Top 10 Disappointing Technologies 682
Slatterz writes "Every once in a while, a product comes along that everyone from the executives to the analysts to even the crusty old reporters thinks will change the IT world. Sadly, they are often misguided. This article lists some of the top ten technology disappointments that failed to change the world, from the ludicrously priced Apple Lisa, to voice recognition, to Intel's ill-fated Itanium chip, and virtual reality, this article lists some of the top ten technology disappointments that failed to change the world." But wait! Don't give up too quickly on the Itanium, says the Register.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Insightful)
Must be an Australian thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Is he just complaining that Dell doesn't offer the same Ubuntu packages that it offers in the United States [dell.com]?
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is, are they wrong? Ubuntu really has remained for Linux hobbyists. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it is, for the most part.
Brett
Apple Lisa?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not following them on that one, and they have the chronology completely wrong. Jobs, in particular, knew the Lisa was DOA and knew that the Mac was the way of the future for the company, and pulled people off it all the time to work on the Mac. They are right, in that the Lisa was a very nice machine (I wanted to get my father one to replace his typewriter a few years ago - he needed and wanted no more - instead he wound up with a $299 Officemax Dell shitbox that still barely functions from day to day) but I think it certainly doesn't deserve a Top 10 list. It wasn't a big enough deal to matter. I would have put the Newton on there before the Lisa.
Brett
Dinosaurs were a marketing failure (Score:2, Insightful)
In the end Apple ended up dumping nearly 3,000 Lisa's in landfill
Give me a good reason for doing this instead of lowering the price or even donating them
Real Top 10 (Score:5, Insightful)
There are much greater fails. Fails of such epic magnitude their ripples are easily confused with the tides on the ocean of technology:
10. Floptical storage. Great stuff if you want to lose data.
9. DIVX DVDs. The ones that you could only buy at Circuit City.
8. VRML. Virtual reality is still around. But VRML was an abortion.
7. CueCat. The epic fail that made Slashdot famous.
6.iOpener. What happens when you try to sell a blade free razor using the razor blade model.
5. The Apple Pippen. You've never seen it, it's that bad.
4. Windows ME. Awful, bad, hideous don't describe this one.
3. Chandler. Mitch Kapor's been a part of lots of great things, but Chandler is the PIM we'd all like to forget.
2. MS Bob. Any top 10 tech failure list without it is not credible.
1. Windows Vista. One would think ME would have taught Redmond a lesson.
Re:VR (Score:5, Insightful)
The current 3D MMORPGs are virtual realities.... Millions of people spend the majority of their time in these virtual worlds. Just because they don't wear bulky helmets they're disqualified?
The article is a bit misguided on some of it's top 10 choices.
Re:Nanotech, virtual reality... (Score:5, Insightful)
Presumably by nanotechnology you mean molecular manufacturing.. and that should hardly be on that list because it hasn't happened yet. The list is about shit that happened but fizzed. If an assembler was created tomorrow (and it could happen if Merkle pulls his finger out) and the entire fucking materials world didn't change in under 12 months, I'd be entirely surprised and put it at #1 on this list.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Insightful)
But did anyone promise that ubuntu would kill off MS or something? Has it actually failed to deliver?
Because from where I'm sitting Ubuntu is doing a great job of streamlining and simplifying linux. And it sure has had an impact on how a distro is expected to work these days. People even use the term "modern distro" to mean pretty much *buntu and Suse.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
Dell has been offering systems with Ubuntu preinstalled for two years now.
Ya, and the incredible impact of this holy grail of Linux has been.......
That's what they should have put on this list :)
Top so far (Score:5, Insightful)
The close second, if we include transportation are (antigrav) flying cars, of course.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
I installed Ubuntu for the first time last year, and man, I was disappointed.
Right out of the box, so to speak, there were problems:
1. NVIDIA graphics card drivers weren't installed because they were proprietary. Come on. Even then, dragging windows around and typing into text boxes had a minor delay that didn't feel natural.
2. All websites looked different and ugly as sin, because the package didn't come with the fonts that every other system used. Come on!
