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The Ideas Behind Longhorn
An anonymous reader writes: "Fortune magazine is carrying an interesting article on the new and improved Bill Gates, as well as some details on Longhorn: 'Because Gates' geeks are completely overhauling the operating system, they'll also have to redesign most of the company's other software products and services to take full advantage, including the MSN online service, its server applications, and especially Microsoft Office, the productivity suite that accounts for nearly a third of the company's sales and profits. If this enormous undertaking succeeds, it will make computers more personal than ever. Equipped with Longhorn, your PC will keep track of how you work, whom you talk to, what sites you look at, how you make documents and whom you share them with, which data on the network are yours--making all those things easier.'"
Is that it won't play nice with samba anymore, office won't be compatible with openoffice anymore, linux and *bsd won't be able to read the filesystem anymore, wine will not be able to run MS applications anymore, and you are not compatible with privacy anymore.
...discussion about this on the Register.
--Kylus
Idiot-proof something, and Life will build a better Idiot.
Equipped with Longhorn, your PC will keep track of how you work, whom you talk to, what sites you look at, how you make documents and whom you share them with, which data on the network are yours--making all those things easier.
Weren't we just talking about that
?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
As I am sure many people will post, do we really want the computer tracking everything we do and everyone we talk to? I am happy that Microsoft is aiming towards better security, but is this new method just leading towards more exploits? Also, one might wonder about compatibility issues if they are talking about redesigning all of their software in order to be more secure.
your PC will keep track of how you work, whom you talk to, what sites you look at, how you make documents and whom you share them with, which data on the network are yours--making all those things easier
...to sell to spammers and identity thieves. Thanks, Microsoft!
--saint
Its not only the phone-home capability of this software that's scary, its also the ability of any l337 h@x0r to compromise your system and discover scary shit about you.
And wait till the G starts to ask for records of what you have been up to on your computer.
George Orwell warned us about this
Live today. Tomorrow will cost a lot more!
I've been looking at tieing up nural nets/ heristics and systems components for 4 to 5 years on-and-off.
/. post..
There are two main problems,
1: nural nets/ heristics at a low level slowwww things down.
2: You need a common dictionary/gramma so that evrything at least has a chance to talk to each other.
minor problems are down to initial design.
How the hell do you write the initial networks for you applications?
But if you get it right then,
The file save as dialog for gimp might show text as a available save format because Gimp presents bitmap data
you have an OCR package that can go from bitmap -> text and somthing that can save text files.
All you applications will look and behive the same, and all components are interchangable (so long as they present the write kind of data).
Well that's about it for the
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
This is a unifying technology! It will be fully endorsed by the SPA, RIAA, MPAA, FBI,
I would suspect that the Open-Source troops can beat 2005 for something similiar...
I am also curious that the article didn't seem bothered that MS broke the law to get to its current dominance.... and of course I couldn't really resist this:
"In 27 years he [B.G] claims he has never called in sick or missed work. Not even once."Certainly now its proven by science: THERE IS NO REST FOR THE WICKED!
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
This "personal" stuff is just fluff for the real initiative - DRM chips in the HW. Read this article and see for yourselves Infoworld.com .
Sound waves should be free!
go away
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Yeah, often not for the better, either, but that's always implied, just like this little beauty was only driven by a little old lady on Sundays. But indirectly, due to my lost patience with the company, I will spend more time with Linux and Open Source, and for the great strides their ridiculous attitudes and poor quality have encouraged in the aforementioned, I do thank them.
The Hook -->> making all those things easier.' (It'll make it easier if it would just not crash and diagnostics agreed with what the system is actually doing, or not doing)
At 135 mph around Sears Point Raceway (soon to be renamed (ugh) Infineon raceway.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
Uh, if "those things" refer to getting the work done, I already have that down pat - once you're over the learning curve, it's done. Vi is vi is vi (unless it's vivivi - the editor of the beast!).
However, it sounds as if "those things" actually refers to something else, namely the ability for some other entity to complete erode my privacy, have unprecidented access to my system (it is mine, like it or not), and leaving me open to unheard of security issues.
Thank you, but I prefer that *I* keep track of how I work, who I talk to, what I look at, how I make *my* documents, and with whom *I* share them. It's not up to the system to decide which data belongs to me since to do so it must analyze my things. To insinuate oneself either personally, or impersonally through the operating system would be simply rude.
You wouldn't tolerate your officemate or the person in the next apartment or even Richard Stallman rifleing through your desk/sock/nightstand drawers. Why should you tolerate it from Microsoft (or Apple, or Sun, or RedHat)?
"Equipped with Longhorn, your PC will keep track of how you work, whom you talk to, what sites you look at, how you make documents and whom you share them with, which data on the network are yours--making all those things easier."
And that's supposed to be a good thing?!
his new Bill is ... well, let him speak for himself, as he did in his office one day in June: "I've always liked multitasking (...)
Billy, Billy... you deserve a +1 funny there, but we all know that is not true :)
Engage!
But with at least 5 years until Longhorn's release, I think we can count on the world changing so radically in the meantime that Longhorn and Palladium become completely irrelevant. Look at Microsoft Bob, their last "big-bang" approach to engineering a network computer architecture, and how the WWW made it completely irrelevant.
And in all that time you never learned to spell properly?
that is if it is done right. This could get rid of a lot of the bloat that comes from making a product and slapping an addon here, and then there.....
Great Linux Site
your PC will keep track of how you work
...whom you talk to ...what sites you look at ...how you make documents and whom you share them with ...which data on the network are yours
"An issue has been found where a malicious hacker can execute VBScript code through our new IE7 parser with the special command:
Dim MyArray As String(100000)
This will cause the array to grow into our Longhorn WorkTrack System, where the hacker might access its address space and see what the user does."
Feel free to make up consequences of security holes in these systems:
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-
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It doesn't take much imagination, so anyone should be able to do it.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Pre-announcing a product and starting the hype five years before it's expected to be released..."
Forgive me for being cynical, but considering Microsoft's previous histroy when reusing their past code, I'll believe it when I see it.
To quote Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain "Hay parches sobre los parches" (There are patches on top of patches)
OK, the humor hasn't escaped me, but the popular media hasn't been hyping duke nukem or nwn for five years either...
Good form. All of your arguments are transparent enough to need little rebuttal, but I would add one thing:
Do you think trying to reverse-engineer MS's encrypted DRM-able filesystem will be branded as "interoperability" or "a federal crime" under the DMCA?
-Dave
We're on the road to Tycho.
where Microsoft (or M$, MicroShaft, Microsucks or whatever you kiddies want to call them) is ridiculed and made to be Satan incarnate? Look at the damn Microsoft topic icon on slashdot! MS as the Borg! har har.
/.
Someone modded this up as "insightful"? I don't think it takes much insight to realize that M$ "is ridiculed and made to be Satan incarnate" on
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Starting with the "Longhorn" release, Microsoft will unveil a new naming scheme to enhance the "Windows" brand name. No longer will versions numbers or years be tacked onto the Windows name, instead, Microsoft is shifting towards a more descriptive naming convention.
