But the much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future
Microsoft never really innovated per se; they mostly marketed and promoted lesser-known technologies (CP/M as DOS, OS/2 as Windows) and tweaked them heavily to make them business-friendly. Gates, Ballmer and crew got ridiculously lucky too, but that's another story (which predates me anyway).
Good riddance if it fails.
Not quite. Imagine if Apple came to the forefront. We'd all have to be running THEIR hardware and be completely subservient to their business model, which is secretive and limiting at best. Perhaps Apple would be even more draconian with competition out of the picture. At least I can install Windows on any PC and expect it to work; can't say the same for OS X (and don't count Hackintoshes either; they aren't supported!).
It employs thousands of the smartest, most capable engineers in the world. More than any other firm, it made using computers both ubiquitous and affordable...Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason.
Same story for IBM, Intel et al. They each have a market which they completely dominate in (IBM in the mainframe and support space; Intel in the microprocessor space). At that point, they don't need to innovate unless they really want to...and if times get really tough and enough loopholes exist, those companies can buy out their competition (Microsoft/IBM) or steamroll them (Intel vs AMD).
While Apple continues to gain market share in many products, Microsoft has lost share in Web browsers, high-end laptops and smartphones.
But the key thing to keep in mind is that Microsoft's bread and butter isn't in the consumer space. Like IBM, Microsoft stays afloat by marketing mostly to the business sector, who not only has (much) more money to give, but is also much more resistant to change. In fact, Microsoft spends TONS and TONS of money figuring out how to best cater their business customers by running all sorts of research, field tests and such. (A good example of this is the Ribbon interface in Office 2007, which was the result of an academic study looking to figure out how people doing work interface with GUIs best.)
Special attention should also be placed on Apple's main consumers. Where is one more likely to see iPhones and Macbooks: at a posh cafe in New York City or in a farm in Tulsa, OK? I'll make the postulation that the core of Apple's audience is young folk who want something simple, svelte and integral to their lifestyles. While there are certainly diehards and fanboys, many of those folks will jump to the "next big thing" just like they did from PCs to Macs (or regular smartphones to iPhones or whatever) just because it's big and happening. Sure, there are lots of youths in the US, but their buying power is unmatched to even a few of the top (or middle) companies on the Fortune 100.
The article is an interesting read, but I think the author misses the business motive behind today's Microsoft. Back when Microsoft started (which, again, predates me), computers were constantly innovating. I'd even argue that computers were still innovations at that point, since Microsoft gained popularity at a time when computers were just starting to move from the mainframe room to the security's desk. I think the biggest mistake that Microsoft made was not paying enough attention to the importance of the Internet over the last few years. Sure, they'll be coming out with Office 2010 and Office web apps, and they already came out with Bing, but they are still playing catch up when they could've taken this space by storm years ago...
Okay, I kid; this idea really sucks. I'm sure others here have picked up on this, but from just pondering it for thirty seconds:
1) (An aside) The headline is quite misleading; for a moment, I thought the article suggested porting physical driving licenses to an online medium, which isn't that good or that useful of an idea
2) What will this theoretical license allow and disallow? Would I have my internet account revoked because I forgot to sign up for a license? What would provoke such action?
3) This license would need physically-identifiable information, which probably means a social security number. Forget bank account hacking; this will be where the money's at. Which leads to...
4) Where would such a license be stored? If it's local, what happens when I wipe my PC? Can I re-download it from "the cloud?" And what happens if my license were stolen from "the cloud?"
5) How would this be enforced anyway? What if I'm connecting via tor or an anonymizing proxy?
I'm sure these questions can get addressed with enough thought, but I really hope this doesn't grow beyond that point.
Time flies when having fun, and as one gets older, one is allowed to do more fun things. People also get more responsibility as they age, so more responibilities = less time. That's my thesis; I think it's pretty good!
I think so, though one should know thy enemies before starting a fight. If the dude is a gangster and can get 20 guys in front of your house...then that's a problem!
Like the others here, my bullies stopped harrassing me after I went after them. I got my head knocked in, but at least I got my point across.
Let me extend on this with a brief experience of mine that drives this point really, really well. I was a really active debater during my high school years. (Not sure if it's there anymore, but I loved it!). Now, considering that most people I meet nowadays automatically relegate debate as a nerdy activity, one would (correctly) assume that the community attracts a pretty niche crowd. There were all kinds of people: liberals, hippies, scientists, philosophers, etc.. We had some slower folks, but they usually went by the wayside. Nonetheless, almost all of us had a really strong commonality: we were all geeks.