3. Multi-monitor use was difficult to set up without having to alter configuration files ( though I do wish taskbars on multiple screens would come to Windows 7). Some things I found simply couldn't be done without writing scripts: setting up a hotkey to send a window to the other monitor, etc.
To resolve most of these issues, I had to navigate a bunch of forums and wiki help pages. I couldn't imagine trying to show my mom how to do that, for instance.
Ubuntu has a lot of strengths, and many of its features made me go "OOOO, cool!" But the Linux learning curve is freakishly steep. To do something of medium difficulty in Windows generally requires advanced console command knowledge in Ubuntu.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
The best line (Score:4, Insightful)
What is wrong is expecting businesses to pay for something they don't need.
That line can be used in many places at many times for many sides of an argument. It's my favorite argument for staying with Windows XP and Office 2003.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Domain please? Segway HT anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
" The question is, are they wrong? Ubuntu really has remained for Linux hobbyists. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it is, for the most part."
Yes, yes they are. The article's name is "Top 10 most disappointing technologies". Maybe the marketshare of Ubuntu has somewhat lagged behind what people hoped for, Ubuntu's tech itself is great and its improvements from release to release are worth the pain of switching to a newer OS. The fact that MS is holding the market hostage with Windows(and it's gigantuan legacy heap) can hardly be described as a fault of Ubuntu.
Failed Product != Failed Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sadly Linux COULD be a solution for many more people but they seem to be so used to Windows that they can't even figure out how to use something else.
Uh huh. Yet people happily figure out how to use Macs. Ok, well, maybe not happily. Why do they do it?
marketing and brand loyalty blindness
Bingo. When Ubuntu started up I really got the feeling that Shuttleworth got that it wasn't about technology... sure, an OS has to do a certain amount of "stuff" before people can use it, but that's the easy part. Getting people to try something new isn't about how great the new thing is, it's about style and bullshit. Using a Mac is no easier than using a PC.. in fact, the vast majority of people find it so much harder because they're not familiar with Macs.. but go out into the street and ask a dozen people and they'll say that oh yes, those Macs are so much easier to use than PCs.. that lovely Mr Jobs told them so.
Re:Must be an Australian thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Weird choice (Score:5, Insightful)
They did not mention DRM? What the hell?
Also this quote about Ubuntu:
Maybe it was just the overenthusiastic marketing or the fanboys who swarmed to the system but Ubuntu really was supposed to change everything, where as the operating system landscape looks very much the same these days.
It did lower the price of XP for netbooks down to a few dollars though... In a way, desktop Linux made netbooks possible - otherwise Microsoft wouldn't lower the price of their system enough for this class of machines to become viable.
Push (Score:4, Insightful)
PointCast anyone?
Bah! Another list... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. NVIDIA graphics card drivers weren't installed because they were proprietary. Come on. Even then, dragging windows around and typing into text boxes had a minor delay that didn't feel natural.
Since when did Microsoft start shipping NVIDIA drivers with their Windows releases, anyways?
Re:Bluetooth? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard for telcos to figure out how to charge you for it, so they cripple the phone instead.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well - in fairness, the other part of the problem is that Ubuntu (& Gnome) are not really designed for end users. They're built for how developers believe end-users should work - which is quite different. I don't mean that they're built for developers - rather their built for a developer's notion of what is a logical interaction.
Unfortunately, that often collides with real workflows in subtle but jarring ways. Look even at the desktop menu names ("Applications" "Places" and "System"). The reason that the Start menu has worked is because it gives users /one/ path to get to the things they want. Instead, using gnome/ubuntu, users are immediately faced with a choice - they have to categorize the task they want to do, before they can do it. Every single time, as they learn the system.
One issue among many that shows the disconnect.
Re:Raymond begging the question much? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also it's wrong anyway.. Firsly, if you decentralise too much the communication issues between developers mean that you get fragmentation, and most of the work ends up never being used because nobody ever hears of it. Secondly you can't even really do it - there will always be one definitive release, with a set of core developers. For most projects that's basically as far as it ever goes - despite intentions few people have the time to devote to a project, so most (I expect nearly all) opensource porjects whilst being theoretically decentralised are really only one tree with 3 or 4 people maximum committing to it. The linux kernel is the exception to this somewhat, but it can't be used as a general model.
