You make a good point. Most people on/. appreciate the fact that Windows is a buggy operating system with lots of vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, that's what people have come to expect because it's all they've known. Most people don't consider it a problem since they don't realize that it can be better. Linux has its own quirks (hardware support, anyone?) and people are much more likely to just stick to the quirks they know.
If this is actually the case, I think Microsoft deserves what's coming to them. The only reason they still have so much market share is because of inertia, but if they can't actually ship a product (even at the already delayed date) they deserve the mass defections that hopefully will be coming. They've dropped a ton of features, they can't ship on time, even Joe six pack will at some point realize that this isn't the company that should be in control of his computer. Like it or not, people aren't going to switch to Linux or OSS because it might be better or because open source is a better sofware development model. They're going to switch because they're having a problem. Nobody's going to go out of their way to fix a problem they don't have. Luckily for us, MS is doing a great job creating those problems.
employers have figured out that trusting somebody else's opinion of what somebody is or isn't capable of might not be the best measure of their actual abilities? Being able to pass a test on how to do something isn't the same as actually being able to do it in a work environment; it's often much more important to look at somebody's experience to see if they're capable of doing the job you want to give them. I just hope that IT companies aren't just realizing this. This fact shouldn't have to be re-learned in every industry.
I think it's pretty obvious that television is undergoing a major shift. As the article pointed out, more and more people are Tivo-ing their programs and skipping commericals, IPTV is coming up. Live commercials are really just a way of having new commercials more often, but I don't think that that will help anything. With all the new ways people are watching TV, there needs to be a new way of delivering ads. I don't know what it will be, but my money is on Google to come up with it. They already have a pretty good record when it comes to new kinds of advertising, and incorporating their ads into lots of different products, as well as making them good ads (relevant, anyway).
Wouldn't that explain the success of something that has no traditional credibility? If somebody had told you five years ago that one day one of the most popular encyclopedias on the planet would be created solely by the people who read it, would you have believed it? But here we are today, wikipedia is a household name and wildly succesful. Maybe not a full version number ahead, but definitely a major revision or two ahead.
Web 2.0: A website's value increases with the number of users creating content on it Web 3.0: A website's value increases with the quality of the content being created
I like the whole concept of websites providing a framework where people create their own content and network, but the quality for most of these is terrible. I can only look at so many pictures of half naked drunk teenagers before I get sick of it. Hopefully the next iteration of the web will find some way to weed out the quality content (isn't that the reason we read Slashdot?) and provide more of that.
How does one get from the fact that Microsoft is planning on spending more money this year than last to the assumption that they must be going to war with Google? If this was Google, everybody would be trying to figure out what new product they were going to come out with (Goobuntu, GInternet, etc). I've got a pretty low opinion of Microsoft, but I try to stick with justifiable reasons to dislike them, not jump to the worst possible conclusion every time they do (or plan to do) something.
*Caveat: in a truly open market, quality can be determined by market share, and the closer one gets to an open market, the better an approximation one can get of the quality of the products involved.
The web server market has some real competition, making it a much more open market than the desktop OS market. I never meant to imply that the Windows monopoly made it a high quality OS. Thanks for pointing that out.
I think you're right. With Merom and Conroe just a few months away (supposedly, but I don't think they're going to pull a Microsoft) I think Intel will regain a large part of the market share they've lost. I've heard lots of good things about Merom and Conroe and nothing about any AMD plans for future products. This just points to that fact even more.
It does all depend on how you count it, but using the amount of revenue each product generates as your method of counting is the kind of thinking that leads to open source software being considered worthless. Yes the products that Microsoft's shipped have generated far more revenue, but Apache isn't even trying to compete on that level. If you must compare the two, compare them by actual quality of product, usually as determined by market share. If one program costs $10 and another costs $100 and you measure their quality by how much money each has made, you're not going to get an accurate comparison.
Step 1: Outlaw all obviously terrorist books, like 1984. Step 2: Outlaw all books because they can all be interpreted in terroristic ways. Step 3: Outlaw all forms of written communication because they all have letters which can be rearranged to form terrorist messages.
