My argument: No casual user WANTS to load an OS. Your argument brings up DBAs. I'm wondering how any relevant connection between casual users and DBAs can be fabricated.
1. "Freeze" the occupant in an annular confinement beam. 2. Record all information about each individual particle in the occupant in some gargantuan memory buffer, you know like velocity and position (which we know is vis-a-vis the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). 3. Losslessly convert the matter into energy (it will need to be converted back on the other end, so you really don't want any loss). 4. Transmit the information and energy to another point... instantaneously (an interesting trick given the sheer quantity of information required). 5. Convert the energy stream, again losslessly, back into matter, and with assiduous detail to the enormous blueprint you were provided along with it (what, in the packet headers?). 6. Pray like hell that you didn't transmit through anything that might disrupt the stream... guess we'll need a lot of CRC checks, eh?
Now I know why McCoy was always so apprehensive about stepping into one of these things. Poor Commander Sonak.
No casual user WANTS to load an OS. Most don't know how, or if they do have a modicum of know-how, it is a concept that scares them shitless. "Double-click on the setup button" is mysterious and might as well be a different language to them.
Preload it or wait for the glaciers to advance for adoption.
If I "lack insight", why don't I go around to the installed user base of most desktops and utter these words: Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, and see which one they don't recognize.
And there is your problem. Your tribe seems to lack insight into other tribes. Widespread adoption will not happen until this is corrected.
1) How many "typical home users" follow that link? 2) Once the "typical home user" gets there to customize it, being that there are such a ridiculous amount of options, how many just turn back? The processor selection alone would probably give most non-techies a choice overload.
IT has more rigid specifications (budgetary among them) so the large amount of options is only sensible, but I wonder how many casual users have the tech acumen to make any of those myriad of choices without an impending feeling of buyer's regret.
My guess is that home users go to the home user selections.
Except that Vista's coming preloaded on new boxes.
Now, you'd think that this would make people switch to Linux or MacOS, on just pissed-offishness alone.
And you'd be wrong.
Casual Windows users will use any operating system that is loaded on their machine. Warts and all. So the only way you're going to see adoption of Apple as the majority of desktops is if Apple starts playing the market and stops acting like a boutique computer manufacturer. And the only way you're going to see adoption of Linux as the majority of desktops is if Dell or Gateway or HP starts preloading it.
I know this is Slashdot and people here like to think that only the truly enlightened and bleeding-edgy use computers, but this is not the case. The geek squad is severely outnumbered by people who just want teh internets and to play that free solitaire game they downloaded. So, until Linux starts getting preloaded on new PCs or Apple starts to price competitively, MS has precisely nothing to fear.
Of course, I have a feeling this will be a long time coming, because I generally detect the attitude of "if Linux is too hard to set up for you, you must be a typical idiot" and "only the really cool people use Apple, but cool's gonna cost ya plenty".
Since DRAM makers only "feel" the adoption obliquely (ostensibly through the PC maker demand for more RAM on newly sold boxes) this could be taken two ways:
1) Vista isn't being as widely adopted as has been declared. 2) Users are opting to buy cheaper boxes and disabling the heavy RAM features (automatically done by Vista if the system requirements aren't up to Aero Glass par).
It may even be some combination of the two. Now, I didn't go into any great amount of research as to the offerings of OOB PC manufacturers, however, I did note that Dell's website still does not offer XP in any flavor (although there was some talk of this eventually becoming an option). From this, I make the careful and qualified surmise that new Windows-preloaded PCs are getting Vista. Knowing the user base, it is unlikely that they are replacing the OS themselves.
As far as I know, most people's personal budgets are still a little tight, so it is likely that people likely to buy PCs from Dell (casual users for the most part) are going to opt for the cheaper models, which, upon a little further inspection, don't have the horsepower or the RAM to run full Vista rendering.
These really aren't "hard numbers". It is difficult to determine anything concrete with this indirect indicator.
Not in the way that was meaningful. Actually, the Win32 API should have been scrapped by XP. NT 3.1 is a security nightmare, as is every OS spawned using the Win32 API as its core functionality. NT 3.1 predates the Web-as-Disease-Vector concern, ergo, no real addressing of security. Once security became an issue Win32, was officially obsolete. One could argue that NT 4 should have been the OS dump. Win 2K was another opportunity. XP was the last gasp.
"For Microsoft, dumping backwards compatibility would be equivalent to giving market share to Linux etc. on a platter."
Interesting.
A free operating system is considered to be a competitor of one that costs money. Seems to me that this equation has only one possible end.
