His position is that he likes his Linux on his servers, but sees absolutely no reason to put money into porting his product to this platform, or to Mac, because he says it does not make business sense. The site was not Slashdotted, so I'm not sure why you had time to ask, but not to peruse the article yourself. But glad to help.
Right, because executing untrusted scripts is the core functionality of Outlook. And here I was thinking it was composing emails, dealing with contacts, and scheduling appointments. Joel is right, and you're not understanding his point.
Outlook has a problem with attachments to email, which is probably actually less than 1% of the codebase of the product. Therefore he is right, and saying that rewriting everything in the program is the only way to fix it is wrong. Sure, let's redo the spellchecker, the datetime picker for the calendar, the user interface components - ONLY by rewriting all of those things will Outlook be secure!
It only takes one bad line of code to crash everything.
Yes, thanks. So should the solution be to rewrite that one line or the whole app? Hmmmmmm
So you're making the assumption that extra features all affect your base functionality, which is of course erroneous. With good programming, extra features go into their own libraries and should have abscolutely nothing to do with a higher probability of your app crashing. Either you're not familiar with programming, or are just a bad coder who does not understand separating functionality through modularity.
No one is saying that the goal is to reproduce the Win95 API, did you forget to actually read both the article and other people's very articulate explanations of what he said? The argument is that if Win95 is the base, and all these things were added since then, like DirectX, AD, IE5, etc. then why can't WINE at least still not even catch up to the base functionality? Obviously the goal isn't to stop there, but to replicate current API calls as well, but he's just saying that worrying about today is silly when they're not at the point that Windows was even 7 years ago. I hope that clears it up.
Oh please. Harry Knowles probably sees more prerelease movies in year that I will in my life, just because that is his business and he has a ton of industry connections. He would not post a review to lie to people, it's not like he needs even more readers. Why does a slightly advance review of a hotly anticipated movie bring the cynics and doubters out of the woodworks? Now if only I could get to the actual site to read it.
Very simply, this issue is about whether you support the corporations or the consumers. Although some (most likely the beneficiaries of this logic) would argue that what benefits corporations also in turn benefits consumers, and vice versa, this is frequently untrue, and is definitely so in this issue.
As a consumer who enjoys technology and innovation, I know I will be hurt by the passage of this law, just as the DMCA was a great loss of my rights. Mandatory DRM will hurt my choice, and ability to do legal activities with media that I purchase or create.
Faced with SSSCA-mandated devices, I will purchase less and less, both devices and media, as will most tech-savvy people. The laws that the industry is lobbying for in their mad rush to protect slipping sales are desperate grabs at making their turf be government-mandated. They do this rather than cultivate talent, or work with consumers to create exciting reasons why piracy should not be done. I would argue that there is not a single industry initiative of any value to create digital music or movies available to consumers for low cost.
Please stop subsidizing the monopolies that control media by giving them more and more legal power over our lives and choices. This is not what government is supposed to be about. In looking at this issue, look at the issue as a good individual who makes a normal income, who values their freedom of choice. Whose prices for digital equipment would rise because of mandated protection. Whose prices for media would rise due to continuing reliance of the industry on copy protection rather than innovation for retaining market share. Do not approach it as a person of power, or one who is influenced by lobbying, or one who buys into the argument that all consumers are thiefs.
Right. First of all, we were talking about administration, which hopefully assumes a higher level of literacy. Secondly, remember when users would telnet into Unix to use all their applications? I bet all of them were very very computer literate. The "Windows users are dumb, Unix people are smart" is such a tired tired cliche, shame on you for retrudging it yet again.
No we're not hearing the only side of the story. The article quotes the airline, and they claim no responsibility. I fail to see how you're questiong NY Times, but want to hear it directly from the airport, who's going to have their lawyer give you the standard "no comment" response.
You're not going to hear from the guys who actually did this, unless it's as a dark silhouette with a disguised voice on Dateline in a few months. I'm not waiting until then to make my decision on which side is right.
