Actually this isn't really about MS at all. What we should be looking at is the fact that this is a sad commentary on the state of Freedom in America overall. That a corporation has to put in caveats like this to protect itself from being sued by those who oppose free speech (which is really what this is about not that MS opposes it) is the real issue. It's a patethic commentary on the state of America where every disagreement has to be resolved in the courts and that people will do anything for a buck. Imagine what kind of money you could get if you sued MS for being racist because someone used the software which they licensed to them to make a neo-Nazi website. Just think of the liability. Of course it's dumb to restrict disparaging remarks about the company but that's a seperate issue.
I suppose it's also a sad commentary on Slashdot that almost everyone has over looked this.
Don't forget there is variation on how MS classifies bugs internally also. I've worked on 4 different teams @ MS and have seen some varations between sev1 and sev2 bugs across them. Several teams classify sev1 bugs as an OS crash caused by thier application. Sev2 bugs are crashes or major functionality problems within thier application that don't affect the OS. Sev3 and 4 are as the same as your list. I personally like this method better as I tend to find bugs that crash my OS to be far more annoying than a simple application crash. When you compare the possible problems caused by the crash and the time (reboot) required to resolve it to me it makes more sense.
The slashdot community should also be able to moderate posts made to the homepage by CmdrTaco and everyone else. That way when some drivel like this gets accidentally posted we can vote it off the site as of no interest whatsoever to us.
First off I live in Seattle. The Pacific Northwest is literally keeping California online right now for lack of a better term. Most of the big aluminum plants up here have shutdown and almost all our excess hydro power is being shipped down south. Many of our resevoirs are so low that there is no longer sufficient pressure to generate power. This is pretty typical, California has more people. God forbid we piss of a whole bunch of voters so we'll just screw over a few smaller states. If you think California was a problem wait until this summer when Washington, Oregon and BC don't have any water to generate with and everyone else needs AC.
Anyways everyone is worried about the wrong type of computers. The problem isn't desktop boxes it's server farms. The major server farms (there are at least 5) in the Seattle metro area eat as much power as the entire city of Seattle proper (that's about 600K people fyi). The problem is in all those idling servers and the AC to cool them not the guy running 5 desktop boxes solving SETI at home. For example the server farm in Building 11 on Microsoft's main campus uses 1/2 of the power that is sent to the city of Redmond.
I think it's important to remember that although nationally this doesn't amount to much when you consider that many server farms are centrally located in high-tech areas it's easy to see how the strain could be more in San Jose or Seattle when compared to say Fargo's heaters.
I will also vouch for the Technics stuff. It is by no means the BEST but for the amount of money you are looking at investing thier higher end stuff is a good starting point. I have a Technic's reciever that I have had since my junior year in college which still works just fine for me with a pair of Bose 301 speakers (also just fine for most people despite what whiny audiophiles will say).
I also suggest that if you pass through the Seattle area that you visit Magnolia Hi-Fi. They have been one of the leading local hi-end audio stores for pushing 50 years now. Many people I know who have spare cash (i.e work in Redmond) have used thier design services for home theaters.
Linux's biggest disadvantage in the education environment is really two fold.
1) It's still to hard for beginning users to use. Linux needs to make inroads not only in the CS/EE world but especially the business community. You MUST remember who cuts the checks to buy software. Make sure the accountants know and love Linux/Unix whatever your flavor is.
2) It's really hard to prevent a unified front. The Linux community is really fairly splintered. And all the other communities pale in comparison to that presented by Microsoft. New users are presented with a many faceted view of Linux while those being introduced to Windows are not. Microsoft has a huge advantage in that it can present a unified "front" to inductees.
It's all basic marketting. Pretty simple. There's no complex combination that will win.
All this arguing about programming languages, what box to build etc. All pointless. The front presented must be uniform and comfortable. The few people I have seen try to teach Linux are it's largest enemies. They (like MS people) are so convinced they are right that they disgust everyone. At least when teaching a Windows app some people know it and will call the "teacher" when he/she is a dick.
It doesn't matter if the judge has no clue. You can still have a judge that has a clue and it's likely he would agree if Microsoft could prove a linkage.
