So, making a statement that "All Americans ought to have broadband." is something that nobody's goign to disagree with, and is not something he can be called for not following through on. More or less, he's said nothing newsworthy at all... he's just trying to get the geek vote without offering much in return.
You have just provided the most concise definition of the Leadership of George Bush that I have ever seen.
He is the epitomy of the Typical Washington Politican. He says much, does little, and expects to be rewarded for it.
They want to own the solution to spam, and they want to take credit for cleaning up your email box, even though their idea is really other people's ideas + XML.
Uh huh. You can make the same statement about all of the solutions out there.
Frick, even back in 1995 I was claiming that the problem with SMTP was there was no way to validate the sender. People far smarter than I were likely saying this was a problem earlier than that.
It's not like SPF came up with the idea just this past year.
Christ sometimes I think people just like to whine a lot. Let's see what they come up with, look at how difficult it is to implement, and what existing stuff it breaks. Then make a comparison.
Pols are ALWAYS paid more than they are worth, and always make far more than the people they represent.
Hey now, careful with that rhetoric!
I'm not about to start a partisan battle and debate the merits of whether President GW Bush makes more money than he's worth(it's like $500,000/year).
But I can guarantee you that he makes far less than the people he represents, as opposed to the average citizens he probably should be representing.:-(
It seems to me like we have industry groups like ISO, W3C and such that can work on technology standards.
This one kind of puzzled me, even moreso than the "Oh my god! Microsoft is evil and they bought plane tickets for UN people to go to a conference that they otherwise couldn't have afford to go to!" response from the slashbot drones.
The results of this project being over budget and having compatibility problems really are not that surprising. I've been involved in various migrations over the years. OS/2->NT, 3.1->95, 95->NT, NT->XP. Nothing ever goes as expected.
Every time, as you get into it, you find that some software doesn't work as expected. You have to come up with a workaround and/or a solution. These take some time, slow down the project, whatever.
But a dramatic determining factor in this equation has to do with how mainstream is your problem, and how likely it is someone else will fix it before you do.
The problem I see with Linux is that the dynamics that exist in the Windows market to help with your deployment problems simply don't exist in the Linux market. There are going to be issues that may not be resolved for 3-4 years or more rather than the six month timeframe you see in the Windows market.
It's a chicken & egg situation... that dynamic will change as more people adopt Linux, but if I was a CIO I wouldn't bet my company on it.
This will probably get missed in the noise, but...
EE Times had a similar article come out yesterday talking about the death threats that SCO execs, and also industry analysts have been receiving from Linux extremists.
Software can be fixed rapidly to prevent a "disease".
Plants cannot, it takes years and years of research and making of hybrids and such.
This argument more readily demonstrates a lack of understanding of the problem, than makes any compelling point.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
Well I think the link to Al Qaeda is pretty strong, if only from the fact that Bin Laden admitted to the crime, but there is also a pretty strong money trail. Now, there's also something to suggest Bin Laden is taking credit for every terrorist action in order to make Al Qaeda seem bigger than it is, but I don't doubt many of them are tied to the group.
As for the Taliban. I think the Bush administration miscalculated the Taliban, or simply didn't understand the culture. I honestly wouldn't have trust the Taliban to turn him over to a non-US court either. But just after that the Taliban released a statement saying something like "Bin Laden is no longer in our home." Now we interpreted this to mean "We don't know where he is", and acted as if the Taliban had snubbed us.
But I was reading another article by an expert on the culture and he said that what they said was more subtle, more like "Bin Laden is no longer under our protection, come and get him." It was a cultural breakdown, we viewed it in a western sense, when that's not what it was. It is a lot like some of the differences we have with Asian culture, where the issue is not about being right or wrong, but about saving face and coming away defeated without looking like you were defeated.
But I have no love of the Taliban. I think we should have gone in there, nabbed Bin Laden, turned our backs on the Taliban and bombed them into the stone age anyway. Prior to 2001 I had been reading about what they were doing over there, the way they treated people, etc. This had been going on since they assumed power in 1996.
