You're being very kind by saying WebM is "less effective" compared to H.264. I'd put it closer to "why in the hell would I want crummy looking compression unless I use at least twice the data rate?" This from someone who's livelihood partially comes from putting compressed streams on the Internet. WebM isn't good enough and just got lapped again.
China has just voted against North Korea probably for the first time. How angry are the North Korean leaders I wonder? How long before North Korea starts biting the hand that feeds it? If China thought through the likely outcome of what the North Korean behavior is, they'd probably take the DPRK out themselves.
I just looked up some sources on artillery and the DPRK has lots of artillery, most of which can't reach Seoul. They apparently have 17 guns that can, however, and those can be quickly located and silenced before too much damage is done to Seoul. All they have to do is fire one round from each gun and we'll have return fire on the way before their shell hits anything. It's likely that the South Koreans have figured on intercepting projectiles from these guns. The U.S. has had field portable radar systems since the 1960s designed to calculate the source of mortar fire for this purpose. I can imagine it's more sophisticated now.
The DPRK million man army (and 8 million reservists) would likely come pouring over the DMZ in an old fashioned charge and get chewed to ribbons before they finished the 40km trek to Seoul through the rugged mountainous areas. There are a bunch of mountain passes to defend but they can forget about making it through the passes or the mountains. The ROK army has thought of that and they've got some nasty surprises ready to go.
I'm sure the DPRK has got missile systems to deliver plenty of fire power to Seoul, so that would be the bigger worry. If I were a leader of the South, I'd have a line of anti kinetic weapons systems aimed northward. They already know where it's coming from.
I'd say a DPRK attack would create more psychological impact than physical damage to Seoul, much like the V1 and V2 rockets of WWII. Most everything coming over the DMZ would get toasted. Once the DPRK shoots that wad, they're essentially undefended. Then what?
I see WAAAYYYYY more ads for Android phones than iPhones. Even the contents of the ads are very different. Apple ads show people using the device (more or less). Android ads usually show a bunch of futuristic imaginary bullshit. Really - I've never had to strap myself into a chair with lasers firing into my veins to make a playlist on my Apple device. You don't have to do that with Android either, but somehow they've identified some really gullible people who respond to that kind of marketing.
Apple did innovate but they've stagnated and the shiny (as you put it) is rubbing off. Innovation isn't "invention", it's more like putting things together in a way nobody has seen before. Sure, there were mockups or half baked attempts at a new phone form factor, but when Steve Jobs pulled that first iPhone out of his pocket in January of 2007, all you heard for months was the sound of mobile phone carrier executives shitting themselves. Before that moment, Android was busily copying the Blackberry form factor. It took years to hone the iPhone so Jobs could pull a working device out of his pocket as witnessed by how long it took Android to start over and catch up, even given a device to copy from. The innovation was actually shipping the device everyone else was supposing was possible - some day. Now pretty much everyone is using that specific type of device. I love the way people say that what Apple did was "obvious" now. They're probably the same people who predicted the iPhone to be a complete failure.
The iPad was a little different. The Android camp jumped all over that immediately and came out with admittedly crudely inferior embarrassments. They're much better now and even worth considering (if I was to consider such a device). Still, the old meme of "HP had tablets back in 2000" makes me laugh. I had one of those. It was a laptop with a swiveling screen, no battery life, chunky, clunky and slow. The innovation of the iPad was to change the form factor of existing things to make it workable. There are even people who insist that the iPad was copied from Star Trek. I wonder if they knew Star Trek was futuristic imaginary bullshit?
Competition is a good thing, I agree, and I don't like patent law here in the States. It's stupid and restrictive. I still think Apple's competitors should come up with their own ideas rather than making counterfeit iPhones. These are crazy times, but the only major company I see that's innovating and NOT copying Apple verbatim is Microsoft. They're doing what competitors should do, namely come up with something they think is different and better. I'm not seeing much of that from the other camps.
