For a lot of people (including me), "DVDs" means "DVD rentals". We're the people who don't watch the same movies over and over, so it makes no sense for us to buy DVDs.
For us non-buyers, watching online is a lot more convenient than waiting for Netflix to deliver a DVD or searching for the DVD in video stores. If all the movies I wanted to watch were available online, I probably wouldn't even own a DVD player. Or it would be unplugged most of the time, the way my VCR is.
If owning DVDs is what you want, fine. But not everybody wants what you want.
I have to ask...why? I thought Microsoft was massively profitable, even today.
The story is beginning to look like a blog rumor. But even so your question deserves an answer.
Which comes from the way capitalism works today. Finance has gotten democratized, and all those 401K owners want maximal return. (Fat chance now, but that's another story.) So the financial markets aren't satisfied by a company just being profitable. Profits have to be see as "optimal". If fund managers think you're spending too much money for the profits you make, they'll pressure you to cut costs. And the most obvious way to cut costs is to lower the head count.
This is something I see every day — literally. My morning routine includes buying a copy of the San Jose Mercury News. This used to be the flagship paper of the Knight-Ridder chain. Like all newspapers, they'd been hit hard by the shift to online advertising. But they still turned a profit, despite spending lots of money on foreign and political reporting. As I recall, the profits for the chain as a whole were about 13%.
That wasn't enough for the fund managers with stakes in Knight-Ridder. They pointed to other media chains earning much more. So Knight-Ridder was forced to put itself up for sale, with all its assets ending up in the hands of these more profitable chains. Who proceeded to cut costs by laying off a good chunk of staff.
Now the Mercury News is about the third of the size it was 3 years ago. Most of its text is wire copy and advertorial crap. What's left of its original content is mostly puff pieces and human interest. Haven't heard whether it's actually more profitable. I'd guess not.
But that is only last mile, I wonder what technology connects the towers to the network.
Good question. I would guess microwave. The alternatives are copper and fiber, and I don't see a provider easily installing those in regions that don't even have paved roads.
You're forgetting that the code base will still be around in 2012. So they have to do a fix. I don't suppose anybody will be motivated to download a firmware update just to get this fix, but there will certainly be other fixes!
A name cannot be copyrighted. It's a trademark. It doesn't expire after a number of years, like a copyright. A copyright is not a trademark, and a trademark is not a patent. Neither is copyright a patent.
Confusion between the three is pretty common. But you'd think a Slashdot editor, of all people would have heard these arguments before, and gotten their terms straight.
Dude, you still have pulse-only dialing in Israel? That's not really part of the developing world.
I was thinking more along the lines of Africa. Cell phone market penetration there is something like 40%. Not a lot by first-world standards, but when you consider the severe poverty there, and the absence of electrical infrastructure (charging one's phone is a major hassle) it's pretty remarkable.
I stand corrected. I'm guessing that your phone network hasn't seen an upgrade since before the moon landings. I think it would actually be more expensive to create a pulse-only network with current technology.
It should have occurred to me that there would still be pulse-only networks in developing countries. I was just reading how badly landline infrastructure has lagged in the third world. And with the rise of cheap cell phones, there's actually little incentive to ever upgrade them.
The shortcut would have been to make a 1-line call to existing library date routines.
That assumes that the programmer was familiar with the date routine APIs. Obviously he wasn't. Writing a dozen lines of date conversion code may be less work than writing a single API call. But not as much as taking the time to look up the API. The shoddy organization of Microsoft API documentation doesn't help.
In Effective Java, Josh Bloch devotes a whole section to the hazards of not using available APIs. Obviously he's seen a lot of programmers do this. And not just for dates: the example he uses is generating random integers based on a random real stream.
I agree with all you have to say about shoddy date code, but disagree with you about the cause. You blame "incompetence." But what do you mean by that? Stupidity? I've seen some really smart programmers make really stupid blunders. (Which is why code reviews need to be mandatory.) Murphy's Law guarantees that mistakes get made, no matter how careful you are.
I blame mental laziness. In order to use an API properly, you need to take the time and effort to learn it. But when you have a lot of code to write and you're on deadline, it's easier to just hack something together instead of taking the time to study the API documentation. Which is often useless anyway.
It counts if they want it to. It's not like Dr. Who is that strong on logic.
We'll soon find out. At this rate, The Doctor is going to run through his 13 allocated incarnations in a couple of years. They might work around this fact, or ignore it. But my prediction is that they'll use it: the writers can't resist a lame moral dilemma.
It does too serve a purpose! It gave the guy a column for this week. Do you think it's easy coming up with Learned Punditry every week?
Seriously, though, this would be pointless even if he'd bothered to record real numbers. All the performance tweaking of Windows got done years ago. I'd have been more interested if somebody told me whether W7 will reverse the we've been going through, where each product upgrade inflicts a higher level of trauma on users and administrators.
