But instead, Microsoft realized they could do better than the "me-too" Google phones. Instead of coming up with another boring cluttered smart-phone to compete with everyone re-packaging Android, they hunkered down and proved themselves the more creative company. They came up with a clean new interface and worked tirelessly on building a solid base platform which could easily go head-to-head with anything available. They are trying to win by helping with advertising costs for their manufacturers, just as Google most assuredly does.
Disclaimer: I do work for Microsoft, though I am nowhere near the Windows Phone nor the marketing departments. I have no special non-public knowledge of the goings-on in either department. I am however a proud owner of a Mango phone (HTC Arrive on Sprint). For anyone who hasn't used Mango, it's an incredibly stable feature-rich platform which deserves a look.
Are they not considering DirecTV to be a company? I don't see any possible way Comcast could take this award over DirecTV. Since I switched to Comcast, they have been straight forward with their billing, I get what I pay for, and if my gear craps out on a Friday night I can get it changed out on Saturday. I'm failing to see what's so terrible about them.
To: Comcast internet service (22 down, 5 up, typically measures out to 30+ down and 15+ up) (~$68/month) Comcast limited cable (channels 2-30, as I was hardly watching TV) (~$15/month) Total price: ~$83/month
Also, DirecTV had the absolute worst customer service I've ever experienced, while Comcast's has honestly been pretty good.
I know it's popular to bash Microsoft on Slashdot, but why don't we just title this "The Walmart Effect: American products made in Chinese sweatshops because Americans have become too damn cheap to pay for quality products produced by skilled labor under good working conditions."
Only two HOV and two general purpose lanes? You've gotta be kidding me... anyone who has EVER driven across the 520 bridge in rush hour would cry foul. Mass transit is a great idea, except in the Seattle area it never runs when you need it to, which means anyone with a less-than-typical schedule (that is to say, 90% of the Puget Sound work force) still has to drive if they want to be able to get home after work.
Right now the bridge is 4 lanes, none of them HOV. Moving ~80% of that traffic into one lane, ~15% into another lane, and ~5 into a mass-transit lane would only a) make the problems worse and b) under-utilize the new bridge.
If someone wanted to suggest making the bridge slightly wider so it could accommodate 4 general-purpose, 2 HOV, and 1 set of tracks down the middle, and do it in such a way that it doesn't significantly delay construction, I'd be all for it.
SharedView and Live Mesh are two kick-ass free services from Microsoft with somewhat different feature sets but both useful for what's being requested here.
SharedView may be one of the most under-advertised products Microsoft has ever released. It's been around for a couple years and is basically a stripped-down version of Live Meeting. A presenter can share his desktop with up to 15 people, give control to attendees, etc. Files of up to 100MB can be transferred through the service.
Live Mesh is a newer offering (in Beta) which allows online storage and synchronization of up to 5GB. Several devices can be added to one's mesh, and specified folders will automatically sync between devices and the online storage (similar to Groove and Sharepoint). Unlike Groove, Mesh also supports connecting to the desktop of other systems which are part of the Mesh. The client install is pretty straight forward and simple, to where most average users could figure it out no problem.
The only downside to these products is they don't work with Linux. There is a Mac OS X client for Live Mesh, though I've never used it. There's a Java console for Live Meeting, but sadly it doesn't appear to be available with SharedView.
Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?
We can only hope it will kill the publishers, the way they've been killing US college kids for years. Do you think college kids would eat such a steady diet of ramen noodles if they weren't spending all their money on textbooks? Have you ever compared the cost of textbooks in the US to the SAME books overseas? Take a look at amazon.co.uk sometime and compare a textbook there to the same book in the US. The only difference is likely that one says "international version" on the cover. Oh, and it'll be less than half the price.
No, a bill such as this won't endanger publishing companies... publishing companies have endangered themselves by pissing off their customers with insanely high pricing. Maybe something like this would finally bring competition to the textbook industry and help make school a little more affordable.
How does it take 68 people to monitor that few servers, and most of them BLADES?!? The writers have apparently never worked in a large network environment (not that I'd expect that they would have, being writers and all). But seriously... that's not really that many servers for a large online service, it really shouldn't take that much work to keep it all running unless it's horribly designed.