Funny - reminds me of my kid when he was a 9 year old. I made a comment to him about not having computers when I was a kid and he said "why not? were people too stupid to make a computer back then?" I got a little huffy with him and told him to go out in the back yard and dig around in the dirt, find all the minerals and elements it takes to make a computer and bring me back a working computer because that's what we had to start with. He went out in the middle of the yard, stood there, looked around for about two minutes, came back in and basically said, "oh, I get it".
The multi-hundred dollar software is usually reserved for desktop workstations as everything doesn't translate down to a handheld device, so the developers can throw away a lot of support expectations. In the video business, that means you can discard directly attached storage through SCSI/SATA/SAS or Fiber SAN, multiple GbE or 10GbE ports, multiple DVI monitors, AES audio I/O... things you won't find on a handheld device. The interface, within the capabilities of the device, will for the most part translate down. Avid video editing software (now called Pinnacle Studio) for iPad is $12.99. It's no Media Composer, but it's not $2,500 either (current list price). Back in the day, Media Composer with equivalent functionality/frustration as Pinnacle Studio on iPad would cost $80,000. We've come a long way.
I found some data points at 24 and 48 hours after the initial release of iOS6 and another after a week. First, a broad statement which seems a little like speculation:
Ummm... the Muslims were swinging their swords all through the Med and got halfway across Spain, which is what triggered the Crusades. The Crusades had a stated goal of restoring Christian access to Holy sites shut down by Muslims all the way back to Jerusalem. All these sites were Holy for Christians, Muslims and Jews since they all come from the same Abrahamic religious roots.
The Christians had their Crusades, alright, but it wasn't just "hey, let's go kick some Muslim ass". The Muslim invasions which were sweeping through the Mediterranean and lower Europe for about five hundred years, spreading Islam by the sword, triggered the Crusades to beat them back. They got as far as [what is now] Spain before any significant counter force was applied. So, they started it.
Ok, when Apple ditched their USERS, Active Storage started up. Sort of a nuance. You know Alex? Smart guy. How about Emjay? One of the coolest support techs around.
Not to appear combative, but in which category was Apple the #3 supplier? That IDC document got pretty granular and I'm having a hard time finding some math that correlates that. Like in 2007, the "Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Terabytes Shipped by Supplier" chart says Apple shipped 67,500.3 TB while HP shipped almost 20x more at 1,299,213.7 TB. Between them was EMC (834,670.6 TB), IBM (834,670.6 TB), Dell (588,671.1 TB), NetApp (488,719.2 TB), Sun (268,570.3 TB) and Hitachi (225,565.8 TB). Apple shipped less than one-third of Hitachi. The Xserve RAID was discontinued in 2008, so 2007 was probably the best year for shipments.
Maybe it's the timeframe. I sort of remember in the early days of the Xserve RAID, they sold quite a few because it was about half the price per TB of pretty much everything else.
The storage/server people who were ditched by Apple started their own company - Active Storage. I've got 600TB of it running in my shop so far and will add another 300-600TB next year. The NASCAR video facility in Charlotte, NC has many Petabytes of it and there are lots of other takers in the video post production world. They've tuned the storage to be friendly to continuous streams of 100GB single files, applications where I've seen EMC, HDS and DDS fall over on.
To the claim of being the #3 storage vendor, I found an IDC competitive analysis from a DDN wen site. They weren't #3, more like between #6-ish and #18-ish depending on which fragment of the industry got measured, but they did win out over some surprising competition. I'm not too upset about the Xserve RAID, but the Xserve was a pretty nice box - like a giant Swiss watch compared to the sloppy assemblies of the competitors.
The hardware in Apple stuff doesn't trap anything that doesn't have RIAA/MPAA shackles on it (DRM), and a lot of it doesn't anymore. Just take your files and play them on anything that plays standards compliant MPEG4/H.264/AAC media.