When Longhorn finally hits the shelves, it will come in 3 flavors, a 'personal' edition for home users, a 'corporate' edition for businesses and a government release.
Pricing has not been set but early speculation would indicate that licensing fees will be rolled into federal taxes to ensure everyone is paying for their license and not using a pirated copy.
"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither!"
You say that like it's a bad thing! Really, if my computer could figure out that X10 popunders don't work on me, that I neither need larger breasts or a longer penis, and that I don't need to MAKE MONEY FAST, that might be worth something!
I thought the whole idea of Longhorn was a really good steak.
Fillets With Flair!
It's going to be five (or more) years until the next major Windows upgrade? Well, that explains why they were pushing so hard to get corporate clients to sign up for subscription pricing for Windows. MS will be getting steady income for the next five years for minor point releases.
--Andy Hickmott
As if WinXP hasn't already driven me to the brink of insanity with its endless wizards. As if clippy wasn't already annoying enough, now he is gonna be taking steroids. As if my privacy wasn't already being invaded enough. As if Microsoft really needed more marketing data. As if Microsoft was trying really hard to make Windows resemble AOL's interface. As if developers really wanted to learn all new Microsoft APIs.(that never stabilize...) As if computers and their endless changing interfaces didn't annoy people to the point that they just don't try anymore. As if their software wasn't already proprietary enough. As if the rest of the world hadn't already wasted enough time trying to keep up with their ever-changing closed source APIs and protocols.
.NET. As if the world around MS, the endless dreamer on heroine, stopped and waited to see what MS would do next. As if I weren't waiting for them to file for chapter eleven protections in the near future...
As if people were really going to buy into this hook, line, and sinker. As if Longhorn really had a chance to be any more successful at making computers easier to use than any other attempt in history. As if this half-cocked idea will be any more successful than
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
I remember the hoopla that surround the book "1984", when the actual year came around. Its nice to know that BillG has not forgotten the book after all these years. And now with this new initiative from Micro$oft and the chipmakers Intel and AMD, we can finally live out the promise of that story.
I know my first wish is to have Big Brother Gates and his M$ and BSA jack booted thugs knowing everything I do on my computer, not to mention any government agency that wishes it. I know I will be one of the first in line to put my rights in the shredder for a safer, cleaner, more wholesome society. It is nice to see the end of privacy finally arrive and we can finally get on to the business of business. Better late than never, as they say.
rewind two years
This XP sounds like the answer to all our problems - a simple OS that helps me watch all that rich web content without all those old bugs in WindowsME. It's got a redesigned interface and makes working with a PC a safe and enjoyable XPerience - indeed I will be able to fly. Where do I sign up ?
rewind two years
This WindowsME sounds like tha answer to all our PC problems. It's got multimedia extensions built in and more user friendly software. Now I can handle all my media on the PC without fear of downloading any nasty software from the interweb. Where to I pay ?
rewind two years
This Windows98 really is the biz - it helps me handle all my PC jobs and lets me enjoy the interweb without any of that nasty netscape software. It can play media files and even games. Wow - where do I sign up ?
rewind two years
Oh yes - now this is cool Windows95 finally lets me enjoy the power of my 486. It's got a revolutionary new interface and even lets me enjoy the interweb. Where do I sign up ?
rewind two years
Holy smoke, this Windows3.1 really is the biz - I can use a mouse and just click the little pictures instead of having to touch the keyboard. Finally, I can use the PC with one hand.
fast forward to 2010
Wow - this new WindowsXXX really is the biz. I don't even have to type in my credit card details anymore - I can hire music instead of own it, and rent films instead of owning them - I don't have to lift a finger because all my data is held in the safe hands of MS. It even shows me the news when I turn it on - MSNBC really is a high class newsfeed. It tells me how nice those MS people are and how there are no bugs or security problems with Windows. One of my nasty friends tried using that Linux stuff last month, but we all just laughed at him - he's been taken away now for not supplying his social security details at the checkpoint. He was a communist and a theif. I love my happy world of the interweb - someone else has taken care of it all for me. All I have to do now is click a button to consume the lovely produce of our great society. Only terrorists would use anything else - why else would they want to keep their information secret ? I am finally free from all those confusing decisions.
'Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.' - George Gordon
Even the most die-hard /.ers have to admit...the guy is good. Good at what he does. He made Windows, and it wasn't luck. I don't know if his run is over, don't know whether Longhorn will succeed--but I wouldn't bet against it.
So "sometime after 2005" means, what, 2006 at the earliest? The big Software Assurance plan MS has been trying to force us into only provides upgrades for the first 3-1/2 years for client software, and four years for server software. But wait, this new version isn't coming out for at least 3-1/2 years, and that's just if all goes well. Like, if the XBox doesn't crash-and-burn, the courts decide that MS was right after all, virus writers get bored with Outlook, worm writers get bored with IIS, and there are no more terrorist attacks. Then, maybe Longhorn will be released just after this first software assurance period ends. Of course Service Pack 1 wouldn't come out for another five months (which addresses the "faulty product activation" vulnerability that refuses to authenticate your license on all versions), and by then MS will start calling them point releases, so we'll have to re-subscribe.
Yes, I know the plan covers other stuff like Office, but the other software tends to coincide with Windows releases (Win95 - Office for Win95, Win98 - Office97, WinME/2K - Office2K, WinXP - OfficeXP). I hope a lot of companies get pissed at MS for not releasing any new software during this first cycle of "Software Assurance."
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
That was the biggest bunch of corporate ass kissing I have seen in a long time. The journalist comes off sounding like a little teenage girl talking about the boy band of the day rather than a reporter. Ugh, that was such crap I couldn't read much, especially after the claims the Bill Gates always knows and shapes the entire industry, and portraying the anti-trust case debauchery in a positive light... But then again Fortune is a publication dedicated to corporate ass-kissing, but this seems to go overboard even for them..
:)
Well, in any case, if Longhorn does do all this and do it successfully, it's good news for me. I mean, if so many people's personal information is made vulnerable in that way, then attacks against *my* personal information might go down. Kinda like Apache not getting as much attention because IIS is such a ripe target. That's not to say that Apache isn't more secure, but certainly the presence of IIS in the market draws dangerous attention from Apache
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'm fine with my computer tracking what I do and working to anticipate my moves -- this kind of pattern matching is what computers are good for, and we're getting to the point that most of the time we've got the spare cycles lying around. But for any such system there better be two things about it:
Anyone care to lay odds on Microsoft giving me those two items?
If, say, one out of ten ideas are good, useful ones, then you need to come up with, implement, and identify nine ideas before you come up with the good one. The faster you can do that, the faster you'll get good ideas out.
Failing slow: "We have decided to persue strategy X. It will work. We will make it work. (repeat for five years, two CEOs, and four project renamings.)
Failing fast: "Does this work? Nope. How bout this? Nope. Hmmm. This? Nope. This? Hey...no. But if we do this...EUREKA!
