Yeah, if you're on gmail, you can send mails to those that aren't, there is no network effect. For social networking it's all about the network effect, so G+ did exactly the wrong thing.
I saw an article a while ago, that argued that Google will not be a big player for long, as it's only in markets that scale linearly with the number of users it has, like search and mail. Social Networking, Operating Systems and such exhibit a strong network effect and scale much faster than the number of users.
Yes, it's very strong, but we've also seen that things can change quickly: Before Facebook there were Friendster and MySpace and Hyves. Facebook could be dethroned as well.
You are making the same mistake that Stallman is making. You're attacking things you don't like by claiming they're evil and that the masses who flock to these "evil things" are stupid.
The mistakes you're making are: 1) These ad hominem attacks accomplish little, they just make you seem like someone who can't win on arguments. 2) You insult a lot of people that you are trying to convince of your point of view. They're now a lot less likely to listen to you.
I actually don't like a lot of the things you mention either, but I still find myself arguing against your rant.
I think that if you really want to change things, you need to go beyond hoping that everyone closed source industry dies tomorrow. Instead I urge you to figure out the reasons of their success and beat them at their own game. If open and free is indeed better, then you should be able to show this.
I'll give you some hints on why I think the things you're ranting against are so popular: - Support. For example Blizzard is famous for how long and well it supports its games. It supported the original StarCraft for almost 10 years. - Make people do the things they want quicker and easier. People are goal oriented, they don't care how it's done, they just want to get there. This is how Google won the search engine. Central heating, automatic transmissions in cars, microwaves, supermarkets instead of lots of small shops, examples are everywhere. - Make it look and feel good. What is "good" is subjective, but surprisingly large numbers of people seem to share certain likes and dislikes. There is also a comfort factor in here, a shoe that fits properly is nicer to wear. Attention to detail is often a part of this. - Consistency. People are creatures of habit. They like it if things work in predictable ways and similar to things they already know. All cars basically use the same interface to a certain degree, where the interfaces don't match you'll get people turning on the windscreen wipers by accident or unable to open a window, if they're in a car they're not familiar with.
I think these are four fields where open and free software systematically performs poorer than commercial closed source competition. If you want to get more people to use free and open source software, this is where the battles are fought.
Device driver support? I'm thinking these guys need decent graphics card performance, maybe even 3D. Given how much trouble people have to get decent open source drivers for graphics under Linux, I think a smaller scale MilitaryOS would struggle.
The problem might be hardware drivers. I think these guys might need some decent graphics card support, maybe even 3D. Those aren't trivial things to do, just look at the existing open source drivers for Linux.
It might be because of graphics card drivers and 3D support. Especially if the software has started development a long time ago (the systems seem to be running XP).
Even if they're not explicitly using DirectX, which they could very well be, then even with OpenGL your best bet still is Windows.
The real reason they're running Windows might be 3D performance though. They might have some hefty graphics card usage needs in there. I don't know, but it could be a reason. As it seems they are running XP, it could be that the system has been in development for a long time, and then Windows has probably been your best bet for good graphics card drivers, even if you don't use DirectX.
And how do you get the virusscanner updates? From the internet.
The problem seems to be that these computers are disconnected, but need updates to maps and such from computers that are connected. This is done with portable harddisks and USB sticks, which apparently do get infected.
IT all sounded very messy.
Personally I would use something obscure to run systems like this, like maybe BeOS, and certainly not Windows.
The article states they are using instructions from Kaspersky's website to remove the virus. My guess those are for Windows as they are mostly, although not exclusively, a Windows shop.
The Greens only hold about 7.5% of the seats. The largest parties are the Conservatives (36%), Socialists (25%) and Liberals (11.4%).
In most countries in the EU the Greens are an opposition party on the national, and thus have relatively little influence in policy. They have been part of government in Germany for a while and are often on the local level. They also are often pro-free software and open standards. This is why you see a lot of city counsels pushing for the use of OSS on the local level.
The Greens have actually more influence than you'd expect from the numbers at the EU level, as the European Parliament often tries to form large coalitions and work on consensus. The EP often functions more like the opposition towards the European Commission and Council of Ministers and thus by proxy to the national parliaments, where the Greens usually have little power.
The EP has been getting more powerful, as a direct representative of the people, vs the EC and CM, although the real power is still in bilateral and multilateral relations between the national governments. The Greens have been getting more influence at the national level as well, as they are now often needed to form majorities at the national level as support for the traditional parties has waned.
You have to remember that your company has no loyalty to you.