It's really hard to have an intelligent exchange just about anywhere, and you're becoming a poster child as to why.
Ever hear of "embrace, extend, extinguish"? Microsoft built in browser incompatibilities with an object tag for ActiveX to make sure Netscape and Opera performed poorly (Opera sued for that), MSN.com even served a different CSS to Opera visitors to make it look broken, for a while, you saw a blank screen on msn.com unless your user-agent string said MSIE, they extended and broke CSS favoring their own -ms- property extensions, they broke Java in browsers with J/Direct, they created Java development tools that stripped away all the cross platform intentions of Java (Sun sued for that), they planned to extinguish the HTML standard with their own free browser to "cut off Netscape's air supply" (Paul Maritz revealed this in a meeting with Intel), they extended and broke Kerberos to lock out other platforms from Windows 2000, they embraced and extended the AOL IM protocol to make AOL's own IM software stop working, they made a mess out of ISO-9660 with their Joliet extension (so you only see the 8.3 names in other platforms), they told Intel to withdraw VDI and threatened PC makers if they implemented it (look up Steven McGeady's testimony), Bill Gates told Andy Grove to shut down the Intel Architecture Labs driving CPU level Internet technologies without Microsoft's permission, Intel had to kill NSP, kill Java support, stop support for Netscape - all part of their illegal restrictive licensing agreements with OEMs to favor Microsoft and harm everything else, they signed up OEMs for a rebate on installing Windows on PCs in exchange for a fee they had to pay for any PC they sold without Windows, effectively making a PC without bundling Windows more expensive for the OEM to make (anti-competitive and illegal), Microsoft threatened Apple unless they abandoned the ability of QuickTime to play multimedia content on computers (they refused and Microsoft sabotaged QuickTime's functionality on Windows with misleading error messages and technical changes or bugs so that QuickTime software sometimes didn't work properly on Windows), they stuffed an ISO standards body to make OOXML (a compendium of Microsoft proprietary undefined digital glop) a "standard" which only they controlled (instead of the truly available ODF standard), Microsoft had fully developed FUD as a marketing strategy (announcing nonexistent products to head off something a competitor actually made or claiming competitive software will crash Windows), If you’ve bought a new PC lately, it probably came equipped with something called “Secure Boot” (UEFI), a feature which prevents you from running anything but Windows on the PC...
These people aren't very nice, relying on a mix of brilliant marketing, threats against OEMs (Microsoft thought they owned any PC right down to the metal), failings of competitors, vaporware and fraudulent illusions. Sure, Netscape had problems and so did Microsoft. They earned their success with their best office productivity software, but their biggest success came from bending everyone over and fucking them, including the customers. Good competition could have been here a lot sooner.
Jesus fucking Christ yourself, buddy. Apple, Google and Facebook was disruptive to Microsoft and only had a choice to face an uphill battle against it or partner with it. There were innovators and practically every one of them had to battle Microsoft in one way or another. Hell, Microsoft even viewed newspapers and television as competition. I'm an IT guy too with the difference that I also saw the strengths of things NOT Microsoft.
It's pretty well documented that Microsoft leveraged three things because of their popularity; (1) strong armed business partners into doing whatever Microsoft wanted under threat of getting thrown off the gravy train, (2) tied their software together so, to the end user, it appeared everything would fall down if anything non-Microsoft was introduced to the system and (3) was actively replicating functions other innovators were coming up with and releasing it en-masse to be Windows only, suppressing many innovators, large and small.
At some point, the "popularity" of Microsoft shifted from having desirable products to "people" being fearful of exiting their ecosystem. By "people", I mean people who didn't know any different. Microsoft products were getting very shoddy and expensive, and they didn't care. I can't tell you how many eye rolls I've spent on board meetings where mentioning something that didn't come from Microsoft sent them scurrying in terror. They all thought email was Outlooking, the Internet was the Big Blue E and the only possible computer to buy was anything Windows because they needed to print Word documents. The real innovations were happening elsewhere and it took 10 years before the frustration of being stuck in Microsoft world came to the surface.
