I don't think they let you use OSS in house without getting lots of lawyers to sign stuff. That's why IBM had to officially let their staff download Mozilla, before you were not allowed to do this.
I have worked for AA and Indenture erm I mean Accenture and your story has the ring of truth to it. I worked for both cos in the late 90s when they had been hollowed out by the talented folks leaving to make a killing on the dot.com boom (Webvan anyone?).
AA was very buttoned down, almost cultish, you had the feeling of working for the Scientologists. There were some cute babes though, snappy dressers - a bit like Donald Trumps apprentices.
Ac was more go getting but were horribly in bed with Microsoft and were less consultants than value added resellers of Microsoft products. The babes were largely geeks and incredibly offish - you had to be partner level to bed them.
With Ac if you had a problem the answer was always NT Server and IIS (I worked on Internet Technologies) no matter how unsuitable this may have proved for building stable eCommerce solutions. Apache etc. couldn't be mentioned despite the technologists within the company believing this to be a better solution in some cases. I felt that Ac were a bit like Lukemia, invading budding dot.coms and eating the bone marrow out of them until their cash situation was so depleted they died. Ac had its own agenda at that time which was misaligned with many of their clients shareholders. I don't think that is good consultancy even if it is profitable.
> It used to be, back in the early-to-mid 90's, that the Microsoft parking lots were full well into the early morning. It wasn't unusual to see full lots at 3AM.
Hah, that's why Microsoft software was so much buggier back then!
Re:Maybe this is sour grapes
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 1
> Bill Gates is a the example of this in the extreme... It's almost as if somebody else's success amounts to a personal failure to him, and that positive attention to others is a personal affront to him.
I suspect he is, deep down, very insecure. It probably goes back to being
rejected by girls when he was a teenager that he has so much anger against people society regards as "cool".
Re:Microsoft Will Fail - Tales From The Inside
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 1
Your tail reminds of a similar event. It was late 1993 and I was in a bar with some Microsoft Techs. I was raving about the Internet and the WorldWideWeb and how Microsoft just didn't get it. They told me that they were going to bury the Internet in 6 months with their own version: The MicroSoft Network, it would be their own private Internet but so so much better. The Internet was as good as dead, they assured me.
Some of the techs in the bar were laid off in 1995 when Gates got Internet evangilism. Gates book "The Road Ahead" is funny, in the first printing there is not 1 mention of the Internet. This for a book written in 1994.
The point about Gates and Microsoft is that they were never, ever, cool. IBM PeeCees and DomesDOS were what people in accounts used. Apple's were cool, Steve Jobs was cool, Acorns were cool. PCs were sad.
USPTO is broken. TigerDirect yes, Tiger no! It's in the dictionary stupid.
There was a case in the UK where Locomotive Software wanted to trademark their name (they make/made office productivity suites). It was thrown out as too generic as it would, for example, prevent companies who made software for locomotives from using the terms.
> Allchin: Microsoft's research shows that the average corporate employee spends about 20% of her time on the PC simply looking for items.
I don't understand this. A few years back we had a Microsoft Droid in our company trying to persuade us to upgrade because window XP would save us 14 minutes per day per employee because all its auto-hiding crap would make it easier to find stuff. Now we discover that XP was really a load of poo and we should upgrade to Longhorn. Thank the lord we are still on Windows 2000.
This is a/. urban legend. The French culture minister said that he was not against working with MS, not that he would. I'm sure he would prefer a home grown solution, the French govt are one of the biggest adopters of OSS in the world.
> you must be able to show one of these upon request.
The Police only have the right to hold you for 4 hours while they establish your identity (unless they are going to prosecute you). A pain in the butt and it is probably just easier to have ID.
The reality is, if you look French and respectable (or are a tourist and not doing anything wrong) the police won't hassle you. If you look Arab or Romanian be prepared for a lifetime of controls.
> Just try to pay anything by cheque in a store nowadays.
I frequently don't get asked for ID when I pay by cheque - even in Casino and places. It surprised me. I've never been asked for ID when paying by cheque in a restaurant.
The filing looks like they had an on-line brainstorming session about all of the historical data that could be discovered about a Web document. Someone then wrote this up with some waffly tech language and came up with a few formula and then filed as a huge patent that appears more to be staking out a massive claim on the search engine algorithm space. I guess that this patent is about having bargaining chips with MSN Search and Yahoo! when the great search engine shakeout comes. I don't blaim Google for using the system as it stands; now they have shareholders they have fidicual duty to be evil:-).
