Nathan Myhrvold preferred a psychoanalytical take, attributing the government's crusade to the impulses of a collection of "very successful people whose deepest regret is that they're not as rich as Bill."
It's not that people who don't work for Microsoft are idiots. It's that they don't have the proper frame of reference on "Bill", and therefore don't, can't, understand.
Classic cult mentality. Makes you wonder what's going on in MS Recruiting.
Well, we used to solve that problem by having seperate admin consoles. WinXP disconnected desktops look like a solution too.
Then again, I've worked in places where they've said "Oh, since you're contract Product X Administrator, we might as well give you NT DomainAdmin rights -- Here's your default IE setup that happy sends out your NT password hash to anyone that tricks you into sending a HTTP request..."
Of course, just because *you're* domain/local admin, doesn't mean that FAT is a smart choice.
ntfs = servers, preferably on volumes that NEED it
And you wouldn't characterize the operating system volume as one that NEEDS ACLs? Basic rule of system integrity is to keep non-privleged programs and users out of there.
Of course, 99 out of 100 NT admins I've known surf the web as Domain Administrator, so there you go.
a DOS boot disk, \WINNT\SYSTEM32\ and replace crap dll
The ability to do this is highly overrated, in my practical expeience. Plus, now you've got SFP. Much more likely that you need to mount the registry to fix some boot problem, and that means having a parallel install any way you cut it.
fat32 is faster, ntfs is a crock of shit. .
I've never seen a FAT/FAT32 install that didn't eventually corrupt it's registry. The shit is 80s era unreliable crap. Don't use it.
For example, see Samba or Cygwin, which allow tight integration between Windows and Unix (no thanks to the "open" and "developer-friendly" Microsoft).
This is sorta a offtopic arc from your comment, but relevant.
Microsoft makes a product which competes with Cygwin called Interix which provide real UNIX/POSIX compatibilty via a subsystem for NT. It ships with a number of GPLed components.
The GPL source was available at ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/interix/, but has recently been removed. I'm suspicious if this move was prompted by their latest anti-GPL PR offensive.
It appears that the source can still be purchased on CD from http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/interix/gplcd.asp , so they aren't in violation of the GPL.
Anyway, just a matter of fact, incase anyone wants to examine or mirror Microsoft GPL software.
Re:Valley startup syndrome. My life in a bucket.
on
Coder on the Cross
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· Score: 2
A long time ago, I had a job that was exactly like vsync64's (not coding, but mutiple, conflicting "This is the top priority" directives). It didn't help that they were firing people left-and-right and dumping their responsibilities onto me.
I tried to do exactly what you said by running a list on a whiteboard and pushing back on them to priortize the workflow. It was actually quite successful for a month or two. Until they decided that whiteboard itself was some metaphorical totem of my lack of respect, it was actually my fault that you can't squeeze a gallon of lemonaid out of one lemon, and I too was eventually fired. To nobody's real suprise, the company was pretty much shut down and certain stuff was outsourced at great cost within a couple months.
And I'm afraid that's the boat vsync64 is in. They don't respect him. They're dumping shit on him percisely so that he takes the blame. He's got more work than he can do, and no amount of manager-massaging is going to change the fact that every potential scenario involves him getting shit on. He's personally involved in a company's self-destruction, and there's no real good solution except a new job.
Speaking of Disinfectant, our college Mac Plus lab got whacked with a nVIR variant that Disinfectant could sometimes identify, but couldn't handle. Took out pretty much every disk in the lab, so perhaps a little too virulant to even spread that far.
But I agree with the sentiment that a free, virtually universal antivirus program minimized the number of viruses. Imagine if Microsoft shipped anti-virus software with Windows (ignoring the half-assed attempt with DOS 6 for the moment).
I've seen this sentiment echoed quite a bit on this thread, and I just have to say that folks don't get it. It's not about "personal" responsibilty -- it's industry responsibility.
In the big picture, the personal computer is a relatively new device, and is the most complex consumer item ever introduced. The industry has grown enormously, mainly due to two things 1) Lowering the user interface bar of entry, and 2) Providing handholding (technical support).
The PC guys could have easily sat on their perch like DEC and IBM and only let the "trained professionals" use their products, but they *deliberately and consciously* chose to mass-market their product to a population which is by definition a bunch of ignormamouses. You have to have a drivers licence to buy a car -- the computer companies are willing to sell a box to any idiot with a credit card.
