It's a tradeoff. It's virtually impossible (as of yet) to have incredible interoperability AND security at the same time. Obviously, the interoperability is worth the potential security risk to MS's customers (including myself). I see security as being a realtively minor threat as long as patches and firewalls are used, but the apps I can write with VBA save my business a lot of time and money.
Some kind of bizzare Visual Basic macros that use Windows DLLs directly or something?
You've obviously never used Windows before. See, for the past, oh, I dunno, 8 years or so, Windows has had this thing called "COM". "COM" is what makes writing Windows apps cheap and easy. It's a way of reusing objects (OOP). So, there's nothing bizarre about using DLL's. Most major Windows apps relies on them heavily. But you don't use them directly, you generally use COM to access them. And the MS Office COM objects are generally called "VBA". There's a whole giant object model for all of MS Office called VBA that is often used extensively. It's pretty nice. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, if you need say, spreadsheet functionality in your app, you just use, say, the Excel.Workbook object. So more than likely, there's at least one app taking advantage of the openness of MS Office, which would take a lot of time and money to re-write, since the object model in Open Office is completely different, if it exists at all.
As a retailer, I can say that there is no way I'd spend money accepting something like this. At least not for many, many years. Look at the current retail environment... it's being destroyed by people shopping online, cutting into margins. Most retailers STILL don't accept Amex (I do), even though accepting Amex takes a 5 minute telephone call, and $0 additional investment. Hell, it took the fast food chains many years to ever take credit cards. Considering how much $$ this is going to cost us as retailers, I can say that there's no way in hell I'd do this until it becomes very, very universal, and a large number of customers start asking for it (no, 1 or 2 geeks doesn't count as a large number of customers). Credit cards work just fine, anyway. This is another solution to a non-existent problem.
I agree with "A solution searching for a problem". What's the problem with voting with paper? It's worked for hundreds of years, and I'm not aware of any problems inherit in it. And, any problems there may be, won't be fixed by electronic voting. If anything, complexity, and more potential for corruption will be introduced. Technology is *not* the cure-all, or in this case, the appropriate solution.
None. Why? One potential reason is because it's not needed. Ever consider that all the 'usability tests' that MS conducts are a bunch of shit? Look at the two 'major' - supposed - outcomes of such research: MS Bob and Windows XP's graphical interface. All that this illustrates is that MS found people are dumb, and that MS doesn't think most folks are capable of too terribly much, mentally. So make it simple to the point where it loses practicality for the marginal number of people that are skilled.
Oh please. Usability is THE REASON (well, ok, marketing too, to a lesser degree) that Windows runs 90%+ of the world's PC's. Usability is THE REASON why Linux isn't widely adopted as a desktop platform. So you just keep telling yourself that, and you'll keep Linux and other OSS projects to a tiny, tiny userbase.
People want more features, so they write them themselves - and quite a few people will use them. Sure, most people don't (they just use the 'vanilla' configuration), but it's necessary to have that flexibility in the framework; otherwise there will be no innovation. The benefit to a system like linux is that flexibility is there due to the openness and availability of the source code: nothing needs to be reverse engineered.
That's great and all, but flexibility is greatly overrated. I want my computers to run my businesses for me. That's it. "Flexibility" as a "feature" is something that's thrown around when a product is simply too difficult to use. Fuck flexibility. I want something that works. Hell, I want something with LESS flexibility. I don't need software that's going to do everything under the sun. Software should do it's job, and get the hell out of the way. If people wanted "flexibility" above all else, you'd find stereos that are sold without cases, and wires that you have to connect yourself every time you wanted to use it.
Every chick I meet says that she's a "real geek". 9 times out of ten, it's not true, but it definitely IS the cool thing among the hipster community right now. Just check out Friendster, and you'll see what I mean. I'm sick of hearing it really, because it's not true. Some chick tells me she's a geek, and I ask her about some article on/. or about OSX, she has no idea what I'm talking about, so I just tell her to shut up and take her clothes off.
I remember dialing up to BBS's with a 300 bps modem, using XModem to download files. You know when you're a geek when you start to get all misty-eyed over a protocol!
It hurts me to say this but Microsoft let Win98 age to 5 years+ before giving it the knife.
On top of that, MS had several alternatives to switch to if you still really needed the support (personally, I think that only W2K is a real alternative, but some people like XP, too).
Who says they have maintained any integrity. My company won't do business with them, ever. Wait another 6 months to see how their bottom line is doing, and you can see what other companies think of them. Personally, I think that they screwed the pooch on this one. What company is going to spend many thousands of dollars in up front costs, training, and time with a company that decided to suddenly drop support for their product not even a year later? It'd be one thing if they were a well-established company. As is, they were still in start-up mode. I personally don't expect them to recover from this one.