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Gives AOL/Redhat/Netscape/Winamp/StarOffice 4 years to come up with a secure, free (or free with 1/2/3 year AOL subsciption) Linux solution that installs faster and easier than Windows and handles all NECESSARY functionality of Windows. You've got AOL for the internet services, Redhat for the OS/Admin tools, Netscape for the browser, Winamp 4 "could be" a MS Media Player killer if they wanted it to be, and Star Office 7 could be the MS Office killer.
Hell, I'd sign up for that.
Chris
Of course, this "upgrade" will be ridiculously costly, and force users to buy new systems and new software.
Consider the latest Google zeitgeist. 46% of the visitors were still using Windows 98. People aren't upgrading like MS wants, they aren't buying new machines and a new $200 copy of Windows. They are using the system they bought a few years ago that still works. And they will continue to do so. Mind you, it's going to be a while before "Longhorn" is released, but what makes MS think people will start all over again when they wouldn't even shell out for XP and a new system?
There is a critical mass right now in the Windows world, with their latest offerings not giving much more functionality than their previous versions, but offering a larger price tag. If there was ever a time for Linux to catch up, this is it.
Actualy if they:
Remove the ten ton's of usless features and junk.
Cleaned up the API so it makes sense in spots.
Put an underlining system to monitor and protect the core from coruption.
And have it so you could start with a basic simple core and add on with out making too big of a mess.
This would litterly burn rubber even on a 800mhz system. Also it would keep the "Undocumented Features" down to a reasonable level.
Most of the people usualy use about 10% of the features in any given software package.
Anyone know of any old used Y2K bunkers that are up for sale?
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I really hope people will have their data managed, and they'll be checked, double-checked, controlled, sniffed, parsed, re-checked and managed again. I really hope The System will know who you have talked to, and when, and what you said. I really hope all the website someone checks will be saved.
:)
Then I want that everything blows up. I want every website, every file, every private information made public by a flaw in the system.
Since such a system is TOO complex not to have flaws (that's Chaos Theory, plain), even the smallest flaw could be exploited and will eventually crush the system.
And I want to see that.
Being a lawyer in that time will be like being a VC during the dot-com boom..
and the best part will be...? that microsoft windows 'longhorn' will be made illegal by the DMCA
have fun!
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
Didn't ReplayTV keep track of what we watched to "make our lives easier"?
Now, it's being used to spy on us. "More personal information" is something that we should have to remember. Would you tell some random guy on the street your SSN, so he could keep track of it for you? I don't think so. Closed source software is much like some random guy on the street, you never can know what it's gonna do with the info you give it.
-twb
"Equipped with Longhorn, your PC will keep track of how you work, whom you talk to, what sites you look at, how you make documents and whom you share them with, which data on the network are yours--making all those things easier."
I can do that all myself thank you very much, I don't need a machine to babysit me.
Of course, if Mr. Gates would open the calendar portion of Exchange a little bit, other programs could access the calendar, maybe even between organizations. But that would require some kind of security. Maybe an Open-source calendar system would be better anyway. If Soccer Mom can't use Frontpage already, she shouldn't be allowed to make web pages at all. And do you really want little Tommy's appointment schedule on the Internet?? Um....can you say VPN and X-Windows/telnet?? I don't even understand this. I have downloaded books to my Palm, and I already use my computer to read Infoworld, Slashdot, et. al.
Come on Bill
You have to be trusted by the people you lie to -- Pink Floyd
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I spent three frustrating hours yesterday just getting bullets to work properly in Word2000. The last bullets in the column would be larger for no reason. The were all the same character and they were all the same font size.
Now they claim they are going to alter the course of human history bla bla bla by rewriting their OS and Office to increase the personal experience??
They really should work on bullets!
You are offended by the MS icon? Read the article and see how Fortune gushes: Did you know that Mr. Gates takes singing lessons? Did you know that he has never missed a day of work in 27 years? I did not know that! = )
No, I will not participate in this Borgish cult because just because Fortune also beleives Mr. Gates to be visionary and well, amazing:
"I've always liked multitasking. But there are incredible limits to what I can do--like how much time there is in a day.."
Incredible is right. Incredible that Fortune prints this too.
It is my every day frustrations with things like bullets on Word that prove this wrong for me. Am I jealous or being childish? I don't think so. I think I'm being practical and realistic.
Sorry if that makes you unhappy.
-b
Yes, we've redesigned Microsoft Office! The product that we said would do all your things for you now, won't. Oh dear. You'll have to buy it again. Oh tough, we don't support Windows XP anymore you'll have to upgrade to Win 2010.
To both the PHBs who read slashdot - DONT DO IT!!!!
Baz
Isn't a Longhorn a large, dumb animal that consumes massive quantities of resources and turns most of them into shit?
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Someone modded this up as "insightful"? I don't think it takes much insight to realize that M$ "is ridiculed and made to be Satan incarnate" on /.
In addition the Microsoft apologist post you reply to ignores the singular fact that it only takes a few seconds of research to discover that Microsoft deserves the ridicule they get, and while they might not be Satan incarnate, they are certainly a Big Brother with aspirations to becomming Big Nannie, Big Daddy, perhaps even Big Goddy, with all of us beneath their Watchful Eye, joined perhaps by their pressing thumb.
Ob Microsoft's New Invasive Operating System: Everyone thought we'd lose our freedoms in the end because we were misled by some lofty, but misguided, (e.g. communism). Instead we're merely selling our freedoms and basic privacy to industry for a quarterly bit of profit on the one side (and defending it as innovation within the Holy Free Market(tm)) while begging the government to take those very same freedoms from us on the other so we can feel a trifle safer on the other side, despite knowing intellectually that this feeling of safety is illusary.
Think we'll even be capable of waking up after we've discovered there is no safety in a surveillance society, even after this quarter's earnings are spent and next quarter's remain as elusive as ever? Somehow I'm not so sure we will be.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
One of the chief reasons they're developing Longhorn is to further integrate the operating system (and the applications that run on it) with their network services, MSN. You can see how they tested certain parts of this strategy in XP -- Windows Messenger, for example, or the streaming audio features in Media Player -- and they're going to continue the trend. This is where Windows is headed. It's going to be as much of a media outlet and a web portal as it will be an operating system.
This, in and of itself, is a wonderful idea. I always thought integrating the web browser with the desktop interface was a brilliant move, and I wish to God that Netscape had come up with a way to do it first. I have the same sort of feelings about Longhorn: it looks like it could be the next really big thing in the development of computing, but the fact that Microsoft is at the wheels makes me very nervous.
Microsoft is going to make it easier for 'a soccer mom to set up a simple website', for business users to 'arrange conference calls and online meetings', and so forth. The truth is, people can do all these things now -- but not through the operating system. They can only do it through a wide range of third-party vendors, which adds an extra level of complexity. But it's this level of complexity that allows for competition; once Windows allows you to automagically post web pages to MSN, where will Angelfire or Geocities go? When Windows lets you remotely control your PC without any technical know-how, what happens to PCanywhere? The list goes on, and as Microsoft tightens integration with MSN, a plethora of what used to be highly competitive industries will fall the same way Netscape did when IE became a bundled component.
