Mmmm... a pox on whoever gave the editors a thesaurus. And may he give the pox to the person who wrote the summary... the number of lines of code grows with each release?! Who would have thought...
Unfortunately none of the things they comment on---number of lines of code, release cycle---particularly reflect on the quality of the codebase or how carefully it gets reviewed. What measures that reflect the amount of time and number of edits between when a patch is proposed to when it is included? Or the fraction of files that remain unchanged?
As a developer, isn't the point to write better/more robust code??
Nope. As a developer, the point is to build a relationship with the consumer of code---end users of various kinds. That relationship is compromised if the underlying technology is untrustworthy, whether for reasons of techical quality or otherwise.
At the moment, there are so many platforms of sufficiently high technical quality (including Windows) that platform decisions should be made on other grounds. For me: (1) is the platform portable? (2) is it susceptible to embrace-and-extend?
A 747 certainly can push over fast enough to get negative gees in the cabin. It has nothing to do with a nose-dive and everything to do with how fast the plane's attitude changes.
"Negative gees" are nothing to do with how fast the plane's altitude is changing (a velocity), but how fast that change rate increases (acceleration).
I use a Mac by preference, which is hardly free at all. But thanks to RMS's insight, I am careful not to lock myself into it. I test any software I build on Linux just to make sure I can drop Steve Jobs tomorrow if he starts being a prick. (Errmm... you get what I mean.)
It's not just a question of fabulous vision and insight. RMS actually went and put his code where his mouth was, and more-or-less kick-started the free platforms that are available today---I know he didn't write Linux, but he deserves most of the credit for it, and, for that matter, for Java being free. Yes, without RMS there would be a few public domain bits and pieces out there now---but no debian to keep everyone honest.
So thanks to RMS, I not only have the awareness of computing freedom, but the option of doing it. I give him far more credit for it than anyone else: he is a person who has seriously enriched my life.
+5 insightful? More like -1 troll. False dichotomy.
RMS is acutely aware of the problems with cloud computing because he is acutely aware of the problems with proprietary computing. Those concerns overlap.
Oh, and while RMS might sometimes be wrong, the man is a genius with fabulous foresight, and he is highly influential because of it. You should have known that your post would be stupid and offensive when you wrote "RMS is going senile" for the heading.
People DO give out far too much data online these days, that much is certain.
Please, please distinguish the two separate privacy issues. One is the "Facebook broadcast" issue. The other is the "Visa big brother" issue.
The sometimes ill-considered information people give out on facebook is a problem. But it's not particularly new, just very public. Facebook being a "cloud" means that people can broadcast louder than before, but realistically, Google could just go and assemble most of what's on Facebook by looking through publicly available websites and generating profiles. I think of this as a "light cloud".
But what concerns me is that Visa no doubt has a cloud too. They have a very detailed profile of me and my spending patterns (products, locations, income, the lot). The problem is that this information is just as collectable as what goes onto facebook or gmail, but it's far more valuable, and I can't reasonably control the collection. The only way I can avoid "giving out" the data is to use cash for purchases. That's a dark could.
This all begs a definition of cloud. I suggest: any big fat set of computers that stores information that I can't physically access but might reflect on me.
Relinquishing control over your data to an outside source seems unfathomably retarded
It's a question of what you value: working with GMail is more convenient than my workplace's Exchange server. So everything gets forwarded there. It turns out that I don't really care if Google reads my occasionally commercially sensitive email, nor does my workplace. I'd rather they didn't but I value convenience and reliability over control. I'd actually prefer that someone at Google read my personal emails than a local sysadmin who knows me (not that my emails are interesting, it's just nice to be a bit anonymous.)
Remember that just because something is local, any appearance of control may be illusory. Microsoft might shift a file format on you; a cracker might put a keylogger on your system, or take your data hostage; a burglar might swipe your laptop; the police might confiscate your server & backups. I know my limitations: any hardware or software controlled by me is less "controllable" than the equivalent from Google.
So the point is that in terms of service delivery, there are huge technical and security advantages to going with the clouds. RMS's concerns are absolutely spot on, though: socially, we need to catch up to the technology.
What we need to establish (by law, convention, treaty, pitchforks, don't care) is that people will always have the advantages of local data when using "cloudy" data. The things that strike me as important are:
a guarantee of ownership
the right to access and/or delete any copy or backup at any time
a guarantee of knowing that the government, police, burglars or crackers looked at it.
No, real pirates are people who pillage, rape and murder. Copyright infringement, even for profit, is neither theft nor piracy in any meaningful sense.
