"Imported IE Favorites" is a voodoo link to the voodoo Windows folder where IE bookmarks are stored. It's not really 'imported', it dyanically reads the IE bookmarks. --
I like Native.Windows too, but I was just playing with it, and it does not pick up customized desktop settings, such as menu fonts and the like.
This is an issue because people with poor vision and so on need to have strange desktop settings, which is why Microsoft requires that apps pick up these settings in their guidelines. --
Hate to say it, but IE's cache actually works properly, where NS4's is horrifically broken. (Resize a window to see this. Does it cache anything at all?)
Netscape.com's webmasters probably had the wrong expire date on the page, and IE just did the right thing and pulled it from cache. --
An interface which breaks every single standard known to man (it doesn't even get Windows quite right.
Try the "native.windows" theme on mozilla.themes.org. It gives Moz a Windows/IE look-and-feel and seems to fix some of the interface issues by using native-looking widgets. It also just seems quicker, although I'm sure that's only due to my own f-ed perceptual associations between IE and the default moz interface. --
I call on the State of Florida to publish the details of the 19,000 disqualified ballots
This is the key issue. I heard a report on NPR this morning that most of the ballots were not marked Gore + Bucannan, but were actually marked Gore + Bush.
Which brings up the issue of whether there was systematic ballot tampering or not. That's the only way I can imagine that you'd get 15K-20K double votes per presidential election (although I'd hate to overestimate Floridians). --
Well, one "feature" of the flipbook is unlike the ink-sensor or the old electromechanical things is that the ballots aren't officially recorded until someone comes with a truck and picks them up and takes them back to City Hall. This increases the likelyhood of fraud, which is probably one reason S.F. stuck with them so long. (To address the grandparent comment, we had the ink system like 10 years ago where I came from, and I was rather shocked when I moved to CA and found the punchcards.)
If you see pictures of the counting procedures in the news, the punchcards are stacked up all nice and even until they are ready to feed them into the counting machine. Perfect situation for someone with a electric drill or a dremel tool to invalidate some ballots. (How else would you get 19,000 people who voted for both Gore and Bush?) --
I've been voting in S.F. for 7 years, and maybe three times in that period, I've gotten a flipbook where the arrows do not line up with the holes, despite the positioning pegs. (Once an election worker had to hand-align everyone's ballot to make sure that it worked correctly.) I don't know if this was due to a defect in the flipbook or, more likely, an alignment error during printing.
A couple things to consider - the positioning holes are actually ovoid-shaped, which gives the ballot some slack, and that the sort of printing presses they use for this type of thing aren't exactly the most accurate machinery in the world. But, still 19,000 invalid ballots is quite a bit - almost enough to make one think that the ballots were intentionally fucked with. --
Why can't you believe it? Berkeley TCP/IP and Utils was the "standard" implementation, is fully relicencable (except for the advert clause, hence the copyright), has been used in virtually every OS, including Linux at one time. I have no doubt you can find that string in everything from MacOS to OS/390. --
An industrial espionage Outlook script would be trival to write -- just scan public folders and shared drives and silently mail files out in the background.
A Lotus Notes version of this sort of thing would also be pretty easy in most environments, providing you had access to somebody's User ID Certificate file. (Notes can restrict the programming interfaces to trusted developers, but the default setting is wide open to all users.) --
Not true, they cranked licencing costs to whatever everyone else was paying, which was 5x more than the $11/copy charge IBM was used to. They were actually offering IBM a huge deal to drop OS/2 support, and IBM took them up on it because they were going to drop OS/2 anyway.
How could IBM get Windows 3.1 for $11/copy? Because they co-owned all Microsoft OS products from before 1990, including Windows 3.0, as per the divorce agreement.
Yeah, IBM extensively marketed it as a Mainframe/Mini gateway, but wouldn't market it for real client-server work (which was all the rage back in the early 90s).
