Lie. Damn lie. Try it yourself, I just did - type a word document (doesn't matter how long, I tried it with just a couple of lines as well as several pages) with a mailto: in it. Size? 24K
You must not have spent much time on the help desk in the last 3 years. It is quite easy to create a 100 word, 2MB MS-Word file. How? Dammed if I know - I never do whatever it is that otherwise ordinary humans do to make this happen, and working together we can never reproduce it. But it happens all the time.
Penicillin - 1920's technology
Iowa/Yamoto class battleships - 1920's technology
Apollo moonrockets - 1940's with a dash of 50's
Polio vaccine - 1880's with a dash of 1940's
Transistor - 1930's
Bulk transport system, rail - 1860's
Bulk transport system, car/truck - 1920's
Airplane - 1910's
Fast airplane - 1950's
Panzer General II, originally published by SSI. Get your copy off the discount rack today before they disappear! This is by far the best computer game I have ever played since I started wasting my time with same in 1978.
I did a home weather search on Google about a year ago and there are quite a few products and distibutors. One that comes to mind right away is Oregon Scientific; they sell direct and also at some electronics and discount stores. Don't forget Boltek for a lightning detector!
Nor can Microsoft's actions be in my best interests as long as Microsoft is a joint stock corporation.
I don't know how MSFT's ownership situation affects whether their actions are in your direct interest.
Microsoft's managers have a legally binding, fiduciary duty to maximize the wealth of the company they manage. Which generally means maximizing the profits they earn on the products they sell. This is in direct conflict with my responsibility to maximize the profits of the organization for which I work (or minimize the outgo of a non-profit). That doesn't mean we can't do business, or that we can't find common ground to our mutual advantage. But it does mean that our interests are in conflict.
Or as Dogbert said, "Your boss said we are forming a partnership. I will hold on to our money."
I don't believe in parnerships, nor that vendors have my best interest at heart. Cruel, but that's the way of a competitive market.
I am sorry, but I must respecfully disagree. I am not a "Microsoft hater" - I have been using their products for 18 years, and I continue to use them when to do so makes busines sense. But neither am I blind to Microsoft's actions. Nor do I think Microsoft's actions are in my best interests. Nor can Microsoft's actions be in my best interests as long as Microsoft is a joint stock corporation.
What is in my best interests is to have multiple, robust, "genetically isolated" choices for the critical technology my business needs to use. "Cross-pollinating" two of those choices so that they are no longer separate is not a good idea.
And have we already forgotten Microsoft's attempt to ban non-IE browsers from "their" web? Although I often do not agree with RMS' more extreme positions, I think he understands quite well that you can't be a little bit pregnant, nor can you sell a fraction of your soul to the devil.
sPh
Lotus ... WordPerfect ... Novell ... Palm?
on
Palm OS 5.0 Preview
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Is Palm now joining the list of IT vendors that created innovative, best-selling products, then sat back and shot themselves repeatedly in the foot with poor marketing, poor execution, and greed? And all the while Bill Gates stood (stands) in the background laughing his head off, knowing that Microsoft's slow, steady effort would eventually pass and crush the innovator?
sPh
Re: Data Recovery Is Only Half the Battle...
on
Disaster Recovery?
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· Score: 2
I, for instance, work at a rather large, international fortune 500 company and we have BCP strategies that include a complete off-site location. This facility houses fail-over systems for all business critical processes including a 1.2 terabyte, mirrored SAP database that can go online within minutes notice, and a phone bank/workstations for our 50+ CSR's (customer service reps) and our global helpdesk
Nice if you can justify it. The problem for a small- to medium-sized organization is that there is no positive cost/benefit or return on investment for DRP/BCP plans of this scope. Do backups? Of course. Store them offsite? Yeah. Have a list of your installed equipment? That would be nice.