10 Years ago, if you wanted to buy a Compaq, you had to deal with POs and distributors and support networks. Now, you walk into Best Buy, and walk out with box which has some colorful instructions on how to plug in it. Compaq sold this box, and they know their assumed the risk of this consumer -- consequentally they are going to have to hire a bunch of bitchy techs like to you to help the poor dope.
Now, quite a bit of this hassle can be avoided by marketing a better product. But to this date, only one such product has been on the market, and that's a company (Apple) that doesn't want to work with the OEMs. So they take the best thing, they've got (Windows, even though it sucks from a support and newbie standpoint) and shovel it out.
Would it be better if Compaq (et al) ran basic user skill classes? I'm sure they've looked into it and the numbers just don't add up -- people won't go, won't help, etc. Should they require user licences? MONEY. So what are they going to do? Set up a meat grinder that looks like "support", but in reality is a strong cluestick that users has to fend for himself. Sorry y'all got caught up into it, but that's exactly what the computer industry wanted.
The one carry-a-pager job I had worked this way: They wanted 8-4 coverage on Sat and Sun, so I billed them 2 hours a day (25%) each weekend I covered, plus any time I spent on-site (2 hr minimum).
(somewhat OT) I live in CA (SF Bay) and it's almost absurd how much the 40-hour work week law is ignored, especially by the tech industry.
If you file official time sheets (for tracking or customer billing purposes), it's a good idea to keep copies. Just in case you get screwed in someway, it's a slamdunk to file with the labor board and get backpay (at 1.5x) and interest.
If you can negotiate on-call to your own domain of responsibility, great. However, I've known a few senior salaried admins who essentially take help desk duties after the contract guys punch out at 6PM. It's also quite common to play pager-rotation. Which means you get called in because the some other guy doesn't know his ass from his keyboard.
Not to get into a flamewar, but when I worked for a hospital, it was part of the standard union agreement that carrying a pager translated into 25% normal pay. If you got called in, it was the normal hourly rate of course, plus OT.
I took this philsophy with me when I was doing independant SA work some years ago. Simply told the customer that pager duty would translate into 25% normal pay, and it never cost me a deal. Usually, they would dump the pager on some poor salaried sod.
As you point out, there's nothing "technical" about the 1900Mhz band being called PCS (by the FCC, originally, where non-telephone services played an important role in justifying turning over the bandwidth to the private sector). In fact, I think "Sprint PCS" actually operates on a cellular band in some markets.
Or OJ Simpson, whose cell location was happily coughed up by his provider without a warrant, thus leading to one of the greatest events in American history.
I have some previous experience working in the finance department of a mid-sized wireless telephone company some years ago. Suffice it to say, the only reason cell phones cost more in 2001 is that consumers are willing to pay -- originally because it was a work necessity (and thus passed off onto an employer), but now primarily because it's viewed as a low-scale luxury good.
I haven't missed the point at all about a reliable landline telephone system being the true luxury. Many thriving economies have virtually no landline system, or a poor and expensive one. (Thus leading to very high wireless usage, which American travellers misinterpret as the economy being 'advanced'). Yet, my apartment's 1930s copper very happily provides high-speed Internet access, something not quite available through wireless systems yet.
"PCS" (personal communication services) was never intended to be anything execept a marketing term which implied "We're better than Cellular. Oh, and you can get paging".
Of course, the term "Cellular" itself became popular due to marketing distingishing it from the old "Radiophone" system which had a nice boring name still accurate enough to this day to use, if anyone wanted to. The phrase "Call me on my cell" should have never entered the language. Especially since most Americans are like OJ Simpson and have no clue what "cellular" actually means.
That was exactly the problem: AT+T didn't like Cellular because that meant potential competition, and therefore didn't push the FCC too hard on the issue.
Because cellular is so cheap to build-out, they knew eventually it would be cost-competitive with landline telephones. (This has happened already, BTW, except American consumers have some inertia and tend to view a landline as a necessity and the mobile phone as the luxury item that they will pay more for.)
The FCC comprimise agreement was to allow 2 cell providers in each market. This AT+T approved of, because in a duopoly situation there isn't that much price competition. True enough, prices stayed high until the FCC auctioned off the PCS bands in the mid 90s.
Ironically, when AT+T was broken up, they didn't really even want the cellular division. So they basically dumped on the baby bells, which then worked it into a huge business. AT+T had to buy their way back into the market (at great expense) by purchasing McCaw Cellular in the mid-90s.