At least one major financial package vendor does that now. I've beta tested one of their newer products repeatedly, as a user, and given them real usability and bug feedback, some of which they've actually incorporated into the product. So, this *does* happen, but there are varying degrees. For example, this one package was slated to go through exactly 3 iterations in beta, come hell or high water. Well, the third try out, there were still several important bugs not fixed, which were fixed between beta 3 and release. As any good developer knows, you do *not* fix bugs then send it to market without first going through Q/A and/or another round of beta.
Re:Stuck with Windows?
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 1
The only thing that keeps people stuck on Windows is their attitudes
Actually, for me, it's time and money. I don't have the time and money to dick around with Linux shit, and Windows works just fine for me. So, when you grow up, get a job, a family, and a life, *then* come talk to me about "attitudes", kiddo.
but still wish someone had the ultimate phone- bluetooth, mac and the ability to use ssh without spending $500+. I don't want a camera or to even browse the web, just give me mail and shell and I'd be extremely happy.
Don't hold your breath. I'd guess that the market for a phone like this is about 10 people. Shell from a phone? Riiiiight. I'm sure that customers are knocking down cellphone providers' doors for this one. I'd also like a phone that had perfect reception everywhere, and that also acted like a spare cash register for my point of sale system. Why oh why isn't anybody making one of these?
don't think the spammers are installing linux that much. (At least not the BIG ones, and they may be knowledgable/paranoid enough to go with OpenBSD or something)
Most spammers use *BSD. Most of them don't know their ass from a hole in the ground... they just install it, and buy a script and a few lists, and fire away.
Linux boxes can't read NTFS? And even if they can't, I can't imagine that being a good enough reason to trade terrible storage efficiency, no security, and no fault tolerance.
Have you ever considered leaving your cave and going out into the real world to support local businesses? That way, you don't pay any shipping whatsoever, and you help local merchants and your local government. I have no sympathy for people who shop online to get the cheapest price possible, without considering where their money goes or how it's being used. I think that you should pay shipping, handling, and a special tax to your local gov't to dissuade this kind of thing.
What I'm trying to figure out is how exactly FAT figures into the future. I mean, I'm in no way up with the times as far as computers go. I use PS2 ports, parallel and serial ports, all because they work and they're rock solid and they've been around for a long time. However, I haven't used FAT in many, many years. As soon as NT 3.51 came out, I switched to NTFS, and never had a data loss or a security problem. That was what... 10 years ago? Why are people still using FAT? It's horribly inefficient on any drive 1 gig+ with even a few thousand files, it's got no security, and no crash recovery (journaling). I can't imagine formatting a 40 gig drive as FAT. That's just stupid in 99.9% of the cases.
Download gentoolkit and emerge from a current server and validate the checksum. Manually build them. Then emerge sync. Then emerge -u world. Anything less is just trusting that the attackers couldn't cover their tracks well.
That's great. How about instructions on how to do all of this?
It's a trade off. Personally, security is not a huge deal for my company, but the integration is very valuable. Thus, I'd rather trade some "security" for the integration, definitely. I save money every time I don't have to deal with editing a.* file.
No matter which way you look at it, there's absolutely no comparison between tobacco and spam. Tobacco kills people, spam is a minor inconvenience. This isn't life or death, and it's sad to see geeks with nothing else in their lives acting as if spam is as bad as say, Hitler. Yes, it's a PITA. Now, get on with your life.
70% is insane. The whole point of starting your own business is so that when you bust your ass, you do it for yourself, and for nobody else. If you're giving away 70% of your company, that's almost as bad as working for somebody else. On top of it, VC is no guarantee that the business will succeed. While some small businesses are under-capitalized, I would worry more about starting the company on a bad note (ie: spending recklessly). I started mine on a shoestring and I very quickly understood how to make a dollar, and how to stretch those dollars that I had. If somebody dropped a few million in my lap, I think I'd just giggle hysterically, and roll around naked, in $100 bills. Plus, who's got the better story to tell Inc. Magazine... the guy who got the VC, or the guy who maxxed out the credit cards?
Where the hell do you live and are there any available apartments?
Hehehehe... Yeah, it's a pretty progressive town. And did I mention... the connection is *fast*?? Much faster than any kind of DSL I've ever seen, or cable. It's closer to an unmetered T3. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go BitTorrent a few new movies to watch tonight.;)
I'm sorry, but starting a software company with $0 is really no big deal at all. Most software doesn't take anything but time to create, and selling takes nothing but a pair of shows and/or a telephone. If these guys had started, say, a retail business, or a manufacturing business with no money, I'd be impressed. As is, I started my own brick-and-mortar company on credit cards last year, and this year will have sales of $500K+ and projected sales next year of $1M+. No VC. Ever. So, like I said... big deal.
