That's completely true. But that actually is more of a problem with the entire model around selling and developing software than a problem specific to Microsoft. Photoshop for example has been "complete" for years. I hope for Adobe they have a list of "killer features" in a drawer somewhere so they can include one in every new release and hope to sell some copies, but in reality the software is simply finished. Which makes a lot of sense after 20+ years of development.
Software-as-a-service is where the money is in the long term. But unluckily for Microsoft that mostly means web applications right now. And they don't care if you run them on Windows or not. Microsoft doesn't want to do business in that world, so they simply try to keep the "sell a new version of the same old stuff every X years"-boat afloat for as long as they can.
Don't forget the web though. Native software is becoming less relevant each passing year as more and more functionality is moved over to web applications and "the cloud". Google amongst others is pushing this as hard as they can and Chromebooks are a good example of how far this development already is. Lots of people have a computer just to use the web. That's also one of the reasons why tablets are such a success. It has much less to do with being a big version of your phone and much more with the fact tablets are a viable laptop-replacement because they offer a more convenient way for using the web.
Maybe Steve Jobs was right. From his appearance at D8 in 2010: "PCs are going to be like trucks," Jobs said. "They are still going to be around." However, he said, only "one out of x people will need them."
In this future "PCs are like trucks"-world, Windows might never be replaced. But the majority of the people wont be using it all the time either.
There really is no reason why this feature should be Silverlight-only. Javascript can just as easily measure where you currenly are in a video, compare that to where you should have been and adjust the source of the stream to a lower bitrate version if you lag behind. Upgrading your stream might require an algorithm which is a bit more sophisticated, but there is no reason why it couldn't be done as well.
The 15% drop in PC-sales last quarter, that's the numbers they are talking about.
But the real numbers are of course that 92% of desktop users world wide are using Windows. Hell, they could lose almost half their users and they still wouldn't be over.
The sad truth is that html5 is failing to take off.
HTML5 failing to take off? What? Who the hell starts a web project and *doesn't* do it in HTML5? And that's been the case for at least a year now. Whether it's an official standard or not makes no difference, the reality is that all current and previous versions of all major browsers do HTML5 and devs know this and use this to their advantage.
HTML5 may not be the best thing since sliced bread and it doesn't solve all of the problems in the world, but it is being used and not by a small amount either.
Maybe you're confusing HTML5 with Windows 8? Because only then your statement would make any sense.
The absolute minimum a developer needs to know in order to create a web application these days is: HTML, CSS, Javascript, some programming language on the server (e.g. PHP, Java, Python) and something to store stuff on the server (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, CouchDB, MongoDB). It's also nice if the developer knows how his webserver works. At the very least he should know how.htaccess files work so he can configure his web application to work the way he wants. Then there is not really necessary but certainly useful stuff to add like an Ajax library (jQuery, YUI, Dojo etc.) and a CSS preprocessor (SASS/SCSS). And there is a bunch of other useful stuff that doesn't really require any training, but they are beneficial to the development of your project like normalize.css, modernizr and html5shiv. These things help to make your web app cross browser compatible and make sure they sorta work with old (but not too old) IE's as well. And because this is already a lot of stuff and you dont need to invent the wheel for the millionth time, it may be nice to wrap both your clientside and serverside code into a framework. This also helps to prevent things from getting too messed up as the project grows. For the clientside the choice is relatively limited as Javascript is the only language available. A selection of different frameworks for review is available here: http://javascriptmvc.com/ For the serverside you pick a framework based on your language. Or you pick a language based on the framework you choose. Its up to you.
So no, we dont need yet another language on top of all this, thank you very much.
It is indeed very sad. Prism was a great tool to package web applications in a cross-platform and distributable way. I don't get why we used to have something like that and now we don't.
If Mac or your favorite flavor of Linux don't have a "guest account" feature, then just make an account named "guest" that doesn't have admin access.