In the corporate world of course decentralisation makes no sense (tracking,auditing and access control is *important* to a company and you can't have people going off and doing their own thing). So in no way is decentralisation 'inherently superior' - it depends on your circumstances.
Top 10 technologies the author doesn't use (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, that's a more accurate title.
Re:Raymond begging the question much? (Score:3, Insightful)
Utter bullshit.
What most distros do is just collect together applications and make it as seamless as they can to install them. Development is spread over a pile of different applications that ultimately end up in every distribution if they are good enough. I think the confusion above comes from thinking that because some companies that put out distributions pay people to work on different applications that the other companies can't use it - so a complete misunderstanding of this open source thing. The reality can be shown with an example. The distribution "Yellow Dog Linux" (which the above poster and most other readers have probably never heard of) put together a package update system called the "yellowdog update manager" which is run by the command "yum". Other more mainstream distributions picked this up.
A distribution "doing your own thing" is really limited to choice of a packaging method, testing how all the applications it chooses run together and artwork. The exceptions are special cases for different architectures, optimisation to run on slow systems or modification to run from different media (eg. live CD or usb stick). There are also many others that use somebody else's distro as a base as just a delivery mechanism for a specific set of applications (eg. MailCleaner).
Ultimatly development is on the application level or kernel level which benefits any distribution that wants those things. That is very different to either the complete misunderstanding or deliberate misdirection in the post above.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Insightful)
What won me over was the "just works" (especially sleeping the laptop, which linux may have improved with by now) combined with the terminal abilities. And as for the 300% price, when I bought my first MacBook it was the best value for the hardware with my student discount (not taking into account value of the OS and bundled iLife software). My current (refurbished) MacBook Pro was a little bit more than some competitors laptops, but I felt the build quality was superior and the physical dimensions were better (in addition timespace allowed for seamless transition from my old computer - all files, settings, everything. No time spent tweaking all the program settings and installing the apps - that experience has ensured my next computer will be from Apple).
With the music player I have owned players by creative, have run rockbox on a Sansa, and have had cheapo-stick players. You really have to give Apple credit for its interface here, it stays out of the way and lets me do what I want: play music. Additionally: for me the iTunes database is added value, I like not having to manage the player and being able to sync smart playlists.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Insightful)
Replace Linux with Vista and you'll see its not just the Linux OS that is having the problem. People are very comfortable with what they have and don't WANT to change.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:1, Insightful)
Also, I think it's not good for supporters of Ubuntu to claim that its unpopularity is because of Microsoft holding people hostage. That's an easy way out that leaves people to wash their hands of all the other problems and factors involved -- many of which, unlike MS's current market dominance, can actually be solved with a bit of effort.
I, for one, need to have it thoroughly demonstrated that Ubuntu is made to be used rather than made to be tinkered with, that the command line is an optional tool rather than integral to the experience, and that config files are something I need not know about when I'm using and adjusting the OS as an average user might. (I've had several bad experiences trying to use Linux on the desktop.) There are probably other things, but basically I need to be enticed; other, less techy users might need a slightly different kind of demo.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
I love Linux, but sadly I agree with him.
I don't.
"While Linux has definitely caught on in the enterprise server and database market, the open-source OS has never really been able to move into the greater market."
You have to draw the line before you can cross is. KIA's not the first brand that comes to mind when citing car manufacturers that are prevalent in the United States, like Ford or Dodge or Mitsubishi, but it certainly exists and will continue to exist.
"Those who do use Linux as the primary OS for their home or work PC are still by and large tech-savvy users who comprise what used to be known as the 'hobbyist' market. The larger end-user crowd has not been able to warm up to Linux."
The large end market, no. Users who are not tech-savvy, yes.
"Ubuntu was supposed to change that. When the OS was launched, I remember all of my Linux-advocate friends predicting that this would be the product to make the jump and challenge Microsoft in the consumer and workstation spaces. Nearly five years after its release, Ubuntu remains popular amongst Linux users, but has yet to really pick up any sort of real momentum in the greater desktop OS market."