My biggest gripe right now is that the Bush administration allowed themselves to be distracted by the non-threat of Iraq and as such are ignoring the real problem area, which is Afghanistan and Pakistan. We're committed now to an occupation, which cripples are ability to properly respond elsewhere.
It was a collossal failure, and a huge strategic mistake.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Quite honestly, I believe you are taking a series of randomly connected concidences and trying to spin this into a conspiracy theory. Police frequently have to filter through all the random events that occur leading up to a crime to find the ones which are directly connected.
This goes back to one of my old arguments about probable and possible. You're not doing the filtering to deselect the probable out of the possible grouping.
And it's not like I'm a big fan of Ariel Sharon or the neocons controlling the White House either. I think there was a horrible failure of analyzing intelligence leading up to 9/11, the focus wasn't in the right place. I said it back then, that the Bush administration, despite warnings from the CIA, was more focused on the least probable risk(rogue nations with ICBMs) versus the most likely risk.(someone sending a bomb via FedEx or some other common every day thing, like an airplane)
So my views are already semi-favorable to your cause, and I still doubt your claims without more solid evidence.
Hell, there's stronger evidence that the Bush family planned the Reagan assassination than what you have linking Israel to 9/11, and I don't believe that was anything other than a coincidence.
Re:Proud to be a Heretic!
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Since your uid is about half of mine, I guess I can't call you a n00b.
My uid is 1/10th his, and I'll call him a n00b.
You're absolutely right. Slashdot is a bastion defense for a wide array of sacred cows, many of which you mention, and slashdot is largely an echo chamber where people can go to pat themselves on the back for thinking they are smart.
This article by Paul Graham says this at one point, "Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. "
The interesting thing about group think is that any slightly differing opinion is "really wrong", and therefore not worth listening to or properly rebutting. It's a fascinating world, where people pat themselves on the back for being open minded and adopting a new fashion, but at the same time ignore or deflect any criticism of their position.
Graham talks about this as he goes on to say, "But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite."
It's an interesting article, and I definately agree with your last sentence...
"I think this is one of the ironies of internet communication -- in an environment which supposedly promotes universal communication, people only seem to communicate in enclaves of like minds, reinforcing each other's narrow world views."
I follow a number of political websites in addition to tech, and I'm finding the internet is really doing more to polarize society than anything else. It's allowing people who might otherwise be exposed to various opinions within their communities, to find like minded people on the internet and commiserate.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Sometimes it's a good thing. One just has to remember to keep it in perspective.
I work for a multinational, and we just kicked EDS's butt over the "gold image" issue. No more back and forth, they own everything and are now responsible for success and failure.
As for Office... I don't know about O2K, but moving from O97 to OXP was a tremendous upgrade, certainly in terms of things working better, security, etc.
Actually I'd say that Microsoft most acted like a monopoly back in the late 1980's up until around 1991 or so. This was when they stuck us with DOS 3 and didn't do anything for like 6 years with the competition driving innovation and change. Now starting in 1991, things started changing. DOS 5, Windows 3.0, etc. and this led to a slew of new software releases, virtually one major one each year up until current time.
(I'm guessing here that the *average*/. reader is under 30 years old).
It's hard to say. There's a lot of slashdotters who are over 30 and still have yet to outgrow the late 1980s computing world.
Although I am generally pro-MS (I remember what it was like _before_ MS, you see -- flames to/dev/null please)
As do I... As do I... Ahh, the good old days, back when nothing worked right.
But I was talking about product activation in the piece you quoted, not the subscription licensing system. I'm at a company which is in the process of rolling out XP, and activation has played zero impact on the project. If other companies are having different experiences, I would love to hear them.
I did agree that the licensing has had an impact, hardly a disaster, but certainly not well received.
And with the price of computers dropping, the cost of the OS and Office Software can be more than the cost of the computer.
You know, the same is true with the price of DVD players, and I don't see any move away from buying DVDs towards Open Source movies.
The acceptability of software cost isn't dependent upon the price of hardware, it is dependent upon what it gives the user in terms of features.
Claiming that we aren't because most people "prefer" MS software is...at best misleading.
Actually this statement is in itself misleading.
