Totally agree with that - if they are selling me something, then they have to conform to my (internationally sanctioned and well documented) standards. I deeply love your comment, and would mod it insightful if I hadnt posted a reply.
I am one of the lucky ones though - if Im selling to someone else, and they want information in.doc format... then I choose to not want their business... because it generally means that the.doc format problem is merely the tip of a very big and nasty iceberg that is beckoning vendors to get sucked into. Im not short of work, so it doesnt bother me. In such cases, I might send them an ODF file regardless, or maybe export it to.txt and see how they go with that, but if they cant interpret really basic well documented common formats, then THEIR problems are often more than its worth dealing with.
If a customer has a good functional website and IT infrastructure (written in something portable like C, java, PHP, RoR, SQL).. then I can deal with them on a peer to peer level. If everything I see about a customer's IT tells me that they are firmly stuck in some Microsoft dystopia stone age, then I know up front that dealing with them is going to involve a lot of (mostly unpaid) educational servives. Im not in the education (or ego demolition) business, so its generally a good indication that the prospect/customer is likely to be an intellectual leech amongst other problems. The quotes and proposed service levels for such customers/prospects sadly have to reflect this, and they mostly revolve around completely outsourcing the guts of what they obviously fail to get their heads around.
Customer A who is unix competent, normally gets quoted $X for a particular service. Customer B who is unix incompetent, wanting the exact same product/service as customer A.. gets quoted 10 * $X for the same end result, which will only be possible if we take the majority of their current IT mess off their hands, and manage it ourselves on their behalf. They go away and do the sums, and unbelievably, they come back all smiles and throw the business at our feet anyway. Its one big WTF after another. I often stop and ask myself 'From which cesspit do these morons continue to emerge ?'.
In order to make these types go away, Im tempted to raise the factor to 20 * $X, and see what the response is next time. Id honestly prefer NOT to do business with them - we can make better margins and have less headaches charging only 10% of the same bill with customers who are unix competent, efficient, capable, and good fun to go have a drink with. But unfortunately, there currently exists this seething mass of incompetent fools all too quick to be parted with their dollars, and who also happen to be boring as all fuck when you get them out for a drink.
My advice to any business owner/operator out there with regards to IT is simple - have a look at your job descriptions in the IT department. If they revolve around using Microsoft's so called 'products', then chances are that your 'IT department' is not really an IT department at all, it is actually a divisional sales branch of Microsoft Corporation, who's primary interest is in keeping itself relevant, and managing YOU as a customer of Microsoft. Just get rid of it. Shoot the boring bastards. Define what your business really needs, write up an acceptable service level agreement, and involve some professionals who have half a clue how computers actually work. You will save yourself a fortune, gain sex appeal, and make interesting conversation after hours.
On the other hand, if you insist that people send you things in.doc format, you may as well get a tattoo on your forehead that reads "Whos My Daddy ?"
I really beg to differ with you in so many fundamental ways.
Firstly - MS-Office, for a start, gained a high market share by the simple fact that all of the competing products were systematically removed from the market as options, and their manufacturers sent to the wall through highly dubious tactics. Thats just for starters.
MS-Office maintains a high market share by the simple fact that the data that it spits out is in an undocumented (and ever changing) format, so competing implementations are not even possible to produce.
After having established this monopoly position, workers in the average office who are stuck with this MS-Crap are now limited in what functions they can perform, as defined by the way that this software operates. NOT the other way around as you so boldly assert. In your world, where "In about 20 year nobody has really identified any additional core functionality they needed over spreadsheet, text-processor, presentation maker, personal database, simple drawing package.".. there is no need for the internet, there is no need for web based collaborative workflow software, there is no need for any future innovations at all.
20 years of stagnation is the best way to describe the awful dystopia that you appear to be stuck in. I live in a totally different world (thank God), where each 'office worker' can do the job of 10 of your MS-Office using worker drones, and do most of it in their lunch break.
Secondly, ODF exists primarily to ensure that documents created by offices and governments the world over can finally be stored in a future proof format that is well defined, and open to competing implementations and extensions. If you cant even begin to see the 'percentage' in that, then you are as intellectually stagnant as those same people you describe who 'choose' MS-Office because it is 'good enough and gets the job done'.
To be fair on you though, I have seen many of your other posts, and you are no dummy, but your knowledge of the real history of this industry is understandably lacking. Id be curious to know exactly what you have been directly exposed to in terms of development over that last 20 year period ?
Thirdly - REINVENTING the wheel is like - having a well defined international standard for office document storage, such as ODF, and inventing something from scratch that attempts to address the same issue, albeit in a completely incompatible way (such as 'inventing' OOXML). Another one would be having something that is open and internationally embraced (such as TCP/IP and the internet).. and then deciding that it should be scrapped in favour of your own closed and broken idea called 'MSN'**. I agree that reinventing the wheel is both bad and stupid.
KOffice 2.0 with ODF support is yet another implementation of the wheel, not a reinvention of the wheel.
In this case the wheel remains a wheel, and there are multiple code bases which compete to be better implementations of that wheel. That is a good thing. The documents can be freely used between multiple implementations, regardless of who wrote the code.
Thinking along the lines of 'OpenOffice already implements ODF, therefore we dont need anything other than OpenOffice' is a bad trap to fall into. Thats the same line of reasoning that PHB management falls into when they think that if the software is currently working, then its a waste of time rewriting and refactoring code after the event.
Having competing from-the-ground-up rewrites all converging on a published standard of functionality.. means that ODF has well and truly won the Office format wars already. How many projects out there have announced that they will be 100% compatible with OOXML for example ? err.. not many Id guess.
The emotional attachment to crusty old code bases is a trap. When you fall into that trap, your product stagnates, and your future options for improving your product grow dim. Do it for too long, and you star
The article makes perfect sense to me, but it does leave me with 2 major concerns :
1) How is this likely to affect my ebay activities ? If that item that I really NEED ends in 1 minute and 43 seconds at the time of the flipover, then will I be perpetually stuck in a 4D world without my precious item, or will I exist in a state where that same precious item is mine only in some ethereal quantum form ? (ie - its there, but not quite there at the same time)
2) As a programmer, I only really care about the data and code itself, but the customers driving the development seem to be obsessed with such abstract concepts as timesheets and deadlines. Will the flip to a 4D space only existence eliminate timesheets, deadlines and other such nonsense altogether ? If so, I could probably accept the loss of my precious ebay items that Ive almost won.
Interesting comment re Japan 'wanting control of Asia'. Considering that even after a stunning series of military victories against the Russians on the Asian mainland, the subsequent treaty of Portsmouth (which was pretty much dictated by the USA), left Japan stripped of any meaningful gains from that conflict.
Its good to see more recognition of the RussoJapanese war in the West now - its always been a big deal in the East, and its now being looked at as 'World War 0'.. setting the course for the subsequent 'Great War' of 1914-1945.