I've been an Apple fan for a long time, and I can tell you that if they keep this up, the fanbase will shrink by at least one.
I consider myself a bit of an early 'alpha geek switcher' from about five years ago, back when OS X became useable. I ditched the Linux ideology for a company that was maybe a bit evil but generally didn't get in my road. When I switched, they only had to be better than Microsoft, and work a bit better than Linux. Apple has filled that need nicely.
However, this move is a very dark shade of grey. At the moment I don't really care because mine is a fine phone and I don't really want to develop for it. Yes, I would prefer to see RMS's freedoms honoured, but I feel much more strongly about "hands off my computer" than "hands off my phone."
It's only a phone, and only a smell of sulphur rather a truly sustained pattern of evil. But if it gets worse (especially if it interferes with my computer) I'll be back to linux like a bat out of hell. My next computer will almost certainly be a mac, but I will be watching very carefully before I put 10.6 on it.
There's not much in the way of "perceived value" when dealing with computers. You either have good hardware, or you don't.....
While you are presumably right about Apple's LCDs being inferior, this comment of yours is way wrong. I'm no benchmark expert so I can't really tell whether my Mac Pro is fast or my Diamond screen has nice colours. But I think they're good, so they work for me.
Perceived value is far more important than actual value. Here are some reasons why perceived value is important:
If I perceive quality in my tools, I know that I cannot blame my tools for failure.
If something looks good, I am not instantly reminded of its faults.
When my computer takes a while, I think "wow, it sure is doing a lot" instead of "cheap computer sucks".
So, the criteria for my purchases are: (1) will it do the job? (2) will it irritate me? (3) can I afford it? Unpacking that a bit: (1) sufficiency is the first criterion, and optimal doesn't even appear; (2) perceived value and subjective measures of quality allow me to distinguish between the sufficient options.
It turns out that people using Macs are able to produce good work/despite/ the quality of the screens or the speed of the OS. That's because they are happy using them---otherwise, most of us would be off bitching over lattes.
Objectively, I'm perfectly aware that I could do the most important parts of my stuff on a stable 486. But (objectively) the subjective factors make that impractical.
Idiots, amazingly smug idiots.
From one smug idiot to another, don't sneeringly ignore subjective factors like perceived value. They're more important than you realise and they're why Steve Jobs is a billionaire and you are not. Of course, you shouldn't buy Macs because they would irritate you.
from a marketing standpoint you want to cram in as much of your own products as possible
Depends on what you're marketing. There is a market for very thin OSs that get out of the way, and MS needs to find a way into that market. You identified yourself as being in that niche... but there are lots of business applications there too.
Microsoft has plenty of options for making this release interesting to business. Really, they just need to say "it is boring, it is a bit more secure, it has a few more Palladium-style paranoia features, your willy is big enough already, it will work on your existing hardware, nobody will need retraining." Sure, that marketing won't be interesting to the geeks, nor will it entice the home users to upgrade.
My theory is that Microsoft has accepted that lots of people skip a version, and is going to adjust their marketing accordingly. The "15 flavours of Vista" thing did not work for them, and the rapid release cycle works surprisingly well for Apple. So they will adopt a two-step release cycle with marketing as follows:
Release A: "Sexy Windows will be lots of fun to use." Home users get it on their new computers, geeks argue about upgrading, business skip it and wonder if MS has lost the plot.
Release B: "Boring Windows is already familiar to your users and very business friendly." Businesses will get it, geeks will bitch about it being Asp3 and think about installing Linux until they get their next machine, and generic home users won't care.
They've more-or-less done it before with the whole 95/NT/ME/2000 thing, and it's got to be easier to build parallel marketing campaigns than parallel operating systems.
The alternative, where business starts migrating around SP3 (if at all) generates them too much bad press.
By any rational, unbiased inspection of the facts, Vista is a colossal failure.
Disagree, completely. By any reasonable assessment of the facts, Vista is pretty much a normal OS. By the facts (marketing) presented by Microsoft, Vista is colossal failure.
It must be acknowledged that Vista is roughly what the market should have wanted: it's a pretty good replacement for XP. It's technically good, nifty, secure, etc. For people who expect OSs to "do what they need and get out of the way" then Vista is one of several options.
But Microsoft doesn't want people to think of OSs like that. Hence the introduction of DRM ("it will make people give you money"), general overmarketing ("it will make you important" and "get you beautiful women"), etc.. Despite Microsoft's (and Apple's) best efforts, OSs are now basically commodities, and applications are king.
