I said nothing about hardware abstraction...I don't know what planet you've been on, but 10 years ago on this planet if several of your application servers not only crashed, but completely disappeared never to return again, that would be cause for alarm. Now (due to a coupling of lowered expectations of vendor product quality, thanks to China et. al, and the natural progression of the industry), one just creates the applications with the idea in mind that the roles are what is important, not the devices that may or may not from one moment to the next be fulfilling the roles.
"Cloud computing" is quite real; it's an entirely different paradigm involving ephemeral hosts where you monitor and protect roles/functions, and the machines that provide those functions are completely unimportant. It's unlike anything that the industry has ever done, and whether you call it "cloud computing" or something else, it is in fact something different that deserves some different type name, whatever that name may be.
Hardware abstraction is new? Here I was thinking that it was a central theme in computing for pretty sizable chunk of time now.
I kind of think this guy takes a bit of undeserved heat sometimes, but the 'story' here is a link to a forum thread with fewer than 10 posts (at the time of this reply). That doesn't seem front page worthy, well, anywhere.
TVs are a commodity too, but that doesn't mean that there aren't people that heavily research before buying one. Sure, there are people that go into a store and get whatever looks good and is on sale (the vast majority, I'd wager), but most people have been doing that for years with computers too. This is the difference between an enthusiast and a layperson, and the former is not going away anytime soon.
Outlook Express has been my favorite mail client for quite awhile (though I've been using Outlook 2010 for awhile and the conversation view is growing on me). In fact, I always found the UI rather simple and straightforward - what are the evil parts of the interface you're referring to?
I hope the phone company has deep pockets, because the phone book is full of first and last names and, last time I checked, it was totally unencrypted!
This happened to me recently with B of A. I live in FL, and someone used my card in NJ. Bank of America shut my card off right after it happened, sent me an email, text message, and gave me a phone call letting me know they'd detected fraud. When I called them back, they gave me the option to turn the card back on (in case I'd jumped on a plane to NJ) or initiate a fraud investigation.
I think the fraud algorithm they use is pretty good, they found it right away. Fortunately it was only a $4.80 "test" charge. But they prevented any more money from coming out, and got the 4.80 back to me within 48 business hours.
Yeah, I use CIBC (Canadian) and they seem to take similar measures. There have been probably half a dozen times over just as many years where they have temporarily disabled my card and immediately called me due to suspicious activity. In each of these case, it was (thankfully) a false positive due to me traveling at the time, but it is somewhat reassuring to know that something is watching, just in case.
Thankfully, you can also call to let them beforehand that you are out of the country so you can hopefully avoid the card being disabled when you try to pay for dinner in that fancy restaurant.
Now all we need is to hook this in to the camera networks that already exist in a lot of cities.
Seriously, it solves the "who watches the watchers" problem and adds heaps of interest. Real time public video feeds.
How does becoming a 'watcher' solve the 'who watches the watchers' problem? The real problem with ubiquitous surveillance is not that they were observing you, but what they are doing with the information they glean from that.
Well, here's a screenshot. I guess it's possible that it's different because I'm Canadian, though it does imply it's not limiting results based on that.
Someone should tell Medhi that it also helps when you don't game the search results to fit your corporate agenda.
From time to time, I try out the following query on Bing: "Why is Windows so expensive?"
The day that the first result returned is NOT a site about Macs being expensive is the day I'll start to take Bing seriously. Until then, I'm sticking with Google, which is at least honest enough to properly index anti-Google queries.
So, today? I just tried that search and the Macs article is number 9 on the first set of results. The first article is basically about what you would expect from this search (http://www.timesoftheinternet.com/98741.html) and the second is a story about what you were just describing (http://www.quickpwn.com/2009/08/why-is-windows-so-expensive.html).
Seriously, though, why would you make claims like this without verifying before posting? Oh yeah - Slashdot.
Company releases an inferior product, much later to the game than competition, makes excuses for failure, water still wet.
Have you ever used it? In my usage, it performs about as well as Google - in some cases, better. Despite this, I still use Google. Why? Like Windows, Google's market share at this point doesn't have that much to do with its quality, it has more to do with being synonymous with what it is used for. However, unlike Windows, I don't see anything on the horizon that is likely to dethrone it anytime soon.
I mostly share your perspective, but I must admit from a business point of view it made perfect business sense for Microsoft to drag their heels for as long as they basically had a monopoly on the web browser market. Why should a company with 90+% share support standards? There's no real advantage to them - all implementing better standards support would do is make it less painful for users to try another browser.