Number one on Distrowatch, Dell, System 76, massive consumer backing, fanatical support, extremely active development, et cetera...
"Yes, getting rave reviews from the Linux community is nice, but get back to me when the housewives and pensioners, not just the IT pros and college students, start dumping Windows for Ubuntu."
How can we know that housewives and pensioners aren't using it?
"But the more he explained his position the more I came to agree. Maybe it was just the overenthusiastic marketing or the fanboys who swarmed to the system but Ubuntu really was supposed to change everything, where as the operating system landscape looks very much the same these days."
Overthrowing Microsoft would have been nice but it doesn't have to go down to change anything. It's easy to think nothing's changed but under the waters the change really is there to behold.
"Don't get me wrong, I like Ubuntu and have it running on a home system. But unless a major manufacturer starts preinstalling it it's going to be confined to the Linux enthusiast and the hobbyist market."
Dell.
From wikipedia...
Total assets US$ 27.561 billion (2008)[1]
Not major enough?
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I think that Ubuntu's a bit too young to call it a 'flop.'
Who's calling it a "flop?" The reason for quoting a word is because you're indicating that someone else said it. It's a disappointment, not a flop. It may still do great things, but before and just immediately after it was released, to hear a user talking about it you would have thought it was God's own OS.
Re:What about the CueCat?! (Score:5, Insightful)
CueCat had a lot riding on it and lots of fairly high profile partners. Perhaps if it wasn't in the retarded shape of a big plastic cat it might have taken off.
Perhaps if it wasn't a solution in search of a problem it might have taken off.
There, fixed that for you.
Re:Failed Technologies: All RISC Chips (Score:1, Insightful)
RISC had Intel on the run, but the combination of Moore's law and the Wintel PC monopoly bailed them out. The P6 and later generation CPUs are basically superscalar RISC machines. Those cute old x86 instructions like string scans have been relegated to (slow) microcode; compiler writers, for the most part, avoid generating them.
That much would suffice for near-parity with the RISC vendors, but then the huge PC market kept Intel as the high volume producer, by far, so their price/performance was much better than their non-x86 competitors. Even IBM with its PowerPC wasn't able to match them in the PC market, so Apple bailed and went with Intel.
Re:The best line (Score:3, Insightful)
10GB ethernet will happen.
8 years ago I thought a 128kb bonded ISDN line was fast. Now 8mb is considered normal - a 64x speed increase. Fast forward another 8 years and you're talking about your raw internet speed being about half a gig (maybe even faster.. I should be on 100mb by the end of the year). It goes without saying a lot of that will be taken up with video and large files which will need to be transferred. Gigabit ethernet will creak under that kind of load.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Insightful)
1. NVIDIA graphics card drivers weren't installed because they were proprietary. Even then, dragging windows around and typing into text boxes had a minor delay that didn't feel natural.
To install the nVidia drivers you must accept an EULA. If it was automatically installed, you would have to accept an EULA to use Ubuntu at all. Clearly that is not acceptable, but it's a point-and-click install. At any rate, what kind of machine are you running??? With or without those drivers I have absolutely zero problems doing anything 2D. Just don't even think about running anything 3D or enabling desktop effects without acceleration, but I can't notice any lag at all.
2. All websites looked different and ugly as sin, because the package didn't come with the fonts that every other system used. Come on!
Believe it or not, fonts as in the actual shapes of the letters are copyright protected. Ubuntu can't just install any font they want to, the only reason you can install those legally at all is because Microsoft at one time provided them for interoperability. And only a few and ancient ones. Plus there are patents related to font aliasing that Ubuntu can't violate. It's not legally possible. Welcome to how software patents fosters innovation...
3. Multi-monitor use was difficult to set up without having to alter configuration files
Unfortunately I agree with you on that one. It definately could use some work, though it's making progress.
