A new battle's shaping up. Citrix, known for remote management software, has acquired XenSource. Symantec has a management utility. So does Microsoft/Novell. Should be a good fight.
I'm looking forward to a return to big iron or something like it. The quality of hardware, and the amount of thought that went into the operating system, software and configuration, was much higher. Big Iron is like the aristocracy of computing.
An interesting article from last year on this topic
It has never attained an altitude of more than seven feet.
This story seems overhyped. I wonder if Nigeria is our next gallant ally in the war against terror and drugs.
Depending on who fixes a problem first and as a result how widely spread the solution becomes, de facto standards occur in the technological community.
Consider PKware's ZIP product. Or Microsoft Word, whose.doc standard is now universal. Or Adobe's PDF. Or.ico files on websites.
Word is the world's word processor. OpenOffice succeeds at all because people think it's a free Word clone.
Terms of the contract allow the user to specify no payment value and still download. Piracy is theft. Offering an item at optional cost does not allow for it to be stolen.
We need them to keep kicking down the doors of terrorists, drug dealers, and other bad people we fear so that we can stay in our apartments, and comfortable denial.
I've finally discovered the truth: Steve Jobs is Bill Clinton in disguise. This isn't meant as a political comment, but a study in management styles. Clinton could backpedal with the best of them because he knew when he'd taken an unpopular course, that it was important to back down gracefully.
Hackers opened the iPhone, Apple bricked it for the iChumps, now Steve's seeing the groundswell and responding. That's both good and bad, because while we get a better product people without clarity of direction aren't great for the industry.
Now he gets to face Vista-level security questions, made complicated by the invisible "clueless" tag in the middle of "consumer hardware."
Lighten up, Slashdot. Put away your moralizing Nanny State do-gooder hats for just a moment.
What he did rocks. It rocks because it was a challenge realized, unlike just showing up for his day o' cubicle like the rest of us. He rose above and took on something that for whatever reason seized his imagination.
That's a more spiritual, more intelligent, more meaningful way to live.
You're just pissed because you're in a cubicle. I know because I used to have the same impulse. Now I think the spirit of the action is more important.
Like most great challenges, this one was self-regulating because hitting anyone would really have slowed them down. 5 years of jail time and 32 hours of driving won't break a 32 hour record.
You get up groggy, haven't had enough sleep. The shower knobs are stiff. The sink knobs are too far from where you stand, so you bend over. Your bed isn't firm enough, so pushing off is a struggle. The doorknob on the way out is stiff and the door spring-loaded, so you stop it with your hand.
At work, your pen is the wrong size for your hand. Your water is too far and too low. The elevator buttons are stiff, and you can't tell when the ATM buttons (membrane keyboard) have triggered.
We all know that moderators on most forums are abusive, and most blogs tend toward being personal reflections instead of informative. Why are we surprised Wiki followed the same path?
Wiki's great strength and great weakness has been its model. Anyone can contribute, but that then requires cops to police the anyones. Then who watches the watchers?
I read Wikipedia for articles regarding computer technologies and video games. On any other subject, it's often an inferior resource. Even further, I've found that most articles (which take the #1 Google spot) are plagiarized from the articles at Google spots 3-7.
For many topics, there are better specialized sources written by actual experts in the field, and not bitter grad students, and these are overshadowed by Wikipedia's prominence. This "decline" was long in the making.
No thank you. If I can't manage to eat well, exercise, sleep enough and breathe on my own, I hope I die as nature intended it. The last thing I want is another beeping, nagging, synthesized voice or other digital reminder to make me even more neurotic than I am.
XP updates automatically even if it's not validated.
This may have changed. On a friend's pirated copy I turned updates on this last weekend, and then went to the updates web page. After it scanned the machine, the Microsoft Windows Update page demanded we go through a validation process. We could not go further without the validation. Unless someone has evidence otherwise, I think this is how almost all computer users will try to update, and they cannot with the WGA check if they're using pirated or hacked copies of Windows.
I think this is a losing strategy for Microsoft, but that's another issue. Most people want a computer to work and view the operating system as part of what they paid for that computer. If it isn't on a machine, or they upgrade, they find someone with a copy and use it. I think it makes more sense for Microsoft to use the operating system as a way of opening a contract with the user, and then to sell them more services and products, much like artists giving away MP3s makes them rich and fat on tshirt sales.
