I don't think he's missing the mobile point much at all. The iPhone is an iPod+phone+PDA, right? And so are a number of other smartphones. Anyway, most competitive smartphones in the U.S. have access to 3G wireless networks. That's more than fast enough to accommodate Internet radio on your device. 3G wireless works just fine in the car. And if you want to play it through your car radio, most conventional car stereos these days have an input jack for an MP3 player -- which will work fine for the iPhone and other smartphones.
You're right. I did a little digging and Sun OS 4 was released in 1988. One year too late. The oldest virtual Window Manager I can think of is TWM, which was also first released in 1988.
Sadly, no, it does not. At least not much. Only about half of households in America even have a computer, and fewer have broadband access. The Internet only increases transparency if citizens are vigilant and pay attention to what's going on in Washington and in their state legislatures.
Unfortunately, Joe Sixpack, when he can be expected turn his attention from his beer, his sports (Nascar, football, hockey, maybe basketball if Joe lives in an urban area), golf and/or bowling (depends on whether he's upper middle or lower middle class), usually it's only about once every four years. And that's only if American Idol isn't good this season.
DESQview on the 386 did full-blown multitasking, not just task switching. Godsend when running a BBS because it meant, given enough RAM, you could run multiple BBS nodes and leave a window open for DOS, etc.
Well, Unix time is the number of seconds since the epoch, 1970-01-01 00:00:00. Like most people here, I figure you have a computer sitting in front of you, probably a calculator applet and at least one programming language installed, right?
I don't think good PR matters as much as people think it does. Many companies with lots of really bad PR succeed anyway: Microsoft, WalMart, McDonald's, AOL, Comcast, etc. It's more about how that bad PR is handled along with the dynamics of the marketplace. People will buy things from companies they love to hate.
I don't know if it's so much a psychological "self-actualization" thing as much as it's just simply doing what you like to do. I've done tons of programming (and indeed, got into it in the first place) simply because it was interesting and I liked doing it.
Mmmmm...you're kinda saying the same thing. Self-actualization is the drive to realize one's full potential. That's why people write programs or author books or climb mountains.
Maslow and Hertzberg had similar ideas. Herzberg's theory was actually a two factor theory and Maslow's hierarchy was a little more fleshed out, but Hertzberg's two factor theory fit neatly into Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Since Maslow and Hertzberg were more or less contemporaries (Hertzberg 1923-2000 and Maslow 1908-1970), it's likely that either Maslow's hierarchy directly influenced Hertzberg's two-factor theory. Either way, they are really just two different ways to express the same idea.
I'm going to reply to this post backwards if you don't mind.
What motivates people is recognition.
That's one of the things. A guy named Frederick Hertzberg suggested that employees are motivated by a hierarchy of needs.
They start at the very low levels: Physical Environment, Salary, Job Security, Status, etc.
Then they proceed to higher levels. Recognition is actually the second highest motivator, and it certainly is a motivator for some. But Google is actually a good example of Hertzberg's highest motivator which is achievement: people are motivated by the work itself. Self-actualization.
Google let's their employees work on their own interesting side projects for 20% of their time. It's resulted in some of their best innovations. The employee is responsible for keeping the project up to date and Google owns it, obviously.
Google's employees get to pitch side projects and suggest them to management. IOW, they get to work on what interests them. They are motivated by the actual work. Real Google products started as side projects.
Why not? Is it any worse than trusting your data being in the datacenter? As long as you have good backups and a good disaster recovery plan, who cares where your data sits? As long as the company whose servers the data is sitting on have appropriate SLAs that say how the data and access to the data will be protected and to what extent, how, etc., is that any different from the SLA you have with your IT department?
Agreed. Corporations solely exist to make money. All business decisions of this type are based on maximizing profit. I realize that there are people out there who are going to try to justify this, but in the end if a key business decision decision is based on something other motive than profit, then that decision was a disservice to the company's shareholders and those that made the decision should be fired.
Right. But if you have the right Blackberry App, you charge $30, $50, $100, whatever. With the Apple Store you get to charge $0.99, right? That means it takes more than 30, 50, or 100 to make the same money as one sale of a Blackberry app, and now I have 30, 50, or 100 x more users to support for the same caah.
FSF members may not run MS OSes, but they do actively support building software to run under MS OSes, and will even accept patches to help their software run better on MS OSes.
While I agree with your post wholeheartedly, I do have one minor quibble: this statement is also true of Mac OS X, which is, after all, Unix.
WTF? He probably would have thought of bicycles with mounted headlights.
No. He thought about someone walking in the train while the train was moving. That's what started the whole chain of thought, at least according to Einstein's accounting of it.
A bicycle with mounted headlights isn't the same thing.