Proof-in-pudding: For $350, the damn thing includes less networking that Windows 95 does. Earler versions included no networking whatsoever (TCP/IP for OS/2 2.1 was $300!).
All Microsoft had to do was put filesharing, TCP/IP, and IPX in the (NT) box, and OS/2 has dead meat ever since. --
1987 -- OS/2 1.0 ships. Doesn't sell any hardware.
1991 -- OS/2 2.0 ships. Doesn't sell any hardware.
1994 -- OS/2 3.0 ships. Doesn't sell any hardware.
1995 -- IBM Hardware Sales Force no longer interested in pushing OS/2. How could this be?
Lots of things contributed to the downfall of OS/2, but one really horrible choice IBM made was to push it as a desktop OS, and to intentionally underemphasize it as a server because they feared it would cut into AS/400 sales or something. (When I was working with OS/2 as a server platform in the 93-95 period, we pretty much had to run on Compaq hardware.)
Lots of good and bad stuff happened in the OS/2 world in the 1994-5 period. However, to everyone except the OS/2 advocates, it was widely known that the OS already had one foot in the grave at that point. IBM racked up a bunch of cheap consumer sales with "Warp" and legacied it just like most people expected them to do.
There has been viruses that attacked antivirus programs. Back in the DOS 6 days, we got bit by by a bootsector virus that destroyed the filesystem only after it was detected by Norton. Only solution was to wait for a patch. --
Welcome to the wonderful world of IT, where the most basic fact is that IT never approves anything, but instead it gets put in on the departmental level, gains a user base, and IT always ends up supporting it in the end.
You weren't planning to maintain those Perl scripts forever, were you? --
Re:Misc. Mac/Marketing comments.
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 3
Marketing != Advertising .
True. But advertising is part of marketing, and the only part most of us see. So it's hard for me to cite examples of other aspects of marketing.
This distinction is important, and is often lost on people. I got involved in some flamage over IBM's handling of OS/2. (The perception among OS/2 users is that IBM didn't "market" the product, but the fact is OS/2 was the product of a shrewd, well-thought-out, and enormously expensive marketing plan that happened to fail due to events largely outside of IBM's control.) So, when people say that Apple's marketing was bad, they often meant that the commercials, but Apple's real marketing activities were horrible. Just as some examples:
+ The original Mac was supposed to be a $1200 "computer for the rest of us" Toaster (or a icon against totalitarian computing, depending). After QuickDraw and bitmapped graphics brought out some innovative applicaitons (the ease of use was less of a factor), Apple was selling Macs for $5000 to $10,000 to professionals within 3 years.
+ In the late 80s, they told their customers "Apple// forever!" and positioned the Mac as a high-end product. End result: Millions of dollars spent putting a GUI, networking, and HyperCard onto the//gs, Millions of customers (mainly schools -- Apple's strongest base at the time) were screwed when they went with a low-end Mac strategy in the early 90s.
+ In the early 90s, Apple spent millions of dollars trying to sell Macs to large corporations. Meanwhile, they forgot the basics like making Mac file/print-sharing compatible with Novell and Microsoft. End result: Far less Macs in large corporations now than in the late 80s.
+ In the mid 90s, Apple introduced dozens of nearly identical models in addition to licencing the OS to others to produce hundreds of other models. End result: Customers are bewildered, nobody knows if a 300Mhz 603e is faster or slower than a 200Mhz 604, and Apple Marketing can't even explain to Steve Jobs why somebody would want a 7600 over a 6500 over a 4400.
Apple marketing fixed itself mainly by cutting the number of models to a very small number, focusing on individual and educational sales, and getting the price in the same range as the compeition. The goofy cases and Think Different adverts were just the icing on the cake.
In my experience working in a union hospital, there was something that every PHB understood -- Someone carries a pager, they get paid per hour the pager is on. Someone works overtime, they get time-n-a-half. Someone gets called in when they were off, they get paid for 4 hours minimum.