The main point is that both KDE and Gnome provide component environments. So does Mozilla. So does StarOffice. Maybe Emacs does too, I don't know.
Now, if those component environments don't interoperate, you've screwed the user because they can't use Tool X with Application Y. This is an issue which, unlike the bloat of multiple similar environments, can't just be solved by faster CPUs and bigger disks.
This is probably stated as flamebait, but it's a valid point. There's really no reason to run a Unix-like system unless your primary requirement is to have Unix-like capabilities at your disposal. Advocates ignore this message at your peril.
Microsoft Interix, Cygwin. It's much easier to turn Windows into a facsimile of Unix than it is to turn Unix into a facsimile of Windows.
Tell me (this is a serious question, not a troll): why would any company with an eye to the future lock themselves into a single-vendor, single-operating-system, single-hardware-platform solution?
What do you say to all those people who bought Informix? At least Microsoft will be around tomorrow.
Consider the IBM buy-out pure luck -- Informix filed for bankrupcy last year, during the largest IT boom market in recent memory, and basically were scrapping along until they could sell their customer list to someone. The future of Informix is migrating to DB2, I'm afraid.
Despite being a total abortion from a user interface point of view, Notes still sells in volumes close or greater to MS Exchange, and has far more deployed seats. Supposedly for each larger Notes to Exchange conversion, Lotus has scored an Exchange to Notes sale.
Which means that it was a smart buy for IBM, even if you hate using.
The biggest problem IBM has is that customers tend to user Notes *too much* and build all sorts of applications that should have never been built on Notes. That makes it difficult for IBM (or anyone else) to come along and get them to transition to WebSphere/Java, or whatever the perferred direction of the future is. (and also leverge their Lotus user base to sell DB2 etc).
Well, I didn't play copy-protected games either. At least they weren't copy protected by the time I got them (grin).
Still, some of the more hardcore Apple II guys I knew would have to patch software to get rid of hardcoded slot references. (One guy ran a BBS with 4 (!) woz controllers and a 'Sider').
Slashdot Mirror
From Wired:
Nathan Myhrvold preferred a psychoanalytical take, attributing the government's crusade to the impulses of a collection of "very successful people whose deepest regret is that they're not as rich as Bill."
It's not that people who don't work for Microsoft are idiots. It's that they don't have the proper frame of reference on "Bill", and therefore don't, can't, understand.
Classic cult mentality. Makes you wonder what's going on in MS Recruiting.
Oops - IE malfunction. Meant to say that Godwin doesn't apply if it's a topical comment. Few people knew propaganda as well as Hitler.
It's mainly a safety valve to prevent long flamewars comparing Bill Gates and Hitler, etc.
Not Godwin: Quoting Mein Kampf when discussiong propaganda tactics.
Well, we used to solve that problem by having seperate admin consoles. WinXP disconnected desktops look like a solution too.
Then again, I've worked in places where they've said "Oh, since you're contract Product X Administrator, we might as well give you NT DomainAdmin rights -- Here's your default IE setup that happy sends out your NT password hash to anyone that tricks you into sending a HTTP request..."
Of course, just because *you're* domain/local admin, doesn't mean that FAT is a smart choice.
ntfs = servers, preferably on volumes that NEED it
And you wouldn't characterize the operating system volume as one that NEEDS ACLs? Basic rule of system integrity is to keep non-privleged programs and users out of there.
Of course, 99 out of 100 NT admins I've known surf the web as Domain Administrator, so there you go.
a DOS boot disk, \WINNT\SYSTEM32\ and replace crap dll
The ability to do this is highly overrated, in my practical expeience. Plus, now you've got SFP. Much more likely that you need to mount the registry to fix some boot problem, and that means having a parallel install any way you cut it.
fat32 is faster, ntfs is a crock of shit. .
I've never seen a FAT/FAT32 install that didn't eventually corrupt it's registry. The shit is 80s era unreliable crap. Don't use it.
For example, see Samba or Cygwin, which allow tight integration between Windows and Unix (no thanks to the "open" and "developer-friendly" Microsoft).
d .asp , so they aren't in violation of the GPL.
This is sorta a offtopic arc from your comment, but relevant.
Microsoft makes a product which competes with Cygwin called Interix which provide real UNIX/POSIX compatibilty via a subsystem for NT. It ships with a number of GPLed components.
The GPL source was available at ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/interix/, but has recently been removed. I'm suspicious if this move was prompted by their latest anti-GPL PR offensive.
