use it.
This is a long story put very short, but it's taught me one thing: If you think that IT doesn't matter, that you don't need an IT department, that you can run IT as an afterthought, you will pay threefold for every buck you save in overhead, quality, availability, security and everything else that takes someone who knows what the fuck he's doing to get it done right.
In other words: Gates is still living in a dream world full of vaporware that he likes to talk about every now and then.
Thanks, but I much prefer Steve Jobs' talks, because they usually end with "available today". That, Bill, is the difference that matters. If your company would deliver even a fraction of what you publicly dream about... well, as it is your visions are on par with the flying cars we all still don't have.
GP claimed Macs are an annoyance for programmers. I countered they aren't, with some examples. It's not about vi or TextMate, or Unity or Torque or Xcode or Eclipse. I really couldn't care less what your favourite editor is. The point was that lots of programmers do use Macs and GP is full of shit.:-)
Also, there is an objective component to my point that you are missing. My point is not that Linux can match Windows and the Mac feature for feature. My point is much different. Rather, my point is that all markets are tiered. Yes, but -
Macs are not really more expensive than PCs anymore. What you are comparing is the software. There's quite a lot of free or cheap software for the Mac. Unity3D, for example, is $199 and compares well with $10,000 engines for windos. iDVD or iMovie are free with the machine and might serve your purpose for the movie. And so on.
What Linux does offer is bringing computing to people who really couldn't afford a computer otherwise, because it runs on machines that XP wouldn't even boot on. But that's the very low end. In the consumer market, I don't think the difference is that big.
Or as the old Pope hold, science provides a description of how God created the world, while religion provides a description of why God created the world. Which sounds very nice and compromising, but still presupposes that god did create the world.
And that's where the whole religion scam falls apart: It never offers any proof for its assumptions.
> So what's left in the god basket? Every question asking for meanings ("why") rather than mechanisms ("how"). Not even those, sorry.
God has simply ceased to be necessary. If you can explain everything without (every "how"), then even with all your "whys" unanswered, you don't need a god anymore. The world works perfectly well without one, so why should there be one, if he has zero effect on anything?
I personally think that the most pressing "why" questions aren't half as important as we make them. Us asking is the primary mover - our brains are trained to find causality, so we ask "why" all the time, but the question isn't anywhere outside of us. There is no necessity for a godly power to answer questions that are purely internally.
acceptance of evolution does not require abandoning belief in God. Not "god" in the sense of "some über-powerful being" perhaps, but certainly the biblical version. When your holy book starts with claims that your scientific knowledge refutes as nonsense, it's very hard to continue being convinced of both.
There's a reason all the xian fundamentalists so desperately oppose evolution, and that's precisely because understanding evolution means understanding that most of the bible is badly written fiction.
Apple might be good for a grandma or for a graphic designer, but for a programmer it's an annoyance. Really? Weird, I beg to differ, and so do lots and lots of other programmers.
TextMate is a wonderful editor, tell me an equivalent on Linux. The Apple Developer tools are said to be excellent, but I've not tried them. 3rd party development environments like Unity blow away their windos and Linux counterparts.
You may not personally like it, but there are enough programmers using Macs on a daily basis that your claim "for a programmer it's an annoyance" is solidly debunked.
1.) wrong. It isn't about "the killer app", never was. Very, very, very few people use their computers for one app, killer or not. It's about the whole experience, and that's where Apple wins hands down: It offers an "experience" instead of a hodgepodge of crappy shareware (windos) or nerdy and not user-friendly Free Software (Linux).
2.) Apple's marketshare started to increase before Vista hit the shelves. Sure, Vista helps, but most of the people I know who switched to Mac over the past 18 months did it or were already contemplating doing it before Vista.
3.) Negative. I've tried Ubuntu and it doesn't hold a candle to OS X. I wish it was otherwise, and I wish the Ubuntu people nothing but the best, but in usability it's years behind OS X.
I made the switch to Linux shortly after windos 95 came around to torture us all.
I switched to Mac last year. I'm not looking back, and I'll be replacing my last Linux machine with another Mac shortly.
There is a good number of like people around me.
It really is that simple: Linux never delivered. It had lots and lots of promise, for example the early Enlightenment releases, which simply blew everyone away. But it didn't push through. Where's E at nowadays? And what does it do that's not pretty much standard by now? Why did it not deliver four years ago?
Same with everything else Linux. I've been very patient, I've manually patched my kernel more times than most windos fanboys even looked at kernel32.dll and yet I was seldom as satisfied with Linux as I am now with my Macs where everything just works, from driver support to the best UI in the computer industry. Certainly not the best possible, but just look at the state of Drag & Drop on Mac and Linux, and you know why I don't do Linux anymore.
Same reply as to the AC: The difference as that one requires preparation (you've got to have that porn DVD with you in the first place), while the other can happen spontaneously.