Close, but you're missing the point that, at 90+% market share, you are the standard.
That would depend on whether you are prepared to recognize the sovereignty of totalitiarian dictatorships that torture and murder their own people.
Dictators (and their cronies) have no right to say what may happen in their own country, let alone anyone else's. They lose those rights the moment they seize power. All Microsoft is doing is helping the Chinse dictatorship to oppress their own people. For the religious amongst us, think Judas and the money.
Unlike the USA which only tortures and murders the people of other countries (mostly)? I'm sorry, but after engaging in torture itself, the USA has kind of lost it's moral high ground.
If a robber points a gun at a child and tells you to hand over all your money, and you refuse, and the child gets shot, you are NOT responsible for the child's death. That would be ridiculous, and would essentially give criminals legal force. The robber alone is responsible.
Pragmatically, this might cause trouble for Hong Kong, but morally, Google's in the right here.
Sure, you might not be legally responsible, but not feeling morally responsible would be inhuman.
Also, I'm surprised that nobody seems to have mentioned that obvious reason for iPhone use in Microsoft. This is a company filled with tech geeks and the iPhone is one of the most iconic gadgets of the past couple of years. I would be surprised if a healthy chunk of employees didn't have one.
Secondly, Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander and C&C/Red Alert. There are RTS games but solely focused on small unit skirmishes and resource management, where development speed is core to winning each game... in which case, why in hell do I want (or even need) to mess around with zooming in and twiddling camera views? Just give me a single isometric view with sprite graphics...
I'm sorry, but if you don't find the zooming in Supreme Commander amazing, you're doing it wrong. That was probably the most amazing feature of that game and makes every other RTS out there frustrating to play.
Tthe glitch where it thinks it's been pirated and down grades you to changing to a black background and nags you to buy a real copy (even though you are using one)
It must not be nagging very effectively if he hasn't noticed it yet.
So, your first point is that the right corner is way out of the way compared to where you are most often clicking (menus) and the second point is you are always clicking in that corner? In any case, I'd think the far more common missclick would be someone hitting the window controls if they were right above the menus.
Also, in case you didn't know, you can resize the window from any corner - though I must say that I don't think I've ever seen anyone resize with that corner. Seems like the kind of nonsense someone who likes window controls in the top left would do.
Slashdot should be embarrassed for all the FUD they've been posting. Apple is the new Microsoft, except for Apple fanboys, who hold Google as the new Microsoft.
It never ceases to amaze me when people are surprised when giant corporations behave like giant corporations.
I'd agree with clumsy and uncompetitve, but innovator? lol. Sorry no.
Microsoft hasn't innovated anything truly new in decades, except maybe the marketing dept changing a few colour schemes or finding new ways to screw customers.
In fact can anyone think of anything technically innovative that Microsoft ever put their name on, that wasn't originally bought, copied, 'embraced', assimilated, or blatantly stolen from some other company? I can't.
Everyone seems to agree that Microsoft isn't an innovator, so who is?
Having a second core was handy for people who like to play world of warcraft in one window and surf web pages in the other (considering how much CPU modern web pages eat for some reason. yay flash?).
Having two more cores beyond that is fairly useless for the vast majority of even power users except for very specific apps that even they are running a very small percentage of the overall time they are using their computers.
Not that I particularly disagree with your conclusions overall, but wow can actually be set to run on multiple cores and does get a performance benefit for doing so.
Of course, the problem with running Windows on a Mac is Microsoft's pricing structure. Boot Camp or Parallels or VMware or VirtualBox needs a retail copy of Windows. But it turns out that one can actually buy a whole PC running Windows, including a spare keyboard and mouse, for close to the price of a retail copy of Windows.
I agree that the pricing of retail Windows is pretty ridiculous, and it continues to surprise me that people buy Windows that way. That being said, I don't like the fact that you have to upgrade OS X in order to get driver support for a new version of Windows. This isn't unusual in the software vendor world (i.e. buy new version to get new features) but it sure is abnormal in the hardware world, and Apple is the hardware vendor in this case. I really shouldn't have to buy your OS to get functioning drivers for your hardware in someone else's OS.
Slashdot Mirror
I said nothing about hardware abstraction...I don't know what planet you've been on, but 10 years ago on this planet if several of your application servers not only crashed, but completely disappeared never to return again, that would be cause for alarm. Now (due to a coupling of lowered expectations of vendor product quality, thanks to China et. al, and the natural progression of the industry), one just creates the applications with the idea in mind that the roles are what is important, not the devices that may or may not from one moment to the next be fulfilling the roles.