The major media deserve NO more credence than the Weekly World News.
I don't trust the any media, but major media certainly have more credibility than the Weekly World News. I definately don't trust any source which clearly has an agenda, such as/., the Inquirer, or your posting.
Pardon me, but the article seems like a bunch of half-assed opinions with no facts to back them up, mixed in with a little bit of good old fashoned flaming/ranting.
Well to be honest, most articles on/. talking about Microsoft are nothing but a bunch of half-assed opinions with no facts to back them up. Nothing new here, and certainly not unexpected.
Licensing 6.0 is a disaster, and so is Product Activation. At least we know that much.
Microsoft certainly took a hit with Licensing 6.0, they've admitted as much.(Which, BTW, is the secret to Microsoft's success... admitting failures and trying to correct them)
But Product Activation? Hasn't impacted Windows XP sales at all. In fact, one could point to it as evidence that Product Activation can work if done correctly.
Now Product Activation with Intuit's tax program, that was a disaster, and Intuit admitted as much.(again, another sign of a sucessful company) But then that's because they didn't implement it correctly.
Frankly, I agree with you. Unfortunately the inmates have been running the asylum and the concept of Open Source has been distorted by Stallman, Perens and others to mean Free as in "screw your ability to make money."
There have been good arguments leveraged for Open source, and having the source code available is certainly one of them. But the requirement that companies screw themselves pretty much kills the notion of open source as a business model.
Redhat clearly understands this, as they move towards a more proprietary model. Mandrake hasn't figured it out yet, as they move to losing more and more money.
This is one danger of commercial entities involving themselves in OSS development. The commercial companies are choosing GNOME not because of technical advantages, but because of monetary advantages (LGPL = no Qt license fees).
This wins the "Most Bizarre Statement of 2003" award.
Perhaps you should try to figure out why things break?
My experience with Microsoft service packs over the past 5-6 years is that they frequently cause bad code to break. i.e. things that worked, but probably shouldn't have.
In most cases this was in the ADO layer. Most other stuff hasn't caused much of a problem.
To the user, there's a very small set of operations they can perform on most programs, and a slightly larger set they can perform on a small set of programs, but there's no general user-visible glue that will let them do things like ``tell application "iTunes"; play "track 01" from "Goldberg variations"; end tell'' or ``sort +1 addresses.txt | grep "gullible" | mailmerge letter.txt''.
Is there a user visible way of doing this in Unix? No, it requires going out and buying a book on shell programming and learning how to do it.
The same is true with Windows. http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting
I don't know about Media player.
As far as the other thing. I can load the address out of Access, and mailmerge in Word... completely automated, no user interaction involved at all.
It's called Windows Scripting Host. It's very similar to the ARexx we used to use on the Amiga, Peter. And if you don't like WSH... NT supports pipes, and you can do similar command line things like you give in your examples.
I believe you've fallen into the same pit that Eric starts from. You don't know anything about Windows, and thus make some vast assumptions about culture.
Windows programmers, nay users, also want programs that work well together.
The existence of the elephantine "suite" was a step in this direction back in the earliest days of Windows, i.e. Windows 3.0. Since that time, features have been built into the OS such as OLE, etc. which now allow any and all programs to operate together as a suite even if they were not written as a suite.
So no need for MAc OSX... Windows has been there for several years already.
I think you need to read "What Liberal Bias?" by Eric Alterman.
I'm sorry, but you look at the news media today and there's very little liberal bias. If there is a bias, it would be a conservative one.
This current Bush administration has gotten a major pass from the media. Events, which under Clinton would have received a full weeks of news coverage, aren't even mentioned. Things like campaign contributors sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
So, making a statement that "All Americans ought to have broadband." is something that nobody's goign to disagree with, and is not something he can be called for not following through on. More or less, he's said nothing newsworthy at all... he's just trying to get the geek vote without offering much in return.
You have just provided the most concise definition of the Leadership of George Bush that I have ever seen.
He is the epitomy of the Typical Washington Politican. He says much, does little, and expects to be rewarded for it.
The case was assigned to a new judge, one with virtually zero antitrust experience, and she ordered settlement talks.
