You'll also remember that IBM's army of lawyers won that fight, too. Suing Intel might not actually yield any benefit, since the real monopoly issue is Windows, which no longer supports anything except Intel procs.
However, in processors, x86 takes a backseat to ARM in embedded devices, and in high-end systems, itanium is hardly taking over the world (alas). An activist court might make Intel lay off some of the behind-the-scenes promos with pc manufacturers, so that intel-compatible chips are viewed more price competitively. However, since a look at the PC market for the past 10 years would lead you to conclude that AMD was running strong for a while when the Athlons came out, and again with the Opteron, but they have lost on the technical front, then there isn't much ground to go after Intel. Intel, despite the prevailing opinion here, has smart people working for it, who have come up with a smart architecture which finally made it into the pipeline and replaced the PIV,and is currently going great guns. AMD needs something new and compelling on the technical front, and the ability to market it.
Slideshows, maybe. Just imagine trying to edit some footnote-heavy document with multiple changes marked on a device the sizes of a phone, with a little stylus. Unless Microsoft has either (1) a direct neural interface, so you can see the document, or (2) thinks the entire world is going to adopt Word Cuneiform edition, then they're smoking a worse grade than normal.
Someone needs to hold an intervention in Redmond. Repeat after me, "not everything, and this includes phones and toasters, needs to run Office". "People do not salivate over the next time they get to fire up Office". "The people that do are probably all sitting within three feet of your desk, Steve".
You didn't work with middle-aged professors, who would tell you that the last computer they trusted was an IBM 1610 with Drum Memory. They had figured out where everything they needed was once, and weren't going to do it again.
Personally, I liked the Win95 interface, especially in its NT 4.0 incarnation. It was no OS/2, of course, but for Windows it was a great leap forward.
The Mac marketshare is small because you have to buy the machine from Apple. Since OS-X, they've been gaining market share, because people really don't like anonymous biege boxes with interfaces that look like they came from Govt-Surplus. Microsoft is concerning itself with something resembling style, as otherwise they wake up one morning and discover that people have split into two camps; those running Aqua, willing to pay the MacTax and live with His Steveness's approved designs, and those willing to buy not objectionable-looking machines from HP and Dell, which run the soothing earth-tones of Ubuntu on the desktop. Before anyone yells, "games!", there are dedicated little boxes, priced like a MacMini and down, which run those, and connect to the large TV in the den. These often also offer things like HD-DVD, so the PC as appliance era marches on, many functions now done by the all-in-one PC are done by dedicated appliances, and MSFT becomes a piece of business-school case history.
One of their problems really is that their current CEO is a former home-products salesman, and not a techie. He can't imagine people moving beyond dishwashing liquid or toilet paper, as long as he changes the packaging every now and then to say "new and improved". Hence the reactive moves in operating systems, and the somewhat random consumer products. He just can't see beyond Windows, while his customers really don't want to run Windows, they want to run their apps, which may or may not require Windows.
As for your desktop still looking like your Win98 one, that's understandable. People who started with Windows a few years earlier than you went to great trouble to turn it back to the Win3.1 look, because that's what they were familiar with. Newcomers, especially those who are putting their PC in less cubiclely environments, tend to want it to blend better with the decor, and become less obtrusive.
This week's WSJ talks about how Coke is doing amazing business with its new Coke Zero, because it tastes more like Real Coke than the current Diet version. MSFT might do something similar, where VistaHomeXXX acquires a more XPish look and feel, but is still brand-new Vista where the customer can't see and complain.
To quote an IBMer I know, "Sometimes you have to drag the customer, kicking and screaming, into the future". If Microsoft hadn't done that periodically in the past, you'd still be running Wordstar and Lotus 123 on a green-screen DOS machine, or MacWrite on a digital toaster.
It's a strange problem; generally better hardware is adopted, even before people need what it offers, but better software is resisted for as long as absolutely possible. I knew colleagues who had top of the line Thinkpads a couple of years back, and then came to get my help making sure their copy of WordPerfect 5.1 and Quattro still ran right under XP, or the senior researcher with the Xeon-based Linux box, large flat-panel display, set to 80x24 text mode to make the world's biggest VT102. Some of that was simply seeing without eyestrain, of course, but some was he saw no reason for modern debuggers, graphical tools, etc, and just wanted one huge display for VI. (note, he didn't even make use of the multiple-windows to have several huge VT102s, just one).