Still not satisfied, the guards took him to a private room for a strip-search in which, he said, the electrodes were torn from his skin, causing bleeding, and several pieces of equipment were strewn about the room.
Man, that's not just bitter, that's just savage. I'm really disturbed just reading that. I feel that there is a lawsuit here based not only on equipment damage, but also on humiliation and emotional abuse. I mean, how can they possibly have the right to do that? I understand that you give up some civil liberties when there is suspicion at an airport, but those guards cannot cause you harm for no reason, I cannot believe they'd have that authority.
Hmm, I'm definitely not an expert. But from their About Page
Western Union is a global leader in money transfer and message services, with a history of pioneering service dating back more than 150 years. With about 1,800 employees and $2 billion in revenue, Western Union remains an industry leader with an eye toward providing fast and reliable money and messaging services. Western Union Financial Services, Inc. is a subsidiary of First Data Corp. (NYSE: FDC).
Sounds like they're definitely an escrow service only, as you cannot keep an account there full of money for several months at a time, or indefinitely (like PayPal).
Wow. I had many economics classes in college and unless I slept through them all, which I don't believe I did as my grades were fine, I've never heard this concept of inventing money explained quite this way. It certainly does make sense though if you stick with it. But I'm still not sure about the statement that the banks do not borrow any money. What about the Fed? I thought the whole point of Greenspan was to affect the banks and the economy by controlling the interest rate at which the banks borrow funds themselves? If what you're saying is true, and banks basically can make virtual money, what's the point of the Fed, and the lending rate for banks?
From where I am standing, the difference is only subjective. It definitely sounds like it's to PayPal's advantage to not be declared a bank, and you have to wonder why they're so adamant on this point, if it wasn't in their best interest. Here's what I do at my real bank: 1) Have accounts 2) Deposit money 3) Earn interest 4) Pay bills online 5) Have a credit card through it
PayPal does all these things, so why are they not a bank? I've read some other posts, and no one seems to definitively point out what "real" banks have that PayPal does not, and which should disqualify them from this status. You can use words like "escrow" instead of deposit, but I believe that is just semantics.
Cnet = www.news.com [news.com] not www.news.com.com
CNet owns the domain news.com.com and the link in the article works, but yeah, the CNet link does not. Who clicks on the "top site" links anyway, we just want to see the article:)
because with PayPal, users are not depositing money
You're incorrect. When you have a PayPal balance on the account when someone paid you, it is essentially a deposit in their system, as it's not in any of your other accounts. In fact, PayPal even wants you to earn an interest on this deposit. So it is not a money transfer in all cases.
I agree that the admin should have the right to do anything, I think my point was that if Windows is trying to stop me from something, chances are I shouldn't be doing it. There's nothing I really wanted to do in Windows and haven't been able to figure out how to get the rights to do it. Files, registry keys, AD nodes, just take ownership and it's yours for the wrecking. I think it's just a matter of background, it sounds like *nix admins love having the built-in ability to kill the system without any safety checks, while I might not have the same opinion. To each his own, right?
Perhaps AltaVista is indeed better (or used to be, as the author points out) at indexing new content, but I'd never know, as I have been using Google exclusively almost since its public debut. However, I think that this point will become less and less important.
Yes, it's true that Google's algorithm prevents new content from being ranked high, because no one has linked to it yet necessarily, but that's by design - it is indeed at that point unproven in terms of quality. However, the spidering process can use improvement so that when many many people link to this new site just a few days later, it now ranks higher.
Google specifically mentions (in previous interviews I read with employees) that they're always working on updating the speed, as well as the precision. The longterm goal is to significantly decrease the amount of time it takes to respider everything, and therefore make the info more relevant faster. I trust that they will continue to improve, and eventually this differentiation between "Altavista is better for new stuff, Google for old" will go away completely.
In Windows 2000, you can already mount drives to an empty directory you create instead of, or in addition to, your normal drive letter. This allows to have more drives than 28, but can also be used to create logical filenames for many drives. If you need details about how to do this, let me know, I can probably find a link. But it's in Disk Management of course.