A judges' job is to interpret the law. (incase you forgot this.) These are VERY smart people and I will bet you money they are not clueless in any sense of the imagination. The judge may philosphically agree with you but it is more than likely he is tied down by arcane laws that no longer work.
Yes if Microsoft can prove linkage between source code theft and Wine, the Linux kernel (god forbid!!) or any other piece of software they WOULD win (not could). It doesn't matter if the judge has been using Linux for years and can compile his own kernel he would have to agree with Microsoft. If he didn't he would be disbarred (fired) for not following the law and the case would bounce to another court until Microsoft got an agreeing judge.
Any theft of intellectual property is extremely risky. Even if it's intended to help a group or embarass another group it can come back and bite you in the ass.
So what? There are lots of specialty degrees that have many theoretical things invovled in them to. (Physics for example). Some of them aren't even in the sciences. (think Economics) Theory is part of our world. Without it we'd just stick in a permanent holding cycle. It challenges the bounderies, forces us to change. I for one am not big on trying to "compile" Java with a stone ax. If you find out a way please tell me. That way when I hose my computer I can still finish my work.
The United Nations has a program by which important sites are designated as "World Heritage Sites" (i think that's the name) for cultural reasons. Usually these are historically important things such as the Roman Forum. I think it would be more appropriate for the moon landings and indeed probably all solar system landing sites (pathfinder, viking, the melted soviet probes on Venus) should be designated as such. There are enforcement issues but it is probably the best thing to do now.
Yup. Out of the 5 of my friends whom upgraded to Win2K on a really ragtag bag of hardware only 2 had ANY problems with Win2K. Both along the lines of your problems. (two drivers, a creative DVD-Drive and one TV card for which it turned out drivers were both nearly released.) So they had to wait a few weeks before it worked perfectly.
No one I know of had any problems with software designed to run under Windows 95 or later. If however you decide you miss some old DOS game and decide to whip it out then you'll get into problems. (But that's why I keep my 486 hooked up to my switch box.)
It's a little more than that.:-) Hotmail has something like 200 backend db boxes alone. The front end I have heard is 1000+. Not small. But then Windows doesn't cost MS anything does it?
But remember with a huge site like this someone would probably site license the OS or get a "bulk" deal for a lot less than what most of us could get it for.
Couldn't happen. I've heard from a reliable source (a friend that is an electrician)that the data center in which the Hotmail servers are kept physically has NO space left, the floors are filled. If they wanted to add more servers they would have to move them to another data center somewhere. (possible but not likely IMO). More realistically the machines are being replaced close to 1:1 or maybe better. (good time to upgrade hardware)
BTW I also havea friend who claims he recieved an email from Hotmail informing him that his cluster was being migrated to Win2K. I haven't heard anyone else say this but I do trust this guy.
It's important to note here that Patrick is NOT replacing Duchovny. Even though he is appearing in all the shows this season. He is simply a new character being added to the show. Although he'll probably be in more episodes than anyone else before it's better to think of him as another Alex Krycek who was used as Mulder's temp partner back when Scully was "abducted". Duchovny is still the male lead on the show.
For the official fox line read here: http://www.thexfiles.com/news/index.html
Microsoft discounted this minutes after the statement was released. What BC apparently offered was support for expanding operations in BC in the future, not moving the company there.
This is unlikely to happen for several reasons aside from earlier mentioned legal ones.
1) Many of Microsoft's employees are now longtime Seattle area residents they are not going to want to move and they dont HAVE to work anymore. They'll just retire or vest their stock options. 2) Microsoft doesn't need office space, infact if anything they may have to much now. They own 200 acres near Issaquah and the area around Redmond is one giant construction zone right now both for MS and other companies. 3) They are tightly integrated with the Washington State economy. Together with Boeing, the Navy, Paccar and a few others they are the largest local employer. The state is not going to let them go anywehre. 4) They are highly reliant on local institutions such as the University of Washington and the local community college system. Much of the education system here is now built around supporting the high tech companies such as Boeing and MS. There is a reason why Washington is now called the Silicon Forest by some.
The fact that this story even got posted borders on sheer lunacy. That and the numerous wrong facts stated about BC and Washington by Slashdot readers are amusing to.
