Ok, so what's the alternative? How should a smart person with big ideas but no money go about starting a company?
Reddit could have been rolled out with a $60/month dedicated machine contract. The amount of code to build the early version (or the current version for that matter) could have been built in a few nights.
Indeed, Reddit -- the only "success" story of Graham's that I've heard of -- is pretty much the antithesis of his model: It is exactly the sort of solution that any chump with a small amount of free time can easily build and roll out with the funds earned running a paper route, scaling up with revenue.
There is no grand capital investment for a site like that (or most sites for that matter). There was no long development period for something so enormously trivial.
In 2006 they were acquired by Wired, almost certainly making them millionaires.
Strange, don't you think, that no one has ever given solid numbers (or *any* numbers) when it comes to Reddit? Everyone grins and makes subtle commentary, but there's zero reason why these numbers would be confidential....unless they are embarrassing for Paul and crew. Instead we're left with Paul fans presuming that the Reddit crew are millionaires, despite one of them crashing out (after being forced on the other two), and the other two operating as corporate drones of Conde Naste.
This sort of comment comes up regarding every web application/internet hosted technology story -- the people who declare that because it doesn't work for them, or at least for dreamed up fringe scenarios, therefore it shouldn't exist.
Every solution isn't for everyone.
In essence you're the guy bitching and complaining because a Honda Civic can't pull his fifth wheel.
Unfortunately, the version of history taught to Canadians is heavily skewed and makes Canada into the center of the universe
Such as?
Apart from an overly-grand sense of importance in the two Great Wars (it seems reasonable that we should care about our own part), Canadian history is largely ignored in our own schools.
The more I think about it, the more I have to call you on your post -- I doubt there's a single country on the planet that has less historical self-interest than Canada.
I was left with the same bad taste in my mouth -- some half-stories that didn't even make a point with any punch, none of them actually correlating with the summary on Slashdot.
What the hell is the point of this Slashvertisement? I hope Taco got paid for this.
The biggest downside of S3 sleep is that about 1 out of every 200 recovers or thereabouts it completely fails to come back, thought that's probably a mainboard issue more than an OS or technology issue.
Oh, and a great little helper app if you use S3 is WakeUpOnStandBy. It allows you to configure a machine to "come alive" at scheduled times, even from an S3 sleep (apparently the BIOS supports configured wake-up times, and this app knows to tell it to wake up accordingly just as going to sleep). Very helpful little app -- I have my PC set to come alive in the morning when I know I'll be remoting in.
Oh, and rather than waking up on all network traffic, as the article recommends, it's far better to wake up on WakeOnLan packets. There are lots of resources out there for that.
The new Conservatives are like the US Republicans little brother
This is a private member's bill, and despite the fact that it came from a Conservative MP, the same sort of nonsense has come from Liberals and the NDP. Indeed, this is the sort of bill that usually comes from a Liberal (because they're all about talk and no action, and everyone with any brains knows this won't ever lead to action).
A little anti-gay marriage rhetoric, some Kyoto bashing, tax cuts for the wealthy, increased military spending and an increasing desire to use it.
I am disturbed by the ignorance of some of my fellow Canadians are.
The Liberals did NOTHING to achieve Kyoto targets, despite having a majority party for over a decade.
Nothing.
Being pragmatic about Kyoto, and actually talking about the reality of it is quite a bit different than "bashing" it. Personally I find such honesty a lot more acceptable than the rhetoric and lip service we'll-say-what-gets-us-voted Liberal policy.
Increased desire to use the military? You mean like how the conservatives sent us to Afghanistan? Oh, right, that was the Liberals. Oh, maybe it's that we're in a new, offensive capacity? Oh, wait, the Liberals sent us in as front-line special forces and head-exploding snipers.
Hrmm...now I'm confused.
And wait, don't I recall the Liberals preparing to go on a military spending spree to buy themselves out of the mess they created? Why yes, I do.
As for the "anti-gay marriage rhetoric" -- yeah, those damn Conservatives believe in a democracy, and allowing each riding to voice an opinion. Damn them! So they've banned gay marriage, right? Oh yeah, not even close.
How many people who work for "American" car companies drive "Japanese" cars?
Michael Dell isn't some random employee. And it would be very big news if a Ford executive drove a Toyota, or a Toyota executive drove a Ford. If it were the CEO, founder, and chairman...well there would be a shareholder revolt.
Of course the story isn't that he's using Gateway computers, so your analogy is irrelevant to begin with, but it is yet another indication that we live in a very different world, where people like Michael Dell no longer fear Microsoft.
The atmosphere is a complete 180 change from just a few years ago.