Ask them to transfer their employees to my local branch. I've spent too much time on the phone trying to track down where bills sent during busy times of the year went.
Then you got a bargain with this one. He may be cutting the red tape on polluting industries, but he's also adding massive (expensive) federal bureacracies run by authoritarian control-freaks. I keep hoping this is like a soap-opera where one morning he wakes up and holds a press conference to announce, "Oh right, I was supposed to get the Govt off everyone's back, not just a few select companies my colleagues have interests in". Billions of waste drifts across his desk for 6 years, and the only thing he vetoes is federal funding of stem cell research not involving the beta ones from before he took office.
They're moving away from letting people into the program based upon their previous programming experience, which is different from moving the entire program.
On a second note, this is not a bad idea, as you've probably noticed that a good deal of software out there, while written by what appear to be otherwise skillful people, is virtually unusuable. Undocumented, hostile interface, brittle, difficult to modify/extend/repair, and otherwise apparently written by sociopaths on a caffeine hangover. What they're trying to overcome is a culture that has grown around a field that keeps people who are interested in the material, but not in the sociopathy, out.
You'll also notice the article points out that they're emphasizing the applications that computing is integral to, rather than computing for its own sake. Once again, there is a population, talented, but differently (or when talking about CSci programs, at all) socialized, who wish to do things using computing, and who don't wish to to spend their time on Linux-distro p*ng contests. This actually bodes well for many fields in which computing is applied, as we may be able to get better communication between (for example) chemists and comp-scis, yielding applications that allow us to do our work more efficiently, while giving an intellectual challenge and sense of accomplishments to the compscis, i.e. they built something and it's being used.
This attitude that everything is being dumbed-down to allow women in is the same one you hear in physics, medicine, or similar traditionally all-male fields, when what's really being requested is that a bunch of prima-donna alpha-males (and beta-males with delusions of alphacity) are being asked to grow personalities and interact a little more humanely with their colleagues who just want to do their work, and not compete for the gold-plated sphincter award. And yes, I have met women who compete in those fields under the old rules, and you guys aren't happy when you find out what a pair of brass sharp elbows look like from the other side.
You were trying to hack it with little laproscopic watchmaker tools, weren't you? You need to get the ones used for hacking furniture if you want to be effective.
It's depressing how if you don't have the obnoxious geek genes (the birth-control personality famed amongst hackers and violinists), that the personality traits that get you marked as "boring" at 20 makes you "stable and reliable" post-30, by which point you're too tired to take advantage of the change.
A modern, refined, version of the old flashbulb gag. Classic press-camera bulbs had standard screw-in bases like a normal lightbulb, but were filled with magnesium ribbon. So, you just go into someone's room/office (such as your sleeping roomie), unscrew the conventional bulbs, and put one of those suckers in. They wake up, flip the light switch, and it looks like a nuke went off in the room, after which it's mercifully dark so you can make your get-away. Someone should combine these two pranks, then report back.
Note: one of you. I'm older, married, and when married you discover that practical jokes on the roomie have different consequences than when in college.
Notice that the Swiss take seriously the "Well Regulated Militia" concept, not the frontier, "Have Gun, Will Travel". They do have a rather high rate of firearms-enhanced suicide.
The usual candidate is Variola mite, to which you may be seriously able to add GM-corn which is producing BT (bees do collect and eat pollen as well as nectar), excessive agrichemical usage, as well as Suburbanites, who plant flower-free ChemLawned monocultures which give the bees little to feed on and much to be poisoned with. It's also possible that the filler that the bees are fed isn't metabolized as well, or otherwise weakens them and makes them more succeptable to all of the above.
There are probably other pathogens imported through globalization (like the Elm blight or Japanese beetle) which the european honeybees aren't resistant to, which will lead to some inconvenience as other pollinators move back into the open niche. This presumes, of course, that pesticide-besotted morons don't poison them first as well.