I, on the contrary, knock their interface every opportunity I get. It's horrible, and getting worse with every new version.
One example is that "hide the not-so-often-used options from a menu" terror. Whoever came up with that should be shot and buried next to the inventor of the "Start" menu. It drives both power-users and newbies mad, provides no mentionable savings and causes additional trouble whenever you do want those functions.
And that's just one example. Every UI "innovation" from MS is an abomination, and that crap is driving people away from windos, Vista or otherwise - namely everyone who's ever used something else. Wanna convert someone to Mac? Borrow them a MacBook for a weekend. The UI alone, compare to what they're used to from windos, convinced almost everyone who's spent as much as 10 minutes on my Mac.
Here's a thought: close Firefox, shut the lid on the laptop, and *gasp* actually talk to the girl sitting next to you. You just might find that you'll be enjoying the real thing, rather than rubbing one out to pictures of it. This assumes that there is a girl sitting next to you. The only times I'll give that more of a 10% chance is when I'm bringing my own, so to speak (i.e. holidays).
I fly regularily on business trips. There are very few girls travelling at those times of day and those routes. Those that are will usually be seated next to their husband/boyfriend or boss. In the off-chance that there's actually one sitting next to you, more likely than not she'll be busy with her laptop the entire flight.
The thing about planes is that there really isn't much you can do. You can't even move about very much. A couple months ago I spent about half of an eight hour train journey talking with a really sweet girl from Israel - but that was only possible because you can move about in a train, there's a small restaurant/bistro on it, etc. - we weren't seated next to each other. On a plane, unless you are extremely lucky and have a person sitting next to you that is interesting and interested in talking with a stranger, you literally having nothing to do.
There's an important legal difference there, and that is the airline as provider of the questionable content. If someone brings his notebook and watches porn, the stewardess will certainly ask him to stop. If he gets it via the built-in airline system, his answer just might be "but you're providing this, and I've paid for it as part of the ticket price".
They've got a tough task ahead of them. The thing is that in a plane you don't have privacy when surfing the web on a screen that at least two people next and two people behind you can see clearly without turning their heads much. Which, yes, gives the airlines some responsibility to make sure that there's nothing on that screen that could cause trouble. You don't want to deal with upset and angry parents and a slightly drunk porn-watcher at 30,000 feet.
Goggles seems to be the obvious answer, but they never quite caught on despite being on the market with reasonable solutions (enough for movies) for a couple years now.
No, I don't support censorship, but that's when it is about content from one private party being delivered to another private party, and what happens inside your home is your business. This isn't your home, and that's the point.
As I already said, by regulating the emissions. More government intervention. Didn't you just argue against that?
Mandating that we all switch to CFLs is silly. It's not the bulbs producing CO2 it's the creation of that electricity at coal plants. I'm with you on that one. Especially building additional coal plants while talking about how we all want to save the environment is kind of hypocritical. But then again, those plants don't generate electricity just because it's so much fun. If energy efficiency rises, and energy demand falls, we would need less of those plants.
Exactly the way the market is designed to operate. Not quite. The market doesn't magically raise prices in line with a moral goal. Something has to cause that raise, either consumers willing to pay more (i.e. shortage) or higher production costs. You could add an "environment tax" to artificially raise production costs, but a) is that an arbitrary price and b) an external intervention anyways, so why not go the whole nine yards instead of playing pretend?
Now, if you are serious about "carbon footprints", "global warming", etc. then look at the root of the problem. It is population. Someone once said "all the simple solutions have already been found". Yes, population is part of the problem. No, population isn't "the" problem. For example, about 1 billion of those 6 billion people is causing the majority of the problem. If I weren't lazy I'd google up the exact numbers, but one US citizen causes as much environmental trouble as whole family of third-world people. One US family with their air-conditioned home and SUV causes as much environmental damage as a whole tribe of inner-african primitives. The sheer number of human beings is too simple a formula.
Plus a lot of our way of life depends on the world having more than 1 billion people. Where'd you get cheap labor if 80% of them were dead?
That's a very partial solution to this specific problem. How do you solve CO2 emission, or any other kind of pollution? Yes, I do question the wisdom of selling "pollution certificates". It's a bullshit solution because the sellers aren't the owners of the "property" that is being sold (on the contrary, they are the polluters).
That, and you ignored the "pricing" part. How much, in dollars, is "extinction of the human species" worth? How much is 1% of that worth? How do you arrive at a number?
in a couple of decades they probably will have banned procreation. Probably sooner. Who needs procreation if you believe in actual creation(ism)? It's not as if we were born, is it? I mean, that would mean sex, and genetics, and evolution and all that modern crap. Of course we are designed, so procreation is just a myth spread by the liberals.
