I don't understand Microsoft. Here's a company that wants to sell you an operating system, then spends the rest of its time collaborating with other companies that want to throw you into jail.
> high school freshmen at many high schools across the nation are now being forced to pick a major
It makes a lot of sense. Only rich kids can afford to go to college and spend several years screwing around while they figure what they want to do. Much better if we get clear in these kids minds what their options are. It saves everyone time: Subjects on offer are infantry, artillery, bomb disposal or Mitt Romney internships. Any a great way for young people to serve!
Of course. The Chinese Government is extremely satisfied with Yahoo. Unfortunately for Yahoo, Congress has just announced they're going to investigate their compliancy with the Chinese Government. Treason is still a crime, Jerry Wang.
This is the Web 2.0 equivalent of the Emperor being thrown down that shaft. Whether it ends in blue plasma or just a splat sound, I don't care as long as that wretched SCO is dead!
From the article: "Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology. Incorporated in Florida, China Public Security has raised much of the money to develop its technology from two investment funds in Plano, Tex., Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Three investment banks--Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, Calif.; Oppenheimer & Company in New York; and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong--helped raise the money."
If American Companies cooperate with this sort of repression, and Congress does nothing to stop it, then America has forgotten what it once stood for. What a disgrace.
Your post and the child posts all deserve mod +funny.:-)
Q: How many DirectX 10 Programmers does it take to change a light bulb. A: Two and we'll let you know when we get them. A: Two, and a brand new house with incompatible light sockets A: Sixty, and that's just to write 500 pages of DirectX initialization code. A: Two from Microsoft, but after they install it your house is covered with mysterious web cams. A: It takes a team of lawyers and bottom-of-their-class no-startup-would-touch-us Microsoft programmers who couldn't code their way out of a soggy cardboard box even if their company's future depend on it. A: Who cares about that. Let's start a rumor. Google is going into the graphics API business, and you heard it here first.
> 'Gamers shouldn't fret too much - 10.1 adds virtually nothing that they will care about and, > more to the point, adds almost nothing that developers are likely to care about.
Actually it's even better. DirectX 10.0 doesn't add anything you will care about either. Game developers are finding Shader 3.0 (DirectX 9.0c) gives them more than enough to do. There's no need to move to DirectX 10.0 for quite some time. Now add to that DirectX only running under Vista, because someone at Microsoft marketing thought it'd help Vista sales (it hasn't). Well, Why would you bother? Here's an interview with John Carmack (DOOM, Quake) on many things, including why DirectX 10 is a big bore:
Labs are out of date. Press releases that pump up the stock price before the next shareholders meeting are what really matters. Science takes too long, and gets bogged down in details. So Ladies and Gentlemen, let me welcome you to the wonderful new world of 'Faith-Based Research'. It's worked for climatology and geopolitics. Imagine what it can do for software.
Let me give you an example: Debugging. Ugh! It's rigorous and plodding. But with Faith-based Programming, close your eyes, concentrate and when you open your eyes, tell everyone it's gone. You will believe it, and so will they. If some pesky user tells you its still there, frown, tell everyone they're a trouble maker, meet with their boss and say they're undermining morale and suggest they're transferred or sacked. Beautiful!
> Batavia school district in Illinois is recommending... upgrade their home computers to Microsoft Office 2007. Why not use one of the free alternatives?
Office 2007? Does anyone even use that? Maybe Microsoft has found an easy way to recruit beta testers? The Batavia school district superintendent sounds pretty clueless. They probably bought him off with a comp copy of 'Microsoft Bob(TM)'.
They couldn't put Spyware in Linux - it's open source so people could just recompile, but with Microsoft's cooperation they could put it Windows. The WGA add-on the Microsoft sent in their 'Security Update' already tells Microsoft when you turn your computer on and off, your computers ID (combination of IP, BIOS, HDD volume #, windows product ids): enough to identify you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Genuine_Advan tage
Given the Chinese Government's penchant for maintaining social order, this could be real handy. Think MS wouldn't do this for fear of a customer backlash? Maybe not in the US (but even there they get away with a lot). In China, would they do anything for that multi-million (billion?) dollar market? Of course they would!