He works for a small company, and that's not always the case.
Agreed. My first employer was about 20 people, and the boss really cared. Almost made him go bust, because he kept employees that he could not afford after the.com bubble burst.
Yeah and a lot of the most successful musicians go bankrupt or nearly so. Either because they can't manage their own finances, or because they trust someone else who then messes up. Some famous Dutch examples are Andre Rieu and Marco Borsato, but there are probably US and other examples as well.
Yeah, but I think Jobs proved that it's not just the engineers that make a product a success.
I think Jobs brilliance was in steering brilliant engineers to make something non-engineers can understand and use.
Engineers left to their own devices will give you Linux and BSD, but Jobs could get them to make OSX.
An engineer will give you an IBM PC, Jobs had the vision to have them make a Mac.
An engineer will give you an Alienware, Steve got us the iMac.
An engineer will give you fixed font, Steve thought text should look good.
iRiver vs. iPod, Windows Mobile vs. iOS, iPAQ vs. iPhone, PirateBay vs. iTunes, netbook vs. iPad, the list goes on...
What Steve was good at, is getting some brilliant engineers together, and have them make something that my grandmother and my 3 year old kid would be able to use almost intuitively.
He will be missed, because ow the engineers will take over again. (I'm one of them).
Not in all countries do corporations have as much political influence as in the USA. For example in my country, the funding of political parties is based on the number of voters they have as registered members, the money those members contribute and the number of elected representatives the party has (for access to public broadcasting networks). Things like PACs simply don't exist. Special interest groups usually start their own party, as you only need about 0,7% of the votes to get a seat in parliament.
Of course that doesn't mean corporations and unions have no influence, there are even official boards that the government has to consult on legislation, which have representation of employers and employees. Recently this was done on pension reform and the compromise that was negotiated between government and this board is now being put into law.
Of course there are lobby groups, but in general politicians aren't as beholden to corporations as in the USA, as their finances and re-election don't depend on them. Also the amount of money involved is much less, an election year might cost a large national party a few million. Of course the population is only 5% of the USA, so numbers are lower anyway.
I think the Start Menu was not a very good idea. It was slightly improved over time with things like the Quicklaunch menu, but MS clung way too long to it.
I think OSX's Dock is better but still not ideal.
I really like how you can add Places in the OSX Finder, but I can't find a way to put those on the Dock. I can add folders, but not the entire Places at once. It also doesn't give me the nice icons that Places does for things like Applications if I do add it as folders. I'm using Snow Leopard.
...that still leaves the less frequently used stuff to sort out.
One of the key strengths of a GUI is supposed to be tasks that you do so infrequently that you are prone to forget how to do them. A good GUI helps smooth over that sort of problem. A bad one just makes it so hard that you just want to reach for a bash prompt.
And then? I use the Unix/Linux command line a lot. But especially for rarely used tasks it's a poor interface. Unless you have Google available, it's very hard to find out what command to use. Only commands you use frequently and know by heart are easy on the command line. Once you know which command to use, of course there are man/info pages to help you along. But if you don't know the name of what you're looking for, you're toast.
Not sure, but the justification is that most people pin their most-used applications to the task bar.
So basically they're saying most people are trying to use the task bar as an OSX Dock?
But probably MS doesn't want, or can't copy what Apple does verbatim, so they come up with this other new thing instead. More choice is good although I'm not sure MS is on the right track here, I know I don't like the whole ribbon interface. But something good might come of it. Finally MS is innovating the GUI after basically not doing much in 15 years.
While I think ALMA is a really cool project, but I don't think it's got the largest collecting area either. I'm assuming that's what you mean, otherwise I'm not sure what you mean.
The systems you quote seem to be some kind of improvement over what I know we use in the field. The links don't really explain how they reach the higher accuracy compared to the GPS disciplined rubidium clocks that we use. But apparently it is possible to at least reach 10 ns accuracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, if you're on gmail, you can send mails to those that aren't, there is no network effect. For social networking it's all about the network effect, so G+ did exactly the wrong thing.
I saw an article a while ago, that argued that Google will not be a big player for long, as it's only in markets that scale linearly with the number of users it has, like search and mail. Social Networking, Operating Systems and such exhibit a strong network effect and scale much faster than the number of users.
Yes, it's very strong, but we've also seen that things can change quickly: Before Facebook there were Friendster and MySpace and Hyves. Facebook could be dethroned as well.
There were Friendster and MySpace before Facebook.
Things can change quickly if the new contender plays it well enough.