Actually, it's pretty shitty. Because let's face it, Microsoft has an infrastructure in place for delivering this sort of information already, so releasing it is a non-issue...
Dude, I do this shit for a living. Trust me, two days from first bug report to documented workaround is pretty damned good. Getting the information, writing it up, having it reviewed, staging it on the web site, all this takes time.
That's assuming that you follow proper procedure in creating your documentation. You can always have shortcuts. But it's the shortcuts that create this kind of problem in the first place.
You're right about toolkits. But my poking (you make development sound obscene!) has never included X. Too complex for me.
But that doesn't insulate me from X's baroque weirdness. There's the weird UI semantics. (If you can tell me how to make the clipboard in Cygwin/X or XMing not do copy-on-select, there's a small bribe in it for you.) There's the config files, which follow a logic all their own.
When I said "a lot of people" I meant "hundreds", which is enough to account for those eBay sales. And I very much doubt that that many are being sold for use as planters.
I also have to quibble with your sig. Not all trolls are ACs. Some are even editors.
I think "credibly claim" is a mild way of putting it. Not only did they neglect the code review, but it doesn't make sense to me that the code even exists. Doesn't Windows CE have libraries for converting data like this? Assuming, of course, the library was properly written. But that's the advantage of using a library instead of coding it yourself — any given bug is likely to bite somebody else before it bites you.
Alas, I've seen bugs even stupider than this. Once I documented a BIOS bug that was a botched workaround for a another BIOS patch, that was botched workaround for a hardware bug. The original hardware bug stemmed from the use of a realtime clock that gave the current year as one output. Somebody thought they could create a leap-year flag just by examining the last two bits in this register. That's equivalent to taking the mod 4 of the register, so that's a good test of the leapiness of the year value, right? At least until 2100 (which is not a leap year even though is divisible by 4), and the computer would certainly be junked by then.
Only problem: the RTC register didn't contain the calendar year. It contained the number of years since 1970. Thus the system had a calendar bug that became apparent every even-numbered year!
Might I suggest that when you do this kind of reply you make it a little more obvious that it's not mean as a refutation? Because it looked like one to me.
... all Microsoft has done is to ask users to wait out the conditions that triggered the bug.
And considering that the bug only came to light two days ago, that's pretty good.
I speak from experience. I'm a tech writer, and I've written literally thousands of bug summaries for customer support web sites and release notes. (In 1999, I did almost nothing else.) Finding the problem, identifying a workaround, and getting it out to the public in such a short time is pretty impressive.
Presumably they're working on a patch, but they won't say they anything about it until it's ready to go. It's an ironclad rule that you never talk about these things before they're ready, not if you want avoid vaporware lawsuits. It should be obvious to anybody that creating, testing, and staging a software patch takes a lot longer than writing up a workaround.
I did a little googling and came up with this post, which claims that the code comes from the Freescale web site. Also a more informative explanation of the bug for those of us not up to analyzing all that C code.
There are two things that have me scratching my head.
First, doesn't anybody at Toshiba or MS do code reviews?
Second, doesn't Windows CE have libraries for converting from one date type to another? Is it not practical to use them in drivers? Or did somebody hand-code this conversion because they couldn't be bothered to look up the API?
Flick the little switch on the back of your phone and try it,
Do they still make phones with a pulse/tone switch? Seems strange, since the last pulse-only POTS service disappeared a long time ago. So the only purpose the switch serves is to create frustrating delays for people who don't know what it's for.
But you're right, POTS still supports pulse dialing. And a lot of people are using it, judging from the number of rotary dial phones for sale.
many for no particularly well found technical reason I will add, some have technical justifications, but many just think it's 'old'
I don't know anybody who hates X because it's "old". It would be very weird if they did, since X almost always runs on top of Unix (or Linux, which is Unix for all purposes except trademarks). And how old is Unix? Pretty darn old.
There are plenty of good reasons to dislike X. It was designed by a committee and looks it. Working with it is nightmare upon nightmare: User Interface contentions, APIs, config files, protocols, all are obscure and complex. Whenever I work with it (and I use X-based apps every day) I end up in the mode of some computer noob who treats the technology like a tarbaby, afraid to try anything for fear of what I'll break. If it works, I'm careful not to touch anything I don't have to.
From day one, people have looked at X and said, "there's got to be a better way". For James Gosling, the nightmare of X coding for Solaris is what convinced him that existing GUI development models had gotten out of control. I've heard other complaints about X's weirdness and complexity for as long as I can remember. There's no "it's just old" about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Because I live in a tiny apartment, own too much crap, and am always moving stuff out of the way.
For a lot of people (including me), "DVDs" means "DVD rentals". We're the people who don't watch the same movies over and over, so it makes no sense for us to buy DVDs.