As Yahoo CEO cum Chinese Government Informant Jerry Wang would say "We're just following the laws of the country in which we are operating" Zeig Heil!
They already used the census to make Jedi an official religion. Now add seriously insecure electronic voting machines, and we could wake up and find geeks have made George Lucas the next President. But I for one would welcome our new overlord. I'd like to see how a new Secretary of State Jar Jar Binks handles Iraq.
> Oh, and about "not wanting to know about the PC"... DEC marketed the first PC in the world, namely the PDP-1, in 1960. True, it was a bit pricey, but computers did cost a lot back then. In every other way, the PDP-1 fulfilled the description of a personal computer.
Not sure I'd call the PDP-1 a PC but in their day, DEC were awesome. I've worked with the original PDPs minis, DEC mainframes and MicroVaxen. All awesome machines. But when the PCs started to roll out, there was no DEC equivalent. When DEC belatedly did enter the PC market, it was with their own proprietary machines at a time everyone else was embracing IBM's compatibles. They also cost too much. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Cor poration
> If it "... died because Olsen didn't want to know about the PC," then why didn't HP, IBM, and Sun die with it? Sure, HP and IBM had PC divisions, but they were never business-critical. Their big computers went right on selling alongside the PCs.
This is well documented: Inside IBM there was a lot of hatred (that's the word!) between the mainframe and PC division. Mainframe manufacturers and data centers tried really hard to white-ant the IBM PC roll out. They blocked distribution of PCs and LANs within IBM, so you had IBM itself using dumb terminals when we IBM customers were going PC. They even penalized reps who sold a PC solution instead of a less-suitable mini or mainframe. This white-anting tore IBM apart. Yes, they still sell mainframes (to customers who already have them), but the rest of the organization changed beyond belief. Their manufacturing standards plummeted. They're mostly a services company now.
The PC revolution killed DEC, but it nearly killed IBM. HP had no PCs to mention, and Suns workstations were high-end PCs. DEC and IBM had so much invested in mainframes they just couldn't imagine a world without them, so they clung to the past.
A personal decision, but I'd rather stay away from everything Yahoo touches for the above reasons. They've sold out customers in the past and been unrepentant for it. There might be something you miss, or they might slip in something later. Do you really trust them?
If the Nazi Party bought out Nazi-brand Milk(TM), even if it's perfectly good milk, nahh... Same with Yahoo and privacy. The brand is tainted.
I'm suspicious of this fat-friends-make-you-fat story. Heard 'experts' on radio this morning repeating this story, using words like 'infectious', 'contagious'. Smacks of Sensationalist Journalism, and Susy Public will go away thinking she'll get fat if she sits next to a fat person.
It's an interview with Dr Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. He says, yes, we're getting fat, but the question is why our bodies don't enact a defense against this. One of the culprits: Fructose (Corn Syrup) which food and drink manufacturers have been putting in everything. Your body has real problems regulating this. Fructose with Fibre is ok (an Orange), but without Fibre it's very bad (Orange Juice). Apart from the vitamins, you might as well be drinking pop. Very interesting link: transcript and MP3.
Greiner's article is pretty lame. If it had a bit of background or insight, it could have been a great read. But it's just a list of companies names with a bare minimum of detail. Not even a decent analysis of why they failed. At least the Slashdot comments give some insight the CIO author was lacking.
Which brings us to DEC:
> When Ken Olsen made his famous comment in 1977, it set the tone for DEC to ensure it quickly lost relevance in the computer world. And when DEC did finally come out with PC's, they were proprietary at a time when the proprietary designs were slowly losing out to the IBM PC.
DEC's systems were a large computer surrounded by dumb terminals. They died because Olsen didn't want to know about the PC.
Now remember that 'Network PC' craze of a few years back? Larry Ellison's call for a PC that was so stripped down it was just a prettier dumb terminal. When Ken Olsen heard about the Network PC, he got excited and declared he had been vindicated. The market disagreed. Olsen was an extremely arrogant man. He knew about the PC but didn't want to know about it. He hated Unix with a vengeance, preferring his DEC's own VMS (I used both: VMS truly sucked). He had a chance to form the OSF (Open Software Foundation) to unite Unix vendors, but he was sniping and suspicious. He and IBM Chariman John Akers wouldn't even shake hands in public. Unsurprisingly Microsoft rode all over them.
