Apparently you missed the content of my post. I'll try again.
They (law enforcement, media, various members of the legislature) have been redefining what constitutes 'hacking.' Borrowing someone's cellphone, and sending a text message from it, without their permission, now constitutes 'hacking.' We aren't talking about crackers, hackers, or script kiddies. We're talking about people who have trouble figuring out whether the light goes out in their fridge when they close the door.
It's a bit like redefining felonies to include parking violations. It's disingenuous at best. But it makes for excellent "Tough on Crime" bar charts.
Now, now, the party of purple is equally corrupt in both its left and right branches. They only differ on what kind of corruption they specialize in.
But don't worry, come 2012, you'll get to pick which candidate from the party of purple you prefer, then spend the next 4 years crying yourself to sleep at night, because you know that no matter who is elected, it will be more of the same. And it will be same for your children, and your grand-children, and your great grand-children, who will work for less money that you earn on a Friday afternoon right now, and have less throughout their lives.
Remember to eat your bread and visit the circus on your way home. It's good bread, if a little stale, and the circus has giraffes. Repeat after me: "I live in the greatest country in the world! I worship authority! If I am struck, I will not strike back! The wiretaps are there for my freedoms, which everyone else on the planet is jealous of, and wants to take from me! USA! USA! USA! USA!"
Is the earth the only planet in the immediate galaxy to develop human beings? Probably. Is the earth the only planet in the immediate galaxy to develop sentient life? Unlikely. Is the earth the only planet in the immediate galaxy to develop life? Incredibly unlikely.
There are many planets, stars, and various other forms of cosmological phenomena that are capable of supporting life. A better question is, if we encounter another form of life, will we be capable of recognizing it as life? The old Star Trek stuff applies here -> what if you run into a life-form that is made up of plasma (the 4th state of matter)? What if the two (or more) of us are competing for the same resources? What if we aren't? And so on.
Even among human beings, we don't (or we choose not to) recognize certain other groups of human beings as human beings. If we have such difficulty identifying our own, what are our chances of identifying others? And if we treat each other so badly, what argument can you make for others to make contact with us?
Of course, we could have the Star Wars universe, at which point none of the above applies-> Human behaviors are merely a reflection of the universe's preference for life-forms which act as such. And contact is merely by chance.
A little less of a degree bubble, a little more of a rising tuition costs bubble. The accountants at the universities noticed that students can get (seemingly) infinitely-sized loans to attend school.
Were it not for their ability to get such large loans, the same population of students might still be able to attend institutions at a somewhat lower rate. Put another way, if everyone can afford $120,000 in student loans for college tuition, where do you think the costs for tuition are going to average? If everyone can only afford $80,000, where do you think the costs for tuition are going to average?
And what are universities doing with all this money? Building. Translating that money into physical buildings and land. Me thinks they know the bubble is going to crash, and there may be upwards of a decade before they'll have enough money to expand again. Fannie Mae, meet Sally Mae. Oh, you know each other? Imagine that...
Lol. Was going to disagree with you about Windows as a server for production use (ASP.NET project like it), but then I realized that I do have a bootable copy of linux on one of my USB keys...
Artificial restriction on an open market. In short, if you have a license, you're for it, and if you don't, you're against it.
To put things in further perspective, how would you feel about requiring everyone in the IT fields to have a SE / CS degree and several Microsoft / Cisco / Comptia certifications?As in not optional.
You'd bounce a lot of programmers out of the field with the SE / CS degree requirement, a lot of good programmers. And the certs require money that, on top of student loans for the college degree, would put many in the poor house.
Indeed. Since our wonderous law enforcement officials appear to have such trouble capturing real crackers / hackers, they've been working to lower the bar of what constitute a 'hacking offense.' Makes the numbers look better, and is a lot easier.
For your information, using someone's computer without their knowledge, even if it's at a public library, and you're checking your email on a machine that someone logged into previously (and forgot to logout), now constitute's 'hacking.' The bar is laughably that low.
I'm starting to think that having a mind and owning a gun are mutually exclusive.
Singularity, a kernel written in Sing#, which is a superset of C# that includes some low-level hooks, appears to run just fine. Admittedly, it's just a research project from MS, but it shows some nice possibilities.