This is the next step in Microsoft's strategy, and it's a very good strategy indeed. People are sick of having to install software, or browse the web, before they can do what they want to do. The average computer user wants to be able to do everything from one place, and Microsoft knows just what that place will be: your MSN-powered Longhorn desktop.
The saddest part is, I'll probably end up using it anyways.
Just a thought,
Doesn't this sound a bit like the spruce goose. Build the biggest greatest ever plane. Sure it flew but then what? It seems to me that an undertaking of this magnitude has the potential to become a money sucking vortex within MS.
Sure rewriting from scratch and redesigning the OS sounds great but in five years? Linux has taken 10 years to get to its current state. That includes havind 20 years of Unix development to learn from. I think 5 years is a dream. Especially if you are trying to rethink the whole thing and not build on the existing windows world.
There are a few outcomes from this plan.
1. MS develops the greates most user friendly OS and continues to dominate
2. Longhorn drags on for years and years and is eventually dropped. Collapsing under its own weight.
3. In order to release someting, Existing elements from the windows code base are integrated to make a ship date. Thus continuing the windows problems they would like to solve.
On another note: Does anyone else see the humor in BG going to the boss and saying that he wants to scrap it and rewrite from scratch? How many IT managers would accept that from the development staff? Would BG have accepted it prior to becoming "Chief Software Architect"?
I think "gramma" might be the funniest thing I've read all day.
country gramma... heheheheh....
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Gates' geeks overhauling the software. Why do that NOT fill me with confidence?
The day marketing takes a back seat to security in M$ is the day that their software will be secure. That'll happen the day after the legal department takes a back seat to the engineering department.
Long live Linux and OS X. Its gotta be better and safer than anything comes out of Redmond.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Tools need to be deterministic. A tool that works only 90% of the time is useless. Imagine a brake pedal that brakes only 90% of the time because it has somehow figured out that there have in the past been situations where you did not actually mean to brake.
A computer that is not deterministic is not a good tool. If you can only copy a file 90% of the time because of arbitrary restrictions, then it is no longer a reliable copying machine.
Of course it will be possible to buy a license that will allow you to operate a computer proper. Nobody will think this strange, after all, nearly all professional fields require some kind of certification. Nobody will stop to think that this is a lot like a scribe having to buy a license before he can buy a pen that will do a Mickey Mouse drawing.
Seriously according to Bill this is akin to designing a 747 and that they have 500 people on the wing alone.
There are 4000 programmers and managers working on this product in the long term , excluding testing and Q/A folks. Assuming a rate of 100 bugs per programmer (typical MS level) per year that need to be Q/A'd and squashed thats 400,000 bugs/year to tackle. And since this will be released in 2.5 years thats close to a Million bugs!
And what is more bothersome is that Bill mentions that the groups don't talk to each other (well it's difficult when you have 500 guys designing the 'wing') -- he says that the fuselage guys don't do lunch with the wing guys. This has always been a big problem in the 'Super star' driven MS culture, and will be exacerbated even more.
The problem with MS has historically not been one of talent, but one of culture and management. I don't see Bill addressing these issues. Perhaps, Bill needs to be introduced to some Software management gurus.
Frederic P. Brooks Jr. meet William Gates Jr. III
Ultimately, tightly knit groups of developers in close contact with the users has a better chance of delivering the goods. Look at BSD or GNU/Linux. They've come so far because of a close knit group. As long as we keep our eye on the ball we will do well. Tackle the issues one at a time and build on the foundation.
For instance, take the filesystem. MS is going after a database filesystem with 500 people on the code. Look at BeOS, 2-4 people worked on the team with Giampaolo at the lead. It wasn't a true Database FS but it did a remarkable job of looking and fucntioning as one. Want to bet that the MS DBFS is going to be top heavy and over engineered and buggy as hell? Or look at security, a tightly knit group of volunteers have made one of the most secure OS's in the world - OpenBSD. And here we have a giant struggling with years of accumulated bad practices- more holes than all of the cheeses in Switzerland. Or look at Quartz and Quartz Extreme from Apple. The core group is less than 15 people led by Mike Paquette have developed a graphics subsystem that has not been matched by the 100+ strong DirectX/3d team from MS.
Ultimately, what matters is a closely knit team which works on building software one step at a time. There are no giant leaps in software, only tiny steps that accumulate over time. This is core to what BSD/Linux has achieved. Apple under Avie Tevenien (sp?) also seems to understand the value of incremental code releases. Release early and release often. This is our biggest advantage. Let's stick to it.
Bill can continue to make his grandiose plans. Heck, let him even get a persian kitty but his plans will take its natural time to evolve. They may have the money but we have the resources.
In the end, it will be lack of good taste and good management which will make Longhorn a spectacularly mediocre release like all other MS products.
The pitfall being that by not trusting the State, anglo-saxons do the utmost to emasculate it's power, whereas the power vacuum left is promptly filled by private croporatitions who answer to nobody, certainly not the people, as the State doe.
As long as the anglo-saxons insist that the State be as small as possible, individual rights will be trampled by big croporations. Do not forget that a strong State is the best guardian of individual rights, simply by the virtue of ruling-in and checking the power of big croporations over the people.
For example, if you lose your job and can get 60% of yout former salary by virtue of the State's unemployment insurance, you can bet that companies don't push their workers around, as people simply quit and take the time to look for a proper job. And when the State provides you with medical insurance, people don't lose their jobs because the collective insurer doesn't threaten to withdraw coverage for all employees when one employees becomes unprofitably ill.
I defy anyone to refute this argument (communism not being of any relevance, it won't be accepted as an argument. A past example, maybe, but not an actual argument).
"...a strong State is the best guardian of individual rights..."
Oh, like perhaps the decidedly NON-Anglo-Saxon Spanish Inquisition??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
And wait until it becomes illegal for you to fail to have said records available to turn over to the gov't. As a logical extension, it would be illegal to run any OS that doesn't keep said records.
What's really scary about Bill Gates, is that he seems to honestly believe he's doing all this for the benefit of mankind. That's the most scary kind of dictatorship -- where everything is predicated on "we're doing it for your own good".
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Apparently you haven't been following the Itanium saga.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me over and over and over and I'll become a customer, obsessed over your every word.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Aren't the anti-trust "penalties" supposed to last 5 years...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Unfortunately, those nifty "know who you talk to, how you work, etc" features will STILL affect me because, sadly, the people I interact with will use Longhorn.
Similar to hotmail/passport - if you send a message to someone barely past the brainstem stage who's onboard hotmail/passport (wittingly or otherwise), YOUR thoughts also end up in that system.
(Gee, in such a situation it would be nice to use that DRM hardware crap mentioned recently to disallow manipulation or storage of my docs/messages by hotmail/passport.)
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Honestly, does anyone just like the computer the way it is? I don't want my computer to assist me any more than being a transparent barrier to what I want. I want it to take dictation when I want to send a friend a note, and talk back to me when I am cooking dinner so I don't have to stare at it, and precious little else. I don't want it looking out for me. Why? Because I didn't fucking program it! Whoever's agenda programmed it, so therefore, it is not looking out for me.
/. But cmon. Stop selling me this shit.