Would you really trust anything that Yahoo puts out? Yahoo has previously ratted on journalists and bloggers to the Chinese Authorities. Worse: They were unapologetic about it, and kept doing it. One Yahoo 'satisfied customer' got ten years jail for criticizing the Government.
So when Yahoo trundles along offering me neat tracking software, umm, no thanks. There's no telling where you might end up reading about it. Now sure, in the U.S. you don't get locked up for criticizing the government, but things do get leaked or given to the wrong people. Anyone who has ever written a comment that was less that P.R.-worthy should consider that. Yahoo has shown itself to be less than trustworthy.
You have a very good point. GPS is very easy to jam. By the time the signals reach the GPS locator, they're very weak. A moderately powered jammer close to the receiver would blot them out. You *NEED* redundancy in such a critical system: GPS *AND* ground radar.
Slashdot Mirror
> the announcement of Microsoft and Universal
I don't understand Microsoft. Here's a company that wants to sell you an operating system, then spends the rest of its time collaborating with other companies that want to throw you into jail.
> MTV to Invest Over $500 Million in Video Games
Woo hoo! We better all start writing video games! The boom is back on! Thought I should warn MTV their staff productivity is going to plummet.
> high school freshmen at many high schools across the nation are now being forced to pick a major
It makes a lot of sense. Only rich kids can afford to go to college and spend several years screwing around while they figure what they want to do. Much better if we get clear in these kids minds what their options are. It saves everyone time: Subjects on offer are infantry, artillery, bomb disposal or Mitt Romney internships. Any a great way for young people to serve!
Maybe all the Die Hard 4.0 previews have left be numb, but this story is difficult for me to get excited about.
What's next? "Verizon Employee caught stealing Stationary: Box of blue pens missing. Only cap left."
> Yahoo Edges out Google in Customer Satisfaction
v estigate-yahoo-involvement-china/story.aspx?guid=% 7B1286B45B-AE3F-426B-B832-1F5E35C677D0%7Di led_jou.html
Of course. The Chinese Government is extremely satisfied with Yahoo. Unfortunately for Yahoo, Congress has just announced they're going to investigate their compliancy with the Chinese Government. Treason is still a crime, Jerry Wang.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/congress-in
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/31/yahoo_and_ja
> Investors Bailing On SCO Stock, SCOX Plummets
This is the Web 2.0 equivalent of the Emperor being thrown down that shaft. Whether it ends in blue plasma or just a splat sound, I don't care as long as that wretched SCO is dead!
From the article: "Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology. Incorporated in Florida, China Public Security has raised much of the money to develop its technology from two investment funds in Plano, Tex., Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Three investment banks--Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, Calif.; Oppenheimer & Company in New York; and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong--helped raise the money."
If American Companies cooperate with this sort of repression, and Congress does nothing to stop it, then America has forgotten what it once stood for. What a disgrace.
> OOXML Won't Get Fast-Track ISO Standardization
;-)
If Rupert Murdoch can buy The Wall Street Journal, why can't Microsoft buy ISO?
PS. Bill, US$680K plus options a year and I'm yours! I've even got a plan to bring that pesky Slashdot into line.
Your post and the child posts all deserve mod +funny. :-)
Q: How many DirectX 10 Programmers does it take to change a light bulb.
A: Two and we'll let you know when we get them.
A: Two, and a brand new house with incompatible light sockets
A: Sixty, and that's just to write 500 pages of DirectX initialization code.
A: Two from Microsoft, but after they install it your house is covered with mysterious web cams.
A: It takes a team of lawyers and bottom-of-their-class no-startup-would-touch-us Microsoft programmers who couldn't code their way out of a soggy cardboard box even if their company's future depend on it.
A: Who cares about that. Let's start a rumor. Google is going into the graphics API business, and you heard it here first.