It appears that the source can still be purchased on CD from http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/interix/gplc
Anyway, just a matter of fact, incase anyone wants to examine or mirror Microsoft GPL software.
A long time ago, I had a job that was exactly like vsync64's (not coding, but mutiple, conflicting "This is the top priority" directives). It didn't help that they were firing people left-and-right and dumping their responsibilities onto me.
I tried to do exactly what you said by running a list on a whiteboard and pushing back on them to priortize the workflow. It was actually quite successful for a month or two. Until they decided that whiteboard itself was some metaphorical totem of my lack of respect, it was actually my fault that you can't squeeze a gallon of lemonaid out of one lemon, and I too was eventually fired. To nobody's real suprise, the company was pretty much shut down and certain stuff was outsourced at great cost within a couple months.
And I'm afraid that's the boat vsync64 is in. They don't respect him. They're dumping shit on him percisely so that he takes the blame. He's got more work than he can do, and no amount of manager-massaging is going to change the fact that every potential scenario involves him getting shit on. He's personally involved in a company's self-destruction, and there's no real good solution except a new job.
Speaking of Disinfectant, our college Mac Plus lab got whacked with a nVIR variant that Disinfectant could sometimes identify, but couldn't handle. Took out pretty much every disk in the lab, so perhaps a little too virulant to even spread that far.
But I agree with the sentiment that a free, virtually universal antivirus program minimized the number of viruses. Imagine if Microsoft shipped anti-virus software with Windows (ignoring the half-assed attempt with DOS 6 for the moment).
I've seen this sentiment echoed quite a bit on this thread, and I just have to say that folks don't get it. It's not about "personal" responsibilty -- it's industry responsibility.
In the big picture, the personal computer is a relatively new device, and is the most complex consumer item ever introduced. The industry has grown enormously, mainly due to two things 1) Lowering the user interface bar of entry, and 2) Providing handholding (technical support).
The PC guys could have easily sat on their perch like DEC and IBM and only let the "trained professionals" use their products, but they *deliberately and consciously* chose to mass-market their product to a population which is by definition a bunch of ignormamouses. You have to have a drivers licence to buy a car -- the computer companies are willing to sell a box to any idiot with a credit card.
10 Years ago, if you wanted to buy a Compaq, you had to deal with POs and distributors and support networks. Now, you walk into Best Buy, and walk out with box which has some colorful instructions on how to plug in it. Compaq sold this box, and they know their assumed the risk of this consumer -- consequentally they are going to have to hire a bunch of bitchy techs like to you to help the poor dope.
Now, quite a bit of this hassle can be avoided by marketing a better product. But to this date, only one such product has been on the market, and that's a company (Apple) that doesn't want to work with the OEMs. So they take the best thing, they've got (Windows, even though it sucks from a support and newbie standpoint) and shovel it out.
Would it be better if Compaq (et al) ran basic user skill classes? I'm sure they've looked into it and the numbers just don't add up -- people won't go, won't help, etc. Should they require user licences? MONEY. So what are they going to do? Set up a meat grinder that looks like "support", but in reality is a strong cluestick that users has to fend for himself. Sorry y'all got caught up into it, but that's exactly what the computer industry wanted.
The one carry-a-pager job I had worked this way: They wanted 8-4 coverage on Sat and Sun, so I billed them 2 hours a day (25%) each weekend I covered, plus any time I spent on-site (2 hr minimum).
(somewhat OT) I live in CA (SF Bay) and it's almost absurd how much the 40-hour work week law is ignored, especially by the tech industry.
If you file official time sheets (for tracking or customer billing purposes), it's a good idea to keep copies. Just in case you get screwed in someway, it's a slamdunk to file with the labor board and get backpay (at 1.5x) and interest.
If you can negotiate on-call to your own domain of responsibility, great. However, I've known a few senior salaried admins who essentially take help desk duties after the contract guys punch out at 6PM. It's also quite common to play pager-rotation. Which means you get called in because the some other guy doesn't know his ass from his keyboard.
Not to get into a flamewar, but when I worked for a hospital, it was part of the standard union agreement that carrying a pager translated into 25% normal pay. If you got called in, it was the normal hourly rate of course, plus OT.
I took this philsophy with me when I was doing independant SA work some years ago. Simply told the customer that pager duty would translate into 25% normal pay, and it never cost me a deal. Usually, they would dump the pager on some poor salaried sod.