As for a managed explorer, assuming that the migration from Win32 to managed code is completed, it should be fast and trivial to implement. I implemented my own OpenGl variant of Explorer a while back using C# and a few imported C++ dlls (from User32 and what not)...ran faster than Window XP's native Explorer. All this on a 16 MB ATI Rage 128 AIW card.
On today's hardware, it would consume very little in the way of resources.
Managed code is awesome (IMHO). MS was making good headway cleaning up the Win32 hell that existed for the past several generations, got about halfway through, then stopped. Now we have some half-finished classes, which very clean and work extremely well, assuming that the function you are looking for made the cutoff. What more, MS has spent a lot of time greasing the CLR, so it's typically as fast, or faster than C++.*
* This is assuming that you are programming C# code in C# style, and actually utilizing the new namespaces / classes / functions that are available to you. For instance, allocating arrays in C++ is much faster than C#; however, a program that uses arrays in C++ would use a different class in C#, like a DataTable, which is much faster than the C++ array. Hence, when code is compiled with little modification between C++ / C#, C# appears terrible; when C# is allowed to use it's more powerful, optimized built-ins, it tends to win. It's one of the things I've spent a small amount of time researching / googling around the web to get an understanding for.
With every release of Windows, it takes an additional click to get the good old control panel.
Going over the past several releases, we've gone from it's placement in My Computer to the Start Menu, we've changed the view from a set of icons to categories (by default, which takes at least one extra click in categories mode to get to where you want to be), have hidden the vast majority of desktop icons (I'm always tickled to see how many users have a shortcut to My Computer on their desktop), and appear to have added an additional layer or two between the device manager / computer name / work-group / domain / advanced systems settings and the control panel itself.
To configure the video card, and add a new computer to a domain takes several times as many clicks as previously, and aside from the intermediate screens, nothing has changed. I'm actually reaching the point of loathing to reconfigure the system, when needed, because of all the additional screens I have to click through.
Meh, it worked for DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), which is now sadly defunct, but whose technology lives on.
I'm more interested in putting the company in a position to take advantage of various technologies and markets that can only be captured with careful planning and some patience. Right now, MS is playing an also-ran to a large number of markets; I don't like that. If you're going to head up a major tech company, you need to lead, and you do that by foregoing being an also-ran in the current hot market (short-term loss) and focusing on new and developing markets where the competition hasn't even begun explore (long term gain). Granted, it's riskier, but the potential gains are much higher. Instead of playing catch-up in the Tablet market, I'd focus on the next three possible emerging markets after that one, and pull my resources into making a solid product. That way the competition will have to over-extend themselves when they finally realize how much of a lead I have on them, and I can focus on shoring up my current assets, paying out a one-time dividend (for all those investors who stuck with the company after my announcement), and getting a feel for any new market possibilities to invest in. I'd put Wall Street on a time-out (tell them not to expect a profit for the next several years), as I focused on cranking out some mad cash, then let them get back to their favorite game of trying to shaft their clients for some loose change.
Again, this isn't about "doing what's right." It's about stopping chases of pennies, and starting chases of dollars. Even Wall Street agrees that while MS has been paying out some super sweet dividends, they haven't really been innovating much in recent years.
It wants to be package management, but it's just a cloaked attempt to move the "Buy" closer to the user's mouse (and credit card).
This release, I fear, will rank up there with Netscape's release of Communicator, after having been acquired, with whom the sole change was the addition of a "Shop" button the browser's toolbar.
The Tech Founders have been dying / retiring for quite some time. So, the business people have been slowly moving in, and trying to milk things for all they are worth while running the company into the ground. By the time that Marketing is mandating techs wearing suits and ties, the company is three versions away from bankruptcy.
Tech companies must be run by techs. If the king of that company isn't a tech, the company will not perform efficiently. And no, trying to swap in a bunch of business people, who do not understand the culture, the lingo, or the design of the flagship product (on an intimate level) is a recipe ripe for disaster. Time and time again, you end up with a hollowed out company, which performs well by Wall Street standards, then suddenly collapses, because the attention to their flagship product has been lacking / they failed to keep innovating in their core market / they decided to innovate in a direction that appeared to come from anyone but the techs within the company.