> 'Gamers shouldn't fret too much - 10.1 adds virtually nothing that they will care about and,
. 0109.1737.15034.htm?Page=1
> more to the point, adds almost nothing that developers are likely to care about.
Actually it's even better. DirectX 10.0 doesn't add anything you will care about either. Game developers are finding Shader 3.0 (DirectX 9.0c) gives them more than enough to do. There's no need to move to DirectX 10.0 for quite some time. Now add to that DirectX only running under Vista, because someone at Microsoft marketing thought it'd help Vista sales (it hasn't). Well, Why would you bother? Here's an interview with John Carmack (DOOM, Quake) on many things, including why DirectX 10 is a big bore:
http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200701/N07
Hey Man, Invading Iraq was legal too. Doesn't mean your customers/the Iraqis will thank you for it.
> I think your inability to spell your own first name correctly might give you away.
Well, they say The President is known for his sense of humor.
> Q: How will this impact the BitTorrent open source development community as a whole?
A: Once word gets out about our RIAA backdoor, Azureus is going to kick our ass. Ummm... you better not print that.
interesting link. thanks.
Labs are out of date. Press releases that pump up the stock price before the next shareholders meeting are what really matters. Science takes too long, and gets bogged down in details. So Ladies and Gentlemen, let me welcome you to the wonderful new world of 'Faith-Based Research'. It's worked for climatology and geopolitics. Imagine what it can do for software.
Let me give you an example: Debugging. Ugh! It's rigorous and plodding. But with Faith-based Programming, close your eyes, concentrate and when you open your eyes, tell everyone it's gone. You will believe it, and so will they. If some pesky user tells you its still there, frown, tell everyone they're a trouble maker, meet with their boss and say they're undermining morale and suggest they're transferred or sacked. Beautiful!
> Batavia school district in Illinois is recommending ... upgrade their home computers to Microsoft Office 2007. Why not use one of the free alternatives?
Office 2007? Does anyone even use that? Maybe Microsoft has found an easy way to recruit beta testers? The Batavia school district superintendent sounds pretty clueless. They probably bought him off with a comp copy of 'Microsoft Bob(TM)'.
They couldn't put Spyware in Linux - it's open source so people could just recompile, but with Microsoft's cooperation they could put it Windows. The WGA add-on the Microsoft sent in their 'Security Update' already tells Microsoft when you turn your computer on and off, your computers ID (combination of IP, BIOS, HDD volume #, windows product ids): enough to identify you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Genuine_Advan tage
Given the Chinese Government's penchant for maintaining social order, this could be real handy. Think MS wouldn't do this for fear of a customer backlash? Maybe not in the US (but even there they get away with a lot). In China, would they do anything for that multi-million (billion?) dollar market? Of course they would!
As Yahoo CEO cum Chinese Government Informant Jerry Wang would say "We're just following the laws of the country in which we are operating" Zeig Heil!
They already used the census to make Jedi an official religion. Now add seriously insecure electronic voting machines, and we could wake up and find geeks have made George Lucas the next President. But I for one would welcome our new overlord. I'd like to see how a new Secretary of State Jar Jar Binks handles Iraq.
> Oh, and about "not wanting to know about the PC"... DEC marketed the first PC in the world, namely the PDP-1, in 1960. True, it was a bit pricey, but computers did cost a lot back then. In every other way, the PDP-1 fulfilled the description of a personal computer.
r poration
Not sure I'd call the PDP-1 a PC but in their day, DEC were awesome. I've worked with the original PDPs minis, DEC mainframes and MicroVaxen. All awesome machines. But when the PCs started to roll out, there was no DEC equivalent. When DEC belatedly did enter the PC market, it was with their own proprietary machines at a time everyone else was embracing IBM's compatibles. They also cost too much. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Co
> If it "... died because Olsen didn't want to know about the PC," then why didn't HP, IBM, and Sun die with it? Sure, HP and IBM had PC divisions, but they were never business-critical. Their big computers went right on selling alongside the PCs.