But from there the decision tree goes like this: cost of having a real disaster recovery plan like the big guys? $X. Probability of a disaster? p%. Cost of having our sysadmin and his buddies work 25 hours a day for 3 or 4 days, slapping together whatever equipment he can find at CompUSA and doing the miminum necessary to get back online? $Z. Cost of not having our computer system for 3 day? $C.
And for a small organization, $X * p% is almost always greater than $Z + $C. So creating an extensive DRP isn't justified. Tough luck for the guys who DO end up working 25 hours a day for a week or so (been there), but the economics are usually pretty clear.
sPh
Yes, but is Itanium going anywhere?
on
Intel's Big Chip
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· Score: 2
Last I heard, Intel may have dug themselves a hole with Itanium. It's incompatibility with existing apps means that there is no desktop demand to drive economy of scale. Therefore the price isn't coming down and the price/performance is not improving faster than the older, "inferior" technology. How will they escape this death spiral?
sPh
Re:Good time to get rid of legacy shit...
on
Disaster Recovery?
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· Score: 2
[...] Novell Netware [...] machines that have been cluttering up the computer room.
Ditch that legacy shit and start anew with the insurance check. (Presuming the machines were insured.)
Yeah, that would be smart. Dump perfectly good, well-designed technology for - what? Samba? You'll be sorry. Windows NT? _Really_ sorry.
So THIS is how he plans to get rid of the competition. (Pictures of MIG flown by Larry flying over competitors corporate HQ, surface to air missiles a-flying).
Not totally a joke, actually. I read an interview with LE in a flying publication where he said that whenever he is flying his MiG into Seattle and is put in a holding pattern, he asks for a fix centered over Bill Gates' house!
Point being, Larry Ellison has a tendency to make sweeping pronouncements of that nature, as with the "Network Computer". Maybe they come true, maybe they don't. But if Larry's next payment to Russia for his newest MiG comes due and he doesn't have the cash, he just changes the pricing structure on the Oracle RDBMS to get a few more cents per transaction, since that's where the real money is.
The two things that ruined Phantom Menace were Jake Lloyd's bad acting
Jake Lloyd may not be the best actor in the universe, but he had at least the potential to do the job right. The failure there was 100% one of directing. Using children in movies/plays is always difficult. There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary one is that childen with the traits you are trying to portray won't sit still on a movie set 6 days a week for 12 months. Children who will sit still and take direction must be directed so that they appear right for the character. 101% the adults fault.
I would have forgiven TPM everything, even two fart jokes, if it had just included an adult conversation between Qui-Gon and Anniken's mother about how she came to be in that prediciment. Oh well.
You can turn on Outlook Web Access on your exchange server and view calendar, mail, contacts, etc. over the web.
Personally, I don't find OWA to be anywhere near as usable as the standard client/server client. Same for other web ports of complex C/S applications I have used. The WWW metaphor is great for what it was designed for, but it hits a wall at a certain point of density/complexity. That's this man's opinion, anyway.
Also, turning on OWA is fraught with security perils, but that's another story.
In response to a different post: had I been here at the time, I would have pushed for Notes/Domino, as it is much more suited to this environment. But the "gotta getta Microsoft" fever had already struck, and Exchange is rooted too deep to dig up easily at this point.
I don't agree with this post myself, but it is far from "flamebait". It is exactly the kind of argument that proponents of the Linux desktop will (and should!) face as they make their case for conversion. It needs to be addressed, not swept under the mod rug.
In the end, the Linux kernel is maintained by a group of hobbyists. As with the applications, these hobbyists put a large amount of time into programming glitz and glamour features into the kernel, and neglect important functions such as scalable SMP support, efficient VM managment, clean TCP/IP communications, and such. These important functions end up being "fixed" by other hobbyist programmers whose fixes usually end up making systems less stable.
First, please note that I am not flaming you - your point of view is one the needs to be considered very thoroughly in this discussion.
That said, speaking as a longtime TOPS-20 and 4.2 BSD user, Novell sysadmin, sufferer through MS-LanManager 1.0, and WordPerfect user, I have a question for you: your description differs from Microsoft's history and business practices exactly how?