I disagree with your conclusion because I think that if Vista was truthfully marketed ("it's just an OS, probably has some bugs, they'll get ironed out") then it wouldn't have been a colossal failure. Most of the facts you pointed out are true enough, though they shouldn't really matter. They show why Vista is not what Microsoft wanted it to be, nor what they told the market it would be, and therefore by Microsoft's own standard, Vista is a colossal failure. It is Microsoft's fault that they are measured by what is a fairly unreasonable stick.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, if they turned around and told the truth as Linux distributors, Sun, etc. tend to, their share price would probably collapse. (Apple is an interesting anomaly. They tell you the OS will get you beautiful women [or men] so you feel good, but they don't really make their money from the OS.)
This thread has gotten pretty confused (yeah, I must be new here...) Ignoring who said what, there are two important issues at stake: (1) is Groklaw a good source, and (2) is IBM a good source? There is a third unimportant issue: (3) is Groklaw speaking for IBM?
The answers are: (1) yes, (2) not really, and (3) who cares.
Assume for the sake of argument that Groklaw is part of IBM. IBM ain't stupid, they understand their audience, and they know that we perceive a difference between independent information and corporate spin. They understand the benefit of preserving Groklaw as a clean source of information, so that it can be perceived as having integrity. If IBM wants to lie, they can pay an advertising agency to do it.
The point is that you can (for the time being) trust Groklaw even if they are a face of IBM, because it's in IBM's interest to keep them good.
Basically, when the facts make me look good, I would always rather somebody else tell them, even if she criticises me from time to time. If I have to feed her to keep the news coming, well that kind of sucks, but it is better to do that at arm's length than to try telling people how good I am myself.
If you desperate geeks still don't like it, the concept is "wingman."
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually - Like IPV6 or changes to daylight savings time?
Well, IPV6 is hardly working and DST is hardly a countermeasure. GP has a point here.
There is a strong network effect working against deployment of co-operative spam countermeasures. Somebody needs to kick-start the process. The challenge is not to find something that will work straight away, but to find something that is (a) initially no worse than the existing system, (b) allows co-operation, (c) provides other benefits. Anything based on digital signatures is likely to fill those criteria. Such a process is not very commercially viable because companies don't make money by introducing things that are 'no worse' and encourage co-operation with the enemy. But it can work with help:
For example:
(1) Sites like gmail can store and sign my emails. Initially it doesn't have to be terribly secure or verifiable, just easy for me to send an email that is cryptographically signed. It's initially no worse than unsigned email, and could be made better.
(2) Government agencies (the tax department) could agree to receive certain correspondence by email provided that they were cryptographically signed. If the correspondence has previously been "postal only" then it is initially no worse. Government doesn't have to worry too much about upsetting the "client", and any cost can be justified if there are other benefits to the Government.
(3) There are occasions when companies might not mind being hard to email. E.g. customer support... they could permit email contact where there is a digital signature "as a spam countermeasure and to help verify your account details".
Great post, btw, thanks. Spam is solvable, but only if the persistent naysayers get told off by the visionaries.
Ok, show me some recent advertising that literally denotes that the service shall be without limitation.
In case you hadn't noticed, the theme here is "put up or shut up" because it's a windy day and that poor strawman is blown to tatters already.
No, that's you introducing the straw man. You know full well that nobody actually advertises that they have completely unlimited service, because that would be (presumably) impossible to deliver. You also know full well that it is common to shout "UNLIMITED" as loudly as possible, and cut that down in the fine print. We all know why people find such behaviour on the part of telcos is quite offensive.
Some marketers seem to think that their job is to make claims that are as misleading as possible without getting charged with false advertising. There should be no surprise that people think they have been lied to, because they have been led to believe that the company was advertising a service that did not have limits that concerned the customer. The Australian government's position seems pretty fair to me: if you mislead the customer, you get busted.
+5 Insightful? Since when have cable company marketing apologists had mod points?
Now some people are clamoring that they were sold "Unlimited" service and they are being cheated. Bullshit. Your still allowed to stay connected for an "unlimited" amount of time which is exactly what your paying for and my guess is that your service contract states this, you get X bandwidth available 24/7.
Utter nonsense. "Unlimited" means without limits. There is no convention, historical or otherwise, that "limitations" only refer "how long you are connected." If the fine print specifies that "unlimited" is limited, or that you have to hold your head at a funny angle, then the advertising is misleading---and in civilised countries, illegal. Perhaps some arrangements did allow for unlimited time, but the existence of such contracts doesn't change the meaning of the frigging word.
Naturally, there are some limitations on any internet connection that don't need to be spelled out as being 'not unlimited.' The relevant issue is whether the advertising was misleading.
