Conceded that your post isn't really FUD -- I was using that for symmetry because I felt that you were unfairly calling other people's views FUD.
The rhetorical problem I really think you were doing was setting the hurdle for success very low and declaring victory. Vista probably does improve XP (again, I haven't touched it yet), and Microsoft's first-line operating system will continue to have massive market share, but after five years of hype, more was expected. Calling it a failure is premature, but treating it as a real success based on the your criteria of sales and technical improvement seems too forgiving. In at least two cases I dealt with, 95 and XP, ordinary windows users were actively wanting the OS upgrade and buying/asking for new hardware to get it. There is no such desire for Vista in my range of hearing, and a certain amount of putting it off, and not because of misinformation.
Your latest point about 'choice' highlights the part of your original post I disagreed with most. I only have real information in only two organizations: mine and my wife's. I allocate replacement PC's to a workgroup as I receive a budget, and nearly all expect to receive whatever the latest MS OS is, without even knowing what it's name is. (Do you realize how many XP users do not know there's a new version of windows called Vista out there?) When I tell them "It doesn't run [x]" where [x] is a mission-critical bit of software, they move back to XP. In my wife's company, PC's are received from on high with no user input, and they are using XP because they have worked out some very carefully controlled information protection/privacy protocols on XP and haven't figured out how to do it absolutely safely on Vista yet. In both cases, someone is choosing XP because of non-MS software compatibility issues, and these are valid choices that are very important to ongoing work, not based on FUD. All of those people will eventually be using Vista, as software is updated and PCs are replaced, and none of them will have put any real thought or choice into it. Two instances do not make a rule, but they're what I know. Writing off every sale? No, but a lot of them.
Nobody I know reads slashdot, none of them follow these arguments (and even here, everyone else has moved on and it's probably just you and me now:-)), and somewhere along the way in XP, the computer stopped getting in their way enough that they stopped paying attention. To make Vista an active, positive choice, you're giving the great masses of computer users more credit than I do.
Two problems in your "admiral" bit of anti-FUD FUD. I suspect that 'most everyone ragging on Vista also recognizes that a high percentage of PCs will be running Vista in a couple of years by shear inertia of Vista coming installed on replacement PCs. Comparing the percentage to XP's two years into the life of the OS may be interesting then.
Secondly, you cannot dismiss the ongoing popularity of XP as a FUD response. In my line of work, we still buy PCs with XP, but that does not imply we have even looked at Vista and evaluated its merits. We have an absolute requirement to run a certain family of software products, and the vendor has not even announced a timetable for Vista compatible versions at this point. I suspect my area of work is not unique in that.
Failure is relative. You point out that Vista is selling decently well and it has improvements on XP, and I won't dispute those points. Whether that is success depends on expectations. You defined the expectations as "technically and in terms of sales," but Microsoft was trying to sell a revolutionary advance.
Exactly. Even in this unfashionable sector of the galaxy, all of your weather forecast and climate predictions are done with models that see everything in SI units, including winds in meters per second. They are then converted to other units for the benefit of ape=descended life forms who still think that digital watches are a neat idea. (Sorry, an earlier post got me into HHGTTG mode.) What's particularly odd when you're looking at raw model output is to see precipitation rates also given in meters per second. (There are generally a lot of zeros after the decimal point.)
Unless you assume that Office for Mac and Office for Windows have no code in common, you cannot assume that the development cost is higher. Microsoft has, presumably, an absolute priority and mandate to make Office for Windows. The development cost for Mac is a marginal cost -- to port it and to make the more Mac-like user interface, not the entire development. While those costs are certainly significant, it's a very strange accounting to assume that the development costs are the same.
We (at a university) pay less than $50/seat (w/o media) for MS Office licenses. You probably have no idea what's being spent on the MS licences on your PCs, but it's probably far less than you think it is. We (in a university, not in a CS department) have no ideological OSS paradigm that says we need to teach our students OpenOffice, and we have a job-placement mandate that says they need to leave here with Word/Excel/PP as basic life skills, more on par with hygeine and proper attire than as real "job skills". As for the rest of it, we spend every nickel we can get on hardware and software that are specialized to the core area we teach, and that stuff is state-of-the-art. What we put in grad student offices is there via trickle down. That's a pretty common approach. I don't expect universities to be the early adapters of the Google Apps.
Maybe in a home computer store you were selling more cheaper ones. (By current standards, corrected for inflation, all these were extremely expensive.) I did a lot of temp jobs in banks during the immediate pre-IBM-PC era, and the only personal computers I ever saw were Apple II. They were usually controlled by ubergeek types (before the term was invented) when most people who had computer access had terminals to the IBM mainframes. These people had the knowledge that Visicalc would help them and the clout to get someone to pay for the computer, and the same logic about familiarity and price that led to rooms full of IBM-brand equipment would lead to buying Apple for PCs at that time. Just one person's sample, but I did work a lot of different locations over several summers.