You can try enabling indexing on it to speed up searches. MS Index Server is built in in Windows 2000, and can be turned on to search for files as well, which you may not have noticed. Look for the "enabled indexing" checkbox on drive properties or in directory properties (advanced button).
Let me respond to some of your points. First of all, your story of searching for file "type" name is a common one, and you're right that MS changed this in XP. However, you're mistaking being used to something for convenience. File extensions are not intuitive to non-PC users and MS has always tried hiding them from newbies, such as not showing them by default. Your problem of not knowing that something is called "Movie Clip" can be solved through other means. For example, in XP, the filetype is displayed on the left side of each frame. Additionally, everything is in Big Icons view by default, which lists the file type. You can even organize the file list by type (not by extension). And even if you couldn't do all those things, you could potentially hover you mouse cursor over the file and it tells you the file type. So I don't buy your argument that extensions are necessary for this reason.
"Extended attributes are not portable." Well, first of all, this would based on XML, so they would be. The specifically say that, so your argument that they're going to "break any standard to break compatibility" is very Slashdot, but also false. As someone else has pointed out, if you believe that MS does not want you communicating with any other operating systems (which of course they realize you have to), they will have to handle talking to older Windows machines. This means that Samba has to continue working, and that compatibility will stay.
"What about performance?" Once again, this argument seems flawed. FAT or even NTFS performance is so poor because every file is its own entity, which happens to be in a directory. Searching databases is fast b/c they're indexed, and optimized. Finding a single record out of a million is always faster than finding a single file out of a million. If your file system is now your database, I expect performance to increase regardless of how many attributes are stored in each file.
"System as it stands works quite well." Fine, don't get this new one then. Any innovation is always encountered by those who think it's not necessary, but innovation drives the market and new products. If you read other posts, you'll see that many agree that this is a logical thing to do, and that it may provide value. If it has no value for you, then don't use it when the time comes, but bashing its performance and so on while it's still only a concept is not giving enough credit to the engineers that are working on it.
Someone already did a good job to respoding to your post more completely, but I'd like to add 1 more comment. You say that you hate metadata on files, but then you close by saying you like id3 tags. Id3 tags are a hack because the filesystem doesn't handle these properties, such as Artist, Year, etc. So my wav/mid/aac/mp3/whatever files are all different and only mp3 can tell me who the artist is. If it's a property of the file system, Artist et al are defined as metadata properties in XML. Now, I (and my applications and my OS) can recognize that the same artist that created my.mod file is the same that created my.mp3 file. By sticking to custom tags, such as the id3 hack, based on first X bytes of the actual file, we'll never see this kind of use.
Not true, Cairo turned out to be NT5, aka Windows 2000. Vaporware is fake, it never gets created and only hyped. Here, Microsoft clearly admits that they tried doing this OFS concept before, and failed. At the time they were talking about it at the conference, it was still looking likely. Just because they failed internally and shelved the product and concept because it wasn't up to standards, does not mean that it was vaporware or that you were lied to.
Did you actually read the article by any chance? It specifically mentions IFS and how it's relevant to this discussion.
Nearly two years ago, Oracle introduced something called Internet File System, which works with its database server to make storage and retrieval of data
Exactly, metadata is what we're missing from our files. So each file has to implement its own way of storing new info about itself. They specifically mention XML in the article, which would make it extremely easy for each application to add its own attributes to its files, and for other applications to figure out what those attributes mean and how to use them.
I think being able to search email and files in the same command will be a welcome addition to Windows. Perhaps this can even eliminate some duplicate storage, as email attachments don't need to be detached to become a normal file on the disk.
Well yes, except that they do not have to "sell it".
They specifically mention potentially forking the OS once again, and having 2 different versions of Windows in the article. This means that they would potentially have to sell the features of this new file system as a reason to buy this version, perhaps even at a premium.