A fair middle ground solution... Would be to give him the.org and they take the.com
No, because "chicago2016" is not a ".com" in any useful sense. They aren't a company. At best, they have some claim to ".org" or ".net" or ".bid". They have no defensible right to *.com at all. I hate the fact that ".com" has come to represent "the internet."
I dislike cybersquatting as much as the next guy, but I don't feel sorry for non-companies who can't get their preferred.com. I liked the old Australian method, you could register a.com.au by sending your "registration of company" information off to the registrar, and it had to show that your company name was sensibly linked to the domain you wanted.
Here's another option: things like "chicago2016.com" which cannot meaningfully be owned, there should be a standard way of negotiating a way of sharing the domain. These olympics people could be "olympics.chicago2016.com" if they must to have a.com in the URL. And if Hillary wants to be Mayor of Chicago, she might ask for "clinton.chicago2016.com"
If that doesn't fit their planned marketing campaign, tough. Hire better and smarter marketers if you can't think past "chicago2016.com." Domain-names should be useful and descriptive as a first priority.
P.S. these guys might well be an incorporated company called something generic like "Chicago2016" and plan to make a lot of money from having the olympics in Chicago in 2016. Doesn't matter. If you call your company something generic, then you don't get the benefit of hiding your money-making ambitions behind a domain-name that doesn't clearly reflect it.
Since when can someone snatch a trade name (which is basically what a domain name is), just because it "fits"??
The old rules basically were: if you registered a name first, it was yours, unless it could be construed as misleading or confusing to consumers (i.e., confusing one product for another), based on someone else's EXISTING name.
...
Chicago did not have the name first.
Nicely put. And it can't even be a name of a product. It's an aspiration. Why the hell would anyone think they were entitled to own an aspiration?
Recently people have taken to labelling things according to aspirations---maybe that's good marketing, but it's intrinsically not trademarkable because trademarking aspirations would restrict the competition's marketing in a downright stupid way.
What if there were two competing organisations wanting to have the Olympics in Chicago in 2016? Who would be entitled to it then? What if the dude wanted to be the Mayor of Chicago in an election held in 2016?
The only plausible item of property at stake is 'the right to use the domain name chicago2016.com for marketing purposes' and (this is unusually libertarian for me) but I say "go the speculator."
PS. yes, that sort of whining about health expenditure makes me really angry and anti-american. It is amazing how so many Americans believe that their system is superior and the only morally defensible system. Empirically, it is more expensive and less effective than other Western systems. People die because of your theoretical whining about 'socialised health systems.'
Yes, yours is a great country and all, but it's got a few damned ugly patches, and the worst of it is that so many of you don't have the ability to criticise yourselves and actually change something.
Please, go forward, patch yourselves up, be strong, be good, get back to being the envy of the world. I would like to revisit the USA one day, but first, I need to want to be there. End rant.
Yet another way for the veterans affairs office to waste taxpayers dollars.
Do you think the cost of this intervention is anything like the cost of the war to begin with? It's a trivial extra cost. Decent nations factor in the cost of being nice to the vets after a war.
More importantly, is the cost of the intervention more than the cost of having the PTSD sufferer continue to suffer? Fixing up a young traumatised soldier is an investment: from one rather crass point of view, the government effectively invests in creating taxpayers, and I bet refurbishing a soldier is much cheaper than creating a new taxpayer from scratch. Hint: you personally benefit from the availability of other taxpayers.
Most importantly, these people are worthwhile human beings who got a bit buggered up. Being decent human beings ourselves, we should want to spend our money on fixing them up. Hint: if you do not want to do that, you are not a decent human being.
Yeah, I'm a public health guy who lives in a country with a decent health-care system [read, better than the US system]. That means that I know the good economic and moral reasons for the society to provide physical and mental health care. Doing anything less is frankly sub-human. Arguing for less is, at best, ignorant. At worst, it is malicious and inhumane.
Business is inherently focused on the short-term, unwilling to take risks, and overly exposed to market-share effects (i.e. network effects). Business alone can't make the leap to IP6.
Government is one of several arrangements by which we make decisions on technical or social cases rather than solely business cases. (Some people think that's a bad thing, and that everything should be entirely economically rational, but we can safely ignore them.)
If there is a technical case for migrating to IP6, which prima facie there is, then some of the cost needs to be borne by government. There are lots of ways of doing that, and it's reasonable for them to bear the cost of kick-starting the IP6 network effect:
Migrate their own networks wherever there is even a weak business case (i.e. where it is not clearly cost effective, but there are useful technical advantages). Fund migration as part of routine upgrades of university and research institute networks.
