New market: either proprietary web-based services (quasi-thin client) or a standards-based, PC-based market. Microsoft wants the latter, Google wants the former. Consequently, Microsoft is opening up to open source, as it will help it gain its goals.
The important thing to remember about corporations is that they're not evil. They're realpolitik. Their only goal is to make their stock price rise, so their stockholders go home happy. Stockholders are people like you and me who've bought Microsoft stock and want to make money off of it.
F/OSS is people power, which should come out and admit that it is opposed to this system. It's not anti-capitalism, but it is anti-capitalism, in its own way. I don't think it means bad by this. I compare it more to the volunteers who spend more time than most people do at day jobs to help their communities. But even that is insane from a capitalist perspective, since they could be getting $$$ for that time.
I support the decision to have a human call center. Until AIs are better, this is a necessary resource for people whose questions do not fit into categorizable types.
For those questions that do, a well-written FAQ placed prominently on the website can make a big difference, especially if the company is smart enough to embed helpful forms within it (a question "How do I contact you?" should link to a form or ideally, have the form embedded within it).
A good FAQ saves massive amounts of time over talking to a human being if the question is both one that is frequently asked, and one for which the general answer does not change. Answer the archetypal question with an archetypal response, and direct the exceptions to the call center.
Good work, Netflix. It almost makes me regret the lack of motivation I have toward seeing anything filmed in the last forty years.
Good reply. I think every point within it is worth analyzing.
What did you expect? Everyone has different truths.
The above, written by another poster, summarizes the difficulty with any democratic information system like WikiPedia. How do you objectively define truth, and assign power to people who won't abuse it, in a volunteer system?
My favorite example of a good resource is the Oxford English Dictionary. Yes, it costs money, and a fair amount of it, but it is also the singularly best resource on the English language. It succeeds because its editors got together, agreed on what truth is, and then agreed to work toward that and so skipped all of the infighting and power struggles of a WikiPedia.
Few people have the time that students do, or the drive, toward activism of many types. They're such a powerful demographic that presidential candidates solicit them. Attacking them aggressively is risky but if the RIAA wins this one, everyone else is going to be gravy.
There may be no cure. As both Orwell and Huxley noted, selective enforcement of laws guarantees absolute control. Making fun things illegal makes normal people criminals. As a result, the best products are those which take away the risk of governmental or social interference with our lives. Did you hear us, corporate America? We want to hide out and not have to deal with our society. Since drugs are illegal, privacy is a good second best.
More instructions, or fewer instructions with more modes? That's an eternal design question, right there. I guess the pure layout mode of HTML was more popular, especially after the cross-browser mess, and so it's back after CSS.
The cross-browser mess was quite frustrating. First Netscape got replaced by IE because IE was simply better, didn't crash as much, supported more stuff. Then IE got almost replaced by FireFox. Now I use Opera:)
You need strong competition to spur you on to even greater things, and with the number of brilliant people they hire, it's not surprising that some truly great ideas come out of Redmond. I'm very relieved to see MS corporate culture is admitting the problems with security, caused by (as one poster here noted) the browser-OS integration that makes writing viruses so easy and fun. Maybe they'll learn from this with Vista, which when it is working will provide a full-on technological challenge to Linux with its new methods of handling screen fonts, data and threads.
Microsoft is going to lose big
on
Storm Worm Rising
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If they can't find a way to reach customers and get them fixes for the rampant insecurity of these machines that are compromised. The silent majority of customers are getting frustrated with this sham of a performance, and while saner heads recognize that Redmond does a lot right and some wrong, the emotional response is going to shove them out of dominance in operating systems. Maybe that's why they're better on spacy Web3.x "cloud" and "distributed OS" technologies instead of what made them big, which was getting things done the hard way consistently.
TFA brings up an important issue, but an obvious one. Over time, similar ethnic groups mixed in a nation (the UK) become closer to one. If a species appears on one continent, the farther it goes from that continent, the more it loses genetic diversity as it gets specialized for the new, foreign environment. All the other whinging is FUD by those who fear science just as much as the Christian fundamentalists do.
Go get yourself DNA tested already, so you know what diseases you're going to inherit and whether or not you really had that Cherokee ancestor. I'm too cynical today to say anything other than that general scientific education has become too scarce and too politicized. Let's just look at the data and make reasonable conclusions, and leave FUD to large corporations and finger-wagging moms.
Those magic words, "who reported," show why this is non-important data although most will not consider it so. Like surveys, Nielsen ratings, man on the street interviews, and polls, this is a classic case of bad science. Take a sample and rely on the honesty of the people involved to report difficult truths. I'd say it's about as reliable as government promises.