This was on the health care side, so if your hospital is union, perhaps the bosses understand the situation all to well, and are perfectly happy to abuse the non-unionized techies. Usually, it's just too difficult for management to treat a small number of employees as a special case. Simple solution? Have the techies vote to join one of the hospital's unions. --
Oh, I agree that cable reguation is all f*ed up, and that things like the telcomm act of 96 have made things worse, not better.
Even so, I have doubts that TW has made their 13% profit back on the cable wiring side of their business. Instead, they have built a system where the real profits come from the content side, and they've used that content to subsidize the actual infrstructure costs. AT+T bleeds money off on their cable operations.
As far as competition goes, the system is already sorta "open" in the sense that the telephone companies have full rights to deliver television and data services to you. They also have the capital to do so. But, yet how many people in the US can get TV from the local Bell? Almost no one -- primarily because the Bells know that they'd never make their money back from infrastructure investment.
So, yeah, cable sucks because it's *expensive* to run coax to everyone's house when only 50% of the people will subscribe. (Cable Internet services are really just an incentive to get more people onto the TV system.) No amount of regulation is really going to change that. --
A monopoly francise made perfect sense back in the 1980s when the cable system was being built out. Running wire to every home is an expensive proposition, and even then, adoption rates were far less than the companies expected. It took most companies years and years to make back their initial investment, usually not before getting bought out by someone huge like AT+T or TimeWarner who could carry the humongous debt load safely.
Keep in mind, cable TV is not exactly an essential service. Maybe a high speed Internet infrastructure will be in the future, but I don't think you can really make that argument right now.
Things like DSL or electric utiltity competition aren't a real solution either -- they primarily shift the edge costs of billing and customer service to other companies and don't address the real infrastructure costs. DSL is getting a real free ride because the copper networks were built out at great expense years ago, and it's only the fact that they've already been paid for many times over that DSL can get away with it's pricing system. (The wiring in my building and the telephone poles outside carrying my DSL was put in the 1920s, for example.)
The only real solution to the "last mile monopoly" problem is wireless. One big reason people the government is trying to auction of spectrum blocks is to let this problem resolve itself without having to regulate big contributers like TW or the Bells. --
btw, if Sony was smart, they'd charge current CD prices for the SACDs and let people have the lower quality MP3 versions for free as come-ons..
Bingo -- one of the big marketing imperatives of SACD or DVD-A is to move physical disks "up market", with computer audio formats like MP3 nipping at CD quality levels. (And I know MP3 isn't CD-quality yet, but it's still pretty much in the first or second generation of adoption. As bandwith increases, so will the sample rates, and the quality.) --
My understanding is that TNG exists to provide more than a working PDC implementation -- They want to provide a full implementation of Microsoft RPC (which as someone pointed out to me earlier is compatible with Open Group DCE/RPC).
Having MS RPC emulation would be a big step because it would potentially allow people to do things like build Exchange server or DCOM clones. (However, Microsoft is moving away from MS-RPC and towards SOAP, so perhaps it's not necessary in the long run.) --
In http://www.openoffice.org/white_papers/tech_overvi ew/tech_overview.html the cross-platform design is discussed. Quite impressive in the number of abstraction layser, but our Unix-running friends will probably see it all as 'bloat' and 'not a native application'. --
Their Technical Overview document describes ruefully describes how it used YA component model, something Star developed called Universal Network Objects, and that there is no standard between Gnome/KDE/XPCOM/COM/and so on.
Their short term solution is a bridge between component technologies. I have a feeling that that's probably also the permenant solution, baring a major rewrite, or the unlikely complete victory of one of the 10 open component models. How well a bridge works depends, but it's an ugly solution. --
Slashdot Mirror
"Imported IE Favorites" is a voodoo link to the voodoo Windows folder where IE bookmarks are stored. It's not really 'imported', it dyanically reads the IE bookmarks.