Interesting comment, considering Kollar-Kotelly showed clear understanding of the computer industry in her statements...
whereas Jackson showed only that he was asleep through the trial.
No, Judge KK's findings were far closer to the law than Jacksons. I don't know where you get this idea that Jackson knew what he was doing.
Uh huh. You can make the same statement about all of the solutions out there.
Frick, even back in 1995 I was claiming that the problem with SMTP was there was no way to validate the sender. People far smarter than I were likely saying this was a problem earlier than that.
It's not like SPF came up with the idea just this past year.
Christ sometimes I think people just like to whine a lot. Let's see what they come up with, look at how difficult it is to implement, and what existing stuff it breaks. Then make a comparison.
Pols are ALWAYS paid more than they are worth, and always make far more than the people they represent.
:-(
Hey now, careful with that rhetoric!
I'm not about to start a partisan battle and debate the merits of whether President GW Bush makes more money than he's worth(it's like $500,000/year).
But I can guarantee you that he makes far less than the people he represents, as opposed to the average citizens he probably should be representing.
It seems to me like we have industry groups like ISO, W3C and such that can work on technology standards.
This one kind of puzzled me, even moreso than the "Oh my god! Microsoft is evil and they bought plane tickets for UN people to go to a conference that they otherwise couldn't have afford to go to!" response from the slashbot drones.
The results of this project being over budget and having compatibility problems really are not that surprising. I've been involved in various migrations over the years. OS/2->NT, 3.1->95, 95->NT, NT->XP. Nothing ever goes as expected.
Every time, as you get into it, you find that some software doesn't work as expected. You have to come up with a workaround and/or a solution. These take some time, slow down the project, whatever.
But a dramatic determining factor in this equation has to do with how mainstream is your problem, and how likely it is someone else will fix it before you do.
The problem I see with Linux is that the dynamics that exist in the Windows market to help with your deployment problems simply don't exist in the Linux market. There are going to be issues that may not be resolved for 3-4 years or more rather than the six month timeframe you see in the Windows market.
It's a chicken & egg situation... that dynamic will change as more people adopt Linux, but if I was a CIO I wouldn't bet my company on it.
This will probably get missed in the noise, but...
EE Times had a similar article come out yesterday talking about the death threats that SCO execs, and also industry analysts have been receiving from Linux extremists.
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20040202S0032
Software can be fixed rapidly to prevent a "disease".
Plants cannot, it takes years and years of research and making of hybrids and such.
This argument more readily demonstrates a lack of understanding of the problem, than makes any compelling point.
Well I think the link to Al Qaeda is pretty strong, if only from the fact that Bin Laden admitted to the crime, but there is also a pretty strong money trail. Now, there's also something to suggest Bin Laden is taking credit for every terrorist action in order to make Al Qaeda seem bigger than it is, but I don't doubt many of them are tied to the group.
As for the Taliban. I think the Bush administration miscalculated the Taliban, or simply didn't understand the culture. I honestly wouldn't have trust the Taliban to turn him over to a non-US court either. But just after that the Taliban released a statement saying something like "Bin Laden is no longer in our home." Now we interpreted this to mean "We don't know where he is", and acted as if the Taliban had snubbed us.
But I was reading another article by an expert on the culture and he said that what they said was more subtle, more like "Bin Laden is no longer under our protection, come and get him." It was a cultural breakdown, we viewed it in a western sense, when that's not what it was. It is a lot like some of the differences we have with Asian culture, where the issue is not about being right or wrong, but about saving face and coming away defeated without looking like you were defeated.
But I have no love of the Taliban. I think we should have gone in there, nabbed Bin Laden, turned our backs on the Taliban and bombed them into the stone age anyway. Prior to 2001 I had been reading about what they were doing over there, the way they treated people, etc. This had been going on since they assumed power in 1996.
My biggest gripe right now is that the Bush administration allowed themselves to be distracted by the non-threat of Iraq and as such are ignoring the real problem area, which is Afghanistan and Pakistan. We're committed now to an occupation, which cripples are ability to properly respond elsewhere.
It was a collossal failure, and a huge strategic mistake.