MS is going down because of avarice. Ballmer has gotten too greedy, the stupid version of greedy, where he's spending so much time thinking about the kinds of money that MS could be earning if he could just get a half-decent product in the right market, that he's neglecting attention to the markets that MS already owns. And he's surrounded by a stacked boardroom, which is apparently filled with people who should not be running the company, and lack a spine to tell him that he's killing the company. And all the while that Ballmer is chasing after Apple and trying to tailor Windows as a touchpad, tablet / DRMed OS, he's not focusing on bringing new features to the market that convince current owners of Windows that the next upgrade is a must-have.
Why did we upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows 2000? Because it was more secure and more stable. Why did we upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP? Because stability increased (especially for video cards), and media integration was a priority. Why did we upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista? Because a few programs we wanted to run did not on Windows XP. Why did we upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7? Because the interface from Vista was tweaked to be less annoying, and any number of bugs were fixed.
No one upgraded from Windows XP to Vista because they "needed an OS that handled DRM." It's not a selling point. Consumers couldn't give a f*ck about DRM, and anyone with half a brain knows that they despise it.
No one is going to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 because they really need access to a marketplace that will provide them with applications that they could easily find with a 1-second Google search. It's not a selling point. More DRM and an integrated marketplace? An interface that has half the MS developers questioning whether to move to a new platform?
Wonderous. We've gone from a fully-featured OS, to an OS with DLC, to a Bazaar masquerading as an OS.
I'm beginning to think MS is incapable of creating any new core components -> the kinds of things that make or break an OS, the kids of things that make consumers want your OS more than their own money.
And Ballmer's sad parade of preferring DRM over any other form of innovation nears its end, with the death of Microsoft.
Were I in charge of MS, my first standing order would be to rip out all DRM components from the OS, and dispatch any board member that disagreed with me. Followed shortly by my second order, which is to quit hiding / moving the fricking control panel every time we release a new version of Windows. And my third, and probably last order, before the shareholders revolt, would be to complete the migration of all OS functions to managed code. I say last order, as it would take several additional years to complete, during which the shareholders will no doubt lose confidence in my long term plan, and act to replace me.
At no time, during my reign, would I forget that the company was founded on a simple principle: personal computers. More specifically, the importance of personal computers, as a paradigm, as opposed to mainframes, how the two differ, and why the personal computer propelled the company to success in the first place. More importantly, however much I might be annoyed with piracy, and given to personal fantasies of turning pirates into paying customers, I will be aware that every person who runs a pirated copy of my software is not running a copy of the competition's. Additionally, I would be mindful to exercise every opportunity to utilize the underlying OS and hardware to provide a better "experience" to the end user than could reasonably be fabricated through a web browser.
I believe the point with storing data overseas is a realization that the procedure for your government getting access to that data may require more effort (since it's interacting with another government), and may be followed more closely, than when hosting your data at home. By making it a larger bureaucratic hassle, it makes anyone who has an interest in gathering that data jump a slightly higher hurdle, ensuring that law enforcement doesn't go on one of their typical fishing expeditions.
How are things supposed to work, according to the public? Police / DoJ / Intelligence Agents must ask a Judge for a search / wiretap warrant, and follow laid out procedures when gathering data. To bother the Judge when asking for a warrant, you must have "probable cause" for asking for said warrant (I think there's an amendment somewhere in the US Constitution that precludes investigators from just randomly searching your stuff, but with the rulings I've seen in recent times, I'm not sure anymore).
How do things appear to work, according to the public? Men in uniform or G-suits (sometimes SWAT gear) wander into a Data Center, wave their hands like one of the Jedi from Star Wars (while saying "these are the servers we are looking for"), and begin carting off gear, whether or not the data of interest is actually stored on those machines (thus shutting down every business who hosts their servers at that site). It's a nuisance, and an interruption in commerce, and gets treated as such.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you missed the content of my post. I'll try again.
They (law enforcement, media, various members of the legislature) have been redefining what constitutes 'hacking.' Borrowing someone's cellphone, and sending a text message from it, without their permission, now constitutes 'hacking.' We aren't talking about crackers, hackers, or script kiddies. We're talking about people who have trouble figuring out whether the light goes out in their fridge when they close the door.
