Also take note: Vendors often lie.
1,209 karma · joined March 6, 2010
Without very competitive high bandwidth costs, i just don't see how business software, much less, enterprise software, could ever really be worth the investment on the web.
The true faith, does not seek reward for good behavior, nor bothers trying to understand the divine will, it simply accepts the Yoke of the heavens. in the case of Job.
He does not ponder the reason, it is all the same to him "...the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away..."
"The more magical the medium, the more compelling the message... ...the less we understand about how the message is getting to us, the more compelled we are to believe it. Just like the priest giving a wafer that turns into a body, my god it must be true. The technology keeps it magic. ...
how do you remystify the demystified technology?! windows! how do you install software in windows? with the wizard, why did they pick the wizard as the metaphor? because its mysterious, weird hocus pocus, don't look behind here. to install software you need the wizard, not the helper, not the friend. The Wizard, might as well be the priest."
No reason why a game specific store shouldn't exist. If the user goes the distance to install the Amazon store, chances are they will install another.
not that 4-5$ is a big deal, but there are myriad of ssh clients for free on android, no doubt due to different clientele, and different developer sentiments.
With that said, I would consider creating an account and paying, a big selling point for me, (which is not mentioned in any of the articles presented would be, that as a paying customer, it would be great if no ads are visible, just premium content.
Artists are often the shock troops of a neighborhood gentrification, after the studio loft, comes the artisan coffee, some renegade youths, a young lawyer or two, and before you know it, the neighborhood just ain't what it used to be.
I would Posit that a website calling itself "Hacker News" immediately opened itself to all kinds of interpretations. The term "Hacker" seems to be as hotly debated as "Artist" and justifiably so.
The Hackers, introduced others who identify with the Label, and still others who probably do not, but nevertheless find it of value to their venture.
When the neighborhood changes, you are free, within your means, to move to another place. Sometimes you yourself change and require a change of scenery.
When a startup grows to a full company, many times you lose something while gaining another, and vice versa. Many in this forum have made those choices on their own, so it should be familiar ground.
It is almost heretical to mention it here, but perhaps there is no algorithmic solution (if there is a problem) to the complexity of human relation, expression, and motivation.
More people, more heat, Entropy.
with that regard i prefer android for syncing to my music library. And the Xbox360 beats the pants off the AppleTV.
Itunes is the cable that holds this platform, at least where i see it, Itunes is obsolete.
HTC seems to be doing well for itself tooling their machines with Google android.
Consider the potential revenue business generates from Adwords. Or freeing small businesses from having to run and manage their own email systems.
My favorite example is the benefit a myriad of startups gained from having access to Google API's like maps, and the benefit business gets from being easily found on a map, a bar for instance is a business too, i find them with Google maps.
You also dont seem to qualify having the most advanced search engine in the world a benefit for businesses, talk about a tremendous impact on the entire ecosystem.
I could go on, with ease. but i think you might get the point, your view of business benefit is too narrow, your sharp dichotomy between business and consumers is false as well, businesses are consumers of other businesses too.
Sometimes i stifle the urge to just push the annoyance down the stairs.
It may be true that some piece of software is programmed for exclusive and specific OS use that is critical for the day to day operation and locks you to a vendor or OS. But it is usually not developed in house, nor does the organization can (or even should, if its not its competency or mission) develop an alternative software to supplant it. Developing complex software costs allot of money, not every organization can do this.
Put simply, Jackass.Corp makes niche software that runs only on windows, or only on OSX (finalcut pro comes to mind for instance) but there is often no alternative at all or a very poor substitute virtually unknown to current and potential staff. What would be a pragmatic choice?
In Addition and to its credit. Technologies like Active directory /group policy are far more mature and fine grained then what is currently offered by Apple (including custom rsync solutions) this has just been a focus of the work Microsoft did in the last 10 years. This is no small issue as it saves allot of time, and lower costs for the support team operations.
To some extent Apple has recognized this themselves, and have abandoned the server platform, it was increasingly a ridiculous proposition to maintain OSX servers (not to mention costly) when every other server platform we had became virtualized and hardware independent (again talking about a JackAss.corp that just ignored the changes of the time)
Where i would agree with you is that the most viable alternative going forward is to implement new applications that are browser based, then it wouldn't matter what OS it runs on that much, so it will be either thin clients, or whoever offers the cheapest license. and in my case, again, Microsoft offered far cheaper licensing price per machine. Personally my measure point is Firefox compatibility and Chrome. Not IE and for that matter not safari either. but we are long way away from having enterprise business that runs entirely through a browser windows.
Banning software or hardware use based on mere preference is wrongheaded, in my case we don't ban any cellular technology, but discourage blackberries (because of their infuriating reliance on the BIS server hosted in house or at your cell provider, and tends to break whenever you patch your mail server system). there is a contingent of blackberry users religiously devoted to their devices, we explain that the efforts on our behalf to maintain their preference prevents us from doing other things, hopefully in time, this will sink in, either that, or the cost to our time will become too much, We would rather study how to support and deal with IOS and android bugs then keep polished skills on increasingly irrelevant platform (in our context that is).