Slashdot Mirror
His position is that he likes his Linux on his servers, but sees absolutely no reason to put money into porting his product to this platform, or to Mac, because he says it does not make business sense. The site was not Slashdotted, so I'm not sure why you had time to ask, but not to peruse the article yourself. But glad to help.
Right, because executing untrusted scripts is the core functionality of Outlook. And here I was thinking it was composing emails, dealing with contacts, and scheduling appointments. Joel is right, and you're not understanding his point.
Outlook has a problem with attachments to email, which is probably actually less than 1% of the codebase of the product. Therefore he is right, and saying that rewriting everything in the program is the only way to fix it is wrong. Sure, let's redo the spellchecker, the datetime picker for the calendar, the user interface components - ONLY by rewriting all of those things will Outlook be secure!
It only takes one bad line of code to crash everything.
Yes, thanks. So should the solution be to rewrite that one line or the whole app? Hmmmmmm
So you're making the assumption that extra features all affect your base functionality, which is of course erroneous. With good programming, extra features go into their own libraries and should have abscolutely nothing to do with a higher probability of your app crashing. Either you're not familiar with programming, or are just a bad coder who does not understand separating functionality through modularity.
No one is saying that the goal is to reproduce the Win95 API, did you forget to actually read both the article and other people's very articulate explanations of what he said? The argument is that if Win95 is the base, and all these things were added since then, like DirectX, AD, IE5, etc. then why can't WINE at least still not even catch up to the base functionality? Obviously the goal isn't to stop there, but to replicate current API calls as well, but he's just saying that worrying about today is silly when they're not at the point that Windows was even 7 years ago. I hope that clears it up.
Thank you very much for the full mirror, much better than just text, especially considering the original site is down.
Oh please. Harry Knowles probably sees more prerelease movies in year that I will in my life, just because that is his business and he has a ton of industry connections. He would not post a review to lie to people, it's not like he needs even more readers. Why does a slightly advance review of a hotly anticipated movie bring the cynics and doubters out of the woodworks? Now if only I could get to the actual site to read it.
Very simply, this issue is about whether you support the corporations or the consumers. Although some (most likely the beneficiaries of this logic) would argue that what benefits corporations also in turn benefits consumers, and vice versa, this is frequently untrue, and is definitely so in this issue.
As a consumer who enjoys technology and innovation, I know I will be hurt by the passage of this law, just as the DMCA was a great loss of my rights. Mandatory DRM will hurt my choice, and ability to do legal activities with media that I purchase or create.
Faced with SSSCA-mandated devices, I will purchase less and less, both devices and media, as will most tech-savvy people. The laws that the industry is lobbying for in their mad rush to protect slipping sales are desperate grabs at making their turf be government-mandated. They do this rather than cultivate talent, or work with consumers to create exciting reasons why piracy should not be done. I would argue that there is not a single industry initiative of any value to create digital music or movies available to consumers for low cost.
Please stop subsidizing the monopolies that control media by giving them more and more legal power over our lives and choices. This is not what government is supposed to be about. In looking at this issue, look at the issue as a good individual who makes a normal income, who values their freedom of choice. Whose prices for digital equipment would rise because of mandated protection. Whose prices for media would rise due to continuing reliance of the industry on copy protection rather than innovation for retaining market share. Do not approach it as a person of power, or one who is influenced by lobbying, or one who buys into the argument that all consumers are thiefs.
Thank you.
Right. First of all, we were talking about administration, which hopefully assumes a higher level of literacy. Secondly, remember when users would telnet into Unix to use all their applications? I bet all of them were very very computer literate. The "Windows users are dumb, Unix people are smart" is such a tired tired cliche, shame on you for retrudging it yet again.
No we're not hearing the only side of the story. The article quotes the airline, and they claim no responsibility. I fail to see how you're questiong NY Times, but want to hear it directly from the airport, who's going to have their lawyer give you the standard "no comment" response.
You're not going to hear from the guys who actually did this, unless it's as a dark silhouette with a disguised voice on Dateline in a few months. I'm not waiting until then to make my decision on which side is right.
