I wouldn't dream of having IBM participate unless it fit their own best interests. The thing is, IBM is mature enough to realize that detailed and strong control over all of their technologies is not the key to success.
Many other computer companies think the key to success is owning everything, or at least, as much as they can own. And that seems an attractive strategy on the fact of things, but is not in the long-term best interests of the company. IBM is one of the few companies that seems mature enough to realize that. Maturity != selflessness, maturity == enlightened self interest.
I assume you are referring to MS Office documents.....if these are not a standard (because 100% of computer users do not use them), then there is no such thing as a standard. In fact they are the de facto standard for office related tasks and information sharing, get over it.
There is no standard where there is no free (as in speech) implementation. Seriously. Specs are not standards, they are implementation suggestions. The only real specs are code. The only truly documented standards have free (as in speech) implementations. I don't care how many people use it.
Why do non-Outlook users always have to be the ones to conform to what Outlook users do?
You don't have to....if you get an office attachment, don't read it, its your choice. However, your boss may not agree with your idealism.
My boss agrees just fine. We have a largely Windows shop, but I feel well supported in my choice to not use it here. It's not idealism anyway. It's pragmatism. Bondage and slavery are uncomfortable and shorten ones lifespan.
As he pointed out, Outlook users send people unreadable, non-standard attachments all the time. What's the difference? Why do non-Outlook users always have to be the ones to conform to what Outlook users do?
Umm, they already do that? Haven't you ever heard of 'integer execution units' and 'floating point execution units' and noticed that there seem to be more than one of each on the chip?
Given MS's history, I don't think the things you say he made up are at all unreasonable. Perhaps there's no proof they did this for Tunney act emails, but there's proof that they've done it for practically every other PR move they've made on this case.
Btw, I have a friend who was horrified when I showed him apt-get. Do you update from binaries? Do you call that security?
While paranoia is a valuable quality to have when you're dealing with security issues, it is most helpful when it is carefully directed. One has a limit amount of time and attention to spend on things, and being paranoid about silly things is a waste of those valuable resources.
Paranoia about installing from source instead of binaries is misdirected unless you friend personally inspects the source very carefully for trojans before compiling anything.
The only thing you're protecting against if you compile from source is if the distribution maker has a piece of malware that auto-trojans any binary created with their toolchain. On the threat scale, I would consider that one pretty unlikely, and the energy spent trying to protect against that would be better spent protecting against some more likely threat.
In fact, keeping the FreeBSD boxes up-to-date is probably a good protection against much more likely threats than the one I outlined above.
Making money by changing license agreements is a stupid way to do business, and likely to fail in the long run. When people buy things, they expect a certain set of rights and responsibilities. The NNLA completely meshed with exactly what you'd expect to be able to do with a piece of software.
It essentially said you could stick it on as many machines as you'd like as long as only one copy would be used at a time. Making a license agreement that's at odds with what your customers would expect doesn't make you any more money up front, and loses customer goodwill in the long run. It's a stupid way to try to make money.
This isn't a backdown, this is a CYA
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Borland Backs Down
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If I were an enterprise volume customer, I would consider the terms of that licesnes to be onerous. Those terms are just wrong no matter who you are. A software license forcing you to submit to binding arbitration and random audits?! What a ridiculous thing. Next thing you know, cleaning product manufacturers will be coming with detailed sets of instructions and licenses requiring you to pay to have someone look over your shoulder to make sure you follow them whenever they like.
No, but you can be sure they'll get the US government in on the act of trying to make sure people can't talk to eachother in ways they don't approve of.
If this isn't a clear cut case of "We can't let people talk freely to one another because they might say things we think are damaging to us!", I don't know what is.
Anybody know if they plan to release a Linux version? I probably won't be playing if they don't.
Re:I'll never tourch RPM again if I have too
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OpenPKG 1.0 Released
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· Score: 1
What's the matter with RPMs? I don't understand what the problem people have with them is at all. They've always worked perfectly well for me. The only problem I've encountered is the dependency problem, but things like red carpet solve that really well. So, what's your problem with them?
A car crash isn't the same as an application crash, sorry.
Almost all application crashes are the developers fault. Only a very tiny percentage (< 0.001%) of application crashes are ever the users fault. Some of them may happen because the hardware or OS is buggy. But, that's not the user's fault. If the user goes into the registry and totally mucks it up, it still isn't the users fault. Even under Linux. If the user unplugs cards randomly from a non-hotswap PCI bus, that's the users fault. If the user breaks their system in some physical way, it's their fault. It is not ever acceptable behavior for a program to crash in the absence of a physical problem with the computer.
So, when the EFF posts a petition against the DMCA and/. posts a link to it trying to get people to sign it, that's ethically bankrupt? By no means! If I worked for MS and saw the poll, I sure as heck would mail my team about it. No one is being forced to do it. Now, if I was a manager and told my programmers to write a script to flood the ballet, then that's a different story. However, one or two over-zealous employees hacking some "vote script" together does not equal some anti-comptetive evil conspiracy.