Outside of myopic world of Tech, most people will not leave a position due to the choice of OS, this type zealotry is usually reserved for geeks that do computing for a living not as a mean for some other goal (say organize a massive street festival).
something that is easy to forget, is that outside of just mere preference, there is an issue of competency, a user may prefer a certain system, but he/she isn't always competent enough to fix a problem when it surfaces (and why should she, fixing a problem after all... isn't her job or interest). There is also the user who has a preference to an antiquated, even obsolete piece of software, moving them away from a system they feel competent in to something newer is often painful, this, by the way, is not exclusive to any OS.
By the way, as a sidenote, in an attempt to avoid changing OS for staff if they didnt want but still maintain access to software they had to, but couldn't use, we tried virtual desktops, (ala parallels, vmware etc) It was a disaster, your average user just couldn't deal with it, frequent crashes, slowdowns and panic cries to the helpdesk. After we moved away from this scenario we ware able to save a staggering amount of our operation costs and funnel it towards development (which we did not have before).
perhaps all this software is boring for the startup mindset to develop, its a pity cause there is a gaping need for innovation in this arena that is left virtually unattended to, and its not just because of some IT manager reticence (IT managers often like the newest gadgets and OS too) Its because it is not created, people are hell bent on building the next spacefacetwatcloud that generates revenue from a new advertisement selling paradigm instead of moving the bigger org into a new age.
I hope this long winded reply, explains a little.
Drivers for the hardware provided by Apple are always a single package making deployment easy, what's more they update cautiously, and updates are easy to deploy, that just isn't the case with many other providers.
The possibility of Installing OSX IF required, is also appealing, and no other hardware vendor offers that, and it happens on occasion.
There is an aesthetic appeal to the machine itself that is hard to deny, Some may question the validity of such frivolity, but in my view, thinking that is selling your coworkers short, aesthetics are important in the work place.
Where inroads are stymied is in the desktop platform - OSX. the Reasons for this can be debated on their merits, But usually this discussion degenerates into a flame war very fast.
I will however volunteer that my current work environment was OSX dominated, and I ventured to keep it so. However, after working in this environment for a while, I made a decision to switch to Windows (windows XP initially, now 7) for the entire organization. using OSX was just untenable for our business practices and environment.
Kept the hardware though, and still buy Apple hardware as replacement, it just doesn't run OSX, which is sacrilegious in some circles.
There is no doubt, the article struck a nerve for many Asian-Americans, some of which try to either validate the way they grew up or the understandable resentment of others who feel cheated from some vocation that didn't materialize because of the Math/Violin issue.
Then there is this large group of what seems to be largely white who either figured there was something there for the upbringing of their children, and those who cry abuse.
As I was raised in another country, this conversation, whether of Asian origin or Caucasian, strikes me as a genuine american cultural phenomena. There is an anxiety here about children and the way they are brought up and educated that is unmatched anywhere else that i have seen. This discussion and the discussion of yesterday about the treatment of all males as defacto criminals in their approach to children, feeds from the same root, that strikes me at times as some kind of hysterical episode.
That the war on terror will last for decades to come, escalating conflicts in other locations, say Pakistan or somewhere in the gulf (again)
World wide war without end.. The assertion that the war in Afghanistan is winding down, doesn't strike me as accurate.
In addition the period after the second world war, was marked by a US economic dominance, as Europe was in ruins and the soviet block stifled economic development in almost half the globe for several decades including the Vietnam period until glasnost started to get a footing (in that curious uptick around 1988 perhaps), right till the fall of the Berlin wall.
Things are different now. slightly.
Not sure about the future of pad computing though.
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Some of your users might well be incompetent computer users and wont pass the "test".
I have often thought about why people dont do backups even when the new tools are easy for most to handle. I think the reason is psychological in nature.
Backup implies that you are at least cognizant of the impending disaster scenario. many people avoid even thinking about this, why think of bad news?. Engineers are accustomed to this way of thinking, its a different mental makeup, we shouldn't assume the general public shares this point of view, especially since most of the time they are led through their computing experiences by "wizards" and "guides" might as well be priests.
I got some fire and ire, restricting users software choices and tools, as it was a zoo before. It is too bad, I dont want to restrict anybody, but to maintain the integrity of the organization information, offer reliability and keep cost low, choices and policy have to be enforced.
Every desktop folder and user folder is synced to a server, restrictions on personal data stores are monitored, and enforced. critical data is copied to an onsite and offsite datastore. I am met with some dissatisfaction by more advanced users at times, but when their desktop/laptop gets fucked (3 year avg for laptop harddrive it seems) login on to a spare and having your desktop just the way you left it, is a huge relief for users.
and we are just a museum, we are not solving the worlds most dire problems.