Oh.. that 5 year span when NOTHING improved on IE? That piece of time between the death of Netscape and the advent of tabbed browsing (and RSS feeds) on Firefox? The lack of innovation certainly WAS Microsoft's fault. Not only that, it was their plan - eliminate everything else so they didn't have to spend money on competition.
People used IE in the early 2000s because it came with the computer. Microsoft had won the desktop wars and with it, everything else. The era of being cross platform was gone. Everyone clicked the Big Blue E to get on the Internet and nobody was going to PAY for Netscape. IE was the logical choice as most people thought Microsoft was the only source for computer software. Under threat of never seeing your precious Word and Excel documents again, they were right.
The ability to stifle innovation (including their own) came from two things; Microsoft Server Extensions and tolerance to really bad code, both of which were a good thing in a way. The big problem with Netscape at the time is they were trying really hard to be W3C standards compliant and, except for the addition of Java to Netscape, things moved very slowly. Microsoft grew impatient with the W3C and leapt out way ahead with Server Extensions, those little addons which made the browser much more like a client-server relationship instead of the stateless relationship originally intended with browsers. Front Page made it easy to activate complex tasks by moving the heavy lifting to the server and calling it with a simple trigger in HTML.
Of course, Server Extensions brought many new capabilities never before seen on a browser, something the W3C couldn't keep up with and it was never Microsoft's intention to standardize them (as in go through a standards committee to define and publish the technology). The problem was that all these sites were "IE Only". Microsoft was VERY close to ensuring anyone not using a totally Microsoft technology chain on the Internet saw a blank screen. In other words, they nearly owned the Internet.
IE's tolerance for bad coding was good for IE users as it rendered pages with broken code pretty well. Microsoft handed out a lot of free copies of Front Page to create this broken code which would render with unexpected results on other browsers. Front Page (and plain bad hand coding) made anything other than IE look illiterate. That's the price of sitting around on your hands. Microsoft was there to take it all away in a long series of brilliant chess moves... and then everything went thud for a while.
It actually functioned rather well when it was novel, but nothing moved in terms of real technical advances unless Microsoft was threatened by some shred of competition which was quickly squashed. The next software patch would allow IE to do the same thing for free but for Windows only. Otherwise, Microsoft pretty much sat on their asses and took their sweet old time releasing anything new. Innovation was dead as long as nobody dared try to use anything else.
I'll try that one - the ruling forced Microsoft to survive on the merits of their products rather than strong arm tactics to force business partners to submit to their wishes. No innovation allowed that would circumvent their leverage of Office into every other aspect of business computing.
There was lots of innovation going on and lots of excitement about what could be done with a microcomputer. Microsoft uniquely understood the power of cross platform capabilities (that's exactly where they started - porting software to the myriad platforms out there). When they suddenly realized they had created their own platform, everything shifted to protecting it. They would "partner" with countless software companies like the old days, modify the product to be Microsoft only, release it to the masses stripping away any cross platform capability and made the original technology irrelevant.
That was the death of any threats against Microsoft for several years.
Interesting. I've got a friend with a Droid who uses the turn by turn for driving and it'll tell her to "turn around" "turn left" or do something else bizarre while sitting at a traffic light. She's ready to throw it out the window.
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You're being very kind by saying WebM is "less effective" compared to H.264. I'd put it closer to "why in the hell would I want crummy looking compression unless I use at least twice the data rate?" This from someone who's livelihood partially comes from putting compressed streams on the Internet. WebM isn't good enough and just got lapped again.
China has just voted against North Korea probably for the first time. How angry are the North Korean leaders I wonder? How long before North Korea starts biting the hand that feeds it? If China thought through the likely outcome of what the North Korean behavior is, they'd probably take the DPRK out themselves.