You are correct for surfaces, reasonably thin atmospheric layers, pieces of clouds, and so on. You also get my point that the law can't be applied to a complicated, layered structure like our atmosphere, because the net result of all those small S-B blackbody and graybody fluxes from small layers does not necessarily lead to a net blackbody result when looking at earth from outside the planet. What is not easy for a nonspecialist to deduce from the original article (TFA in/.-speak) is that the 'lambda' being attacked is a sensitivity parameter based on whole-planetary considerations. The author of the article is asserting that you can throw away the detailed climate model and calculate lambda from Stefan-Boltzmann, and that is emphatically wrong. You can model it using very complicated radiative-convective models or you can estimate it from satellite data, but you can't pull it easily out of the blackbody equation.
The earth is far closer to a perfect blackbody than you might expect.
IAAClimatologist, and the earth-atmosphere-clouds system is not a surface and follows the Stefan-Boltzmann blackbody law quite poorly. That's why we have a greenhouse effect. Usually, we parameterize outgoing longwave flux in a way that the sensitivity to temperature is about half of what S-B predicts.
A reference to which I cannot provide a link without (c) violations:
Bintanja, R., 1996: The parameterization of shortwave and longwave radiative fluxes for use in zonally averaged climate models. J. Climate, 9, 439-454
If you look at the actual Bush/Kerry geography, particularly those done in purple shades, such as http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/, the idea that the coasts are all that liberal and that the interior is all right-wing breaks down pretty quickly.
It was more part of usenet and email - a text-only service for the part of the internet that was around before the web. True, it came and went in the early days of the web, but I always associated it with ascii text in pre-web applications like pine and trn.
Maybe we need to read what IBM might have done a little more carefully than SCO's lawyers have. The claim in that quote isn't that IBM got rid of big chunks of its codebase, but rather that it told its Linux programmers not to have or refer to the Unix source codes. I.e., if you're working on Linux, please don't look at the AIX version of what you're coding, and get it off your hard drive so you aren't tempted to look. That could have been a reasonable response to the original suit -- make sure that old Unix code doesn't leak into Linux accidentally (like the way George Harrison got the tune for My Sweet Lord). Also, even if all versions of AIX are under subpoena, it doesn't seem illegal to tell some of your employees to delete their personal reference copies, but that's a lawyer question.
Slashdot Mirror
Conceded that your post isn't really FUD -- I was using that for symmetry because I felt that you were unfairly calling other people's views FUD.
:-)), and somewhere along the way in XP, the computer stopped getting in their way enough that they stopped paying attention. To make Vista an active, positive choice, you're giving the great masses of computer users more credit than I do.
The rhetorical problem I really think you were doing was setting the hurdle for success very low and declaring victory. Vista probably does improve XP (again, I haven't touched it yet), and Microsoft's first-line operating system will continue to have massive market share, but after five years of hype, more was expected. Calling it a failure is premature, but treating it as a real success based on the your criteria of sales and technical improvement seems too forgiving. In at least two cases I dealt with, 95 and XP, ordinary windows users were actively wanting the OS upgrade and buying/asking for new hardware to get it. There is no such desire for Vista in my range of hearing, and a certain amount of putting it off, and not because of misinformation.
Your latest point about 'choice' highlights the part of your original post I disagreed with most. I only have real information in only two organizations: mine and my wife's. I allocate replacement PC's to a workgroup as I receive a budget, and nearly all expect to receive whatever the latest MS OS is, without even knowing what it's name is. (Do you realize how many XP users do not know there's a new version of windows called Vista out there?) When I tell them "It doesn't run [x]" where [x] is a mission-critical bit of software, they move back to XP. In my wife's company, PC's are received from on high with no user input, and they are using XP because they have worked out some very carefully controlled information protection/privacy protocols on XP and haven't figured out how to do it absolutely safely on Vista yet. In both cases, someone is choosing XP because of non-MS software compatibility issues, and these are valid choices that are very important to ongoing work, not based on FUD. All of those people will eventually be using Vista, as software is updated and PCs are replaced, and none of them will have put any real thought or choice into it. Two instances do not make a rule, but they're what I know. Writing off every sale? No, but a lot of them.