There are some interesting ideas in the Google Patent and a much narrower filing with some specifics might merit a patent but talk like: a link has a creation and eventual destruction date, the rate of link creation to a document may be an indicator of the document's freshness, doesn't strike me as an invention more handwaving.
Given that the patent office is not up to the task at least restrict the lifetime of software patents to around 4 years.
Don't worry too much if Chris doesn't come back next year. David Tennant will make an excellent Dr. if the Beeb can convince him to sign-up.
David Tennant is currently starring in the BBC's Casanova and although not to everyone's tastes I thought this mini-series was excellent. I can't see him wanting to do the Dr for a long time though.
Tennant previously had a role in the BBC Webcast: Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka. Richard E. Grant played the Dr.
I think it is a bit of a meme for people who are doing something wrong. The original "Google Sandbox" idea was that overly optimized new sites were sandboxed not just everyday personal sites. I've launched a number of sites in the last 6 months and most show up in Google's index within a couple of days and stay there. They may not always rank as high as I would like but they are not sandboxed.
Now a lot of people have heard about the "sandbox" without bothering to read the original theory (sounds familiar huh?) and are using it as an excuse for why they are doing badly in Google. Apart from one or two examples most of the site owners I've seen complaining about the Sandbox are doing stuff wrong - like no inbound-links to their site.
Twaddle. Except for under Napoleon and to a certain extent Charlemagne (although he was a Frank) France was a weak state more intent on stabilizing and extending its own direct borders. After the defeat of the Moore's Spain was Europe's superpower.
> The collapse during the Franco-Prussian War can largely be blamed on Bismark's willingness to stoop to any level to provoke a war.
Bullshit. It can be blamed on a weak French government that chose to attack Germany (or the collection of states that comprised Germany) to detract from domestic problems. The French expected to walk over Germany.
> France's defeat in WWII, of course, can be blamed more on the Americans and the Brits who basically sold themselves and France up the river with ludicrous disarmament agreements.
Nonsense. It was the French who insisted on the luicrous disarmament agreements much to the dismay of the Americans and to some extent the British. This was payback time for 1870.
> France managed to fight off the English for centuries before finally evicting them permanently.
Piffle. France had a long term internal squabble with the Franco-Norman descendents of William the Conquerer who claimed certain lands in France. The English were not involved having been conquered by the Franco-Norman invaders in 1066.
> I think this is unlikely. The underlying NT is quite well-designed (originally by David Cutler of VMS, amongst others, as I believe), and a reasonably flexible system upon which to develop applications.
I'd go along with that, when I worked for the OSF we considered NT as the uKernel for OSF/1 uK.
(considered == joint study with Dave Cutler and others)
As a user of Google Print for my copyrighted work I can tell you that it depends on how the person submitting the work has set things up. The default is to easily show 20% of the work to a single user per month but the rights holder can set this to a higher value, a 100% if they fancy.
Google Print is not about giving free online access to books - it is about letting searchers find, browse and buy print books with Google making money through affliate schemes. As long as you understand that you will see that it is "not evil".
Aggh, I just noticed that my site has been/.ed.:-).
It is not the only book out there but it tries to present SEO from the viewpoint of making pages more useful to humans - a typical example is using relevant anchor text on internal links rather than the awful "click-here". I try to steer readers away from using tricks and towards making a site that is useful for humans - well structured and internally linked just as the Web originally intended. This is generally known as ethical SEO.
"JamVM is a new Java Virtual Machine which conforms to the JVM specification version 2 (blue book). In comparison to most other VM's (free and commercial) it is extremely small, with a stripped executable on PowerPC of only ~100K, and Intel 80K. However, unlike other small VMs (e.g. KVM) it is designed to support the full specification, and includes support for object finalisation, the Java Native Interface (JNI) and the Reflection API."
> The internet is making money for a lot of people, just not as an advertising vehicle
it seems to be working quite well as an advertising vehicle for Google adwords/adsense users (and similar schemes). It is apparently just a question of finding the right business model
Slashdot Mirror
> That would be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that has an endowment of roughly $29 billion
:-)
of Window and Offices licenses
> With IBMs large scale support for OSS
I don't think they let you use OSS in house without getting lots of lawyers to sign stuff. That's why IBM had to officially let their staff download Mozilla, before you were not allowed to do this.