Mac OS X has a guest account built-in which has no admin rights and resets itself to the default state after logging out. You don't even have to log out yourself to use the guest account, as multiple accounts can be logged in simultaneously.
If I somehow could go back a year and tell my past self that in 2013 Opera would be using WebKit, but Chrome would be using something else I would not have believed it. Yet, here we are. It's bizarro world.
All I've seen are the cases where he says that supernatural stuff can't exist.
Dude, you're trolling and it ain't funny. He explicitly says the exact opposite, that he *can't* prove supernatural stuff isn't real. That's why there's the test and the prize.
From the interview:
I have dedicated my existence for what that’s worth to explaining to people when they ask or if they have any curiosity in that regard as to whether or not these things are genuine. And my conclusion so far has been, and as I say, I’m 85, that is a long time, a lot of experience in this field, I have never found any so-called paranormal event or ability or performance to be the real thing.
That doesn’t mean there won’t. I can’t prove a negative. [...] But to prove there is no God, that there is no telepathy, there is no ESP, there are no clairvoyant powers, or whatever is impossible to prove that there aren’t. So we offer our $1 billion prize which has been on offer for quite some years now. We offer that prize for evidence that there is such a thing, because we are not claiming there isn’t. We merely say if you say there is, establish the proof for it.
He says "I don't know" all the time. He also explicitly doesn't say he knows supernatural stuff doesn't exist. He just asks that if you say you have a supernatural ability, you have to be able to prove it. Many have tried, but so far nobody has ever been able to do so.
You claim the interview is "too long" to post in one go, so you cut in half (it's not even half an hour, but ok). Yet you didn't use these cutting abilities to edit out the bit where Randi had to go turn off his TV in the other room, making us watch at his empty chair for over a minute.
I just read on Wikipedia the original 5V Pentium 66 MHz had a TDP of 16W. Lol, that's crazy for a chip running at such a low clock speed. There are modern Ivy Bridge Mobile i5's running at 2 GHz with lower power consumption than an original Pentium.
I don't think that was every officially released. I remember 60 and 66 MHz were the original clock speeds, with 75 MHz and 90 MHz added not much later.
The Pentium MMX was really popular with gamers. I actually skipped the Pentium II because AMD's K6 was imho a much better deal. I only switched back to Intel when the Pentium III came out.
This article has some original iComp benchmark scores, rating the 66MHz Pentium at a heady 565, compared with 297 for the 66MHz 486DX2, which was the fastest chip available prior to the Pentium launch.
I'm amazed by these scores. I remember having a fairly fast 486 DX4 @ ~100 MHz (probably by Cyrix or AMD perhaps) at the time the Pentiums started to become popular. I got the impression that a Pentium 66 or 75 would actually be a downgrade for me, but maybe that hadn't been the case.
I eventually switched when the Pentium Overdrive came out, so I could keep my 486 mainboard but still have a faster Pentium chip in my machine. That was a pretty sweet deal.
I can't believe this is all 20 years ago, it feels like only yesterday.
Wow, to me that seems completely backwards. I never cared for the Mac until they released OS X. An operating system based on Unix with a usable desktop environment and actual support from commercial 3rd party applications seemed like a really interesting thing to me, so I got my first Mac in 2004 and never looked back. I absolutely love the fact I can both use a sane terminal and run Photoshop, both completely native.
I do worry a bit about the move towards more iOS-like elements, but as it seems both Linux and Windows are equally struggling to find their way, I'll stick with the Mac for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
That's completely true. But that actually is more of a problem with the entire model around selling and developing software than a problem specific to Microsoft. Photoshop for example has been "complete" for years. I hope for Adobe they have a list of "killer features" in a drawer somewhere so they can include one in every new release and hope to sell some copies, but in reality the software is simply finished. Which makes a lot of sense after 20+ years of development.