An AC posted a good rebuttal about the causes of the US-Japanese conflict in the Pacific in 'ww2', which I totally agree with. Japan was already heavily engaged in China long before the 'world war' came along, and the USA pretty much goaded Japan into reacting, by the blockade that they established.
Looking at the conduct of the war in the Pacific that resulted from that, there is always this depiction that it was a very nasty affair, and the blame for that is also layed squarely on the Japanese for their unusually enthusiastic level of brutality. I can only really comment in depth on the conduct of battle between Australian and Japanese forces, having served as an Australian soldier myself, and having spoken first hand to ex-diggers who fought against the hated 'japs'.
The stats pretty much speak for themselves when you look at Japanese casualty figures in any of those battles. Most battles in ww2, you typically see the losing side suffering 20-30% dead, 50% wounded / POW. However, the Japanese have these 90+% killed, and hardly any POWs. That is not just because they were superhumanly heroic and fanatic fighters - its simply because WE preferred to murder them in cold blood rather treat them as fellow soldiers. Even then, the majority of casualties on both sides was not due to enemy fire - it was due to losses from disease and malnutrition. Believe that or not.
At least with Australian operations, battles in the Pacific were based on patrol-patrol-patrol-and-avoid-contact, followed by prepared ambushes against massed targets lacking food, ammo and clean water. No interest in taking prisoners who you consider not even human. Just machine gun them down till they stop groaning. This was not a campaign of flags, bugle calls and steadfast lines of brave soldiers facing off against each other. It was a campaign of patience, stealth, disease, starvation - and systematic murder.
Its just war - you cant go around believing that one nationality fights a fair and just fight whilst the other one fights dirty. Hollywood loves that idea, but it doesn't happen like that in real life.
Even before WW2 ended, the focus shifted to containing the USSR in anticipation of the cold war to come. The Nuking of Japan, along with the wanton destruction at Dresden.. and the subsequent rapid rebuilding of both Japan and Germany.. was all aimed to sending a big message to the Soviets, and creating strong pro-Western allied buffer zones right on the doors of the new expanded Soviet empire.
None of you have read the whole article by the sounds of it.
A speaker cable carries an analog signal from the amp to the speaker (where a magnet resonates to create compression waves in the air, which in turn impact upon the ear, which in turn generate a signal to the brain). There is a lot that can go wrong in that chain, from crappy cable, turbulance or accoustic imbalances in the ear, through to ear wax.
Have a look at those 1 inch cables again - and notice the big prongs of pure copper coming out the ends. Those cables carry an analog signal from the amplifier, and those prongs can connect directly to the human brain. Bypassing the whole messy speaker magnet / air wave compression / ear drum vibration problem.
The idiot reviewer, Dave Clarke, inserted those thick prongs (one up each nostril mind you), and thrust them deeply into the ever-so-soft tissues of the cerebral cortex, in order to experience the ultimate 'danceable rendition' of his fav tunes.
For $7000 odd, its one of the best ways to increase your musical appreciation without resorting to recreational drugs. For the rest of us, dropping a $20 pill remains the best way to make several hours of music sound soooo much more 'danceable'.
Oh, for goodness sakes Daniel.. you are making it sound like it was a wild 50:50 guestimate of who was going to win the next Melbourne Cup or something. You make it sound like this time (by pure good luck) the nerds got it right for once.
Sure, you got it wrong and the nerds got it right.. but then again blind freddy got it right as well. Every man and his dog actually got it right. Every man and his dog that is, except for yourself and a small handful of (surprise surprise) 'Professional Tech Journalists'.
You didnt just 'get it wrong', you got ALL of the facts completely and blatantly ass up. Lets not pretend it was just an unlucky guess on your part - like putting a dollar on the wrong horse. What you did is akin to turning up in court to provide a character reference for Al Capone, and lavishing the most extreme praise upon most honest self when you barely know the guy.
OF COURSE anyone with half a brain knows why you did it. Nobody thinks you are incompetant or stupid - we just think you are greedy and unethical.
Its a damn good thing they were not also transporting several boxes full of deadly venomous snakes from Minot to Barksdale zoo... otherwise Hollywood scriptwriters would be prompted to lower their 'standards' to a whole new level:)
Just wondering.. with the whole argument about aritifical life having no intrinsic soul.
What would happen if one of the results of the artifical life program (aka LFSer or Life From Scratch, or whatever name they give to these people).. what would happen if one of them made it onto American Idol, and after making the top 12 they give a reasonably crisp performance, but the judges are not too impressed with the standard of their singing.
Could it be possible that a statement such as "The vocals were clear and well pronounced, but there was something lacking in that performance.. dunno.. just no soul to it". Would such a statement crush the LFS'er due to its possible multiple connotations ? Would that sort of comment be likely to cause permanent psychological scarring of the LFSer ? Is it too early to tell ? In creating artifical life, are we setting ourselves up for a whole new generation of Emos, dark children with some really deep issues ? What effects will this be likely to have in the usage patterns of recreactional drugs ?
Today it's 2007 and we have MS stuffing ballots to get OOXML declared a standard.. we have psychopathic astronauts running amok whilst wearing nappies.. and now just when things couldn't possibly get any worse, we have scientists threatening to unleash a plague of flying spiders from their labs out into the wider world.
A lot of people here are having a good giggle about how lame this translator is..
But keep in mind a simple fact before you laugh too loud :
- If the Mars explorer missions find artifacts of a prior civilisation on the face of the red planet... then they are most likely to be culturally similar / identical to Sumerian culture found here on Earth.
Ruins of temples, memorials, grand stadiums, works of art and science - if such things are soon found on mars, then the chances are that they wont be enscribed in modern English, or Chinese, or even Latin.. they will be in formal Sumeric Cuniform, using the full range of all of the agglutinative morphemes that continue to baffle scholars of linguistics today.
There is also a relatively high probability that many of the scrawlings and scratchings enscribed upon artifacts found on the surface of mars may also conform to ancient Tibetan/Sanskrit writings.. and equally so with the major languages of pre-flood Mesoamerian lost civilisations.
However, Sumerian would be the most probable find.
So go ahead and have a good giggle at the lame translator, but in the back of your mind.. you should seriously be asking yourself whether it is time to start learning Sumerian !!
If you care to dive into the article, download and read the.doc format 'case studies', you will see there is nothing much to crow about.
If you are looking for hard empirical stats on a real comparison of Linux vs Windows, then these case studies are not for you. If you are looking for fuzzy feel-good buzzword-laden coffee table anecdotes, then its worth the download.