How about IE has functionality that your sacred cow doesn't?
Such as? What necessary piece of functionality does IE have that Mozilla (or Opera, or others) don't have?
The GP is absolutely correct most of the time: In the vast majority of cases there is no justifiable reason, and the only explanation is a lazy and/or dumb development team that couldn't be bothered to support another browser. Many of these projects were developed or began back when such a lazy choice wouldn't impede them much, but nowadays it can be deadly (if I encounter an IE-only site, I presume the operators are just grossly incompetent and go elsewhere).
Actually, Paul didn't restrict his comments to a particular industry
The entire context of Paul's commentary made it abundantly clear what industry he was speaking to.
nor did he make any claim that non-MS users were more innovative
Paul said that no one he meets run Windows...yet he obviously has access to the same statistics that the rest of us have, which indicate that over 90% of the general computing population runs Windows. Do you think Paul was just claiming that the stats are bogus, and most people are really running alternatives?
There are plenty of opportunities in the world to innovate beyond the computer industry
Paul, and thus my reply, was talking specifically about people in the information technology industry, creating solutions for and in this space. Thus your reply is asinine, and you're really just arguing with yourself.
I can't think of a single person I know (in the computing industry or otherwise) who use *any* web based applications instead of desktop ones. I think it's you who are delusional.
Well it sounds like you're just going to re-qualify what an "application" is eternally, forever making the idea that people don't use web applications true.
Here in the real world, however, corporations are using the web for time tracking, expense reporting, bug tracking, project management, information sharing, customer relations management, corporate reporting and dashboards, help systems, accounting systems, and that's just getting started. Home users have largely left fat-client mail clients, instead using online clients. They use online banking, online scheduling and calendaring, online photo management (sorry, but Flickr beats any tool I've used locally), and on, and on, and on, and on. Countless areas where we used to have special clients have completely disappeared.
Yet one day, way in the future, you'll be clutching whatever last "app" you have left on your PC, decrying that it's the only true app in the world.
I said past couple of years. C# came out 6 years ago, and if it wasn't for the fact that they have a captive audience, basically electro-shocking a resistant-to-change Visual Basic crowd, it would have been just another virtual machine/language.
You may not like Microsoft
Who said I didn't like Microsoft? I make 6-figures developer for, and evangelizing, Microsoft products. That doesn't skew my perspective, however.
There is also the matter of Microsoft Research
Whenever Microsoft innovation comes up, Microsoft Research inevitably gets mentioned. Yet what has that enormously funded division actually done? Some lame software that stitches images into a unusable little 3D canvas? A functional, but really unfunctional, language that's just another recreation of hundreds before?
Innovation isn't about what brand of computer you use any more that it's about what brand of telephone you use.
While I would argue the ridiculously weak comparison of a telephone and two entirely dissimilar, tens-of-million lines operating systems and platforms, ultimately it comes down to the preferences of the operator, and that will vary based on skill.
What sort of car do you think an F1 driver uses on normal roads? Do you think perhaps they might be a bit more discerning of the vehicles that they use, even if ultimately it is "just a tool" that gets them from point A) to point B).
Oh, and for those who felt some knee-jerk need to get defensive about this topic, let me say that I'm typing this reply in Firefox (kudos to me), albeit on Windows 2003. I am not an innovator, and my area is the staid, generally lagging the trend financial industry. Yet it doesn't offend me to know that other niches feature entirely dissimilar user patterns.
Innovative employees are NOT the people fiddling with the equipment. The innovation is in the company's product, not it's information infrastructure.
If your business is information technology, then the "equipment", as you so weakly refer to it, is a critical and vitally important part of the "product" and its creation. To argue otherwise implies that your role in this industry is bottom-feeder chair filler.
When they want to edit a photo, they do NOT think of web apps (and I laughed to see Graham link "Photoshop" to a kinda-neat-but-oh-so-limited web app that provides marginally less functionality than Paintbrush).
Editing a photo -- always the example given in favor of desktop applications. Yet remarkably, it is something that a vanishingly small percentage of the population actually does. At most, the general computing public uses features like automatic red-eye reduction or color correction -- both well implemented online -- but even that is pushing the boundaries of personal usage.
I'm not at all saying that the desktop is dead, but if you think that desktop apps are as strong as ever, and haven't been supplanted by web apps, you are in a state of incredible delusion.
They seem to be working for once in a coordinated way to dominate (truly, and not by default) the home market
Virtually everything you listed have been areas that Microsoft has been trying to infiltrate for years, to little success. Indeed, HP just stopped production of what was considered that leading Media Center PC, because no one cared for it. MSN Live is of course a laughable re-branding of a long failing web strategy.