Given the amount of software that was incompatible with XP, it is clear that backwards compatibility isn't really all that important. It certainly hasn't been handing Linux market share since users seemed to be OK with sacrificing a bit of backwards compatibility for a reasonably stable OS. And as someone else in this thread correctly stated, OSX was a complete rewrite and it didn't seem to harm adoption.
To your statement, assuming truth to your surmise, if Windows cannot compete with other OSes because they've finally made the transition to dinosaur, then let Darwinian principles take over and naturally select it out, rather than artificially controlling the market to allow continued existence.
Risking market share with a rewrite is the ONLY way Windows can survive. Windows is a bloated OS whose base code is about 15 years out of date, and because they refuse to make the statement "your old programs WILL NOT WORK on this new OS", they will continue to tweak a system and con people into paying for a continuous upgrade path, and that's a strategy headed for the dungheap.
Linux is gaining strength because people have had it with the "upgrade and pay through the nose, or don't and be obsoleted" MS revenue strategy used on every single one of their product lines.
The only way proprietary software can compete with F/OSS is by making a better product with a singular focus. And for MS that means a clean break from the past, an assumption of inherent risk on a new product absorbing the lessons of the past, and a strategy of long-term technology investment, rather than short-term planned obsolescence. I just wonder if they have the talent for that kind of forward thinking. I'm doubting it.
Will it take the opportunity? Probably not. GM and Microsoft have a lot in common. All the effort is in figuring out new ways to prop up and extend the revenue stream, and very little is going to product development.
Maybe being forced to play as a newbie will bring their best efforts forward. Maybe it'll drown the whole company. Who knows? Who cares? People will adapt to the playing field they're presented.
The only thing you need to teach a human being is that age old, seldom used technique called "critical thinking". This type of thinking is "teach a man to fish" where those you mentioned are closer to "give a man a fish". Once critical thought is mastered, a person can learn without BEING taught.
US measure has always been popular because we relate to it.
A foot... was actually the measurement of someone's foot. A cup... was actually the measurement of the amount of liquid that fit in a cup. A teaspoon, a tablespoon... A bushel, a barrel... well you get the idea.
A gallon just sounds like a lot... Pour a gallon of anything over anyone's head and they'll probably have to change clothes. A mile just sounds real far... Is 37C real hot? Dunno, but I'm pretty sure 98.6F is.
But the usage of football field as a measurement...
I'd like to blame that on Chuck Bednarik. I don't know why. I'm almost positive he had nothing to do with it.
...to do something they should have done (but didn't) at one (any one) of the previous Windows releases:
Shitcan the old code and start from scratch. At its heart, Win32 is dangerous and unsecured, an acceptable, if generally undesirable, answer to the needs of a more 'civilized' age.
Backward compatibility is only desirable if doing so doesn't compromise forward progress or prevent the correction of certain unacceptable conditions (like swiss-cheese security). XP (at the barest minimum, I'd have argued Windows 2000) should have been a complete OS rewrite.
Oh, big deal. So your freeware Solitaire game won't run on the new OS. If this is really that important to you, KEEP YOUR OLD BOX! No one said you had to throw the damn thing out, now did they?
If MS is really shitting bricks about F/OSS, then the way forward is clear: dump the junk. This late in the game, however, to bring a brand spankin' new OS about might be a moot issue. Free alternatives would then effectively be "mature product".
So, Bill? Given any thought to the next Age of Empires? Maybe MS should stick to writing apps FOR an OS, rather than the OS itself.
"you might consider that Galileo was considered a heretic because of his accurate minority opinion"
You might also consider that his detractors weren't scientists. They were clergy. If it were a bunch of televangelists telling the world's scientists that evolution is bunk and that this represents the majority opinion, would not make the opposing view of those scientists a minority opinion. Because religion and science are not in the same sphere.
Galileo was imprisoned because the brokers of power at the time felt threatened by the truth. The same goes today.
because there's seems to be just no way (yet... fingers crossed) to get away from pages developed in ASP that just won't render right under Firefox, otherwise I'd use Firefox exclusively.
The problem with all of this is that HTML was never meant to deliver active content. The initial usage was for images, sound, text, and links. But that was/is boring. Here comes Java and Javascript, Flash, etc. and now you have All Your Base, flying toasters, virii, and worms because you just HAD to execute code in your browser. And MS, long given to fits of computer utopia fantasies, didn't think for a minute that anyone would EVER write malicious code.
IE6 is a security mess, IE7 is a joke as I've never seen a less intuitive browser, and Netscape, Firefox, and Opera won't render MS technologies properly. Cross-platform development is an absolute nightmare.