I have worked for AA and Indenture erm I mean Accenture and your story has the ring of truth to it. I worked for both cos in the late 90s when they had been hollowed out by the talented folks leaving to make a killing on the dot.com boom (Webvan anyone?).
AA was very buttoned down, almost cultish, you had the feeling of working for the Scientologists. There were some cute babes though, snappy dressers - a bit like Donald Trumps apprentices.
Ac was more go getting but were horribly in bed with Microsoft and were less consultants than value added resellers of Microsoft products. The babes were largely geeks and incredibly offish - you had to be partner level to bed them.
With Ac if you had a problem the answer was always NT Server and IIS (I worked on Internet Technologies) no matter how unsuitable this may have proved for building stable eCommerce solutions. Apache etc. couldn't be mentioned despite the technologists within the company believing this to be a better solution in some cases. I felt that Ac were a bit like Lukemia, invading budding dot.coms and eating the bone marrow out of them until their cash situation was so depleted they died. Ac had its own agenda at that time which was misaligned with many of their clients shareholders. I don't think that is good consultancy even if it is profitable.
> It used to be, back in the early-to-mid 90's, that the Microsoft parking lots were full well into the early morning. It wasn't unusual to see full lots at 3AM.
Hah, that's why Microsoft software was so much buggier back then!
I suspect he is, deep down, very insecure. It probably goes back to being rejected by girls when he was a teenager that he has so much anger against people society regards as "cool".
Your tail reminds of a similar event. It was late 1993 and I was in a bar with some Microsoft Techs. I was raving about the Internet and the WorldWideWeb and how Microsoft just didn't get it. They told me that they were going to bury the Internet in 6 months with their own version: The MicroSoft Network, it would be their own private Internet but so so much better. The Internet was as good as dead, they assured me.
Some of the techs in the bar were laid off in 1995 when Gates got Internet evangilism. Gates book "The Road Ahead" is funny, in the first printing there is not 1 mention of the Internet. This for a book written in 1994.
The point about Gates and Microsoft is that they were never, ever, cool. IBM PeeCees and DomesDOS were what people in accounts used. Apple's were cool, Steve Jobs was cool, Acorns were cool. PCs were sad.
There was a case in the UK where Locomotive Software wanted to trademark their name (they make/made office productivity suites). It was thrown out as too generic as it would, for example, prevent companies who made software for locomotives from using the terms.
> No mensa logic puzzles there. Just: Here's a pen, there's the whiteboard, Here's a problem, start pseudocoding.
So that's how they coded Longhorn?
> Allchin: Microsoft's research shows that the average corporate employee spends about 20% of her time on the PC simply looking for items.
I don't understand this. A few years back we had a Microsoft Droid in our company trying to persuade us to upgrade because window XP would save us 14 minutes per day per employee because all its auto-hiding crap would make it easier to find stuff. Now we discover that XP was really a load of poo and we should upgrade to Longhorn. Thank the lord we are still on Windows 2000.
This is a /. urban legend. The French culture minister said that he was not against working with MS, not that he would. I'm sure he would prefer a home grown solution, the French govt are one of the biggest adopters of OSS in the world.
> you must be able to show one of these upon request.
The Police only have the right to hold you for 4 hours while they establish your identity (unless they are going to prosecute you). A pain in the butt and it is probably just easier to have ID.
The reality is, if you look French and respectable (or are a tourist and not doing anything wrong) the police won't hassle you. If you look Arab or Romanian be prepared for a lifetime of controls.
> Just try to pay anything by cheque in a store nowadays.
I frequently don't get asked for ID when I pay by cheque - even in Casino and places. It surprised me. I've never been asked for ID when paying by cheque in a restaurant.
The filing looks like they had an on-line brainstorming session about all of the historical data that could be discovered about a Web document. Someone then wrote this up with some waffly tech language and came up with a few formula and then filed as a huge patent that appears more to be staking out a massive claim on the search engine algorithm space. I guess that this patent is about having bargaining chips with MSN Search and Yahoo! when the great search engine shakeout comes. I don't blaim Google for using the system as it stands; now they have shareholders they have fidicual duty to be evil
There are some interesting ideas in the Google Patent and a much narrower filing with some specifics might merit a patent but talk like: a link has a creation and eventual destruction date, the rate of link creation to a document may be an indicator of the document's freshness, doesn't strike me as an invention more handwaving.