Many of us were tossed around and bullied during middle and/or high school, so the debate community insulated us from that somewhat. We could be weird and quirky, but still have fun being ourselves. However, there were always the elite folks. These were the creme de la creme: some of whom were the best debaters in the country. They formed their own cliques of greatness and practically shunned everyone "beneath" them. I've had people in my own team toss the less accomplished around in amusement, and I've even been harrassed by my own partners many times. I still loved debating, but that made it especially hard.
On top of that, getting bullied by smart people is, in some ways, worse than getting bullied by "brutes" because their methods of bullying people are usually more harmful and more subtle, thus being easier to let slide.
I don't see any discussion here about actually writing on the iPad, nor did I see any mention of it in the WWDC presentation. Since the screen is capacitive, is there any possibility that it can be used as a decent notepad?
Honestly, considering the fact that "old school" tablets tout native pen support as a HUGE feature, I would be pretty disappointed if the iPad doesn't support it. However, Apple has the tendency to add significant features later in the product's lifecycle, so it might be a more viable purchase after a few updates. I'm also sure that there will be hackers out there who will be able to get OS X on it somehow, though I'm even more sure that Apple engineers thoroughly accounted for (and attempted to remove) that possibility.
I, for one, also think that the iPad will steamroll the netbook/eBook market in the months/years to come. If previous history is an indicator of anything, this will become THE device in about a year or two. Especially if people can write on it; imagine being able to actually UNDERLINE and write stuff in eBooks!
Does this matter? In my mind, no way. I can think of only one place NT 4.0 skills might be valuable today, and it involves embedded systems with no typical Windows user interface. (The New York subway system uses NT 4 for their fare collection machines.)
I don't think that's correct; last time I saw maintenance being done on them, they were running Windows 2000. PATHVISION for the PATH subway system was, however, running NT 4.0 until they integrated NBCi into it; it now runs Windows XP. Even their card readers run XPe (based off a blue screen I saw).
Please visit the OSx86project wiki page to have those questions answered. I'll tell you off the bat that you will have to patch the kernel, which already puts you at risk for a world of hurt if your other components don't play nicely either.
I second this. It's an especially bad idea when frustrated, as anger easily makes one unfocused on anything but the problem. I've had a few near-hits because of this, and I'm a pretty good driver.
Heck, with the amount of capabilities phones are having nowadays (and the increasing prevalence of unlimited text/minute bundles), even walking while using the cell phone is dangerous. I've lost count of the amount of time I've almost ran into someone or something simply because I wasn't looking up.
It's kind of common sense that having plugins with various amounts of access to their installed browser(s) can compromise its entire security model. For the Slashdot crowd, it's kind of like having an aftermarket ECU on an auto's engine which, if programmed incorrectly, can cause great harm to it.
Additionally, I think browser wars are quite insipid the amount of variety we have now. Most of the browser is in its renderer, and the pros and cons of each kind is public information. Furthermore, the pros and cons of the browsers that constitute the heaping majority of the market (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome) are also fairly well-known (i.e. one wouldn't put Safari on Windows because its performance is known to be subpar, and a user with more rigid browsing habits won't use IE given the amount of malicious attention it gets). If there was one unanimously labelled "BEST" browser, everyone would be using it.
Though that routine is pretty humorous (and was, as others mentioned, performed by George Carlin), I don't really agree with it. PTSD is a very broad and wide-ranging disorder; calling it "shell shock" is a disservice to those who inherited the condition through other equally-traumatic means (rape, death of a close friend, accident, etc).
Linux, which is at the core of Red Hat’s software strategy, has never been a huge success on the desktop, and especially not on the business desktop. Red Hat officials have shrewdly maintained that desktop Linux is not a core focus for the company, but that virtualization and the facilitation of desktop and cloud operating systems applications are.
As I know this will become a polarizing statement on this thread, let me try (try being the key word) to neutralize this quote.
Red Hat is not implying here that desktop Linux is a failure (like it's subpoint headline apparently does). They are stating two important truths: (a) that Linux on the desktop has not taken off as much as some pundits have been forecasting for a while, and (b) that this goal is not part of their overall focus and won't be for some time.