Oh with the current quality of the journalism on this site it's only a matter of time until a slander lawsuit of some type will be brought against SlashDot.
I'm surprised that anyone would suggest Mr. Allen would be selling his stock because he is afraid of it's devaluation. Aside from his Microsoft stock he own's several highly profitable ventures including the Portland Trailblazers and Seattle Seahawks. His income from alternative sources other than MS stock are such that there is little chance he would really care in a strictly financial sense.
Of more concern to those of us who care about others rather than ourselves would be that various foundations lost TONS of money because of the verdict and the fact that much of their assets is still in MS stock.
The last sentence in this story makes me want to puke.
Don't feel to bad. Although I can't pin it specifically on Napster the network at the University of Washington has gotten much slower since it was release. Although we can't serve data out from the campus network due to security already in place we can of course download. The network here grinds to a halt quite frequently and it's literally impossible to get out. And the UW mind you has multiple OC-3 lines out and in.
It's now not uncommon for me to be unable to get out of the campus network during certain times of the day. *sigh*
There is nothing wrong with banning Napster. It violates almost all regulations that any university has in place. It would not even be unfounded for them to ban Unreal or other games because it would be non-academically related which violates most policies.
The central MS Security office is in building 8 in the south east corner. I grew up 2 miles from MS, got in trouble a few times for using their athletic fields after we ripped up the local public ones playing pickup footbal so badly you couldn't stand on them. Actually their security guys were pretty nice to us most of the time.:-)
It is not uncommon for Microsoft Research to throw up non Windows servers for some reason or other. They had a Linux box running apache up for some time IIRC.
I've seen this movie twice now. Seattle has a brand new IMAX theatre downtown.
I found the sequence done to Pines of Rome with the whales far and away the most spectactular, although the firebird suite ranked right up there.
The most disappointing thing was the quality of the Sorcerer's Apprentice which is one of my favorite animated sequences of all time. It was simply the 35mm version blown up to 70mm and it was very grainy. Despite the fact that it would in a sense ruin the originality of the piece Disney should have extensively used computers to clean up the piece. Or it should have been redrawn to fit the format.
A cool IMAX film. However it'll never beat "The Dream is Alive" for coolness, or Everest for raw beauty.
Dunno. I don't remember the specific order in that they do product with. He described it but I wasn't paying superb attention. I think they did a read through early before any drawing is done and then after all the animation is done they do it again to make any necessary corrections.
Dan Castalaneta (sp) the voice of Homer Simpson stated on the Tom Lykis show (while in Aspen) that a feature film was unlikely during the time the show is in television.
Apparently the current yearly episode load (something like 22) is about the maximum the show can handle. Apparently it takes 7 months to write, draw, animate and then do the voices for an episode.
I was a QA tester in the Office Group in Microsoft and did specification based testing. The guy next to me did more freeform type testing. My test lead did have a helluva lot experience. 15 YEARS to be exact. This guy knew exactly what needed to be now fixed and what should be revisited later and knew how to find bugs in the product that the team otherwise never would have found. I have been of the frequent opinion that our component was one of the better parts of Office 2000 simply because of him. Just shows you how important good leadership is.
Lab studies like this mean nothing. What matters is running the server in a production environment. My NT server has run for almost a year now since one of it's drives failed in March last year. Before that it had put in another year. NT on my server is really quite stable. The applications on it? Well that's another story. They crash all the time.:-) On the other hand on of my fellow admin's NT servers has to be restarted almost daily due to an NT problem. (Same Compaq box to). I really do hate studies like this.
I'm pleased with a 1 year uptime. I won't change. On the other hand if I was my buddy I would change to Linux or some other OS that met my real world needs better.
Question. This was "server" operating systems. Since many Linux distro's are used as both workstations and servers how did IDG determine what the share of the "server" market was? Did they go out and determine that 1.3 million copies were being used as servers? I mean doing it with Windows is easy. You just count up all the NT Server licenses, but Linux sales mostly don't work like that.
I don't know how much to read into this "report", parts of it like many things of this nature sound suspect. Not to be a party pooper....