As you point out, there's nothing "technical" about the 1900Mhz band being called PCS (by the FCC, originally, where non-telephone services played an important role in justifying turning over the bandwidth to the private sector). In fact, I think "Sprint PCS" actually operates on a cellular band in some markets.
Or OJ Simpson, whose cell location was happily coughed up by his provider without a warrant, thus leading to one of the greatest events in American history.
I have some previous experience working in the finance department of a mid-sized wireless telephone company some years ago. Suffice it to say, the only reason cell phones cost more in 2001 is that consumers are willing to pay -- originally because it was a work necessity (and thus passed off onto an employer), but now primarily because it's viewed as a low-scale luxury good.
I haven't missed the point at all about a reliable landline telephone system being the true luxury. Many thriving economies have virtually no landline system, or a poor and expensive one. (Thus leading to very high wireless usage, which American travellers misinterpret as the economy being 'advanced'). Yet, my apartment's 1930s copper very happily provides high-speed Internet access, something not quite available through wireless systems yet.
"PCS" (personal communication services) was never intended to be anything execept a marketing term which implied "We're better than Cellular. Oh, and you can get paging".
Of course, the term "Cellular" itself became popular due to marketing distingishing it from the old "Radiophone" system which had a nice boring name still accurate enough to this day to use, if anyone wanted to. The phrase "Call me on my cell" should have never entered the language. Especially since most Americans are like OJ Simpson and have no clue what "cellular" actually means.
That was exactly the problem: AT+T didn't like Cellular because that meant potential competition, and therefore didn't push the FCC too hard on the issue.
Because cellular is so cheap to build-out, they knew eventually it would be cost-competitive with landline telephones. (This has happened already, BTW, except American consumers have some inertia and tend to view a landline as a necessity and the mobile phone as the luxury item that they will pay more for.)
The FCC comprimise agreement was to allow 2 cell providers in each market. This AT+T approved of, because in a duopoly situation there isn't that much price competition. True enough, prices stayed high until the FCC auctioned off the PCS bands in the mid 90s.
Ironically, when AT+T was broken up, they didn't really even want the cellular division. So they basically dumped on the baby bells, which then worked it into a huge business. AT+T had to buy their way back into the market (at great expense) by purchasing McCaw Cellular in the mid-90s.
Did you moderate yourself to -1 to avoid archiving? Honest question.
The main point is that both KDE and Gnome provide component environments. So does Mozilla. So does StarOffice. Maybe Emacs does too, I don't know.
Now, if those component environments don't interoperate, you've screwed the user because they can't use Tool X with Application Y. This is an issue which, unlike the bloat of multiple similar environments, can't just be solved by faster CPUs and bigger disks.
This is probably stated as flamebait, but it's a valid point. There's really no reason to run a Unix-like system unless your primary requirement is to have Unix-like capabilities at your disposal. Advocates ignore this message at your peril.
Microsoft Interix, Cygwin. It's much easier to turn Windows into a facsimile of Unix than it is to turn Unix into a facsimile of Windows.
Tell me (this is a serious question, not a troll): why would any company with an eye to the future lock themselves into a single-vendor, single-operating-system, single-hardware-platform solution?
What do you say to all those people who bought Informix? At least Microsoft will be around tomorrow.
Consider the IBM buy-out pure luck -- Informix filed for bankrupcy last year, during the largest IT boom market in recent memory, and basically were scrapping along until they could sell their customer list to someone. The future of Informix is migrating to DB2, I'm afraid.
Despite being a total abortion from a user interface point of view, Notes still sells in volumes close or greater to MS Exchange, and has far more deployed seats. Supposedly for each larger Notes to Exchange conversion, Lotus has scored an Exchange to Notes sale.
Which means that it was a smart buy for IBM, even if you hate using.
The biggest problem IBM has is that customers tend to user Notes *too much* and build all sorts of applications that should have never been built on Notes. That makes it difficult for IBM (or anyone else) to come along and get them to transition to WebSphere/Java, or whatever the perferred direction of the future is. (and also leverge their Lotus user base to sell DB2 etc).
IBM didn't patent their BIOS. IIRC, it wasn't even legal to have software patents back then.
Well, I didn't play copy-protected games either. At least they weren't copy protected by the time I got them (grin).
Still, some of the more hardcore Apple II guys I knew would have to patch software to get rid of hardcoded slot references. (One guy ran a BBS with 4 (!) woz controllers and a 'Sider').