It's a bit like redefining felonies to include parking violations. It's disingenuous at best. But it makes for excellent "Tough on Crime" bar charts.
Now, now, the party of purple is equally corrupt in both its left and right branches. They only differ on what kind of corruption they specialize in.
But don't worry, come 2012, you'll get to pick which candidate from the party of purple you prefer, then spend the next 4 years crying yourself to sleep at night, because you know that no matter who is elected, it will be more of the same. And it will be same for your children, and your grand-children, and your great grand-children, who will work for less money that you earn on a Friday afternoon right now, and have less throughout their lives.
Remember to eat your bread and visit the circus on your way home. It's good bread, if a little stale, and the circus has giraffes. Repeat after me: "I live in the greatest country in the world! I worship authority! If I am struck, I will not strike back! The wiretaps are there for my freedoms, which everyone else on the planet is jealous of, and wants to take from me! USA! USA! USA! USA!"
Is the earth the only planet in the immediate galaxy to develop human beings? Probably.
Is the earth the only planet in the immediate galaxy to develop sentient life? Unlikely.
Is the earth the only planet in the immediate galaxy to develop life? Incredibly unlikely.
There are many planets, stars, and various other forms of cosmological phenomena that are capable of supporting life. A better question is, if we encounter another form of life, will we be capable of recognizing it as life? The old Star Trek stuff applies here -> what if you run into a life-form that is made up of plasma (the 4th state of matter)? What if the two (or more) of us are competing for the same resources? What if we aren't? And so on.
Even among human beings, we don't (or we choose not to) recognize certain other groups of human beings as human beings. If we have such difficulty identifying our own, what are our chances of identifying others? And if we treat each other so badly, what argument can you make for others to make contact with us?
Of course, we could have the Star Wars universe, at which point none of the above applies-> Human behaviors are merely a reflection of the universe's preference for life-forms which act as such. And contact is merely by chance.
Yes, because that's how that works.
A little less of a degree bubble, a little more of a rising tuition costs bubble. The accountants at the universities noticed that students can get (seemingly) infinitely-sized loans to attend school.
Were it not for their ability to get such large loans, the same population of students might still be able to attend institutions at a somewhat lower rate. Put another way, if everyone can afford $120,000 in student loans for college tuition, where do you think the costs for tuition are going to average? If everyone can only afford $80,000, where do you think the costs for tuition are going to average?
And what are universities doing with all this money? Building. Translating that money into physical buildings and land. Me thinks they know the bubble is going to crash, and there may be upwards of a decade before they'll have enough money to expand again. Fannie Mae, meet Sally Mae. Oh, you know each other? Imagine that...
Lol. Was going to disagree with you about Windows as a server for production use (ASP.NET project like it), but then I realized that I do have a bootable copy of linux on one of my USB keys...
Artificial restriction on an open market. In short, if you have a license, you're for it, and if you don't, you're against it.
To put things in further perspective, how would you feel about requiring everyone in the IT fields to have a SE / CS degree and several Microsoft / Cisco / Comptia certifications?As in not optional.
You'd bounce a lot of programmers out of the field with the SE / CS degree requirement, a lot of good programmers. And the certs require money that, on top of student loans for the college degree, would put many in the poor house.
Indeed. Since our wonderous law enforcement officials appear to have such trouble capturing real crackers / hackers, they've been working to lower the bar of what constitute a 'hacking offense.' Makes the numbers look better, and is a lot easier.
For your information, using someone's computer without their knowledge, even if it's at a public library, and you're checking your email on a machine that someone logged into previously (and forgot to logout), now constitute's 'hacking.' The bar is laughably that low.
I'm starting to think that having a mind and owning a gun are mutually exclusive.
No Powershell? ^_^
Hmm, sort of. Perhaps port would be a better term.
You doing something with structures and managed code?
Singularity, a kernel written in Sing#, which is a superset of C# that includes some low-level hooks, appears to run just fine. Admittedly, it's just a research project from MS, but it shows some nice possibilities.