Slashdot Mirror
Actually this isn't really about MS at all. What we should be looking at is the fact that this is a sad commentary on the state of Freedom in America overall. That a corporation has to put in caveats like this to protect itself from being sued by those who oppose free speech (which is really what this is about not that MS opposes it) is the real issue. It's a patethic commentary on the state of America where every disagreement has to be resolved in the courts and that people will do anything for a buck. Imagine what kind of money you could get if you sued MS for being racist because someone used the software which they licensed to them to make a neo-Nazi website. Just think of the liability. Of course it's dumb to restrict disparaging remarks about the company but that's a seperate issue.
I suppose it's also a sad commentary on Slashdot that almost everyone has over looked this.
Don't forget there is variation on how MS classifies bugs internally also. I've worked on 4 different teams @ MS and have seen some varations between sev1 and sev2 bugs across them. Several teams classify sev1 bugs as an OS crash caused by thier application. Sev2 bugs are crashes or major functionality problems within thier application that don't affect the OS. Sev3 and 4 are as the same as your list. I personally like this method better as I tend to find bugs that crash my OS to be far more annoying than a simple application crash. When you compare the possible problems caused by the crash and the time (reboot) required to resolve it to me it makes more sense.
The slashdot community should also be able to moderate posts made to the homepage by CmdrTaco and everyone else. That way when some drivel like this gets accidentally posted we can vote it off the site as of no interest whatsoever to us.
First off I live in Seattle. The Pacific Northwest is literally keeping California online right now for lack of a better term. Most of the big aluminum plants up here have shutdown and almost all our excess hydro power is being shipped down south. Many of our resevoirs are so low that there is no longer sufficient pressure to generate power. This is pretty typical, California has more people. God forbid we piss of a whole bunch of voters so we'll just screw over a few smaller states. If you think California was a problem wait until this summer when Washington, Oregon and BC don't have any water to generate with and everyone else needs AC.
Anyways everyone is worried about the wrong type of computers. The problem isn't desktop boxes it's server farms. The major server farms (there are at least 5) in the Seattle metro area eat as much power as the entire city of Seattle proper (that's about 600K people fyi). The problem is in all those idling servers and the AC to cool them not the guy running 5 desktop boxes solving SETI at home. For example the server farm in Building 11 on Microsoft's main campus uses 1/2 of the power that is sent to the city of Redmond.
I think it's important to remember that although nationally this doesn't amount to much when you consider that many server farms are centrally located in high-tech areas it's easy to see how the strain could be more in San Jose or Seattle when compared to say Fargo's heaters.
I will also vouch for the Technics stuff. It is by no means the BEST but for the amount of money you are looking at investing thier higher end stuff is a good starting point. I have a Technic's reciever that I have had since my junior year in college which still works just fine for me with a pair of Bose 301 speakers (also just fine for most people despite what whiny audiophiles will say). I also suggest that if you pass through the Seattle area that you visit Magnolia Hi-Fi. They have been one of the leading local hi-end audio stores for pushing 50 years now. Many people I know who have spare cash (i.e work in Redmond) have used thier design services for home theaters.
Linux's biggest disadvantage in the education environment is really two fold.
1) It's still to hard for beginning users to use. Linux needs to make inroads not only in the CS/EE world but especially the business community. You MUST remember who cuts the checks to buy software. Make sure the accountants know and love Linux/Unix whatever your flavor is.
2) It's really hard to prevent a unified front. The Linux community is really fairly splintered. And all the other communities pale in comparison to that presented by Microsoft. New users are presented with a many faceted view of Linux while those being introduced to Windows are not. Microsoft has a huge advantage in that it can present a unified "front" to inductees.
It's all basic marketting. Pretty simple. There's no complex combination that will win.
All this arguing about programming languages, what box to build etc. All pointless. The front presented must be uniform and comfortable. The few people I have seen try to teach Linux are it's largest enemies. They (like MS people) are so convinced they are right that they disgust everyone. At least when teaching a Windows app some people know it and will call the "teacher" when he/she is a dick.
It doesn't matter if the judge has no clue. You can still have a judge that has a clue and it's likely he would agree if Microsoft could prove a linkage.
