The department is asking lawmakers to approve a supplemental budget request for $220,700 (165,900) to cover the excess costs incurred during the six-week recovery effort, including about $128,400 (96,500) in overtime and $71,800 (54,000) for computer consultants.
So, M$/Dell made $71,800 on their systems failure that had already cost the people of Alaska $150,000. I wonder how many minutes of overtime Bill Gates himself charged.
It was not the tech's fault, unless you believe reformatting is routine. The system failed the tech as did a reasonable mitigation strategy. They thought they had the data in three places, but it was not in any.
Typical thoughts, if you can have them over the rushing sound in your ears are, "My career is over," and "I hate Microsoft/Dell." If his boss made him use the system as is, he's hating his boss too but both of them are going to be scapegoated by billion dollar companies.
The root cause of the accident was system instability. The article talks about "routine" reformatting. No stable system needs a routine reformat. Storing the data onto another partition may have helped, but that's just a mitigation strategy for a situation that should never have happened. It's possible they had put their trust and data into a hardware RAID they did not and could not understand. Finally, the tape backup should have been a sufficient mitigating strategy but was not. Blame for that can only be laid at the feet of the people who sold the system and said that it worked. You have to wonder if Dell/M$ picked up the tab for this or if they charged consulting time for the failure of their systems.
routine maintenance work,... mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well.... Over the next few days, as the department, the division and consultants from Microsoft Corp. and Dell Inc. labored to retrieve the data, it became obvious the worst-case scenario was at hand.
With "routine" reformatting, you know the system in question was the very best Dell and M$ can provide. I've never lost a file since going to gnu/Linux. Never, and that includes the survivors transferred from the Windoze word dating back to 1989. These jokers managed to lose a file in less than a year because they had to do a "routine" reformat of a machine.
Actually, alarm bells should be going off in your head. This cynical and inflammatory poster thinks he knows you and how to deal with you. His advice is to "do a political end-run around the geek." I imagine he means like they did in Massachusetts and thinks that was a winner.
This is why free software users must also be free software advocates. The bad guys know who you are and will not waste their time on you. They will go for you boss or institution first. Character assassination and other attacks from above won't work if you already have a good reputation as a practical person who's getting work done. Freedom itself can and should be promoted as a practical way to avoid roach traps for your data. You can't ignore them when they come gunning for you so it's better to be prepared in advance.
The copyright owner can set those license terms, and most do. The vast bulk of commercial software (*including commercial OSS) you will buy is licensed for use on one computer - are you suggesting all those vendors are monopolies ?
It does not matter, M$ loses this one by being harder to use than free software.
Copyright is a temporary, exclusive right to publish by the holder. That is a form of monopoly. You can quibble over the meaning of "publish" and wonder if that covers single user or family coppies of software, but that does not absolve the vendor.
If a vendor tries to make it difficult for you to share their program with yourself and members of your family, they have taken themselves out of the family market.
The technician's other points also stick. Everyone in my family has all the software they want and all of it runs great on six year old PCs. The same arguments only grow with the number of users to be served. The case for small and large business is even stronger.
Microsoft has 95% or so of the PC market. That is not changing anytime soon.
A Network administrator at LSU told me the M$ share was already down to 80%. M$ only services now generate substantial outrage and resistance. It's getting easier to do without the soft all the time.
The PinkPanther has what he thinks is helpful advice to force M$ shit onto people:
The reason that the sales cycle is longer for some of the types is that either they are rabid OSS drones (medium-length cycle; note to sales folks - do a political end-run around the geek) or they actually have successful experience with the alternative platforms (longest cycle; note to sales folks - it is going to be a hard fight and a lot of the "sales tools" relied on for other profiles likely will fail here).
There are a couple of problems with that advice, but the root cause is that M$ is not competitive. The first important problem is that those with successful alternative platform experience learn to value their freedom and become "rabid OSS drones" like me. The second and most important problem is that pushing inferior crap onto an application driven user by a "political end-run around the geek" is the surest way to teach people to value their freedom and to loath M$ sales asshats in particular. When you sell something, it has to have real advantages. The list of M$ advantages has always been slim and is now heavily offset by digital restrictions.