In the comparison cases presented, the reasoning is basically as follows :
"I went out with a Blonde once, and she was cool, except she had no job, and was stuck at home with 3 noisy kids - so we rarely got out together. Then I met this independent Brunette chick with a rich Dad and no ties, and we had a ball together. Therefore, based on my extensive experience with such a broad variety of women, I must conclude that in 100% of cases Brunettes make better girlfriends than Blondes'.
SwissAir's initial problem was that their existing Java/Oracle web site was less than optimal, and the code mixed presentation with business logic at all levels of the spaghetti triangle. So they went for a ground-up rebuild using their newly aquirred experience in how not to build a system. The operating systems hosting the bad-build / good-build of their web site are not even relevant to the study, but they happen to be Linux the first time around, and Windows the second time around.
Its a good article if you are interested in the subject of system development lifecycles.. but its hard to build a case for operating systems around it. You could just as easily say that the original Java/Oracle first cut (which ran on HP proliants) was replaced with a.NET rebuild (running on Dell), and therefore Dell is a better choice than HP.
The State of Illinois story is no better. Their initial problem is an aging hulk of a Groupwise messaging system running on Novell Netware. They chose to go to an unspecified line of Microsoft products, the prime deciding motivation being 'Because of Microsoft's position in the market'. The IT director even goes so far as to admit that 'We are not a science outfit - we just need something to get the job done', and they forgot to edit out the comment that 'For us, security was not a driving issue'. In other words, here is an organisation that is flat out doing whatever it does, and it just wants to outsource all of it's IT problems to a big outside company, and get on with the business of.. whatever it is that it does. Linux doesnt even come into the discussion - they never used it at all, so its hardly even a comparison. Very lame choice of stories to include in the 'Comparison' site I would have thought.
Is there a data cap on that ? Im really interested, sounds like Japan has an awesome infrastructure.
We have 'excellent', and 'low cost' broadband services in Australia with semi-attractive sticker prices, but they have ridiculously low data transfer limits on them before you get 'shaped' back to less than dialup speed.
You can get 8Mbit broadband for $9.95 per month, with a 'massive' 500MB monthly data limit. Then they will tell you that 500MB is enough to hold all the information available in the entire state library.... and so it is superficially a good deal. What they dont tell you is that 10 minutes on myspace, and your 500MB is all but used up for the entire month.. after that you get 'shaped' back to 300 baud !!!
I guess Japan got it right though ? Do tell more.
Its also election time coming up in Australia, so both political parties have plans on the table to ensure that 99% of Australian homes get 100-million-billion-Gigabit fibre links rolled out to every door. But then again, these plans are bought to you by the same people who offered election promises such as "By 1990, no Australian child will live in poverty".
Hooollywood has been happily re-writing history since the year dot, so why not re-write the laws of physics at the same time ?
Lets see what I have learned about history and current affairs from TV: - At the beginning of history, the bloodthirsty Egyptians ruled the world, and cruelly mistreated all the _good_ people, who they kept as slaves for no particular reason. - Then the Romans took over, and they were even worse slave drivers than the Egyptians. The bloodthirsty Romans were particularly nasty to the _good_ people, and fed them to lions for no discernable reason. - After the Romans came the dark ages, Where the _good_ people rode white horses, and bravely fought against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty Turks. - Then there was a lot of sailing and stuff, and the _good_ people came to settle in America. - In the 1800's the _good_ people rode horses, and fought bravely against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty savages (Native American Indians) - Later on, Germany declared war on the whole world for no good reason.. and almost won.. until the _good_ guys came along and fought against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty nazis, to save the world. - Later on, the Vietnamese attacked us in South East Asia for no reason, and the _good_ guys fought bravely and triumphed against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty communists. After we left, we found out that the Vietnamese had lied to us, and so retired heroes have to keep going back there to bust POWs out of bamboo cages. (which continues to this day) - There was some sort of 'Cold War' after the Vietname thing.. where the bloodthirsty Russians sent spys out to enslave the entire world, and drop nukes on all the _good_ people for no sane reason. - Now the news tells me that we are under unprovoked attack in the middle east, and the _good_ guys are fighting bravely against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty terrorists, bent on destroying our freedoms for no discernable reason.
But I feel safe, because : - the NCIS can track all the emails of our bloodthirsty enemies. - We have an endless supply of special heroes who will come out of retirement and save us if things get too tough. - We have access to all sorts of technically impossible tools to help us win this one, but they are kept secret for obvious reasons.
OMG, I just tried a little experiment, and I am shocked by the results.
I just took a song off a CD - which is roughly 30MB of raw 16bit wav file.. and converted it to mp3. Goddamn ! the resulting mp3 file is just shy of 3MB in size.
Holy Virgin Mother of Kazan !!!
30MB...... to...... 3MB
That must mean that over 90% of the original CD quality music has GONE - VANISHED - REDUCED - DECIMATED - DESTROYED - CONSUMED - FUCKED OVER by this mp3 format !
I had no idea that mp3 did this to music - its simply criminal. I hope that all God fearing citizens of this great nation get together soon and take out a lawsuit against this shaitanic abominashion known as mp3.
Yesh, we should shoe thish mp3 thing immediately !!.
What we are seeing here is quite simple - the old client-server fat desktop model of development is dying, and EVERYBODY wants to get in on web apps.
So of course, there is a big rush of growth in domain names (many of them parked), simple brochureware sites, and first-attempts at websites with a mix of content and backend code.
So its no surprise to see the result of millions of former desktop VB programmers take their first big steps out of the 1980's, and the result is a big growth in new sites of all kinds. We are going to see more and more and more Windows 'servers' popping up on the net.
You cannot infer from this anything useful in terms of comparing the functionality of IIS to Apache, or Windows to Unix, or (insert religious war flamebait here)
All you can infer is that the web continues to grow, and that many Microsoft centric developers are getting on board with web apps. Thats it in a nutshell.
You can infer from this that web apps have become a mainstream solution to age-old IT problems, and this trend is here to stay. Thats fantastically good news for anyone who is up to speed with the tubes of the internets, and who enjoys making their solutions web-based.
There are no more boardroom battles needed to convince PHB's that webifying your developments is a sensible plan of attack. Microsoft have done a fantastic job of breaking down that particular barrier. They have also done well for themselves in doing that, but unwittingly, by opening up the floodgates.. they are helping to make the old idea of 'The desktop is the computer' a thing of the past. THEY are helping to push the idea that 'the web is the computer'.. which truly opens the field up like never before.
And so, every new Microsoft server popping up on the web with some first attempt at a website is a future business opportunity. All of those sites (even the most spectacularly unsuccessful), will generate future requirements for bigger and better expansions down the track. As that happens, the business opportunities for taking these companies to the next level will be phenomenal.
Like anything remotely complicated, the real winners here are those rare breed of people with the skills to make it happen. The creme of the crop of MS developers will do well.. but for myself (as a Linux nut devoted to the web), it is also a good thing. Its so much easier to take something already almost-running on IIS, and convert it to my way of doing things, than it is to take a hairball mess of a VB, Access and Office based 'desktop solution'.. and make it work on the web.
