Thanks for the nugget of information. Anyway, in the 1950s climate of what-is-good-for-GM-is-good-for-America could the congress have passed a law similar to Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act? Monopoly abuse has to become an issue enough voters cared about, only then the congress will follow. For all that talk about politicians claiming to be "leaders" they are in effect followers. The good ones figure out which way the crowd is heading and get in front of them and "lead" them to wherever they were already going.
Microsoft's user base is very very large and their technical knowledge varies significantly. Most of them dont know where the OS leaves off and where the applications kick in. They dont know the difference between the browser and MS Office. They are willing to pay whatever MS demands. Under these circumstances MS can get away with anything.
Free markets and specilizations work, when large systems are broken into simpler components, the performance metrics and interface details are specified by a neutral standard that do not play favourites. Does the consumer really know the vicosity vs temperature profile of 10W-40 and 5W-40? They dont know, they dont care. The IC engine manufacturers and the lubricant oil manufacturer know it. All the rest only care about the spec name. Free market takes care of the rest and provides us with the cheapest engine oil taking advantage of all economies of scale etc.
If GM could make its cars accept only GM engine oil and keeps the spec secret and the competition out,
it will do it. But it is the consumers who would refuse to buy such cars and force GM to disclose the lubricant requirements for
its IC engines. If consumers are willing to buy such "closed" cars from GM, could the courts or the govt do anything
to change it? The can try. But they will never be able to reach the same level of efficiency the free market does.
So dont just blame MS, blame the consumers too. All the tech columnists who should be educating the public about
these things are talking fluff about the latest and greatest gadgets and widgets in trade shows. Blame them too.
Slashdotters who know these things better talk to the other consumers as though they are complete idiots, creating a backlash against nerds/geeks etc. People buy MS blindly because they are not fully informed. Not because they are
idiots willing to fork over their money to a large corporation without asking questions. Only educated consumers can break the monopoly. It is our duty to educate them without insulting them.
All analogies are a little flawed so this one par for the course. Yes, Darwin answered it broadly, Dawkings gets into the details. He explains it well.
Imagine a plant with many branches and one branch does better than others and it grows bigger. It eventually touches the ground, sprouts roots and crowds out the mother plant and siblings and continues to grow. And some of its branches mutate, adapt better and the cycle repeats. This is not a far out scenario. It is posible. Not only possible it happened. He cites many plants. I rememer the banana and the banyan tree because I thought of them as examples before he mentioned it in the book. What is wrong with this process? Why the more complex embryonic development supplant it so completely that it is quite difficult to even find examples? His explanation was that when branches mutate, survive better and crowd out the competitors, all mutations propagate. Both beneficial and deletrious mutations go forward. At some point so many deletrious mutations would have accumulated, other organisms that invested in the complex process of embryonic development wins. Much of the chapter explains how embryonic development keeps good mutations and keep out the bad mutations. Too much for me to paraphrase it here. Get the 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene.
Comparing software to organisms might be a flawed analogy. But still how many software projects just grow too big to be effectively managed with so many bugs and patches and hacks and eventually some manage somewhere says, "enough, start from the scratch, and keep only the well proven procedures, subroutines and algorithms."? That is going back to embryonic development. IMHO.
No one ever writes a new XML (and most other Web2.0) application from the scratch. They all take an app they are familiar with and modify it to do new things. And some of the initial boot-strap processes are never looked into. If it works, dont mess with it attitude is pervasive. So someone long ago may be in a galaxy far away wrote an application that replicated and mutated by developers and others took it and did more mutations and it propagated. One side effect of this and similar cut&paste code development tactics is that bugs, security holes, inefficient algorithms, brain dead implementations also propagate.
Richard Dawkins asks this very fundamental question, why reproduce (sexually or asexually) using seeds and embryos? Why not propagate by cuttings and cloning? It happens in nature. Many fern like plants do it. Bananas have been reproducing by new shoots. Then he discusses how harmful mutations too propagage and how going back to the basics and recreating the embryo selects the beneficial mutations and puts a check on deletrious mutations. Books The Selfish Gene, Climbing the Mount Improbable.
Similarly, downloading a movie and watching it on your PC is going to feel very different from renting a DVD. And speaking of Milton Berle on a 5" diameter round Dumont picture tube... a) who wants to watch movies "on their PCs?" b) Do you have your PC in the living room connected to a big screen? Does anybody you know?
Almost all the HDTVs and HD monitors in the market take in VGA input.