The market would have sorted this all out eventually No, it would not. That myth is being perpetuated in way too many places. "the market" does not solve non-market problems. Google "Externalities". The only way the market would sort this out were if energy would suddenly cost so much that the efficiency difference actually forces people towards fluorescents, including your grandmother who couldn't care less and won't go anything "newfangled" that was invented after 1960 or so unless she has no other choice.
So until we price "destruction of the human species through climate change" somehow and add it to the price... wait... how would we do that, except through an act of congress? It's not as if nature would be selling climate change by the degree.
Same thing over here in Europe. My grandparents still remembered times when mail would come three times a day.
But, it's been a long time since public services were seen as a service to the public and the goal should be the best possible service. Today the goal is profit for the shareholders, and the general public is a tiny minority shareholder, if at all.
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But the number of people putting the US on their personal "do not go there" list is increasing rapidly, at least from what I hear all around. Maybe a few years down the road it'll start to hurt. You know, as usual, when the damage is done and all that.
Actually, in a large corporation, decentralized IT might work, because the corp is large enough to have several specialized IT departments.
What TI did was doing away with the IT department and replacing it with, essentially, help-desks, outsourcers and, to put it bluntly, idiots.
For all I have seen in my life, you need an IT department the way you need financials, legal and human resources. You can dream about decentralizing it, you can fantasize about having each department take care of their own finances, legal and HR needs, but in the real world that'll simply not work. Same with IT.
Mod me down all you want, but the truth still is that MS is a company of promises and "next version" dreams, while other companies out there (and by far not only Apple) actually deliver.
Hot air may drive a wind-energy power generator, but it doesn't drive technology, IT or even a single website, home-business or enterprise.
In this sense, the "IT" he speaks about are providers of basic services - hosting companies, ISPs, hardware leasing, etc. - well, we have all of them already.
I know one large corporation from the inside that has, more or less, abandoned the IT department: Telecom Italia. Here, IT is considered an "add on" and what's there of IT is tacked on to the departments it is supposed to support, or is outsourced (usually to Acenture).
TI has the worst IT that I have ever seen, by a wide margin. I have never met so many so incompetent fools before. I have never seen such a shoddy network, such crappy software, and such a low quality in general. Run an IT project within TI and you have dozens of consultants running around, most producing work that is so shitty you have to completely rewrite it from scratch before you can use it.
This is a long story put very short, but it's taught me one thing: If you think that IT doesn't matter, that you don't need an IT department, that you can run IT as an afterthought, you will pay threefold for every buck you save in overhead, quality, availability, security and everything else that takes someone who knows what the fuck he's doing to get it done right.
In other words: Gates is still living in a dream world full of vaporware that he likes to talk about every now and then.
Thanks, but I much prefer Steve Jobs' talks, because they usually end with "available today". That, Bill, is the difference that matters. If your company would deliver even a fraction of what you publicly dream about... well, as it is your visions are on par with the flying cars we all still don't have.
You missed the point.
:-)
GP claimed Macs are an annoyance for programmers. I countered they aren't, with some examples. It's not about vi or TextMate, or Unity or Torque or Xcode or Eclipse. I really couldn't care less what your favourite editor is. The point was that lots of programmers do use Macs and GP is full of shit.
Macs are not really more expensive than PCs anymore. What you are comparing is the software. There's quite a lot of free or cheap software for the Mac. Unity3D, for example, is $199 and compares well with $10,000 engines for windos. iDVD or iMovie are free with the machine and might serve your purpose for the movie. And so on.
What Linux does offer is bringing computing to people who really couldn't afford a computer otherwise, because it runs on machines that XP wouldn't even boot on. But that's the very low end. In the consumer market, I don't think the difference is that big.
And that's where the whole religion scam falls apart: It never offers any proof for its assumptions.
Every question asking for meanings ("why") rather than mechanisms ("how"). Not even those, sorry.
God has simply ceased to be necessary. If you can explain everything without (every "how"), then even with all your "whys" unanswered, you don't need a god anymore. The world works perfectly well without one, so why should there be one, if he has zero effect on anything?
I personally think that the most pressing "why" questions aren't half as important as we make them. Us asking is the primary mover - our brains are trained to find causality, so we ask "why" all the time, but the question isn't anywhere outside of us. There is no necessity for a godly power to answer questions that are purely internally.
There's a reason all the xian fundamentalists so desperately oppose evolution, and that's precisely because understanding evolution means understanding that most of the bible is badly written fiction.
TextMate is a wonderful editor, tell me an equivalent on Linux.
The Apple Developer tools are said to be excellent, but I've not tried them.
3rd party development environments like Unity blow away their windos and Linux counterparts.
You may not personally like it, but there are enough programmers using Macs on a daily basis that your claim "for a programmer it's an annoyance" is solidly debunked.