--
I like Native.Windows too, but I was just playing with it, and it does not pick up customized desktop settings, such as menu fonts and the like.
This is an issue because people with poor vision and so on need to have strange desktop settings, which is why Microsoft requires that apps pick up these settings in their guidelines.
--
Hate to say it, but IE's cache actually works properly, where NS4's is horrifically broken. (Resize a window to see this. Does it cache anything at all?)
Netscape.com's webmasters probably had the wrong expire date on the page, and IE just did the right thing and pulled it from cache.
--
An interface which breaks every single standard known to man (it doesn't even get Windows quite right.
Try the "native.windows" theme on mozilla.themes.org. It gives Moz a Windows/IE look-and-feel and seems to fix some of the interface issues by using native-looking widgets. It also just seems quicker, although I'm sure that's only due to my own f-ed perceptual associations between IE and the default moz interface.
--
Well, you could always write in "Nono A. Bove" for whatever it's worth.
A few years back CA had a "none of the above" proposition on the ballot, but it was defeated, so that's what we get.
--
I call on the State of Florida to publish the details of the 19,000 disqualified ballots
This is the key issue. I heard a report on NPR this morning that most of the ballots were not marked Gore + Bucannan, but were actually marked Gore + Bush.
Which brings up the issue of whether there was systematic ballot tampering or not. That's the only way I can imagine that you'd get 15K-20K double votes per presidential election (although I'd hate to overestimate Floridians).
--
No, I didn't vote for certain things (Community College Board Members - Pick no more than 7 out of 30 people), and the ballot validated fine.
--
Well, one "feature" of the flipbook is unlike the ink-sensor or the old electromechanical things is that the ballots aren't officially recorded until someone comes with a truck and picks them up and takes them back to City Hall. This increases the likelyhood of fraud, which is probably one reason S.F. stuck with them so long. (To address the grandparent comment, we had the ink system like 10 years ago where I came from, and I was rather shocked when I moved to CA and found the punchcards.)
If you see pictures of the counting procedures in the news, the punchcards are stacked up all nice and even until they are ready to feed them into the counting machine. Perfect situation for someone with a electric drill or a dremel tool to invalidate some ballots. (How else would you get 19,000 people who voted for both Gore and Bush?)
--
How did Reagan get 1 electoral vote in 1976? I thought the minimum for any given state was 3.
--
I've been voting in S.F. for 7 years, and maybe three times in that period, I've gotten a flipbook where the arrows do not line up with the holes, despite the positioning pegs. (Once an election worker had to hand-align everyone's ballot to make sure that it worked correctly.) I don't know if this was due to a defect in the flipbook or, more likely, an alignment error during printing.
A couple things to consider - the positioning holes are actually ovoid-shaped, which gives the ballot some slack, and that the sort of printing presses they use for this type of thing aren't exactly the most accurate machinery in the world. But, still 19,000 invalid ballots is quite a bit - almost enough to make one think that the ballots were intentionally fucked with.
--
Why can't you believe it? Berkeley TCP/IP and Utils was the "standard" implementation, is fully relicencable (except for the advert clause, hence the copyright), has been used in virtually every OS, including Linux at one time. I have no doubt you can find that string in everything from MacOS to OS/390.
--
An industrial espionage Outlook script would be trival to write -- just scan public folders and shared drives and silently mail files out in the background.
A Lotus Notes version of this sort of thing would also be pretty easy in most environments, providing you had access to somebody's User ID Certificate file. (Notes can restrict the programming interfaces to trusted developers, but the default setting is wide open to all users.)
--
Not true, they cranked licencing costs to whatever everyone else was paying, which was 5x more than the $11/copy charge IBM was used to. They were actually offering IBM a huge deal to drop OS/2 support, and IBM took them up on it because they were going to drop OS/2 anyway.
How could IBM get Windows 3.1 for $11/copy? Because they co-owned all Microsoft OS products from before 1990, including Windows 3.0, as per the divorce agreement.