I just looked up some sources on artillery and the DPRK has lots of artillery, most of which can't reach Seoul. They apparently have 17 guns that can, however, and those can be quickly located and silenced before too much damage is done to Seoul. All they have to do is fire one round from each gun and we'll have return fire on the way before their shell hits anything. It's likely that the South Koreans have figured on intercepting projectiles from these guns. The U.S. has had field portable radar systems since the 1960s designed to calculate the source of mortar fire for this purpose. I can imagine it's more sophisticated now.
The DPRK million man army (and 8 million reservists) would likely come pouring over the DMZ in an old fashioned charge and get chewed to ribbons before they finished the 40km trek to Seoul through the rugged mountainous areas. There are a bunch of mountain passes to defend but they can forget about making it through the passes or the mountains. The ROK army has thought of that and they've got some nasty surprises ready to go.
I'm sure the DPRK has got missile systems to deliver plenty of fire power to Seoul, so that would be the bigger worry. If I were a leader of the South, I'd have a line of anti kinetic weapons systems aimed northward. They already know where it's coming from.
I'd say a DPRK attack would create more psychological impact than physical damage to Seoul, much like the V1 and V2 rockets of WWII. Most everything coming over the DMZ would get toasted. Once the DPRK shoots that wad, they're essentially undefended. Then what?
If China ever thinks through how this nonsense will likely play out, they may take the DPRK out themselves.
Yeah but the PCs ship with Windows which cuts the value in half.
After that post, your sig is pure irony.
I see WAAAYYYYY more ads for Android phones than iPhones. Even the contents of the ads are very different. Apple ads show people using the device (more or less). Android ads usually show a bunch of futuristic imaginary bullshit. Really - I've never had to strap myself into a chair with lasers firing into my veins to make a playlist on my Apple device. You don't have to do that with Android either, but somehow they've identified some really gullible people who respond to that kind of marketing.
Apple did innovate but they've stagnated and the shiny (as you put it) is rubbing off. Innovation isn't "invention", it's more like putting things together in a way nobody has seen before. Sure, there were mockups or half baked attempts at a new phone form factor, but when Steve Jobs pulled that first iPhone out of his pocket in January of 2007, all you heard for months was the sound of mobile phone carrier executives shitting themselves. Before that moment, Android was busily copying the Blackberry form factor. It took years to hone the iPhone so Jobs could pull a working device out of his pocket as witnessed by how long it took Android to start over and catch up, even given a device to copy from. The innovation was actually shipping the device everyone else was supposing was possible - some day. Now pretty much everyone is using that specific type of device. I love the way people say that what Apple did was "obvious" now. They're probably the same people who predicted the iPhone to be a complete failure.
The iPad was a little different. The Android camp jumped all over that immediately and came out with admittedly crudely inferior embarrassments. They're much better now and even worth considering (if I was to consider such a device). Still, the old meme of "HP had tablets back in 2000" makes me laugh. I had one of those. It was a laptop with a swiveling screen, no battery life, chunky, clunky and slow. The innovation of the iPad was to change the form factor of existing things to make it workable. There are even people who insist that the iPad was copied from Star Trek. I wonder if they knew Star Trek was futuristic imaginary bullshit?
Competition is a good thing, I agree, and I don't like patent law here in the States. It's stupid and restrictive. I still think Apple's competitors should come up with their own ideas rather than making counterfeit iPhones. These are crazy times, but the only major company I see that's innovating and NOT copying Apple verbatim is Microsoft. They're doing what competitors should do, namely come up with something they think is different and better. I'm not seeing much of that from the other camps.
Funny - reminds me of my kid when he was a 9 year old. I made a comment to him about not having computers when I was a kid and he said "why not? were people too stupid to make a computer back then?" I got a little huffy with him and told him to go out in the back yard and dig around in the dirt, find all the minerals and elements it takes to make a computer and bring me back a working computer because that's what we had to start with. He went out in the middle of the yard, stood there, looked around for about two minutes, came back in and basically said, "oh, I get it".
