He absolutely claimed that it was the moral equivalent of committing a crime. He hypothesized that if someone is willing to cut corners ethically on SEO then they would be willing to cut corners ethically in other areas of their business.
If a fast food company wants to set up websites that link back to their main website with keywords like "fries" and "shakes" then that is their right. It isnt unethical just because it makes life more difficult for google's algorithm writers. (and I would argue that it does not constitute cutting corners ethically either)
Oh come on now, how much of a fanboy do you have to be to think that modifying your own web pages in a way you see fit is equivalent to committing a crime because Google doesnt like it? Google has no right to tell people what they can and cant do on the internet, they are not the law. Doing something they dont like is not equivalent to breaking the law. If their algorithm doesnt handle other people's websites doing certain things very well they should fix their algorithm, not demand that everyone play by their rules and design their websites in a way which doesnt mess up their algorithm.
I know that a lot of the things they push may be in the best interests of the tech industry but at the same time it doesnt seem right that they have anointed themselves as the police and lawmakers of the internet. (how many lobbyists do they have again trying to get laws written which are friendly to them?)
"So -- Viacom could enjoy at 12% profit margin (still better than retail!) and meet the writers demands of 0.6% on DVD and Internet revenues (3 cents on each $5, wow that's really ball-busting the studios)."
But here is the thing, all the other people who work on the movies get residuals too. (actors, directors, etc.) If you give the writers their.6% everyone else is going to expect their residuals to go up too. So that 12% profit margin will turn into a negative number very quickly if they start tripling and quadrupling employee's residuals.
"I think the real contention comes from the issue of writers wanting a cut of revenues instead of profits -- as the studios for ages have used their corrupt and contorted accounting..."
Not likely, these kinds of contracts have always been based on revenues rather than profits and the studios arent contesting that at all. Your speculation is incorrect.
I always hear people say things like "running a company that does xyz isnt that hard and could be done a hundred times more efficiently". If you really believe that this is the case why dont you go do it and become a bazillionaire? After all our economic system is structured in such a way that if there actually is a better way to run a company you are free to go do it and reap the rewards.
That isnt what I said at all. I said that it costs X number of dollars to produce a movie. You cannot substantially increase everyone's pay without going above X. Therefore you either have to reduce someone else's compensation in order to give someone (the writers) a raise or pass the cost onto consumers. (raise ticket prices) Believe it or not studios do not enjoy massive profit margins that they could use to double everyone's compensation if they wanted to. (as an example viacom enjoys a 13% profit margin, although that is the average across their entire business)
If you support the writers and you want them to make more money thats fine, but understand that over the long term that means some combination of less money for other people who produce the film and higher costs for consumers. Thats just basic economics/arithmetic.
You cant produce something like Lord of the Rings with a webcam and a youtube account. As long as people are willing to pay 7 bucks for a ticket to see movies like Lord of the Rings there will be a reason for large production companies to exist.
Yes, and if you ask the actors guild they will give a line about how their contribution is the most important to a film. If you ask the special effects guys they will say the same thing about how important theirs is. And so on and so forth. At the end of the day if you have X number of dollars to produce a movie you have to divide it up somehow between the different parties. If the writers come along and say they think their effort is worth several times what they are currently paid you either have to get more money to make your movie or reduce someone else's compensation. And dont kid youself, even if you assume the movie profit margins get reduced to zero to pay everyone thats not enough to cover substantial increases in cost across the board.
Hmm, so all the writers need is actors, stagehands, a set, and all the other stuff required to produce a movie and they can make it and distribute it online. Maybe they could organize all these things together and call it a "production company". Thatll show those studios!
This isnt the end of studios, those amatuerish videos on YouTube may be entertaining but you will still need large organizations to produce anything complex. The only thing that will change is that some of the marketing and sales may be different.
The clever part is that they used anti-aliasing on subpixels in text. You are not the first person ive heard saying that it was obvious or that someone else had thought of subpixel rendering first. But if thats true why didnt anyone else ever do subpixel rendering for text on lcd screens before? Its very useful, if it was so obvious I would think that other companies would have done it. I'm not saying its good that its all locked up in patents, but I do believe that MS did something useful here and they were the first ones to do it.