Eh well, if they have the cash flow to retain that many warm bags of mostly water, more power to them.
Here I thought we were just becoming a nation of lard-asses, when really it was a sneaky plot to build up our future stem cell reserves. Thank you, McDonalds for your SuperSized McWisdom.
We no longer have to deal with that conflict and jump though hoops to try and make science without angering paymasters / teachers / bosses.
Surely you don't believe this? How much of science is done on behalf of the ones giving the grant money? How much research is set aside or silenced because those funding it at some level don't like the results? If a scientist believes they have strong scientific evidence for intelligent design, do you expect they'll be able to get it published easily and obtain the same recognition that they might for the latest hypothesis on evolution? Or do you suppose people might refuse to publish their work, demote or fire them from their schools, and in short do everything possible to shut them up?
So, where do you suppose the "Earth as a solid surfaced planet covered with water" came from?
There is no scientific explanation for the origin of matter. The creationist view (no matter which if any religious viewpoint it comes from) at least puts forth some sort of answer to that question, though it is necessarily not a scientific answer, as the beginnings of the universe are not something that can be observed and tested (and it is understood to the pupil that a hypothesis without testability, observability and repeatability is not science).
That answer for most would be "An intelligent designer who is not bound by the scientific laws of space/time/physics created matter and proceeded to create the universe and the earth and all that is in them. As the designer exists outside of the laws we know and understand, he is able to do these things in a way which is beyond our understanding."
Microsoft making deals with OEMs to block installation of competing browsers: BAD. I don't disagree one bit with that.
Microsoft being forced to bundle competing browsers with their product: ALSO BAD.
The court never said which browsers. If Microsoft is doing the bundling, the OEMs still don't have much choice in the matter. They could add 6 other browsers to Windows and still hurt Firefox by excluding it if they wanted. That might open them to lawsuits, so perhaps they include EVERY browser, no matter how lame. Then some massive security flaw is found in one of them, and a bunch of computers get owned... Microsoft gets sued for including a browser full of known security problems and not patching them (even though it's a competitor's product which they should have responsibility to patch).
So, the final result - Microsoft eventually just removes all browsers from Windows, including IE. Who wins then? It makes it awful hard to download Firefox or Chrome. It's a PITA for consumers. It would be seen as "selling an intentionally crippled OS" and someone would sue Microsoft.
I say, let Microsoft bundle what they want. Let the OEMs add what they want. Let the consumers use what they want. Forcing Microsoft to add competitors' browsers to Windows is still NOT the answer.
Freedom of the people to choose a different browser is great. Somewhere, however, the line has to be drawn. Microsoft is clearly not limiting the ability of other browsers to work with Windows, and is not stopping anyone from downloading and installing a different browser.
What happened to the freedom of a company to sell their own product without interference? Why should they advertise for a competing product in their own? Even more, why should they be required to bundle a competitor's product in their own?
Should the Adobe Flash installer also include Silverlight? Should RedHat include a Slackware install disk? Really, where does the madness end?
I think the appropriate response from Microsoft would be to stop selling Windows in the EU. The EU wants people to see alternatives, so great. Stop making Windows available until there's a public outcry and reversal of these insane rulings.
No, never in my life have I had to speed up to avoid an accident.
And just how many days have you been driving, sir? My life and the lives of my passengers were likely saved by me speeding up when I saw I was about to be in a collision once. I was driving through an intersection, and a cab driver in a minivan was waiting to turn left. As I was entering the intersection, he turned. It was too late for me to stop, so I sped up and swerved as far to the right as I could. As a result, he hit my driver door at a fairly low rate of speed, rather than me hitting his passenger door at a much higher rate of speed. As a result, the car was totaled but no one was injured at all.