I dont know how many readers here can remember the early 1990's.. but I remember clearly how Microsoft tried every trick in the book to kill this threat called 'the internet'. It was clear back then that the internet would (eventually) spell the end of the road for a complete Windows stranglehold. Their replacement vision at the time (called 'The Microsoft Network') was a non-TCP/IP based global SMB network that would rely on RPC's and OLE-2 over netbui. Thank fuck that never happened !!!
Whilst Microsoft may conveniently be rewriting history 1984 style to suit themselves (We are allied to Eurasia, we have always been strong allies of Eurasia).. fact is, they are being extremely helpful at the moment in supporting the notion of the web as an application platform. WE have been fighting for this concept for over 15 years now. I for one thoroughly welcome Microsoft to the party.. helping US put a nail in the coffin of the closed and proprietary desktop operating system paradigm.
There are many comments on here presenting the sort arguments such as : - "Open Office is not 100% compat with MSOffice" - "My Visio docs cant be used on linux/other-non-MS-os" - "I cant connect to our exchange servers without Windows" - "Our company intranet requires active-x controls" - "Yada Yada Yada, etc, etc, etc, ad-infinitum, ad-nauseum" - "And therefore, linux is no good, and will never catch on until it does this and that, and anything else that Windows makes possible"
None of these arguments demonstrate anything lacking with Linux. The ALL demonstrate how very badly your organisation's IT policies and strategies has backed itself into a corner and locked itself so deeply into a closed and proprietary architecture... that it has lost all ability to conform to international standards.
If Linux has a hard time co-existing in your current infrastructure, then that should be a huge red flag that there is something seriously wrong with the way you are operating, and the strategic decisions that have been made in the past. If your organisation doesnt have the agility to adapt to what is happening now in the wider world - then its only a matter of time before that lack of agility is going to hit you hard like a speeding train.
Thats all well and good if you are happy to thrive in isolation, like some extended family of inbred hillbillys far from civilisation, but in the meantime, the rest of the world will be passing you by. If thats where you want to be in 10-20 years time, then stick to what you are doing now, and ignore the obvious. Blame it all on linux if that makes you happy.
Incidentally - I sent an email to 'MK Electronics' who are listed as a partner - they seem like a legit business as well. They just got back to me and said that - yes - they are doing the distribution for this thing, and as far as they are concerned, its all above board.
I hope we are all wrong and that this thing turns out to be real. Still doubt it, but will wait and see.
Geez - you cant get away with anything these days, can you ?
I just checked the google map, and there is a big green arrow pointing accussingly at his bedroom window even..
hang on - (zooming in on google map) - Hello hello hello, that looks like the Ole Bailley is driving a big white van down his street, getting ready to ask him a few choice questions by the look of it.
which enables YOU to sign on as a valued business partner, and present your advert on their site.
$15,000.. $200,000.. or $2m for their top of the line partnership deal.
Their website pulled 100,000 'hits' in April 07, and 430,000 'hits' since then. That massive volume of interweb traffic (*cough*) is nothing to be sneezed at, so it looks like brilliant value - who could resist such a deal ? Looks like Medison are about to give google a run for their money !!
Almost sucked me in.. until I started reading the website of the parent company.
Mind you thats just my opinion. Please feel free to read all about their other 'achievements', such as the Medison line of designer clothing (which doesnt appear on google anywhere), the awesome words of wisdom of their founder in his own blog, the un-attributed quotes, random photos of capital cities, the slightly-dithered-like-ive-been-put-through-a-scan ner-and-photoshopped company logo, and other quiet achievements such as designing the color iMac.
I love their accesories page - whats with the link to clk.atdmt.com to download a copy of 'Windows Live Messenger'. WTF ?
Anyway, in Australia, the big mining company BHP used to have a TV ad with the motto: "BHP - The quiet achiever"
But if half of their un-gogglable claims are valid, then this Medison crowd really have earned that label.
Scam, IMHO.
On the upside, if it wasnt for Medison, I wouldnt have learned that I have a new word in my diminishing vocabulary - "ungooglable".
ungooglable: A product, or a claim, a thing, or a statement of supposed fact, that when searched for on google, produces zero relevant supporting results, to the extent where serious doubts are then cast upon those same claims or facts. eg: "Johnny made several ungooglable claims about an alleged series of concerts that he supposedly performed with the El Mariachi Trio whilst on his recent holiday 'South of the Border'". Ant. un- . eg "Natalie Portman's naked butt may well be one of the most unungooglable butts never really photographed for real".
Linux developers are an irresponsible mob who are out of control. What linux needs is a strong project management team to implement unrealistic deadlines, contradictory requirements, unattainable budget constraints, utopian sales targets, and then allocate resources to areas that are needed. Most of all - converge all coding work on a single unified GUI based office system.
The government should implement fines and jail terms for people who go off writing code for whatever THEY think is a good idea - when clearly its project managers who know better.
Work on games, music applications, skins, lightweight distributions, gentoo and its wasteful portage system, and other software 'toys' is a criminal and negligent waste of precious programming resources. There is way too much experimentation happening in linux. What rights (to go off in their own time and do their own thing) do these linux developers think they have ????
I also believe that artists should not be allowed to paint whatever picture they want - there should be a single project management team organizing all the artists out there to only work a small number of already defined images and themes. There is way too much experimentation in the field of art.
Music as well - there is a criminal amount of divergence and outright experimentation happening in the field of music. Its shocking - we have already worked out the ideal genres of songs - there is classical music, country and western and then easy listening ala Celine Dion and Kenny Rogers. Thats all we need to listen to. Who the hell do some of these musos think they are ? - like this My Chemical Romance crowd who go off and make up songs of their own. And whats with these 'Hip Hup Krew' who actually TALK to a rythum - that is not singing!. And then there are these hippy types who use computers to generate 'music' they call psy-trance. Where is the violin, the clarinet, or the vocals ? No - we need a strong management team to allocate these musicians to predefined projects, and get them to just do covers of much loved Country and Western songs.
All this experimentation is counter productive - it creates way too many choices, and just confuses the consumer. After all - capturing the attention of the consumer is the sole god-given purpose of human existence, and the meaning of life itself.
Its about time that linux developers realized this quintessential fact.
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Totally agree with that - if they are selling me something, then they have to conform to my (internationally sanctioned and well documented) standards. I deeply love your comment, and would mod it insightful if I hadnt posted a reply.
.doc format ... then I choose to not want their business ... because it generally means that the .doc format problem is merely the tip of a very big and nasty iceberg that is beckoning vendors to get sucked into. Im not short of work, so it doesnt bother me. In such cases, I might send them an ODF file regardless, or maybe export it to .txt and see how they go with that, but if they cant interpret really basic well documented common formats, then THEIR problems are often more than its worth dealing with.