I don't agree entirely with this viewpoint, since Ubuntu and netbook-provided distributions have contributed to its significant increase in consumer presence. Regardless, Linux on the server is where it's at, and where Red Hat has had huge control over for quite some time. Thus, it's no surprise that they are flourishing at the moment, despite the current economic situation.
There are a few things here that might be problematic:
It's $2,300 for a cruiser bike. With that amount of money, one could buy a much nicer looking road or mountain bike or just save it for transportation costs, since it may not save them that much.
The cheaper models have to worry about being really, REALLY heavy.
A lot of folks buying bicycles are thinking of the price points being at Wal-Mart prices, and is part of the reason why a lot of people just buy used bikes on Craigslist (at least here in NYC, which is a bike commuter-heavy city).
These bikes are not new, though I haven't seen a lot of bike shops push these. They are super fun to pace though; 450W on a flat road means a pretty high pace to follow...:-)
It's pretty easy for applications that don't have any anti-piracy measures in place, but applications that do, like BeeJive, find and, subsequently, lock out any apps that are detected to have been pirated. Thus, cracking some more popular applications is kind of a moving target. Additionally, one has to install some extra background application that disables the signing check that allows these pirated apps to install.
Lastly, finding a pirated app can be a bitch sometimes. From my experience, it usually consists of finding a cracked version (which is pretty risky, since it's the express route to getting your phone hacked), substituting the real version with the cracked one and hoping it will run after that. Considering the difficulty I had in finding a cracked version of a relatively popular jailbroken application, I highly doubt that pirating is popular.
Just find a college student and get the collegiate discount. $49 per license. What I miss is having Volume Licensing for MSDN Academic Alliance subscribers. That shit was the shit.
I sort of agree with this. Finding the actual network devices takes a little more time, and configuring the Firewall looks horrendously intimidating at first, but is easy to do after peering through it a little bit. Most of the other networking tasks are either the same as they were on XP (namely, IP/DNS/WINS [?] configuration, etc.), others are even easier (like connecting to a wireless network).
A minor nitpick: The complaint here is that Nexus One owners are experiencing spotty 3G coverage on their phones. Since none of the iPhones support T-Mobile's 3G band, none of them would have this problem.
A company can promise lots of things. Most companies hope that people forget those promises. The real question is whether they'll follow through or not.
Slashdot Mirror
So...
But the much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future
Microsoft never really innovated per se; they mostly marketed and promoted lesser-known technologies (CP/M as DOS, OS/2 as Windows) and tweaked them heavily to make them business-friendly. Gates, Ballmer and crew got ridiculously lucky too, but that's another story (which predates me anyway).
Good riddance if it fails.
Not quite. Imagine if Apple came to the forefront. We'd all have to be running THEIR hardware and be completely subservient to their business model, which is secretive and limiting at best. Perhaps Apple would be even more draconian with competition out of the picture. At least I can install Windows on any PC and expect it to work; can't say the same for OS X (and don't count Hackintoshes either; they aren't supported!).
It employs thousands of the smartest, most capable engineers in the world. More than any other firm, it made using computers both ubiquitous and affordable...Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason.
Same story for IBM, Intel et al. They each have a market which they completely dominate in (IBM in the mainframe and support space; Intel in the microprocessor space). At that point, they don't need to innovate unless they really want to...and if times get really tough and enough loopholes exist, those companies can buy out their competition (Microsoft/IBM) or steamroll them (Intel vs AMD).
While Apple continues to gain market share in many products, Microsoft has lost share in Web browsers, high-end laptops and smartphones.
But the key thing to keep in mind is that Microsoft's bread and butter isn't in the consumer space. Like IBM, Microsoft stays afloat by marketing mostly to the business sector, who not only has (much) more money to give, but is also much more resistant to change. In fact, Microsoft spends TONS and TONS of money figuring out how to best cater their business customers by running all sorts of research, field tests and such. (A good example of this is the Ribbon interface in Office 2007, which was the result of an academic study looking to figure out how people doing work interface with GUIs best.)