As if storing something for 25 years is actually a challenge. I have 5.25" floppy disks from when I was a young child. Not quite 25 years, but getting close and still fine. 3.5" floppies always sucked, the bits fall off if you look at them wrong. Most electronics have NO PROBLEM lasting 25 years. I have a record player and receiver from probably early 70s that work fine. LPs from the early 1900s that still play, though a little scratchy. If seriously in doubt, burn the files into a ROM chip, interface it with USB, and be done with it. I know my old NES games still play fine, and they're burned into a ROM... An interface as prevalent as USB will be around in 25 years, assuming we're still around. Really... if I can wire up an old floppy drive from the early 80s today, why would I not be able to hook up an old USB device in another 25 years. A 25-yr time capsule shouldn't be a terribly difficult thing. Once you get to 100+ years, I can understand needing to do a bit more planning (at that point, you've gotta at the very least include a complete machine to read the media). Oh, and as far as capacitors go, if you're that worried about them replace all the electrolytics with tantalums or somesuch. More expensive sure, but they don't dry out. Of course, if you use a high quality electrolytic it'll probably be fine too. Even if they do dry out, any decent sod with a soldering iron should be able to fix it in no time. Caps have been around a long-ass time, they aren't going anywhere.
At risk of sounding like I'm supporting something Microsoft has done, the feature they added with Server 2003 SP2 (and I believe also XP SP2) was quite a good move considering these facts.
When a SP2 system is first brought up, after running through Mini-Setup or the OOBE, it will open a "Post-Setup Security Update" wizard. Until the user clicks the "Finish" button on the wizard, the firewall blocks all incoming traffic. The wizard also has links to Microsoft Update, etc. This gives the user a chance to download all the patches before opening up the firewall.
In Vista/2008, the firewall is on by default and fairly locked down, only allowing certain traffic through. In Server 2008, the firewall rules are also grouped into categories to make it easier to configure so the user doesn't get frustrated and just turn it off completely (and if a user tries this by just stopping the firewall service, they lose their 'net connection completely... one must instead set a firewall policy to allow all traffic, which then shows the firewall status as "off").
It's unfortunate that they felt like crippling a perfectly useful router just because free firmware made it competitive with their high end products. Dude... If that were their reason, they wouldn't have come out with the WRT54GL to please all the people wanting to put better firmware on their routers. The reason for lessening the Flash and RAM is simple - They switched OSs. The first WRT54Gs ran Linux. They switched to a smaller, lighter embedded OS (VxWorks). Since it has a smaller footprint, they were able to halve the Flash and RAM, helping them compete in a market primarily made up of cheap bastards. For people who are slightly less cheap, they still make the version with more memory... the GL model is, from what I've read, identical to the v4.0 of the WRT54G. When people aren't willing to pony up the cash for a quality product, manufacturers drop the quality of the product. Consumers don't really care. If they did, you'd still be able to find quality merchandise made in the US at all retailers. Instead, we have disposable crap on the shelves in most of our stores, and people snatch it up. Just wait and see what happens when we go to war with China (and mark my words, we will).
Re:Fuck you, Slashdot.
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 1
Please, oh PLEASE, use a DICTIONARY and look up the word "travesty!" The only travesty here is you making a travesty of the English language. Perhaps slashdot should have a section on proper grammar. It's a TRAGEDY that people like yourself seem to have forgotten what a dictionary or thesaurus is to be used for.
This seems like one case where RFID would be truly good and useful. Embed an RFID chip in each medical tool/sponge/whatever, and then pass a reader over the patient's body to check for anything still inside. Cost shouldn't really be an issue... RFID chips are cheap now, and medical equipment is so outrageously expensive that adding $0.50 each or whatever isn't really going to be a noticeable difference in price. It would allow everything that can be done with a barcode, and then some.
Yes - I'm replying to my own message. Just went back and actually looked at the link - The advisory was sent out on 4/26/06. So, this is now officially at least a 2-month old issue. Now on to The Onion for my timely news.
Blah I say. Blah. This is old news. I first read about it over a month ago when Dell shipped a "critical update" for some of their laptops for this issue. Check out this HP advisory from a couple weeks ago:
Please, if you love the spaghetti of cables, NEVER go anywhere NEAR a datacenter I have to work in. Those who believe in spaghetti cabling should be strung up in it and left to die slowly, suspended above the air vents in the cold aisle so they dry out and preserve nicely as a warning to others who might be tempted to spaghetti-cable.
Velcro straps are a wonderful thing. They should be used liberally in the cabling of a cabinet, to avoid this spaghetti you speak of.