--
Yeah, IBM extensively marketed it as a Mainframe/Mini gateway, but wouldn't market it for real client-server work (which was all the rage back in the early 90s).
Proof-in-pudding: For $350, the damn thing includes less networking that Windows 95 does. Earler versions included no networking whatsoever (TCP/IP for OS/2 2.1 was $300!).
All Microsoft had to do was put filesharing, TCP/IP, and IPX in the (NT) box, and OS/2 has dead meat ever since.
--
1987 -- OS/2 1.0 ships. Doesn't sell any hardware.
1991 -- OS/2 2.0 ships. Doesn't sell any hardware.
1994 -- OS/2 3.0 ships. Doesn't sell any hardware.
1995 -- IBM Hardware Sales Force no longer interested in pushing OS/2. How could this be?
Lots of things contributed to the downfall of OS/2, but one really horrible choice IBM made was to push it as a desktop OS, and to intentionally underemphasize it as a server because they feared it would cut into AS/400 sales or something. (When I was working with OS/2 as a server platform in the 93-95 period, we pretty much had to run on Compaq hardware.)
Lots of good and bad stuff happened in the OS/2 world in the 1994-5 period. However, to everyone except the OS/2 advocates, it was widely known that the OS already had one foot in the grave at that point. IBM racked up a bunch of cheap consumer sales with "Warp" and legacied it just like most people expected them to do.
--
There has been viruses that attacked antivirus programs. Back in the DOS 6 days, we got bit by by a bootsector virus that destroyed the filesystem only after it was detected by Norton. Only solution was to wait for a patch.
--
Welcome to the wonderful world of IT, where the most basic fact is that IT never approves anything, but instead it gets put in on the departmental level, gains a user base, and IT always ends up supporting it in the end.
You weren't planning to maintain those Perl scripts forever, were you?
--
Marketing != Advertising .
// forever!" and positioned the Mac as a high-end product. End result: Millions of dollars spent putting a GUI, networking, and HyperCard onto the //gs, Millions of customers (mainly schools -- Apple's strongest base at the time) were screwed when they went with a low-end Mac strategy in the early 90s.
True. But advertising is part of marketing, and the only part most of us see. So it's hard for me to cite examples of other aspects of marketing.
This distinction is important, and is often lost on people. I got involved in some flamage over IBM's handling of OS/2. (The perception among OS/2 users is that IBM didn't "market" the product, but the fact is OS/2 was the product of a shrewd, well-thought-out, and enormously expensive marketing plan that happened to fail due to events largely outside of IBM's control.) So, when people say that Apple's marketing was bad, they often meant that the commercials, but Apple's real marketing activities were horrible. Just as some examples:
+ The original Mac was supposed to be a $1200 "computer for the rest of us" Toaster (or a icon against totalitarian computing, depending). After QuickDraw and bitmapped graphics brought out some innovative applicaitons (the ease of use was less of a factor), Apple was selling Macs for $5000 to $10,000 to professionals within 3 years.
+ In the late 80s, they told their customers "Apple
+ In the early 90s, Apple spent millions of dollars trying to sell Macs to large corporations. Meanwhile, they forgot the basics like making Mac file/print-sharing compatible with Novell and Microsoft. End result: Far less Macs in large corporations now than in the late 80s.
+ In the mid 90s, Apple introduced dozens of nearly identical models in addition to licencing the OS to others to produce hundreds of other models. End result: Customers are bewildered, nobody knows if a 300Mhz 603e is faster or slower than a 200Mhz 604, and Apple Marketing can't even explain to Steve Jobs why somebody would want a 7600 over a 6500 over a 4400.
Apple marketing fixed itself mainly by cutting the number of models to a very small number, focusing on individual and educational sales, and getting the price in the same range as the compeition. The goofy cases and Think Different adverts were just the icing on the cake.
--
Do you work for a non-union hospital?
