Linked by David Adams on Sat 31st Jul 2010 06:05 UTC, submitted by fran
Microsoft had its annual financial analyst meeting on Thursday, and Steve Ballmer answered questions about what the company's answer to the iPad was going to be, and whether Windows Phone 7 was going to be a part of that product strategy. He said, "We're coming . . . We're coming full guns. The operating system is called Windows." Ballmer and Microsoft so don't get it. I can't believe Steve Ballmer is making me feel sorry for Microsoft.
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RE[7]: It's easy to hate them...
by BallmerKnowsBest on Mon 2nd Aug 2010 02:20
in reply to "RE[6]: It's easy to hate them..."
Member since:2008-06-02
It's easy to say anything wasn't the first at anything, and it's a great (but intellectually lazy) way to dismiss a company or technology.
Yes, it's almost as facile as praising a company for being "first" regardless of whether that's true or has any significance.
The iPad is the first blockbuster tablet. The iPad revitalized a desperately stagnant tablet market, the way that the iPhone revitalized a desperately stagnant smartphone market.
And...? That will be worth a grand total of Jack-all if Apple repeats the same mistakes they made with the Mac. Which they're on course to do, given that the response to competition from Android et al has been to make their platform even MORE closed and even LESS attractive to developers.
That whole "no cross-platform apps on iOS" restriction is particularly stupid and short-sighted. Doesn't anyone at Apple remember what happened to AOL? Exclusive content is worth nothing when people can get the same thing (or better) elsewhere, especially when "elsewhere" has much better pricing.
Haters can pick and chose the things that Apple didn't do first, but it just shows how desperate they are to dismiss the huge success Apple has had.
Just as trying to give Apple credit for being "first" at everything betrays a desperate need brag about something, even if it's only by proxy. Psychological transference at its most pathetic.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.More News »
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Also, it's now a fashion company. Fashion tends to go out of, you know, fashion. And because their fans tend to be massive wankers who are overselling the product to a ridiculous degree, many people are already fed up. Just a couple of days ago, I read an article in a fucking newspaper claiming Apple's new "revolutionary" trackpad was going to kill the traditional mouse. Fuck Apple and their fans. They're a bit like Brit Pop fans of the 90s, who thought Oasis were the best band since The Beatles. Well, in reality they were nearly entirely irrelevant. And the iPad wasn't the first at anything.
It's easy to say anything wasn't the first at anything, and it's a great (but intellectually lazy) way to dismiss a company or technology. The iPad is the first blockbuster tablet. The iPad revitalized a desperately stagnant tablet market, the way that the iPhone revitalized a desperately stagnant smartphone market. Haters can pick and chose the things that Apple didn't do first, but it just shows how desperate they are to dismiss the huge success Apple has had.
There's a reason Apple is so successful, and as much as you'd like to go tribal and dismiss Apple users as fashion victims and sheep, and Apple as an overhyped company, users of Apple products tend to love Apple products. Apple did radically different approaches to the various markets, and those approaches have resonated with users in a way few tech companies have been able to pull off.