If I was to add a point where Ubuntu just isn't up to it out of the box, it's codec and media support. Restricted extrsa still isn't enough, medibuntu with libdvdcss and w32codecs are a must IMO.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you seriously suggesting that it's better for a user to have to click a button before being presented with essentially same choice?
Re:What about the CueCat?! (Score:3, Insightful)
But what's this about the "ludicrously priced Apple Lisa"? Sure it was $10,000 in 1983, but it wasn't targeted to home users. Apple's Lisa also invented the Office desktop suite, which was bundled into its price.
The original Lisa had a 5 mHz 68000 series CPU, 1 MB of RAM and two Apple FileWare 871 KB 5 1/2" floppy disk drives.
It was not - let us say - the most responsive system Apple ever built.
A significant impediment to third-party software on the Lisa was the fact that, when first launched, the Lisa Office System could not be used to write programs for itself: a separate development OS was required called Lisa Workshop. An engineer runs the two OSes in a dual-boot config, writing and compiling code on one machine and testing it on the other. Apple Lisa [wikipedia.org]
The Lisa belongs in the same family line as the dedicated word processor. But a $10,000 PC on every office desktop was never in the cards.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Insightful)
OS/2 and BeOS were also technically excellent, and only held back by Microsoft's dominance. I would consider their lack of success to be a disappointment.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Insightful)
Bluetooth and Firewire? Whaaaat? (Score:3, Insightful)
Bluetooth has always worked great for me. For the last 7 or 8 years I've used it to sync contact/calendar data between my Mac and whatever mobile phone I've had (I'm still an iPhone holdout). Plus I use it for file transfers between the computer and phone, and to tether to the phone to use its WWAN connection.
And I'm a huge fan of Firewire and hate that it lost out to USB. Firewire is a lot more versatile and was designed that way from the start (comes in damned handy as a network port between two Macs sometimes, because you can run TCP/IP over it). USB was never supposed to be much more than a new connection for keyboards and mice, and now they're shoehorning other capabilities into it that it was never designed for-- which IMHO never leads to good things. This line from the article particularly annoyed me: "I know of at least three people who purchased shiny new portable video recorders and were stuffed when they realised they'd have to upgrade their systems to support FireWire." Oh, noes! They have to spend a few bucks on a PCI card! The horror!!!! Seriously? Is this a real gripe? I mean, the cheapest Firewire card at NewEgg costs $6. A really good one will only set you back $40 or so.
~Philly
VR fail (Score:1, Insightful)
Having been a teen through most of the 90's, I grew up under the assumption that VR would be the next big thing. Everybody was bragging about how great the world of VR would be once the price of the technology reduced to a point where it could be accepted by the public. Well... that thought came and went. I blame Nintendo. While I'm an 8bit and 16bit fanboy, the Virtual Boy came and went so fast and left such a bad taste in everybody's mouths that the term 'virtual' has been poison to marketability. Nintendo tried to push 'virtual' on to the market before it was good enough.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your final point is the key thing here. The OS is no longer the limiting factor.
The limiting factor is that the linux ecosystem is just not complete enough for a lot of users (accounting software, games, application specific software of so many types), and running a windows VM is mostly pointless if all you do is run windows apps (good for winding back, snapshots, image management etc).
Other thing that is not mentioned enough. Lots of users have struggled for years to accumulate just enough know-how to just get by with Windows. They simply are resistant to having to learn anything new. Total change fatigue dominates the user experience. Think how immense the effort Apple has put in and how long it's taking to win new customers, and it has a far superior ecosystem to Linux in the desktop world.
The great advantage in the server market is that the people making decisions have a clue, so you see Linux win on technical merit, and do very well indeed.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on! proprietary driver issues are the fault of the hardware maker. Nvidia is the 5uXX0r when it comes to Linux support. Anyhow, since last year, Ubuntu auto installs proprietary drivers.
What would we say if Microsoft or Apple took that attitude?
I know for a fact both companies have people who's job it is to work with specific hardware vendors all day long resolving issues and making sure everything works perfectly.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
I love Linux, but sadly I agree with him.
The most intractable problem for Linux as a client OS is that it arrived too late.