Slightly hopeful case in point; when I was growing up the bio-textbook example of adaptation was how some small moth was required to fertilize yucca, and without said desert moth, they wouldn't reproduce. People planted yucca in places (southern Michigan, NJ) that it doesn't belong, and apparently some other pollinator saw an opportunity, as I have seen new ones apparently sprouted from seed in the wild, sopme distance from the domestic plantings. This doesn't mean that the new pollinators are as efficient, and since they might include studly africanized "killer" bees, not as benign either, but we're probably not looking at total collapse.
When you see headlines like this involving radio-emissions as the cause of everything wrong in the world (as if the percent difference over natural field isn't trivial), you should require the alleged researcher to check one of two boxes, "I am a technophobic idiot who wants everyone to live in an unheated mud-hut like Gaia demands", or "I absolutely despise our over-connected, non-introspective, obnoxious cell-phone culture, and want a reason to make it go away".
That depends on how many sales they lose to customers selecting the cheaper "good enough" version, the delays in purchasing by the legions of the confused, and the internal costs of accounting for and tracking the plethora of barely differentiated products.
It's the US Government we're talking about. The approved OS solution will probably be Prime-OS or something whacked-out supplied by Lockheed-Martin, with all apps coded in ADA-95, or else. If Hollywood starts throwing money around, it'll be MacOS 9, the last version they thought they understood.
The primary "Defect" here is that number of different Vista versions are being decided by a former toilet paper salesman , rather than by any sane engineering rationale. There ought to be no more than three; "Client", "Server", "Really Big Server", ala NT 4.0. Cut the consumer-confusing price "optimization", and clone that feature from MacOS (or their own past) as well.
In rant mode, one could argue that they ought to charge you more if you run without virtualization from a more secure operating system, because you're going to have more problems. I'd love to see a Vista install instruction sheet that begins with, "have a competent admin install and secure Solaris-10 + VMWare on your laptop..."
You're kind of thinking of Chandler, which could grow into an OpenSource Notes. IBM still makes real money with Notes, so they're not going to Open-Source it, but they will happily sell you an installation and a consultant in a blue suit.
Notes vs. Exchange is kind of one of those VI vs Emacs things; binary opinions only, and users are all willing to carry a sharpened Pike to defend their choice. What we really need is the email equivalent of the introduction of gunpowder to make this argument irrelevant.
When I think Jimmy Stewart, I'm thinking of some Air-Force Rah-Rah movie he did, with swelling soundtracks and bright orange sunsets with bombers in the front. Harry Morgan (Col. Potter to those of us of a certain age) was his mechanic, and the plot revolved partly around telling his subordinate who had been re-drafted that losing his business to the greater glory of US military superiority was a necessary sacrifice. There were a couple of scenes, shot in great earnestness, which were later reshot for much less earnest use by Stanley Kubrick for "Dr. Strangelove".
If you have better films by him to recommend, I'd be curious, but I associate Jimmy Stewart with 1950s, earnest, propaganda flicks.
Allow the NSA to deputize the USMC to respond to break-ins. That will be one script-kiddie with a story to tell the next day at school. (or at his 45 year class reunion when he finally gets released). Both of those organizations are generally considered highly competent in their area of expertise. (electronic security and blowing things up, respectively)
Depressingly, though I'm likely to never see one again, my technical bookshelf at work has the Grey, Hardback, guide to VAX Assembler carefully placed with the algorithm references. Nice to know I'm not the only technical nostalgist out here.
Their priority is tasteful world domination. Your Apple TV connected to your Apple Cinema Display, which links seamlessly to your .Mac account holding your iWeb page created on the desktop Mac wirelessly linked to all the rest through Airport. You're still thinking in terms of individually wrapped boxes, each standing in its own category. OS-X sells Macs, and integrates the rest of the Apple Digital Lifestyle. As such, it's a vital component, but increasingly a tightly-integrated part of the whole. When you buy a dog, you don't get the Snout from store 1, Tail from Store 2, and Personality from Store 3; you get an integrated package. (We leave as an exercise for the reader what a Microsoft Dog would look like)
In a couple of years, you'll be lucky if when you buy more than one of these components that someone in a black turtleneck doesn't show up at your house and redecorate you to Cupertino-Standard.
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You'll also remember that IBM's army of lawyers won that fight, too. Suing Intel might not actually yield any benefit, since the real monopoly issue is Windows, which no longer supports anything except Intel procs.