Are others as concerned as I am about equipment piling up? I seem to end up with towering piles of hardware unless I restrain myself. Does this concern you when considering buying a PS/2 and new PS/3 as well? Or is this only something I experience and should tell my therapist about?
There are now so many people convinced they are writers, and so many of them are terrible, that fewer people are reading and if they are, they are turning to what the large publishers are putting out. I think there's two definitions of writers, one the "you get paid to do it" definition and the other the one advanced by Beckett in the original article. Some people are truly artists with text. The vast majority just pretend to be.
Taquestions
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
First, thanks for a great site. I read something about "20 hour days" keeping the site afloat, and I believe it was required. For those of us who enjoy it daily (along with Dwight Silverman's column) it can be a real lifeline, especially when work is ultra-boring.
Just a few questions:
1. You oversaw the "internet revolution." Beyond Al Gore inventing it, beyond the dot-com hype, beyond the spam and the sockpuppets, what do you think is the future of networked communication? Is it the cloud OS and social networking, or are we rounding another bend?
2. You've mentioned liking Postgres DBs. What other underrated hardware and software do you enjoy and employ on a regular basis?
3. What emergent technologies do you watch?
4. In the Wired interview, you mention a balance between wise crowd tendencies and dumb crowd tendencies:
"When you're building a system like this you're balancing the wisdom of the crowds versus the tyranny of the mob. Sometimes a crowd is really smart, but some things don't work so well by committee. Crowds work when you have a tightly knit group of people with similar interests, but when you have a loosely knit community you get 'Man Gets Hit in Crotch With Football.'"
What have you learned is the balance of this duality? For all of its attempts to be crowd-wisdom propelled, Slashdot does lean on the theory of exceptional individuals, because it has picked editors to filter what makes it to the front page, which cuts down on the "site-rhymes-with-bigg" tendency to put rosy garbage on the front page. Are you satisfied with the balance of your responses to whatever psychological fulcrum keeps a crowd wise and not mobbish?
5. What if any fiction authors do you enjoy?
6. I'm a technical writer, and am curious what you think about the current state of software and hardware documentation. Is it getting better? What are its common failings? Does anyone read it? Will single-sourcing (documentation that appears in print, online help, web sites, flash cards and text messages but uses the same text) change documentation's effectiveness radically?
7. In the CNET article, you talk about Slashdot as a community.
"But to some of our readers, it's a community that's here to discuss issues that are relevant to this community. There is a lot of value. The bulk of our content comes from other people. There are 6,000 or 7,000 comments on a busy day that other people write and just a dozen stories of just a paragraph or two that we actually generate, that are ours."
As you started out in BBSs, you probably had a prexisting idea of this being important to a resource on technology. Why do you think this is?
8. In the same interview, you talk about the ability of low-tech websites to take on big roles:
"I think that it really comes down to the content. If you have content people want, they will tolerate a system that is inferior. Now our system is solid, but back in the day, it wasn't. Look at eBay: That system is the most hodgepodge and clumsy user interface that you will ever find. People use it because it was first and it worked."
In the world of advertising, people call this branding. What do you think Slashdot's brand represents, and is it something IT workers will always have in common?
The botnets out there are composed of Windows computers that are unpatched. Some are unpatched through user cluelessness, but more commonly, through pirated copies of Windows XP. If it costs $200 to get Geek Squad to (fail to) clean viruses and trojans from your PC, and you can upgrade to a self-updating copy of Windows XP for the same price, wouldn't you?
Slashdot Mirror
A new battle's shaping up. Citrix, known for remote management software, has acquired XenSource. Symantec has a management utility. So does Microsoft/Novell. Should be a good fight.
I'm looking forward to a return to big iron or something like it. The quality of hardware, and the amount of thought that went into the operating system, software and configuration, was much higher. Big Iron is like the aristocracy of computing.
An interesting article from last year on this topic
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2004075,00.asp
It has never attained an altitude of more than seven feet. This story seems overhyped. I wonder if Nigeria is our next gallant ally in the war against terror and drugs.
1. Download the PowerPointViewer.exe from the link in the article. /extract:complete-path-to-test-folder"
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=048DC840-14E1-467D-8DCA-19D2A8FD7485&displaylang=en
2. Open a DOS window, go to where the PowerPointViewer.exe file is, and create a directory called test.
3. Type the command "PowerPointViewer
4. Using WinRAR, look into the CAB file and extract all font files.
If you're too lazy to do that, try this link:
http://technical-writing.dionysius.com/resources/vista-fonts.zip
They look beautiful on my current monitor, and are a big improvement. All hail the new better standard.