Still not satisfied, the guards took him to a private room for a strip-search in which, he said, the electrodes were torn from his skin, causing bleeding, and several pieces of equipment were strewn about the room.
Man, that's not just bitter, that's just savage. I'm really disturbed just reading that. I feel that there is a lawsuit here based not only on equipment damage, but also on humiliation and emotional abuse. I mean, how can they possibly have the right to do that? I understand that you give up some civil liberties when there is suspicion at an airport, but those guards cannot cause you harm for no reason, I cannot believe they'd have that authority.
Hmm, I'm definitely not an expert. But from their About Page
Western Union is a global leader in money transfer and message services, with a history of pioneering service dating back more than 150 years.
With about 1,800 employees and $2 billion in revenue, Western Union remains an industry leader with an eye toward providing fast and reliable money and messaging services.
Western Union Financial Services, Inc. is a subsidiary of First Data Corp. (NYSE: FDC).
Sounds like they're definitely an escrow service only, as you cannot keep an account there full of money for several months at a time, or indefinitely (like PayPal).
Wow. I had many economics classes in college and unless I slept through them all, which I don't believe I did as my grades were fine, I've never heard this concept of inventing money explained quite this way. It certainly does make sense though if you stick with it. But I'm still not sure about the statement that the banks do not borrow any money. What about the Fed? I thought the whole point of Greenspan was to affect the banks and the economy by controlling the interest rate at which the banks borrow funds themselves? If what you're saying is true, and banks basically can make virtual money, what's the point of the Fed, and the lending rate for banks?
From where I am standing, the difference is only subjective. It definitely sounds like it's to PayPal's advantage to not be declared a bank, and you have to wonder why they're so adamant on this point, if it wasn't in their best interest. Here's what I do at my real bank:
1) Have accounts
2) Deposit money
3) Earn interest
4) Pay bills online
5) Have a credit card through it
PayPal does all these things, so why are they not a bank? I've read some other posts, and no one seems to definitively point out what "real" banks have that PayPal does not, and which should disqualify them from this status. You can use words like "escrow" instead of deposit, but I believe that is just semantics.
Cnet = www.news.com [news.com] not www.news.com.com
:)
CNet owns the domain news.com.com and the link in the article works, but yeah, the CNet link does not. Who clicks on the "top site" links anyway, we just want to see the article
because with PayPal, users are not depositing money
You're incorrect. When you have a PayPal balance on the account when someone paid you, it is essentially a deposit in their system, as it's not in any of your other accounts. In fact, PayPal even wants you to earn an interest on this deposit. So it is not a money transfer in all cases.
I agree that the admin should have the right to do anything, I think my point was that if Windows is trying to stop me from something, chances are I shouldn't be doing it. There's nothing I really wanted to do in Windows and haven't been able to figure out how to get the rights to do it. Files, registry keys, AD nodes, just take ownership and it's yours for the wrecking. I think it's just a matter of background, it sounds like *nix admins love having the built-in ability to kill the system without any safety checks, while I might not have the same opinion. To each his own, right?
Perhaps AltaVista is indeed better (or used to be, as the author points out) at indexing new content, but I'd never know, as I have been using Google exclusively almost since its public debut. However, I think that this point will become less and less important.
Yes, it's true that Google's algorithm prevents new content from being ranked high, because no one has linked to it yet necessarily, but that's by design - it is indeed at that point unproven in terms of quality. However, the spidering process can use improvement so that when many many people link to this new site just a few days later, it now ranks higher.
Google specifically mentions (in previous interviews I read with employees) that they're always working on updating the speed, as well as the precision. The longterm goal is to significantly decrease the amount of time it takes to respider everything, and therefore make the info more relevant faster. I trust that they will continue to improve, and eventually this differentiation between "Altavista is better for new stuff, Google for old" will go away completely.
In Windows 2000, you can already mount drives to an empty directory you create instead of, or in addition to, your normal drive letter. This allows to have more drives than 28, but can also be used to create logical filenames for many drives. If you need details about how to do this, let me know, I can probably find a link. But it's in Disk Management of course.