I think this just shows that Google isn't playing it's cards well enough and that Facebook is on the ball in countering them.
You are making the same mistake that Stallman is making. You're attacking things you don't like by claiming they're evil and that the masses who flock to these "evil things" are stupid.
The mistakes you're making are:
1) These ad hominem attacks accomplish little, they just make you seem like someone who can't win on arguments.
2) You insult a lot of people that you are trying to convince of your point of view. They're now a lot less likely to listen to you.
I actually don't like a lot of the things you mention either, but I still find myself arguing against your rant.
I think that if you really want to change things, you need to go beyond hoping that everyone closed source industry dies tomorrow. Instead I urge you to figure out the reasons of their success and beat them at their own game. If open and free is indeed better, then you should be able to show this.
I'll give you some hints on why I think the things you're ranting against are so popular:
- Support. For example Blizzard is famous for how long and well it supports its games. It supported the original StarCraft for almost 10 years.
- Make people do the things they want quicker and easier. People are goal oriented, they don't care how it's done, they just want to get there. This is how Google won the search engine. Central heating, automatic transmissions in cars, microwaves, supermarkets instead of lots of small shops, examples are everywhere.
- Make it look and feel good. What is "good" is subjective, but surprisingly large numbers of people seem to share certain likes and dislikes. There is also a comfort factor in here, a shoe that fits properly is nicer to wear. Attention to detail is often a part of this.
- Consistency. People are creatures of habit. They like it if things work in predictable ways and similar to things they already know. All cars basically use the same interface to a certain degree, where the interfaces don't match you'll get people turning on the windscreen wipers by accident or unable to open a window, if they're in a car they're not familiar with.
I think these are four fields where open and free software systematically performs poorer than commercial closed source competition. If you want to get more people to use free and open source software, this is where the battles are fought.
Device driver support? I'm thinking these guys need decent graphics card performance, maybe even 3D. Given how much trouble people have to get decent open source drivers for graphics under Linux, I think a smaller scale MilitaryOS would struggle.
The problem might be hardware drivers. I think these guys might need some decent graphics card support, maybe even 3D. Those aren't trivial things to do, just look at the existing open source drivers for Linux.
It might be because of graphics card drivers and 3D support. Especially if the software has started development a long time ago (the systems seem to be running XP).
Even if they're not explicitly using DirectX, which they could very well be, then even with OpenGL your best bet still is Windows.
The real reason they're running Windows might be 3D performance though. They might have some hefty graphics card usage needs in there. I don't know, but it could be a reason. As it seems they are running XP, it could be that the system has been in development for a long time, and then Windows has probably been your best bet for good graphics card drivers, even if you don't use DirectX.
And how do you get the virusscanner updates? From the internet.
The problem seems to be that these computers are disconnected, but need updates to maps and such from computers that are connected. This is done with portable harddisks and USB sticks, which apparently do get infected.
IT all sounded very messy.
Personally I would use something obscure to run systems like this, like maybe BeOS, and certainly not Windows.
The article states they are using instructions from Kaspersky's website to remove the virus. My guess those are for Windows as they are mostly, although not exclusively, a Windows shop.
The Greens only hold about 7.5% of the seats. The largest parties are the Conservatives (36%), Socialists (25%) and Liberals (11.4%).
In most countries in the EU the Greens are an opposition party on the national, and thus have relatively little influence in policy. They have been part of government in Germany for a while and are often on the local level. They also are often pro-free software and open standards. This is why you see a lot of city counsels pushing for the use of OSS on the local level.
The Greens have actually more influence than you'd expect from the numbers at the EU level, as the European Parliament often tries to form large coalitions and work on consensus. The EP often functions more like the opposition towards the European Commission and Council of Ministers and thus by proxy to the national parliaments, where the Greens usually have little power.
The EP has been getting more powerful, as a direct representative of the people, vs the EC and CM, although the real power is still in bilateral and multilateral relations between the national governments. The Greens have been getting more influence at the national level as well, as they are now often needed to form majorities at the national level as support for the traditional parties has waned.
You have to remember that your company has no loyalty to you.
He works for a small company, and that's not always the case.
Agreed. My first employer was about 20 people, and the boss really cared. Almost made him go bust, because he kept employees that he could not afford after the .com bubble burst.
Yeah and a lot of the most successful musicians go bankrupt or nearly so. Either because they can't manage their own finances, or because they trust someone else who then messes up.
Some famous Dutch examples are Andre Rieu and Marco Borsato, but there are probably US and other examples as well.