The mass market desktop in 2009 runs 64 bit Vista Home Premium on a quad core CPU with 4 to 8 GB RAM.
The geek will rant -
but this is fundamentally a very solid platform on which to build.
The budget dual core Atom netbook with Win 7 and ION graphics is just down the road. The form factor is attractive, the price is right - and you can even play games.
If UNIX is more to your taste and you want a mature and standardized GUI, than Apple has you covered.
It's tough to find any breathing room here.
Re:Firewire (Score:4, Insightful)
I was in full agreement with all the items they brought up until I got to firewire. You could tell the author has had little or no exposure to it. It's only major downfall if you want to call it that, is that very few windows pcs come with it by default. For the people that can use it, it's very handy for streamed raw video, high speed data transfer, and occasionally in unexpected places like networking and scanners.
Calling USB the "firewire killer" is almost laughable. I ran some tests recently on drive IO speeds on a variety of interfaces here, including IDE, SATA, firewire 400, firewire 800, and watched firewire 400 drill USB480 into the ground on a consistent basis. Insert a hub (since USB is not chainable) and the speed gets butchered even worse. Considering that (for whatever silly reason) windows pcs don't come with it and have such a large market share, and manufacturers are still making products that use firewire as an option or the only interface, there's obviously an advantage to it over USB.
Since there is currently no video-over-usb standard, all sorts of bad things result from a usb only camcorder. USB is not designed to be peer-to-peer, it's peer-to-host, and that severely limits its application and what works naturally with it. I don't even see why the author made a blanket comparison between the two, since mass storage is the only use they really share. Though nowadays high end scanners can use USB480 which is a good thing.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bluetooth (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree - the technology itself was fairly sound, especially in the later versions
The main issue were definitely market implementation:
1) Software stack - why were the basic stacks so buggy and counter-intuative. Most windows users had to pirate a third party stack to do anything usefull.
2) Price - I rarely saw anything bluetooth (even generic brands) for under A$100 (US$70) which is rip off for a wireless keyboard or mouse.
I daresay both of these were caused due to restrictive and expensive licensing schemes. Had it been cheaper alot of poeple could have made more money through increased sales.
Re:Failed Technologies: All RISC Chips (Score:1, Insightful)
The brand (maybe) failed. But the tech didn't. Every x86 clone has a RISC at its core. It just makes more sense to have a simple instruction set, or actaully more importantly, an orthogonal instruction set.
Now onto that maybe- maybe RISC as a brand didn't win the laptop (but that war i still on) or desktop, but it sure as hell won everything embedded (games consoles, phones, PDAs etc.)
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you didn't (try to) use linux on the desktop before Ubuntu.
The author (in GP post) talks as if Ubuntu IS Linux.
Ubuntu is just the best desktop Linux so far. By a long shot And I've tried a LOT of desktop linux distributions, and been using linux on the desktop as my primary OS (outside of gaming) for 10+ years.
It's sad that such a great movement in the direction of good desktop linux is being broadly painted as a disappointment. When you hear Ubuntu talked up its because its the best linux yet, not because it's going to overnight put Microsoft out of business and convince everyone to use free software and open formats.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:2, Insightful)
"Don't get me wrong, I like Ubuntu and have it running on a home system. But unless a major manufacturer starts preinstalling it it's going to be confined to the Linux enthusiast and the hobbyist market."
Dell.
From wikipedia...
Total assets US$ 27.561 billion (2008)[1]
Not major enough?
Not preinstalled enough.
1. Dell doesn't preinstall anything in the sense that they build to order. How many times do you read about something like the Dell mini 9 for $99 that people won't see for 6 months after they paid for it before you realize they aren't "just in time" they are "after they should have done it".