However, in processors, x86 takes a backseat to ARM in embedded devices, and in high-end systems, itanium is hardly taking over the world (alas). An activist court might make Intel lay off some of the behind-the-scenes promos with pc manufacturers, so that intel-compatible chips are viewed more price competitively. However, since a look at the PC market for the past 10 years would lead you to conclude that AMD was running strong for a while when the Athlons came out, and again with the Opteron, but they have lost on the technical front, then there isn't much ground to go after Intel. Intel, despite the prevailing opinion here, has smart people working for it, who have come up with a smart architecture which finally made it into the pipeline and replaced the PIV,and is currently going great guns. AMD needs something new and compelling on the technical front, and the ability to market it.
Slideshows, maybe. Just imagine trying to edit some footnote-heavy document with multiple changes marked on a device the sizes of a phone, with a little stylus. Unless Microsoft has either (1) a direct neural interface, so you can see the document, or (2) thinks the entire world is going to adopt Word Cuneiform edition, then they're smoking a worse grade than normal.
Someone needs to hold an intervention in Redmond. Repeat after me, "not everything, and this includes phones and toasters, needs to run Office". "People do not salivate over the next time they get to fire up Office". "The people that do are probably all sitting within three feet of your desk, Steve".
You didn't work with middle-aged professors, who would tell you that the last computer they trusted was an IBM 1610 with Drum Memory. They had figured out where everything they needed was once, and weren't going to do it again.
Personally, I liked the Win95 interface, especially in its NT 4.0 incarnation. It was no OS/2, of course, but for Windows it was a great leap forward.
>>>>It's rather embarassing when your competitor's two year old product is more popular than your brand new product.
Actually, your competitor's five-year ahead product. You forgot to factor in the Space-Time Continuum Shift caused by Job's Reality Distortion Field.
The Mac marketshare is small because you have to buy the machine from Apple. Since OS-X, they've been gaining market share, because people really don't like anonymous biege boxes with interfaces that look like they came from Govt-Surplus. Microsoft is concerning itself with something resembling style, as otherwise they wake up one morning and discover that people have split into two camps; those running Aqua, willing to pay the MacTax and live with His Steveness's approved designs, and those willing to buy not objectionable-looking machines from HP and Dell, which run the soothing earth-tones of Ubuntu on the desktop. Before anyone yells, "games!", there are dedicated little boxes, priced like a MacMini and down, which run those, and connect to the large TV in the den. These often also offer things like HD-DVD, so the PC as appliance era marches on, many functions now done by the all-in-one PC are done by dedicated appliances, and MSFT becomes a piece of business-school case history.
One of their problems really is that their current CEO is a former home-products salesman, and not a techie. He can't imagine people moving beyond dishwashing liquid or toilet paper, as long as he changes the packaging every now and then to say "new and improved". Hence the reactive moves in operating systems, and the somewhat random consumer products. He just can't see beyond Windows, while his customers really don't want to run Windows, they want to run their apps, which may or may not require Windows.
As for your desktop still looking like your Win98 one, that's understandable. People who started with Windows a few years earlier than you went to great trouble to turn it back to the Win3.1 look, because that's what they were familiar with. Newcomers, especially those who are putting their PC in less cubiclely environments, tend to want it to blend better with the decor, and become less obtrusive.
This week's WSJ talks about how Coke is doing amazing business with its new Coke Zero, because it tastes more like Real Coke than the current Diet version. MSFT might do something similar, where VistaHomeXXX acquires a more XPish look and feel, but is still brand-new Vista where the customer can't see and complain.
To quote an IBMer I know, "Sometimes you have to drag the customer, kicking and screaming, into the future". If Microsoft hadn't done that periodically in the past, you'd still be running Wordstar and Lotus 123 on a green-screen DOS machine, or MacWrite on a digital toaster.
It's a strange problem; generally better hardware is adopted, even before people need what it offers, but better software is resisted for as long as absolutely possible. I knew colleagues who had top of the line Thinkpads a couple of years back, and then came to get my help making sure their copy of WordPerfect 5.1 and Quattro still ran right under XP, or the senior researcher with the Xeon-based Linux box, large flat-panel display, set to 80x24 text mode to make the world's biggest VT102. Some of that was simply seeing without eyestrain, of course, but some was he saw no reason for modern debuggers, graphical tools, etc, and just wanted one huge display for VI. (note, he didn't even make use of the multiple-windows to have several huge VT102s, just one).
