Gannon had to post $10,000 bail to get out of jail. So either he had $10,000 lying around, or he (his wife) paid a bail bondsman $1,000 to put up the $10,000.
OK, for $1,000, he gets to show up at work the next day (instead of remaining behind bars, and risk getting fired for failure to show up to work) (Or if he owns his own business, leaving the doors closed, or paying someone else to fill his position).
From what I have heard (admittedly, all anecdotal), Microsoft is a terribly bureaucratic organization.
If this is true, then I can see where a Microsoft programmer might start out planning that his/her program code will reign supreme, but after a harsh dose of reality, they settle for 'excel'
<rimshot>
(Taking a pot-shot at a spreadsheet that couldn't add right. Now was that fair? YES - we paid good money for that stupid thing. Dolts.)
True enough - I don't actually know why it was killed, but I can easily see what could lead to it being killed off in Vista. Although Vista won't get it, that doesn't mean it is 100% dead. "Folded into other projects" could mean the version of Windows after Vista.
The parent poster was wondering why Microsoft failed the engineering; really I was just trying to say that probably the thing was doomed from the start as being too ambitious / too prone to scope creep.
My theory is that it's not the software engineering that's the problem - it's marketing. So some of Microsoft's competition has full file indexing and document management. One set of marketing people say "Hey - we should do that! Can we do that? Make it a part of the OS, too? Of course we can - We're Mircosoft"
Meanwhile, other marketing people are looking at the feature set of distributed link tracking.... And another set of marketing weasels are looking at DRM respect... and attributes for near-line storage management... and (name any competitor's advantage, and expect Marketing to want to add it to the feature set).
The failure isn't in Engineering - it's in Management. Someone promised too much complexity.
Given a year or two per feature set, done incrementally, with product releases that allow the code to be tested and refined, WinFS probably could be engineered into a fine solution.
But the deadline is too close now. They need to cut their losses and bug-check what they have, now, so that the file system that does ship is stable, and not a huge disaster.
Interestingly, the open source solution of file systems is far better at trying out new ideas and making progress. It may take longer to make the features integrated - but that integration hasn't been a defining requirement for success or failure.
If you are willing to buy both an email system and an instant messaging system, consider Novell GroupWise.
Runs on Windows, comes with an Instant Messaging component, and to appease your management that might be worried about IM traffic carrying company secrets out to your competitors, it doesn't hook up to YIM, AIM, or MSN. However, the GAIM client does talk to both Jabber and GWIM.
Best, is that should you later want to move to Linux, your GroupWise system will move seamlessly.
I really like that program. I also like that I can use Java Keyring to open the file on Windows, and confirm that I'm making a good backup of the database.
In my ideal world, there would be a port of it to the BlackBerry, as I carry that more than my Palm Pilot nowadays.
You can just see the high-school cheerleaders rolling their eyes. And the techie girls going "hmmmm... does it do video?"
Re:Well, twenty years ago....
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You make an interesting point. In a sense, a movie theater could be considered a carpool. And yes, the movie ticket does cost less than a DVD (although not by a whole lot).
The price pressure on DVDs is eliminated because it is illegal to host a movie (with paying customers) in your home or office.
Interestingly, a movie theater near my home just installed their first digital projection system, complete with movies as datafiles.
It doesn't take a genius to see that soon the theater chains will be sending movies by private BitTorrent - where it would illegal for us to do the same.
Well, it wouldn't be illegal if the DVDs were made available through iTunes. But that would put a lot of price pressure on retail DVDs.
Re:Well, twenty years ago....
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Good catch - that's freakin' hilarious, and completely accidental.
Thanks!
Re:Well, twenty years ago....
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The problem with analogies is that things don't map 100% well.
I picked the airplane analogy, because using an airplane is faster than driving (watching an auto-commercial-skipped show is faster than not). One really is skipping over the obnoxious parts of the trip. Also, planes are more expensive, which reflects the case of monthly electronic guide service, and the higher cost of the hardware.
In contrast, using side exits and entrances to bypass toll-booths is slower and more painful. The only purpose it has is to be a cheapskate.
The problem isn't that people don't want to pay; it's that the TV industry knows it couldn't charge much money for the current dreck.
I'm all for the TV industry living off my subscription fees to cable. If they feel the need to raise prices, that is their risk to take. But if they choose instead to hand me something I don't want (commercials) and then feel slighted when I refuse their offer - that's their problem. It is a dumb business model. In the 21st century, you need to be smarter than that.