Quite honestly, I believe you are taking a series of randomly connected concidences and trying to spin this into a conspiracy theory. Police frequently have to filter through all the random events that occur leading up to a crime to find the ones which are directly connected.
This goes back to one of my old arguments about probable and possible. You're not doing the filtering to deselect the probable out of the possible grouping.
And it's not like I'm a big fan of Ariel Sharon or the neocons controlling the White House either. I think there was a horrible failure of analyzing intelligence leading up to 9/11, the focus wasn't in the right place. I said it back then, that the Bush administration, despite warnings from the CIA, was more focused on the least probable risk(rogue nations with ICBMs) versus the most likely risk.(someone sending a bomb via FedEx or some other common every day thing, like an airplane)
So my views are already semi-favorable to your cause, and I still doubt your claims without more solid evidence.
Hell, there's stronger evidence that the Bush family planned the Reagan assassination than what you have linking Israel to 9/11, and I don't believe that was anything other than a coincidence.
Since your uid is about half of mine, I guess I can't call you a n00b.
My uid is 1/10th his, and I'll call him a n00b.
You're absolutely right. Slashdot is a bastion defense for a wide array of sacred cows, many of which you mention, and slashdot is largely an echo chamber where people can go to pat themselves on the back for thinking they are smart.
This article by Paul Graham says this at one point, "Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. "
The interesting thing about group think is that any slightly differing opinion is "really wrong", and therefore not worth listening to or properly rebutting. It's a fascinating world, where people pat themselves on the back for being open minded and adopting a new fashion, but at the same time ignore or deflect any criticism of their position.
Graham talks about this as he goes on to say, "But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite."
It's an interesting article, and I definately agree with your last sentence...
"I think this is one of the ironies of internet communication -- in an environment which supposedly promotes universal communication, people only seem to communicate in enclaves of like minds, reinforcing each other's narrow world views."
I follow a number of political websites in addition to tech, and I'm finding the internet is really doing more to polarize society than anything else. It's allowing people who might otherwise be exposed to various opinions within their communities, to find like minded people on the internet and commiserate.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Sometimes it's a good thing. One just has to remember to keep it in perspective.
I work for a multinational, and we just kicked EDS's butt over the "gold image" issue. No more back and forth, they own everything and are now responsible for success and failure.
As for Office... I don't know about O2K, but moving from O97 to OXP was a tremendous upgrade, certainly in terms of things working better, security, etc.
What MS needed to do was slow down the treadmill.
That's not gonna happen.
Interesting.
/. reader is under 30 years old).
Actually I'd say that Microsoft most acted like a monopoly back in the late 1980's up until around 1991 or so. This was when they stuck us with DOS 3 and didn't do anything for like 6 years with the competition driving innovation and change. Now starting in 1991, things started changing. DOS 5, Windows 3.0, etc. and this led to a slew of new software releases, virtually one major one each year up until current time.
(I'm guessing here that the *average*
It's hard to say. There's a lot of slashdotters who are over 30 and still have yet to outgrow the late 1980s computing world.
Although I am generally pro-MS (I remember what it was like _before_ MS, you see -- flames to /dev/null please)
As do I... As do I... Ahh, the good old days, back when nothing worked right.
But I was talking about product activation in the piece you quoted, not the subscription licensing system. I'm at a company which is in the process of rolling out XP, and activation has played zero impact on the project. If other companies are having different experiences, I would love to hear them.
I did agree that the licensing has had an impact, hardly a disaster, but certainly not well received.
And with the price of computers dropping, the cost of the OS and Office Software can be more than the cost of the computer.
/., the Inquirer, or your posting.
You know, the same is true with the price of DVD players, and I don't see any move away from buying DVDs towards Open Source movies.
The acceptability of software cost isn't dependent upon the price of hardware, it is dependent upon what it gives the user in terms of features.
Claiming that we aren't because most people "prefer" MS software is...at best misleading.
Actually this statement is in itself misleading.
The major media deserve NO more credence than the Weekly World News.