For one, I did not imply a conspiracy in the strict sense. The attitude Microsoft encourages in its employees is well known, and not in the least hidden. I propose no hidden instructions to organize this ballot stuffing effort. Your use of the word 'conspiracy' is ill-founded.
Secondly, there is a distinct difference between the scenario you propose and Microsoft's behavior.
In your scenario, the EFF petition does not have any direct financial benefit for Slashdot, and Slashdot does not, by any means, have a monopoly in any sense related to the topic of the petition. And the signers of the petition do not even work for Slashdot.
In Microsoft's case, they gain a direct financial benefit from the results of the poll. If their technology looks like it's winning, people will flock to it and spend money on it. The people voting are paid by Microsoft. They have a direct interest in the outcome of the poll. In a non-ethically bankrupt company, a manager might point out the poll as something to watch, but not as something that should necessarily be participated in. Also, people might feel odd or bad about voting in the poll because they would sense the conflict of interest. If they did vote it would not occur to any of them that they ought to flood it with a script.
Microsoft encourages its employees to engage in behavior that perpetuates its monopoly. Perhaps, from a purely profit motivated standpoint, their behavior is correct, but it is not ethical.
I will not stand for the old saw of a company's only job being to make money either. At the very least, Microsoft stands to be judged for breaking monopoly laws. A company's job is not to make money at all costs, even at the cost of breaking the law.
I seriously doubt that this was organized by anyone high level at MS.. probably just a salesman who thought it would be a good idea to get everyone to vote in the poll.
And the attitude and outlook required to think this was a good idea, and for lots of people within the organization to act on it is organized by people at a high level in MS. They bear culpability for the actions they encourage in their employees.
It is precisely because their top level execs encourage this kind of ethically bankrupt thinking among the rank and file that Microsoft is in the anti-trust hot water it's in today, and precisely why they're such an evil company.
The company website is all Flash. Well, that blows my opinion of them completely. All glitz and no substance. That changed my opinion from 95% sure it was a pile of BS to 99.99%.
Just do what I do and set up a squid proxy at home, then an encrypted tunnel to your home machine. Configure your browser to proxy all requests to your home squid proxy, and voila, encrypted browsing of everything. Work will have no clue what you're doing.
I'm not suggesting that vim be made reiserfs specific, but that all filesystems change to be more like reiserfs. Filesystems should all make having large numbers of files in a single directory efficient, and should also make having lots of small files efficient. So far, reiserfs is the only filesystem I know of that's realized what a virtue this is.
Read The Naming System Venture for several good reasons why all filesystems should make these things efficient. The basic idea is that having lots of different object naming systems that don't seemlessly integrate with eachother is bad.
Why not just store each line in a file named with the line's number and let the filesystem do all that ugly work for you? Oh, wait, I guess reiserfs isn't that ubiquitous yet.
Seriously, there are good filesystems that do all of this balanced block tree work for you, and you should take advantage of them. IMHO, all filesystems should efficiently handle gigantic directories and tons of small files.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't dream of having IBM participate unless it fit their own best interests. The thing is, IBM is mature enough to realize that detailed and strong control over all of their technologies is not the key to success.
Many other computer companies think the key to success is owning everything, or at least, as much as they can own. And that seems an attractive strategy on the fact of things, but is not in the long-term best interests of the company. IBM is one of the few companies that seems mature enough to realize that. Maturity != selflessness, maturity == enlightened self interest.
Why not charge people for help then? If they can't demonstrate that they've paid for your software, then charge them for questions.
Shouldn't that be:
I fault in your general protection! Your LILO was a Commodore, and your kernel smelt of fried CPU!
or something.
There is no standard where there is no free (as in speech) implementation. Seriously. Specs are not standards, they are implementation suggestions. The only real specs are code. The only truly documented standards have free (as in speech) implementations. I don't care how many people use it.
My boss agrees just fine. We have a largely Windows shop, but I feel well supported in my choice to not use it here. It's not idealism anyway. It's pragmatism. Bondage and slavery are uncomfortable and shorten ones lifespan.
I love the opinion based moderation on this post. *grin* It's quite fun to watch.
As he pointed out, Outlook users send people unreadable, non-standard attachments all the time. What's the difference? Why do non-Outlook users always have to be the ones to conform to what Outlook users do?
Umm, they already do that? Haven't you ever heard of 'integer execution units' and 'floating point execution units' and noticed that there seem to be more than one of each on the chip?
Given MS's history, I don't think the things you say he made up are at all unreasonable. Perhaps there's no proof they did this for Tunney act emails, but there's proof that they've done it for practically every other PR move they've made on this case.
While paranoia is a valuable quality to have when you're dealing with security issues, it is most helpful when it is carefully directed. One has a limit amount of time and attention to spend on things, and being paranoid about silly things is a waste of those valuable resources.
Paranoia about installing from source instead of binaries is misdirected unless you friend personally inspects the source very carefully for trojans before compiling anything.
The only thing you're protecting against if you compile from source is if the distribution maker has a piece of malware that auto-trojans any binary created with their toolchain. On the threat scale, I would consider that one pretty unlikely, and the energy spent trying to protect against that would be better spent protecting against some more likely threat.