I also get a little miffed that the TV industry doesn't deign to acknowledge that they owe us. Their industry was built on the public airwaves. This is a public resource, with TV stations sanctioned by the FCC as the only allowed users of that resource. The opportunity for the money they make is a grant by we the people.
I can see your point that the TV execs view skipping commercials like bypassing the toll-booth. But who's road is it?
Is the content provided by the studios the asphalt or the billboard or "the driving experience"?
If I find the drive obnoxious, why should I be prevented from climbing in a plane and leaving the ugly behind?
Which is precisely the purpose of the broadcast control flags - keep me mired in the muck.
Well, twenty years ago....
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I'm curious what the breakdown for cable service really looks like.
Well, twenty years ago I had a co-worker that had previously been in the accounting department for Disney television. At that time, Continental Cablevision (my area cable TV provider, later sold out to Comcast), was paying Disney fifty cents per subscriber per month. So from my home town, Disney was making about $10,000 per month off The Disney Channel. (Subscriber = home w/ cable TV, not per person)
I later heard that the charge to Comcast went to a dollar per month per subscribing home.
Is it enough money to fund an entire network without 'commercial break' advertising? Probably not, unless all those people take cuts in pay (or their operation gets outsourced).
Which to me, is an entirely viable solution. The pay scales in the TV and movie industries tend to be pretty high....
As far as OTA distribution goes, I think that is a dinosaur marketing scheme that deserves to become extinct. If technology hastens this extinction - great. I certainly object to Congress passing laws to guarantee these bozos their rents.
The business model of television is based on blind advertising - interrupting as many people as possible, with the hope that *some* are not annoyed, but instead buy. Please let me illustrate by analogy.
Imagine a freeway, where every ten minutes, you go through a toll booth, where they stop you, tell you you smell bad or have ring-around-the-collar, and ask: "would you like to buy some deodorant? Soap? Your teeth are yellow too. We have whiteners."
For some strange reason, this is drives people away from the freeway, and toward private airplanes.
At the heart of the RIAA and MPAA lobbying is the demand by the toll-booth industry that private airplanes be forced to land every ten minutes and go through the toll-booth. Those toll booths made good money, and the tool-booth industry has a right to it.
From their point of view, people should have no right to bypass the toll booth, to bypass the insults to their cleanliness or beauty, to bypass the 'opportunity' to shell out some cash.
It seems to me there are three business models working here: OTA (charging advertisers 100%), Cable / Satellite TV (charging customers 25%, charging advertisers 75%), and subscription services (Pay-per-view, iTunes, XM Radio) (charging customers 100%).
For streaming media, only subscription services make long term financial sense to me.
"Broadcast" means not knowing your audience. Anything that shifts the cost to advertisers to subsidize consumers to choose broadcasts has made the fundamental mistake of disconnecting the money paid (to advertise) from the results.
It may work today, but (barring Congressional action) in twenty years it will appear as ignorant as junk faxes.
IIRC, the ODMA people were going to try to extend things to allow a library identifier instead of just a drive letter. I think that didn't go anywhere because Microsoft wasn't interested.
It's a legacy from our Windows 3 days. E: = Everyone, F:= Fileserver, G: = Group, H: = Home. As a mnemonic, it worked well.
Back when Windows 3 only needed a C: drive (this is before CD-ROMs), it was a fine setup. Even after CD-ROM drives became popular, the only conflicts with E: were the occasional Zip Drive users.
Really, the removable drive problem only became a problem within the last year. Since most of the people who have these kinds of devices are tech-savvy anyway, they solved the problem themselves. What is happening today is that portable storage is becoming cheap and easy enough that it's being handed to non-tech-savvy users, and this is where the drive letter stomping becomes a Help Desk call.
I'm going to argue that drive letter mapping is a good thing. I'll agree with you that it doesn't matter which letter gets mapped. F: could easily become Y:, H: could easily become X:, (in my case, E: could easily become the W: drive.)
It would be painful to do, but yes we could move things around. Probably will someday.
Where drive letter mapping is a good thing is in creating relative links. If the document contains a link to E:, then it really doesn't matter if we (IT) ran out of disk space on Server1, and moved the entire folder structure to Server33, and just update one login script organization-wide.
Unfortunately, I have zero idea of how OpenOffice manages inter-document links. If it can handle drive letter mappings, then things will be easier for us in IT.