Special attention should also be placed on Apple's main consumers. Where is one more likely to see iPhones and Macbooks: at a posh cafe in New York City or in a farm in Tulsa, OK? I'll make the postulation that the core of Apple's audience is young folk who want something simple, svelte and integral to their lifestyles. While there are certainly diehards and fanboys, many of those folks will jump to the "next big thing" just like they did from PCs to Macs (or regular smartphones to iPhones or whatever) just because it's big and happening. Sure, there are lots of youths in the US, but their buying power is unmatched to even a few of the top (or middle) companies on the Fortune 100.
The article is an interesting read, but I think the author misses the business motive behind today's Microsoft. Back when Microsoft started (which, again, predates me), computers were constantly innovating. I'd even argue that computers were still innovations at that point, since Microsoft gained popularity at a time when computers were just starting to move from the mainframe room to the security's desk. I think the biggest mistake that Microsoft made was not paying enough attention to the importance of the Internet over the last few years. Sure, they'll be coming out with Office 2010 and Office web apps, and they already came out with Bing, but they are still playing catch up when they could've taken this space by storm years ago...
Okay, I kid; this idea really sucks. I'm sure others here have picked up on this, but from just pondering it for thirty seconds:
I'm sure these questions can get addressed with enough thought, but I really hope this doesn't grow beyond that point.
Yes, the heads on mechanical hard drives still park and unpark on power on.
Time flies when having fun, and as one gets older, one is allowed to do more fun things. People also get more responsibility as they age, so more responibilities = less time. That's my thesis; I think it's pretty good!
I think so, though one should know thy enemies before starting a fight. If the dude is a gangster and can get 20 guys in front of your house...then that's a problem!
Like the others here, my bullies stopped harrassing me after I went after them. I got my head knocked in, but at least I got my point across.
Let me extend on this with a brief experience of mine that drives this point really, really well. I was a really active debater during my high school years. (Not sure if it's there anymore, but I loved it!). Now, considering that most people I meet nowadays automatically relegate debate as a nerdy activity, one would (correctly) assume that the community attracts a pretty niche crowd. There were all kinds of people: liberals, hippies, scientists, philosophers, etc.. We had some slower folks, but they usually went by the wayside. Nonetheless, almost all of us had a really strong commonality: we were all geeks.
Many of us were tossed around and bullied during middle and/or high school, so the debate community insulated us from that somewhat. We could be weird and quirky, but still have fun being ourselves. However, there were always the elite folks. These were the creme de la creme: some of whom were the best debaters in the country. They formed their own cliques of greatness and practically shunned everyone "beneath" them. I've had people in my own team toss the less accomplished around in amusement, and I've even been harrassed by my own partners many times. I still loved debating, but that made it especially hard.
On top of that, getting bullied by smart people is, in some ways, worse than getting bullied by "brutes" because their methods of bullying people are usually more harmful and more subtle, thus being easier to let slide.
I don't see any discussion here about actually writing on the iPad, nor did I see any mention of it in the WWDC presentation. Since the screen is capacitive, is there any possibility that it can be used as a decent notepad?
Honestly, considering the fact that "old school" tablets tout native pen support as a HUGE feature, I would be pretty disappointed if the iPad doesn't support it. However, Apple has the tendency to add significant features later in the product's lifecycle, so it might be a more viable purchase after a few updates. I'm also sure that there will be hackers out there who will be able to get OS X on it somehow, though I'm even more sure that Apple engineers thoroughly accounted for (and attempted to remove) that possibility.
I, for one, also think that the iPad will steamroll the netbook/eBook market in the months/years to come. If previous history is an indicator of anything, this will become THE device in about a year or two. Especially if people can write on it; imagine being able to actually UNDERLINE and write stuff in eBooks!
Does this matter? In my mind, no way. I can think of only one place NT 4.0 skills might be valuable today, and it involves embedded systems with no typical Windows user interface. (The New York subway system uses NT 4 for their fare collection machines.)
I don't think that's correct; last time I saw maintenance being done on them, they were running Windows 2000. PATHVISION for the PATH subway system was, however, running NT 4.0 until they integrated NBCi into it; it now runs Windows XP. Even their card readers run XPe (based off a blue screen I saw).
Please visit the OSx86project wiki page to have those questions answered. I'll tell you off the bat that you will have to patch the kernel, which already puts you at risk for a world of hurt if your other components don't play nicely either.
You must be new here. :-)
I second this. It's an especially bad idea when frustrated, as anger easily makes one unfocused on anything but the problem. I've had a few near-hits because of this, and I'm a pretty good driver.
