Linux and the BSDs have been chasing desktop usability for ages. Hell, I've been chasing desktop usability for ages.

Microsoft has it easy. The produce windows and all the laptop, desktop, and server vendors spend hundreds of millions of dollars making sure their designs work with it.

Apple makes their own PCs, they don't have to chase hardware.

And us? Every time a new machine comes out (which is often). A new model, a new chipset, a different combination of on-board devices, whatever.. every single time that happens we developers have to write new drivers or modify existing drivers. We have to work out the kinks, the broken mobo hardware, the broken ACPI implementations, the broken sound hardware that doesn't follow vendor specs or has major exceptions because vendors are lazy. We have to glue the whole mess together not just once. Not just twice. But 20 or 30 times a year. Every year. Forever.

Until that equation changes, the general population simply can't depend on any of our open source code to work on whatever new cool computer they want to buy. And that puts us in the backseat in terms of adoption. Every time.

We can make our stuff work with specific machines, at least if the stars align (that is, if we have the chip specs for the chipsets that have changed and we can write drivers for them fast enough). Making our stuff work with everything, out of the box... it just doesn't happen on a macro scale.

In some small way the collapse of the external chip vendors into a much smaller set of companies has helped. Only two major video companies that we have to worry about now, plus whatever Intel is doing (which they at least provide some specs on now, finally). Only two WIFI chipsets that really matter, maybe three. Only a half dozen ethernet chipset families really matter now. Only two cpu vendors really matter. It's getting better but not because the companies are altruistic. Simply because there are fewer of them and we don't have to write as many drivers or make as many driver mods whenever new hardware comes out. But it isn't enough. Not nearly enough to make us competitive.

That's the #1 problem.

The #2 problem we face is that there is no suitable desktop that works as well as either Windows or Mac desktops. I've tried them all. In linux even. They ALL SUCK. They all break in one way or another and it's just as bad in the linux community as it is in the BSD community due to rampant N.I.H. syndrome. The desktops fail on many levels. Apple doesn't have this problem because Apple enforces a unified ABI for accessing major media subsystems such as audio and video. Microsoft doesn't have this problem either, for the same reason. Linux and the BSDs have no unified ABI, essentially forcing application writers to target their apps to specific user interfaces or hardware subsystems.

It annoys the hell out of me but I don't see anything on the horizon that can really solve the problem.

-Matt

Yeah, and good earplugs like these have a nearly flat frequency response which make it easier to have a conversation in loud room, unlike foam earplugs or headphones that muffle the sound in addition to attenuating it.

Wow, someone other than me who uses fvwm (fvwm2 that is). For the same reason as well. I've tried many other window managers and they all have glitzy graphics and look pretty cool... and also all fall flat on their face if I have a lot of open windows. Spread over 4 virtual x 2 real screens. Dozens and dozens of open windows, usually a mix of xterms, firefox, and xpdf.

Fvwm? I configure a bunch of button bars and a couple of background clocks stuck to my screens. And, of course, a color-gradient title bar:

ButtonStyle 3 Vector 13 26x29@1 34x21@1 50x35@1 70x21@1 79x29@1 63x48@0 79x65@1 70x75@0 50x61@0 34x75@0 26x65@0 44x48@1 26x29@0

Yah, it definitely takes some messing around with the configuration file but what I love most about fvwm2? It's ultra stable and so is the config file. I don't care if its old, it does everything I need it to and it does it fast.

-Matt

Be thankful they were just plain laserdiscs - the BBC Domesday Project is an oft-cited example of digital obsolescence, involving weird analogue/digital laserdiscs and custom computer hardware...

Exactly. That was my take-away as well.

(1) Get a huge government contract

(2) Ignore robots.txt

(3) Profit!

There are commercial emulation chips available, used for testing everything up to the flat panel. You could build your own FPGA if you wanted to, I suppose.

Well, then, very clearly, we need to start giving government contracts to your brother in law's company which manufactures deep oceanic temperature sensors. You know, "just to be sure"...

Think "anomalously long backscatter times"/"anamalous diffusion of backscatter" for energetic cosmic rays. You can refine the specificity for the location utilizing synthetic aperture techniques, but you end up with very thin stripes for each pass over the scanned region. I *did* say "long term observation"...

Note that the Fukushima detectors are a pretty long ways away from the reactor itself, as well as the containment vessel, compared to straight tomographic techniques used to examine cargo containers, say in Oakland.

NB: These days, it's pretty obsolete as a technique, and we use neutrino tomography instead, but there are enough "dark spots" that it's not possible to cover everywhere with the technique. Interestingly, Vernor Vinge "outed" the neutrino tomography technique in his novel "The Peace War", although his details are a bit hand-wavy and wrong.