Ask them to transfer their employees to my local branch. I've spent too much time on the phone trying to track down where bills sent during busy times of the year went.
How far do you trust your local PO to correctly transmit packets (mail) under load? Peace of mind is worth something.
Then you got a bargain with this one. He may be cutting the red tape on polluting industries, but he's also adding massive (expensive) federal bureacracies run by authoritarian control-freaks. I keep hoping this is like a soap-opera where one morning he wakes up and holds a press conference to announce, "Oh right, I was supposed to get the Govt off everyone's back, not just a few select companies my colleagues have interests in". Billions of waste drifts across his desk for 6 years, and the only thing he vetoes is federal funding of stem cell research not involving the beta ones from before he took office.
...
They're moving away from letting people into the program based upon their previous programming experience, which is different from moving the entire program.
On a second note, this is not a bad idea, as you've probably noticed that a good deal of software out there, while written by what appear to be otherwise skillful people, is virtually unusuable. Undocumented, hostile interface, brittle, difficult to modify/extend/repair, and otherwise apparently written by sociopaths on a caffeine hangover. What they're trying to overcome is a culture that has grown around a field that keeps people who are interested in the material, but not in the sociopathy, out.
You'll also notice the article points out that they're emphasizing the applications that computing is integral to, rather than computing for its own sake. Once again, there is a population, talented, but differently (or when talking about CSci programs, at all) socialized, who wish to do things using computing, and who don't wish to to spend their time on Linux-distro p*ng contests. This actually bodes well for many fields in which computing is applied, as we may be able to get better communication between (for example) chemists and comp-scis, yielding applications that allow us to do our work more efficiently, while giving an intellectual challenge and sense of accomplishments to the compscis, i.e. they built something and it's being used.
This attitude that everything is being dumbed-down to allow women in is the same one you hear in physics, medicine, or similar traditionally all-male fields, when what's really being requested is that a bunch of prima-donna alpha-males (and beta-males with delusions of alphacity) are being asked to grow personalities and interact a little more humanely with their colleagues who just want to do their work, and not compete for the gold-plated sphincter award. And yes, I have met women who compete in those fields under the old rules, and you guys aren't happy when you find out what a pair of brass sharp elbows look like from the other side.
You were trying to hack it with little laproscopic watchmaker tools, weren't you? You need to get the ones used for hacking furniture if you want to be effective.
It's depressing how if you don't have the obnoxious geek genes (the birth-control personality famed amongst hackers and violinists), that the personality traits that get you marked as "boring" at 20 makes you "stable and reliable" post-30, by which point you're too tired to take advantage of the change.
A modern, refined, version of the old flashbulb gag. Classic press-camera bulbs had standard screw-in bases like a normal lightbulb, but were filled with magnesium ribbon. So, you just go into someone's room/office (such as your sleeping roomie), unscrew the conventional bulbs, and put one of those suckers in. They wake up, flip the light switch, and it looks like a nuke went off in the room, after which it's mercifully dark so you can make your get-away. Someone should combine these two pranks, then report back.
Note: one of you. I'm older, married, and when married you discover that practical jokes on the roomie have different consequences than when in college.
Notice that the Swiss take seriously the "Well Regulated Militia" concept, not the frontier, "Have Gun, Will Travel". They do have a rather high rate of firearms-enhanced suicide.
You're right, my bad. I'd better check which one the doctor vaccinated me against.
The usual candidate is Variola mite, to which you may be seriously able to add GM-corn which is producing BT (bees do collect and eat pollen as well as nectar), excessive agrichemical usage, as well as Suburbanites, who plant flower-free ChemLawned monocultures which give the bees little to feed on and much to be poisoned with. It's also possible that the filler that the bees are fed isn't metabolized as well, or otherwise weakens them and makes them more succeptable to all of the above.
There are probably other pathogens imported through globalization (like the Elm blight or Japanese beetle) which the european honeybees aren't resistant to, which will lead to some inconvenience as other pollinators move back into the open niche. This presumes, of course, that pesticide-besotted morons don't poison them first as well.