But it was the guy who invented the train that enabled the thinker to think.
All the world is connected. Einstein came up with this Relativity while thinking about a train. So the inventor of the train, the guys who built the train that Einstein thought about, the train's engineer, and all the people on the train all contributed to Einstein's original thought. Einstein's parents were responsible for his upbringing. Einstein's teachers influenced his thinking.
My point is that while the thinker came up with the thought, he did not do so alone. Isaac Newton noted about science that we stand on the shoulders of giants. That refers not just to previous thinkers, but to all of human experience.
Don't be so quick to dismiss things out of hand. A spatially-aware cube is and important building block of other things and is certainly a technological marvel to behold in and of itself.
What makes you say it's not about thinkers? Look at how technology has influenced great minds in the world. Einstein, for example, came up with the Theory of Relativity while thinking about a train. What if there had been no trains? Maybe Einstein would never have came up with his theories of General and Special Relativity and physics would be a lot less rich for it.
Food for thought: if you had a spacially-aware computer, what could you do with it? What applications can you come up with? What could you do with it from an infrastructure standpoint?
The mind needs these toys. Great thinkers often surround themselves with them.
Well, the whole story of Microsoft and piracy goes all the way back to its early, early days of BASIC on the MITS Altair. Bill Gates wrote his Open Letter to Hobbyists in 1976. The whole idea that software piracy is theft and indeed the entire concept of software piracy goes back to this letter.
Understand that before Bill Gates came along demanding money for Altair BASIC, in general, software was commonly and freely passed around. This is exactly what Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchey did with Unix and C starting around the early part of that same decade. Applications software was something you paid programmers to create for you in-house. Systems software came with the hardware. No one thought anything of passing software around. Bill Gates essentially single-handedly created the idea of retail software out of whole cloth.
So the anti-piracy stance is something that is and always has been part of the Microsoft ethos practically from day one. That's why I tend to doubt those who take Bill Gates quotes out of context and then turn around and say that Microsoft condones piracy. I don't think they do.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think he's missing the mobile point much at all. The iPhone is an iPod+phone+PDA, right? And so are a number of other smartphones. Anyway, most competitive smartphones in the U.S. have access to 3G wireless networks. That's more than fast enough to accommodate Internet radio on your device. 3G wireless works just fine in the car. And if you want to play it through your car radio, most conventional car stereos these days have an input jack for an MP3 player -- which will work fine for the iPhone and other smartphones.
Someone else pointed out GNU screen, which dates back to 1987. That might count, but it's not graphical.
You're right. I did a little digging and Sun OS 4 was released in 1988. One year too late. The oldest virtual Window Manager I can think of is TWM, which was also first released in 1988.
*sigh*
You could get a door to run Grolier's Encyclopaedia on your BBS? I had no idea. That's cool.
Sadly, no, it does not. At least not much. Only about half of households in America even have a computer, and fewer have broadband access. The Internet only increases transparency if citizens are vigilant and pay attention to what's going on in Washington and in their state legislatures.
Unfortunately, Joe Sixpack, when he can be expected turn his attention from his beer, his sports (Nascar, football, hockey, maybe basketball if Joe lives in an urban area), golf and/or bowling (depends on whether he's upper middle or lower middle class), usually it's only about once every four years. And that's only if American Idol isn't good this season.
DESQview on the 386 did full-blown multitasking, not just task switching. Godsend when running a BBS because it meant, given enough RAM, you could run multiple BBS nodes and leave a window open for DOS, etc.
None of those had multiple workspaces. They all supported multiple applications running in a single workspace.
Neither DesqView/X nor BeOS predate 1987. But, I would definitely think SunView, which ran on Solaris 4 in the 1980s would count.
That was funny as hell? I see your point?
Well, Unix time is the number of seconds since the epoch, 1970-01-01 00:00:00. Like most people here, I figure you have a computer sitting in front of you, probably a calculator applet and at least one programming language installed, right?
So why are you asking us? ;)
Me, too. Just don't tell my wife!
(Just kidding, sweetheart! ;)
I don't think good PR matters as much as people think it does. Many companies with lots of really bad PR succeed anyway: Microsoft, WalMart, McDonald's, AOL, Comcast, etc. It's more about how that bad PR is handled along with the dynamics of the marketplace. People will buy things from companies they love to hate.
I don't know if it's so much a psychological "self-actualization" thing as much as it's just simply doing what you like to do. I've done tons of programming (and indeed, got into it in the first place) simply because it was interesting and I liked doing it.
Mmmmm...you're kinda saying the same thing. Self-actualization is the drive to realize one's full potential. That's why people write programs or author books or climb mountains.