It's not the standards, people. It's the content. The content we want is active, running code. Controls and buttons and boxes and gizmos and visual fluff of all kinds. The browser is a document viewer. Work that out for yourself and you'll come to the same conclusion I've come to.
The Web may not be obsolete, but the technologies it relies on are, and Web 2.0 is just a repackaging of it. A document delivery system is no way to run code, son. Teh internets need an overhaul and we need a better, more secure tool than a document viewer with plug-ins hanging off of it to deliver our dancing bananas and D-grade home movies.
Internet (pron. in'-tur-net'') - n. - colloquial: teh internets
1. The worldwide decentralized system of networked computers and similarly enabled electronic devices linked together via various protocols which permit the transmission of packets of data from one device to any other or combinations of others, and whose system of data routing permits data to be transmitted over alternate linkages should elements of the network fail.
2. An experiment which has dismally answered the question, once and for all, of what would happen when you give just about every idiot in the world a megaphone.
If the major problem with the Wii is the fact that it is last-gen graphics...
WiiToo: 2-3 years down the road, same controller system, backward compatibility, serious graphics/sound upgrades, and this is very important... SAME PRICE POINT.
That "small demographic" had been buying 99% of the game consoles.
Ermmm. No. That small demographic assemble their own PCs and overclock their CPUs. They don't buy consoles. So as it turns out, this small demographic that MS and Sony were targeting never bought their stuff in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The comment count for this article was a hair over 3 times greater than the front page runner up.
From this, we can deduce:
1) Nerds care about politics to some degree.
2) This must be news that matters.
You'd see that in this case, you need to use the future past perfect subjunctive, which would be:
"The star is about to will had haven been exploding."
My argument: No casual user WANTS to load an OS.
Your argument brings up DBAs. I'm wondering how any relevant connection between casual users and DBAs can be fabricated.
Yeah. Just what I need. A computer attached to my brain IMing to everyone what a bunch of dimwitted fucksticks I think they are.
1. "Freeze" the occupant in an annular confinement beam.
2. Record all information about each individual particle in the occupant in some gargantuan memory buffer, you know like velocity and position (which we know is vis-a-vis the Heisenberg uncertainty principle).
3. Losslessly convert the matter into energy (it will need to be converted back on the other end, so you really don't want any loss).
4. Transmit the information and energy to another point... instantaneously (an interesting trick given the sheer quantity of information required).
5. Convert the energy stream, again losslessly, back into matter, and with assiduous detail to the enormous blueprint you were provided along with it (what, in the packet headers?).
6. Pray like hell that you didn't transmit through anything that might disrupt the stream... guess we'll need a lot of CRC checks, eh?
Now I know why McCoy was always so apprehensive about stepping into one of these things. Poor Commander Sonak.
No casual user WANTS to load an OS. Most don't know how, or if they do have a modicum of know-how, it is a concept that scares them shitless. "Double-click on the setup button" is mysterious and might as well be a different language to them.
Preload it or wait for the glaciers to advance for adoption.
If I "lack insight", why don't I go around to the installed user base of most desktops and utter these words:
Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, and see which one they don't recognize.
And there is your problem. Your tribe seems to lack insight into other tribes. Widespread adoption will not happen until this is corrected.
That comment, though, speaks volumes to my point.
What if I was new here? Would your comment be welcoming or dismissive to me, do you think?
Two things:
1) How many "typical home users" follow that link?
2) Once the "typical home user" gets there to customize it, being that there are such a ridiculous amount of options, how many just turn back? The processor selection alone would probably give most non-techies a choice overload.
IT has more rigid specifications (budgetary among them) so the large amount of options is only sensible, but I wonder how many casual users have the tech acumen to make any of those myriad of choices without an impending feeling of buyer's regret.
My guess is that home users go to the home user selections.
Except that Vista's coming preloaded on new boxes.
Now, you'd think that this would make people switch to Linux or MacOS, on just pissed-offishness alone.
And you'd be wrong.
Casual Windows users will use any operating system that is loaded on their machine. Warts and all. So the only way you're going to see adoption of Apple as the majority of desktops is if Apple starts playing the market and stops acting like a boutique computer manufacturer. And the only way you're going to see adoption of Linux as the majority of desktops is if Dell or Gateway or HP starts preloading it.
I know this is Slashdot and people here like to think that only the truly enlightened and bleeding-edgy use computers, but this is not the case. The geek squad is severely outnumbered by people who just want teh internets and to play that free solitaire game they downloaded. So, until Linux starts getting preloaded on new PCs or Apple starts to price competitively, MS has precisely nothing to fear.