You can try enabling indexing on it to speed up searches. MS Index Server is built in in Windows 2000, and can be turned on to search for files as well, which you may not have noticed. Look for the "enabled indexing" checkbox on drive properties or in directory properties (advanced button).
Let me respond to some of your points. First of all, your story of searching for file "type" name is a common one, and you're right that MS changed this in XP. However, you're mistaking being used to something for convenience. File extensions are not intuitive to non-PC users and MS has always tried hiding them from newbies, such as not showing them by default. Your problem of not knowing that something is called "Movie Clip" can be solved through other means. For example, in XP, the filetype is displayed on the left side of each frame. Additionally, everything is in Big Icons view by default, which lists the file type. You can even organize the file list by type (not by extension). And even if you couldn't do all those things, you could potentially hover you mouse cursor over the file and it tells you the file type. So I don't buy your argument that extensions are necessary for this reason.
"Extended attributes are not portable." Well, first of all, this would based on XML, so they would be. The specifically say that, so your argument that they're going to "break any standard to break compatibility" is very Slashdot, but also false. As someone else has pointed out, if you believe that MS does not want you communicating with any other operating systems (which of course they realize you have to), they will have to handle talking to older Windows machines. This means that Samba has to continue working, and that compatibility will stay.
"What about performance?" Once again, this argument seems flawed. FAT or even NTFS performance is so poor because every file is its own entity, which happens to be in a directory. Searching databases is fast b/c they're indexed, and optimized. Finding a single record out of a million is always faster than finding a single file out of a million. If your file system is now your database, I expect performance to increase regardless of how many attributes are stored in each file.
"System as it stands works quite well." Fine, don't get this new one then. Any innovation is always encountered by those who think it's not necessary, but innovation drives the market and new products. If you read other posts, you'll see that many agree that this is a logical thing to do, and that it may provide value. If it has no value for you, then don't use it when the time comes, but bashing its performance and so on while it's still only a concept is not giving enough credit to the engineers that are working on it.
Someone already did a good job to respoding to your post more completely, but I'd like to add 1 more comment. You say that you hate metadata on files, but then you close by saying you like id3 tags. Id3 tags are a hack because the filesystem doesn't handle these properties, such as Artist, Year, etc. So my wav/mid/aac/mp3/whatever files are all different and only mp3 can tell me who the artist is. If it's a property of the file system, Artist et al are defined as metadata properties in XML. Now, I (and my applications and my OS) can recognize that the same artist that created my .mod file is the same that created my .mp3 file. By sticking to custom tags, such as the id3 hack, based on first X bytes of the actual file, we'll never see this kind of use.
Cairo turned out to be vapourware
Not true, Cairo turned out to be NT5, aka Windows 2000. Vaporware is fake, it never gets created and only hyped. Here, Microsoft clearly admits that they tried doing this OFS concept before, and failed. At the time they were talking about it at the conference, it was still looking likely. Just because they failed internally and shelved the product and concept because it wasn't up to standards, does not mean that it was vaporware or that you were lied to.
Did you actually read the article by any chance? It specifically mentions IFS and how it's relevant to this discussion.
Nearly two years ago, Oracle introduced something called Internet File System, which works with its database server to make storage and retrieval of data
Exactly, metadata is what we're missing from our files. So each file has to implement its own way of storing new info about itself. They specifically mention XML in the article, which would make it extremely easy for each application to add its own attributes to its files, and for other applications to figure out what those attributes mean and how to use them.
I think being able to search email and files in the same command will be a welcome addition to Windows. Perhaps this can even eliminate some duplicate storage, as email attachments don't need to be detached to become a normal file on the disk.
Well yes, except that they do not have to "sell it".
They specifically mention potentially forking the OS once again, and having 2 different versions of Windows in the article. This means that they would potentially have to sell the features of this new file system as a reason to buy this version, perhaps even at a premium.