Maslow and Hertzberg had similar ideas. Herzberg's theory was actually a two factor theory and Maslow's hierarchy was a little more fleshed out, but Hertzberg's two factor theory fit neatly into Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Since Maslow and Hertzberg were more or less contemporaries (Hertzberg 1923-2000 and Maslow 1908-1970), it's likely that either Maslow's hierarchy directly influenced Hertzberg's two-factor theory. Either way, they are really just two different ways to express the same idea.
I'm going to reply to this post backwards if you don't mind.
What motivates people is recognition.
That's one of the things. A guy named Frederick Hertzberg suggested that employees are motivated by a hierarchy of needs.
They start at the very low levels: Physical Environment, Salary, Job Security, Status, etc.
Then they proceed to higher levels. Recognition is actually the second highest motivator, and it certainly is a motivator for some. But Google is actually a good example of Hertzberg's highest motivator which is achievement: people are motivated by the work itself. Self-actualization.
Google let's their employees work on their own interesting side projects for 20% of their time. It's resulted in some of their best innovations. The employee is responsible for keeping the project up to date and Google owns it, obviously.
Google's employees get to pitch side projects and suggest them to management. IOW, they get to work on what interests them. They are motivated by the actual work. Real Google products started as side projects.
Do you trust your data being up in the "cloud"?
Why not? Is it any worse than trusting your data being in the datacenter? As long as you have good backups and a good disaster recovery plan, who cares where your data sits? As long as the company whose servers the data is sitting on have appropriate SLAs that say how the data and access to the data will be protected and to what extent, how, etc., is that any different from the SLA you have with your IT department?
Agreed. Corporations solely exist to make money. All business decisions of this type are based on maximizing profit. I realize that there are people out there who are going to try to justify this, but in the end if a key business decision decision is based on something other motive than profit, then that decision was a disservice to the company's shareholders and those that made the decision should be fired.
s/caah/cash
Right. But if you have the right Blackberry App, you charge $30, $50, $100, whatever. With the Apple Store you get to charge $0.99, right? That means it takes more than 30, 50, or 100 to make the same money as one sale of a Blackberry app, and now I have 30, 50, or 100 x more users to support for the same caah.
FSF members may not run MS OSes, but they do actively support building software to run under MS OSes, and will even accept patches to help their software run better on MS OSes.
While I agree with your post wholeheartedly, I do have one minor quibble: this statement is also true of Mac OS X, which is, after all, Unix.
WTF? He probably would have thought of bicycles with mounted headlights.
No. He thought about someone walking in the train while the train was moving. That's what started the whole chain of thought, at least according to Einstein's accounting of it.
A bicycle with mounted headlights isn't the same thing.
But it was the guy who invented the train that enabled the thinker to think.
All the world is connected. Einstein came up with this Relativity while thinking about a train. So the inventor of the train, the guys who built the train that Einstein thought about, the train's engineer, and all the people on the train all contributed to Einstein's original thought. Einstein's parents were responsible for his upbringing. Einstein's teachers influenced his thinking.
My point is that while the thinker came up with the thought, he did not do so alone. Isaac Newton noted about science that we stand on the shoulders of giants. That refers not just to previous thinkers, but to all of human experience.
Don't be so quick to dismiss things out of hand. A spatially-aware cube is and important building block of other things and is certainly a technological marvel to behold in and of itself.
What makes you say it's not about thinkers? Look at how technology has influenced great minds in the world. Einstein, for example, came up with the Theory of Relativity while thinking about a train. What if there had been no trains? Maybe Einstein would never have came up with his theories of General and Special Relativity and physics would be a lot less rich for it.
Food for thought: if you had a spacially-aware computer, what could you do with it? What applications can you come up with? What could you do with it from an infrastructure standpoint?
The mind needs these toys. Great thinkers often surround themselves with them.
I'll take a triple venti FUDaccino with extra FUD please!
Well, the whole story of Microsoft and piracy goes all the way back to its early, early days of BASIC on the MITS Altair. Bill Gates wrote his Open Letter to Hobbyists in 1976. The whole idea that software piracy is theft and indeed the entire concept of software piracy goes back to this letter.
Understand that before Bill Gates came along demanding money for Altair BASIC, in general, software was commonly and freely passed around. This is exactly what Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchey did with Unix and C starting around the early part of that same decade. Applications software was something you paid programmers to create for you in-house. Systems software came with the hardware. No one thought anything of passing software around. Bill Gates essentially single-handedly created the idea of retail software out of whole cloth.
So the anti-piracy stance is something that is and always has been part of the Microsoft ethos practically from day one. That's why I tend to doubt those who take Bill Gates quotes out of context and then turn around and say that Microsoft condones piracy. I don't think they do.