Given that the patent office is not up to the task at least restrict the lifetime of software patents to around 4 years.
David Tennant is currently starring in the BBC's Casanova and although not to everyone's tastes I thought this mini-series was excellent. I can't see him wanting to do the Dr for a long time though.
Tennant previously had a role in the BBC Webcast: Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka. Richard E. Grant played the Dr.
> DNS Cache Poisoning: DNS Cache Poisoning is the process by which a DNS Server's cache is poisoned.
The problem with some of those wiki guys is they guard their entries like savage poodles. If you add anything useful it gets deleted within 24 hours.
> Ten years ago that was just getting popular in universities
twenty years ago in my Uni in Britain, you guys are so behind the times.
I think it is a bit of a meme for people who are doing something wrong. The original "Google Sandbox" idea was that overly optimized new sites were sandboxed not just everyday personal sites. I've launched a number of sites in the last 6 months and most show up in Google's index within a couple of days and stay there. They may not always rank as high as I would like but they are not sandboxed.
Now a lot of people have heard about the "sandbox" without bothering to read the original theory (sounds familiar huh?) and are using it as an excuse for why they are doing badly in Google. Apart from one or two examples most of the site owners I've seen complaining about the Sandbox are doing stuff wrong - like no inbound-links to their site.
> "Microsoft" is a singular noun.
I thought they were the borg collective.
This is such a load of bollocks.
> France was Europe's superpower.
Twaddle. Except for under Napoleon and to a certain extent Charlemagne (although he was a Frank) France was a weak state more intent on stabilizing and extending its own direct borders. After the defeat of the Moore's Spain was Europe's superpower.
> The collapse during the Franco-Prussian War can largely be blamed on Bismark's willingness to stoop to any level to provoke a war.
Bullshit. It can be blamed on a weak French government that chose to attack Germany (or the collection of states that comprised Germany) to detract from domestic problems. The French expected to walk over Germany.
> France's defeat in WWII, of course, can be blamed more on the Americans and the Brits who basically sold themselves and France up the river with ludicrous disarmament agreements.
Nonsense. It was the French who insisted on the luicrous disarmament agreements much to the dismay of the Americans and to some extent the British. This was payback time for 1870.
> France managed to fight off the English for centuries before finally evicting them permanently.
Piffle. France had a long term internal squabble with the Franco-Norman descendents of William the Conquerer who claimed certain lands in France. The English were not involved having been conquered by the Franco-Norman invaders in 1066.
> I think this is unlikely. The underlying NT is quite well-designed (originally by David Cutler of VMS, amongst others, as I believe), and a reasonably flexible system upon which to develop applications.
I'd go along with that, when I worked for the OSF we considered NT as the uKernel for OSF/1 uK.
(considered == joint study with Dave Cutler and others)
> Fact is, IE is a security disaster because it's badly written
That will serve them right for basing it initially on that crappy Spyglass Mosiac written by the dough-boy-coder himself, Marc Andreeeeesen.
Their "business model" as you put it, relies heavily on the French Taxpayer (like me) subsidising them. I feel like I own a piece of AFP.
As a user of Google Print for my copyrighted work I can tell you that it depends on how the person submitting the work has set things up. The default is to easily show 20% of the work to a single user per month but the rights holder can set this to a higher value, a 100% if they fancy.
Google Print is not about giving free online access to books - it is about letting searchers find, browse and buy print books with Google making money through affliate schemes. As long as you understand that you will see that it is "not evil".
Aggh, I just noticed that my site has been /.ed. :-).
It is not the only book out there but it tries to present SEO from the viewpoint of making pages more useful to humans - a typical example is using relevant anchor text on internal links rather than the awful "click-here". I try to steer readers away from using tricks and towards making a site that is useful for humans - well structured and internally linked just as the Web originally intended. This is generally known as ethical SEO.
- David
In the mean time I suggest people take a look at Dr Rob Lougher's JamVM as an interesting independent (not under Sun's control) VM
JamVM
> The internet is making money for a lot of people, just not as an advertising vehicle
it seems to be working quite well as an advertising vehicle for Google adwords/adsense users (and similar schemes). It is apparently just a question of finding the right business model