That page kind of misrepresents things, the apple wasnt really using subpixel rendering it was really just saying that you had 280 half pixels and you could use any two neighboring pixels to make one pixel that you would then use normally. The algorithms involved in cleartype are way different and substantially more advanced.
People dont like to admit it but MS actually does have patents on some fairly innovative things (example: ClearType) that are pretty clever. Whether its good or bad that you can patent a lot of these things is debatable but at least they are producing some useful stuff as opposed to just using patents as a money grab like a lot of patent troll companies.
What is it exactly you dont like about UAC and the allow/deny thing? I hear people rant against it all the time but I still dont know why it is inferior to other models. Not trying to flame you, I am genuinely curious what you think is wrong with it.
True that, however why would you want to be confrontational about it? If it is a company which doesnt directly compete wouldnt you do your best to maintain good relations with your old employer? I know I would, quitting is not something an employer likes but you should never burn bridges unnecessarily.
Any decent manager would surely ask for a specific company. I imagine most people would be inclined to give an honest answer. I think refusing to answer completely would be a surefire way to make said manager very suspicious that its a direct competitor and make damn sure you were out that same day. Its not like it would be some casual conversation where you could dodge questions, any responsible manager would want to know your motivations as to why you wanted to leave.
Just as a clarification, when I say "80% wouldnt" I am refering to the employees not the employer. I mean "80% wouldnt gather information that could prove valuable for their new corporate masters".
Why is this a problem? Its just MS playing it safe, if I told my employer that I was leaving for our biggest competitor I think I wouldnt be allowed to sit around for the next two weeks out of concern that I could be gathering information. While 80% probably wouldnt there would surely be some who would. I can think of a half a dozen times off the top of my head when non-MS engineers I knew were "shown the door" when they informed their employer they were leaving for a competitor.
And since when is Amazon a second tier company? I've been there and know people that work there, it seems like a great place and from what I hear the compensation is very competitive with MS, Google, and whatever other company you think is a trendy "first tier company".
You might have a point if it werent for the fact that these non-internet ventures arent money losers, they are money makers in a major way. Although google certainly does spend more on web services right now the idea that MS will go bankrupt trying to compete with them is just nuts, they can afford to spend money like noone else can.
If I wasnt at the same presentation parent was at, I was at one just like it. I have listened to at least a half a dozen people who work on the windows kernel say this exact same thing too.
I saw a picture of a lame motivational poster MS had up in one of their development buildings once that said something to the effect of "do your part to make windows more reliable..." (not quite as cheesy but you get the idea) underneath those words some MS engineer had scrawled the words "..kill an nvidia programmer".
At the very least there are some people at MS who want to blame nvidia for a lot of blue screens, although it certainly sounds like they deserve it.
I think that you are mostly correct about his role, but MS does try to attract people to develop OSS for windows. They arent stupid, they know that its important to have all the applications available for windows that are also available for other OSes. Bill Hilf has said this a number of times. I guess there is the possiblity that he is lieing and he doesnt want people developing software for windows. But does that really make any sense?
They do compete with some of those applications. (and yes, they have done some shady things with interoperability in the past with the apps that they compete with) But that doesnt mean that they dont want people using OSS on windows. A good example here is firefox, although MS tries to get people to use IE they have been very friendly and supportive of firefox developers.
Yes, I have met MS executives before. They were all technically oriented ones. (I have probably never met the marketing types that you have) No I have not met anyone on the new york city council before. No, I do not work in marketing, I am an engineer. No, I do not work for Microsoft. But really, why should what I do matter? Your entire post is based on speculation about what I do, as though that is actually relevant to the issue at hand here.
The point I am trying to make is that it should not come as a surprise that the people they send out to talk to customers are mostly sales and marketing types. They do have a lot of very technical people in leadership positions, but they spend most of their time doing R&D related activities back in Redmond. Based on my personal experience, your generalization that all the MS execs are marketers who know nothing about the technical side is wrong.