For us non-buyers, watching online is a lot more convenient than waiting for Netflix to deliver a DVD or searching for the DVD in video stores. If all the movies I wanted to watch were available online, I probably wouldn't even own a DVD player. Or it would be unplugged most of the time, the way my VCR is.
If owning DVDs is what you want, fine. But not everybody wants what you want.
I have to ask...why? I thought Microsoft was massively profitable, even today.
The story is beginning to look like a blog rumor. But even so your question deserves an answer.
Which comes from the way capitalism works today. Finance has gotten democratized, and all those 401K owners want maximal return. (Fat chance now, but that's another story.) So the financial markets aren't satisfied by a company just being profitable. Profits have to be see as "optimal". If fund managers think you're spending too much money for the profits you make, they'll pressure you to cut costs. And the most obvious way to cut costs is to lower the head count.
This is something I see every day — literally. My morning routine includes buying a copy of the San Jose Mercury News. This used to be the flagship paper of the Knight-Ridder chain. Like all newspapers, they'd been hit hard by the shift to online advertising. But they still turned a profit, despite spending lots of money on foreign and political reporting. As I recall, the profits for the chain as a whole were about 13%.
That wasn't enough for the fund managers with stakes in Knight-Ridder. They pointed to other media chains earning much more. So Knight-Ridder was forced to put itself up for sale, with all its assets ending up in the hands of these more profitable chains. Who proceeded to cut costs by laying off a good chunk of staff.
Now the Mercury News is about the third of the size it was 3 years ago. Most of its text is wire copy and advertorial crap. What's left of its original content is mostly puff pieces and human interest. Haven't heard whether it's actually more profitable. I'd guess not.
But that is only last mile, I wonder what technology connects the towers to the network.
Good question. I would guess microwave. The alternatives are copper and fiber, and I don't see a provider easily installing those in regions that don't even have paved roads.
You're forgetting that the code base will still be around in 2012. So they have to do a fix. I don't suppose anybody will be motivated to download a firmware update just to get this fix, but there will certainly be other fixes!
A name cannot be copyrighted. It's a trademark. It doesn't expire after a number of years, like a copyright. A copyright is not a trademark, and a trademark is not a patent. Neither is copyright a patent.
Confusion between the three is pretty common. But you'd think a Slashdot editor, of all people would have heard these arguments before, and gotten their terms straight.
Dude, you still have pulse-only dialing in Israel? That's not really part of the developing world.
I was thinking more along the lines of Africa. Cell phone market penetration there is something like 40%. Not a lot by first-world standards, but when you consider the severe poverty there, and the absence of electrical infrastructure (charging one's phone is a major hassle) it's pretty remarkable.
ranks of the Air Force
Uh dude, the other services have pilots too. Of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, there were 3 Air Force, 3 Navy, and a Marine.
More importantly, will they have pockets?
I stand corrected. I'm guessing that your phone network hasn't seen an upgrade since before the moon landings. I think it would actually be more expensive to create a pulse-only network with current technology.
It should have occurred to me that there would still be pulse-only networks in developing countries. I was just reading how badly landline infrastructure has lagged in the third world. And with the rise of cheap cell phones, there's actually little incentive to ever upgrade them.
If true, interesting, and a little lame. With current digital switches, the extra overhead of supporting pulse dialing is negligible.
The shortcut would have been to make a 1-line call to existing library date routines.
That assumes that the programmer was familiar with the date routine APIs. Obviously he wasn't. Writing a dozen lines of date conversion code may be less work than writing a single API call. But not as much as taking the time to look up the API. The shoddy organization of Microsoft API documentation doesn't help.
In Effective Java, Josh Bloch devotes a whole section to the hazards of not using available APIs. Obviously he's seen a lot of programmers do this. And not just for dates: the example he uses is generating random integers based on a random real stream.
I agree with all you have to say about shoddy date code, but disagree with you about the cause. You blame "incompetence." But what do you mean by that? Stupidity? I've seen some really smart programmers make really stupid blunders. (Which is why code reviews need to be mandatory.) Murphy's Law guarantees that mistakes get made, no matter how careful you are.
I blame mental laziness. In order to use an API properly, you need to take the time and effort to learn it. But when you have a lot of code to write and you're on deadline, it's easier to just hack something together instead of taking the time to study the API documentation. Which is often useless anyway.
It counts if they want it to. It's not like Dr. Who is that strong on logic.
We'll soon find out. At this rate, The Doctor is going to run through his 13 allocated incarnations in a couple of years. They might work around this fact, or ignore it. But my prediction is that they'll use it: the writers can't resist a lame moral dilemma.
It does too serve a purpose! It gave the guy a column for this week. Do you think it's easy coming up with Learned Punditry every week?
Seriously, though, this would be pointless even if he'd bothered to record real numbers. All the performance tweaking of Windows got done years ago. I'd have been more interested if somebody told me whether W7 will reverse the we've been going through, where each product upgrade inflicts a higher level of trauma on users and administrators.