I don't trust the any media, but major media certainly have more credibility than the Weekly World News. I definately don't trust any source which clearly has an agenda, such as
Pardon me, but the article seems like a bunch of half-assed opinions with no facts to back them up, mixed in with a little bit of good old fashoned flaming/ranting.
/. talking about Microsoft are nothing but a bunch of half-assed opinions with no facts to back them up. Nothing new here, and certainly not unexpected.
Well to be honest, most articles on
Licensing 6.0 is a disaster, and so is Product Activation. At least we know that much.
Microsoft certainly took a hit with Licensing 6.0, they've admitted as much.(Which, BTW, is the secret to Microsoft's success... admitting failures and trying to correct them)
But Product Activation? Hasn't impacted Windows XP sales at all. In fact, one could point to it as evidence that Product Activation can work if done correctly.
Now Product Activation with Intuit's tax program, that was a disaster, and Intuit admitted as much.(again, another sign of a sucessful company) But then that's because they didn't implement it correctly.
Open source entails no obligation by any individual or any company to make their product available gratis.
You better talk to The OSI people about that...
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
Frankly, I agree with you. Unfortunately the inmates have been running the asylum and the concept of Open Source has been distorted by Stallman, Perens and others to mean Free as in "screw your ability to make money."
There have been good arguments leveraged for Open source, and having the source code available is certainly one of them. But the requirement that companies screw themselves pretty much kills the notion of open source as a business model.
Redhat clearly understands this, as they move towards a more proprietary model. Mandrake hasn't figured it out yet, as they move to losing more and more money.
If you really want to grok the true Unix experience, you use twm. tvtwm if you're feeling extra randy.
Anything else is training wheels.
This is one danger of commercial entities involving themselves in OSS development. The commercial companies are choosing GNOME not because of technical advantages, but because of monetary advantages (LGPL = no Qt license fees).
This wins the "Most Bizarre Statement of 2003" award.
Perhaps you should try to figure out why things break?
My experience with Microsoft service packs over the past 5-6 years is that they frequently cause bad code to break. i.e. things that worked, but probably shouldn't have.
In most cases this was in the ADO layer. Most other stuff hasn't caused much of a problem.
If you have specific points you want to address, feel free to mention them.
Otherwise, I find this ad hominem attack to be baseless.
To the user, there's a very small set of operations they can perform on most programs, and a slightly larger set they can perform on a small set of programs, but there's no general user-visible glue that will let them do things like ``tell application "iTunes"; play "track 01" from "Goldberg variations"; end tell'' or ``sort +1 addresses.txt | grep "gullible" | mailmerge letter.txt''.
Is there a user visible way of doing this in Unix? No, it requires going out and buying a book on shell programming and learning how to do it.
The same is true with Windows.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting
I don't know about Media player.
As far as the other thing. I can load the address out of Access, and mailmerge in Word... completely automated, no user interaction involved at all.
It's called Windows Scripting Host. It's very similar to the ARexx we used to use on the Amiga, Peter. And if you don't like WSH... NT supports pipes, and you can do similar command line things like you give in your examples.
I'm all for keeping software up to date, but if it breaks things?
How do you know if it breaks things if you don't try it?
How do you know it doesn't fix things?
I'm not a huge fan of spending weeks trying to debug and workaround some glitch that could have been fixed by simply updating the core software.
I believe you've fallen into the same pit that Eric starts from. You don't know anything about Windows, and thus make some vast assumptions about culture.
Windows programmers, nay users, also want programs that work well together.
The existence of the elephantine "suite" was a step in this direction back in the earliest days of Windows, i.e. Windows 3.0. Since that time, features have been built into the OS such as OLE, etc. which now allow any and all programs to operate together as a suite even if they were not written as a suite.
So no need for MAc OSX... Windows has been there for several years already.
I think you need to read "What Liberal Bias?" by Eric Alterman.
I'm sorry, but you look at the news media today and there's very little liberal bias. If there is a bias, it would be a conservative one.
This current Bush administration has gotten a major pass from the media. Events, which under Clinton would have received a full weeks of news coverage, aren't even mentioned. Things like campaign contributors sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom, etc.
The facts just don't back up your preconceptions.