Many modern laptops have S-Video out.
VGA to NTSC converters are cheap. 50$ or so.
1 Mbit per sec [note bit not byte] works out to 430 Megabytes per hour. Full DVD quality video stream is 2.2 Gigabytes pers hour. So there is some compression. But still the quality would be much better than VHS or VCD or even S-VCD. BTW getting the picture on to the big screen in the living room is no big deal. Almost all the HDTVs have VGA input, PC input. Even if they dont have, S-Video out is common in many laptops. Or you can buy a 50$ adapter to convert VGA to NTSC.
The British Raj introduced similar thing in India too. They had 12 paisa making one anna and 16 annas making one rupee. After independance the anna went away and the New rupee had 100 new paisa. But still people still call the 25 paisa coin, the four anna coin and the 50 paisa coin eight anna coin, for some 40 years.
By then inflation had devalued the rupee so much that even beggars beggin outside the temples feel insulted if you throw them even a full rupee coin as alms.
[mods, save your points. Already marked off topic by myself in the subject line and I am not using my karma bonus either.]
Wait till one IITian win a Nobel. Then he/she will reveal the inner special secret hand shake to his classmates, and they will tell their juniors, and then the knowledge will spread and IITians will be winning the Nobels like gangbusters:-)
Well, MSFT had how much sales last year? 40 Billion Dollars? What is the total expenditure of all the Fortune 500 companies put together? 2 trillion dollars? MSFT is not taking big enough chunk of the companies to matter.
Some spooks were using the bird to zoom into those nude beaches and the camera got stuck, (or that is what they are telling their bosses) and so they pretend there is a communication problem.
The whole universe was just created 6000 years ago. That star 1 billion light years away is also just 6000 years old. It was created along with the stream of photons stretching all the way from here to there so that it appears to shine steadily. BTW all the dino fossils? they too was created 6000 years ago along with the Earth's crust. It will all be explained very clearly in my forthcoming book The Theory of Intelligent Shining. For advance copy, please send me 79.99$.
Re:Interoperability and market dominance
on
The Home Server Cometh
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
When people understand the issues, the free market will promote competition. For example I cant persuade many people to buy my "new and improved" light bulbs or garden hoses or car tires or radios, even if they are cheaper if this means they will forever be locked into my company. But it is possible to confuse the consumers enough to make them act against their own self interest in complex products like technology. Uninformed customers means, the feedback loop is broken and the Freemarket goes haywire. When the majority of the customers are uninformed the few making rational decisions are punished.
Of course the solution is NOT govt regulation, which will hurt more than help. I would say the proper role for the government is to just make things visible and then leave it to the customers to act in their own self interest. Like "truth in lending", "truth in advertising" laws we could demand proper disclosure of conflicts of interest of the think tanks, columnists, trade practices etc.
Interoperability and market dominance
on
The Home Server Cometh
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What the consumer wants is full interoperability so that there is competition. I might buy an iPod today and a Zune tomorrow. I want to be able to port my music or video or whatever without being locked into a particular vendor. But the tech companies want to carve the market into multiple walled gardens. Theoretically free market should react and break it up. But free market depends on customers being informed and making rational decisions. In the tech world, a huge majority of the customers are not well informed. So all the fuddged studies like TCO, columnists paid and bought out by money or laptops or praise will continue to confuse the customers. And DRM and patent lawsuits will proliferate. And it will be business as usual.
Is it accurate enough to print contact lenses?
Is the material safe enough to be put in the eye?
I wear RGP lenses and would really like to program the printer to print a fresh
set of lenses every day.
Users want software to be psychic and do what they mean not what they say.
Programmers write robots that do what they say. There in lies the fundamental problem.
They say they want everything to be as simple as a toaster. But they also want their toasters to toast bagles, and control the browning and they sometimes toast twenty batches of toasts in a row, and sometimes only one single piece of bread and they want the toasting to be as fast as possible too. They would also like the toasters to make coffee and open the garage doors. But it all should be as simple as a toaster.
Run ads making fun of spreadsheeting, budgeting and other IT tasks and promote the ability to do video, photo and music. Then go the IT shops and try to sell a brand identified photo video and music to do spreadsheets and budgeting. Wow! Apple's strategy is not comprehendable to mere humans like us.
Look at all the DRMs it is pushing in iPod. Look at how they stymie interoperability. Look how cavalierly they ignore all my settings and repeatedly install iPodhelper and other junk in the start up tray. Look how aggressively they try to associate Apple executables with every damn file type there is.