A judges' job is to interpret the law. (incase you forgot this.) These are VERY smart people and I will bet you money they are not clueless in any sense of the imagination. The judge may philosphically agree with you but it is more than likely he is tied down by arcane laws that no longer work.
Yes if Microsoft can prove linkage between source code theft and Wine, the Linux kernel (god forbid!!) or any other piece of software they WOULD win (not could). It doesn't matter if the judge has been using Linux for years and can compile his own kernel he would have to agree with Microsoft. If he didn't he would be disbarred (fired) for not following the law and the case would bounce to another court until Microsoft got an agreeing judge.
Any theft of intellectual property is extremely risky. Even if it's intended to help a group or embarass another group it can come back and bite you in the ass.
So what? There are lots of specialty degrees that have many theoretical things invovled in them to. (Physics for example). Some of them aren't even in the sciences. (think Economics) Theory is part of our world. Without it we'd just stick in a permanent holding cycle. It challenges the bounderies, forces us to change. I for one am not big on trying to "compile" Java with a stone ax. If you find out a way please tell me. That way when I hose my computer I can still finish my work.
The United Nations has a program by which important sites are designated as "World Heritage Sites" (i think that's the name) for cultural reasons. Usually these are historically important things such as the Roman Forum. I think it would be more appropriate for the moon landings and indeed probably all solar system landing sites (pathfinder, viking, the melted soviet probes on Venus) should be designated as such. There are enforcement issues but it is probably the best thing to do now.
Yup. Out of the 5 of my friends whom upgraded to Win2K on a really ragtag bag of hardware only 2 had ANY problems with Win2K. Both along the lines of your problems. (two drivers, a creative DVD-Drive and one TV card for which it turned out drivers were both nearly released.) So they had to wait a few weeks before it worked perfectly.
No one I know of had any problems with software designed to run under Windows 95 or later. If however you decide you miss some old DOS game and decide to whip it out then you'll get into problems. (But that's why I keep my 486 hooked up to my switch box.)
FUD goes both ways my friends...
It's a little more than that. :-) Hotmail has something like 200 backend db boxes alone. The front end I have heard is 1000+. Not small. But then Windows doesn't cost MS anything does it?
But remember with a huge site like this someone would probably site license the OS or get a "bulk" deal for a lot less than what most of us could get it for.
Couldn't happen. I've heard from a reliable source (a friend that is an electrician)that the data center in which the Hotmail servers are kept physically has NO space left, the floors are filled. If they wanted to add more servers they would have to move them to another data center somewhere. (possible but not likely IMO). More realistically the machines are being replaced close to 1:1 or maybe better. (good time to upgrade hardware)
BTW I also havea friend who claims he recieved an email from Hotmail informing him that his cluster was being migrated to Win2K. I haven't heard anyone else say this but I do trust this guy.
It's important to note here that Patrick is NOT replacing Duchovny. Even though he is appearing in all the shows this season. He is simply a new character being added to the show. Although he'll probably be in more episodes than anyone else before it's better to think of him as another Alex Krycek who was used as Mulder's temp partner back when Scully was "abducted". Duchovny is still the male lead on the show.
For the official fox line read here:
http://www.thexfiles.com/news/index.html
Microsoft discounted this minutes after the statement was released. What BC apparently offered was support for expanding operations in BC in the future, not moving the company there.
This is unlikely to happen for several reasons aside from earlier mentioned legal ones.
1) Many of Microsoft's employees are now longtime Seattle area residents they are not going to want to move and they dont HAVE to work anymore. They'll just retire or vest their stock options.
2) Microsoft doesn't need office space, infact if anything they may have to much now. They own 200 acres near Issaquah and the area around Redmond is one giant construction zone right now both for MS and other companies.
3) They are tightly integrated with the Washington State economy. Together with Boeing, the Navy, Paccar and a few others they are the largest local employer. The state is not going to let them go anywehre.
4) They are highly reliant on local institutions such as the University of Washington and the local community college system. Much of the education system here is now built around supporting the high tech companies such as Boeing and MS. There is a reason why Washington is now called the Silicon Forest by some.
The fact that this story even got posted borders on sheer lunacy. That and the numerous wrong facts stated about BC and Washington by Slashdot readers are amusing to.