Thank you for clearing up that puzzler. Seems like a nice, stable network setup.
What determines why you run Red Hat 9 on some systems, and CentOS on others? Was BSD even considered? (You wouldn't run on Macs, would you?)
Depending on who fixes a problem first and as a result how widely spread the solution becomes, de facto standards occur in the technological community.
.doc standard is now universal. Or Adobe's PDF. Or .ico files on websites.
Consider PKware's ZIP product. Or Microsoft Word, whose
Word is the world's word processor. OpenOffice succeeds at all because people think it's a free Word clone.
Terms of the contract allow the user to specify no payment value and still download. Piracy is theft. Offering an item at optional cost does not allow for it to be stolen.
Do we really want him to "stay the course" even if the entire rest of the world thinks he's wrong?
Doesn't that depend on whether or not he's right? The "entire rest of the world" has been wrong before, and they will be again.
We need them to keep kicking down the doors of terrorists, drug dealers, and other bad people we fear so that we can stay in our apartments, and comfortable denial.
I've finally discovered the truth: Steve Jobs is Bill Clinton in disguise. This isn't meant as a political comment, but a study in management styles. Clinton could backpedal with the best of them because he knew when he'd taken an unpopular course, that it was important to back down gracefully.
Hackers opened the iPhone, Apple bricked it for the iChumps, now Steve's seeing the groundswell and responding. That's both good and bad, because while we get a better product people without clarity of direction aren't great for the industry.
Now he gets to face Vista-level security questions, made complicated by the invisible "clueless" tag in the middle of "consumer hardware."
Lighten up, Slashdot. Put away your moralizing Nanny State do-gooder hats for just a moment.
What he did rocks. It rocks because it was a challenge realized, unlike just showing up for his day o' cubicle like the rest of us. He rose above and took on something that for whatever reason seized his imagination.
That's a more spiritual, more intelligent, more meaningful way to live.
You're just pissed because you're in a cubicle. I know because I used to have the same impulse. Now I think the spirit of the action is more important.
Like most great challenges, this one was self-regulating because hitting anyone would really have slowed them down. 5 years of jail time and 32 hours of driving won't break a 32 hour record.
Or future religions will be based on copious proselytization of porn spam.
You get up groggy, haven't had enough sleep. The shower knobs are stiff. The sink knobs are too far from where you stand, so you bend over. Your bed isn't firm enough, so pushing off is a struggle. The doorknob on the way out is stiff and the door spring-loaded, so you stop it with your hand.
At work, your pen is the wrong size for your hand. Your water is too far and too low. The elevator buttons are stiff, and you can't tell when the ATM buttons (membrane keyboard) have triggered.
Many of our everyday objects are bad designs. We can fix them, with some patience and an insightful technical writer or user interface designer or interaction designer on the scene.
The citizen editors are assisted and fact-checked by professional editors.
Wasn't the whole point of Wiki that professional editors and writers were not needed? Did they just reverse their position 180 degrees?
Usually, web.archive.org or other dating information which can compare to the wikipages, often revealing the original source beat wiki by 3-10 years.
We all know that moderators on most forums are abusive, and most blogs tend toward being personal reflections instead of informative. Why are we surprised Wiki followed the same path?
Wiki's great strength and great weakness has been its model. Anyone can contribute, but that then requires cops to police the anyones. Then who watches the watchers?
I read Wikipedia for articles regarding computer technologies and video games. On any other subject, it's often an inferior resource. Even further, I've found that most articles (which take the #1 Google spot) are plagiarized from the articles at Google spots 3-7.
For many topics, there are better specialized sources written by actual experts in the field, and not bitter grad students, and these are overshadowed by Wikipedia's prominence. This "decline" was long in the making.
No thank you. If I can't manage to eat well, exercise, sleep enough and breathe on my own, I hope I die as nature intended it. The last thing I want is another beeping, nagging, synthesized voice or other digital reminder to make me even more neurotic than I am.
As the FAQ says- we really don't delete comments except for the incredibly rare DMCA or Secret Service mandated events.
You can't just dangle that out there. Please tell us more. We, the readers, love intrigue.
XP updates automatically even if it's not validated.
This may have changed. On a friend's pirated copy I turned updates on this last weekend, and then went to the updates web page. After it scanned the machine, the Microsoft Windows Update page demanded we go through a validation process. We could not go further without the validation. Unless someone has evidence otherwise, I think this is how almost all computer users will try to update, and they cannot with the WGA check if they're using pirated or hacked copies of Windows.