.. then I can deal with them on a peer to peer level. If everything I see about a customer's IT tells me that they are firmly stuck in some Microsoft dystopia stone age, then I know up front that dealing with them is going to involve a lot of (mostly unpaid) educational servives. Im not in the education (or ego demolition) business, so its generally a good indication that the prospect/customer is likely to be an intellectual leech amongst other problems. The quotes and proposed service levels for such customers/prospects sadly have to reflect this, and they mostly revolve around completely outsourcing the guts of what they obviously fail to get their heads around.
.. gets quoted 10 * $X for the same end result, which will only be possible if we take the majority of their current IT mess off their hands, and manage it ourselves on their behalf. They go away and do the sums, and unbelievably, they come back all smiles and throw the business at our feet anyway. Its one big WTF after another. I often stop and ask myself 'From which cesspit do these morons continue to emerge ?'.
.doc format, you may as well get a tattoo on your forehead that reads "Whos My Daddy ?"
I am one of the lucky ones though - if Im selling to someone else, and they want information in
If a customer has a good functional website and IT infrastructure (written in something portable like C, java, PHP, RoR, SQL)
Customer A who is unix competent, normally gets quoted $X for a particular service. Customer B who is unix incompetent, wanting the exact same product/service as customer A
In order to make these types go away, Im tempted to raise the factor to 20 * $X, and see what the response is next time. Id honestly prefer NOT to do business with them - we can make better margins and have less headaches charging only 10% of the same bill with customers who are unix competent, efficient, capable, and good fun to go have a drink with. But unfortunately, there currently exists this seething mass of incompetent fools all too quick to be parted with their dollars, and who also happen to be boring as all fuck when you get them out for a drink.
My advice to any business owner/operator out there with regards to IT is simple - have a look at your job descriptions in the IT department. If they revolve around using Microsoft's so called 'products', then chances are that your 'IT department' is not really an IT department at all, it is actually a divisional sales branch of Microsoft Corporation, who's primary interest is in keeping itself relevant, and managing YOU as a customer of Microsoft. Just get rid of it. Shoot the boring bastards. Define what your business really needs, write up an acceptable service level agreement, and involve some professionals who have half a clue how computers actually work. You will save yourself a fortune, gain sex appeal, and make interesting conversation after hours.
On the other hand, if you insist that people send you things in
I really beg to differ with you in so many fundamental ways.
.. there is no need for the internet, there is no need for web based collaborative workflow software, there is no need for any future innovations at all.
.. and then deciding that it should be scrapped in favour of your own closed and broken idea called 'MSN'**. I agree that reinventing the wheel is both bad and stupid.
.. means that ODF has well and truly won the Office format wars already. How many projects out there have announced that they will be 100% compatible with OOXML for example ? err .. not many Id guess.
Firstly - MS-Office, for a start, gained a high market share by the simple fact that all of the competing products were systematically removed from the market as options, and their manufacturers sent to the wall through highly dubious tactics. Thats just for starters.
MS-Office maintains a high market share by the simple fact that the data that it spits out is in an undocumented (and ever changing) format, so competing implementations are not even possible to produce.
After having established this monopoly position, workers in the average office who are stuck with this MS-Crap are now limited in what functions they can perform, as defined by the way that this software operates. NOT the other way around as you so boldly assert. In your world, where "In about 20 year nobody has really identified any additional core functionality they needed over spreadsheet, text-processor, presentation maker, personal database, simple drawing package."
20 years of stagnation is the best way to describe the awful dystopia that you appear to be stuck in. I live in a totally different world (thank God), where each 'office worker' can do the job of 10 of your MS-Office using worker drones, and do most of it in their lunch break.
Secondly, ODF exists primarily to ensure that documents created by offices and governments the world over can finally be stored in a future proof format that is well defined, and open to competing implementations and extensions. If you cant even begin to see the 'percentage' in that, then you are as intellectually stagnant as those same people you describe who 'choose' MS-Office because it is 'good enough and gets the job done'.
To be fair on you though, I have seen many of your other posts, and you are no dummy, but your knowledge of the real history of this industry is understandably lacking. Id be curious to know exactly what you have been directly exposed to in terms of development over that last 20 year period ?
Thirdly - REINVENTING the wheel is like - having a well defined international standard for office document storage, such as ODF, and inventing something from scratch that attempts to address the same issue, albeit in a completely incompatible way (such as 'inventing' OOXML). Another one would be having something that is open and internationally embraced (such as TCP/IP and the internet)
KOffice 2.0 with ODF support is yet another implementation of the wheel, not a reinvention of the wheel.
In this case the wheel remains a wheel, and there are multiple code bases which compete to be better implementations of that wheel. That is a good thing. The documents can be freely used between multiple implementations, regardless of who wrote the code.
Thinking along the lines of 'OpenOffice already implements ODF, therefore we dont need anything other than OpenOffice' is a bad trap to fall into. Thats the same line of reasoning that PHB management falls into when they think that if the software is currently working, then its a waste of time rewriting and refactoring code after the event.
Having competing from-the-ground-up rewrites all converging on a published standard of functionality
The emotional attachment to crusty old code bases is a trap. When you fall into that trap, your product stagnates, and your future options for improving your product grow dim. Do it for too long, and you star
The article makes perfect sense to me, but it does leave me with 2 major concerns :
1) How is this likely to affect my ebay activities ? If that item that I really NEED ends in 1 minute and 43 seconds at the time of the flipover, then will I be perpetually stuck in a 4D world without my precious item, or will I exist in a state where that same precious item is mine only in some ethereal quantum form ? (ie - its there, but not quite there at the same time)
2) As a programmer, I only really care about the data and code itself, but the customers driving the development seem to be obsessed with such abstract concepts as timesheets and deadlines. Will the flip to a 4D space only existence eliminate timesheets, deadlines and other such nonsense altogether ? If so, I could probably accept the loss of my precious ebay items that Ive almost won.
Interesting comment re Japan 'wanting control of Asia'. Considering that even after a stunning series of military victories against the Russians on the Asian mainland, the subsequent treaty of Portsmouth (which was pretty much dictated by the USA), left Japan stripped of any meaningful gains from that conflict.
.. setting the course for the subsequent 'Great War' of 1914-1945.
Its good to see more recognition of the RussoJapanese war in the West now - its always been a big deal in the East, and its now being looked at as 'World War 0'
An AC posted a good rebuttal about the causes of the US-Japanese conflict in the Pacific in 'ww2', which I totally agree with. Japan was already heavily engaged in China long before the 'world war' came along, and the USA pretty much goaded Japan into reacting, by the blockade that they established.