This longhorn smacks of a full, legitimate, digital identity, and I am sorry, but at the end of the day it is just a dang box with wires people, not who you are. Count me out. You can't engineer happiness. The internet is a big, funny, stupid, sometimes dangerous, LIBRARY.
Yes, I play C-strike. YES, I play RtCW. And GTA3. And I like
I don't want to be a "cyber-citizen! (TM) (all rights reserved) (ASCAP) (BMI) (MPAA)"
What I've learned is that cities are a nice place to visit and live on the outskirts of. If the computers of the world start looking like New York on Yankee's Bat Day or Hong Kong on the Chinese New Year then count me out. Don't get me wrong. Cities are a wonderful place to visit. I live on the outskirts of one, and work in it. But the more people that you pack in and personalize in a personal network, the more it will look like a city and that means the more likely you are going to:
be stuck in a ridiculous beauracracy doing simple things
more likely the equivalent of you car stereo will be lifted (this just happened today)
the more equivalent that law or rules enforcement will be unevenly taken care of and care a lot less about you
the more you will be a number- already happened
the more the lowest denominator mob mentality rules you
the more you have to put up with the angry masses
and finally, the less sunshine you see because you will be spending all fucking day on the comp paying bills and renewing car licenses for fifty God damned hours a week because you can never get a hold of a person and ask them face to face- trust me, paying bills on-line will not EVER be as easy as they say
If you think the automated phone is a pain. Just wait. If you think waiting in line at fileplanet is a pain in the ass, this is going to really take the cake... cuz they are going to fire all the tellers and have just one engineer running the system.
Hell, we all might just get so lazy that we will just check to see how much they left in your account for all the fees and taxes one day. Then you REALLY are someoene else's property.
Call this a troll if you want, but consider: if it was a troll, I'd have done it anonymously...
/. is anti-MS in nearly every respect. I understand and accept that, in fact it's one of the reasons I visit here 100 times a day: I like seeing both sides of an argument before I reach my own conclusions.
.Net installed, Norton Antivirus, ActiveSync, eVC++, Seti@Home, Popup Killer, WinAmp, AOLIM and a PocketPC emulator... and this is pretty much what is always open). My machine is virtually never turned off and I have not seen a BSOD in well over a year, I virtually never experience problems whatsoever, and those that I do on those rare occassions are directly traceable to a misbehaving app, and the OS DOES NOT get taken down with the app.
I understand
But it seems to me that many of you (you meaning the open source community in general) are spreading just as much FUD as MS is, drapped in a cloak of supposed reality.
For instance: I constantly see posts saying how crash-prone MS OS's are and how you get 100 BSOD's a day on your work PC's (those of you that admit using an MS OS in the first place that is).
I'd be foolish to try and say that Win95, Win98, Win98SE or WinME aren't more crash-prone than just about any Linux distro, they are. But the FUD is in not being specific enough: Win2K and WinXP are quite stable. If you find it to be otherwise in your experience, let me point you in the right direction: It's not the OS! My work PC, a 2+ year-old Win2K PIII/500 Dell Optiplex GX1 with 512M RAM, on which I have over 20 gigs of various software installed, I have 10+ different things running at any given time (currently I have Windows Explorer, UltraEdit, CuteFTP, Apache Tomcat, IE, Lotus Notes R5, IIS with
If your Win2K or WinXP machine crashes all the time, perhaps I'm just that much better an admin than you are, but I doubt it. But, rather than be fair about it, you will be quick to bash MS and their "buggy" OS. Bull. Rag on any Win9x you want, I won't argue, but if your going to tell me Win2K or WinXP are crash-prone and buggy, you are wrong, absolutely. (WinNT by the way is somewhere in between in my experience... I have 5 NT servers, database and web servers, with heavy usage, none of them has had ANY unscheduled downtime in about two years, but I also had NT on my desktop for a while and it did blue screen on occassion, once every few months perhaps. Not terrible, but not great either).
How about the secure argument? Well, there's no denying that MS didn't place the emphasis on security that they should have all along. There are far too many buffer overruns in MS software to be sure. But the vast majority of viruses and trojans and other serious security problems are the result of good-old-fashioned social engineering, getting people to open attachments and such. Understand, having an application scriptable is not a bad thing, *IF* the user base is somewhat intelligent (there are exceptions of course, scripts should NEVER run without user authorization, and they of course can under some conditions in Outlook, that's MS's fault for sure). I'm not going to hammer them for giving us greater flexibility.
And what about the FUD? People claim Linux is less virus-prone than Windows. Of COURSE it is! Go out and iterview 100 virus writers and I guarantee you will find the majority hate MS and love Linux and the open-source movement. Which platform do you think they are going to target? DUH!
Windows sees more viruses because it is targeted more, plain and simple. Now, don't misunderstand me: I AM NOT blaming the open-source community for viruses, not in the least. And I am NOT saying that Windows is as secure as Linux, because it's not at a fundamental level. But simply because you see more viruses on Windows DOES NOT mean it is soo much more virus-prone than Linux. That's why I hope Linux does make it's way onto the desktop in good numbers. Let's see if this piece of FUD still stands up at that point. I very much suspect it won't.
Now, what about this Longhorn stuff? MS is trying to do something innovative (although not original) here... they are trying to give you ubiquitous access to any type of data from any location in a common fashion. What's wrong with that? Sounds like a fantastic idea to me. In fact, from a strictly forward-looking mentality, it's the logical evolution. I see so many paranoid statements about privacy, but come on folks, your smart enough to not go down that path! You know as well as I do that if MS is pulling anything fishy with privacy, it will be found out in short order. I mean, how hard is it to unplug your cable modem and throw a packet sniffer on the network to see what the OS is sending out? Geez, MS's worst move would be to do something like that because, and I say this in a positive way, you people will find it and scream it at the top of your virtual lungs faster than Bill Clinton goes down on an interm!
You say they never truly innovate. Then, when you hear about some potential innovation from them, you bash them for it!
It's one thing to be anti-MS, it's another thing to spread your own brand of FUD. It's also another thing to dismiss out of hand absolutely anything at all that comes from Redmond. If something is a good idea, it's a good idea regardless of where it comes from. The United States thought the atomic bomb was a good idea, even though the idea came from Germany (and try to not make the obvious "and Windows explodes just as bad as an atomic bomb!" jokes).
It's funny... I have always hated with a passion Bill Gates because he always struck me as an arrogant cheater who I just could not respect. Be better than that folks, make the community better than that... don't pull the same dirty tricks he has.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
nothing will - this is obviously a booster piece for 'Fortune' hunters and other stakeholders who purchased Msft at > $75 + waiting to get their share of the pie back.
But does the mass market of preinstalled sw still trust this guy? Can the dream be re-illisioned after so many being largely burnt so far? I.e., is there still gold in them thar' hills?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
With every article I see on the future of computing from Microsoft, the better an Apple looks.
Is Time-Warner reducing everything to the same level. Fortune sounds like "Entertainment Tonight" with fawning and drooling over CEOs instead of celebreties. Add just enough content to keep you from tossing the whole thing in disgust and you've got a four-page "article."