Except, of course, if we leave those drive letters mapped to where USB sticks and digital cameras will stomp on them.
Your suggestion is what? No linking? Teach them to use the spreadsheet built into the word processor (and have two sets of data to maintain)? Print reports, and arrange to have certain page numbers skipped, so that a printout of the spreadsheet chart can be inserted before delivery? Kind of sucks for the manager that opens the file on disk, doesn't it?
"Don't do that" isn't exactly a helpful answer - and my job is to help my users.
Drive letter mappings are a good thing: how many tough problems in computer science are solved by Yet Another Level Of Redirection? This is one of them.
The real problem is that 1) Winders happily stomps on network drive mappings, and 2) We didn't have the foresight ten years ago to set up the drive mappings to avoid the problem of multiple removable media.
It appears the work around is to give users a drive remapping tool; the long term solution is move the drive letters (even though moving those drive letters will be painful).
Was my answer snippy? I'll grant that. Yes - it was. Us NetWare admins tend to have a sore spot where people rub our noses in the superiority of Microsoft or Linux solutions - where we don't see it.
People still use Netware? Seriously... Why? NFS and/or SAMBA and a few Linux servers are much easier to deal with...
Doesn't seem a genuine question to me. To ask 'why' and then state a position that something else is better smacks of flamebait. Nor did it to even attempt to address the question asked in article.
You answer smacks of the attitude "Nothing is impossible for the man that does not have to do it himself".
Yes, I think the question is a decent one for an Ask/.
I've got the same problem - and I'd like to know if someone found a way to keep MS Windows from pissing on my users. It appears that the answer is: no.
Could I change the drive mappings for 2,000 users to accommodate the 100 power users that bring in USB sticks or hook up digital cameras? Sure I could. Would another 100 of them be pissed because all their OLE links between documents broke? Sure would. Is that your problem? No, I guess not.
It looks like the best workaround is to make a ZfD app out of FixMyKey
Yes, I have users that do number crunching in a spreadsheet, and report writing in a word processor, and link the chart in the spreadsheet to a paragraph in the report. What were those people thinking?
As someone else said: reality bites.
We don't really want to tell the users to convert to UNC either. One particular E: drive on our network has been hosted over the years by no less than five different servers. If we keep the drive mapping = E:, the old document links still work.
We do have a new CIO who may mandate that we change the drive letters in use. That's fine. If all the document linking breaks, and we can blame him instead of taking the blame ourselves, it should let us change the infrastructure to accommodate MS's pissing on our environment.
I disagree that it was a good question. I've got thirty NetWare servers, and they work fine thank you. If you have a tool that manages file system rights for 2,000 users across thirty servers with a single click - I'd like to know about it.
The real problem is that forever we have mapped the E: drive to the Everyone folder. For a decade or more, our user's have been using Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) to connect a spreadsheet pie chart into a word processing file. Guess what happens when you change the drive letter from E: to U: ?
And how does switching from NetWare to Samba change the problem?
I did an intranet documentation wiki based on MediaWiki, and it was worthless for IP addresses. The basic problem was the MediaWiki used MySQL for searching, and MySQL excludes 'words' that are too short from its indexes - which means no index of IP addresses.
I ended up cobbling together.htdig + MediaWiki - which was a horrible experience.
There was some talk on the MediaWiki list about moving to Lucene for indexing. If that has happened already, MediaWiki might work fine. But before you throw many hours into it, do a simple test first.
I find it funny that they named this old Internet2 "Abilene". I know it is a town, but when I hear the word, I am reminded of the phrase "The road to Abilene"
Funny timing for this article. I work for an outsourcer for local government in California. We pulled our last Token-Ring MAU out of our wiring rack only last week. The AS/400 sysadmin had turned off the NIC the week before, and nobody screamed, so....
We do still have one segment on the network that carries SNA traffic - but it is SNA over Ethernet.
Slashdot Mirror
And pivot tables. Today someone sees pivot tables in Excel and thinks Microsoft invented the world - but Borland had them first.
One of those things that if you need it, you need it bad, and likely don't have the time to research it.
OK, for $1,000, he gets to show up at work the next day (instead of remaining behind bars, and risk getting fired for failure to show up to work) (Or if he owns his own business, leaving the doors closed, or paying someone else to fill his position).
He's still out the $1,000 to the bail bondsman.
If they had a clean design, then even the tough problems are solvable.
But your point is a good one: they may not have a clean design on which to build.