2. The statement about "a major manufacturer starts preinstalling it" implies that they do so for the majority of their products or do so in a way that it is the default choice when ordering a system. Until Joe sixpack orders a Dell without thinking "Hey, I want Ubuntu on that" and actually gets Ubuntu on it you can't call it preinstalled as though it has any significance
3. You can't even get Ubuntu from Dell on most systems. Take the Optiplex 740. Say I want to support AMD and still get Ubuntu preloaded. My choices when I buy that PC today are
Genuine Windows Vista® Business Service Pack 1, with media, 32, ENG [add $99 $38]
Dell Recommended - Includes Windows Vista Business Assurance
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Basic Service Pack 1, With media, 32, ENG [Included in Price]
Genuine Windows Vista® Ultimate Service Pack 1, with media, 32, ENG [add $115]
Genuine Windows Vista Business Bonus-Windows XP Professional downgrade [add $99 $38]
Genuine Windows Vista Ultimate Bonus-Windows XP Professional downgrade [add $115]
I'm not seeing a lot of love for Ubuntu in those choices. Given it's a business PC I'm not happy they are charging extra for the XP downgrade that was/is supposed to be free downgrade for Corporate users. I'm not happy they are playing bait and switch with a professional line of PCs that defaults to a home OS. Sure I can take whichever silly choice is in the list and format the drive. I have CD-Rs laying in plain site in my office with the last 3 major Ubuntu releases but anything I do with those ISO downloads I got from http://www.ubuntu.com/ [ubuntu.com] is way far removed from the concept of "preinstalled".
MacOS is a good example (Score:3, Insightful)
Of a quote from "Mostly Harmless" the final book in the Hitchhiker's series:
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
This is the case with the "just works" mentality in MacOS. When things are as expected, yes everything and just work with no effort and it's cool. However when something goes haywire, the tools needed to find and fix it are absent since it "just works" and thus doesn't need any.
As a historical example, take Appletalk. Appletalk was designed with the misguided idea that you could have a protocol that was both zero configuration and high scalability. Other protocols were either one or the other. You had things like NetBEUI, which was Windows' small workgroup protocol that basically consisted of machines in the same broadcast domain shouting at each other. Easy to use, but didn't scale past a single segment and the broadcast traffic could get intense. You also had things like TCP/IP. It scales to, well, the whole world as we are well aware today. However, there's some configuration needed, it isn't all automatic.
Basically you could configure routers to route it, but on the computer level there wasn't any config. You plugged in a bunch of Macs and they just went to town. This was accomplished in part through the idea of a seed router. One computer on a given Appletalk segment was promoted to seed router and then took care of handling various functions needed for computers to communicate. The users didn't have to set it up, and in fact were not aware of it. None of the computers noted who their seed was.
This was all well and good, until something went wrong, and you got two seed routers on a network. Then everything went to shit, and nothing would tell you why. None of the computers would tell you who they thought their seed was, the seeds themselves wouldn't tell you they were seeds, and they wouldn't back off and fix the problem. More or less you had to turn off every single computer, and then power them back on to fix the problem.
Thus today everyone, even Apple, uses TCP/IP. Maybe it doesn't "just work", maybe you need to configure it, but at least when something goes wrong you CAN configure it and fix the problem.
Ten real disappointing technologies (Score:4, Insightful)
Not products, technologies.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Insightful)
How is that intuitive? "Just working" when you insert a CD is that it automatically plays your CD. Last I checked this was the default behavior and must be disabled. Casually click the disc and drag it to your library. Watch as iTunes rips it without asking you any annoying questions. It just works. The problem is that you think ripping a CD is the most intuitive behavior for software that is, primarily, a media PLAYER. I'm not an Apple fanboy-- I don't even own a Mac-- but this makes perfect sense to me. As for your wireless issue, no clue.
Re:Technologies vs products (Score:3, Insightful)
Fusion/Cold fusion: Is this always 40 years in the future?
That was upgraded to 20 years in the future about 30 years ago. Get with the program.
* Photovolatic power: Why hasn't this followed 'Moores law(sic)' like trends of other silicon based technology? (yeah there's a slashjoke somewhere in that sentence.
Thankfully for humanity, the sun's output has not been growing exponentially.
Neural Networks: This and fuzzly logic were buzzwords for a while but what happened?
Modern ones are called "support vector machines". They're used. to solve real problems. You probably don't hear of teh since they've moved from hype in to the real world (which is always les exciting than hype).