Oh with the current quality of the journalism on this site it's only a matter of time until a slander lawsuit of some type will be brought against SlashDot.
I'm surprised that anyone would suggest Mr. Allen would be selling his stock because he is afraid of it's devaluation. Aside from his Microsoft stock he own's several highly profitable ventures including the Portland Trailblazers and Seattle Seahawks. His income from alternative sources other than MS stock are such that there is little chance he would really care in a strictly financial sense.
Of more concern to those of us who care about others rather than ourselves would be that various foundations lost TONS of money because of the verdict and the fact that much of their assets is still in MS stock.
The last sentence in this story makes me want to puke.
Don't feel to bad. Although I can't pin it specifically on Napster the network at the University of Washington has gotten much slower since it was release. Although we can't serve data out from the campus network due to security already in place we can of course download. The network here grinds to a halt quite frequently and it's literally impossible to get out. And the UW mind you has multiple OC-3 lines out and in.
It's now not uncommon for me to be unable to get out of the campus network during certain times of the day. *sigh*
There is nothing wrong with banning Napster. It violates almost all regulations that any university has in place. It would not even be unfounded for them to ban Unreal or other games because it would be non-academically related which violates most policies.
The central MS Security office is in building 8 in the south east corner. I grew up 2 miles from MS, got in trouble a few times for using their athletic fields after we ripped up the local public ones playing pickup footbal so badly you couldn't stand on them. Actually their security guys were pretty nice to us most of the time. :-)
It is not uncommon for Microsoft Research to throw up non Windows servers for some reason or other. They had a Linux box running apache up for some time IIRC.
I've seen this movie twice now. Seattle has a brand new IMAX theatre downtown.
I found the sequence done to Pines of Rome with the whales far and away the most spectactular, although the firebird suite ranked right up there.
The most disappointing thing was the quality of the Sorcerer's Apprentice which is one of my favorite animated sequences of all time. It was simply the 35mm version blown up to 70mm and it was very grainy. Despite the fact that it would in a sense ruin the originality of the piece Disney should have extensively used computers to clean up the piece. Or it should have been redrawn to fit the format.
A cool IMAX film. However it'll never beat "The Dream is Alive" for coolness, or Everest for raw beauty.
Well worth the $$$.
Dunno. I don't remember the specific order in that they do product with. He described it but I wasn't paying superb attention. I think they did a read through early before any drawing is done and then after all the animation is done they do it again to make any necessary corrections.
Dan Castalaneta (sp) the voice of Homer Simpson stated on the Tom Lykis show (while in Aspen) that a feature film was unlikely during the time the show is in television.
Apparently the current yearly episode load (something like 22) is about the maximum the show can handle. Apparently it takes 7 months to write, draw, animate and then do the voices for an episode.
All of this is EXACTLY right.
I was a QA tester in the Office Group in Microsoft and did specification based testing. The guy next to me did more freeform type testing. My test lead did have a helluva lot experience. 15 YEARS to be exact. This guy knew exactly what needed to be now fixed and what should be revisited later and knew how to find bugs in the product that the team otherwise never would have found. I have been of the frequent opinion that our component was one of the better parts of Office 2000 simply because of him. Just shows you how important good leadership is.
Lab studies like this mean nothing. What matters is running the server in a production environment. My NT server has run for almost a year now since one of it's drives failed in March last year. Before that it had put in another year. NT on my server is really quite stable. The applications on it? Well that's another story. They crash all the time. :-) On the other hand on of my fellow admin's NT servers has to be restarted almost daily due to an NT problem. (Same Compaq box to). I really do hate studies like this.
I'm pleased with a 1 year uptime. I won't change. On the other hand if I was my buddy I would change to Linux or some other OS that met my real world needs better.
Question. This was "server" operating systems. Since many Linux distro's are used as both workstations and servers how did IDG determine what the share of the "server" market was? Did they go out and determine that 1.3 million copies were being used as servers? I mean doing it with Windows is easy. You just count up all the NT Server licenses, but Linux sales mostly don't work like that.
I don't know how much to read into this "report", parts of it like many things of this nature sound suspect. Not to be a party pooper....