Generally we don't have to worry about being shot down when we fly a constellation of high altitude aircraft over North Korea without their permissions in order to create a synthetic aperture large enough to be meaningful, so it's OK for filling in the dark spots there. You wouldn't want to run the same flights over Russia, even at 90,000 feet these days.

PS: In case you missed it, there was a story the other day bemoaning the lack of noble gas detectors to detect by-products of fission plant operation, but they also wanted some better generalized climatological models (read: give us lots of money for supercomputer hardware to play with) in order to determine the origin, should noble gasses be detected with their new detectors.

This article is specifically about Silicon Valley Day Care.

Which I think is probably code to "The day care next door to Marisa Mayer's office", but even if it's not, in the companies I've worked in in SV, they were a substitute for a babysitter to get mothers and fathers back to work as quickly as possible following a birth, without paying them enough to be able to afford a nanny. They took kids from a few weeks old up to age 4.

You can have stuff *like that*, but it's not going to be the same stuff, it's going to be *new stuff* written in VB.Net or C#.Net.

This would be fine, if anyone had liked some of the intermediate Windows releases, and gone forward on those platforms, instead of running more XP systems because they freaking *HATED* "ME", "Vista", which is why they never achieved sufficient market share to displace XP. This should have been obvious when everyone avoided "200" and instead went for XP when it came out.

Instead, the vertical market code is still living on the old VB platform on XP.

While VB6.0 apps *can* run on Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows 8 platforms, most *don't*.

First of all, the Server 2008 platform is irrelevant for vertical market apps, since they run client side, not server-side.

Second, you can't use Office 2000 as an installed application on the new platforms, you have to use Office 2011 and 2013, and the DLL components that make up the components you'd use in the vertical market app are sufficiently different from one another that you'd have to pic running one or the other anyway. Which would be fine, except Office 2013 requires Windows 7 or above to install. So basically, if I want new Office, I have to tke new Windows, and vice versa.

This means that you have to do a re-buy, or you have to have two versions of your vertical market application.

To add insult to injury, it's practically impossible to force the newer versions of Office to use the older file formats at the DLL level, without reselecting the settings every time you save a document. So if your vertical market app has to communicate data between an older and a newer workstation instance, even if you invest in rewriting you vertical market app from scratch to move off VB 6.0, it's most non-interoperable without a bunch of "Can you re-save that document in the old office format so I can use it? Thanks.".

At a minimum, if I'm a small business with 20 employees, and I want to add 3 more, I am pretty much screwed, unless I've done one of two things:

(1) Pre-bought a bunch of XP systems and stuck them in a closet in case I wanted to hire someone, or someone's computer dies

(2) Paid to move everyone forward onto at *least* Windows 7 and Office 2003, and paid to have my middleware rewritten.

Even so, there are a lot of third party DLL components that simple *are not available* as 64 bit versions. So I m either SOL, or paying to duplicate their functionality, as well, in order to get my dentists office / collections agency / non-profit call center / POS systems / whatever vertical market app, back online.

---

So like I've said: they've missed the boat for about 70% of their market, which simply can not afford to redo everything all at once.

They *REALLY* needed to deprecate the OS and the applications components - Office - and the applications platform - VB 6.0 - *separately* so that SMBs could do overlapping buy-forward, which is more in line with the fact that they are constrained in their instantaneous purchasing power by being in a cash flow business model, but relatively unconstrained in their over time purchasing power, for the same reason.

Frankly, they *could* have maintained component binary binary compatibility, while deploying a new office.

The actual order should have been:

(1) New windows with VB 6.0 and Office binary backward compatibility
(2) Deprecate XP and force people OS-forward with (relatively) little pain

(3) New Office with component binary backward compatibility, requiring new OS

(4) New VB.Net capable of running VB 6.0
(5) *GOOD* source translation tools that warned about coming incompatibilities. Include translation to C# instead of VB.Net for extra good will

(6) Deprecate VB 6.0 in favor of VB.Net / C#
(7) Deprecate old Office DLL APIs that were warned about in #5; force migration to new DLLs for new installs of Office used as components

This would have allowed layered buy-forward into the new ecosystem without crapping on anyone's business that they've been running on a vertical market since 1991.

Microsoft sold everyone a bill of goods with their component architecture, and then failed to carry through on component reuse going forward.

And I would say that that is about 70% of their installed base.

Me too. I electrically emulated a LVDS flat panel and reconstructed the high resolution image from the LVDS.