Stuff like this used to be funny, but now it's just scary. I wonder just how much politicians can get away with if they just say it's to fight terrorism. I wonder how long people will let them get away with all this right under their noses.
Why is it that every time a politician wants to get something passed that's obviously not going to be good, they do it because it 'funds terrorism'? Next thing you know politicians are going to fund some study saying that open source funds terrorism.
Hahahaha. No pink shirts in my closet. I'm not gay, I don't have a pink shirt, but being part of a community where the color of my shirt is what I'm going to get judged on doesn't appeal to me. I'd much rather be judged on how well (or poorly) I code than what I choose to wear. Besides, geeks aren't exactly on the cutting edge of fashion, anyway...
And as long as you're not pointing your guns at me (or anybody else for that matter) I don't care if you like to hunt, or go to shooting ranges, or whatever it is people with guns do.
Did that really add anything to this discussion? What's up with the homophobism? Any guy who wears a pink shirt no longer has a penis? Nor should they be able to propagate? Come on, man. I think that it's possible to make a much, much better case that anybody who's so narrow-minded that they can't see past the color of the shirt somebody chooses to wear shouldn't be allowed to propagate. Don't you think?
You make good points, but they're slightly off topic. In your original post, you made the point that you weren't willing to offload much of the processing done on the server to the clients computer. It was that point that I was refuting.
In regards to your point about it being nothing but a buzzword, so are a lot of technologies when they first come out. Does the.NET framework allow you to do anything radically different from what you could do before? No, but it makes a lot of things easier; it's a new way of using an old technology and like it or not, AJAX is moving the internet forward. People I know who would have never been involved at all otherwise now have Gmail accounts, and because they were so impressed with that, they now use Google maps, and now they've found Wikipedia (and even contributed to an article or two) and are using Google Talk and interested in VoIP and how they can use it on more than just their computer. Without the great interfaces/usability/responsiveness (the 'ooh' and 'aah') a lot of people would never care to switch, and would still be using MS Hotmail. Using these old technologies in a new way is making people switch, is showing them what new technology can do and while there are always developers who will abuse a new technology, I think it's equally bad for people to summarily refuse to use it, when it's obviously working for millions of people just because they can't see anything new about it.
I realize that because this is about websites, the dynamic changes slightly, but at some point you have to accept that technology has moved forward. There are industries where that happens much more quickly than in others (3d games come quickly come to mind, where they try and use every bit of performance they can get from all the newest cards), but it happens in all industries. While there are still people with Pentium 2's or older, how far back are you going to support? I think that any computer bought within the past 6-7 years (mine's up near that age) will have no problems doing the processing for something as low-weight as a web page. While you still have to deal with anti-virus/spyware/etc, I think the vast acceptance and usability of Flickr, Gmail, Google maps and all the other AJAX applications show that most people aren't having problems accessing AJAX content.
That still doesn't prove that Intel didn't have a monopoly, or that they illegally tried to maintain it. Just that if all that is true, they were unsucessful at it, which is entirely possible.
Seriously? There are flaws in Microsoft code? Maybe it's news that a patch is actually going to be released but with all the problems in Windows, is this even news?
Personally, I think Cringely's talking out of his ass. Much as I'd love to be able to run.exe's from within OSX, I'm not going to hold my breath. The point though is that while Apple may have a gulf to bridge, it's a far smaller gulf than if they were starting from scratch. Having full access to the API's from 2002 and trying to work their way to 2006 is a far cry easier than starting from scratch. Also, many applications written in 2002 will still run. My copy of XP was installed in 2002 and the only times I've gotten incompatibility errors were when I tried to open a solution file in Visual Studio made with a.NET version I didn't have.
As many previous comments have pointed out, Apple does have a liscence for the entire Windows API. FTA:
Remember Steve Jobs' first days back at Apple in 1997 as Interim-CEO-for-Life? Trying to save the company, Steve got Bill Gates to invest $150 million in Apple and promise to keep Mac Office going for a few more years in exchange for a five-year patent cross-licensing agreement? The idea in everyone's mind, of course, was that Microsoft would grab lots of Apple technology, which they probably did, and it quite specifically ended an Apple patent infringement suit against Microsoft. But I'm told that the exchange wasn't totally one-way, that Apple, in turn, got some legal right to the Windows API.
