Why aren't computer clocks as accurate as cheap quartz watches?

Most MUAs sort by date ascending. That puts their spam right at the top of the list.

As technologies mature, breakthroughs come less and less frequently.

It depends on what is meant by desktop. Graphic user interfaces contributed to productivity in some ways, by extending the usefulness of the computer beyond plain text, and by making multitasking environments easier to manage.

You're probably only looking at a handful of developed economies. The entire world is much further behind. Even in developed countries, there are large institutional users of computers that are still struggling with 16-bit Windows. And Windows 9x is still very common. Where I work, everyone is still on Windows 9x.

I don't have to know. It's a general principle, applicable to software like anything else. Why risk billions on a new software product that may or may not succeed, when you can make almost as much by adding a few "features" to an existing produce with virtually no risk and very low cost and then charge for upgrades?

I suppose there are some people who look forward to things like aggressive, and intrusive DRM, or filesystems that are designed to be continually searched and indexed, but I do not, and I don't think the majority of people care.

Yes, I mean NT 4. Of course, XP looks uncannily like NT, especially if you peek behind the superficial user interface.

Sorta reminds me of the old joke .....

NASA spent millions on designing a ball point pen that would work in zero gravity (or up side down in gravity). The Russians use a pencil!

Yes, I sometimes play with that one for the obvious lesson that more complex isn't necessarily better but it's just as important to tell, as Paul Harvey says, "the rest of the story."

Fact is, both NASA and Russia used pencils in the beginning and both, yes both, ended up using pens because, you see, as 'obvious' as the pencil's advantages are the lead tended to sometimes break and float around in the

Fisher did all the development, ate the 1 million development cost, and sold the pens to NASA for $2.95 each, the first 400 going to NASA in 1967, and the Russians ended up using the same Fisher pen.

But lead pencils were used on all Mercury and Gemini space flights prior to

So the 'obvious' isn't always such a great idea after all ;)

And that was the point, along with the summary of the general principle you snipped out, that "'Bells and whistles" are often more useful than the cynic realizes."

Which has, for all practical purposes, nothing to do with the matter of whether companies do 'new things', or just add 'fluff', as people who do not use the things are not in the market.

And I can find folks in "large institutions' that don't use computers at all. You're overstating another fragment.

Yes, and I suspected that by "DOS" you meant to include anything even remotely connected to it. Not exactly cricket as the GUI *was* the (second half) of the 'big idea' that made Microsoft what it is (and began the gist of this thread section)

Sounds logical except it isn't a "general principle" and companies introduce new products all the time. Some succeed, like Apple's IPOD, and some don't. And it's pretty much the same with startups except you don't pay no mind to failed startups and they don't have anything else to sustain them when they do. Not to mention that most startups are the 'new company' equivalent to your 'modify existing product' approach, making something akin to what exists with some new 'bells and whistles' added: their 'better version' of it.

Plus, it's becoming increasingly clear that you don't consider anything that even remotely resembles the existing product to be anything more than a 'bell and whistle' upgrade while I have stated that a sufficient performance improvement is my criteria. E.g. If the topic were cars it seems that nothing short of magnetic levitation would satisfy your need for "truly interesting" while I would consider a hybrid significant enough. Hell, I might even consider "rides like a car but has the payload capacity of a truck" sufficient enough because it fills a useful functional criteria regardless of not being "truly interesting."

If that were the entire feature list I might agree with you, but it isn't. Nor is the 'end user' the entire market.

Compared to NT4, a fully functional PnP alone is reason enough.

Now, 'peaking behind the superficial user interface' really *is* something the majority of people don't care about.

I find it lets me run 4 or 5 command-lines simultaneously. :)

this morning I resized 1000 jpeg images to approx 1200 and 120000 pixels, while woring in the web site that will use them. there may be GUI tools capable of doing that in less than a week, but I haven't seen them.

Bye. Jasen

capable

There may not be any but I never said a GUI was the ideal solution to everything.

On the other hand, it would have been a real pain looking at that web site at the same time on a text command line ;)

Invented at Xerox PARC

Introduced to the market by Apple

-- "Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it." (Stephen Leacock)

They were sent through HAL. "Dave? What are you doing, Dave?"

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

Ever notice that all the letters in HAL are just one off of IBM? HAL IBM

About 35 years ago.

However, nobody has found a way to transform HAL into Microsoft, so the conspiracy theories died out with the decline of IBM.

IBM provided a great deal of technical assistance in the making of the film, though.

hehe. Yeah, me too.

So true.

I wonder if anyone tried playing it backwards to hear satanic sounds?

No wonder HAL went a bit loopy ;)

IBM was a good company in its time. Like so many computer companies, it first developed problems with marketing and management, and these eventually contaminated engineering departments. It's depressing to think how many major mistakes in managing computer companies have been driven by marketing and sales decisions. As one of a trillion examples, just look at Intel's marketing-driven decision to pursue inferior microprocessor architectures just so that it could run chips at faster clock speeds (thereby satisfying clueless marketroids with higher and higher GHz numbers).

And it's a shame how many companies have been ruined by letting engineering make the decisions. But those don't usually get large enough to easily notice.

The same trick can turn VMS int WNT (Windows NT)....

the way I heard it MS got a bunch of ex-DEC people who had worked on VMS

Bye. Jasen

Companies like Hewlett-Packard seem to have done well with engineers at the helm.

First, I didn't say "all" and secondly, do you really think they have no marketing department or, since they do, ignore them?

The real point was that single minded reliance on any one perspective is potentially destructive and that it takes a proper mix of them all.

So he gives more in dollars, but a LOT less in percentage of income or total worth.