I'm all for a free internet, but that requires no one declare it "safe," because then fat politicians will feel compelled to attempt to make it so, even though that's mathematically impossible.
America should be like an all-you-can-eat buffet, with one fair price charged for everyone. This variable charge penalizes those who are fat, prone to illness, or require nicotine to calm their neurotic minds. I think it is a variation of "ableism," or a hegemony that assumes all people suffer no disabilities.
The shortest route to the truth. Which is more likely, sudden Godlike sentience, or failure and degeneration into a has-been? It may be that life was never meant to get smarter than apes are, and humans were an anomaly...
It was creative when James Joyce did it. Maybe. But throwing in all sorts of different styles, puns, mysteries and so on is a trivial act. It's not the equal to writing documentation so good it becomes definitive. It's more like being "creative" by being random, which ends up being cute but not really effective.
If someone handed this documentation to me, I'd send them back to redo it. Not because I'm an enemy of creativity, if one even considered this mess creative, but because I'm thinking of the end user. I want them to be able to find information quickly and get out.
Making reading the documentation "an art" won't do that for them and it will slow them down and force them to spend more time on the documentation, which no one (even documentation authors) likes to do.
Your coworkers are all geeks without lives, so they're thrilled to stay until midnight for free pizza. Management are the only people who can stand being between geeks, who are socially incoherent, and marketing, who have lied so long truth is an oxymoron to them.
All together, everyone is working to make personal profit by selling ephemera like software, operating systems and hardware. The high profit margin raises the competition and means that He with the least life wins, because those who dedicate themselves entirely to the job are most valued.
A woman who might want to someday be married, have a family, and have some reason for being alive other than going to work where she gets a title and two video screens, is not going to jump at a chance to be in IT no matter how good the money is. (Some men want this too, but show a man a Big Title, a big income and lots of shiny objects, and he becomes a blue jay with a master's degree.)
In this, I think, women have surpassed men in basic reasoning skills.
No two groups or people are equal except in a political sense. Men should look toward their women for wisdom, because left to their own devices, men will create a nightmare IT industry. Given that work hours have increased, but software is still as buggy as ever, I have to say this prophecy has come true.
Apache on windows is not a difficult install. I've done it many times, for multi-homed domains, and it works quite well.
People install IIS so they can use Microsoft's varied and highly efficient enterprise application development tools. The tools are superior for business needs, and so with them come the operating system and web server.
I continue to prefer Apache on FreeBSD (not Linux) as my primary platform if I want stuff to work right from the beginning, but on Windows 2003 or greater or Linux from the same vintage, practical performance (real-world factors that users and business cohorts will notice) is very, very close.
The operating system has grown up and so has the web server. The vast gulfs in performance are no longer so vast. I'm not sure how I feel about this either. Part of me will forever be nostalgic for the computer gang warfare days of the 1980s, when Apple II users snubbed PC owners, Commodore 64/128 users were lawbreaking maniacs, the weird kids used Ataris to make techno and the Amiga people were as annoying as the Macintosh people are today.
Interestingly, from the days of the 286 onward, finding home UNIXen was not as difficult as one might think. First AT&T, then Minix, then a number of ports of Berkeley and AT&T UNIXes came down the path. True, it required top-notch hardware, but that was an artifact of the time when most machines were 1-8 MHz boxes.
Humanity's chances of avoiding self-destruction or regression to a simian mean within the next 7 million years approximate zero, or worse (Cantor sets).
Apple: Our patent system is the best because it allows us to make money from trivial ideas before others can exploit them
Google: Our patent system is in crisis because it sometimes threatens those of us who make money by exploiting your trivial ideas
The more we have it "our way," as individuals, the less we need or want to be with others, and so the more we're alone. That's what Elton John is talking about. People are spending time in front of their telescreens, talking about themselves to people they'll never meet, and making dumb chintzy music with MIDI instead of learning to play. We have turned life into Second Life. It's obvious now that George Orwell was wrong. We don't need a master state to force us to monitor ourselves with telescreens. Tell us that it's having it "our way," and we'll do it voluntarily.
Smart people know this even when they're not teens. Doing something you can be proud of (writing code, writing a book, breaking an athletic record, writing music, building a house, sculpting David) is like touching eternity, but any idiot can have sex, get drunk, take a dump in someone's hot tub, etc.
I have a patent for an electromechanical device that like a human brain is able to make choices based on a series of logical assessments of sensed data, like "they're both true" or "neither are true." I would like royalties please, or burn all the computers in the world, thanks!
Slashdot Mirror
New market: either proprietary web-based services (quasi-thin client) or a standards-based, PC-based market. Microsoft wants the latter, Google wants the former. Consequently, Microsoft is opening up to open source, as it will help it gain its goals.