Heck, with the amount of capabilities phones are having nowadays (and the increasing prevalence of unlimited text/minute bundles), even walking while using the cell phone is dangerous. I've lost count of the amount of time I've almost ran into someone or something simply because I wasn't looking up.
It's kind of common sense that having plugins with various amounts of access to their installed browser(s) can compromise its entire security model. For the Slashdot crowd, it's kind of like having an aftermarket ECU on an auto's engine which, if programmed incorrectly, can cause great harm to it.
Additionally, I think browser wars are quite insipid the amount of variety we have now. Most of the browser is in its renderer, and the pros and cons of each kind is public information. Furthermore, the pros and cons of the browsers that constitute the heaping majority of the market (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome) are also fairly well-known (i.e. one wouldn't put Safari on Windows because its performance is known to be subpar, and a user with more rigid browsing habits won't use IE given the amount of malicious attention it gets). If there was one unanimously labelled "BEST" browser, everyone would be using it.
Though that routine is pretty humorous (and was, as others mentioned, performed by George Carlin), I don't really agree with it. PTSD is a very broad and wide-ranging disorder; calling it "shell shock" is a disservice to those who inherited the condition through other equally-traumatic means (rape, death of a close friend, accident, etc).
Linux, which is at the core of Red Hat’s software strategy, has never been a huge success on the desktop, and especially not on the business desktop. Red Hat officials have shrewdly maintained that desktop Linux is not a core focus for the company, but that virtualization and the facilitation of desktop and cloud operating systems applications are.
As I know this will become a polarizing statement on this thread, let me try (try being the key word) to neutralize this quote.
Red Hat is not implying here that desktop Linux is a failure (like it's subpoint headline apparently does). They are stating two important truths: (a) that Linux on the desktop has not taken off as much as some pundits have been forecasting for a while, and (b) that this goal is not part of their overall focus and won't be for some time.
I don't agree entirely with this viewpoint, since Ubuntu and netbook-provided distributions have contributed to its significant increase in consumer presence. Regardless, Linux on the server is where it's at, and where Red Hat has had huge control over for quite some time. Thus, it's no surprise that they are flourishing at the moment, despite the current economic situation.
Just wait until it matures. I highly doubt that Google/YouTube will keep their movies as grainy as their other content.
And while movies are more expensive now, two things to consider:
Considering that tons upon tons of people already use YouTube, I wonder how badly this will affect Netflix...I, for one, look forward to this.
There are a few things here that might be problematic:
These bikes are not new, though I haven't seen a lot of bike shops push these. They are super fun to pace though; 450W on a flat road means a pretty high pace to follow... :-)
Informative.
It's pretty easy for applications that don't have any anti-piracy measures in place, but applications that do, like BeeJive, find and, subsequently, lock out any apps that are detected to have been pirated. Thus, cracking some more popular applications is kind of a moving target. Additionally, one has to install some extra background application that disables the signing check that allows these pirated apps to install.
Lastly, finding a pirated app can be a bitch sometimes. From my experience, it usually consists of finding a cracked version (which is pretty risky, since it's the express route to getting your phone hacked), substituting the real version with the cracked one and hoping it will run after that. Considering the difficulty I had in finding a cracked version of a relatively popular jailbroken application, I highly doubt that pirating is popular.
Lol, yeah! First success from internet dating left me thinking that.
Fortunately, I haven't slept with a clepto yet. Though I'm still trying to find my favorite blue pair of socks...
Just find a college student and get the collegiate discount. $49 per license. What I miss is having Volume Licensing for MSDN Academic Alliance subscribers. That shit was the shit.
I sort of agree with this. Finding the actual network devices takes a little more time, and configuring the Firewall looks horrendously intimidating at first, but is easy to do after peering through it a little bit. Most of the other networking tasks are either the same as they were on XP (namely, IP/DNS/WINS [?] configuration, etc.), others are even easier (like connecting to a wireless network).
A minor nitpick: The complaint here is that Nexus One owners are experiencing spotty 3G coverage on their phones. Since none of the iPhones support T-Mobile's 3G band, none of them would have this problem.
...but all I know, based on my experience with them for several years, is that they've found a good home.
A company can promise lots of things. Most companies hope that people forget those promises. The real question is whether they'll follow through or not.