Did you ever have the pleasure of converting a 500 user Novell 2.2 network to MS-Lanman because "Microsoft is a serious business partner", then have to convert it back to Novell 18 months later because it wouldn't stay up for more than a day (and we expended about 40,000 engineering manhours trying to make it work)? Sure, today Windows 2000 is reasonably stable (about 70% of what Novell 3.11 was anyway). Why did Microsoft get those 10 free years of shipping unstable products to improve themselves?
I would like to start down this road at my place of work, but we are pretty much set on Exchange as the e-mail server for the mid-term. Is there any Linux desktop client that can perform the functions of Outlook with the mailbox residing on the Exchange server?
3) It's not used by anywhere near the numbers of people who use Google, Yahoo, etc. And the people who do use it can generally afford to pay the charges, and what with the aforementioned ease of use, it's much better then searching shelves of books for case citations.
IANAL, but I used to work in a law library. Trust me, you can fill entire floors with regional court decisions.
Lexis/Nexus contains plenty of information other than court cases. Thousands of newspapers, magazines, journals, and trade publications are in there, almost all of which are not available for free on the web. L/N is used daily by journalists, corporate researchers, academics, and probably spies as well.
As to the heroin-like aspect of L/N, I agree: they pulled the same deal at the business school where I took my MBA. It was funny to walk past the law students lined up 50 deep for the (at that time propriatary) terminal and into the B-school library where there was never a line!
But this isn't throwing a rock and spraypainting. That's more like trolling Slashdot. This is setting the building on fire. The difference between what these kids do and an arsonist is the FBI actually cares about arson.
I don't disagree, but keep in mind two things: (i) if you have ever done long-term maintenance on a building, you know there is only one real enemy: water. A building can stand for several hundred years if the roof and windows are intact. One broken window that goes unrepaired means the inevitable destruction of the building (ii) "broken windows" is Jane Jacobs' shorthand for what starts a neighborhood, as well as a single building, on the path to destruction.
Can someone please clue me into why people do this? I don't quite understand this mentality. I have never done something bad like this simply because I could. Am I a rarity in this world?
If 1000 people walk down a backstreet past an empty building, 998 will just pass by. 2 will throw a rock through a window and spraypaint the walls.
This just seems to be part of human nature; I haven't seen much change in the percentage of people who behave this way since my childhood (1960's) anyway. The problem is that the world today is so interconnected, and also dependent on technologies whose webs of interconnection are more fragile than we like to think, that the 2/1000 with the desire to damage can do a lot more damage to a lot more people than ever before.
I am a bit discouraged myself about whether or not this can be stopped on the Internet, personally.
HP used to be a company that made good test equipment, sold it at the highest prices, and supported it very well (also at the highest price). Now that's been spun off to the bizarrely named Agilent, leaving HP with the low-margin PC's and printers. The trouble with making PC's is that the market is very price competitive -- you've got to cut prices to just above cost to sell anything. Maybe you can make it up in volume. Or maybe you let your expenses get a teeny bit too high, and you're losing money every time you make a sale.
Indeed. The problem is that many good, solid companies were enticed/driven/seduced (take your pick) by the 1998-2000 period to believe that 100%/year sales growth was possible, that 150%/year stock price appreciation was sustainable and necessary, and that trees grew to the sky. As a result they made structural changes (e.g. "sell that boring old Test & Measurement Division - they only earn 45%) to maintain this rate of growth.
Of course, it turned out that trees don't grow to the sky. Bet HP wishes they had some of those boring, "slow" growing divisions back. And Lucent, and many others. Oops.
Okay, frankly, those are the only people I really care about progressing in the world anyways. I'm not sure what your point is. I couldn't give two flying shits for those with no ambition or self-motivation.
First, I wasn't talking about those with no education or self-motivation. If we assume that these traits are (like most things) distributed 20-60-20, I am talking about the 60% in the middle, not the 20% at the bottom. The bottom 20% is an entirely different discussion.