As for a managed explorer, assuming that the migration from Win32 to managed code is completed, it should be fast and trivial to implement. I implemented my own OpenGl variant of Explorer a while back using C# and a few imported C++ dlls (from User32 and what not)...ran faster than Window XP's native Explorer. All this on a 16 MB ATI Rage 128 AIW card.
On today's hardware, it would consume very little in the way of resources.
Managed code is awesome (IMHO). MS was making good headway cleaning up the Win32 hell that existed for the past several generations, got about halfway through, then stopped. Now we have some half-finished classes, which very clean and work extremely well, assuming that the function you are looking for made the cutoff. What more, MS has spent a lot of time greasing the CLR, so it's typically as fast, or faster than C++.*
* This is assuming that you are programming C# code in C# style, and actually utilizing the new namespaces / classes / functions that are available to you. For instance, allocating arrays in C++ is much faster than C#; however, a program that uses arrays in C++ would use a different class in C#, like a DataTable, which is much faster than the C++ array. Hence, when code is compiled with little modification between C++ / C#, C# appears terrible; when C# is allowed to use it's more powerful, optimized built-ins, it tends to win. It's one of the things I've spent a small amount of time researching / googling around the web to get an understanding for.
With every release of Windows, it takes an additional click to get the good old control panel.
Going over the past several releases, we've gone from it's placement in My Computer to the Start Menu, we've changed the view from a set of icons to categories (by default, which takes at least one extra click in categories mode to get to where you want to be), have hidden the vast majority of desktop icons (I'm always tickled to see how many users have a shortcut to My Computer on their desktop), and appear to have added an additional layer or two between the device manager / computer name / work-group / domain / advanced systems settings and the control panel itself.
To configure the video card, and add a new computer to a domain takes several times as many clicks as previously, and aside from the intermediate screens, nothing has changed. I'm actually reaching the point of loathing to reconfigure the system, when needed, because of all the additional screens I have to click through.
Meh, it worked for DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), which is now sadly defunct, but whose technology lives on.
I'm more interested in putting the company in a position to take advantage of various technologies and markets that can only be captured with careful planning and some patience. Right now, MS is playing an also-ran to a large number of markets; I don't like that. If you're going to head up a major tech company, you need to lead, and you do that by foregoing being an also-ran in the current hot market (short-term loss) and focusing on new and developing markets where the competition hasn't even begun explore (long term gain). Granted, it's riskier, but the potential gains are much higher. Instead of playing catch-up in the Tablet market, I'd focus on the next three possible emerging markets after that one, and pull my resources into making a solid product. That way the competition will have to over-extend themselves when they finally realize how much of a lead I have on them, and I can focus on shoring up my current assets, paying out a one-time dividend (for all those investors who stuck with the company after my announcement), and getting a feel for any new market possibilities to invest in. I'd put Wall Street on a time-out (tell them not to expect a profit for the next several years), as I focused on cranking out some mad cash, then let them get back to their favorite game of trying to shaft their clients for some loose change.
Again, this isn't about "doing what's right." It's about stopping chases of pennies, and starting chases of dollars. Even Wall Street agrees that while MS has been paying out some super sweet dividends, they haven't really been innovating much in recent years.
Who said I would be assuming the position of CTO?
If I were in charge of MS, I'd handle it B. Gates-style: Chairman of the Board.
For what, ripping out the DRM?
*Sighs and opens wallet* Yet another one for the stack of books I will eventually get around to reading. ;-)
It wants to be package management, but it's just a cloaked attempt to move the "Buy" closer to the user's mouse (and credit card).
This release, I fear, will rank up there with Netscape's release of Communicator, after having been acquired, with whom the sole change was the addition of a "Shop" button the browser's toolbar.
Pathetic.
The Tech Founders have been dying / retiring for quite some time. So, the business people have been slowly moving in, and trying to milk things for all they are worth while running the company into the ground. By the time that Marketing is mandating techs wearing suits and ties, the company is three versions away from bankruptcy.
Tech companies must be run by techs. If the king of that company isn't a tech, the company will not perform efficiently. And no, trying to swap in a bunch of business people, who do not understand the culture, the lingo, or the design of the flagship product (on an intimate level) is a recipe ripe for disaster. Time and time again, you end up with a hollowed out company, which performs well by Wall Street standards, then suddenly collapses, because the attention to their flagship product has been lacking / they failed to keep innovating in their core market / they decided to innovate in a direction that appeared to come from anyone but the techs within the company.