Hybrid cars (be real, the battery capacity is anemic and the mpg on some of these hybrids is below what some of GM's Cadillacs and other diesel monstrosities of the late 1970s, erly 80s had)
Not to mention the lare '00s. Hybrids use gasoline engines since they're lighter than deisels, and the hugh battery pack already makes them heavy cars. Deisels are more efficient than gasoline engines. Hybrids will never beat diesels on interstate cruising. They can only win if power can be usefully reclaimed.
Cars with small, efficient Diesel or rotary engines:GM and Mazda's teething pains gave these technologies a bad rap which hasn't been overcome 2 decades later (at least not in the U.S. market.)
You need to visie europe some time. Also, I think you mean Wankel engines, not rotary engines. [wikipedia.org]
Laserdisc:Randomly access each frame, skip the commercials, no copy protection, what's not to like about this 1980 technology?
Too expensive/high bandwidth? CDs, DVDs and now Blu-Ray are essentially digital versions of the same tech. Also, you should try MPlayer sometime if you don't like commercials in DVDs.
DEC, Cray, Amiga:... This list should be much longer but it's late. Have we abandoned Josephson Junctions, Full memory crossbars, fast buses and efficient Operating systems?
Josephson Junctions? Not sure how that made the list. But no, to the rest.
GNU/Linux, OSX and Solaris: Three solid alternatives to Microsoft Windows, each has strength and yet none have made a significant dent in Microsoft's marketshare.
This is just plain nuts. Linux is *everywhere*. In some areas it is dominant, in others, a smallish chunk of a VAST market. Whay can it only be considered a success then it is the largest chunk of a VAST market? By this measure almost nothing in the entire world is a success.
Products which should have never seen the light of day.
Yeah.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Must be an Australian thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep, Dell Australia offers no Ubuntu options anywhere. I was ready to buy one of their netbooks and all, but I really don't need another useless MS license tyvm. I also can't think of a reasonable basis for the decision, but I'm sure they have their reasons. I doubt it's due to any underhandedness, much more likely incompetence blessed by ignorance.
Re:Back to TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
The worst bit was when they said
Don't get me wrong, I like Ubuntu and have it running on a home system. But unless a major manufacturer starts preinstalling it it's going to be confined to the Linux enthusiast and the hobbyist market.
Is Dell not a major manufacturer? This seems like pure flamebait, or perhaps just extremely ignorant journalism.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm really NOT trolling, nor trying to start an OS war, honest! But facts are facts,
and
and STILL it's a worthless "lab queen", suitable for ZERO desktops.
Yeah, ZERO, right. So all of us who are running Ubuntu (or whatever distro) exclusively and getting our work done are completely deluded, we're really running Windows or Mac OS and don't realize it.
In fact, your own words label you a troll and show you wouldn't know a fact from a kick up the arse.
That's why the vast majority of Linux users have OS X machines. Because they need to actually get shit done.
What's that, based on your extensive survey of 2 people? Pulled out your arse again more likely.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Insightful)
This would be good if people thought that way. In my own observations (and I'm certainly no expert), they don't. As much as UI designers /want/ them to think "I want to browse the web", what they seem to actually think is "I want to start Firefox". Similarly while they may think "I want to pay my bills", they will still know that they installed Quicken to do this, and they will want to start Quicken - not "Manage Finances".
Gnome is built around the exact theory you have described, but the more I watch people (whose primary job isn't computers) work, the more I realize that those are not necessarily valid assumptions for the majority of users.
I think the reason that the task-oriented approach doesn't really work so well is that people think of tasks differently - which makes identifying the task by name rather difficult. You might think "Browse the web" while I think "Surf the web". You might "pay bills" while I want to "manage money". It seems an impossible job to create a name that universally identifies any given task - which means that the user is again required to think and make a choice for nearly every simple task. Even worse, they have to manually search the menu and do mental translations as they go.
When they're launching Quicken, there's no thought required. They know that quicken is what they want to be running, so they run it.
Windows doesn't quite get it right either though they're closer. Presenting things by company name is (usually) a step up, because in many cases those names are things that users can see and recognize immediately.