Its nice to see that the 'hooked on phonics' kids are growing up and posting on slashdot
It's not their fault IE does not do spell checking.
Give him credit for being right. If M$ is unable to compete with the OS that they've been developing for six years, they will never be competitive. It's over for them.
they are currently getting slaughtered in many sections of the press over Vista they are quietly laying the ground work for the next phase, which is largely why there has been so little reaction from Redmond to the adverse press.
No reaction, discounting present company of course.
Do you really think they have been "laying the groundwork" for six years and it's not in Vista? How many times are you going to accept their usual line, "this version sucks but the next one will have everything our competitors have but much better"?
Did you consider the fact that it's difficult to answer so many obvious failings? Vista, Office, Xbox, Zune, net services have all taken a justified beating and are all outclassed by their competition. They got so greedy in so many directions all at once that they ended up with a mass of "trip bits" and other stuff that does not work - nowhere.
The only thing remotely correct in your impassioned defense and refutation of this negative press is surprise. I will be very surprised if they pull a rabbit out of the hat at anytime in the next five years.
The only reason most consumers use what software they use is because either:
A.) It came with the computer
B.) It was on the shelf at Best Buy/Stapes/Target/Walmart.
C.) Their relative/friend gave them a "copy"
Seeing that Windows and MS Office apply to all 3 rather easily it is a no brainier to why it is successful.
Yes, but the real question is why nothing else comes with the computer or is on the shelf at Walmart.
The answer is anticompetitive pressure that's at a breaking point. The "record proffits" Scoble talks about are getting harder to maintain, especially as hardware prices drop. The potential difference in performace for the user and profits for the vendor is large and growing. One of the most interesting things from the Iowa consumer case is that people at M$ thought gnu/linux was in Dells best interest as they were busy planning to whack them. You can't keep vendors and users from persuing their best interests forever.
To read some people here, though, you'd think that we were fighting a constant, losing battle to get the truth out past the MS shills in the press.
It's mostly a matter of ignorance perpetuated by M$'s $1 billion/month marketing and legal budget. Take this story about M$ threats to Dell over Linux in 2002, for example. Despite reading the emails, the author publishes the M$ party line, "we didn't take any retaliatory action against Dell. In fact, we very clearly increased our investment with Dell." That's not just wrong, it misses the meat of the story as I did myself. The most important admission of the M$ email tread was that one of M$'s own executives thought it was in Dell's best interest to adopt Linux. That email tread has been put into the memory hole along with the rest of the case, though I imagine Dell took note. The combination of feeding reporters BS, shiny feel good advertising, paying people to BS Wikipedia and other forums and removing evidence of their wrong doing is very powerful. Most people have a favorable view of M$ which is demonstrably wrong.
I can't tell if you are serious or not, but you are right when you say:
Thank god someone has finally stepped up and debunked Ballmer's overzealous claims regarding the Zune's success!! Someone has GOT to keep the media in line after all.
I agree, people should hear what's true because lies have consequences. You might remember many news outlets copying his wild claims of 20 to 25% market share for December. Roughly Drafted shows how that's orders of magnitude off unless you restricted the "market" to some really twisted definition of 30GB players in brown plastic or some other nonsense. Lot's of really sloppy or bought reporting got that figure out to people who were considering a new music player at a critical season. If it were not for the utter suck of the Zune, people might have been herded into a "safe bet" purchase. M$ had no such luck and Zune is sitting on shelves, where it belongs but a large segment of the press let the public down on the issue.
The lies were too little to late and too much too soon. Even a if M$ did grab a 20% share of the HD player market for a month, the Zune would be no better a bet than the Dell Jukebox was. No one really wants a subscription service that only works on a single device, which is why 90% of the world's music is still sold on CD. Next year, people are going to remember being lied to and continue to avoid Zune. More importantly, reporters might remember it and not repeat the next batch.