In which case, the whole 'we need to add new features' idea is A Round-Trip To Abilene.
If this is true, then I can see where a Microsoft programmer might start out planning that his/her program code will reign supreme, but after a harsh dose of reality, they settle for 'excel'
<rimshot>
(Taking a pot-shot at a spreadsheet that couldn't add right. Now was that fair? YES - we paid good money for that stupid thing. Dolts.)
The parent poster was wondering why Microsoft failed the engineering; really I was just trying to say that probably the thing was doomed from the start as being too ambitious / too prone to scope creep.
Meanwhile, other marketing people are looking at the feature set of distributed link tracking.... And another set of marketing weasels are looking at DRM respect... and attributes for near-line storage management... and (name any competitor's advantage, and expect Marketing to want to add it to the feature set).
The failure isn't in Engineering - it's in Management. Someone promised too much complexity.
Given a year or two per feature set, done incrementally, with product releases that allow the code to be tested and refined, WinFS probably could be engineered into a fine solution.
But the deadline is too close now. They need to cut their losses and bug-check what they have, now, so that the file system that does ship is stable, and not a huge disaster.
Interestingly, the open source solution of file systems is far better at trying out new ideas and making progress. It may take longer to make the features integrated - but that integration hasn't been a defining requirement for success or failure.
Runs on Windows, comes with an Instant Messaging component, and to appease your management that might be worried about IM traffic carrying company secrets out to your competitors, it doesn't hook up to YIM, AIM, or MSN. However, the GAIM client does talk to both Jabber and GWIM.
Best, is that should you later want to move to Linux, your GroupWise system will move seamlessly.
In my ideal world, there would be a port of it to the BlackBerry, as I carry that more than my Palm Pilot nowadays.
You can just see the high-school cheerleaders rolling their eyes. And the techie girls going "hmmmm... does it do video?"
The price pressure on DVDs is eliminated because it is illegal to host a movie (with paying customers) in your home or office.
Interestingly, a movie theater near my home just installed their first digital projection system, complete with movies as datafiles.
It doesn't take a genius to see that soon the theater chains will be sending movies by private BitTorrent - where it would illegal for us to do the same.
Well, it wouldn't be illegal if the DVDs were made available through iTunes. But that would put a lot of price pressure on retail DVDs.
Thanks!
I picked the airplane analogy, because using an airplane is faster than driving (watching an auto-commercial-skipped show is faster than not). One really is skipping over the obnoxious parts of the trip. Also, planes are more expensive, which reflects the case of monthly electronic guide service, and the higher cost of the hardware.
In contrast, using side exits and entrances to bypass toll-booths is slower and more painful. The only purpose it has is to be a cheapskate.
The problem isn't that people don't want to pay; it's that the TV industry knows it couldn't charge much money for the current dreck.
I'm all for the TV industry living off my subscription fees to cable. If they feel the need to raise prices, that is their risk to take. But if they choose instead to hand me something I don't want (commercials) and then feel slighted when I refuse their offer - that's their problem. It is a dumb business model. In the 21st century, you need to be smarter than that.
I also get a little miffed that the TV industry doesn't deign to acknowledge that they owe us. Their industry was built on the public airwaves. This is a public resource, with TV stations sanctioned by the FCC as the only allowed users of that resource. The opportunity for the money they make is a grant by we the people.
I can see your point that the TV execs view skipping commercials like bypassing the toll-booth. But who's road is it?
Is the content provided by the studios the asphalt or the billboard or "the driving experience"?
If I find the drive obnoxious, why should I be prevented from climbing in a plane and leaving the ugly behind?
Which is precisely the purpose of the broadcast control flags - keep me mired in the muck.
I later heard that the charge to Comcast went to a dollar per month per subscribing home.
Is it enough money to fund an entire network without 'commercial break' advertising? Probably not, unless all those people take cuts in pay (or their operation gets outsourced).
Which to me, is an entirely viable solution. The pay scales in the TV and movie industries tend to be pretty high....
As far as OTA distribution goes, I think that is a dinosaur marketing scheme that deserves to become extinct. If technology hastens this extinction - great. I certainly object to Congress passing laws to guarantee these bozos their rents.
The business model of television is based on blind advertising - interrupting as many people as possible, with the hope that *some* are not annoyed, but instead buy. Please let me illustrate by analogy.