The important thing to remember about corporations is that they're not evil. They're realpolitik. Their only goal is to make their stock price rise, so their stockholders go home happy. Stockholders are people like you and me who've bought Microsoft stock and want to make money off of it.
F/OSS is people power, which should come out and admit that it is opposed to this system. It's not anti-capitalism, but it is anti-capitalism, in its own way. I don't think it means bad by this. I compare it more to the volunteers who spend more time than most people do at day jobs to help their communities. But even that is insane from a capitalist perspective, since they could be getting $$$ for that time.
I support the decision to have a human call center. Until AIs are better, this is a necessary resource for people whose questions do not fit into categorizable types.
For those questions that do, a well-written FAQ placed prominently on the website can make a big difference, especially if the company is smart enough to embed helpful forms within it (a question "How do I contact you?" should link to a form or ideally, have the form embedded within it).
A good FAQ saves massive amounts of time over talking to a human being if the question is both one that is frequently asked, and one for which the general answer does not change. Answer the archetypal question with an archetypal response, and direct the exceptions to the call center.
Good work, Netflix. It almost makes me regret the lack of motivation I have toward seeing anything filmed in the last forty years.
Good reply. I think every point within it is worth analyzing.
What did you expect? Everyone has different truths.
The above, written by another poster, summarizes the difficulty with any democratic information system like WikiPedia. How do you objectively define truth, and assign power to people who won't abuse it, in a volunteer system?
My favorite example of a good resource is the Oxford English Dictionary. Yes, it costs money, and a fair amount of it, but it is also the singularly best resource on the English language. It succeeds because its editors got together, agreed on what truth is, and then agreed to work toward that and so skipped all of the infighting and power struggles of a WikiPedia.
It's something Wiki might keep in mind.
Corporate IPs are too distinctive, so I must use the home IP, proxies or Tor. Oh wait, I'm not important enough to have anything to whitewash.
Few people have the time that students do, or the drive, toward activism of many types. They're such a powerful demographic that presidential candidates solicit them. Attacking them aggressively is risky but if the RIAA wins this one, everyone else is going to be gravy.
There may be no cure. As both Orwell and Huxley noted, selective enforcement of laws guarantees absolute control. Making fun things illegal makes normal people criminals. As a result, the best products are those which take away the risk of governmental or social interference with our lives. Did you hear us, corporate America? We want to hide out and not have to deal with our society. Since drugs are illegal, privacy is a good second best.
More instructions, or fewer instructions with more modes? That's an eternal design question, right there. I guess the pure layout mode of HTML was more popular, especially after the cross-browser mess, and so it's back after CSS.
:)
The cross-browser mess was quite frustrating. First Netscape got replaced by IE because IE was simply better, didn't crash as much, supported more stuff. Then IE got almost replaced by FireFox. Now I use Opera
You need strong competition to spur you on to even greater things, and with the number of brilliant people they hire, it's not surprising that some truly great ideas come out of Redmond. I'm very relieved to see MS corporate culture is admitting the problems with security, caused by (as one poster here noted) the browser-OS integration that makes writing viruses so easy and fun. Maybe they'll learn from this with Vista, which when it is working will provide a full-on technological challenge to Linux with its new methods of handling screen fonts, data and threads.
If they can't find a way to reach customers and get them fixes for the rampant insecurity of these machines that are compromised. The silent majority of customers are getting frustrated with this sham of a performance, and while saner heads recognize that Redmond does a lot right and some wrong, the emotional response is going to shove them out of dominance in operating systems. Maybe that's why they're better on spacy Web3.x "cloud" and "distributed OS" technologies instead of what made them big, which was getting things done the hard way consistently.
TFA brings up an important issue, but an obvious one. Over time, similar ethnic groups mixed in a nation (the UK) become closer to one. If a species appears on one continent, the farther it goes from that continent, the more it loses genetic diversity as it gets specialized for the new, foreign environment. All the other whinging is FUD by those who fear science just as much as the Christian fundamentalists do.
Go get yourself DNA tested already, so you know what diseases you're going to inherit and whether or not you really had that Cherokee ancestor. I'm too cynical today to say anything other than that general scientific education has become too scarce and too politicized. Let's just look at the data and make reasonable conclusions, and leave FUD to large corporations and finger-wagging moms.
Those magic words, "who reported," show why this is non-important data although most will not consider it so. Like surveys, Nielsen ratings, man on the street interviews, and polls, this is a classic case of bad science. Take a sample and rely on the honesty of the people involved to report difficult truths. I'd say it's about as reliable as government promises.
I'm all for a free internet, but that requires no one declare it "safe," because then fat politicians will feel compelled to attempt to make it so, even though that's mathematically impossible.