Sorry guys, the "Pro-Microsoft Press" is as much a straw-man shibboleth as "Main Stream Media's Liberal Bias". Give me a break! How many analysts out there saw the Zunes Microsoft unveiled last fall and actually predicted a success?
Straw man, I understand but did not see one in the article. They were careful to attribute the source of pro-Zune/M$ buzz to several very misleading stories by NPD and Steve Ballmer. They then flay those stories to show how they are misleading.
do we really need a pro-mac blog to provide a multi-part essay on why the Zune is not a success?
Sure, Zune tanked but that's in part because of bloggers tweezing reality from BS. Microsoft made a second rate device and tried to push it as "the best ever" and likely to succeed because of M$'s usual market might. When it did not sell because everyone knew it was a turd, they made up numbers to say it was selling. Because of the net, Zune has the reputation and sales it deserves.
It's funny, but nothing happens to me when I notepad random.vbs
Your point?
What happens when someone plays an extension or embedded icon trick on you and you double click it? Those tricks don't work on my system and again nothing happens even if they would because no gnu/linux email client makes attachments executable by default. Even Dedazo should understand the point here: With GNU/Linux, the user has to work hard to get hosed. To get hosed with Windoze, all you have to do is use it.
And I'll use this post to update the massive trolling I get from Dedazo. 13 of the 24 visible posts on your page are harassment for Twitter. What's not harassment for Twitter is mostly the same for others advocating free softare.
Here you blame me for the harassment you dish out. Things really won't work out better for your employer if people like me could be silenced because their "product" still won't work.
Here you defend M$ file formats as "the best tool for the job", ha ha, and then tell me I'm impractical and don't care about "compatibility" because I think M$ has a history of intentionally breaking compatibility with past works and making it impossible for other to work with them.
There's more, of course, like this quickly refuted beauty , where you pretend M$ has never broken their own file formats, but there are only so many hours in a day to show up astroturfers like you.
Gaim unites your IM world. Email forwarding, such as provided by the free software foundation, routes your email to whatever friendly name your ISP gave you. Or you could just give them a gmail address.
... they have all our communications archived.... I work at a fortune 500 there's always a lawsuit.... we don't work just your basic 9-5...
No privacy. Unreasonable work hours, without ability to take care of personal business. Everyone is suing them. A company that mistreats it's employees and customers. I'll bet they treat their investors just as well.
It's amazing how people can tell you the root of their problem without seeing it. The submitter asks about "webmail security" like this:
... Of course, we know that AOL and Microsoft have both compromised the security of their customers.... Three of my Big Four either allow VBS attachments or have a poor security track records....
The issues raised are not "webmail" problems, they are problems of the underlying OS from a company that has "compromised the security of their customers." If you are using a decent OS, these security issues vanish.
With the watermark and no DRM, you can do as you please with your music/movie/media, and if it gets out onto the file-sharing networks - you'll be responsible...
Don't be confused, this is just another means of implementing digital restrictions. It corrupts your files, removes anonymity from all your activities and sets you up for more of the same. DRM free means that and only that. Anything that identifies you is designed to enforce limits one way or another. One of the first things the bad guys will learn is how to remove and spoof the evil bits, so this technique is dead in the watermark and will only cause problems for honest people.
I personally would not mind such a scheme, if it lets me do what I want (personally) with digital files I purchase and record.
Suppose that I send my family home video. Does it watermark that?
I imagine they can add their evil bits to whatever you do. The ISP is not going to ask you, they are just going to do it. When I say evil, I mean it.
This is not about "piracy", it's about control. Real copyright violations happen in places where people set up DVD printing presses and make exact copies of works. As soon as these devices are everywhere, the AAs will redefine "piracy" to get the pay per play they want out of you. Suckering you for entertainment cash should be the least of your concerns, though. Imagine a world where nothing can be done anonymously ever again. The modem is a computer and it can be programed to track your communications. Whistleblowers and activists, beware.
Why should google be above the law, just because they're a/. fave?