.. and the subsequent rapid rebuilding of both Japan and Germany .. was all aimed to sending a big message to the Soviets, and creating strong pro-Western allied buffer zones right on the doors of the new expanded Soviet empire.
Looking at the conduct of the war in the Pacific that resulted from that, there is always this depiction that it was a very nasty affair, and the blame for that is also layed squarely on the Japanese for their unusually enthusiastic level of brutality. I can only really comment in depth on the conduct of battle between Australian and Japanese forces, having served as an Australian soldier myself, and having spoken first hand to ex-diggers who fought against the hated 'japs'.
The stats pretty much speak for themselves when you look at Japanese casualty figures in any of those battles. Most battles in ww2, you typically see the losing side suffering 20-30% dead, 50% wounded / POW. However, the Japanese have these 90+% killed, and hardly any POWs. That is not just because they were superhumanly heroic and fanatic fighters - its simply because WE preferred to murder them in cold blood rather treat them as fellow soldiers. Even then, the majority of casualties on both sides was not due to enemy fire - it was due to losses from disease and malnutrition. Believe that or not.
At least with Australian operations, battles in the Pacific were based on patrol-patrol-patrol-and-avoid-contact, followed by prepared ambushes against massed targets lacking food, ammo and clean water. No interest in taking prisoners who you consider not even human. Just machine gun them down till they stop groaning. This was not a campaign of flags, bugle calls and steadfast lines of brave soldiers facing off against each other. It was a campaign of patience, stealth, disease, starvation - and systematic murder.
Its just war - you cant go around believing that one nationality fights a fair and just fight whilst the other one fights dirty. Hollywood loves that idea, but it doesn't happen like that in real life.
Even before WW2 ended, the focus shifted to containing the USSR in anticipation of the cold war to come. The Nuking of Japan, along with the wanton destruction at Dresden
None of you have read the whole article by the sounds of it.
A speaker cable carries an analog signal from the amp to the speaker (where a magnet resonates to create compression waves in the air, which in turn impact upon the ear, which in turn generate a signal to the brain). There is a lot that can go wrong in that chain, from crappy cable, turbulance or accoustic imbalances in the ear, through to ear wax.
Have a look at those 1 inch cables again - and notice the big prongs of pure copper coming out the ends. Those cables carry an analog signal from the amplifier, and those prongs can connect directly to the human brain. Bypassing the whole messy speaker magnet / air wave compression / ear drum vibration problem.
The idiot reviewer, Dave Clarke, inserted those thick prongs (one up each nostril mind you), and thrust them deeply into the ever-so-soft tissues of the cerebral cortex, in order to experience the ultimate 'danceable rendition' of his fav tunes.
For $7000 odd, its one of the best ways to increase your musical appreciation without resorting to recreational drugs. For the rest of us, dropping a $20 pill remains the best way to make several hours of music sound soooo much more 'danceable'.
Yes, true, but for everything that most non-techies want to do on a computer ... they can do comfortably on a well configured 400 linux box.
Oh, for goodness sakes Daniel .. you are making it sound like it was a wild 50:50 guestimate of who was going to win the next Melbourne Cup or something. You make it sound like this time (by pure good luck) the nerds got it right for once.
.. but then again blind freddy got it right as well. Every man and his dog actually got it right. Every man and his dog that is, except for yourself and a small handful of (surprise surprise) 'Professional Tech Journalists'.
Sure, you got it wrong and the nerds got it right
You didnt just 'get it wrong', you got ALL of the facts completely and blatantly ass up. Lets not pretend it was just an unlucky guess on your part - like putting a dollar on the wrong horse. What you did is akin to turning up in court to provide a character reference for Al Capone, and lavishing the most extreme praise upon most honest self when you barely know the guy.
OF COURSE anyone with half a brain knows why you did it. Nobody thinks you are incompetant or stupid - we just think you are greedy and unethical.
Its a damn good thing they were not also transporting several boxes full of deadly venomous snakes from Minot to Barksdale zoo ... otherwise Hollywood scriptwriters would be prompted to lower their 'standards' to a whole new level :)
Just wondering .. with the whole argument about aritifical life having no intrinsic soul.
.. what would happen if one of them made it onto American Idol, and after making the top 12 they give a reasonably crisp performance, but the judges are not too impressed with the standard of their singing.
.. dunno .. just no soul to it". Would such a statement crush the LFS'er due to its possible multiple connotations ? Would that sort of comment be likely to cause permanent psychological scarring of the LFSer ? Is it too early to tell ? In creating artifical life, are we setting ourselves up for a whole new generation of Emos, dark children with some really deep issues ? What effects will this be likely to have in the usage patterns of recreactional drugs ?
What would happen if one of the results of the artifical life program (aka LFSer or Life From Scratch, or whatever name they give to these people)
Could it be possible that a statement such as "The vocals were clear and well pronounced, but there was something lacking in that performance
This is just what we need.
.. we have psychopathic astronauts running amok whilst wearing nappies .. and now just when things couldn't possibly get any worse, we have scientists threatening to unleash a plague of flying spiders from their labs out into the wider world.
Today it's 2007 and we have MS stuffing ballots to get OOXML declared a standard
Giant foot long flying spiders for god's sake !!
Im locking the door and going back to bed.
A lot of people here are having a good giggle about how lame this translator is ..
... then they are most likely to be culturally similar / identical to Sumerian culture found here on Earth.
.. they will be in formal Sumeric Cuniform, using the full range of all of the agglutinative morphemes that
.. and equally so with the major languages of pre-flood Mesoamerian lost civilisations.
.. you should seriously be asking yourself whether it is time to start learning Sumerian !!
But keep in mind a simple fact before you laugh too loud :
- If the Mars explorer missions find artifacts of a prior civilisation on the face of the red planet
Ruins of temples, memorials, grand stadiums, works of art and science - if such things are soon found on mars, then the chances are that they wont be enscribed in modern English, or Chinese, or even Latin
continue to baffle scholars of linguistics today.
There is also a relatively high probability that many of the scrawlings and scratchings enscribed upon artifacts found on the surface of mars may also conform to ancient Tibetan/Sanskrit writings
However, Sumerian would be the most probable find.
So go ahead and have a good giggle at the lame translator, but in the back of your mind
Dont come crying to me when its all too late !!
If you care to dive into the article, download and read the .doc format 'case studies', you will see there is nothing much to crow about.
.. but its hard to build a case for operating systems around it. You could just as easily say that the original Java/Oracle first cut (which ran on HP proliants) was replaced with a .NET rebuild (running on Dell), and therefore Dell is a better choice than HP.
.. whatever it is that it does. Linux doesnt even come into the discussion - they never used it at all, so its hardly even a comparison. Very lame choice of stories to include in the 'Comparison' site I would have thought.
If you are looking for hard empirical stats on a real comparison of Linux vs Windows, then these case studies are not for you. If you are looking for fuzzy feel-good buzzword-laden coffee table anecdotes, then its worth the download.