But the overall point of my post, which you seem to have missed, is this: If you are in the top 20%, great. Go to it. Earn a billion USD. But if in the process of doing so you take away the opportunity for the middle 60% to have a rasonable stable, satisfying, productive life (e.g. the archtypical "Joe Sixpack" in his 3 bedroom ranch), then you will most likely reap the whirlwind in the form of the destruction of the stable social order. Remember that the middle 60 outnumbers you at least 3-1.
A pretty high price to pay to provide extra "opportunity" for a few at the top, I would say.
Although the loss of work security creates a temporary loss of security and social capital, he believes that down the road, this individuality and freedom -- much of it empowered by the same technology that has eroded work security -- will create a new kind of global citizen, one who is better informed, more communicative and civically-involved than before.
People at the very top of the income, education, and internal self-direction scales tend to make claims of this nature. Sure, if you have a degree from Oxford/MIT/Tokyo, or rank very high in ambition or self-motivation, this type of world is a great place to live. Lose your job in New York? No problem - lots of openings in Sydney. I'll just call my college roommate in the AU Foreign Office and get the ball rolling.
The fact is (just as with Lake Woebegon), the vast majority of humans are average. They prefer stability and order to chaos and "opportunity". And the other fact is that in North America these orderly, stable, average people have built the civil society that we have today (Kabul anyone? Bagota? Jo'burg?) So now the cultural and economic elite is going to destroy any hope of economic stability to "improve opportunity".
Isn't there an old proverb that goes, "Be careful of what you wish for - you may receive it"?
Slashdot Mirror
sPh
Penicillin - 1920's technology
Iowa/Yamoto class battleships - 1920's technology
Apollo moonrockets - 1940's with a dash of 50's
Polio vaccine - 1880's with a dash of 1940's
Transistor - 1930's
Bulk transport system, rail - 1860's
Bulk transport system, car/truck - 1920's
Airplane - 1910's
Fast airplane - 1950's
Yup, makin progress fast.
sPh
Panzer General II, originally published by SSI. Get your copy off the discount rack today before they disappear! This is by far the best computer game I have ever played since I started wasting my time with same in 1978.
sPh
sPh
Or as Dogbert said, "Your boss said we are forming a partnership. I will hold on to our money."
I don't believe in parnerships, nor that vendors have my best interest at heart. Cruel, but that's the way of a competitive market.
sPh
What is in my best interests is to have multiple, robust, "genetically isolated" choices for the critical technology my business needs to use. "Cross-pollinating" two of those choices so that they are no longer separate is not a good idea.
And have we already forgotten Microsoft's attempt to ban non-IE browsers from "their" web? Although I often do not agree with RMS' more extreme positions, I think he understands quite well that you can't be a little bit pregnant, nor can you sell a fraction of your soul to the devil.
sPh
Is Palm now joining the list of IT vendors that created innovative, best-selling products, then sat back and shot themselves repeatedly in the foot with poor marketing, poor execution, and greed? And all the while Bill Gates stood (stands) in the background laughing his head off, knowing that Microsoft's slow, steady effort would eventually pass and crush the innovator?
sPh
But from there the decision tree goes like this: cost of having a real disaster recovery plan like the big guys? $X. Probability of a disaster? p%. Cost of having our sysadmin and his buddies work 25 hours a day for 3 or 4 days, slapping together whatever equipment he can find at CompUSA and doing the miminum necessary to get back online? $Z. Cost of not having our computer system for 3 day? $C.