Of course, I have a feeling this will be a long time coming, because I generally detect the attitude of "if Linux is too hard to set up for you, you must be a typical idiot" and "only the really cool people use Apple, but cool's gonna cost ya plenty".
No. MS is in no trouble.
Since DRAM makers only "feel" the adoption obliquely (ostensibly through the PC maker demand for more RAM on newly sold boxes) this could be taken two ways:
1) Vista isn't being as widely adopted as has been declared.
2) Users are opting to buy cheaper boxes and disabling the heavy RAM features (automatically done by Vista if the system requirements aren't up to Aero Glass par).
It may even be some combination of the two. Now, I didn't go into any great amount of research as to the offerings of OOB PC manufacturers, however, I did note that Dell's website still does not offer XP in any flavor (although there was some talk of this eventually becoming an option). From this, I make the careful and qualified surmise that new Windows-preloaded PCs are getting Vista. Knowing the user base, it is unlikely that they are replacing the OS themselves.
As far as I know, most people's personal budgets are still a little tight, so it is likely that people likely to buy PCs from Dell (casual users for the most part) are going to opt for the cheaper models, which, upon a little further inspection, don't have the horsepower or the RAM to run full Vista rendering.
These really aren't "hard numbers". It is difficult to determine anything concrete with this indirect indicator.
Not in the way that was meaningful. Actually, the Win32 API should have been scrapped by XP. NT 3.1 is a security nightmare, as is every OS spawned using the Win32 API as its core functionality. NT 3.1 predates the Web-as-Disease-Vector concern, ergo, no real addressing of security. Once security became an issue Win32, was officially obsolete. One could argue that NT 4 should have been the OS dump. Win 2K was another opportunity. XP was the last gasp.
"For Microsoft, dumping backwards compatibility would be equivalent to giving market share to Linux etc. on a platter."
Interesting.
A free operating system is considered to be a competitor of one that costs money. Seems to me that this equation has only one possible end.
Given the amount of software that was incompatible with XP, it is clear that backwards compatibility isn't really all that important. It certainly hasn't been handing Linux market share since users seemed to be OK with sacrificing a bit of backwards compatibility for a reasonably stable OS. And as someone else in this thread correctly stated, OSX was a complete rewrite and it didn't seem to harm adoption.
To your statement, assuming truth to your surmise, if Windows cannot compete with other OSes because they've finally made the transition to dinosaur, then let Darwinian principles take over and naturally select it out, rather than artificially controlling the market to allow continued existence.
Risking market share with a rewrite is the ONLY way Windows can survive. Windows is a bloated OS whose base code is about 15 years out of date, and because they refuse to make the statement "your old programs WILL NOT WORK on this new OS", they will continue to tweak a system and con people into paying for a continuous upgrade path, and that's a strategy headed for the dungheap.
Linux is gaining strength because people have had it with the "upgrade and pay through the nose, or don't and be obsoleted" MS revenue strategy used on every single one of their product lines.
The only way proprietary software can compete with F/OSS is by making a better product with a singular focus. And for MS that means a clean break from the past, an assumption of inherent risk on a new product absorbing the lessons of the past, and a strategy of long-term technology investment, rather than short-term planned obsolescence. I just wonder if they have the talent for that kind of forward thinking. I'm doubting it.
Will it take the opportunity? Probably not. GM and Microsoft have a lot in common. All the effort is in figuring out new ways to prop up and extend the revenue stream, and very little is going to product development.
Maybe being forced to play as a newbie will bring their best efforts forward. Maybe it'll drown the whole company. Who knows? Who cares? People will adapt to the playing field they're presented.
The only thing you need to teach a human being is that age old, seldom used technique called "critical thinking". This type of thinking is "teach a man to fish" where those you mentioned are closer to "give a man a fish". Once critical thought is mastered, a person can learn without BEING taught.
And it really isn't that hard.
US measure has always been popular because we relate to it.
A foot... was actually the measurement of someone's foot.
A cup... was actually the measurement of the amount of liquid that fit in a cup.
A teaspoon, a tablespoon...
A bushel, a barrel... well you get the idea.
A gallon just sounds like a lot... Pour a gallon of anything over anyone's head and they'll probably have to change clothes.
A mile just sounds real far... Is 37C real hot? Dunno, but I'm pretty sure 98.6F is.
But the usage of football field as a measurement...
I'd like to blame that on Chuck Bednarik. I don't know why. I'm almost positive he had nothing to do with it.
...to do something they should have done (but didn't) at one (any one) of the previous Windows releases:
Shitcan the old code and start from scratch. At its heart, Win32 is dangerous and unsecured, an acceptable, if generally undesirable, answer to the needs of a more 'civilized' age.