Subsidise telcos to migrate their own networks. In the case of sparsely populated areas where Govt subsidy is necessary for any roll-out, pay the extra cost of IP6.
Assuming it's easy, but 'people don't know how', provide subsidised or even free technical assistance to small business and geeks who want to migrate. Provide free introductory courses for geeks. Start a network effect for IP6 expertise and knowledge.
Etc.. The point is that any national government can, for a reasonably small up-front cost, arrange it so that their internet infrastructure is way ahead of anyone else's.
Slashdot Mirror
Mmmm... a pox on whoever gave the editors a thesaurus. And may he give the pox to the person who wrote the summary... the number of lines of code grows with each release?! Who would have thought...
Unfortunately none of the things they comment on---number of lines of code, release cycle---particularly reflect on the quality of the codebase or how carefully it gets reviewed. What measures that reflect the amount of time and number of edits between when a patch is proposed to when it is included? Or the fraction of files that remain unchanged?
As a developer, isn't the point to write better/more robust code??
Nope. As a developer, the point is to build a relationship with the consumer of code---end users of various kinds. That relationship is compromised if the underlying technology is untrustworthy, whether for reasons of techical quality or otherwise.
At the moment, there are so many platforms of sufficiently high technical quality (including Windows) that platform decisions should be made on other grounds. For me: (1) is the platform portable? (2) is it susceptible to embrace-and-extend?
A 747 certainly can push over fast enough to get negative gees in the cabin. It has nothing to do with a nose-dive and everything to do with how fast the plane's attitude changes.
"Negative gees" are nothing to do with how fast the plane's altitude is changing (a velocity), but how fast that change rate increases (acceleration).
You can have both if you prefer, sir.
All this static caused the eesult to diverge!
Thank you for your post. I cannot agree more.
I use a Mac by preference, which is hardly free at all. But thanks to RMS's insight, I am careful not to lock myself into it. I test any software I build on Linux just to make sure I can drop Steve Jobs tomorrow if he starts being a prick. (Errmm... you get what I mean.)
It's not just a question of fabulous vision and insight. RMS actually went and put his code where his mouth was, and more-or-less kick-started the free platforms that are available today---I know he didn't write Linux, but he deserves most of the credit for it, and, for that matter, for Java being free. Yes, without RMS there would be a few public domain bits and pieces out there now---but no debian to keep everyone honest.
So thanks to RMS, I not only have the awareness of computing freedom, but the option of doing it. I give him far more credit for it than anyone else: he is a person who has seriously enriched my life.
+5 insightful? More like -1 troll. False dichotomy.
RMS is acutely aware of the problems with cloud computing because he is acutely aware of the problems with proprietary computing. Those concerns overlap.
Oh, and while RMS might sometimes be wrong, the man is a genius with fabulous foresight, and he is highly influential because of it. You should have known that your post would be stupid and offensive when you wrote "RMS is going senile" for the heading.
People DO give out far too much data online these days, that much is certain.
Please, please distinguish the two separate privacy issues. One is the "Facebook broadcast" issue. The other is the "Visa big brother" issue.
The sometimes ill-considered information people give out on facebook is a problem. But it's not particularly new, just very public. Facebook being a "cloud" means that people can broadcast louder than before, but realistically, Google could just go and assemble most of what's on Facebook by looking through publicly available websites and generating profiles. I think of this as a "light cloud".
But what concerns me is that Visa no doubt has a cloud too. They have a very detailed profile of me and my spending patterns (products, locations, income, the lot). The problem is that this information is just as collectable as what goes onto facebook or gmail, but it's far more valuable, and I can't reasonably control the collection. The only way I can avoid "giving out" the data is to use cash for purchases. That's a dark could.
This all begs a definition of cloud. I suggest: any big fat set of computers that stores information that I can't physically access but might reflect on me.
Relinquishing control over your data to an outside source seems unfathomably retarded
It's a question of what you value: working with GMail is more convenient than my workplace's Exchange server. So everything gets forwarded there. It turns out that I don't really care if Google reads my occasionally commercially sensitive email, nor does my workplace. I'd rather they didn't but I value convenience and reliability over control. I'd actually prefer that someone at Google read my personal emails than a local sysadmin who knows me (not that my emails are interesting, it's just nice to be a bit anonymous.)
Remember that just because something is local, any appearance of control may be illusory. Microsoft might shift a file format on you; a cracker might put a keylogger on your system, or take your data hostage; a burglar might swipe your laptop; the police might confiscate your server & backups. I know my limitations: any hardware or software controlled by me is less "controllable" than the equivalent from Google.