That agreement ran for five years, from August, 1997 to August 2002. Even though it has since expired, the rights it conferred at the time still lie with the respective companies. Whatever Microsoft grabbed from Apple they can still use, they just aren't able to grab anything developed since August 2002. Same for Apple using Microsoft technology like that in Office X. But Windows XP shipped October 25, 2001: 10 months before the agreement expired.
I'm told Apple has long had this running in the Cupertino lab -- Intel Macs running OS X while mixing Apple and XP applications. This is not a guess or a rumor, this something that has been demonstrated and observed by people who have since reported to me.
Apparently you cannot take and publish a picture you take of certain Chicago buildings...
If there's a law against taking pictures of the buildings, why does there have to be a law against publishing pictures that it's already illegal for you to have taken?
Are you going to wait until he's here to start worrying about him? Yes it might be slighly doomsday-ish to talk about it now, but it's not hard at all to see that if we're not aware of what the consequences of some of our choices might be, we might end up in such a society. I prefer the occasional suspicion to the possible coming to pass of that world any day.
Retraining may be a problem, but there are a lot of people that have aquired a good deal of knowledge about Linux and OSS from the internet. And a government putting its weight behind training a community to use Linux would be a powerful thing. We've seen a lot of cases on Slashdot where the biggest hurdle to any new technology being adopted was political rather than technical. I think it's much easier to solve a technical problem than a political problem.
I think that's the same point. The size of the town means that there are far fewer people who need to be convinced and that it's much easier to get all those people together. All of those people are probably much more accessible than they are here in Reseda. Politicians here must field hundreds of calls per day; Anybody regular person trying to reach them with a good idea would have to go through so much red tape that they might get smothered in it before actually getting to anyone with any authority.
All that aside, I'm glad to see that in the areas where it is easier for OSS to gain some ground governments are starting to adopt it.
Slashdot Mirror
You make a good point. Most people on /. appreciate the fact that Windows is a buggy operating system with lots of vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, that's what people have come to expect because it's all they've known. Most people don't consider it a problem since they don't realize that it can be better. Linux has its own quirks (hardware support, anyone?) and people are much more likely to just stick to the quirks they know.
If this is actually the case, I think Microsoft deserves what's coming to them. The only reason they still have so much market share is because of inertia, but if they can't actually ship a product (even at the already delayed date) they deserve the mass defections that hopefully will be coming. They've dropped a ton of features, they can't ship on time, even Joe six pack will at some point realize that this isn't the company that should be in control of his computer. Like it or not, people aren't going to switch to Linux or OSS because it might be better or because open source is a better sofware development model. They're going to switch because they're having a problem. Nobody's going to go out of their way to fix a problem they don't have. Luckily for us, MS is doing a great job creating those problems.
employers have figured out that trusting somebody else's opinion of what somebody is or isn't capable of might not be the best measure of their actual abilities? Being able to pass a test on how to do something isn't the same as actually being able to do it in a work environment; it's often much more important to look at somebody's experience to see if they're capable of doing the job you want to give them. I just hope that IT companies aren't just realizing this. This fact shouldn't have to be re-learned in every industry.
I think it's pretty obvious that television is undergoing a major shift. As the article pointed out, more and more people are Tivo-ing their programs and skipping commericals, IPTV is coming up. Live commercials are really just a way of having new commercials more often, but I don't think that that will help anything. With all the new ways people are watching TV, there needs to be a new way of delivering ads. I don't know what it will be, but my money is on Google to come up with it. They already have a pretty good record when it comes to new kinds of advertising, and incorporating their ads into lots of different products, as well as making them good ads (relevant, anyway).
Wouldn't that explain the success of something that has no traditional credibility? If somebody had told you five years ago that one day one of the most popular encyclopedias on the planet would be created solely by the people who read it, would you have believed it? But here we are today, wikipedia is a household name and wildly succesful. Maybe not a full version number ahead, but definitely a major revision or two ahead.