Backward compatibility is only desirable if doing so doesn't compromise forward progress or prevent the correction of certain unacceptable conditions (like swiss-cheese security). XP (at the barest minimum, I'd have argued Windows 2000) should have been a complete OS rewrite.
Oh, big deal. So your freeware Solitaire game won't run on the new OS. If this is really that important to you, KEEP YOUR OLD BOX! No one said you had to throw the damn thing out, now did they?
If MS is really shitting bricks about F/OSS, then the way forward is clear: dump the junk. This late in the game, however, to bring a brand spankin' new OS about might be a moot issue. Free alternatives would then effectively be "mature product".
So, Bill? Given any thought to the next Age of Empires? Maybe MS should stick to writing apps FOR an OS, rather than the OS itself.
Nintendo discovered your 5 things learned back in the mid-eighties when they single-handedly resurrected the video game industry.
"you might consider that Galileo was considered a heretic because of his accurate minority opinion"
You might also consider that his detractors weren't scientists. They were clergy. If it were a bunch of televangelists telling the world's scientists that evolution is bunk and that this represents the majority opinion, would not make the opposing view of those scientists a minority opinion. Because religion and science are not in the same sphere.
Galileo was imprisoned because the brokers of power at the time felt threatened by the truth. The same goes today.
Shigeru Miyamoto once again states the obvious:
"A good game's a good game. If you build it, they will buy."
His competition states:
"Meh, just throw a few more clock cycles at the hardware."
The results seem... predictable.
"Jar Jar, you're being appointed as the Imperial ambassador to Alderaan."
"Me-sa honored, Big Boss Tarkin, When me go?"
(Tarkin whispers to Vader) "You've got the princess on the Death Star, right?"
(Vader) "Yes, governor."
"Why right away, Jar Jar, as soon as you're packed!"
"Whoopee!" (exit right).
(Tarkin) "So we'll finally be rid of this annoying fool?"
(Vader) "I've been wanting to do this since I was 10."
...an irretrievable moron.
I cite the following:
1. The 80's were musically irrelevant...
2. Rush was a heavy metal band.
While the first is open to debate, the second has long since been proven in the court of public opinion to be absolutely false.
Conclusion:
If faced with a side-by-side comparison of his head and his ass, our dear columnist would be hard-pressed to find any dissimilarity.
Thank you.
...when approached by Lucas' people, it was discovered that Natalie Portman had never seen any of the Star Wars movies.
Is that a BLARING KLAXON I hear? Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!
...Long live Mike Binkley...
because there's seems to be just no way (yet... fingers crossed) to get away from pages developed in ASP that just won't render right under Firefox, otherwise I'd use Firefox exclusively.
The problem with all of this is that HTML was never meant to deliver active content. The initial usage was for images, sound, text, and links. But that was/is boring. Here comes Java and Javascript, Flash, etc. and now you have All Your Base, flying toasters, virii, and worms because you just HAD to execute code in your browser. And MS, long given to fits of computer utopia fantasies, didn't think for a minute that anyone would EVER write malicious code.
IE6 is a security mess, IE7 is a joke as I've never seen a less intuitive browser, and Netscape, Firefox, and Opera won't render MS technologies properly. Cross-platform development is an absolute nightmare.
It's not the standards, people. It's the content. The content we want is active, running code. Controls and buttons and boxes and gizmos and visual fluff of all kinds. The browser is a document viewer. Work that out for yourself and you'll come to the same conclusion I've come to.
The Web may not be obsolete, but the technologies it relies on are, and Web 2.0 is just a repackaging of it. A document delivery system is no way to run code, son. Teh internets need an overhaul and we need a better, more secure tool than a document viewer with plug-ins hanging off of it to deliver our dancing bananas and D-grade home movies.
Internet (pron. in'-tur-net'') - n. - colloquial: teh internets
1. The worldwide decentralized system of networked computers and similarly enabled electronic devices linked together via various protocols which permit the transmission of packets of data from one device to any other or combinations of others, and whose system of data routing permits data to be transmitted over alternate linkages should elements of the network fail.
2. An experiment which has dismally answered the question, once and for all, of what would happen when you give just about every idiot in the world a megaphone.
If the major problem with the Wii is the fact that it is last-gen graphics...
WiiToo: 2-3 years down the road, same controller system, backward compatibility, serious graphics/sound upgrades, and this is very important... SAME PRICE POINT.
That "small demographic" had been buying 99% of the game consoles.
Ermmm. No. That small demographic assemble their own PCs and overclock their CPUs. They don't buy consoles. So as it turns out, this small demographic that MS and Sony were targeting never bought their stuff in the first place.