You'd think that a business magazine might attempt some analysis as to what is feasible, desirable, and what the competition (oops, forgot we were talking about Microsoft) might do in response.
Hold on isn't this exactly what all the monopoly trials are about.
You Are Being Lied To.
Honestly does anyone believe this is anything more than the usual 3 years early pre development hype? Software companies now take the tack that they talk about developing something before they try and then use the feedback as market research. It's a kind of reality check combined with mindshare.
Here's your friendly /. neighbourhood rhetoric wonk weighing in... I have to wonder what the semantics, grammar, and rhetoric of the Longhorn interface are going to be. In case you're wondering, the underlying ideational structures of the interface create its meaning, and make the difference between dumb and intelligent design, useful and frustrating, easy-to-learn and Adobe ;) and so on. So far I haven't been too impressed with much of anything MS, rhetoric-wise. Some pretty impressive people (not just weirdos like me) have also weighed in on the importance of this issue, like:
Terry Winograd
Joseph Goguen
Eben Moglen
Neil Randall
and a bunch of lesser lights including Neil Stephenson.
While I'm not against innovation, I have a hard time imagining that MS could actually come up with something more intelligent than these folks, all of whom, I notice, aren't working for MS. Even Neil Randall, who apparently took some money from MS to do a study works for the University of Waterloo (hi, Neil!).
Maybe I'm just a Jaded Cynic, but I have to wonder.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Well, you do know/realize that your timeline coincides nicely with the fact that from 1984 until 1995 Microsoft was catching up to Mac OS?
And from 1995 until 2002 they've been trying to catch up to NeXTStep and OS 2?
NeXTStep was out in 1989. was rereleased in 2001 as OS X, and has set the bar for Longhorn to be released in 2007; check it out, OS X really is all that and a bucket of beans.
GPL Deconstructed
Any changes to the OS require the users to learn which is the single greatest cost of software as MS loves to point out when explaining why their solutions are cheaper overall than using open source.
MS programmers may do a helluva job, but if it's anything different from what exists, they create a real problem for themselves. They've got to convince the users that their new system is worth learning and to do that there has to be a motivation. Way back when, the motivation to learn Microsoft's new system was to save money over Macs. They are no longer the cheap fix that made them what they are today. Their only hope is to maintain the staus quo for as long as possible and avoid rocking the boat.
Besides, the desktop, file manager, media player, web browser combo that are what most users assocaiate with the operating software of a PC are mostly seventies ideas that have been done so many ways now it's hard to imagine that these geniuses are going to come up with something genuinely new that doesn't require a steep learning curve or become a major security problem or both.
And, if they're really got some super magic secret surprise it's only a matter of time before there are ten other version of it. Microsoft dug its own grave years ago.
My computer already knows who I talk to, where I go, and how I work. If it didn't, well, we'd all be using UDP instead of TCP, and I wouldn't be able to see what's on the screen
This is nonsense. Unless you computer is logging this information in a fairly exhaustive manner it doesn't know who you talk to, where you go, or how you work, any more than you know the contents of Elevator Inspection Form you glanced at while riding the lift up to your office.
The information is only known if it is kept around in a fashion that can be accessed, and presumably used against you, at a later time. For most non-invasive operating systems like OS X, FreeBSD, and GNU/Linux, this only amounts to a small amount of information, an amount which can be reduced to zero relatively easilly be turning off browser caching and proxy logging completely. Even in its default state these operating systems record relatively little about where you go and who you speak to, and generally nothing whatsoever about what music you listen to or what movies you watch, in contrast to todays Microsoft XP machines, and in stark contrast to the incredibly invasive features described in this rather gushingly pro-microsoft article.
Indeed, it says a lot about how horrific these features are, that a gushingly pro-microsoft article lauding such features can be so chilling, despite its bias. We should all be concerned about this, but I suspect humanity's ability to live in denial means we won't be until it is biting us in the ass directly, hard. At which point in time it will be far too late to do much about it.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Um... with personal privacy being a fairly hot topic nowadays, why would I want my PC keeping track of all of my personal computing habits? Especially when it's via software created by a company with a past history of sending information from peoples' PCs back to the corporate headquarters and imbedding traceable, unique IDs in all the Words documents they create?
Remember: ``Ctrl-Alt-Del helps keep your password secure.'' (Hee hee!) Will Microsoft now extend that bit of humor to all my personal information? God help us.
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How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
- Jane, I notice you e-mailed Mary and asked about her kids. Are you interested in goats? You should visit http://goatse.cx.
- Jane, some guy called Dave has been phoning you repeatedly. I noticed you haven't any appointments so I gave him your address and invited him over.
- Jane, I notice you haven't got any money. I've found 10287 mailing lists dedicated to methods of obtaining money quickly, and subscribed you to them.
- You have asked to play this MP3 file. Your bank statements do not contain a record of your paying for the album it came from. I can't let you do that, Jane.
If you think it's really so simple, write a useful AI program. For extra credit attempt it in VB-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
Judging by the description of Longhorn, then its official release name should be Windows 1984 - the OS the KGB really wanted!
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
That reminds me - what happened to the "merced" name? That was a much cooler name than itanium. I went to a presentation on merced in '96 (maybe '97) and it was only a couple of years away then... I guess that after 5 years they need to change the name so it sounds new 'n stuff.
Then they announced their latest and greatest, six months ahead of release. And everyone decided to wait and buy the new machine when it came out. And there was no more money to make Kaypros. And the business just folded up.
It sounds like Microsoft is spending a lot of money just to incorporate something like Sherlock into the operating system.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
The whole philosophy of MS software is to add features. The more features you can add to a product before the next release cycle means you can charge more for them. Just as long as they are 'stable enough.' They've been doing this for 27 years. Every product has more features then the last.
.net, programs that run completly in user space that have nothing to do with an 'operating system'.
This is their reaction to not being able to add more features to their OS. This is a trend that has been going on for many years, basically since Windows 95. Windows 95, if it was a quality implementation of win32 that didn't crash, had almost all the features that an operating system needed. Except for the hardware support that it would need today. It really had a lot. Since the internet they have been adding more and more features to their OS that are in no way related to the traditional defination of 'operating system'. Like the web browser, like
MS will never focus on making a product 'quality' because it's not exciting. Bill and Co want action, they want people to be excited about the next big thing. It's hard to get excited about something that exactly like what you've got, but will just last longer.
You have all three?
I'm not sure whether I should envy or pity you.
For MS's "document-centric" vision, the first thing to do is toss tree-based file systems. The file system should be or resemble a relational or at least a set-based database:
http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/sets1.htm
(Probability estimatation for slash-dotting effect of this link: 46%)
I like the idea of integrating the phone and the PC. I see no reason why one cannot right-click on a name and have it dial. Phone interfaces are usually cryptic. I would like a GUI (virtual) phone.
I like this quote:
"Bill isn't afraid of taking long-term chances. He also understands that you have to try everything, because the real secret to innovation is failing fast."
.NET seems well on its way. I see its sales are in the dumps right now.
Table-ized A.I.