I am curious though, what is it exactly that these marketing exec types didnt know that horrified you so much?
Wow, what vitirol. It is hard to imagine that a city council would take your seriously talking like that.
Of course most execs wont be familiar with every detail of every patch that went out years before they took a project over. This isnt just microsoft, this is any company.
This isnt necessarily a bad thing. Microsoft has had several VPs that were criticized for being too technical and not business/leadership oriented enough. James Allchin comes to mind, brilliant engineer in charge of Vista, look how bad that turned out in terms of delays, marketing failures, adoption by customers, etc. Being a supercoder who has a lot of technical knowledge doesnt necessarily make you a kickass manager/executive.
Frankly, I think your characterization of MS execs is way off. They have lots of highly technical executives. It shouldnt come as a surprise that the guy they sent to talk to a city council leaned more heavily towards marketing.
I always thought it was an easy problem to fix. You just take all the parts out and keep adding them back in until you get the one that causes a failure to post. Then bam, youve found your problem. Very easy to use process of elimination here. You dont need any spare parts at all, you are just trying to see what is stopping the MB from posting. You can turn a computer on without any pci cards, memory, hard drive, etc. plugged in. I guess you might have a point if the difficulty was in distinguishing between a MB failure and a cpu failure since you do need to have both of those. But all the other parts are unnecessary.
What you are saying is true, but the problem that they induced in this story resulted in a failure to even post, it wasnt a few bits that wouldnt set/unset correctly or something wacky like that. Note that all of the bad diagnoses were for things like a bad hard disk, ram, motherboard, etc. I think its a fair assumption that they messed up the stick in such a way that the machine wouldnt even post. So even though the diagnoses was wrong they werent totally off base and the problem was fairly easy to isolate.
Slashdot Mirror
He absolutely claimed that it was the moral equivalent of committing a crime. He hypothesized that if someone is willing to cut corners ethically on SEO then they would be willing to cut corners ethically in other areas of their business.
If a fast food company wants to set up websites that link back to their main website with keywords like "fries" and "shakes" then that is their right. It isnt unethical just because it makes life more difficult for google's algorithm writers. (and I would argue that it does not constitute cutting corners ethically either)
Oh come on now, how much of a fanboy do you have to be to think that modifying your own web pages in a way you see fit is equivalent to committing a crime because Google doesnt like it? Google has no right to tell people what they can and cant do on the internet, they are not the law. Doing something they dont like is not equivalent to breaking the law. If their algorithm doesnt handle other people's websites doing certain things very well they should fix their algorithm, not demand that everyone play by their rules and design their websites in a way which doesnt mess up their algorithm.
I know that a lot of the things they push may be in the best interests of the tech industry but at the same time it doesnt seem right that they have anointed themselves as the police and lawmakers of the internet. (how many lobbyists do they have again trying to get laws written which are friendly to them?)
"So -- Viacom could enjoy at 12% profit margin (still better than retail!) and meet the writers demands of 0.6% on DVD and Internet revenues (3 cents on each $5, wow that's really ball-busting the studios)."
.6% everyone else is going to expect their residuals to go up too. So that 12% profit margin will turn into a negative number very quickly if they start tripling and quadrupling employee's residuals.
..."
But here is the thing, all the other people who work on the movies get residuals too. (actors, directors, etc.) If you give the writers their
"I think the real contention comes from the issue of writers wanting a cut of revenues instead of profits -- as the studios for ages have used their corrupt and contorted accounting
Not likely, these kinds of contracts have always been based on revenues rather than profits and the studios arent contesting that at all. Your speculation is incorrect.
I always hear people say things like "running a company that does xyz isnt that hard and could be done a hundred times more efficiently". If you really believe that this is the case why dont you go do it and become a bazillionaire? After all our economic system is structured in such a way that if there actually is a better way to run a company you are free to go do it and reap the rewards.