They are not above the law and have not broken it, but that does not make copyright law right or moral. Google is everyone's favorite, despite years of fierce competition from immoral and well fininced rivals. Laws follow public opinion and people's moral sense. In the end, the big dumb publishers are doomed because what they do is wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I should have guessed it.
So, M$/Dell made $71,800 on their systems failure that had already cost the people of Alaska $150,000. I wonder how many minutes of overtime Bill Gates himself charged.
It was not the tech's fault, unless you believe reformatting is routine. The system failed the tech as did a reasonable mitigation strategy. They thought they had the data in three places, but it was not in any.
Typical thoughts, if you can have them over the rushing sound in your ears are, "My career is over," and "I hate Microsoft/Dell." If his boss made him use the system as is, he's hating his boss too but both of them are going to be scapegoated by billion dollar companies.
The root cause of the accident was system instability. The article talks about "routine" reformatting. No stable system needs a routine reformat. Storing the data onto another partition may have helped, but that's just a mitigation strategy for a situation that should never have happened. It's possible they had put their trust and data into a hardware RAID they did not and could not understand. Finally, the tape backup should have been a sufficient mitigating strategy but was not. Blame for that can only be laid at the feet of the people who sold the system and said that it worked. You have to wonder if Dell/M$ picked up the tab for this or if they charged consulting time for the failure of their systems.
With "routine" reformatting, you know the system in question was the very best Dell and M$ can provide. I've never lost a file since going to gnu/Linux. Never, and that includes the survivors transferred from the Windoze word dating back to 1989. These jokers managed to lose a file in less than a year because they had to do a "routine" reformat of a machine.
My biggest fan is calling me a liar:
Ahh, how nice. A statement that is everything that it says it is.
Actually, alarm bells should be going off in your head. This cynical and inflammatory poster thinks he knows you and how to deal with you. His advice is to "do a political end-run around the geek." I imagine he means like they did in Massachusetts and thinks that was a winner.
This is why free software users must also be free software advocates. The bad guys know who you are and will not waste their time on you. They will go for you boss or institution first. Character assassination and other attacks from above won't work if you already have a good reputation as a practical person who's getting work done. Freedom itself can and should be promoted as a practical way to avoid roach traps for your data. You can't ignore them when they come gunning for you so it's better to be prepared in advance.
The copyright owner can set those license terms, and most do. The vast bulk of commercial software (*including commercial OSS) you will buy is licensed for use on one computer - are you suggesting all those vendors are monopolies ?
It does not matter, M$ loses this one by being harder to use than free software.
Copyright is a temporary, exclusive right to publish by the holder. That is a form of monopoly. You can quibble over the meaning of "publish" and wonder if that covers single user or family coppies of software, but that does not absolve the vendor.
If a vendor tries to make it difficult for you to share their program with yourself and members of your family, they have taken themselves out of the family market.
The technician's other points also stick. Everyone in my family has all the software they want and all of it runs great on six year old PCs. The same arguments only grow with the number of users to be served. The case for small and large business is even stronger.
Microsoft has 95% or so of the PC market. That is not changing anytime soon.
A Network administrator at LSU told me the M$ share was already down to 80%. M$ only services now generate substantial outrage and resistance. It's getting easier to do without the soft all the time.
The PinkPanther has what he thinks is helpful advice to force M$ shit onto people:
The reason that the sales cycle is longer for some of the types is that either they are rabid OSS drones (medium-length cycle; note to sales folks - do a political end-run around the geek) or they actually have successful experience with the alternative platforms (longest cycle; note to sales folks - it is going to be a hard fight and a lot of the "sales tools" relied on for other profiles likely will fail here).
There are a couple of problems with that advice, but the root cause is that M$ is not competitive. The first important problem is that those with successful alternative platform experience learn to value their freedom and become "rabid OSS drones" like me. The second and most important problem is that pushing inferior crap onto an application driven user by a "political end-run around the geek" is the surest way to teach people to value their freedom and to loath M$ sales asshats in particular. When you sell something, it has to have real advantages. The list of M$ advantages has always been slim and is now heavily offset by digital restrictions.