Yup - several people have done this kind of thing before - BeOS came faily close... the thing is, Bill is the only guy who's going to get pretty much the whole desktop world to use it....
With all that money and resources, you would think Bill would find a way to finally get a deep voice, instead of that nerdy squeaky mouse voice.
Table-ized A.I.
Even the DMCA has provisions allowing reverse-engineering for interoperability purposes. The problem is that this is what legislators and lawyers like to call a "phantom exception" or a "bait exception."
DeCSS is an excellent example of the problem. DeCSS is required to decrypt DVD's so they can be watched on Linux. Of course, once the data's unencrypted, it's also possible to DivX it and put it on the internet.
Of course DeCSS's primary purpose is interoperability - this is the oldest story in open source operating systems; we have to reverse engineer proprietary systems that vendors have designed in order to keep us out (because they don't want to worry about competition). But the architects of both Europe's and America's IP-protectionism laws knew that when faced with the dilemma of deciding what a program's "significant use" was, the courts could easily be made to err on the side of "caution." Besides, how many private citizens can even afford the first round of the fight?
Hence, no free DVD players (and none at all on Linux), and programmers all over the world in jail, in court, or living in fear. Many of them in Europe. So please, if this issue concerns you, don't rest on your laurels, no matter which side of the pond you're on.
Write a letter or make a phone call to your elected representatives now. What we all need is to have the DMCA (and its European equivalents, if any) repealed, and the members of government who created these laws properly investigated for corruption.
We're on the road to Tycho.
But you should know, solid, logical, and well-spoken rebuttals only encourage them.
;)
-Dave
We're on the road to Tycho.
This cracks me up. But it's true. I know some people who've spent months trying to get MS Project set up to ease project management. Getting Project set up has become yet another project. So much for productivity.
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How long have we been waiting for GNU Hurd to be finished, anyway?
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
I agree with your Spruce Goose analogy. Longhorn will never get off the ground. The biggest problem in software is not how many features you can add but whether the features can work reliably. Longhorn sounds like a nightmare of complexity.
My prediction is that, unless there is breakthrough in software engineering soon, Longhorn will be so ladden with bugs (termites in the spruce) that it will just crumble into dust before it gets off the ground.
Rand contends that it is the absolute weakest of government that will allow for both the Jeffersonian form of freedom (life, liberty, etc.) and the Roosevelt form of freedom (prosperity, abscence of need, etc.). Her basic argument is that trade is the only true measure of value and by giving anything to anybody (ie taxes to welfare, corps to unemployment insurance, etc) reduces the inherent value of all trade. If I buy something from you for $1 then give you $1, then I have essentially paid $2 for the item, thereby devaluing my original $1. Since I work the same for each $1, my work value is cut in half wrt the item I purchased from you. As an example of this, farming is subsidized by the government of the US to protect various crops from countries more suited to grow them. Therefore, when I buy bread, I pay the $1 for the loaf and give another $1 to the farmer through subsidies for not growing a particular crop, poor weather, or whatever else the government wishes to pay out in subsidies to ``protect'' the farming industry.
While this is not directly on point with your argument, there are some conclusions that can be drawn that are. Still considering the farming industry, why are there protections? The protections are not there for Cargill or ADM--two of the largest industrial firms in the world. They are there for the family farmer. That is who is being protected--you know Paul Neuman and other multimillionaires with small farms raking in subsidies there to protect the industry from the power of ADM, Cargill, and other foreign countries.
Your example of unemployment insurance is another example of this sort of policy. Rand focuses precisely on alleged deleterious effects of such policies. In the end, a strong government will devalue currency implicitly--even though bread still costs a $1 at the store, it will cost substantially more in work.
As for the power vacuum you mention, Rand addresses this quite elegantly--the only power that can be taken from you is the power that you give away. Should you not like a particular companies practice, don't use the companies products. That simple. And simply because you feel they are bad does not mean that they are. Even if a majority feels that, it doesn't mean anything. For if you ask 100,000 people if they would like to have $1,000,000US free for the taking, no strings attached, 100% would say ``YES! GIMME GIMME!'' Does that mean that everyone should have $1,000,000US? If it does, then how much is $1,000,000US going to be worth once everyone has it?
Your fault: you believe that people cannot be trusted with power of their own. Her fault: she believes that public works projects can never be more efficient that private works. I can tell you that I am glad that I don't have to use Microsoft, eat ADM, or ship by FedEx. I would rather pay for choice then have a strong government regulate an industry in favor of what you or I or anybody else would like so that pork and other favors rule the day rather than quality. I also am glad that I can drive on a road and that road is guaranteed, roughly, to be in good repair regardless of how the finances of local road construction companies are doing.
If you think this argument doesn't apply to you, Ayn Rand predicted as much. She even explained why you might not think this argument is applicable or even sound.
I suppose the good news is we can run it on the Hurd...
LOL! Bill hasn't changed. Really. Fortune may think this is something new, but it's the same dang thing he's been doing since Windows first saw the light of day; Absorbing everybody's 3rd party utilities as native OS support. Winzip? Winamp? Defrag? the list goes on. The comment "it will handle so many functions of computing that Oracle, Sun, AOL Time Warner, and Sony may find themselves with less to do." alone will tell you that. He's looking to make Windows the TV that cooks, cleans and serves breakfast in bed. Sure, they may need to redesign it from the ground up similar to what Jobs did with OS X and Apple, but the news itself isn't too big a surprise, expecially given his history. A word to Linux developers: I see their door of opportunity closing once more. It's still open, but if this hits and history is any indication, open source might have to wait a bit longer before it's next chance to gain a serious foothold on the consumer market. In reality (and I mean this with the best possible intentions), Linux should already be heading where gates is going.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Some of these have obvious security concerns (esp in a closed source environment and coming from microsoft), but in general, this is the sort of thinking that gives us the futuristic world we see in movies where everyone is connected to everything.
Today, we may still snicker at this. After all, we had a thriving, competitive PC industry without Microsoft: Commodore, Amiga, Atari, Exidy, Apple, and many others. Those systems were often way ahead of whatever Microsoft was selling at the same time. All of Microsoft's major successes were invented by others, then copied by Microsoft.
Rather than creating the modern computer industry, Gates single-handedly destroyed most of it. Gates' legacy in computer history is despicable. But the victors get to write history...
For example, if you lose your job and can get 60% of yout former salary by virtue of the State's unemployment insurance, you can bet that companies don't push their workers around, as people simply quit and take the time to look for a proper job.
So, you want to be able to quit your job, and have me pay you money, so you can look for another one? What gives you the right to claim my income as your own? And what is the societal effect if we can all do that? Who pays the freight? The scheme isn't sustainable.
I defy anyone to refute this argument (communism not being of any relevance, it won't be accepted as an argument. A past example, maybe, but not an actual argument).
Well, you can't just declare things invalid; I don't really care what you'll "accept" as an argument. Communism was a great example of government-run economy. But if you want more examples, look at high-unemployment socialist countries today.
Your post got off on a good start. It was simple, somewhat insightful, but more importantly grabbed people's attention.