Actually, it's pretty shitty. Because let's face it, Microsoft has an infrastructure in place for delivering this sort of information already, so releasing it is a non-issue...
Dude, I do this shit for a living. Trust me, two days from first bug report to documented workaround is pretty damned good. Getting the information, writing it up, having it reviewed, staging it on the web site, all this takes time.
That's assuming that you follow proper procedure in creating your documentation. You can always have shortcuts. But it's the shortcuts that create this kind of problem in the first place.
You're right about toolkits. But my poking (you make development sound obscene!) has never included X. Too complex for me.
But that doesn't insulate me from X's baroque weirdness. There's the weird UI semantics. (If you can tell me how to make the clipboard in Cygwin/X or XMing not do copy-on-select, there's a small bribe in it for you.) There's the config files, which follow a logic all their own.
When I said "a lot of people" I meant "hundreds", which is enough to account for those eBay sales. And I very much doubt that that many are being sold for use as planters.
I also have to quibble with your sig. Not all trolls are ACs. Some are even editors.
Oh, grow up. If you can be misunderstood you will be misunderstood. It's up to you to make your point clear. Bad writing is not the reader's fault.
I think "credibly claim" is a mild way of putting it. Not only did they neglect the code review, but it doesn't make sense to me that the code even exists. Doesn't Windows CE have libraries for converting data like this? Assuming, of course, the library was properly written. But that's the advantage of using a library instead of coding it yourself — any given bug is likely to bite somebody else before it bites you.
Alas, I've seen bugs even stupider than this. Once I documented a BIOS bug that was a botched workaround for a another BIOS patch, that was botched workaround for a hardware bug. The original hardware bug stemmed from the use of a realtime clock that gave the current year as one output. Somebody thought they could create a leap-year flag just by examining the last two bits in this register. That's equivalent to taking the mod 4 of the register, so that's a good test of the leapiness of the year value, right? At least until 2100 (which is not a leap year even though is divisible by 4), and the computer would certainly be junked by then.
Only problem: the RTC register didn't contain the calendar year. It contained the number of years since 1970. Thus the system had a calendar bug that became apparent every even-numbered year!
Might I suggest that when you do this kind of reply you make it a little more obvious that it's not mean as a refutation? Because it looked like one to me.
... all Microsoft has done is to ask users to wait out the conditions that triggered the bug.
And considering that the bug only came to light two days ago, that's pretty good.
I speak from experience. I'm a tech writer, and I've written literally thousands of bug summaries for customer support web sites and release notes. (In 1999, I did almost nothing else.) Finding the problem, identifying a workaround, and getting it out to the public in such a short time is pretty impressive.
Presumably they're working on a patch, but they won't say they anything about it until it's ready to go. It's an ironclad rule that you never talk about these things before they're ready, not if you want avoid vaporware lawsuits. It should be obvious to anybody that creating, testing, and staging a software patch takes a lot longer than writing up a workaround.
I did a little googling and came up with this post, which claims that the code comes from the Freescale web site. Also a more informative explanation of the bug for those of us not up to analyzing all that C code.
There are two things that have me scratching my head.
First, doesn't anybody at Toshiba or MS do code reviews?
Second, doesn't Windows CE have libraries for converting from one date type to another? Is it not practical to use them in drivers? Or did somebody hand-code this conversion because they couldn't be bothered to look up the API?
Flick the little switch on the back of your phone and try it,
Do they still make phones with a pulse/tone switch? Seems strange, since the last pulse-only POTS service disappeared a long time ago. So the only purpose the switch serves is to create frustrating delays for people who don't know what it's for.
But you're right, POTS still supports pulse dialing. And a lot of people are using it, judging from the number of rotary dial phones for sale.
many for no particularly well found technical reason I will add, some have technical justifications, but many just think it's 'old'
I don't know anybody who hates X because it's "old". It would be very weird if they did, since X almost always runs on top of Unix (or Linux, which is Unix for all purposes except trademarks). And how old is Unix? Pretty darn old.
There are plenty of good reasons to dislike X. It was designed by a committee and looks it. Working with it is nightmare upon nightmare: User Interface contentions, APIs, config files, protocols, all are obscure and complex. Whenever I work with it (and I use X-based apps every day) I end up in the mode of some computer noob who treats the technology like a tarbaby, afraid to try anything for fear of what I'll break. If it works, I'm careful not to touch anything I don't have to.
From day one, people have looked at X and said, "there's got to be a better way". For James Gosling, the nightmare of X coding for Solaris is what convinced him that existing GUI development models had gotten out of control. I've heard other complaints about X's weirdness and complexity for as long as I can remember. There's no "it's just old" about it.
So your message had nothing to do with my message? Then why did you reply to me?