Its nice to see that the 'hooked on phonics' kids are growing up and posting on slashdot
It's not their fault IE does not do spell checking.
Give him credit for being right. If M$ is unable to compete with the OS that they've been developing for six years, they will never be competitive. It's over for them.
they are currently getting slaughtered in many sections of the press over Vista they are quietly laying the ground work for the next phase, which is largely why there has been so little reaction from Redmond to the adverse press.
No reaction, discounting present company of course.
Do you really think they have been "laying the groundwork" for six years and it's not in Vista? How many times are you going to accept their usual line, "this version sucks but the next one will have everything our competitors have but much better"?
Did you consider the fact that it's difficult to answer so many obvious failings? Vista, Office, Xbox, Zune, net services have all taken a justified beating and are all outclassed by their competition. They got so greedy in so many directions all at once that they ended up with a mass of "trip bits" and other stuff that does not work - nowhere.
The only thing remotely correct in your impassioned defense and refutation of this negative press is surprise. I will be very surprised if they pull a rabbit out of the hat at anytime in the next five years.
The only reason most consumers use what software they use is because either: A.) It came with the computer B.) It was on the shelf at Best Buy/Stapes/Target/Walmart. C.) Their relative/friend gave them a "copy" Seeing that Windows and MS Office apply to all 3 rather easily it is a no brainier to why it is successful.
Yes, but the real question is why nothing else comes with the computer or is on the shelf at Walmart.
The answer is anticompetitive pressure that's at a breaking point. The "record proffits" Scoble talks about are getting harder to maintain, especially as hardware prices drop. The potential difference in performace for the user and profits for the vendor is large and growing. One of the most interesting things from the Iowa consumer case is that people at M$ thought gnu/linux was in Dells best interest as they were busy planning to whack them. You can't keep vendors and users from persuing their best interests forever.
To read some people here, though, you'd think that we were fighting a constant, losing battle to get the truth out past the MS shills in the press.
It's mostly a matter of ignorance perpetuated by M$'s $1 billion/month marketing and legal budget. Take this story about M$ threats to Dell over Linux in 2002, for example. Despite reading the emails, the author publishes the M$ party line, "we didn't take any retaliatory action against Dell. In fact, we very clearly increased our investment with Dell." That's not just wrong, it misses the meat of the story as I did myself. The most important admission of the M$ email tread was that one of M$'s own executives thought it was in Dell's best interest to adopt Linux. That email tread has been put into the memory hole along with the rest of the case, though I imagine Dell took note. The combination of feeding reporters BS, shiny feel good advertising, paying people to BS Wikipedia and other forums and removing evidence of their wrong doing is very powerful. Most people have a favorable view of M$ which is demonstrably wrong.
I can't tell if you are serious or not, but you are right when you say:
Thank god someone has finally stepped up and debunked Ballmer's overzealous claims regarding the Zune's success!! Someone has GOT to keep the media in line after all.
I agree, people should hear what's true because lies have consequences. You might remember many news outlets copying his wild claims of 20 to 25% market share for December. Roughly Drafted shows how that's orders of magnitude off unless you restricted the "market" to some really twisted definition of 30GB players in brown plastic or some other nonsense. Lot's of really sloppy or bought reporting got that figure out to people who were considering a new music player at a critical season. If it were not for the utter suck of the Zune, people might have been herded into a "safe bet" purchase. M$ had no such luck and Zune is sitting on shelves, where it belongs but a large segment of the press let the public down on the issue.
The lies were too little to late and too much too soon. Even a if M$ did grab a 20% share of the HD player market for a month, the Zune would be no better a bet than the Dell Jukebox was. No one really wants a subscription service that only works on a single device, which is why 90% of the world's music is still sold on CD. Next year, people are going to remember being lied to and continue to avoid Zune. More importantly, reporters might remember it and not repeat the next batch.
Oh yeah, instead they will get headaches.