I think this is a losing strategy for Microsoft, but that's another issue. Most people want a computer to work and view the operating system as part of what they paid for that computer. If it isn't on a machine, or they upgrade, they find someone with a copy and use it. I think it makes more sense for Microsoft to use the operating system as a way of opening a contract with the user, and then to sell them more services and products, much like artists giving away MP3s makes them rich and fat on tshirt sales.
Are others as concerned as I am about equipment piling up? I seem to end up with towering piles of hardware unless I restrain myself. Does this concern you when considering buying a PS/2 and new PS/3 as well? Or is this only something I experience and should tell my therapist about?
Apple hasn't responded to the claims yet other than sending him a packet to return the iPod.
"Your Honor, we cannot reproduce the allegedly malfunctioning device at this time."
There are now so many people convinced they are writers, and so many of them are terrible, that fewer people are reading and if they are, they are turning to what the large publishers are putting out. I think there's two definitions of writers, one the "you get paid to do it" definition and the other the one advanced by Beckett in the original article. Some people are truly artists with text. The vast majority just pretend to be.
First, thanks for a great site. I read something about "20 hour days" keeping the site afloat, and I believe it was required. For those of us who enjoy it daily (along with Dwight Silverman's column) it can be a real lifeline, especially when work is ultra-boring.
Just a few questions:
1. You oversaw the "internet revolution." Beyond Al Gore inventing it, beyond the dot-com hype, beyond the spam and the sockpuppets, what do you think is the future of networked communication? Is it the cloud OS and social networking, or are we rounding another bend?
2. You've mentioned liking Postgres DBs. What other underrated hardware and software do you enjoy and employ on a regular basis?
3. What emergent technologies do you watch?
4. In the Wired interview, you mention a balance between wise crowd tendencies and dumb crowd tendencies:
"When you're building a system like this you're balancing the wisdom of the crowds versus the tyranny of the mob. Sometimes a crowd is really smart, but some things don't work so well by committee. Crowds work when you have a tightly knit group of people with similar interests, but when you have a loosely knit community you get 'Man Gets Hit in Crotch With Football.'"
What have you learned is the balance of this duality? For all of its attempts to be crowd-wisdom propelled, Slashdot does lean on the theory of exceptional individuals, because it has picked editors to filter what makes it to the front page, which cuts down on the "site-rhymes-with-bigg" tendency to put rosy garbage on the front page. Are you satisfied with the balance of your responses to whatever psychological fulcrum keeps a crowd wise and not mobbish?
5. What if any fiction authors do you enjoy?
6. I'm a technical writer, and am curious what you think about the current state of software and hardware documentation. Is it getting better? What are its common failings? Does anyone read it? Will single-sourcing (documentation that appears in print, online help, web sites, flash cards and text messages but uses the same text) change documentation's effectiveness radically?
7. In the CNET article, you talk about Slashdot as a community.
"But to some of our readers, it's a community that's here to discuss issues that are relevant to this community. There is a lot of value. The bulk of our content comes from other people. There are 6,000 or 7,000 comments on a busy day that other people write and just a dozen stories of just a paragraph or two that we actually generate, that are ours."
As you started out in BBSs, you probably had a prexisting idea of this being important to a resource on technology. Why do you think this is?
8. In the same interview, you talk about the ability of low-tech websites to take on big roles:
"I think that it really comes down to the content. If you have content people want, they will tolerate a system that is inferior. Now our system is solid, but back in the day, it wasn't. Look at eBay: That system is the most hodgepodge and clumsy user interface that you will ever find. People use it because it was first and it worked."
In the world of advertising, people call this branding. What do you think Slashdot's brand represents, and is it something IT workers will always have in common?
9. In the Network Administrator interview, you compare Slashdot to bulletin board systems favorably.
"Strangely not that far. It's all just a matter of scale. At some level it's all identical."
You mean in twenty years, not much has changed except the technology? I'd like to hear more on this if you find it compelling.
10.
The botnets out there are composed of Windows computers that are unpatched. Some are unpatched through user cluelessness, but more commonly, through pirated copies of Windows XP. If it costs $200 to get Geek Squad to (fail to) clean viruses and trojans from your PC, and you can upgrade to a self-updating copy of Windows XP for the same price, wouldn't you?
Always write their own homebrew search engines.