Yup, comprehension sure has gone downhill.
"Cloud computing" is quite real; it's an entirely different paradigm involving ephemeral hosts where you monitor and protect roles/functions, and the machines that provide those functions are completely unimportant. It's unlike anything that the industry has ever done, and whether you call it "cloud computing" or something else, it is in fact something different that deserves some different type name, whatever that name may be.
Hardware abstraction is new? Here I was thinking that it was a central theme in computing for pretty sizable chunk of time now.
It's kdawson. You can't expect fact-checking.
I kind of think this guy takes a bit of undeserved heat sometimes, but the 'story' here is a link to a forum thread with fewer than 10 posts (at the time of this reply). That doesn't seem front page worthy, well, anywhere.
TVs are a commodity too, but that doesn't mean that there aren't people that heavily research before buying one. Sure, there are people that go into a store and get whatever looks good and is on sale (the vast majority, I'd wager), but most people have been doing that for years with computers too. This is the difference between an enthusiast and a layperson, and the former is not going away anytime soon.
Outlook Express.
Outlook Express has been my favorite mail client for quite awhile (though I've been using Outlook 2010 for awhile and the conversation view is growing on me). In fact, I always found the UI rather simple and straightforward - what are the evil parts of the interface you're referring to?
I hope the phone company has deep pockets, because the phone book is full of first and last names and, last time I checked, it was totally unencrypted!
This happened to me recently with B of A. I live in FL, and someone used my card in NJ. Bank of America shut my card off right after it happened, sent me an email, text message, and gave me a phone call letting me know they'd detected fraud. When I called them back, they gave me the option to turn the card back on (in case I'd jumped on a plane to NJ) or initiate a fraud investigation.
I think the fraud algorithm they use is pretty good, they found it right away. Fortunately it was only a $4.80 "test" charge. But they prevented any more money from coming out, and got the 4.80 back to me within 48 business hours.
Yeah, I use CIBC (Canadian) and they seem to take similar measures. There have been probably half a dozen times over just as many years where they have temporarily disabled my card and immediately called me due to suspicious activity. In each of these case, it was (thankfully) a false positive due to me traveling at the time, but it is somewhat reassuring to know that something is watching, just in case.
Thankfully, you can also call to let them beforehand that you are out of the country so you can hopefully avoid the card being disabled when you try to pay for dinner in that fancy restaurant.
Now all we need is to hook this in to the camera networks that already exist in a lot of cities.
Seriously, it solves the "who watches the watchers" problem and adds heaps of interest. Real time public video feeds.
How does becoming a 'watcher' solve the 'who watches the watchers' problem? The real problem with ubiquitous surveillance is not that they were observing you, but what they are doing with the information they glean from that.
Well, here's a screenshot. I guess it's possible that it's different because I'm Canadian, though it does imply it's not limiting results based on that.
Someone should tell Medhi that it also helps when you don't game the search results to fit your corporate agenda.
From time to time, I try out the following query on Bing: "Why is Windows so expensive?"
The day that the first result returned is NOT a site about Macs being expensive is the day I'll start to take Bing seriously. Until then, I'm sticking with Google, which is at least honest enough to properly index anti-Google queries.
So, today? I just tried that search and the Macs article is number 9 on the first set of results. The first article is basically about what you would expect from this search (http://www.timesoftheinternet.com/98741.html) and the second is a story about what you were just describing (http://www.quickpwn.com/2009/08/why-is-windows-so-expensive.html).
Seriously, though, why would you make claims like this without verifying before posting? Oh yeah - Slashdot.
Company releases an inferior product, much later to the game than competition, makes excuses for failure, water still wet.
Have you ever used it? In my usage, it performs about as well as Google - in some cases, better. Despite this, I still use Google. Why? Like Windows, Google's market share at this point doesn't have that much to do with its quality, it has more to do with being synonymous with what it is used for. However, unlike Windows, I don't see anything on the horizon that is likely to dethrone it anytime soon.
I mostly share your perspective, but I must admit from a business point of view it made perfect business sense for Microsoft to drag their heels for as long as they basically had a monopoly on the web browser market. Why should a company with 90+% share support standards? There's no real advantage to them - all implementing better standards support would do is make it less painful for users to try another browser.
Close, but you're missing the point that, at 90+% market share, you are the standard.