Sorry guys, the "Pro-Microsoft Press" is as much a straw-man shibboleth as "Main Stream Media's Liberal Bias". Give me a break! How many analysts out there saw the Zunes Microsoft unveiled last fall and actually predicted a success?
Shibboleth, I'm not sure what you mean by that.
Straw man, I understand but did not see one in the article. They were careful to attribute the source of pro-Zune/M$ buzz to several very misleading stories by NPD and Steve Ballmer. They then flay those stories to show how they are misleading.
do we really need a pro-mac blog to provide a multi-part essay on why the Zune is not a success?
Sure, Zune tanked but that's in part because of bloggers tweezing reality from BS. Microsoft made a second rate device and tried to push it as "the best ever" and likely to succeed because of M$'s usual market might. When it did not sell because everyone knew it was a turd, they made up numbers to say it was selling. Because of the net, Zune has the reputation and sales it deserves.
Dedicated twitter attack troll, Dedazo states and asks:
It's funny, but nothing happens to me when I notepad random.vbs Your point?
What happens when someone plays an extension or embedded icon trick on you and you double click it? Those tricks don't work on my system and again nothing happens even if they would because no gnu/linux email client makes attachments executable by default. Even Dedazo should understand the point here: With GNU/Linux, the user has to work hard to get hosed. To get hosed with Windoze, all you have to do is use it.
And I'll use this post to update the massive trolling I get from Dedazo. 13 of the 24 visible posts on your page are harassment for Twitter. What's not harassment for Twitter is mostly the same for others advocating free softare.
There's more, of course, like this quickly refuted beauty , where you pretend M$ has never broken their own file formats, but there are only so many hours in a day to show up astroturfers like you.
Gaim unites your IM world. Email forwarding, such as provided by the free software foundation, routes your email to whatever friendly name your ISP gave you. Or you could just give them a gmail address.
No privacy. Unreasonable work hours, without ability to take care of personal business. Everyone is suing them. A company that mistreats it's employees and customers. I'll bet they treat their investors just as well.
anybody that opens ANYTHING with a .vbs extension deserves whatever happens to their computer! Are users really that dumb?
It's funny, but nothing bad happens to me when I vi random.vbs
It's amazing how people can tell you the root of their problem without seeing it. The submitter asks about "webmail security" like this:
The issues raised are not "webmail" problems, they are problems of the underlying OS from a company that has "compromised the security of their customers." If you are using a decent OS, these security issues vanish.
With the watermark and no DRM, you can do as you please with your music/movie/media, and if it gets out onto the file-sharing networks - you'll be responsible ...
Don't be confused, this is just another means of implementing digital restrictions. It corrupts your files, removes anonymity from all your activities and sets you up for more of the same. DRM free means that and only that. Anything that identifies you is designed to enforce limits one way or another. One of the first things the bad guys will learn is how to remove and spoof the evil bits, so this technique is dead in the watermark and will only cause problems for honest people.
I personally would not mind such a scheme, if it lets me do what I want (personally) with digital files I purchase and record.
It won't.
Suppose that I send my family home video. Does it watermark that?
I imagine they can add their evil bits to whatever you do. The ISP is not going to ask you, they are just going to do it. When I say evil, I mean it.
This is not about "piracy", it's about control. Real copyright violations happen in places where people set up DVD printing presses and make exact copies of works. As soon as these devices are everywhere, the AAs will redefine "piracy" to get the pay per play they want out of you. Suckering you for entertainment cash should be the least of your concerns, though. Imagine a world where nothing can be done anonymously ever again. The modem is a computer and it can be programed to track your communications. Whistleblowers and activists, beware.
Why should google be above the law, just because they're a /. fave?
They are not above the law and have not broken it, but that does not make copyright law right or moral. Google is everyone's favorite, despite years of fierce competition from immoral and well fininced rivals. Laws follow public opinion and people's moral sense. In the end, the big dumb publishers are doomed because what they do is wrong.
You just replied to me with a link to the post I was replying to in the first place. Brilliant!
Sorry, but no loss you read all of my posts anyway. Keep reading.