The multi-hundred dollar software is usually reserved for desktop workstations as everything doesn't translate down to a handheld device, so the developers can throw away a lot of support expectations. In the video business, that means you can discard directly attached storage through SCSI/SATA/SAS or Fiber SAN, multiple GbE or 10GbE ports, multiple DVI monitors, AES audio I/O... things you won't find on a handheld device. The interface, within the capabilities of the device, will for the most part translate down. Avid video editing software (now called Pinnacle Studio) for iPad is $12.99. It's no Media Composer, but it's not $2,500 either (current list price). Back in the day, Media Composer with equivalent functionality/frustration as Pinnacle Studio on iPad would cost $80,000. We've come a long way.
I found some data points at 24 and 48 hours after the initial release of iOS6 and another after a week. First, a broad statement which seems a little like speculation:
"..within the first day, iOS 6 peaked at more than 15 percent of Web traffic to its mobile ad network.."
Then something that seems more like data that isn't going away:
iOS 6 on 25% of iOS Devices 48 Hours After Public Release
And finally:
iOS 6 Adoption At Just Over One Week: 60% For iPhone And 41% For iPad"
...crickets...
Ha! I always kept a jug full of liquid labeled "dihydrogen monoxide cleaning fluid" in my fridge. Nobody ever touched it but they sure asked about it.
Ummm... the Muslims were swinging their swords all through the Med and got halfway across Spain, which is what triggered the Crusades. The Crusades had a stated goal of restoring Christian access to Holy sites shut down by Muslims all the way back to Jerusalem. All these sites were Holy for Christians, Muslims and Jews since they all come from the same Abrahamic religious roots.
The Christians had their Crusades, alright, but it wasn't just "hey, let's go kick some Muslim ass". The Muslim invasions which were sweeping through the Mediterranean and lower Europe for about five hundred years, spreading Islam by the sword, triggered the Crusades to beat them back. They got as far as [what is now] Spain before any significant counter force was applied. So, they started it.
Ok, when Apple ditched their USERS, Active Storage started up. Sort of a nuance. You know Alex? Smart guy. How about Emjay? One of the coolest support techs around.
Not to appear combative, but in which category was Apple the #3 supplier? That IDC document got pretty granular and I'm having a hard time finding some math that correlates that. Like in 2007, the "Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Terabytes Shipped by Supplier" chart says Apple shipped 67,500.3 TB while HP shipped almost 20x more at 1,299,213.7 TB. Between them was EMC (834,670.6 TB), IBM (834,670.6 TB), Dell (588,671.1 TB), NetApp (488,719.2 TB), Sun (268,570.3 TB) and Hitachi (225,565.8 TB). Apple shipped less than one-third of Hitachi. The Xserve RAID was discontinued in 2008, so 2007 was probably the best year for shipments.
Maybe it's the timeframe. I sort of remember in the early days of the Xserve RAID, they sold quite a few because it was about half the price per TB of pretty much everything else.
The storage/server people who were ditched by Apple started their own company - Active Storage. I've got 600TB of it running in my shop so far and will add another 300-600TB next year. The NASCAR video facility in Charlotte, NC has many Petabytes of it and there are lots of other takers in the video post production world. They've tuned the storage to be friendly to continuous streams of 100GB single files, applications where I've seen EMC, HDS and DDS fall over on.
To the claim of being the #3 storage vendor, I found an IDC competitive analysis from a DDN wen site. They weren't #3, more like between #6-ish and #18-ish depending on which fragment of the industry got measured, but they did win out over some surprising competition. I'm not too upset about the Xserve RAID, but the Xserve was a pretty nice box - like a giant Swiss watch compared to the sloppy assemblies of the competitors.
The hardware in Apple stuff doesn't trap anything that doesn't have RIAA/MPAA shackles on it (DRM), and a lot of it doesn't anymore. Just take your files and play them on anything that plays standards compliant MPEG4/H.264/AAC media.
