I’m actually pretty stoked about the future of KDE:
But then, they let us down with 4, where they went on and on about hiring usability experts, and then SURPRISE! Here’s Plasma!
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Apple has it coming, too. As a developer myself, I view all of these huge mega-corporations with a severe kind of no-love skepticism.
The really cool stuff is mostly down in the trenches. When you see someone write something really kick-ass, they usually just put (at least a piece of) it out there for people to gawk at. Some really amazing visualizations and intelligent, clever stuff that makes you scratch your head when you look at the source.
The big guys recognize these “occurrences” and coalesce them into “products” by acquisition. Through their Juggernauts of marketing and promotion, they spin these already-conceived-masterpieces into a thing they then claim credit for creating. You hear about Google absorbing amazing stuff that some kid did in his bedroom… and then where’s that technology now? I don’t see it. It got borged. It’s gone. Absorbed into the machine.
Sure, tech companies DO produce some amazing shit mostly on their own. Map Reduce was freakin’ amazeballs, but the idea came from prior work down in the trenches and then the Goog sucked it up and under their sponsorship turned it into a commercial success. It couldn’t have become what it is without the Goog’s deep pockets, so they do deserve some of the credit. Some.
IBM’s Watson was/is freakin’ amazing, too, but it was from academia as well. It wouldn’t have happened without the IBM über umbrella funding its gestation. So, IBM can have some of the credit.
Same for all the amazing shite that comes out of MIT’s Media Lab, like the Goog itself, and from RPI and Stanford & all the NASA shit from So Cal and UT, and amazing stuff happening with the LHC software in Switzerland, and the sheer volume of crap exuding from China and Taiwan… etc etc etc. Amazing shit is everywhere! But it’s not the big companies that MAKE it. They take it to a different level, but the ideas came from the fertile human minds who just sit and think and type and create, regardless of corporate affiliation.
So, all of that said, I have no love for these big companies. They’re big. They’re powerful. They’re sometimes amazing. I love my iPhone like a third lobe of my brain. But those companies are not the reason for the technology. The reason we have all this amazing shit at our fingertips is the men and women who simply want to create, test, forge forward and make new stuff nobody ever thought of before.
Microsoft is just the latest in a forever-chain of tech companies who will see their time, be glad in it, then fade away into the dustbin of history, like the Hudson’s Bay Company.
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There hasn’t been much to do since 4.0 but get better. I don’t want to run them down too much, but… there are still some basic issues with settings and geometry that simply don’t work and can’t be healed from the users’ side, and it doesn’t seem like some of the bug reports get much attention.
Well, anyway. Hopefully the move to cutee5 won’t kill things too badly.
I just use the terminal and to hell with all of that GUI-that-barely-works-and-constantly-changes nonsense.
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Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I want to be
Pony trekking or camping
Or just watching TV
Finland, Finland, Finland
It’s the country for me
… Except if I worked for Nokia
Cause then I would be fucked
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Good, only 109.000 to go.
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I don’t know if I agree with that, mainly because I rarely use windows machines (at school, I guess). Plus, MS could be said to have had pretty monopolistic business practices, so there’s that.
You’re right. In an ideal world people would make stuff for the love of it, and not have to go through giant corporations to get it to others.
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Actually, the sad fact is that amazing ideas are relatively common compared to those willing to risk the millions of dollars to back a technology and see if it commercially takes off. And realistically, most tech bets lose (and are then ignored), so it looks like all you have to do is buy a tech and it automatically makes money…
It’s a bit like publishing. There are lots of good authors out there, but they’re effectively worthless until a publisher puts 10-20K of its own money to put it out there so that I can find it. Similarly, a neat-o tech will remain the knowledge of only a few until some other company spends millions to develop and promote it to me.
So, no, halve the number of bright minds out there, and you get a little less tech as companies choose the 1 in 50 techs instead of the 1 in 100. Halve the number of companies, and you get half the tech.
Good ideas aren’t the bottleneck - it’s the money and the willingness of people to lose it the vast majority of the time.
It’s not terribly heroic, but it is reality. My good ideas have made money, but only because someone put money behind it. And there’s no question - between the money and me, I was the dispensable one. There are a lot other ideas that might have been equally or more successful.
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Um… HBC is still going.
Starting a “you are fired” Email with “Hello There,” is pretty epic. At least they took INITECH’s advice and fired them on a Friday. Less chance of an incident.
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Not really. They got bought out a bunch of times and now they are just a retailer, not the globetrotting juggernaut they once were. It would be like Apple someday becoming Radio Shack.
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Damn straight. If I had to fire 20,000 people with passwords to all my shit, I’d announce a week of paid vacation, then fire them the day before and have my remaining tech people take care of the cleanup.
I just realised what bothered me most about that “you are fired memo”, they started it with “Hello” and included no picture of Lionel Richie. WHO IS WORKING on their social team, MONKEYS?
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Bought out or not, they’ve been in continuous existence since their founding 300+ years ago. That’s a helluva record for a company. Apple will be very lucky to last as long, even as a Radio Shack type of company.
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They’ve changed so much, except in name and funky crest, that the tall claim of “continuous operation” may as well be 600+ years or 6000+. It’s not really “continuous operation.” Are they still trapping beaver and trading with First Nations? Reminds me of the Holy Roman Empire claiming lineage from Augustus.
Continuous operation means not shutting down operations at any point. That certainly applies, so I wouldn’t call it a “tall” claim. They aren’t the first company to change their focus; they won’t be the last. The thing here is that they started making the change to retail a long time ago (first store in 1857, first department store in 1913), while they were still trading with the First Nations (which trade only came to an end in the late 1980s).
I think a more apt comparison would be the Byzantine Empire - started as a legitimate successor to the Roman empire and gradually became Greek.
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Well done! I’m forwarding this to their PR department, where they are looking for a deputy spokesperson. Your first interview will be with Tariq “Everything is OK in Baghdad” Aziz.