So the point is that in terms of service delivery, there are huge technical and security advantages to going with the clouds. RMS's concerns are absolutely spot on, though: socially, we need to catch up to the technology.
What we need to establish (by law, convention, treaty, pitchforks, don't care) is that people will always have the advantages of local data when using "cloudy" data. The things that strike me as important are:
No, real pirates are people who pillage, rape and murder. Copyright infringement, even for profit, is neither theft nor piracy in any meaningful sense.
I've been an Apple fan for a long time, and I can tell you that if they keep this up, the fanbase will shrink by at least one.
I consider myself a bit of an early 'alpha geek switcher' from about five years ago, back when OS X became useable. I ditched the Linux ideology for a company that was maybe a bit evil but generally didn't get in my road. When I switched, they only had to be better than Microsoft, and work a bit better than Linux. Apple has filled that need nicely.
However, this move is a very dark shade of grey. At the moment I don't really care because mine is a fine phone and I don't really want to develop for it. Yes, I would prefer to see RMS's freedoms honoured, but I feel much more strongly about "hands off my computer" than "hands off my phone."
It's only a phone, and only a smell of sulphur rather a truly sustained pattern of evil. But if it gets worse (especially if it interferes with my computer) I'll be back to linux like a bat out of hell. My next computer will almost certainly be a mac, but I will be watching very carefully before I put 10.6 on it.
That's true, but Apple hasn't figured out how to crack the "I believe boring is a virtue and I want a boring computer" market.
There are two very different market segments out there, and shipping one OS to both of them has to be a real challenge.
There's not much in the way of "perceived value" when dealing with computers. You either have good hardware, or you don't. ....
While you are presumably right about Apple's LCDs being inferior, this comment of yours is way wrong. I'm no benchmark expert so I can't really tell whether my Mac Pro is fast or my Diamond screen has nice colours. But I think they're good, so they work for me.
Perceived value is far more important than actual value. Here are some reasons why perceived value is important:
So, the criteria for my purchases are: (1) will it do the job? (2) will it irritate me? (3) can I afford it? Unpacking that a bit: (1) sufficiency is the first criterion, and optimal doesn't even appear; (2) perceived value and subjective measures of quality allow me to distinguish between the sufficient options.
It turns out that people using Macs are able to produce good work /despite/ the quality of the screens or the speed of the OS. That's because they are happy using them---otherwise, most of us would be off bitching over lattes.
Objectively, I'm perfectly aware that I could do the most important parts of my stuff on a stable 486. But (objectively) the subjective factors make that impractical.
Idiots, amazingly smug idiots.
From one smug idiot to another, don't sneeringly ignore subjective factors like perceived value. They're more important than you realise and they're why Steve Jobs is a billionaire and you are not. Of course, you shouldn't buy Macs because they would irritate you.
from a marketing standpoint you want to cram in as much of your own products as possible
Depends on what you're marketing. There is a market for very thin OSs that get out of the way, and MS needs to find a way into that market. You identified yourself as being in that niche... but there are lots of business applications there too.
Microsoft has plenty of options for making this release interesting to business. Really, they just need to say "it is boring, it is a bit more secure, it has a few more Palladium-style paranoia features, your willy is big enough already, it will work on your existing hardware, nobody will need retraining." Sure, that marketing won't be interesting to the geeks, nor will it entice the home users to upgrade.
My theory is that Microsoft has accepted that lots of people skip a version, and is going to adjust their marketing accordingly. The "15 flavours of Vista" thing did not work for them, and the rapid release cycle works surprisingly well for Apple. So they will adopt a two-step release cycle with marketing as follows:
They've more-or-less done it before with the whole 95/NT/ME/2000 thing, and it's got to be easier to build parallel marketing campaigns than parallel operating systems.
The alternative, where business starts migrating around SP3 (if at all) generates them too much bad press.
By any rational, unbiased inspection of the facts, Vista is a colossal failure.
Disagree, completely. By any reasonable assessment of the facts, Vista is pretty much a normal OS. By the facts (marketing) presented by Microsoft, Vista is colossal failure.
It must be acknowledged that Vista is roughly what the market should have wanted: it's a pretty good replacement for XP. It's technically good, nifty, secure, etc. For people who expect OSs to "do what they need and get out of the way" then Vista is one of several options.
But Microsoft doesn't want people to think of OSs like that. Hence the introduction of DRM ("it will make people give you money"), general overmarketing ("it will make you important" and "get you beautiful women"), etc.. Despite Microsoft's (and Apple's) best efforts, OSs are now basically commodities, and applications are king.