It's really hard to have an intelligent exchange just about anywhere, and you're becoming a poster child as to why.
Ever hear of "embrace, extend, extinguish"? Microsoft built in browser incompatibilities with an object tag for ActiveX to make sure Netscape and Opera performed poorly (Opera sued for that), MSN.com even served a different CSS to Opera visitors to make it look broken, for a while, you saw a blank screen on msn.com unless your user-agent string said MSIE, they extended and broke CSS favoring their own -ms- property extensions, they broke Java in browsers with J/Direct, they created Java development tools that stripped away all the cross platform intentions of Java (Sun sued for that), they planned to extinguish the HTML standard with their own free browser to "cut off Netscape's air supply" (Paul Maritz revealed this in a meeting with Intel), they extended and broke Kerberos to lock out other platforms from Windows 2000, they embraced and extended the AOL IM protocol to make AOL's own IM software stop working, they made a mess out of ISO-9660 with their Joliet extension (so you only see the 8.3 names in other platforms), they told Intel to withdraw VDI and threatened PC makers if they implemented it (look up Steven McGeady's testimony), Bill Gates told Andy Grove to shut down the Intel Architecture Labs driving CPU level Internet technologies without Microsoft's permission, Intel had to kill NSP, kill Java support, stop support for Netscape - all part of their illegal restrictive licensing agreements with OEMs to favor Microsoft and harm everything else, they signed up OEMs for a rebate on installing Windows on PCs in exchange for a fee they had to pay for any PC they sold without Windows, effectively making a PC without bundling Windows more expensive for the OEM to make (anti-competitive and illegal), Microsoft threatened Apple unless they abandoned the ability of QuickTime to play multimedia content on computers (they refused and Microsoft sabotaged QuickTime's functionality on Windows with misleading error messages and technical changes or bugs so that QuickTime software sometimes didn't work properly on Windows), they stuffed an ISO standards body to make OOXML (a compendium of Microsoft proprietary undefined digital glop) a "standard" which only they controlled (instead of the truly available ODF standard), Microsoft had fully developed FUD as a marketing strategy (announcing nonexistent products to head off something a competitor actually made or claiming competitive software will crash Windows), If you’ve bought a new PC lately, it probably came equipped with something called “Secure Boot” (UEFI), a feature which prevents you from running anything but Windows on the PC...
These people aren't very nice, relying on a mix of brilliant marketing, threats against OEMs (Microsoft thought they owned any PC right down to the metal), failings of competitors, vaporware and fraudulent illusions. Sure, Netscape had problems and so did Microsoft. They earned their success with their best office productivity software, but their biggest success came from bending everyone over and fucking them, including the customers. Good competition could have been here a lot sooner.
Jesus fucking Christ yourself, buddy. Apple, Google and Facebook was disruptive to Microsoft and only had a choice to face an uphill battle against it or partner with it. There were innovators and practically every one of them had to battle Microsoft in one way or another. Hell, Microsoft even viewed newspapers and television as competition. I'm an IT guy too with the difference that I also saw the strengths of things NOT Microsoft.
It's pretty well documented that Microsoft leveraged three things because of their popularity; (1) strong armed business partners into doing whatever Microsoft wanted under threat of getting thrown off the gravy train, (2) tied their software together so, to the end user, it appeared everything would fall down if anything non-Microsoft was introduced to the system and (3) was actively replicating functions other innovators were coming up with and releasing it en-masse to be Windows only, suppressing many innovators, large and small.
At some point, the "popularity" of Microsoft shifted from having desirable products to "people" being fearful of exiting their ecosystem. By "people", I mean people who didn't know any different. Microsoft products were getting very shoddy and expensive, and they didn't care. I can't tell you how many eye rolls I've spent on board meetings where mentioning something that didn't come from Microsoft sent them scurrying in terror. They all thought email was Outlooking, the Internet was the Big Blue E and the only possible computer to buy was anything Windows because they needed to print Word documents. The real innovations were happening elsewhere and it took 10 years before the frustration of being stuck in Microsoft world came to the surface.