That isnt what I said at all. I said that it costs X number of dollars to produce a movie. You cannot substantially increase everyone's pay without going above X. Therefore you either have to reduce someone else's compensation in order to give someone (the writers) a raise or pass the cost onto consumers. (raise ticket prices) Believe it or not studios do not enjoy massive profit margins that they could use to double everyone's compensation if they wanted to. (as an example viacom enjoys a 13% profit margin, although that is the average across their entire business)
If you support the writers and you want them to make more money thats fine, but understand that over the long term that means some combination of less money for other people who produce the film and higher costs for consumers. Thats just basic economics/arithmetic.
You cant produce something like Lord of the Rings with a webcam and a youtube account. As long as people are willing to pay 7 bucks for a ticket to see movies like Lord of the Rings there will be a reason for large production companies to exist.
Yes, and if you ask the actors guild they will give a line about how their contribution is the most important to a film. If you ask the special effects guys they will say the same thing about how important theirs is. And so on and so forth. At the end of the day if you have X number of dollars to produce a movie you have to divide it up somehow between the different parties. If the writers come along and say they think their effort is worth several times what they are currently paid you either have to get more money to make your movie or reduce someone else's compensation. And dont kid youself, even if you assume the movie profit margins get reduced to zero to pay everyone thats not enough to cover substantial increases in cost across the board.
Hmm, so all the writers need is actors, stagehands, a set, and all the other stuff required to produce a movie and they can make it and distribute it online. Maybe they could organize all these things together and call it a "production company". Thatll show those studios!
This isnt the end of studios, those amatuerish videos on YouTube may be entertaining but you will still need large organizations to produce anything complex. The only thing that will change is that some of the marketing and sales may be different.
The clever part is that they used anti-aliasing on subpixels in text. You are not the first person ive heard saying that it was obvious or that someone else had thought of subpixel rendering first. But if thats true why didnt anyone else ever do subpixel rendering for text on lcd screens before? Its very useful, if it was so obvious I would think that other companies would have done it. I'm not saying its good that its all locked up in patents, but I do believe that MS did something useful here and they were the first ones to do it.
That page kind of misrepresents things, the apple wasnt really using subpixel rendering it was really just saying that you had 280 half pixels and you could use any two neighboring pixels to make one pixel that you would then use normally. The algorithms involved in cleartype are way different and substantially more advanced.
People dont like to admit it but MS actually does have patents on some fairly innovative things (example: ClearType) that are pretty clever. Whether its good or bad that you can patent a lot of these things is debatable but at least they are producing some useful stuff as opposed to just using patents as a money grab like a lot of patent troll companies.
What is it exactly you dont like about UAC and the allow/deny thing? I hear people rant against it all the time but I still dont know why it is inferior to other models. Not trying to flame you, I am genuinely curious what you think is wrong with it.
True that, however why would you want to be confrontational about it? If it is a company which doesnt directly compete wouldnt you do your best to maintain good relations with your old employer? I know I would, quitting is not something an employer likes but you should never burn bridges unnecessarily.
Any decent manager would surely ask for a specific company. I imagine most people would be inclined to give an honest answer. I think refusing to answer completely would be a surefire way to make said manager very suspicious that its a direct competitor and make damn sure you were out that same day. Its not like it would be some casual conversation where you could dodge questions, any responsible manager would want to know your motivations as to why you wanted to leave.
Maybe the boss asked? I mean doesnt that seem like the logical response?
"I am going to work somewhere else."
"oh, where?"
I mean, how do you not ask "where" right after someone says that to you?
Just as a clarification, when I say "80% wouldnt" I am refering to the employees not the employer. I mean "80% wouldnt gather information that could prove valuable for their new corporate masters".
Why is this a problem? Its just MS playing it safe, if I told my employer that I was leaving for our biggest competitor I think I wouldnt be allowed to sit around for the next two weeks out of concern that I could be gathering information. While 80% probably wouldnt there would surely be some who would. I can think of a half a dozen times off the top of my head when non-MS engineers I knew were "shown the door" when they informed their employer they were leaving for a competitor.