MS is going down because of avarice. Ballmer has gotten too greedy, the stupid version of greedy, where he's spending so much time thinking about the kinds of money that MS could be earning if he could just get a half-decent product in the right market, that he's neglecting attention to the markets that MS already owns. And he's surrounded by a stacked boardroom, which is apparently filled with people who should not be running the company, and lack a spine to tell him that he's killing the company. And all the while that Ballmer is chasing after Apple and trying to tailor Windows as a touchpad, tablet / DRMed OS, he's not focusing on bringing new features to the market that convince current owners of Windows that the next upgrade is a must-have.
Why did we upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows 2000? Because it was more secure and more stable. Why did we upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP? Because stability increased (especially for video cards), and media integration was a priority. Why did we upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista? Because a few programs we wanted to run did not on Windows XP. Why did we upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7? Because the interface from Vista was tweaked to be less annoying, and any number of bugs were fixed.
No one upgraded from Windows XP to Vista because they "needed an OS that handled DRM." It's not a selling point. Consumers couldn't give a f*ck about DRM, and anyone with half a brain knows that they despise it.
No one is going to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 because they really need access to a marketplace that will provide them with applications that they could easily find with a 1-second Google search. It's not a selling point. More DRM and an integrated marketplace? An interface that has half the MS developers questioning whether to move to a new platform?
Yes, good money in the short term, a dead company in the long term.
Wonderous. We've gone from a fully-featured OS, to an OS with DLC, to a Bazaar masquerading as an OS.
I'm beginning to think MS is incapable of creating any new core components -> the kinds of things that make or break an OS, the kids of things that make consumers want your OS more than their own money.
And Ballmer's sad parade of preferring DRM over any other form of innovation nears its end, with the death of Microsoft.
Were I in charge of MS, my first standing order would be to rip out all DRM components from the OS, and dispatch any board member that disagreed with me. Followed shortly by my second order, which is to quit hiding / moving the fricking control panel every time we release a new version of Windows. And my third, and probably last order, before the shareholders revolt, would be to complete the migration of all OS functions to managed code. I say last order, as it would take several additional years to complete, during which the shareholders will no doubt lose confidence in my long term plan, and act to replace me.
At no time, during my reign, would I forget that the company was founded on a simple principle: personal computers. More specifically, the importance of personal computers, as a paradigm, as opposed to mainframes, how the two differ, and why the personal computer propelled the company to success in the first place. More importantly, however much I might be annoyed with piracy, and given to personal fantasies of turning pirates into paying customers, I will be aware that every person who runs a pirated copy of my software is not running a copy of the competition's. Additionally, I would be mindful to exercise every opportunity to utilize the underlying OS and hardware to provide a better "experience" to the end user than could reasonably be fabricated through a web browser.
Indeed. However, human psychopaths can learn, if only to survive in a society that does not understand them.
Can corporations?
I believe the point with storing data overseas is a realization that the procedure for your government getting access to that data may require more effort (since it's interacting with another government), and may be followed more closely, than when hosting your data at home. By making it a larger bureaucratic hassle, it makes anyone who has an interest in gathering that data jump a slightly higher hurdle, ensuring that law enforcement doesn't go on one of their typical fishing expeditions.
How are things supposed to work, according to the public? Police / DoJ / Intelligence Agents must ask a Judge for a search / wiretap warrant, and follow laid out procedures when gathering data. To bother the Judge when asking for a warrant, you must have "probable cause" for asking for said warrant (I think there's an amendment somewhere in the US Constitution that precludes investigators from just randomly searching your stuff, but with the rulings I've seen in recent times, I'm not sure anymore).
How do things appear to work, according to the public? Men in uniform or G-suits (sometimes SWAT gear) wander into a Data Center, wave their hands like one of the Jedi from Star Wars (while saying "these are the servers we are looking for"), and begin carting off gear, whether or not the data of interest is actually stored on those machines (thus shutting down every business who hosts their servers at that site). It's a nuisance, and an interruption in commerce, and gets treated as such.