Oh, please. Web-based software? C'mon. Ajax and "web-based" applications haven't gone anywhere, and they're not going to.
Presuming that you aren't 15 and with no historic context from which to compare, why don't you watch what friends and relatives actually do with their PCs these days. You might be surprised to find that the average user spends vastly more time in their browser than anywhere else.
Come on, 4% market share and you are surprised when a computer does not run OSX? The last number I saw was that Macs now counted for 6% of new PC sales. 6% is huge from a historical perspective, especially given the bulk of new PC purchases are businesses that usually lag the trend.
And I think his point was just that among innovators and edge pushers, Windows is rare -- would anyone really argue with that? While I don't think OS X owns that arena (Linux obviously being another major choice), I don't think you're going to find many installs of Vista.
While I disagree with some of Paul's points, ultimately I think he is absolutely right -- Microsoft's initiatives over the past couple of years have almost entirely been duds. No one really cares what Microsoft is doing, except when they know that it's going to be forced on them (Vista), which is remarkably different than how it has historically been. What do you know -- I just wrote about this.
The world is getting to be a much better place when Microsoft is freed to compete on actual merit, and not just one division hobbling another based upon the belief that they were their only real competition.
We could fix this by having something like "half maximize" I tried to implement exactly that in Windows -- a global windows interception handler that caught and handled maximize messages, with the intent of doing steps of maximization (e.g. 1/4 the screen if smaller than a quarter, 1/2, full).
For years I've been a fervent advocate of multiple monitors, largely because the limited pixel count on any given monitors means that users often maximize applications, so going between documentation and an app, or a helpful webpage and the IDE, etc, is usually one or the other.
Hence the advantage of dual monitors, allowing you to display one or several apps (or tool windows) on one, and the other apps on the other.
I'm reconsidering now, however, and pondering just getting a very high resolution 24" widescreen display, changing my usage to actually keeps windows as windows.
Really, these stores about various Microsoft talking heads ruminating about something or other are so bloody cheap. No one cares what Microsoft thinks, as their history of talk that vastly exceeds their reach has gotten tiring.
"Bob Blow, Microsoft's Executive VP of Random Blather, today surprized crowds by announcing that `we've been thinking of doing what everyone else is doing....only better! Infinity+1 better!'."
Dear Microsoft - your credibility is completely shot. Don't talk about anything because no one believes a word you say. DO.
But why are AJAX apps storing authentication in cookies? If you need to store authentication (User session id's etc), store them in a variable within the javascript.
Store then in javascript? Huh?
It is completely normal -- across the entire industry -- to store session identifiers in cookies. There is nothing special or AJAXy about that.
The PDF isn't full of anything revolutionary, and most are just common sense data security, but it is a great starting point for securing virtually any highly confidential data.
Far too many shops don't comply with the majority (or any) of the recommendations.
Slashdot Mirror
Reddit could have been rolled out with a $60/month dedicated machine contract. The amount of code to build the early version (or the current version for that matter) could have been built in a few nights.
Indeed, Reddit -- the only "success" story of Graham's that I've heard of -- is pretty much the antithesis of his model: It is exactly the sort of solution that any chump with a small amount of free time can easily build and roll out with the funds earned running a paper route, scaling up with revenue.
There is no grand capital investment for a site like that (or most sites for that matter). There was no long development period for something so enormously trivial.
Strange, don't you think, that no one has ever given solid numbers (or *any* numbers) when it comes to Reddit? Everyone grins and makes subtle commentary, but there's zero reason why these numbers would be confidential....unless they are embarrassing for Paul and crew. Instead we're left with Paul fans presuming that the Reddit crew are millionaires, despite one of them crashing out (after being forced on the other two), and the other two operating as corporate drones of Conde Naste.
This sort of comment comes up regarding every web application/internet hosted technology story -- the people who declare that because it doesn't work for them, or at least for dreamed up fringe scenarios, therefore it shouldn't exist.
Every solution isn't for everyone.
In essence you're the guy bitching and complaining because a Honda Civic can't pull his fifth wheel.
Such as?
Apart from an overly-grand sense of importance in the two Great Wars (it seems reasonable that we should care about our own part), Canadian history is largely ignored in our own schools.
The more I think about it, the more I have to call you on your post -- I doubt there's a single country on the planet that has less historical self-interest than Canada.
I was left with the same bad taste in my mouth -- some half-stories that didn't even make a point with any punch, none of them actually correlating with the summary on Slashdot.
What the hell is the point of this Slashvertisement? I hope Taco got paid for this.