And since when is Amazon a second tier company? I've been there and know people that work there, it seems like a great place and from what I hear the compensation is very competitive with MS, Google, and whatever other company you think is a trendy "first tier company".
This is slashdot, whether or not something is advertising depends on the company. Here is a quick explanation of terms used:
Google: News
Apple: Major Announcement
Microsoft: Astroturfing
Everyone Else: Advertisement
You might have a point if it werent for the fact that these non-internet ventures arent money losers, they are money makers in a major way. Although google certainly does spend more on web services right now the idea that MS will go bankrupt trying to compete with them is just nuts, they can afford to spend money like noone else can.
If I wasnt at the same presentation parent was at, I was at one just like it. I have listened to at least a half a dozen people who work on the windows kernel say this exact same thing too.
I saw a picture of a lame motivational poster MS had up in one of their development buildings once that said something to the effect of "do your part to make windows more reliable..." (not quite as cheesy but you get the idea) underneath those words some MS engineer had scrawled the words "..kill an nvidia programmer".
At the very least there are some people at MS who want to blame nvidia for a lot of blue screens, although it certainly sounds like they deserve it.
I think that you are mostly correct about his role, but MS does try to attract people to develop OSS for windows. They arent stupid, they know that its important to have all the applications available for windows that are also available for other OSes. Bill Hilf has said this a number of times. I guess there is the possiblity that he is lieing and he doesnt want people developing software for windows. But does that really make any sense?
They do compete with some of those applications. (and yes, they have done some shady things with interoperability in the past with the apps that they compete with) But that doesnt mean that they dont want people using OSS on windows. A good example here is firefox, although MS tries to get people to use IE they have been very friendly and supportive of firefox developers.
Calm down, I am not trying to troll you.
Yes, I have met MS executives before. They were all technically oriented ones. (I have probably never met the marketing types that you have) No I have not met anyone on the new york city council before. No, I do not work in marketing, I am an engineer. No, I do not work for Microsoft. But really, why should what I do matter? Your entire post is based on speculation about what I do, as though that is actually relevant to the issue at hand here.
The point I am trying to make is that it should not come as a surprise that the people they send out to talk to customers are mostly sales and marketing types. They do have a lot of very technical people in leadership positions, but they spend most of their time doing R&D related activities back in Redmond. Based on my personal experience, your generalization that all the MS execs are marketers who know nothing about the technical side is wrong.
I am curious though, what is it exactly that these marketing exec types didnt know that horrified you so much?
Wow, what vitirol. It is hard to imagine that a city council would take your seriously talking like that.
Of course most execs wont be familiar with every detail of every patch that went out years before they took a project over. This isnt just microsoft, this is any company.
This isnt necessarily a bad thing. Microsoft has had several VPs that were criticized for being too technical and not business/leadership oriented enough. James Allchin comes to mind, brilliant engineer in charge of Vista, look how bad that turned out in terms of delays, marketing failures, adoption by customers, etc. Being a supercoder who has a lot of technical knowledge doesnt necessarily make you a kickass manager/executive.
Frankly, I think your characterization of MS execs is way off. They have lots of highly technical executives. It shouldnt come as a surprise that the guy they sent to talk to a city council leaned more heavily towards marketing.
I always thought it was an easy problem to fix. You just take all the parts out and keep adding them back in until you get the one that causes a failure to post. Then bam, youve found your problem. Very easy to use process of elimination here. You dont need any spare parts at all, you are just trying to see what is stopping the MB from posting. You can turn a computer on without any pci cards, memory, hard drive, etc. plugged in. I guess you might have a point if the difficulty was in distinguishing between a MB failure and a cpu failure since you do need to have both of those. But all the other parts are unnecessary.
What you are saying is true, but the problem that they induced in this story resulted in a failure to even post, it wasnt a few bits that wouldnt set/unset correctly or something wacky like that. Note that all of the bad diagnoses were for things like a bad hard disk, ram, motherboard, etc. I think its a fair assumption that they messed up the stick in such a way that the machine wouldnt even post. So even though the diagnoses was wrong they werent totally off base and the problem was fairly easy to isolate.