In my experience working in a union hospital, there was something that every PHB understood -- Someone carries a pager, they get paid per hour the pager is on. Someone works overtime, they get time-n-a-half. Someone gets called in when they were off, they get paid for 4 hours minimum.
This was on the health care side, so if your hospital is union, perhaps the bosses understand the situation all to well, and are perfectly happy to abuse the non-unionized techies. Usually, it's just too difficult for management to treat a small number of employees as a special case. Simple solution? Have the techies vote to join one of the hospital's unions.
--
Oh, I agree that cable reguation is all f*ed up, and that things like the telcomm act of 96 have made things worse, not better.
Even so, I have doubts that TW has made their 13% profit back on the cable wiring side of their business. Instead, they have built a system where the real profits come from the content side, and they've used that content to subsidize the actual infrstructure costs. AT+T bleeds money off on their cable operations.
As far as competition goes, the system is already sorta "open" in the sense that the telephone companies have full rights to deliver television and data services to you. They also have the capital to do so. But, yet how many people in the US can get TV from the local Bell? Almost no one -- primarily because the Bells know that they'd never make their money back from infrastructure investment.
So, yeah, cable sucks because it's *expensive* to run coax to everyone's house when only 50% of the people will subscribe. (Cable Internet services are really just an incentive to get more people onto the TV system.) No amount of regulation is really going to change that.
--
A monopoly francise made perfect sense back in the 1980s when the cable system was being built out. Running wire to every home is an expensive proposition, and even then, adoption rates were far less than the companies expected. It took most companies years and years to make back their initial investment, usually not before getting bought out by someone huge like AT+T or TimeWarner who could carry the humongous debt load safely.
Keep in mind, cable TV is not exactly an essential service. Maybe a high speed Internet infrastructure will be in the future, but I don't think you can really make that argument right now.
Things like DSL or electric utiltity competition aren't a real solution either -- they primarily shift the edge costs of billing and customer service to other companies and don't address the real infrastructure costs. DSL is getting a real free ride because the copper networks were built out at great expense years ago, and it's only the fact that they've already been paid for many times over that DSL can get away with it's pricing system. (The wiring in my building and the telephone poles outside carrying my DSL was put in the 1920s, for example.)
The only real solution to the "last mile monopoly" problem is wireless. One big reason people the government is trying to auction of spectrum blocks is to let this problem resolve itself without having to regulate big contributers like TW or the Bells.
--
btw, if Sony was smart, they'd charge current CD prices for the SACDs and let people have the lower quality MP3 versions for free as come-ons..
Bingo -- one of the big marketing imperatives of SACD or DVD-A is to move physical disks "up market", with computer audio formats like MP3 nipping at CD quality levels. (And I know MP3 isn't CD-quality yet, but it's still pretty much in the first or second generation of adoption. As bandwith increases, so will the sample rates, and the quality.)
--
My understanding is that TNG exists to provide more than a working PDC implementation -- They want to provide a full implementation of Microsoft RPC (which as someone pointed out to me earlier is compatible with Open Group DCE/RPC).
Having MS RPC emulation would be a big step because it would potentially allow people to do things like build Exchange server or DCOM clones. (However, Microsoft is moving away from MS-RPC and towards SOAP, so perhaps it's not necessary in the long run.)
--
In http://www.openoffice.org/white_papers/tech_overvi ew/tech_overview.html the cross-platform design is discussed. Quite impressive in the number of abstraction layser, but our Unix-running friends will probably see it all as 'bloat' and 'not a native application'.
--
Have they announced any Bonobo support at all?
Their Technical Overview document describes ruefully describes how it used YA component model, something Star developed called Universal Network Objects, and that there is no standard between Gnome/KDE/XPCOM/COM/and so on.
Their short term solution is a bridge between component technologies. I have a feeling that that's probably also the permenant solution, baring a major rewrite, or the unlikely complete victory of one of the 10 open component models. How well a bridge works depends, but it's an ugly solution.
--