And for a small organization, $X * p% is almost always greater than $Z + $C. So creating an extensive DRP isn't justified. Tough luck for the guys who DO end up working 25 hours a day for a week or so (been there), but the economics are usually pretty clear.
sPh
Last I heard, Intel may have dug themselves a hole with Itanium. It's incompatibility with existing apps means that there is no desktop demand to drive economy of scale. Therefore the price isn't coming down and the price/performance is not improving faster than the older, "inferior" technology. How will they escape this death spiral?
sPh
sPh
Have you looked at Novell's eDirectory?
sPh
sPh
Point being, Larry Ellison has a tendency to make sweeping pronouncements of that nature, as with the "Network Computer". Maybe they come true, maybe they don't. But if Larry's next payment to Russia for his newest MiG comes due and he doesn't have the cash, he just changes the pricing structure on the Oracle RDBMS to get a few more cents per transaction, since that's where the real money is.
sPh
I would have forgiven TPM everything, even two fart jokes, if it had just included an adult conversation between Qui-Gon and Anniken's mother about how she came to be in that prediciment. Oh well.
sPh
Also, turning on OWA is fraught with security perils, but that's another story.
In response to a different post: had I been here at the time, I would have pushed for Notes/Domino, as it is much more suited to this environment. But the "gotta getta Microsoft" fever had already struck, and Exchange is rooted too deep to dig up easily at this point.
sPh
I don't agree with this post myself, but it is far from "flamebait". It is exactly the kind of argument that proponents of the Linux desktop will (and should!) face as they make their case for conversion. It needs to be addressed, not swept under the mod rug.
sPh
That said, speaking as a longtime TOPS-20 and 4.2 BSD user, Novell sysadmin, sufferer through MS-LanManager 1.0, and WordPerfect user, I have a question for you: your description differs from Microsoft's history and business practices exactly how?
Did you ever have the pleasure of converting a 500 user Novell 2.2 network to MS-Lanman because "Microsoft is a serious business partner", then have to convert it back to Novell 18 months later because it wouldn't stay up for more than a day (and we expended about 40,000 engineering manhours trying to make it work)? Sure, today Windows 2000 is reasonably stable (about 70% of what Novell 3.11 was anyway). Why did Microsoft get those 10 free years of shipping unstable products to improve themselves?
sPh
I would like to start down this road at my place of work, but we are pretty much set on Exchange as the e-mail server for the mid-term. Is there any Linux desktop client that can perform the functions of Outlook with the mailbox residing on the Exchange server?
sPh
As to the heroin-like aspect of L/N, I agree: they pulled the same deal at the business school where I took my MBA. It was funny to walk past the law students lined up 50 deep for the (at that time propriatary) terminal and into the B-school library where there was never a line!
sPh
sPh
sPh
This just seems to be part of human nature; I haven't seen much change in the percentage of people who behave this way since my childhood (1960's) anyway. The problem is that the world today is so interconnected, and also dependent on technologies whose webs of interconnection are more fragile than we like to think, that the 2/1000 with the desire to damage can do a lot more damage to a lot more people than ever before.
I am a bit discouraged myself about whether or not this can be stopped on the Internet, personally.
sPh
Of course, it turned out that trees don't grow to the sky. Bet HP wishes they had some of those boring, "slow" growing divisions back. And Lucent, and many others. Oops.
sPh
But the overall point of my post, which you seem to have missed, is this: If you are in the top 20%, great. Go to it. Earn a billion USD. But if in the process of doing so you take away the opportunity for the middle 60% to have a rasonable stable, satisfying, productive life (e.g. the archtypical "Joe Sixpack" in his 3 bedroom ranch), then you will most likely reap the whirlwind in the form of the destruction of the stable social order. Remember that the middle 60 outnumbers you at least 3-1.
A pretty high price to pay to provide extra "opportunity" for a few at the top, I would say.
sPh
The fact is (just as with Lake Woebegon), the vast majority of humans are average. They prefer stability and order to chaos and "opportunity". And the other fact is that in North America these orderly, stable, average people have built the civil society that we have today (Kabul anyone? Bagota? Jo'burg?) So now the cultural and economic elite is going to destroy any hope of economic stability to "improve opportunity".
Isn't there an old proverb that goes, "Be careful of what you wish for - you may receive it"?
sPh