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It's a tradeoff. It's virtually impossible (as of yet) to have incredible interoperability AND security at the same time. Obviously, the interoperability is worth the potential security risk to MS's customers (including myself). I see security as being a realtively minor threat as long as patches and firewalls are used, but the apps I can write with VBA save my business a lot of time and money.
Some kind of bizzare Visual Basic macros that use Windows DLLs directly or something?
You've obviously never used Windows before. See, for the past, oh, I dunno, 8 years or so, Windows has had this thing called "COM". "COM" is what makes writing Windows apps cheap and easy. It's a way of reusing objects (OOP). So, there's nothing bizarre about using DLL's. Most major Windows apps relies on them heavily. But you don't use them directly, you generally use COM to access them. And the MS Office COM objects are generally called "VBA". There's a whole giant object model for all of MS Office called VBA that is often used extensively. It's pretty nice. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, if you need say, spreadsheet functionality in your app, you just use, say, the Excel.Workbook object. So more than likely, there's at least one app taking advantage of the openness of MS Office, which would take a lot of time and money to re-write, since the object model in Open Office is completely different, if it exists at all.
As a retailer, I can say that there is no way I'd spend money accepting something like this. At least not for many, many years. Look at the current retail environment... it's being destroyed by people shopping online, cutting into margins. Most retailers STILL don't accept Amex (I do), even though accepting Amex takes a 5 minute telephone call, and $0 additional investment. Hell, it took the fast food chains many years to ever take credit cards. Considering how much $$ this is going to cost us as retailers, I can say that there's no way in hell I'd do this until it becomes very, very universal, and a large number of customers start asking for it (no, 1 or 2 geeks doesn't count as a large number of customers). Credit cards work just fine, anyway. This is another solution to a non-existent problem.
Carrboro, NC
I agree with "A solution searching for a problem". What's the problem with voting with paper? It's worked for hundreds of years, and I'm not aware of any problems inherit in it. And, any problems there may be, won't be fixed by electronic voting. If anything, complexity, and more potential for corruption will be introduced. Technology is *not* the cure-all, or in this case, the appropriate solution.
None. Why? One potential reason is because it's not needed. Ever consider that all the 'usability tests' that MS conducts are a bunch of shit? Look at the two 'major' - supposed - outcomes of such research: MS Bob and Windows XP's graphical interface. All that this illustrates is that MS found people are dumb, and that MS doesn't think most folks are capable of too terribly much, mentally. So make it simple to the point where it loses practicality for the marginal number of people that are skilled.
Oh please. Usability is THE REASON (well, ok, marketing too, to a lesser degree) that Windows runs 90%+ of the world's PC's. Usability is THE REASON why Linux isn't widely adopted as a desktop platform. So you just keep telling yourself that, and you'll keep Linux and other OSS projects to a tiny, tiny userbase.
People want more features, so they write them themselves - and quite a few people will use them. Sure, most people don't (they just use the 'vanilla' configuration), but it's necessary to have that flexibility in the framework; otherwise there will be no innovation. The benefit to a system like linux is that flexibility is there due to the openness and availability of the source code: nothing needs to be reverse engineered.
That's great and all, but flexibility is greatly overrated. I want my computers to run my businesses for me. That's it. "Flexibility" as a "feature" is something that's thrown around when a product is simply too difficult to use. Fuck flexibility. I want something that works. Hell, I want something with LESS flexibility. I don't need software that's going to do everything under the sun. Software should do it's job, and get the hell out of the way. If people wanted "flexibility" above all else, you'd find stereos that are sold without cases, and wires that you have to connect yourself every time you wanted to use it.
Every chick I meet says that she's a "real geek". 9 times out of ten, it's not true, but it definitely IS the cool thing among the hipster community right now. Just check out Friendster, and you'll see what I mean. I'm sick of hearing it really, because it's not true. Some chick tells me she's a geek, and I ask her about some article on /. or about OSX, she has no idea what I'm talking about, so I just tell her to shut up and take her clothes off.
I remember dialing up to BBS's with a 300 bps modem, using XModem to download files. You know when you're a geek when you start to get all misty-eyed over a protocol!
It hurts me to say this but Microsoft let Win98 age to 5 years+ before giving it the knife.
On top of that, MS had several alternatives to switch to if you still really needed the support (personally, I think that only W2K is a real alternative, but some people like XP, too).
Who says they have maintained any integrity. My company won't do business with them, ever. Wait another 6 months to see how their bottom line is doing, and you can see what other companies think of them. Personally, I think that they screwed the pooch on this one. What company is going to spend many thousands of dollars in up front costs, training, and time with a company that decided to suddenly drop support for their product not even a year later? It'd be one thing if they were a well-established company. As is, they were still in start-up mode. I personally don't expect them to recover from this one.