In the comparison cases presented, the reasoning is basically as follows :
"I went out with a Blonde once, and she was cool, except she had no job, and was stuck at home with 3 noisy kids - so we rarely got out together. Then I met this independent Brunette chick with a rich Dad and no ties, and we had a ball together. Therefore, based on my extensive experience with such a broad variety of women, I must conclude that in 100% of cases Brunettes make better girlfriends than Blondes'.
SwissAir's initial problem was that their existing Java/Oracle web site was less than optimal, and the code mixed presentation with business logic at all levels of the spaghetti triangle. So they went for a ground-up rebuild using their newly aquirred experience in how not to build a system. The operating systems hosting the bad-build / good-build of their web site are not even relevant to the study, but they happen to be Linux the first time around, and Windows the second time around.
Its a good article if you are interested in the subject of system development lifecycles
The State of Illinois story is no better. Their initial problem is an aging hulk of a Groupwise messaging system running on Novell Netware. They chose to go to an unspecified line of Microsoft products, the prime deciding motivation being 'Because of Microsoft's position in the market'. The IT director even goes so far as to admit that 'We are not a science outfit - we just need something to get the job done', and they forgot to edit out the comment that 'For us, security was not a driving issue'. In other words, here is an organisation that is flat out doing whatever it does, and it just wants to outsource all of it's IT problems to a big outside company, and get on with the business of
Is there a data cap on that ? Im really interested, sounds like Japan has an awesome infrastructure.
.... and so it is superficially a good deal. What they dont tell you is that 10 minutes on myspace, and your 500MB is all but used up for the entire month .. after that you get 'shaped' back to 300 baud !!!
We have 'excellent', and 'low cost' broadband services in Australia with semi-attractive sticker prices, but they have ridiculously low data transfer limits on them before you get 'shaped' back to less than dialup speed.
You can get 8Mbit broadband for $9.95 per month, with a 'massive' 500MB monthly data limit. Then they will tell you that 500MB is enough to hold all the information available in the entire state library
I guess Japan got it right though ? Do tell more.
Its also election time coming up in Australia, so both political parties have plans on the table to ensure that 99% of Australian homes get 100-million-billion-Gigabit fibre links rolled out to every door. But then again, these plans are bought to you by the same people who offered election promises such as "By 1990, no Australian child will live in poverty".
Hooollywood has been happily re-writing history since the year dot, so why not re-write the laws of physics at the same time ?
.. and almost won .. until the _good_ guys came along and fought against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty nazis, to save the world. .. where the bloodthirsty Russians sent spys out to enslave the entire world, and drop nukes on all the _good_ people for no sane reason.
Lets see what I have learned about history and current affairs from TV:
- At the beginning of history, the bloodthirsty Egyptians ruled the world, and cruelly mistreated all the _good_ people, who they kept as slaves for no particular reason.
- Then the Romans took over, and they were even worse slave drivers than the Egyptians. The bloodthirsty Romans were particularly nasty to the _good_ people, and fed them to lions for no discernable reason.
- After the Romans came the dark ages, Where the _good_ people rode white horses, and bravely fought against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty Turks.
- Then there was a lot of sailing and stuff, and the _good_ people came to settle in America.
- In the 1800's the _good_ people rode horses, and fought bravely against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty savages (Native American Indians)
- Later on, Germany declared war on the whole world for no good reason
- Later on, the Vietnamese attacked us in South East Asia for no reason, and the _good_ guys fought bravely and triumphed against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty communists. After we left, we found out that the Vietnamese had lied to us, and so retired heroes have to keep going back there to bust POWs out of bamboo cages. (which continues to this day)
- There was some sort of 'Cold War' after the Vietname thing
- Now the news tells me that we are under unprovoked attack in the middle east, and the _good_ guys are fighting bravely against overwhelming numbers of bloodthirsty terrorists, bent on destroying our freedoms for no discernable reason.
But I feel safe, because :
- the NCIS can track all the emails of our bloodthirsty enemies.
- We have an endless supply of special heroes who will come out of retirement and save us if things get too tough.
- We have access to all sorts of technically impossible tools to help us win this one, but they are kept secret for obvious reasons.
OMG, I just tried a little experiment, and I am shocked by the results.
.. and converted it to mp3. Goddamn ! the resulting mp3 file is just shy of 3MB in size.
...... to ...... 3MB
I just took a song off a CD - which is roughly 30MB of raw 16bit wav file
Holy Virgin Mother of Kazan !!!
30MB
That must mean that over 90% of the original CD quality music has GONE - VANISHED - REDUCED - DECIMATED - DESTROYED - CONSUMED - FUCKED OVER by this mp3 format !
I had no idea that mp3 did this to music - its simply criminal. I hope that all God fearing citizens of this great nation get together soon and take out a lawsuit against this shaitanic abominashion known as mp3.
Yesh, we should shoe thish mp3 thing immediately !!.
Or C the programming language - an infinitely recursive definition if ever I saw one.
What we are seeing here is quite simple - the old client-server fat desktop model of development is dying, and EVERYBODY wants to get in on web apps.
.. they are helping to make the old idea of 'The desktop is the computer' a thing of the past. THEY are helping to push the idea that 'the web is the computer' .. which truly opens the field up like never before.
.. but for myself (as a Linux nut devoted to the web), it is also a good thing. Its so much easier to take something already almost-running on IIS, and convert it to my way of doing things, than it is to take a hairball mess of a VB, Access and Office based 'desktop solution' .. and make it work on the web.
.. but I remember clearly how Microsoft tried every trick in the book to kill this threat called 'the internet'. It was clear back then that the internet would (eventually) spell the end of the road for a complete Windows stranglehold. Their replacement vision at the time (called 'The Microsoft Network') was a non-TCP/IP based global SMB network that would rely on RPC's and OLE-2 over netbui. Thank fuck that never happened !!!
.. fact is, they are being extremely helpful at the moment in supporting the notion of the web as an application platform. WE have been fighting for this concept for over 15 years now. I for one thoroughly welcome Microsoft to the party .. helping US put a nail in the coffin of the closed and proprietary desktop operating system paradigm.
So of course, there is a big rush of growth in domain names (many of them parked), simple brochureware sites, and first-attempts at websites with a mix of content and backend code.
So its no surprise to see the result of millions of former desktop VB programmers take their first big steps out of the 1980's, and the result is a big growth in new sites of all kinds. We are going to see more and more and more Windows 'servers' popping up on the net.
You cannot infer from this anything useful in terms of comparing the functionality of IIS to Apache, or Windows to Unix, or (insert religious war flamebait here)
All you can infer is that the web continues to grow, and that many Microsoft centric developers are getting on board with web apps. Thats it in a nutshell.