Oh, and touring a datacenter is interesting for about the first 5 minutes, if that. After that it's "hey, more blinkenlights. more cable. more cold air blowing up my legs out of the floor. more fan noise. can we go yet?"
Slashdot Mirror
Let me fix that last paragraph for you:
But instead, Microsoft realized they could do better than the "me-too" Google phones. Instead of coming up with another boring cluttered smart-phone to compete with everyone re-packaging Android, they hunkered down and proved themselves the more creative company. They came up with a clean new interface and worked tirelessly on building a solid base platform which could easily go head-to-head with anything available. They are trying to win by helping with advertising costs for their manufacturers, just as Google most assuredly does.
Disclaimer: I do work for Microsoft, though I am nowhere near the Windows Phone nor the marketing departments. I have no special non-public knowledge of the goings-on in either department. I am however a proud owner of a Mango phone (HTC Arrive on Sprint). For anyone who hasn't used Mango, it's an incredibly stable feature-rich platform which deserves a look.
Are they not considering DirecTV to be a company? I don't see any possible way Comcast could take this award over DirecTV. Since I switched to Comcast, they have been straight forward with their billing, I get what I pay for, and if my gear craps out on a Friday night I can get it changed out on Saturday. I'm failing to see what's so terrible about them.
My switch was:
Qwest DSL (1.5Mb, ~$40/month)
DirecTV (~$70/month)
Total: ~$110/month
To:
Comcast internet service (22 down, 5 up, typically measures out to 30+ down and 15+ up) (~$68/month)
Comcast limited cable (channels 2-30, as I was hardly watching TV) (~$15/month)
Total price: ~$83/month
Also, DirecTV had the absolute worst customer service I've ever experienced, while Comcast's has honestly been pretty good.
I know it's popular to bash Microsoft on Slashdot, but why don't we just title this "The Walmart Effect: American products made in Chinese sweatshops because Americans have become too damn cheap to pay for quality products produced by skilled labor under good working conditions."
Only two HOV and two general purpose lanes? You've gotta be kidding me... anyone who has EVER driven across the 520 bridge in rush hour would cry foul. Mass transit is a great idea, except in the Seattle area it never runs when you need it to, which means anyone with a less-than-typical schedule (that is to say, 90% of the Puget Sound work force) still has to drive if they want to be able to get home after work.
Right now the bridge is 4 lanes, none of them HOV. Moving ~80% of that traffic into one lane, ~15% into another lane, and ~5 into a mass-transit lane would only a) make the problems worse and b) under-utilize the new bridge.
If someone wanted to suggest making the bridge slightly wider so it could accommodate 4 general-purpose, 2 HOV, and 1 set of tracks down the middle, and do it in such a way that it doesn't significantly delay construction, I'd be all for it.
Ok, so everyone hates Microsoft. Get over it.
SharedView and Live Mesh are two kick-ass free services from Microsoft with somewhat different feature sets but both useful for what's being requested here.
SharedView may be one of the most under-advertised products Microsoft has ever released. It's been around for a couple years and is basically a stripped-down version of Live Meeting. A presenter can share his desktop with up to 15 people, give control to attendees, etc. Files of up to 100MB can be transferred through the service.
Live Mesh is a newer offering (in Beta) which allows online storage and synchronization of up to 5GB. Several devices can be added to one's mesh, and specified folders will automatically sync between devices and the online storage (similar to Groove and Sharepoint). Unlike Groove, Mesh also supports connecting to the desktop of other systems which are part of the Mesh. The client install is pretty straight forward and simple, to where most average users could figure it out no problem.
The only downside to these products is they don't work with Linux. There is a Mac OS X client for Live Mesh, though I've never used it. There's a Java console for Live Meeting, but sadly it doesn't appear to be available with SharedView.
Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?
We can only hope it will kill the publishers, the way they've been killing US college kids for years. Do you think college kids would eat such a steady diet of ramen noodles if they weren't spending all their money on textbooks? Have you ever compared the cost of textbooks in the US to the SAME books overseas? Take a look at amazon.co.uk sometime and compare a textbook there to the same book in the US. The only difference is likely that one says "international version" on the cover. Oh, and it'll be less than half the price.