1.) wrong. It isn't about "the killer app", never was. Very, very, very few people use their computers for one app, killer or not. It's about the whole experience, and that's where Apple wins hands down: It offers an "experience" instead of a hodgepodge of crappy shareware (windos) or nerdy and not user-friendly Free Software (Linux).
2.) Apple's marketshare started to increase before Vista hit the shelves. Sure, Vista helps, but most of the people I know who switched to Mac over the past 18 months did it or were already contemplating doing it before Vista.
3.) Negative. I've tried Ubuntu and it doesn't hold a candle to OS X. I wish it was otherwise, and I wish the Ubuntu people nothing but the best, but in usability it's years behind OS X.
I disagree.
I made the switch to Linux shortly after windos 95 came around to torture us all.
I switched to Mac last year. I'm not looking back, and I'll be replacing my last Linux machine with another Mac shortly.
There is a good number of like people around me.
It really is that simple: Linux never delivered. It had lots and lots of promise, for example the early Enlightenment releases, which simply blew everyone away. But it didn't push through. Where's E at nowadays? And what does it do that's not pretty much standard by now? Why did it not deliver four years ago?
Same with everything else Linux. I've been very patient, I've manually patched my kernel more times than most windos fanboys even looked at kernel32.dll and yet I was seldom as satisfied with Linux as I am now with my Macs where everything just works, from driver support to the best UI in the computer industry. Certainly not the best possible, but just look at the state of Drag & Drop on Mac and Linux, and you know why I don't do Linux anymore.
Same reply as to the AC: The difference as that one requires preparation (you've got to have that porn DVD with you in the first place), while the other can happen spontaneously.
I, on the contrary, knock their interface every opportunity I get. It's horrible, and getting worse with every new version.
One example is that "hide the not-so-often-used options from a menu" terror. Whoever came up with that should be shot and buried next to the inventor of the "Start" menu. It drives both power-users and newbies mad, provides no mentionable savings and causes additional trouble whenever you do want those functions.
And that's just one example. Every UI "innovation" from MS is an abomination, and that crap is driving people away from windos, Vista or otherwise - namely everyone who's ever used something else. Wanna convert someone to Mac? Borrow them a MacBook for a weekend. The UI alone, compare to what they're used to from windos, convinced almost everyone who's spent as much as 10 minutes on my Mac.
I fly regularily on business trips. There are very few girls travelling at those times of day and those routes. Those that are will usually be seated next to their husband/boyfriend or boss. In the off-chance that there's actually one sitting next to you, more likely than not she'll be busy with her laptop the entire flight.
The thing about planes is that there really isn't much you can do. You can't even move about very much. A couple months ago I spent about half of an eight hour train journey talking with a really sweet girl from Israel - but that was only possible because you can move about in a train, there's a small restaurant/bistro on it, etc. - we weren't seated next to each other. On a plane, unless you are extremely lucky and have a person sitting next to you that is interesting and interested in talking with a stranger, you literally having nothing to do.
There's an important legal difference there, and that is the airline as provider of the questionable content. If someone brings his notebook and watches porn, the stewardess will certainly ask him to stop. If he gets it via the built-in airline system, his answer just might be "but you're providing this, and I've paid for it as part of the ticket price".
And in a court of law, he just might win.
They've got a tough task ahead of them. The thing is that in a plane you don't have privacy when surfing the web on a screen that at least two people next and two people behind you can see clearly without turning their heads much. Which, yes, gives the airlines some responsibility to make sure that there's nothing on that screen that could cause trouble. You don't want to deal with upset and angry parents and a slightly drunk porn-watcher at 30,000 feet.
Goggles seems to be the obvious answer, but they never quite caught on despite being on the market with reasonable solutions (enough for movies) for a couple years now.
No, I don't support censorship, but that's when it is about content from one private party being delivered to another private party, and what happens inside your home is your business. This isn't your home, and that's the point.
Plus a lot of our way of life depends on the world having more than 1 billion people. Where'd you get cheap labor if 80% of them were dead?
That's a very partial solution to this specific problem. How do you solve CO2 emission, or any other kind of pollution? Yes, I do question the wisdom of selling "pollution certificates". It's a bullshit solution because the sellers aren't the owners of the "property" that is being sold (on the contrary, they are the polluters).
That, and you ignored the "pricing" part. How much, in dollars, is "extinction of the human species" worth? How much is 1% of that worth? How do you arrive at a number?
So until we price "destruction of the human species through climate change" somehow and add it to the price... wait... how would we do that, except through an act of congress? It's not as if nature would be selling climate change by the degree.
Same thing over here in Europe. My grandparents still remembered times when mail would come three times a day.
But, it's been a long time since public services were seen as a service to the public and the goal should be the best possible service. Today the goal is profit for the shareholders, and the general public is a tiny minority shareholder, if at all.