I disagree with your conclusion because I think that if Vista was truthfully marketed ("it's just an OS, probably has some bugs, they'll get ironed out") then it wouldn't have been a colossal failure. Most of the facts you pointed out are true enough, though they shouldn't really matter. They show why Vista is not what Microsoft wanted it to be, nor what they told the market it would be, and therefore by Microsoft's own standard, Vista is a colossal failure. It is Microsoft's fault that they are measured by what is a fairly unreasonable stick.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, if they turned around and told the truth as Linux distributors, Sun, etc. tend to, their share price would probably collapse. (Apple is an interesting anomaly. They tell you the OS will get you beautiful women [or men] so you feel good, but they don't really make their money from the OS.)
This thread has gotten pretty confused (yeah, I must be new here...) Ignoring who said what, there are two important issues at stake: (1) is Groklaw a good source, and (2) is IBM a good source? There is a third unimportant issue: (3) is Groklaw speaking for IBM?
The answers are: (1) yes, (2) not really, and (3) who cares.
Assume for the sake of argument that Groklaw is part of IBM. IBM ain't stupid, they understand their audience, and they know that we perceive a difference between independent information and corporate spin. They understand the benefit of preserving Groklaw as a clean source of information, so that it can be perceived as having integrity. If IBM wants to lie, they can pay an advertising agency to do it.
The point is that you can (for the time being) trust Groklaw even if they are a face of IBM, because it's in IBM's interest to keep them good.
Basically, when the facts make me look good, I would always rather somebody else tell them, even if she criticises me from time to time. If I have to feed her to keep the news coming, well that kind of sucks, but it is better to do that at arm's length than to try telling people how good I am myself.
If you desperate geeks still don't like it, the concept is "wingman."
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually - Like IPV6 or changes to daylight savings time?
Well, IPV6 is hardly working and DST is hardly a countermeasure. GP has a point here.
There is a strong network effect working against deployment of co-operative spam countermeasures. Somebody needs to kick-start the process. The challenge is not to find something that will work straight away, but to find something that is (a) initially no worse than the existing system, (b) allows co-operation, (c) provides other benefits. Anything based on digital signatures is likely to fill those criteria. Such a process is not very commercially viable because companies don't make money by introducing things that are 'no worse' and encourage co-operation with the enemy. But it can work with help: For example:
(1) Sites like gmail can store and sign my emails. Initially it doesn't have to be terribly secure or verifiable, just easy for me to send an email that is cryptographically signed. It's initially no worse than unsigned email, and could be made better.
(2) Government agencies (the tax department) could agree to receive certain correspondence by email provided that they were cryptographically signed. If the correspondence has previously been "postal only" then it is initially no worse. Government doesn't have to worry too much about upsetting the "client", and any cost can be justified if there are other benefits to the Government.
(3) There are occasions when companies might not mind being hard to email. E.g. customer support... they could permit email contact where there is a digital signature "as a spam countermeasure and to help verify your account details".
Great post, btw, thanks. Spam is solvable, but only if the persistent naysayers get told off by the visionaries.
Ok, show me some recent advertising that literally denotes that the service shall be without limitation.
In case you hadn't noticed, the theme here is "put up or shut up" because it's a windy day and that poor strawman is blown to tatters already.
No, that's you introducing the straw man. You know full well that nobody actually advertises that they have completely unlimited service, because that would be (presumably) impossible to deliver. You also know full well that it is common to shout "UNLIMITED" as loudly as possible, and cut that down in the fine print. We all know why people find such behaviour on the part of telcos is quite offensive.
Some marketers seem to think that their job is to make claims that are as misleading as possible without getting charged with false advertising. There should be no surprise that people think they have been lied to, because they have been led to believe that the company was advertising a service that did not have limits that concerned the customer. The Australian government's position seems pretty fair to me: if you mislead the customer, you get busted.
+5 Insightful? Since when have cable company marketing apologists had mod points?
Now some people are clamoring that they were sold "Unlimited" service and they are being cheated. Bullshit. Your still allowed to stay connected for an "unlimited" amount of time which is exactly what your paying for and my guess is that your service contract states this, you get X bandwidth available 24/7.
Utter nonsense. "Unlimited" means without limits. There is no convention, historical or otherwise, that "limitations" only refer "how long you are connected." If the fine print specifies that "unlimited" is limited, or that you have to hold your head at a funny angle, then the advertising is misleading---and in civilised countries, illegal. Perhaps some arrangements did allow for unlimited time, but the existence of such contracts doesn't change the meaning of the frigging word.
Naturally, there are some limitations on any internet connection that don't need to be spelled out as being 'not unlimited.' The relevant issue is whether the advertising was misleading.