You can infer from this that web apps have become a mainstream solution to age-old IT problems, and this trend is here to stay. Thats fantastically good news for anyone who is up to speed with the tubes of the internets, and who enjoys making their solutions web-based.
There are no more boardroom battles needed to convince PHB's that webifying your developments is a sensible plan of attack. Microsoft have done a fantastic job of breaking down that particular barrier. They have also done well for themselves in doing that, but unwittingly, by opening up the floodgates
And so, every new Microsoft server popping up on the web with some first attempt at a website is a future business opportunity. All of those sites (even the most spectacularly unsuccessful), will generate future requirements for bigger and better expansions down the track. As that happens, the business opportunities for taking these companies to the next level will be phenomenal.
Like anything remotely complicated, the real winners here are those rare breed of people with the skills to make it happen. The creme of the crop of MS developers will do well
I dont know how many readers here can remember the early 1990's
Whilst Microsoft may conveniently be rewriting history 1984 style to suit themselves (We are allied to Eurasia, we have always been strong allies of Eurasia)
There are many comments on here presenting the sort arguments such as :
... that it has lost all ability to conform to international standards.
- "Open Office is not 100% compat with MSOffice"
- "My Visio docs cant be used on linux/other-non-MS-os"
- "I cant connect to our exchange servers without Windows"
- "Our company intranet requires active-x controls"
- "Yada Yada Yada, etc, etc, etc, ad-infinitum, ad-nauseum"
- "And therefore, linux is no good, and will never catch on until it does this and that, and anything else that Windows makes possible"
None of these arguments demonstrate anything lacking with Linux. The ALL demonstrate how very badly your organisation's IT policies and strategies has backed itself into a corner and locked itself so deeply into a closed and proprietary architecture
If Linux has a hard time co-existing in your current infrastructure, then that should be a huge red flag that there is something seriously wrong with the way you are operating, and the strategic decisions that have been made in the past. If your organisation doesnt have the agility to adapt to what is happening now in the wider world - then its only a matter of time before that lack of agility is going to hit you hard like a speeding train.
Thats all well and good if you are happy to thrive in isolation, like some extended family of inbred hillbillys far from civilisation, but in the meantime, the rest of the world will be passing you by. If thats where you want to be in 10-20 years time, then stick to what you are doing now, and ignore the obvious. Blame it all on linux if that makes you happy.
Then again, many of us have moved to Australia (or Portland, OR - which is almost the same thing), so don't read too much into the "time of post"
Blimey, I stand corrected.
Incidentally - I sent an email to 'MK Electronics' who are listed as a partner - they seem like a legit business as well. They just got back to me and said that - yes - they are doing the distribution for this thing, and as far as they are concerned, its all above board.
I hope we are all wrong and that this thing turns out to be real. Still doubt it, but will wait and see.
Geez - you cant get away with anything these days, can you ?
..
I just checked the google map, and there is a big green arrow pointing accussingly at his bedroom window even
hang on - (zooming in on google map) - Hello hello hello, that looks like the Ole Bailley is driving a big white van down his street, getting ready to ask him a few choice questions by the look of it.
Top peice of research there ! Mod parent up ++
From their website (on the accessories page - where is no mention of accessories), there are lots of ads for a bizarre range of unrelated products.
.. $200,000 .. or $2m for their top of the line partnership deal.
Scrolling in the middle is a link to this page here :
http://www.medisoncelebrity.com/adsfacts.html
which enables YOU to sign on as a valued business partner, and present your advert on their site.
$15,000
Their website pulled 100,000 'hits' in April 07, and 430,000 'hits' since then. That massive volume of interweb traffic (*cough*) is nothing to be sneezed at, so it looks like brilliant value - who could resist such a deal ? Looks like Medison are about to give google a run for their money !!
Almost sucked me in .. until I started reading the website of the parent company.
n ner-and-photoshopped company logo, and other quiet achievements such as designing the color iMac.
Mind you thats just my opinion. Please feel free to read all about their other 'achievements', such as the Medison line of designer clothing (which doesnt appear on google anywhere), the awesome words of wisdom of their founder in his own blog, the un-attributed quotes, random photos of capital cities, the slightly-dithered-like-ive-been-put-through-a-sca
I love their accesories page - whats with the link to clk.atdmt.com to download a copy of 'Windows Live Messenger'. WTF ?
Anyway, in Australia, the big mining company BHP used to have a TV ad with the motto:
"BHP - The quiet achiever"
But if half of their un-gogglable claims are valid, then this Medison crowd really have earned that label.
Scam, IMHO.
On the upside, if it wasnt for Medison, I wouldnt have learned that I have a new word in my diminishing vocabulary - "ungooglable".
ungooglable:
A product, or a claim, a thing, or a statement of supposed fact, that when searched for on google, produces zero relevant supporting results, to the extent where serious doubts are then cast upon those same claims or facts. eg: "Johnny made several ungooglable claims about an alleged series of concerts that he supposedly performed with the El Mariachi Trio whilst on his recent holiday 'South of the Border'". Ant. un- . eg "Natalie Portman's naked butt may well be one of the most unungooglable butts never really photographed for real".
Linux developers are an irresponsible mob who are out of control. What linux needs is a strong project management team to implement unrealistic deadlines, contradictory requirements, unattainable budget constraints, utopian sales targets, and then allocate resources to areas that are needed. Most of all - converge all coding work on a single unified GUI based office system.
The government should implement fines and jail terms for people who go off writing code for whatever THEY think is a good idea - when clearly its project managers who know better.
Work on games, music applications, skins, lightweight distributions, gentoo and its wasteful portage system, and other software 'toys' is a criminal and negligent waste of precious programming resources. There is way too much experimentation happening in linux. What rights (to go off in their own time and do their own thing) do these linux developers think they have ????
I also believe that artists should not be allowed to paint whatever picture they want - there should be a single project management team organizing all the artists out there to only work a small number of already defined images and themes. There is way too much experimentation in the field of art.
Music as well - there is a criminal amount of divergence and outright experimentation happening in the field of music. Its shocking - we have already worked out the ideal genres of songs - there is classical music, country and western and then easy listening ala Celine Dion and Kenny Rogers. Thats all we need to listen to. Who the hell do some of these musos think they are ? - like this My Chemical Romance crowd who go off and make up songs of their own. And whats with these 'Hip Hup Krew' who actually TALK to a rythum - that is not singing!. And then there are these hippy types who use computers to generate 'music' they call psy-trance. Where is the violin, the clarinet, or the vocals ? No - we need a strong management team to allocate these musicians to predefined projects, and get them to just do covers of much loved Country and Western songs.
All this experimentation is counter productive - it creates way too many choices, and just confuses the consumer. After all - capturing the attention of the consumer is the sole god-given purpose of human existence, and the meaning of life itself.
Its about time that linux developers realized this quintessential fact.