Imagine a freeway, where every ten minutes, you go through a toll booth, where they stop you, tell you you smell bad or have ring-around-the-collar, and ask: "would you like to buy some deodorant? Soap? Your teeth are yellow too. We have whiteners."
For some strange reason, this is drives people away from the freeway, and toward private airplanes.
At the heart of the RIAA and MPAA lobbying is the demand by the toll-booth industry that private airplanes be forced to land every ten minutes and go through the toll-booth. Those toll booths made good money, and the tool-booth industry has a right to it.
From their point of view, people should have no right to bypass the toll booth, to bypass the insults to their cleanliness or beauty, to bypass the 'opportunity' to shell out some cash.
It seems to me there are three business models working here: OTA (charging advertisers 100%), Cable / Satellite TV (charging customers 25%, charging advertisers 75%), and subscription services (Pay-per-view, iTunes, XM Radio) (charging customers 100%).
For streaming media, only subscription services make long term financial sense to me.
"Broadcast" means not knowing your audience. Anything that shifts the cost to advertisers to subsidize consumers to choose broadcasts has made the fundamental mistake of disconnecting the money paid (to advertise) from the results.
It may work today, but (barring Congressional action) in twenty years it will appear as ignorant as junk faxes.
Back when Windows 3 only needed a C: drive (this is before CD-ROMs), it was a fine setup. Even after CD-ROM drives became popular, the only conflicts with E: were the occasional Zip Drive users.
Really, the removable drive problem only became a problem within the last year. Since most of the people who have these kinds of devices are tech-savvy anyway, they solved the problem themselves. What is happening today is that portable storage is becoming cheap and easy enough that it's being handed to non-tech-savvy users, and this is where the drive letter stomping becomes a Help Desk call.
It would be painful to do, but yes we could move things around. Probably will someday.
Where drive letter mapping is a good thing is in creating relative links. If the document contains a link to E:, then it really doesn't matter if we (IT) ran out of disk space on Server1, and moved the entire folder structure to Server33, and just update one login script organization-wide.
Unfortunately, I have zero idea of how OpenOffice manages inter-document links. If it can handle drive letter mappings, then things will be easier for us in IT.
Except, of course, if we leave those drive letters mapped to where USB sticks and digital cameras will stomp on them.
"Don't do that" isn't exactly a helpful answer - and my job is to help my users.
Drive letter mappings are a good thing: how many tough problems in computer science are solved by Yet Another Level Of Redirection? This is one of them.
The real problem is that 1) Winders happily stomps on network drive mappings, and 2) We didn't have the foresight ten years ago to set up the drive mappings to avoid the problem of multiple removable media.
It appears the work around is to give users a drive remapping tool; the long term solution is move the drive letters (even though moving those drive letters will be painful).
Doesn't seem a genuine question to me. To ask 'why' and then state a position that something else is better smacks of flamebait. Nor did it to even attempt to address the question asked in article.
Yes, I think the question is a decent one for an Ask /.
I've got the same problem - and I'd like to know if someone found a way to keep MS Windows from pissing on my users. It appears that the answer is: no.
Could I change the drive mappings for 2,000 users to accommodate the 100 power users that bring in USB sticks or hook up digital cameras? Sure I could. Would another 100 of them be pissed because all their OLE links between documents broke? Sure would. Is that your problem? No, I guess not.
It looks like the best workaround is to make a ZfD app out of FixMyKey
As someone else said: reality bites.
We don't really want to tell the users to convert to UNC either. One particular E: drive on our network has been hosted over the years by no less than five different servers. If we keep the drive mapping = E:, the old document links still work.
We do have a new CIO who may mandate that we change the drive letters in use. That's fine. If all the document linking breaks, and we can blame him instead of taking the blame ourselves, it should let us change the infrastructure to accommodate MS's pissing on our environment.
The real problem is that forever we have mapped the E: drive to the Everyone folder. For a decade or more, our user's have been using Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) to connect a spreadsheet pie chart into a word processing file. Guess what happens when you change the drive letter from E: to U: ?
And how does switching from NetWare to Samba change the problem?
It doesn't.
So yes, the question was flamebait.
I ended up cobbling together .htdig + MediaWiki - which was a horrible experience.
There was some talk on the MediaWiki list about moving to Lucene for indexing. If that has happened already, MediaWiki might work fine. But before you throw many hours into it, do a simple test first.
Internet2.
Why?
Why not?
We do still have one segment on the network that carries SNA traffic - but it is SNA over Ethernet.