A fair middle ground solution... Would be to give him the .org and they take the .com
No, because "chicago2016" is not a ".com" in any useful sense. They aren't a company. At best, they have some claim to ".org" or ".net" or ".bid". They have no defensible right to *.com at all. I hate the fact that ".com" has come to represent "the internet."
I dislike cybersquatting as much as the next guy, but I don't feel sorry for non-companies who can't get their preferred .com. I liked the old Australian method, you could register a .com.au by sending your "registration of company" information off to the registrar, and it had to show that your company name was sensibly linked to the domain you wanted.
Here's another option: things like "chicago2016.com" which cannot meaningfully be owned, there should be a standard way of negotiating a way of sharing the domain. These olympics people could be "olympics.chicago2016.com" if they must to have a .com in the URL. And if Hillary wants to be Mayor of Chicago, she might ask for "clinton.chicago2016.com"
If that doesn't fit their planned marketing campaign, tough. Hire better and smarter marketers if you can't think past "chicago2016.com." Domain-names should be useful and descriptive as a first priority.
P.S. these guys might well be an incorporated company called something generic like "Chicago2016" and plan to make a lot of money from having the olympics in Chicago in 2016. Doesn't matter. If you call your company something generic, then you don't get the benefit of hiding your money-making ambitions behind a domain-name that doesn't clearly reflect it.
Since when can someone snatch a trade name (which is basically what a domain name is), just because it "fits"??
The old rules basically were: if you registered a name first, it was yours, unless it could be construed as misleading or confusing to consumers (i.e., confusing one product for another), based on someone else's EXISTING name.
...
Chicago did not have the name first.
Nicely put. And it can't even be a name of a product. It's an aspiration. Why the hell would anyone think they were entitled to own an aspiration?
Recently people have taken to labelling things according to aspirations---maybe that's good marketing, but it's intrinsically not trademarkable because trademarking aspirations would restrict the competition's marketing in a downright stupid way.
What if there were two competing organisations wanting to have the Olympics in Chicago in 2016? Who would be entitled to it then? What if the dude wanted to be the Mayor of Chicago in an election held in 2016?
The only plausible item of property at stake is 'the right to use the domain name chicago2016.com for marketing purposes' and (this is unusually libertarian for me) but I say "go the speculator."
PS. yes, that sort of whining about health expenditure makes me really angry and anti-american. It is amazing how so many Americans believe that their system is superior and the only morally defensible system. Empirically, it is more expensive and less effective than other Western systems. People die because of your theoretical whining about 'socialised health systems.'
Yes, yours is a great country and all, but it's got a few damned ugly patches, and the worst of it is that so many of you don't have the ability to criticise yourselves and actually change something.
Please, go forward, patch yourselves up, be strong, be good, get back to being the envy of the world. I would like to revisit the USA one day, but first, I need to want to be there. End rant.
Yet another way for the veterans affairs office to waste taxpayers dollars.
Do you think the cost of this intervention is anything like the cost of the war to begin with? It's a trivial extra cost. Decent nations factor in the cost of being nice to the vets after a war.
More importantly, is the cost of the intervention more than the cost of having the PTSD sufferer continue to suffer? Fixing up a young traumatised soldier is an investment: from one rather crass point of view, the government effectively invests in creating taxpayers, and I bet refurbishing a soldier is much cheaper than creating a new taxpayer from scratch. Hint: you personally benefit from the availability of other taxpayers.
Most importantly, these people are worthwhile human beings who got a bit buggered up. Being decent human beings ourselves, we should want to spend our money on fixing them up. Hint: if you do not want to do that, you are not a decent human being.
Yeah, I'm a public health guy who lives in a country with a decent health-care system [read, better than the US system]. That means that I know the good economic and moral reasons for the society to provide physical and mental health care. Doing anything less is frankly sub-human. Arguing for less is, at best, ignorant. At worst, it is malicious and inhumane.
Business is inherently focused on the short-term, unwilling to take risks, and overly exposed to market-share effects (i.e. network effects). Business alone can't make the leap to IP6.
Government is one of several arrangements by which we make decisions on technical or social cases rather than solely business cases. (Some people think that's a bad thing, and that everything should be entirely economically rational, but we can safely ignore them.)
If there is a technical case for migrating to IP6, which prima facie there is, then some of the cost needs to be borne by government. There are lots of ways of doing that, and it's reasonable for them to bear the cost of kick-starting the IP6 network effect:
Etc.. The point is that any national government can, for a reasonably small up-front cost, arrange it so that their internet infrastructure is way ahead of anyone else's.