Make no mistake, Apple is just a Microsoft wannabe that failed miserably to be Microsoft.
Went through scholar.google.com and found a 1997 abstract that claims that OO Cobol has been in developement since 1989. So it has been tried for a long time. But Cobol coders dont exactly take to OO like fish to water.
Way back in 1990, I had a friend who was a Grad Teaching Assistant in a business school. He was joking about how easy it is to get papers published by putting together buzzwords. He said, "If I say Object Oriented Cobol in the title, I can get it published". The next day he said, "too late, some one has already published a paper on OO COBOL". The idea is that old. For what it is worth, google finds:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22object+ori ented+cobol%22&btnG=Google+Search
Well, I like my pasta primevera on heated plates but I am not so sure I would put 37 TB of my data on platters that get heated repeatedly, till some independant testing shows the durability of the data.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the nugget of information. Anyway, in the 1950s climate of what-is-good-for-GM-is-good-for-America could the congress have passed a law similar to Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act? Monopoly abuse has to become an issue enough voters cared about, only then the congress will follow. For all that talk about politicians claiming to be "leaders" they are in effect followers. The good ones figure out which way the crowd is heading and get in front of them and "lead" them to wherever they were already going.
Free markets and specilizations work, when large systems are broken into simpler components, the performance metrics and interface details are specified by a neutral standard that do not play favourites. Does the consumer really know the vicosity vs temperature profile of 10W-40 and 5W-40? They dont know, they dont care. The IC engine manufacturers and the lubricant oil manufacturer know it. All the rest only care about the spec name. Free market takes care of the rest and provides us with the cheapest engine oil taking advantage of all economies of scale etc.
If GM could make its cars accept only GM engine oil and keeps the spec secret and the competition out, it will do it. But it is the consumers who would refuse to buy such cars and force GM to disclose the lubricant requirements for its IC engines. If consumers are willing to buy such "closed" cars from GM, could the courts or the govt do anything to change it? The can try. But they will never be able to reach the same level of efficiency the free market does.
So dont just blame MS, blame the consumers too. All the tech columnists who should be educating the public about these things are talking fluff about the latest and greatest gadgets and widgets in trade shows. Blame them too. Slashdotters who know these things better talk to the other consumers as though they are complete idiots, creating a backlash against nerds/geeks etc. People buy MS blindly because they are not fully informed. Not because they are idiots willing to fork over their money to a large corporation without asking questions. Only educated consumers can break the monopoly. It is our duty to educate them without insulting them.
Imagine a plant with many branches and one branch does better than others and it grows bigger. It eventually touches the ground, sprouts roots and crowds out the mother plant and siblings and continues to grow. And some of its branches mutate, adapt better and the cycle repeats. This is not a far out scenario. It is posible. Not only possible it happened. He cites many plants. I rememer the banana and the banyan tree because I thought of them as examples before he mentioned it in the book. What is wrong with this process? Why the more complex embryonic development supplant it so completely that it is quite difficult to even find examples? His explanation was that when branches mutate, survive better and crowd out the competitors, all mutations propagate. Both beneficial and deletrious mutations go forward. At some point so many deletrious mutations would have accumulated, other organisms that invested in the complex process of embryonic development wins. Much of the chapter explains how embryonic development keeps good mutations and keep out the bad mutations. Too much for me to paraphrase it here. Get the 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene.
Comparing software to organisms might be a flawed analogy. But still how many software projects just grow too big to be effectively managed with so many bugs and patches and hacks and eventually some manage somewhere says, "enough, start from the scratch, and keep only the well proven procedures, subroutines and algorithms."? That is going back to embryonic development. IMHO.
Well, Der Reichmarshall assures me that I have nothing to fear if I have nothing to hide. [Clicks the heels, salutes and leaves]
Richard Dawkins asks this very fundamental question, why reproduce (sexually or asexually) using seeds and embryos? Why not propagate by cuttings and cloning? It happens in nature. Many fern like plants do it. Bananas have been reproducing by new shoots. Then he discusses how harmful mutations too propagage and how going back to the basics and recreating the embryo selects the beneficial mutations and puts a check on deletrious mutations. Books The Selfish Gene, Climbing the Mount Improbable.
... if you have nothing to hide. Right?
Similarly, downloading a movie and watching it on your PC is going to feel very different from renting a DVD. And speaking of Milton Berle on a 5" diameter round Dumont picture tube... a) who wants to watch movies "on their PCs?" b) Do you have your PC in the living room connected to a big screen? Does anybody you know?