Web 2.0: A website's value increases with the number of users creating content on it
Web 3.0: A website's value increases with the quality of the content being created
I like the whole concept of websites providing a framework where people create their own content and network, but the quality for most of these is terrible. I can only look at so many pictures of half naked drunk teenagers before I get sick of it. Hopefully the next iteration of the web will find some way to weed out the quality content (isn't that the reason we read Slashdot?) and provide more of that.
How does one get from the fact that Microsoft is planning on spending more money this year than last to the assumption that they must be going to war with Google? If this was Google, everybody would be trying to figure out what new product they were going to come out with (Goobuntu, GInternet, etc). I've got a pretty low opinion of Microsoft, but I try to stick with justifiable reasons to dislike them, not jump to the worst possible conclusion every time they do (or plan to do) something.
*Caveat: in a truly open market, quality can be determined by market share, and the closer one gets to an open market, the better an approximation one can get of the quality of the products involved.
The web server market has some real competition, making it a much more open market than the desktop OS market. I never meant to imply that the Windows monopoly made it a high quality OS. Thanks for pointing that out.
I think you're right. With Merom and Conroe just a few months away (supposedly, but I don't think they're going to pull a Microsoft) I think Intel will regain a large part of the market share they've lost. I've heard lots of good things about Merom and Conroe and nothing about any AMD plans for future products. This just points to that fact even more.
It does all depend on how you count it, but using the amount of revenue each product generates as your method of counting is the kind of thinking that leads to open source software being considered worthless. Yes the products that Microsoft's shipped have generated far more revenue, but Apache isn't even trying to compete on that level. If you must compare the two, compare them by actual quality of product, usually as determined by market share. If one program costs $10 and another costs $100 and you measure their quality by how much money each has made, you're not going to get an accurate comparison.
Step 1: Outlaw all obviously terrorist books, like 1984.
Step 2: Outlaw all books because they can all be interpreted in terroristic ways.
Step 3: Outlaw all forms of written communication because they all have letters which can be rearranged to form terrorist messages.
Stuff like this used to be funny, but now it's just scary. I wonder just how much politicians can get away with if they just say it's to fight terrorism. I wonder how long people will let them get away with all this right under their noses.
Be careful with how loosely you throw around the 1984 references. You never know when Big Brother is watching...
Why is it that every time a politician wants to get something passed that's obviously not going to be good, they do it because it 'funds terrorism'? Next thing you know politicians are going to fund some study saying that open source funds terrorism.
Oh, wait...
Hahahaha. No pink shirts in my closet. I'm not gay, I don't have a pink shirt, but being part of a community where the color of my shirt is what I'm going to get judged on doesn't appeal to me. I'd much rather be judged on how well (or poorly) I code than what I choose to wear. Besides, geeks aren't exactly on the cutting edge of fashion, anyway...
And as long as you're not pointing your guns at me (or anybody else for that matter) I don't care if you like to hunt, or go to shooting ranges, or whatever it is people with guns do.
Did that really add anything to this discussion? What's up with the homophobism? Any guy who wears a pink shirt no longer has a penis? Nor should they be able to propagate? Come on, man. I think that it's possible to make a much, much better case that anybody who's so narrow-minded that they can't see past the color of the shirt somebody chooses to wear shouldn't be allowed to propagate. Don't you think?
You make good points, but they're slightly off topic. In your original post, you made the point that you weren't willing to offload much of the processing done on the server to the clients computer. It was that point that I was refuting.
In regards to your point about it being nothing but a buzzword, so are a lot of technologies when they first come out. Does the .NET framework allow you to do anything radically different from what you could do before? No, but it makes a lot of things easier; it's a new way of using an old technology and like it or not, AJAX is moving the internet forward. People I know who would have never been involved at all otherwise now have Gmail accounts, and because they were so impressed with that, they now use Google maps, and now they've found Wikipedia (and even contributed to an article or two) and are using Google Talk and interested in VoIP and how they can use it on more than just their computer. Without the great interfaces/usability/responsiveness (the 'ooh' and 'aah') a lot of people would never care to switch, and would still be using MS Hotmail. Using these old technologies in a new way is making people switch, is showing them what new technology can do and while there are always developers who will abuse a new technology, I think it's equally bad for people to summarily refuse to use it, when it's obviously working for millions of people just because they can't see anything new about it.