Software-as-a-service is where the money is in the long term. But unluckily for Microsoft that mostly means web applications right now. And they don't care if you run them on Windows or not. Microsoft doesn't want to do business in that world, so they simply try to keep the "sell a new version of the same old stuff every X years"-boat afloat for as long as they can.
Don't forget the web though. Native software is becoming less relevant each passing year as more and more functionality is moved over to web applications and "the cloud". Google amongst others is pushing this as hard as they can and Chromebooks are a good example of how far this development already is. Lots of people have a computer just to use the web. That's also one of the reasons why tablets are such a success. It has much less to do with being a big version of your phone and much more with the fact tablets are a viable laptop-replacement because they offer a more convenient way for using the web.
Maybe Steve Jobs was right. From his appearance at D8 in 2010: "PCs are going to be like trucks," Jobs said. "They are still going to be around." However, he said, only "one out of x people will need them."
In this future "PCs are like trucks"-world, Windows might never be replaced. But the majority of the people wont be using it all the time either.
There really is no reason why this feature should be Silverlight-only. Javascript can just as easily measure where you currenly are in a video, compare that to where you should have been and adjust the source of the stream to a lower bitrate version if you lag behind. Upgrading your stream might require an algorithm which is a bit more sophisticated, but there is no reason why it couldn't be done as well.
Do you seriously think the number of people using Photoshop and/or Premiere is at all relevant to the entire PC-market?
The 15% drop in PC-sales last quarter, that's the numbers they are talking about.
But the real numbers are of course that 92% of desktop users world wide are using Windows. Hell, they could lose almost half their users and they still wouldn't be over.
Windows is like Facebook: users are fed up with it, but since there is no viable alternative, they stick around.
The second something does come up that looks like it could be "the next big thing" it will be, because users are ready to switch anyway.
The sad truth is that html5 is failing to take off.
HTML5 failing to take off? What? Who the hell starts a web project and *doesn't* do it in HTML5? And that's been the case for at least a year now. Whether it's an official standard or not makes no difference, the reality is that all current and previous versions of all major browsers do HTML5 and devs know this and use this to their advantage.
HTML5 may not be the best thing since sliced bread and it doesn't solve all of the problems in the world, but it is being used and not by a small amount either.
Maybe you're confusing HTML5 with Windows 8? Because only then your statement would make any sense.
That's a creative use of the phrase "works fine".
The absolute minimum a developer needs to know in order to create a web application these days is: HTML, CSS, Javascript, some programming language on the server (e.g. PHP, Java, Python) and something to store stuff on the server (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, CouchDB, MongoDB). It's also nice if the developer knows how his webserver works. At the very least he should know how .htaccess files work so he can configure his web application to work the way he wants.
Then there is not really necessary but certainly useful stuff to add like an Ajax library (jQuery, YUI, Dojo etc.) and a CSS preprocessor (SASS/SCSS). And there is a bunch of other useful stuff that doesn't really require any training, but they are beneficial to the development of your project like normalize.css, modernizr and html5shiv. These things help to make your web app cross browser compatible and make sure they sorta work with old (but not too old) IE's as well.
And because this is already a lot of stuff and you dont need to invent the wheel for the millionth time, it may be nice to wrap both your clientside and serverside code into a framework. This also helps to prevent things from getting too messed up as the project grows.
For the clientside the choice is relatively limited as Javascript is the only language available. A selection of different frameworks for review is available here: http://javascriptmvc.com/
For the serverside you pick a framework based on your language. Or you pick a language based on the framework you choose. Its up to you.
So no, we dont need yet another language on top of all this, thank you very much.
Its not the same. Chromium's solution is much more of a hassle than what Prism used to offer.
It is indeed very sad. Prism was a great tool to package web applications in a cross-platform and distributable way. I don't get why we used to have something like that and now we don't.
If Mac or your favorite flavor of Linux don't have a "guest account" feature, then just make an account named "guest" that doesn't have admin access.