Ha... I said "surface".
Exactly how did MS set the web back 5 years?
Oh.. that 5 year span when NOTHING improved on IE? That piece of time between the death of Netscape and the advent of tabbed browsing (and RSS feeds) on Firefox? The lack of innovation certainly WAS Microsoft's fault. Not only that, it was their plan - eliminate everything else so they didn't have to spend money on competition.
People used IE in the early 2000s because it came with the computer. Microsoft had won the desktop wars and with it, everything else. The era of being cross platform was gone. Everyone clicked the Big Blue E to get on the Internet and nobody was going to PAY for Netscape. IE was the logical choice as most people thought Microsoft was the only source for computer software. Under threat of never seeing your precious Word and Excel documents again, they were right.
The ability to stifle innovation (including their own) came from two things; Microsoft Server Extensions and tolerance to really bad code, both of which were a good thing in a way. The big problem with Netscape at the time is they were trying really hard to be W3C standards compliant and, except for the addition of Java to Netscape, things moved very slowly. Microsoft grew impatient with the W3C and leapt out way ahead with Server Extensions, those little addons which made the browser much more like a client-server relationship instead of the stateless relationship originally intended with browsers. Front Page made it easy to activate complex tasks by moving the heavy lifting to the server and calling it with a simple trigger in HTML.
Of course, Server Extensions brought many new capabilities never before seen on a browser, something the W3C couldn't keep up with and it was never Microsoft's intention to standardize them (as in go through a standards committee to define and publish the technology). The problem was that all these sites were "IE Only". Microsoft was VERY close to ensuring anyone not using a totally Microsoft technology chain on the Internet saw a blank screen. In other words, they nearly owned the Internet.
IE's tolerance for bad coding was good for IE users as it rendered pages with broken code pretty well. Microsoft handed out a lot of free copies of Front Page to create this broken code which would render with unexpected results on other browsers. Front Page (and plain bad hand coding) made anything other than IE look illiterate. That's the price of sitting around on your hands. Microsoft was there to take it all away in a long series of brilliant chess moves... and then everything went thud for a while.
It actually functioned rather well when it was novel, but nothing moved in terms of real technical advances unless Microsoft was threatened by some shred of competition which was quickly squashed. The next software patch would allow IE to do the same thing for free but for Windows only. Otherwise, Microsoft pretty much sat on their asses and took their sweet old time releasing anything new. Innovation was dead as long as nobody dared try to use anything else.
I'll try that one - the ruling forced Microsoft to survive on the merits of their products rather than strong arm tactics to force business partners to submit to their wishes. No innovation allowed that would circumvent their leverage of Office into every other aspect of business computing.
There was lots of innovation going on and lots of excitement about what could be done with a microcomputer. Microsoft uniquely understood the power of cross platform capabilities (that's exactly where they started - porting software to the myriad platforms out there). When they suddenly realized they had created their own platform, everything shifted to protecting it. They would "partner" with countless software companies like the old days, modify the product to be Microsoft only, release it to the masses stripping away any cross platform capability and made the original technology irrelevant.
That was the death of any threats against Microsoft for several years.
Hehe... You said "surface"
"China's state-run media, which dubbed the plane Air Force One..."
HEY, just a minute there...
China practically invented the category of Gov't spyware in electronics. Be careful what you say in front of your Chinese made toaster.
That's what I was thinking. Many of the posts are trying to tell me that I'm stupid because I just want something to work for a change.
Interesting. I've got a friend with a Droid who uses the turn by turn for driving and it'll tell her to "turn around" "turn left" or do something else bizarre while sitting at a traffic light. She's ready to throw it out the window.
They have their own version of AOL now.