Then conclude it by pulling out the trite ol' dystopia bit, made references to communism, terrorism, alienating just about any reasonable individual, and subverted any rational explaination as to how Microsoft could exploit thier power in the future.
Try not being so dramatic next time, it sets off people's bullshit detectors.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Longhorn sounds just like Microsoft's "Cairo" (aka "Information at your fingertips") project from the mid 1990s. It too was supposed to deliver an object-oriented database system with a new UI. Eventually, bits and pieces were released in IE, Windows 2000, and Active Directory, but the reality fell far short of the promises.
:)
btw, one rumor is that the "Windows XP" name is an homage to the Cario project because xp = "chi rho" in Greek letters.
cpeterso
But, mrBoB, you forgot the one named after you!
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Nah, nobody expects the ... Ooops, here they come!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Spot on. Thanks for the quote.
By coincidence, as I wait for the "at least 2 minutes between posts" thing to time out, I found myself reading this in Ed Foster's GripeLine (infoworld.com):
"Spammers appear to be taking to heart the Nazi propaganda dictum that more people will believe a big lie than a small one. The lies that spammers tell keep getting bigger, and the scariest part is that apparently some folks do indeed believe them."
Substitute "Microsoft" for "Spammers" and consider the whoppers they're telling us are the future of computing...
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Did you know OS X is based on Darwin, a GPL'ed platform? It's even ported to the Intel chip.
Yes, if you wanted to you could write your own OS X. What do you feel is stopping you? You'd have to re-write Quartz (hint: use HW accell to start with in your version!) but you have to expect a bit of work. Or, just run Linux on the PPC platform.
I disagree about us trading one dictator for another if Apple were to rise to power. Apple has been very open, and also VERY supportive of open technologies - they ship with Apache and SSL right out of the box!!! They build on top of thigns that are alerady fine, like the GUI overlying a number of network apps like netstat and nslookup.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But it will.
It's a very simple matter to embed watermarks in, say, kiddy pr0n- or pictures of sunsets _labelled_ as kiddy pr0n. Computer displays picture, does quick scan for watermark, discovers that it's displaying stuff that is a crime, rings up the government and informs. Possibly this leads to an arrest, possibly it just leads to your being kept under very tight surveillance by human beings as a non-active sex offender. Possibly the banks would be interested in this on the basis that if you're in jail you won't have great credit. The possibilities really are impressive. All this is possible with the technology of TODAY, not just two or ten years from now.
No points for hacking into someone's computer and triggering the 'pr0n' alert to have it inform on them. This would be difficult, but considerably easier than undoing the damage that would be done.
So you can ssh in when there's a problem, and when there isn't your Grandma can use Netscape and IE and Word?
GPL Deconstructed
MS hires all the top talent that they can get ahold of. unfortunatly they keep all those people locked in the MS world of more features and not in reality where normal people need software that works today. People really didn't need a grammer checker for MS word that highlights their errors as they type, what they needed was a stable program that would never lose their work. Does it look good when all you have to advertise about a new product is how it fixes all the problems with the last one? It is not sexy to say, "BUY Word 2005, it won't lose your work like Word 2000!" Not at all sexy, and software has to be sexy and cool to sell.
The problem is when the State and Corporations collaborate to create monopolies and then force you to purchase their products and services. Auto insurance would be a good example.
How so? I don't have insurance.
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Granted, I don't have a car or even a driver's license (I'm old enough to get one if that's what you were thinking).
You could argue the same thing about gasoline. "Oh, horror, the oil industry is trying to gouge me and kill my family! Look at the prices they charge for gas!" Who exactly forced you to buy a car?
There are quite a few alternatives, such as public transit and riding a bicycle (or even a Segway). You got yourself into this "conspiracy" and if you don't like it, vote with your wallet.
Let's hope the hardware encryption is as robust as the XBox (or any other encryption hardware for that matter)
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Well, until the system becomes ubiquitous, and required for authorization to do anything outside of the confines of your little box. See this article at The Register for some interesting thoughts on this.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Wow! Someone sure doesn't have a sense of humor & modded me down. Maybe they're just dense and couldn't figure out this comment was meant to be humor.
And if the US has a stronger State, there is a good chance that no plane would have been flown into buildings, because everybody would see as a matter of course that plane security should not be entrusted to untrained minimum-wage workers with criminal records, but, instead to highly-skilled professionnals.
History shows plainly that the economy doesn't give a flying fuck about people having enough to eat. It also doesn't care whether people are housed decently. It could not care less if people can have medical care or not. It could not be bothered whether people can enjoy political rights or not. It even doesn't give a shit if the houses are properly built following strictly-enforced building codes in hurricane/earthquaque zones; hell, it even likes it better when there is a natural disaster: the reconstruction efforts make the gross national product grow!!!In short, the economy cares less about people than you care about all the e. coli bacteria you just shitted last time you had a dump!!! The economy is important, for sure, but it is not the only thing in life!!!
Billions of people worldwide believe it strongly, and have fought epic battles to have it implemented. They certainly can't be wrong!!!It's even more alarming that someone would be so blind as to parrot the big croporation rhetoric that wants to eradicate the power of States as much as possible in order to occupy it...
Initial design?
... *gasp*... perhaps even uncomputable.
Grow the sucker!...... Genetic algorithm esoterica my friend.
It's my understanding (and granted I havent looked at the Neural Networking universe for years) that the initial layer configuration problems are pretty muched unresolved or
Look at GA techniques. come up with some good fitness criteria, and then ask your self *why?* would you want to drive your pc with a neural net. (When a simple statistical method may do it so much better , not withstanding that neural nets tend towards 'normal' anyway).
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
my point is that Word shouldn't ever crash. I mean is a Word processor really so complex that it's impossiable to create one that doesn't crash? I program software for a living and I must say that building software that has specific boundrys isn't that hard.
I think that Word crashes because it does too much, tries to be things it's not. It's like, word should be word processing, not word processing, page layout , excel , a drawing program, a 3-d text tool, image editor and god knows what else they try to make it today. Swiss army vs good knife. Anyone who has tried to use word as a page layout tool realizes that it sucks, anyone who uses it as a draw program must realize that there are better products out there.
I have a collection of 'creatures' that run around an 'environment',
to extend the system, i need to extend the environment and the functions the animals can perform.
the problem is to create a way to make a universal system that can be extended.
so, instead of an environment and creatures i model a set of AI's, the interactions between the AI's are also AI's and the whole model it's self is an AI.
the AI's are a set of components linked up using neural nets, stats, HMM etc...
If you apply this to a computer system network, the components become, text editors, buttons, spell checkers, GDI's, protocols other machines etc...
the 4-5 years is very on and off. around 5 years ago I wrote a component based system where components expressed datatypes and functions, and the system would find the components to make the application work. The application was basicly a set of links between the components.
I also wrote a creature/environment simulation but gave up because of the starting block/extensibility problem.
A year or so ago, I realized that both problems were the same i.e. each creature and the environment could be complete components so long as there was a communication mechanism in place.
extending on that each creature can be a set of components etc.....
infact the communication mechanism can be a component/collection of components.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.