In fact, keeping the FreeBSD boxes up-to-date is probably a good protection against much more likely threats than the one I outlined above.
Making money by changing license agreements is a stupid way to do business, and likely to fail in the long run. When people buy things, they expect a certain set of rights and responsibilities. The NNLA completely meshed with exactly what you'd expect to be able to do with a piece of software.
It essentially said you could stick it on as many machines as you'd like as long as only one copy would be used at a time. Making a license agreement that's at odds with what your customers would expect doesn't make you any more money up front, and loses customer goodwill in the long run. It's a stupid way to try to make money.
If I were an enterprise volume customer, I would consider the terms of that licesnes to be onerous. Those terms are just wrong no matter who you are. A software license forcing you to submit to binding arbitration and random audits?! What a ridiculous thing. Next thing you know, cleaning product manufacturers will be coming with detailed sets of instructions and licenses requiring you to pay to have someone look over your shoulder to make sure you follow them whenever they like.
No, but you can be sure they'll get the US government in on the act of trying to make sure people can't talk to eachother in ways they don't approve of.
If this isn't a clear cut case of "We can't let people talk freely to one another because they might say things we think are damaging to us!", I don't know what is.
Anybody know if they plan to release a Linux version? I probably won't be playing if they don't.
What's the matter with RPMs? I don't understand what the problem people have with them is at all. They've always worked perfectly well for me. The only problem I've encountered is the dependency problem, but things like red carpet solve that really well. So, what's your problem with them?
A car crash isn't the same as an application crash, sorry.
Almost all application crashes are the developers fault. Only a very tiny percentage (< 0.001%) of application crashes are ever the users fault. Some of them may happen because the hardware or OS is buggy. But, that's not the user's fault. If the user goes into the registry and totally mucks it up, it still isn't the users fault. Even under Linux. If the user unplugs cards randomly from a non-hotswap PCI bus, that's the users fault. If the user breaks their system in some physical way, it's their fault. It is not ever acceptable behavior for a program to crash in the absence of a physical problem with the computer.
For one, I did not imply a conspiracy in the strict sense. The attitude Microsoft encourages in its employees is well known, and not in the least hidden. I propose no hidden instructions to organize this ballot stuffing effort. Your use of the word 'conspiracy' is ill-founded.
Secondly, there is a distinct difference between the scenario you propose and Microsoft's behavior.
In your scenario, the EFF petition does not have any direct financial benefit for Slashdot, and Slashdot does not, by any means, have a monopoly in any sense related to the topic of the petition. And the signers of the petition do not even work for Slashdot.
In Microsoft's case, they gain a direct financial benefit from the results of the poll. If their technology looks like it's winning, people will flock to it and spend money on it. The people voting are paid by Microsoft. They have a direct interest in the outcome of the poll. In a non-ethically bankrupt company, a manager might point out the poll as something to watch, but not as something that should necessarily be participated in. Also, people might feel odd or bad about voting in the poll because they would sense the conflict of interest. If they did vote it would not occur to any of them that they ought to flood it with a script.
Microsoft encourages its employees to engage in behavior that perpetuates its monopoly. Perhaps, from a purely profit motivated standpoint, their behavior is correct, but it is not ethical.
I will not stand for the old saw of a company's only job being to make money either. At the very least, Microsoft stands to be judged for breaking monopoly laws. A company's job is not to make money at all costs, even at the cost of breaking the law.
And the attitude and outlook required to think this was a good idea, and for lots of people within the organization to act on it is organized by people at a high level in MS. They bear culpability for the actions they encourage in their employees.
It is precisely because their top level execs encourage this kind of ethically bankrupt thinking among the rank and file that Microsoft is in the anti-trust hot water it's in today, and precisely why they're such an evil company.
It's perfectly fine for Windows-philes to do. It's not perfectly fine for Microsoft employees to do.
The company website is all Flash. Well, that blows my opinion of them completely. All glitz and no substance. That changed my opinion from 95% sure it was a pile of BS to 99.99%.
Just do what I do and set up a squid proxy at home, then an encrypted tunnel to your home machine. Configure your browser to proxy all requests to your home squid proxy, and voila, encrypted browsing of everything. Work will have no clue what you're doing.
I'm not suggesting that vim be made reiserfs specific, but that all filesystems change to be more like reiserfs. Filesystems should all make having large numbers of files in a single directory efficient, and should also make having lots of small files efficient. So far, reiserfs is the only filesystem I know of that's realized what a virtue this is.
Read The Naming System Venture for several good reasons why all filesystems should make these things efficient. The basic idea is that having lots of different object naming systems that don't seemlessly integrate with eachother is bad.
Why not just store each line in a file named with the line's number and let the filesystem do all that ugly work for you? Oh, wait, I guess reiserfs isn't that ubiquitous yet.
Seriously, there are good filesystems that do all of this balanced block tree work for you, and you should take advantage of them. IMHO, all filesystems should efficiently handle gigantic directories and tons of small files.
Gee, one of the very few times I agree with you. :-)
No, they should merely be polite.