Slightly hopeful case in point; when I was growing up the bio-textbook example of adaptation was how some small moth was required to fertilize yucca, and without said desert moth, they wouldn't reproduce. People planted yucca in places (southern Michigan, NJ) that it doesn't belong, and apparently some other pollinator saw an opportunity, as I have seen new ones apparently sprouted from seed in the wild, sopme distance from the domestic plantings. This doesn't mean that the new pollinators are as efficient, and since they might include studly africanized "killer" bees, not as benign either, but we're probably not looking at total collapse.
When you see headlines like this involving radio-emissions as the cause of everything wrong in the world (as if the percent difference over natural field isn't trivial), you should require the alleged researcher to check one of two boxes, "I am a technophobic idiot who wants everyone to live in an unheated mud-hut like Gaia demands", or "I absolutely despise our over-connected, non-introspective, obnoxious cell-phone culture, and want a reason to make it go away".
That depends on how many sales they lose to customers selecting the cheaper "good enough" version, the delays in purchasing by the legions of the confused, and the internal costs of accounting for and tracking the plethora of barely differentiated products.
It's the US Government we're talking about. The approved OS solution will probably be Prime-OS or something whacked-out supplied by Lockheed-Martin, with all apps coded in ADA-95, or else. If Hollywood starts throwing money around, it'll be MacOS 9, the last version they thought they understood.
The primary "Defect" here is that number of different Vista versions are being decided by a former toilet paper salesman , rather than by any sane engineering rationale. There ought to be no more than three; "Client", "Server", "Really Big Server", ala NT 4.0. Cut the consumer-confusing price "optimization", and clone that feature from MacOS (or their own past) as well.
In rant mode, one could argue that they ought to charge you more if you run without virtualization from a more secure operating system, because you're going to have more problems. I'd love to see a Vista install instruction sheet that begins with, "have a competent admin install and secure Solaris-10 + VMWare on your laptop..."
You're kind of thinking of Chandler, which could grow into an OpenSource Notes. IBM still makes real money with Notes, so they're not going to Open-Source it, but they will happily sell you an installation and a consultant in a blue suit.
Notes vs. Exchange is kind of one of those VI vs Emacs things; binary opinions only, and users are all willing to carry a sharpened Pike to defend their choice. What we really need is the email equivalent of the introduction of gunpowder to make this argument irrelevant.
I've always more envisioned putting a cattle prod to their gums, but horses for courses.
When I think Jimmy Stewart, I'm thinking of some Air-Force Rah-Rah movie he did, with swelling soundtracks and bright orange sunsets with bombers in the front. Harry Morgan (Col. Potter to those of us of a certain age) was his mechanic, and the plot revolved partly around telling his subordinate who had been re-drafted that losing his business to the greater glory of US military superiority was a necessary sacrifice. There were a couple of scenes, shot in great earnestness, which were later reshot for much less earnest use by Stanley Kubrick for "Dr. Strangelove".
If you have better films by him to recommend, I'd be curious, but I associate Jimmy Stewart with 1950s, earnest, propaganda flicks.
Allow the NSA to deputize the USMC to respond to break-ins. That will be one script-kiddie with a story to tell the next day at school. (or at his 45 year class reunion when he finally gets released). Both of those organizations are generally considered highly competent in their area of expertise. (electronic security and blowing things up, respectively)
Depressingly, though I'm likely to never see one again, my technical bookshelf at work has the Grey, Hardback, guide to VAX Assembler carefully placed with the algorithm references. Nice to know I'm not the only technical nostalgist out here.
Their priority is tasteful world domination. Your Apple TV connected to your Apple Cinema Display, which links seamlessly to your .Mac account holding your iWeb page created on the desktop Mac wirelessly linked to all the rest through Airport. You're still thinking in terms of individually wrapped boxes, each standing in its own category. OS-X sells Macs, and integrates the rest of the Apple Digital Lifestyle. As such, it's a vital component, but increasingly a tightly-integrated part of the whole. When you buy a dog, you don't get the Snout from store 1, Tail from Store 2, and Personality from Store 3; you get an integrated package. (We leave as an exercise for the reader what a Microsoft Dog would look like)
In a couple of years, you'll be lucky if when you buy more than one of these components that someone in a black turtleneck doesn't show up at your house and redecorate you to Cupertino-Standard.