That would depend on whether you are prepared to recognize the sovereignty of totalitiarian dictatorships that torture and murder their own people. Dictators (and their cronies) have no right to say what may happen in their own country, let alone anyone else's. They lose those rights the moment they seize power. All Microsoft is doing is helping the Chinse dictatorship to oppress their own people. For the religious amongst us, think Judas and the money.
Unlike the USA which only tortures and murders the people of other countries (mostly)? I'm sorry, but after engaging in torture itself, the USA has kind of lost it's moral high ground.
Whoever wrote that claim made it way too specific, and easy to work around it.
You mean how all patents are supposed to be very specific?
If a robber points a gun at a child and tells you to hand over all your money, and you refuse, and the child gets shot, you are NOT responsible for the child's death. That would be ridiculous, and would essentially give criminals legal force. The robber alone is responsible.
Pragmatically, this might cause trouble for Hong Kong, but morally, Google's in the right here.
Sure, you might not be legally responsible, but not feeling morally responsible would be inhuman.
Microsoft is not going to run a BES.
It may come as a surprise, but you're actually wrong there http://www.microsoft.com/online/mobility/blackberry.mspx.
Also, I'm surprised that nobody seems to have mentioned that obvious reason for iPhone use in Microsoft. This is a company filled with tech geeks and the iPhone is one of the most iconic gadgets of the past couple of years. I would be surprised if a healthy chunk of employees didn't have one.
Secondly, Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander and C&C/Red Alert. There are RTS games but solely focused on small unit skirmishes and resource management, where development speed is core to winning each game... in which case, why in hell do I want (or even need) to mess around with zooming in and twiddling camera views? Just give me a single isometric view with sprite graphics...
I'm sorry, but if you don't find the zooming in Supreme Commander amazing, you're doing it wrong. That was probably the most amazing feature of that game and makes every other RTS out there frustrating to play.
In what way is the DRM in Windows 7 harming me?
Tthe glitch where it thinks it's been pirated and down grades you to changing to a black background and nags you to buy a real copy (even though you are using one)
It must not be nagging very effectively if he hasn't noticed it yet.
So, your first point is that the right corner is way out of the way compared to where you are most often clicking (menus) and the second point is you are always clicking in that corner? In any case, I'd think the far more common missclick would be someone hitting the window controls if they were right above the menus.
Also, in case you didn't know, you can resize the window from any corner - though I must say that I don't think I've ever seen anyone resize with that corner. Seems like the kind of nonsense someone who likes window controls in the top left would do.
For a secret lawsuit filed in a secret court that resulted in a secret action being taken, everyone sure seems to know a lot about what happened.
Slashdot should be embarrassed for all the FUD they've been posting. Apple is the new Microsoft, except for Apple fanboys, who hold Google as the new Microsoft.
It never ceases to amaze me when people are surprised when giant corporations behave like giant corporations.
I'd agree with clumsy and uncompetitve, but innovator? lol. Sorry no.
Microsoft hasn't innovated anything truly new in decades, except maybe the marketing dept changing a few colour schemes or finding new ways to screw customers.
In fact can anyone think of anything technically innovative that Microsoft ever put their name on, that wasn't originally bought, copied, 'embraced', assimilated, or blatantly stolen from some other company? I can't.
Everyone seems to agree that Microsoft isn't an innovator, so who is?
Having a second core was handy for people who like to play world of warcraft in one window and surf web pages in the other (considering how much CPU modern web pages eat for some reason. yay flash?).
Having two more cores beyond that is fairly useless for the vast majority of even power users except for very specific apps that even they are running a very small percentage of the overall time they are using their computers.
Not that I particularly disagree with your conclusions overall, but wow can actually be set to run on multiple cores and does get a performance benefit for doing so.
Of course, the problem with running Windows on a Mac is Microsoft's pricing structure. Boot Camp or Parallels or VMware or VirtualBox needs a retail copy of Windows. But it turns out that one can actually buy a whole PC running Windows, including a spare keyboard and mouse, for close to the price of a retail copy of Windows.
I agree that the pricing of retail Windows is pretty ridiculous, and it continues to surprise me that people buy Windows that way. That being said, I don't like the fact that you have to upgrade OS X in order to get driver support for a new version of Windows. This isn't unusual in the software vendor world (i.e. buy new version to get new features) but it sure is abnormal in the hardware world, and Apple is the hardware vendor in this case. I really shouldn't have to buy your OS to get functioning drivers for your hardware in someone else's OS.
The 10.9 billion is 3rd quarter revenue, not for a whole year, so the comparison would be 195 million to 10.9 billion