Mac OS X has a guest account built-in which has no admin rights and resets itself to the default state after logging out. You don't even have to log out yourself to use the guest account, as multiple accounts can be logged in simultaneously.
If I somehow could go back a year and tell my past self that in 2013 Opera would be using WebKit, but Chrome would be using something else I would not have believed it. Yet, here we are. It's bizarro world.
The Chromebook is a threat to everything
I'm a web developer. How is a world where every computer is basically a machine running a browser bad for me?
All I've seen are the cases where he says that supernatural stuff can't exist.
Dude, you're trolling and it ain't funny. He explicitly says the exact opposite, that he *can't* prove supernatural stuff isn't real. That's why there's the test and the prize.
From the interview:
I have dedicated my existence for what that’s worth to explaining to people when they ask or if they have any curiosity in that regard as to whether or not these things are genuine. And my conclusion so far has been, and as I say, I’m 85, that is a long time, a lot of experience in this field, I have never found any so-called paranormal event or ability or performance to be the real thing.
That doesn’t mean there won’t. I can’t prove a negative. [...] But to prove there is no God, that there is no telepathy, there is no ESP, there are no clairvoyant powers, or whatever is impossible to prove that there aren’t. So we offer our $1 billion prize which has been on offer for quite some years now. We offer that prize for evidence that there is such a thing, because we are not claiming there isn’t. We merely say if you say there is, establish the proof for it.
He says "I don't know" all the time. He also explicitly doesn't say he knows supernatural stuff doesn't exist. He just asks that if you say you have a supernatural ability, you have to be able to prove it. Many have tried, but so far nobody has ever been able to do so.
You claim the interview is "too long" to post in one go, so you cut in half (it's not even half an hour, but ok). Yet you didn't use these cutting abilities to edit out the bit where Randi had to go turn off his TV in the other room, making us watch at his empty chair for over a minute.
I just read on Wikipedia the original 5V Pentium 66 MHz had a TDP of 16W. Lol, that's crazy for a chip running at such a low clock speed. There are modern Ivy Bridge Mobile i5's running at 2 GHz with lower power consumption than an original Pentium.
I don't think that was every officially released. I remember 60 and 66 MHz were the original clock speeds, with 75 MHz and 90 MHz added not much later.
My dad had a 486 SX while I had a mere 386... but it was a DX running at 40 MHz, so it was actually better for playing Doom! Muahahaha.
The Pentium MMX was really popular with gamers. I actually skipped the Pentium II because AMD's K6 was imho a much better deal. I only switched back to Intel when the Pentium III came out.
This article has some original iComp benchmark scores, rating the 66MHz Pentium at a heady 565, compared with 297 for the 66MHz 486DX2, which was the fastest chip available prior to the Pentium launch.
I'm amazed by these scores. I remember having a fairly fast 486 DX4 @ ~100 MHz (probably by Cyrix or AMD perhaps) at the time the Pentiums started to become popular. I got the impression that a Pentium 66 or 75 would actually be a downgrade for me, but maybe that hadn't been the case.
I eventually switched when the Pentium Overdrive came out, so I could keep my 486 mainboard but still have a faster Pentium chip in my machine. That was a pretty sweet deal.
I can't believe this is all 20 years ago, it feels like only yesterday.
I love how you just casually move from talking about the highly educated and rich to talking about yourself.
Wow, to me that seems completely backwards. I never cared for the Mac until they released OS X. An operating system based on Unix with a usable desktop environment and actual support from commercial 3rd party applications seemed like a really interesting thing to me, so I got my first Mac in 2004 and never looked back. I absolutely love the fact I can both use a sane terminal and run Photoshop, both completely native.
I do worry a bit about the move towards more iOS-like elements, but as it seems both Linux and Windows are equally struggling to find their way, I'll stick with the Mac for a while.
I'm happy to see such problems are taken seriously instead of dismissed as paranoia.