No, a bill such as this won't endanger publishing companies... publishing companies have endangered themselves by pissing off their customers with insanely high pricing. Maybe something like this would finally bring competition to the textbook industry and help make school a little more affordable.
with only a staff of 68 people
How does it take 68 people to monitor that few servers, and most of them BLADES?!? The writers have apparently never worked in a large network environment (not that I'd expect that they would have, being writers and all). But seriously... that's not really that many servers for a large online service, it really shouldn't take that much work to keep it all running unless it's horribly designed.
Eh well, if they have the cash flow to retain that many warm bags of mostly water, more power to them.
Here I thought we were just becoming a nation of lard-asses, when really it was a sneaky plot to build up our future stem cell reserves. Thank you, McDonalds for your SuperSized McWisdom.
We no longer have to deal with that conflict and jump though hoops to try and make science without angering paymasters / teachers / bosses.
Surely you don't believe this? How much of science is done on behalf of the ones giving the grant money? How much research is set aside or silenced because those funding it at some level don't like the results? If a scientist believes they have strong scientific evidence for intelligent design, do you expect they'll be able to get it published easily and obtain the same recognition that they might for the latest hypothesis on evolution? Or do you suppose people might refuse to publish their work, demote or fire them from their schools, and in short do everything possible to shut them up?
So, where do you suppose the "Earth as a solid surfaced planet covered with water" came from?
There is no scientific explanation for the origin of matter. The creationist view (no matter which if any religious viewpoint it comes from) at least puts forth some sort of answer to that question, though it is necessarily not a scientific answer, as the beginnings of the universe are not something that can be observed and tested (and it is understood to the pupil that a hypothesis without testability, observability and repeatability is not science).
That answer for most would be "An intelligent designer who is not bound by the scientific laws of space/time/physics created matter and proceeded to create the universe and the earth and all that is in them. As the designer exists outside of the laws we know and understand, he is able to do these things in a way which is beyond our understanding."
Have you ever looked into it? Maybe there IS scientific evidence for intelligent design. In other news, the earth may not be flat.
Microsoft making deals with OEMs to block installation of competing browsers: BAD. I don't disagree one bit with that.
Microsoft being forced to bundle competing browsers with their product: ALSO BAD.
The court never said which browsers. If Microsoft is doing the bundling, the OEMs still don't have much choice in the matter. They could add 6 other browsers to Windows and still hurt Firefox by excluding it if they wanted. That might open them to lawsuits, so perhaps they include EVERY browser, no matter how lame. Then some massive security flaw is found in one of them, and a bunch of computers get owned... Microsoft gets sued for including a browser full of known security problems and not patching them (even though it's a competitor's product which they should have responsibility to patch).
So, the final result - Microsoft eventually just removes all browsers from Windows, including IE. Who wins then? It makes it awful hard to download Firefox or Chrome. It's a PITA for consumers. It would be seen as "selling an intentionally crippled OS" and someone would sue Microsoft.
I say, let Microsoft bundle what they want. Let the OEMs add what they want. Let the consumers use what they want. Forcing Microsoft to add competitors' browsers to Windows is still NOT the answer.
Freedom of the people to choose a different browser is great. Somewhere, however, the line has to be drawn. Microsoft is clearly not limiting the ability of other browsers to work with Windows, and is not stopping anyone from downloading and installing a different browser. What happened to the freedom of a company to sell their own product without interference? Why should they advertise for a competing product in their own? Even more, why should they be required to bundle a competitor's product in their own? Should the Adobe Flash installer also include Silverlight? Should RedHat include a Slackware install disk? Really, where does the madness end? I think the appropriate response from Microsoft would be to stop selling Windows in the EU. The EU wants people to see alternatives, so great. Stop making Windows available until there's a public outcry and reversal of these insane rulings.
No, never in my life have I had to speed up to avoid an accident.
And just how many days have you been driving, sir? My life and the lives of my passengers were likely saved by me speeding up when I saw I was about to be in a collision once. I was driving through an intersection, and a cab driver in a minivan was waiting to turn left. As I was entering the intersection, he turned. It was too late for me to stop, so I sped up and swerved as far to the right as I could. As a result, he hit my driver door at a fairly low rate of speed, rather than me hitting his passenger door at a much higher rate of speed. As a result, the car was totaled but no one was injured at all.