Nobody I know reads slashdot, none of them follow these arguments (and even here, everyone else has moved on and it's probably just you and me now
Two problems in your "admiral" bit of anti-FUD FUD. I suspect that 'most everyone ragging on Vista also recognizes that a high percentage of PCs will be running Vista in a couple of years by shear inertia of Vista coming installed on replacement PCs. Comparing the percentage to XP's two years into the life of the OS may be interesting then.
Secondly, you cannot dismiss the ongoing popularity of XP as a FUD response. In my line of work, we still buy PCs with XP, but that does not imply we have even looked at Vista and evaluated its merits. We have an absolute requirement to run a certain family of software products, and the vendor has not even announced a timetable for Vista compatible versions at this point. I suspect my area of work is not unique in that.
Failure is relative. You point out that Vista is selling decently well and it has improvements on XP, and I won't dispute those points. Whether that is success depends on expectations. You defined the expectations as "technically and in terms of sales," but Microsoft was trying to sell a revolutionary advance.
Exactly. Even in this unfashionable sector of the galaxy, all of your weather forecast and climate predictions are done with models that see everything in SI units, including winds in meters per second. They are then converted to other units for the benefit of ape=descended life forms who still think that digital watches are a neat idea. (Sorry, an earlier post got me into HHGTTG mode.) What's particularly odd when you're looking at raw model output is to see precipitation rates also given in meters per second. (There are generally a lot of zeros after the decimal point.)
Unless you assume that Office for Mac and Office for Windows have no code in common, you cannot assume that the development cost is higher. Microsoft has, presumably, an absolute priority and mandate to make Office for Windows. The development cost for Mac is a marginal cost -- to port it and to make the more Mac-like user interface, not the entire development. While those costs are certainly significant, it's a very strange accounting to assume that the development costs are the same.
We (at a university) pay less than $50/seat (w/o media) for MS Office licenses. You probably have no idea what's being spent on the MS licences on your PCs, but it's probably far less than you think it is. We (in a university, not in a CS department) have no ideological OSS paradigm that says we need to teach our students OpenOffice, and we have a job-placement mandate that says they need to leave here with Word/Excel/PP as basic life skills, more on par with hygeine and proper attire than as real "job skills". As for the rest of it, we spend every nickel we can get on hardware and software that are specialized to the core area we teach, and that stuff is state-of-the-art. What we put in grad student offices is there via trickle down. That's a pretty common approach. I don't expect universities to be the early adapters of the Google Apps.
Maybe in a home computer store you were selling more cheaper ones. (By current standards, corrected for inflation, all these were extremely expensive.) I did a lot of temp jobs in banks during the immediate pre-IBM-PC era, and the only personal computers I ever saw were Apple II. They were usually controlled by ubergeek types (before the term was invented) when most people who had computer access had terminals to the IBM mainframes. These people had the knowledge that Visicalc would help them and the clout to get someone to pay for the computer, and the same logic about familiarity and price that led to rooms full of IBM-brand equipment would lead to buying Apple for PCs at that time. Just one person's sample, but I did work a lot of different locations over several summers.
You are correct for surfaces, reasonably thin atmospheric layers, pieces of clouds, and so on. You also get my point that the law can't be applied to a complicated, layered structure like our atmosphere, because the net result of all those small S-B blackbody and graybody fluxes from small layers does not necessarily lead to a net blackbody result when looking at earth from outside the planet. What is not easy for a nonspecialist to deduce from the original article (TFA in /.-speak) is that the 'lambda' being attacked is a sensitivity parameter based on whole-planetary considerations. The author of the article is asserting that you can throw away the detailed climate model and calculate lambda from Stefan-Boltzmann, and that is emphatically wrong. You can model it using very complicated radiative-convective models or you can estimate it from satellite data, but you can't pull it easily out of the blackbody equation.
If you look at the actual Bush/Kerry geography, particularly those done in purple shades, such as http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/, the idea that the coasts are all that liberal and that the interior is all right-wing breaks down pretty quickly.
It was more part of usenet and email - a text-only service for the part of the internet that was around before the web. True, it came and went in the early days of the web, but I always associated it with ascii text in pre-web applications like pine and trn.
Maybe we need to read what IBM might have done a little more carefully than SCO's lawyers have. The claim in that quote isn't that IBM got rid of big chunks of its codebase, but rather that it told its Linux programmers not to have or refer to the Unix source codes. I.e., if you're working on Linux, please don't look at the AIX version of what you're coding, and get it off your hard drive so you aren't tempted to look. That could have been a reasonable response to the original suit -- make sure that old Unix code doesn't leak into Linux accidentally (like the way George Harrison got the tune for My Sweet Lord). Also, even if all versions of AIX are under subpoena, it doesn't seem illegal to tell some of your employees to delete their personal reference copies, but that's a lawyer question.