I wrote about the power consumption of S1 versus S3 sleep, and as you mentioned dumppo.exe was the enabling-tool that let me take advantage of this great bit of functionality.
The biggest downside of S3 sleep is that about 1 out of every 200 recovers or thereabouts it completely fails to come back, thought that's probably a mainboard issue more than an OS or technology issue.
Oh, and a great little helper app if you use S3 is WakeUpOnStandBy. It allows you to configure a machine to "come alive" at scheduled times, even from an S3 sleep (apparently the BIOS supports configured wake-up times, and this app knows to tell it to wake up accordingly just as going to sleep). Very helpful little app -- I have my PC set to come alive in the morning when I know I'll be remoting in.
Oh, and rather than waking up on all network traffic, as the article recommends, it's far better to wake up on WakeOnLan packets. There are lots of resources out there for that.
This is a private member's bill, and despite the fact that it came from a Conservative MP, the same sort of nonsense has come from Liberals and the NDP. Indeed, this is the sort of bill that usually comes from a Liberal (because they're all about talk and no action, and everyone with any brains knows this won't ever lead to action).
I am disturbed by the ignorance of some of my fellow Canadians are.
The Liberals did NOTHING to achieve Kyoto targets, despite having a majority party for over a decade.
Nothing.
Being pragmatic about Kyoto, and actually talking about the reality of it is quite a bit different than "bashing" it. Personally I find such honesty a lot more acceptable than the rhetoric and lip service we'll-say-what-gets-us-voted Liberal policy.
Increased desire to use the military? You mean like how the conservatives sent us to Afghanistan? Oh, right, that was the Liberals. Oh, maybe it's that we're in a new, offensive capacity? Oh, wait, the Liberals sent us in as front-line special forces and head-exploding snipers.
Hrmm...now I'm confused.
And wait, don't I recall the Liberals preparing to go on a military spending spree to buy themselves out of the mess they created? Why yes, I do.
As for the "anti-gay marriage rhetoric" -- yeah, those damn Conservatives believe in a democracy, and allowing each riding to voice an opinion. Damn them! So they've banned gay marriage, right? Oh yeah, not even close.
Michael Dell isn't some random employee. And it would be very big news if a Ford executive drove a Toyota, or a Toyota executive drove a Ford. If it were the CEO, founder, and chairman...well there would be a shareholder revolt.
Of course the story isn't that he's using Gateway computers, so your analogy is irrelevant to begin with, but it is yet another indication that we live in a very different world, where people like Michael Dell no longer fear Microsoft.
The atmosphere is a complete 180 change from just a few years ago.
Such as? What necessary piece of functionality does IE have that Mozilla (or Opera, or others) don't have?
The GP is absolutely correct most of the time: In the vast majority of cases there is no justifiable reason, and the only explanation is a lazy and/or dumb development team that couldn't be bothered to support another browser. Many of these projects were developed or began back when such a lazy choice wouldn't impede them much, but nowadays it can be deadly (if I encounter an IE-only site, I presume the operators are just grossly incompetent and go elsewhere).
While Slashdot was a great news source on 9/11, it completely dropped the ball on this.
The entire context of Paul's commentary made it abundantly clear what industry he was speaking to.
Paul said that no one he meets run Windows...yet he obviously has access to the same statistics that the rest of us have, which indicate that over 90% of the general computing population runs Windows. Do you think Paul was just claiming that the stats are bogus, and most people are really running alternatives?
Paul, and thus my reply, was talking specifically about people in the information technology industry, creating solutions for and in this space. Thus your reply is asinine, and you're really just arguing with yourself.
Well it sounds like you're just going to re-qualify what an "application" is eternally, forever making the idea that people don't use web applications true.
Here in the real world, however, corporations are using the web for time tracking, expense reporting, bug tracking, project management, information sharing, customer relations management, corporate reporting and dashboards, help systems, accounting systems, and that's just getting started. Home users have largely left fat-client mail clients, instead using online clients. They use online banking, online scheduling and calendaring, online photo management (sorry, but Flickr beats any tool I've used locally), and on, and on, and on, and on. Countless areas where we used to have special clients have completely disappeared.
Yet one day, way in the future, you'll be clutching whatever last "app" you have left on your PC, decrying that it's the only true app in the world.
I said past couple of years. C# came out 6 years ago, and if it wasn't for the fact that they have a captive audience, basically electro-shocking a resistant-to-change Visual Basic crowd, it would have been just another virtual machine/language.
Who said I didn't like Microsoft? I make 6-figures developer for, and evangelizing, Microsoft products. That doesn't skew my perspective, however.