I don't think it would have made a difference. It might even have made iTunes a bigger success.
The thing with iTunes was that it was the only game in town, was easy to use and well integrated with the iPod line.
And the power of iTunes is that it has content from multiple companies. The power is that it is not fragmented.
Yeah, but I think Jobs proved that it's not just the engineers that make a product a success.
I think Jobs brilliance was in steering brilliant engineers to make something non-engineers can understand and use.
Engineers left to their own devices will give you Linux and BSD, but Jobs could get them to make OSX.
An engineer will give you an IBM PC, Jobs had the vision to have them make a Mac.
An engineer will give you an Alienware, Steve got us the iMac.
An engineer will give you fixed font, Steve thought text should look good.
iRiver vs. iPod, Windows Mobile vs. iOS, iPAQ vs. iPhone, PirateBay vs. iTunes, netbook vs. iPad, the list goes on...
What Steve was good at, is getting some brilliant engineers together, and have them make something that my grandmother and my 3 year old kid would be able to use almost intuitively.
He will be missed, because ow the engineers will take over again. (I'm one of them).
Not in all countries do corporations have as much political influence as in the USA. For example in my country, the funding of political parties is based on the number of voters they have as registered members, the money those members contribute and the number of elected representatives the party has (for access to public broadcasting networks). Things like PACs simply don't exist. Special interest groups usually start their own party, as you only need about 0,7% of the votes to get a seat in parliament.
Of course that doesn't mean corporations and unions have no influence, there are even official boards that the government has to consult on legislation, which have representation of employers and employees. Recently this was done on pension reform and the compromise that was negotiated between government and this board is now being put into law.
Of course there are lobby groups, but in general politicians aren't as beholden to corporations as in the USA, as their finances and re-election don't depend on them. Also the amount of money involved is much less, an election year might cost a large national party a few million. Of course the population is only 5% of the USA, so numbers are lower anyway.
I fortunately live in a slightly more sane country, but as I understand it, this is entirely legal, and even decided to be according to your Constitution quite recently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission
I think the Start Menu was not a very good idea. It was slightly improved over time with things like the Quicklaunch menu, but MS clung way too long to it.
I think OSX's Dock is better but still not ideal.
I really like how you can add Places in the OSX Finder, but I can't find a way to put those on the Dock. I can add folders, but not the entire Places at once. It also doesn't give me the nice icons that Places does for things like Applications if I do add it as folders. I'm using Snow Leopard.
Yeah, I know it was supposed to be a joke, but...
ctrl-alt-delete, then find the menu option for shutting down the computer.
Seriously? That's how it needs to be done in Windows 8?
I don't think my mom is ever going to remember that.
So how is this different from the old Quickmenu? (I'm stuck on XP).
The whole concept sounds similar to the OSX Dock to me.
...that still leaves the less frequently used stuff to sort out.
One of the key strengths of a GUI is supposed to be tasks that you do so infrequently that you are prone to forget how to do them. A good GUI helps smooth over that sort of problem. A bad one just makes it so hard that you just want to reach for a bash prompt.
And then? I use the Unix/Linux command line a lot. But especially for rarely used tasks it's a poor interface. Unless you have Google available, it's very hard to find out what command to use. Only commands you use frequently and know by heart are easy on the command line. Once you know which command to use, of course there are man/info pages to help you along. But if you don't know the name of what you're looking for, you're toast.
Not sure, but the justification is that most people pin their most-used applications to the task bar.
So basically they're saying most people are trying to use the task bar as an OSX Dock?
But probably MS doesn't want, or can't copy what Apple does verbatim, so they come up with this other new thing instead. More choice is good although I'm not sure MS is on the right track here, I know I don't like the whole ribbon interface. But something good might come of it. Finally MS is innovating the GUI after basically not doing much in 15 years.
While I think ALMA is a really cool project, but I don't think it's got the largest collecting area either. I'm assuming that's what you mean, otherwise I'm not sure what you mean.
ALMA has a collecting area of about 7,000 m2. LOFAR has a collecting area of up to to 300,000 m2, depending on the frequency and antenna configuration used.
http://www.astron.nl/radio-observatory/astronomers/technical-information/lofar-technical-information
But yeah, there are multiple ways to claim the title "Largest Telescope". Things get really funny with VLBI and space based VLBI.
The systems you quote seem to be some kind of improvement over what I know we use in the field. The links don't really explain how they reach the higher accuracy compared to the GPS disciplined rubidium clocks that we use. But apparently it is possible to at least reach 10 ns accuracy.