At least one major financial package vendor does that now. I've beta tested one of their newer products repeatedly, as a user, and given them real usability and bug feedback, some of which they've actually incorporated into the product. So, this *does* happen, but there are varying degrees. For example, this one package was slated to go through exactly 3 iterations in beta, come hell or high water. Well, the third try out, there were still several important bugs not fixed, which were fixed between beta 3 and release. As any good developer knows, you do *not* fix bugs then send it to market without first going through Q/A and/or another round of beta.
The only thing that keeps people stuck on Windows is their attitudes
Actually, for me, it's time and money. I don't have the time and money to dick around with Linux shit, and Windows works just fine for me. So, when you grow up, get a job, a family, and a life, *then* come talk to me about "attitudes", kiddo.
Geez, what I wouldn't give to see this laser fired at a giant house-sized, popcorn-filled, foil Jiffy-pop thingy. Mmmmm..... popcorn.....
but still wish someone had the ultimate phone- bluetooth, mac and the ability to use ssh without spending $500+. I don't want a camera or to even browse the web, just give me mail and shell and I'd be extremely happy.
Don't hold your breath. I'd guess that the market for a phone like this is about 10 people. Shell from a phone? Riiiiight. I'm sure that customers are knocking down cellphone providers' doors for this one. I'd also like a phone that had perfect reception everywhere, and that also acted like a spare cash register for my point of sale system. Why oh why isn't anybody making one of these?
don't think the spammers are installing linux that much. (At least not the BIG ones, and they may be knowledgable/paranoid enough to go with OpenBSD or something)
Most spammers use *BSD. Most of them don't know their ass from a hole in the ground... they just install it, and buy a script and a few lists, and fire away.
Linux boxes can't read NTFS? And even if they can't, I can't imagine that being a good enough reason to trade terrible storage efficiency, no security, and no fault tolerance.
Have you ever considered leaving your cave and going out into the real world to support local businesses? That way, you don't pay any shipping whatsoever, and you help local merchants and your local government. I have no sympathy for people who shop online to get the cheapest price possible, without considering where their money goes or how it's being used. I think that you should pay shipping, handling, and a special tax to your local gov't to dissuade this kind of thing.
I'd be careful about trying to tax ninjas... Ninjas can kick ass and they're sweet!
What I'm trying to figure out is how exactly FAT figures into the future. I mean, I'm in no way up with the times as far as computers go. I use PS2 ports, parallel and serial ports, all because they work and they're rock solid and they've been around for a long time. However, I haven't used FAT in many, many years. As soon as NT 3.51 came out, I switched to NTFS, and never had a data loss or a security problem. That was what... 10 years ago? Why are people still using FAT? It's horribly inefficient on any drive 1 gig+ with even a few thousand files, it's got no security, and no crash recovery (journaling). I can't imagine formatting a 40 gig drive as FAT. That's just stupid in 99.9% of the cases.
Download gentoolkit and emerge from a current server and validate the checksum. Manually build them. Then emerge sync. Then emerge -u world. Anything less is just trusting that the attackers couldn't cover their tracks well.
That's great. How about instructions on how to do all of this?
It's a trade off. Personally, security is not a huge deal for my company, but the integration is very valuable. Thus, I'd rather trade some "security" for the integration, definitely. I save money every time I don't have to deal with editing a .* file.
No matter which way you look at it, there's absolutely no comparison between tobacco and spam. Tobacco kills people, spam is a minor inconvenience. This isn't life or death, and it's sad to see geeks with nothing else in their lives acting as if spam is as bad as say, Hitler. Yes, it's a PITA. Now, get on with your life.
70% is insane. The whole point of starting your own business is so that when you bust your ass, you do it for yourself, and for nobody else. If you're giving away 70% of your company, that's almost as bad as working for somebody else. On top of it, VC is no guarantee that the business will succeed. While some small businesses are under-capitalized, I would worry more about starting the company on a bad note (ie: spending recklessly). I started mine on a shoestring and I very quickly understood how to make a dollar, and how to stretch those dollars that I had. If somebody dropped a few million in my lap, I think I'd just giggle hysterically, and roll around naked, in $100 bills. Plus, who's got the better story to tell Inc. Magazine... the guy who got the VC, or the guy who maxxed out the credit cards?
Proudly paying down my credit cards...
free... wireless... network...
;)
Where the hell do you live and are there any available apartments?
Hehehehe... Yeah, it's a pretty progressive town. And did I mention... the connection is *fast*?? Much faster than any kind of DSL I've ever seen, or cable. It's closer to an unmetered T3. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go BitTorrent a few new movies to watch tonight.
I'm sorry, but starting a software company with $0 is really no big deal at all. Most software doesn't take anything but time to create, and selling takes nothing but a pair of shows and/or a telephone. If these guys had started, say, a retail business, or a manufacturing business with no money, I'd be impressed. As is, I started my own brick-and-mortar company on credit cards last year, and this year will have sales of $500K+ and projected sales next year of $1M+. No VC. Ever. So, like I said... big deal.