Almost all the HDTVs and HD monitors in the market take in VGA input. Many modern laptops have S-Video out. VGA to NTSC converters are cheap. 50$ or so.
1 Mbit per sec [note bit not byte] works out to 430 Megabytes per hour. Full DVD quality video stream is 2.2 Gigabytes pers hour. So there is some compression. But still the quality would be much better than VHS or VCD or even S-VCD. BTW getting the picture on to the big screen in the living room is no big deal. Almost all the HDTVs have VGA input, PC input. Even if they dont have, S-Video out is common in many laptops. Or you can buy a 50$ adapter to convert VGA to NTSC.
By then inflation had devalued the rupee so much that even beggars beggin outside the temples feel insulted if you throw them even a full rupee coin as alms.
[mods, save your points. Already marked off topic by myself in the subject line and I am not using my karma bonus either.]
... the government kills the competition.
Wait till one IITian win a Nobel. Then he/she will reveal the inner special secret hand shake to his classmates, and they will tell their juniors, and then the knowledge will spread and IITians will be winning the Nobels like gangbusters :-)
Well, MSFT had how much sales last year? 40 Billion Dollars? What is the total expenditure of all the Fortune 500 companies put together? 2 trillion dollars? MSFT is not taking big enough chunk of the companies to matter.
Am very disappointed. There is no "in soviet russia the motherboard .... you" post.
Some spooks were using the bird to zoom into those nude beaches and the camera got stuck, (or that is what they are telling their bosses) and so they pretend there is a communication problem.
The whole universe was just created 6000 years ago. That star 1 billion light years away is also just 6000 years old. It was created along with the stream of photons stretching all the way from here to there so that it appears to shine steadily. BTW all the dino fossils? they too was created 6000 years ago along with the Earth's crust. It will all be explained very clearly in my forthcoming book The Theory of Intelligent Shining. For advance copy, please send me 79.99$.
Thomas? Ginsberg? Kennedy?
Of course the solution is NOT govt regulation, which will hurt more than help. I would say the proper role for the government is to just make things visible and then leave it to the customers to act in their own self interest. Like "truth in lending", "truth in advertising" laws we could demand proper disclosure of conflicts of interest of the think tanks, columnists, trade practices etc.
What the consumer wants is full interoperability so that there is competition. I might buy an iPod today and a Zune tomorrow. I want to be able to port my music or video or whatever without being locked into a particular vendor. But the tech companies want to carve the market into multiple walled gardens. Theoretically free market should react and break it up. But free market depends on customers being informed and making rational decisions. In the tech world, a huge majority of the customers are not well informed. So all the fuddged studies like TCO, columnists paid and bought out by money or laptops or praise will continue to confuse the customers. And DRM and patent lawsuits will proliferate. And it will be business as usual.
Is it accurate enough to print contact lenses? Is the material safe enough to be put in the eye? I wear RGP lenses and would really like to program the printer to print a fresh set of lenses every day.
Programmers write robots that do what they say. There in lies the fundamental problem.
They say they want everything to be as simple as a toaster. But they also want their toasters to toast bagles, and control the browning and they sometimes toast twenty batches of toasts in a row, and sometimes only one single piece of bread and they want the toasting to be as fast as possible too. They would also like the toasters to make coffee and open the garage doors. But it all should be as simple as a toaster.
iTunes in windows does this.
Look at all the DRMs it is pushing in iPod. Look at how they stymie interoperability. Look how cavalierly they ignore all my settings and repeatedly install iPodhelper and other junk in the start up tray. Look how aggressively they try to associate Apple executables with every damn file type there is. Make no mistake, Apple is just a Microsoft wannabe that failed miserably to be Microsoft.
Went through scholar.google.com and found a 1997 abstract that claims that OO Cobol has been in developement since 1989. So it has been tried for a long time. But Cobol coders dont exactly take to OO like fish to water.
Way back in 1990, I had a friend who was a Grad Teaching Assistant in a business school. He was joking about how easy it is to get papers published by putting together buzzwords. He said, "If I say Object Oriented Cobol in the title, I can get it published". The next day he said, "too late, some one has already published a paper on OO COBOL". The idea is that old. For what it is worth, google finds: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22object+ori ented+cobol%22&btnG=Google+Search
Well, I like my pasta primevera on heated plates but I am not so sure I would put 37 TB of my data on platters that get heated repeatedly, till some independant testing shows the durability of the data.