America should be like an all-you-can-eat buffet, with one fair price charged for everyone. This variable charge penalizes those who are fat, prone to illness, or require nicotine to calm their neurotic minds. I think it is a variation of "ableism," or a hegemony that assumes all people suffer no disabilities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ableism
The shortest route to the truth. Which is more likely, sudden Godlike sentience, or failure and degeneration into a has-been? It may be that life was never meant to get smarter than apes are, and humans were an anomaly...
It was creative when James Joyce did it. Maybe. But throwing in all sorts of different styles, puns, mysteries and so on is a trivial act. It's not the equal to writing documentation so good it becomes definitive. It's more like being "creative" by being random, which ends up being cute but not really effective.
If someone handed this documentation to me, I'd send them back to redo it. Not because I'm an enemy of creativity, if one even considered this mess creative, but because I'm thinking of the end user. I want them to be able to find information quickly and get out.
Making reading the documentation "an art" won't do that for them and it will slow them down and force them to spend more time on the documentation, which no one (even documentation authors) likes to do.
Your coworkers are all geeks without lives, so they're thrilled to stay until midnight for free pizza. Management are the only people who can stand being between geeks, who are socially incoherent, and marketing, who have lied so long truth is an oxymoron to them.
All together, everyone is working to make personal profit by selling ephemera like software, operating systems and hardware. The high profit margin raises the competition and means that He with the least life wins, because those who dedicate themselves entirely to the job are most valued.
A woman who might want to someday be married, have a family, and have some reason for being alive other than going to work where she gets a title and two video screens, is not going to jump at a chance to be in IT no matter how good the money is. (Some men want this too, but show a man a Big Title, a big income and lots of shiny objects, and he becomes a blue jay with a master's degree.)
In this, I think, women have surpassed men in basic reasoning skills.
No two groups or people are equal except in a political sense. Men should look toward their women for wisdom, because left to their own devices, men will create a nightmare IT industry. Given that work hours have increased, but software is still as buggy as ever, I have to say this prophecy has come true.
Apache on windows is not a difficult install. I've done it many times, for multi-homed domains, and it works quite well.
People install IIS so they can use Microsoft's varied and highly efficient enterprise application development tools. The tools are superior for business needs, and so with them come the operating system and web server.
I continue to prefer Apache on FreeBSD (not Linux) as my primary platform if I want stuff to work right from the beginning, but on Windows 2003 or greater or Linux from the same vintage, practical performance (real-world factors that users and business cohorts will notice) is very, very close.
The operating system has grown up and so has the web server. The vast gulfs in performance are no longer so vast. I'm not sure how I feel about this either. Part of me will forever be nostalgic for the computer gang warfare days of the 1980s, when Apple II users snubbed PC owners, Commodore 64/128 users were lawbreaking maniacs, the weird kids used Ataris to make techno and the Amiga people were as annoying as the Macintosh people are today.
Interestingly, from the days of the 286 onward, finding home UNIXen was not as difficult as one might think. First AT&T, then Minix, then a number of ports of Berkeley and AT&T UNIXes came down the path. True, it required top-notch hardware, but that was an artifact of the time when most machines were 1-8 MHz boxes.
Ah, nostalgia!
Yep, he really does look 14/f in that picture. I'm sure it's not fake.
Humanity's chances of avoiding self-destruction or regression to a simian mean within the next 7 million years approximate zero, or worse (Cantor sets).
"Justice","no", "be" and "law" are absolutes.
Apple: Our patent system is the best because it allows us to make money from trivial ideas before others can exploit them Google: Our patent system is in crisis because it sometimes threatens those of us who make money by exploiting your trivial ideas
30 years is about like marriage, between cellmates.
The more we have it "our way," as individuals, the less we need or want to be with others, and so the more we're alone. That's what Elton John is talking about. People are spending time in front of their telescreens, talking about themselves to people they'll never meet, and making dumb chintzy music with MIDI instead of learning to play. We have turned life into Second Life. It's obvious now that George Orwell was wrong. We don't need a master state to force us to monitor ourselves with telescreens. Tell us that it's having it "our way," and we'll do it voluntarily.
Smart people know this even when they're not teens. Doing something you can be proud of (writing code, writing a book, breaking an athletic record, writing music, building a house, sculpting David) is like touching eternity, but any idiot can have sex, get drunk, take a dump in someone's hot tub, etc.
Like Ubuntu versus Islam.
I have a patent for an electromechanical device that like a human brain is able to make choices based on a series of logical assessments of sensed data, like "they're both true" or "neither are true." I would like royalties please, or burn all the computers in the world, thanks!