As if storing something for 25 years is actually a challenge. I have 5.25" floppy disks from when I was a young child. Not quite 25 years, but getting close and still fine. 3.5" floppies always sucked, the bits fall off if you look at them wrong. Most electronics have NO PROBLEM lasting 25 years. I have a record player and receiver from probably early 70s that work fine. LPs from the early 1900s that still play, though a little scratchy. If seriously in doubt, burn the files into a ROM chip, interface it with USB, and be done with it. I know my old NES games still play fine, and they're burned into a ROM... An interface as prevalent as USB will be around in 25 years, assuming we're still around. Really... if I can wire up an old floppy drive from the early 80s today, why would I not be able to hook up an old USB device in another 25 years. A 25-yr time capsule shouldn't be a terribly difficult thing. Once you get to 100+ years, I can understand needing to do a bit more planning (at that point, you've gotta at the very least include a complete machine to read the media). Oh, and as far as capacitors go, if you're that worried about them replace all the electrolytics with tantalums or somesuch. More expensive sure, but they don't dry out. Of course, if you use a high quality electrolytic it'll probably be fine too. Even if they do dry out, any decent sod with a soldering iron should be able to fix it in no time. Caps have been around a long-ass time, they aren't going anywhere.
You, sir, are obviously in the former category.
At risk of sounding like I'm supporting something Microsoft has done, the feature they added with Server 2003 SP2 (and I believe also XP SP2) was quite a good move considering these facts.
When a SP2 system is first brought up, after running through Mini-Setup or the OOBE, it will open a "Post-Setup Security Update" wizard. Until the user clicks the "Finish" button on the wizard, the firewall blocks all incoming traffic. The wizard also has links to Microsoft Update, etc. This gives the user a chance to download all the patches before opening up the firewall.
In Vista/2008, the firewall is on by default and fairly locked down, only allowing certain traffic through. In Server 2008, the firewall rules are also grouped into categories to make it easier to configure so the user doesn't get frustrated and just turn it off completely (and if a user tries this by just stopping the firewall service, they lose their 'net connection completely... one must instead set a firewall policy to allow all traffic, which then shows the firewall status as "off").
Please, oh PLEASE, use a DICTIONARY and look up the word "travesty!" The only travesty here is you making a travesty of the English language. Perhaps slashdot should have a section on proper grammar. It's a TRAGEDY that people like yourself seem to have forgotten what a dictionary or thesaurus is to be used for.
This seems like one case where RFID would be truly good and useful. Embed an RFID chip in each medical tool/sponge/whatever, and then pass a reader over the patient's body to check for anything still inside. Cost shouldn't really be an issue... RFID chips are cheap now, and medical equipment is so outrageously expensive that adding $0.50 each or whatever isn't really going to be a noticeable difference in price. It would allow everything that can be done with a barcode, and then some.
Yes - I'm replying to my own message. Just went back and actually looked at the link - The advisory was sent out on 4/26/06. So, this is now officially at least a 2-month old issue. Now on to The Onion for my timely news.
Blah I say. Blah. This is old news. I first read about it over a month ago when Dell shipped a "critical update" for some of their laptops for this issue. Check out this HP advisory from a couple weeks ago:
D ocument.jsp?objectID=c01038053
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/
Dell released an update for PE2950 servers around the same time.
So again I say, Blah.
*YAWN*
"We're Sorry, this news story is currently undergoing routine maintenance, and will be available again soon."
Please, if you love the spaghetti of cables, NEVER go anywhere NEAR a datacenter I have to work in. Those who believe in spaghetti cabling should be strung up in it and left to die slowly, suspended above the air vents in the cold aisle so they dry out and preserve nicely as a warning to others who might be tempted to spaghetti-cable.
Velcro straps are a wonderful thing. They should be used liberally in the cabling of a cabinet, to avoid this spaghetti you speak of.
Oh, and touring a datacenter is interesting for about the first 5 minutes, if that. After that it's "hey, more blinkenlights. more cable. more cold air blowing up my legs out of the floor. more fan noise. can we go yet?"
Hex is the one true base.
I don't care what base you want.
All your base are belong to us.