This is well documented: Inside IBM there was a lot of hatred (that's the word!) between the mainframe and PC division. Mainframe manufacturers and data centers tried really hard to white-ant the IBM PC roll out. They blocked distribution of PCs and LANs within IBM, so you had IBM itself using dumb terminals when we IBM customers were going PC. They even penalized reps who sold a PC solution instead of a less-suitable mini or mainframe. This white-anting tore IBM apart. Yes, they still sell mainframes (to customers who already have them), but the rest of the organization changed beyond belief. Their manufacturing standards plummeted. They're mostly a services company now.
The PC revolution killed DEC, but it nearly killed IBM. HP had no PCs to mention, and Suns workstations were high-end PCs. DEC and IBM had so much invested in mainframes they just couldn't imagine a world without them, so they clung to the past.
You're right of course: I meant 'High fructose corn syrup' not just 'corn syrup'. BTW in the article the guy describes this.
A personal decision, but I'd rather stay away from everything Yahoo touches for the above reasons. They've sold out customers in the past and been unrepentant for it. There might be something you miss, or they might slip in something later. Do you really trust them?
If the Nazi Party bought out Nazi-brand Milk(TM), even if it's perfectly good milk, nahh... Same with Yahoo and privacy. The brand is tainted.
I'm suspicious of this fat-friends-make-you-fat story. Heard 'experts' on radio this morning repeating this story, using words like 'infectious', 'contagious'. Smacks of Sensationalist Journalism, and Susy Public will go away thinking she'll get fat if she sits next to a fat person.
7 /1969924.htm
This on the other hand is a much better story:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories/200
It's an interview with Dr Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. He says, yes, we're getting fat, but the question is why our bodies don't enact a defense against this. One of the culprits: Fructose (Corn Syrup) which food and drink manufacturers have been putting in everything. Your body has real problems regulating this. Fructose with Fibre is ok (an Orange), but without Fibre it's very bad (Orange Juice). Apart from the vitamins, you might as well be drinking pop. Very interesting link: transcript and MP3.
Greiner's article is pretty lame. If it had a bit of background or insight, it could have been a great read. But it's just a list of companies names with a bare minimum of detail. Not even a decent analysis of why they failed. At least the Slashdot comments give some insight the CIO author was lacking.
Which brings us to DEC:
> When Ken Olsen made his famous comment in 1977, it set the tone for DEC to ensure it quickly lost relevance in the computer world. And when DEC did finally come out with PC's, they were proprietary at a time when the proprietary designs were slowly losing out to the IBM PC.
DEC's systems were a large computer surrounded by dumb terminals. They died because Olsen didn't want to know about the PC.
Now remember that 'Network PC' craze of a few years back? Larry Ellison's call for a PC that was so stripped down it was just a prettier dumb terminal. When Ken Olsen heard about the Network PC, he got excited and declared he had been vindicated. The market disagreed. Olsen was an extremely arrogant man. He knew about the PC but didn't want to know about it. He hated Unix with a vengeance, preferring his DEC's own VMS (I used both: VMS truly sucked). He had a chance to form the OSF (Open Software Foundation) to unite Unix vendors, but he was sniping and suspicious. He and IBM Chariman John Akers wouldn't even shake hands in public. Unsurprisingly Microsoft rode all over them.
He claims he was misquoted. His actions suggest otherwise: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/kenolsen.asp
Would you really trust anything that Yahoo puts out? Yahoo has previously ratted on journalists and bloggers to the Chinese Authorities. Worse: They were unapologetic about it, and kept doing it. One Yahoo 'satisfied customer' got ten years jail for criticizing the Government.
m lu siness/12search.html?ex=1185508800&en=a0a01819d3ec c0ca&ei=5070
So when Yahoo trundles along offering me neat tracking software, umm, no thanks. There's no telling where you might end up reading about it. Now sure, in the U.S. you don't get locked up for criticizing the government, but things do get leaked or given to the wrong people. Anyone who has ever written a comment that was less that P.R.-worthy should consider that. Yahoo has shown itself to be less than trustworthy.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0909/p01s03-woap.ht
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=14884
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/12/business/worldb
You have a very good point. GPS is very easy to jam. By the time the signals reach the GPS locator, they're very weak. A moderately powered jammer close to the receiver would blot them out. You *NEED* redundancy in such a critical system: GPS *AND* ground radar.