Whenever Microsoft innovation comes up, Microsoft Research inevitably gets mentioned. Yet what has that enormously funded division actually done? Some lame software that stitches images into a unusable little 3D canvas? A functional, but really unfunctional, language that's just another recreation of hundreds before?
While I would argue the ridiculously weak comparison of a telephone and two entirely dissimilar, tens-of-million lines operating systems and platforms, ultimately it comes down to the preferences of the operator, and that will vary based on skill.
What sort of car do you think an F1 driver uses on normal roads? Do you think perhaps they might be a bit more discerning of the vehicles that they use, even if ultimately it is "just a tool" that gets them from point A) to point B).
Oh, and for those who felt some knee-jerk need to get defensive about this topic, let me say that I'm typing this reply in Firefox (kudos to me), albeit on Windows 2003. I am not an innovator, and my area is the staid, generally lagging the trend financial industry. Yet it doesn't offend me to know that other niches feature entirely dissimilar user patterns.
If your business is information technology, then the "equipment", as you so weakly refer to it, is a critical and vitally important part of the "product" and its creation. To argue otherwise implies that your role in this industry is bottom-feeder chair filler.
Editing a photo -- always the example given in favor of desktop applications. Yet remarkably, it is something that a vanishingly small percentage of the population actually does. At most, the general computing public uses features like automatic red-eye reduction or color correction -- both well implemented online -- but even that is pushing the boundaries of personal usage.
I'm not at all saying that the desktop is dead, but if you think that desktop apps are as strong as ever, and haven't been supplanted by web apps, you are in a state of incredible delusion.
Virtually everything you listed have been areas that Microsoft has been trying to infiltrate for years, to little success. Indeed, HP just stopped production of what was considered that leading Media Center PC, because no one cared for it. MSN Live is of course a laughable re-branding of a long failing web strategy.
Presuming that you aren't 15 and with no historic context from which to compare, why don't you watch what friends and relatives actually do with their PCs these days. You might be surprised to find that the average user spends vastly more time in their browser than anywhere else.
Come on, 4% market share and you are surprised when a computer does not run OSX?
The last number I saw was that Macs now counted for 6% of new PC sales. 6% is huge from a historical perspective, especially given the bulk of new PC purchases are businesses that usually lag the trend.
And I think his point was just that among innovators and edge pushers, Windows is rare -- would anyone really argue with that? While I don't think OS X owns that arena (Linux obviously being another major choice), I don't think you're going to find many installs of Vista.
While I disagree with some of Paul's points, ultimately I think he is absolutely right -- Microsoft's initiatives over the past couple of years have almost entirely been duds. No one really cares what Microsoft is doing, except when they know that it's going to be forced on them (Vista), which is remarkably different than how it has historically been. What do you know -- I just wrote about this.
The world is getting to be a much better place when Microsoft is freed to compete on actual merit, and not just one division hobbling another based upon the belief that they were their only real competition.
We could fix this by having something like "half maximize"
I tried to implement exactly that in Windows -- a global windows interception handler that caught and handled maximize messages, with the intent of doing steps of maximization (e.g. 1/4 the screen if smaller than a quarter, 1/2, full).
For years I've been a fervent advocate of multiple monitors, largely because the limited pixel count on any given monitors means that users often maximize applications, so going between documentation and an app, or a helpful webpage and the IDE, etc, is usually one or the other.
Hence the advantage of dual monitors, allowing you to display one or several apps (or tool windows) on one, and the other apps on the other.
I'm reconsidering now, however, and pondering just getting a very high resolution 24" widescreen display, changing my usage to actually keeps windows as windows.
You're probably thinking of the I, Cringely entry that revealed Google's data center in a shipping container implementation back in November of 2005.
Really, these stores about various Microsoft talking heads ruminating about something or other are so bloody cheap. No one cares what Microsoft thinks, as their history of talk that vastly exceeds their reach has gotten tiring.
"Bob Blow, Microsoft's Executive VP of Random Blather, today surprized crowds by announcing that `we've been thinking of doing what everyone else is doing....only better! Infinity+1 better!'."
Dear Microsoft - your credibility is completely shot. Don't talk about anything because no one believes a word you say. DO.
Store then in javascript? Huh?
It is completely normal -- across the entire industry -- to store session identifiers in cookies. There is nothing special or AJAXy about that.
The PDF isn't full of anything revolutionary, and most are just common sense data security, but it is a great starting point for securing virtually any highly confidential data.
Far too many shops don't comply with the majority (or any) of the recommendations.
Someone got too greedy? They targeted a rare individual that was more vigilant about their machine?