I realize that because this is about websites, the dynamic changes slightly, but at some point you have to accept that technology has moved forward. There are industries where that happens much more quickly than in others (3d games come quickly come to mind, where they try and use every bit of performance they can get from all the newest cards), but it happens in all industries. While there are still people with Pentium 2's or older, how far back are you going to support? I think that any computer bought within the past 6-7 years (mine's up near that age) will have no problems doing the processing for something as low-weight as a web page. While you still have to deal with anti-virus/spyware/etc, I think the vast acceptance and usability of Flickr, Gmail, Google maps and all the other AJAX applications show that most people aren't having problems accessing AJAX content.
That still doesn't prove that Intel didn't have a monopoly, or that they illegally tried to maintain it. Just that if all that is true, they were unsucessful at it, which is entirely possible.
Seriously? There are flaws in Microsoft code? Maybe it's news that a patch is actually going to be released but with all the problems in Windows, is this even news?
Personally, I think Cringely's talking out of his ass. Much as I'd love to be able to run .exe's from within OSX, I'm not going to hold my breath. The point though is that while Apple may have a gulf to bridge, it's a far smaller gulf than if they were starting from scratch. Having full access to the API's from 2002 and trying to work their way to 2006 is a far cry easier than starting from scratch. Also, many applications written in 2002 will still run. My copy of XP was installed in 2002 and the only times I've gotten incompatibility errors were when I tried to open a solution file in Visual Studio made with a .NET version I didn't have.
As many previous comments have pointed out, Apple does have a liscence for the entire Windows API. FTA:
Remember Steve Jobs' first days back at Apple in 1997 as Interim-CEO-for-Life? Trying to save the company, Steve got Bill Gates to invest $150 million in Apple and promise to keep Mac Office going for a few more years in exchange for a five-year patent cross-licensing agreement? The idea in everyone's mind, of course, was that Microsoft would grab lots of Apple technology, which they probably did, and it quite specifically ended an Apple patent infringement suit against Microsoft. But I'm told that the exchange wasn't totally one-way, that Apple, in turn, got some legal right to the Windows API.
That agreement ran for five years, from August, 1997 to August 2002. Even though it has since expired, the rights it conferred at the time still lie with the respective companies. Whatever Microsoft grabbed from Apple they can still use, they just aren't able to grab anything developed since August 2002. Same for Apple using Microsoft technology like that in Office X. But Windows XP shipped October 25, 2001: 10 months before the agreement expired.
I'm told Apple has long had this running in the Cupertino lab -- Intel Macs running OS X while mixing Apple and XP applications. This is not a guess or a rumor, this something that has been demonstrated and observed by people who have since reported to me.
Apparently you cannot take and publish a picture you take of certain Chicago buildings...
If there's a law against taking pictures of the buildings, why does there have to be a law against publishing pictures that it's already illegal for you to have taken?
Are you going to wait until he's here to start worrying about him? Yes it might be slighly doomsday-ish to talk about it now, but it's not hard at all to see that if we're not aware of what the consequences of some of our choices might be, we might end up in such a society. I prefer the occasional suspicion to the possible coming to pass of that world any day.
Retraining may be a problem, but there are a lot of people that have aquired a good deal of knowledge about Linux and OSS from the internet. And a government putting its weight behind training a community to use Linux would be a powerful thing. We've seen a lot of cases on Slashdot where the biggest hurdle to any new technology being adopted was political rather than technical. I think it's much easier to solve a technical problem than a political problem.
I think that's the same point. The size of the town means that there are far fewer people who need to be convinced and that it's much easier to get all those people together. All of those people are probably much more accessible than they are here in Reseda. Politicians here must field hundreds of calls per day; Anybody regular person trying to reach them with a good idea would have to go through so much red tape that they might get smothered in it before actually getting to anyone with any authority. All that aside, I'm glad to see that in the areas where it is easier for OSS to gain some ground governments are starting to adopt it.