Works great for BluRay encryption, and for projectionist monitor screens in movie theaters, too, since the flat panels themselves are *after* the content decryption.

We've been using muon detectors for over 40 years to detect nuclear-related activities in various countries, including reactor installation, stockpiling, bomb-building, and so on. One of the reasons for the ability to move MX missiles around underground was so that long term muon detector observation by the Soviets could not pinpoint the location of the missiles.

Microsoft has gotten themselves in trouble.

One of the big things they did wrong was kill binary compatibility for software running on XP at the same time they killed XP.

This effectively forces a re-buy of all your hardware, because any new hardware you buy can no longer run the old software.

Totally ignoring the fact that for all middleware-based vertical market software (which is, in effect, "all of it", mostly written in dialects of VB to glue a bunch of Microsoft and third party DLLs together) it's an added "rewrite everything from scratch" overhead, it ignores buying cycle.

Typical accounting for computer hardware is an accelerated depreciation schedule, which is a 3 year schedule. This effectively means that every year, you intend to replace 1/3 of your computer systems (without an accelerated depreciation, as allowed by the IRS, this turns into a 5 year schedule, which means 1/5th or 20% get replaced).

The changes in binary compatibility at the same time the OS changed means that you have to do a full re-buy to handle adding people, or simple because old systems need replaced.

While this is great for Microsoft (they get a 3X - or 5X - bump in the number of licenses the y get to sell for everything), and it's great for computer vendors (same bump, in order to sell hardware capable of running the new OS), and it's great for vertical market consulting developers ("hey, we get to do the same job we did ~10 years ago over again for more $$$, and it's an emergency, so we can charge usurious rates!") ... it's a pretty big hit.

Larger businesses can pretty much stomach this hit, because they have reserve.

Small and medium businesses, however, are cash flow-based, and have to have money on hand. Which is why they were still using XP in the first place: they needed to be able to do incremental replacement a a survival requirement, since they pretty much can only afford to replace a machine every month or so, rather than fully re-buying, or even replacing the 1/3 or 1/5 of their machines all at the same time.

Sadly, you can't glue things together to make a vertical market app with all the software living on the back end (as it does with Office365), which makes that a completely unsuitable alternative.

So:

(1) Microsoft missed the boat on Office365 because that's not actually how 50% of the people use their products: they don't use them stand-alone, or at least, they *also* use them as components in vertical market systems, if they use them standalone too.

(2) Microsoft missed the boat on bringing people forward onto the new OS, due to inability to use a new OS system as a fungible replacement for a Windows XP system; they really needed this to keep working as they EOL'ed XP.

(3) They assumed their primary market was education/corporate, rather than SMB (Small and Medium Businesses); most estimates put the Microsoft market at 72%+ SMB, since bigger businesses have options, which are generally corporate mandates. These include Lotus's suite, Google Docs, and other options, up to and including in-house supported OpenOffice, among others.

So you're really quite wrong about them doing well.

They've been trying to reinvent themselves on a lot of fronts (tablet OS company, Phone OS company, SAS company, Cloud provider company, etc., but they lack a really coherent vision for their existing base market which they could then leverage to enter and successfully compete in their new frontiers (either via "whole product" offerings, or via "Halo effect" offerings).

So, I think Microsoft must turn their ship, or they're in for some really rough times ahead.

It's one thing to shoot yourself in the foot once, perhaps even twice; it's another thing entirely to reload and continue firing.

Well, that's one way... to try to make Google+ relevant to a larger community where it's not currently relevant.

Vaccination works.

You are likely an idiot if you do not get yourself and your kid vaccinated, if you can tolerate the vaccine.

If your kid is immunocompromised, they will either (A) not vaccinate or (B) be very careful about vaccination.

If they go route 'B', then they will do single dose vaccines, rather than combinations (i.e. separate measles vaccine, rather than MMR), and they will do an antibody titer (a relatively expensive test) to verify a primary, rather than secondary, immune response to the disease. A secondary response is generally a response to the IgE response, and is likely to make your child *more* sick than if they had not been immunized. Then, if necessary, they will immunize until they get a primary response. Your child will not be one of the ones with unknown vaccine effectiveness.

You definitely want an immunity to measles. There's up to an 8% chance of untreatable encephalitis from measles (the protein coat makes most broad spectrum antivirals ineffective as a stop-gap), after which your child will at a minimum be brain damaged, if they do not end up brain dead or actually dead.

So get vaccinated. Get your kid vaccinated.

Just don't do it for Measles or Diphtheria out of some misguided sense of social responsibility.