There was one thing I noticed in these screenshots that looks like a real improvement in Vista over every previous incarnation of Windows: It looks like they've finally centralised the placement of all control panels and applications and, thank God, done away with the myriad modal dialog windows that one needed to configure for instance, any network connection.
I think Vista might actually be quite good after all.
Uhm, and VS2005 is free with the OS right? Why do you think OSX is so popular with indie developers? That's right, sherlock, the tools are free with the OS.
I do agree that Microsoft will be much more compelling with the release of Vista, but I don't think Micorosoft will be able to kill Apple as easily as all that. Quite a few features in Vista were copied from OSX (Remember the early Longhorn releases with that huge sidebar on the right? That dissapeared after Microsoft saw OSX 10.4). And while sparkle will make development of user interfaces much easier, It doesn't mean much since the people who develop web interfaces with Flash are not the people who develop applicationn interface with Sparkle. The real competitor to Flash is the Expression engine (Called Acrylic or something) that will make web graphic easier but only for those who run IE. MS is trying to counter the IE only syndrome by offering crapped out versions of the Sparkle runtime for other platforms, but I seriously doubt there will be much uptake with those. The only way it would work would be if it was fully cross platform and Microsoft is far too greedy to ever let that happen.
So no, I don't think Vista will kill OSX. It will make Apple have to fight harder to compete, but that's good.
An no, I don't want to give you money from my former prince/master/dictator whatever. I'm South African, I haven't lived in SA for over 15 years, but I was an IBM mainframe operator there in the 80's and I still visit regularly and have family and friends there. The plus side of the racist white minority rule in SA is that the country got the best infrastructure in Africa, which it still has except that the current government caters to more than a small white minority and thus has other pressing problems as well to deal with.
South Africa is the original home of Mark Shuttleworth and his foundation Ubuntu has an ongoing task in South Africa to teach and install Ubuntu in schools (Hint to Microsoft: It's one fuck of a lot cheaper than a Windows solution). I chat regularly with my mom down there who has a Windows PC. South Africa's biggest problem is a monopoly telecommunication company that refuses to allow competition or lower prices on internet access, thus ensuring some of the highest access prices in the world.
However, if you go accross the border to the north, in Zimbabwe, which is in total financial ruin with an autocratic president who hates whites and the blames everyone but himself for the crap that is going on there, you'll find an infrastructure that was similarly built up by the original white minority government, but one that has almost no new investment since Mugabe came to power ensuring that growth in the IT sector there is non existent.
And that is the case all over Africa, you have some countries which have fairly decent political systems, such as South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, etc and you have others which are either run by despotic tyrants, plagued by tribal warfare or thoroughly corrupt or a mixture of these.
In those countries where there is a semi decent system, the education is usually quite good. In those which are chaotic the people are lucky if they can read or write and those who do know the internet, know it usually from an internet cafe.
Linux has advantages due to its flexibility and low price. Claiming that teaching people Microsoft is better because there are more Microsoft trained people is only true if there really are trained Microsoft people around. Usually, the level of trained Microsoft people doesn't reach the level of even an MCSE, since we all know what an MCSE POS costs, so that advantage is null. Training people from scratch with Linux is in my opinion better since a basic grasp of Linux will enable someone to manage in extremely difficult circumstances where hardware and other constraints would make it extremely difficult to keep a system running with Windows.
When I saw compared negativley with I expected the usual bout of trolling, defensive excuses and outright off topic criticism of those other places, but this really takes the cake. What is it, in this day and age, that makes so called educated americans who use the internet, so utterly unable to comprehend that some little thing, somewhere else on the planet might be better than in their country?
Why do they use the excuse that America is much bigger and more rural than any of those countries and simply ignore Canada sitting right next door with routine 2mbit connections in towns 400 kilometers from anywhere else in a country that is bigger than America and has a far smaller population? Why do they make up utter bullshit statements about so called socialist governments and other crap.
The simple answer would be that realising that you are in a unfavourable position is the first step to changing it. Denial, however, never helped anyone.
For the record, I live in Switzerland, which, while having one of the highest rates of broadband penetration is ridiculously expensive and the only cable company, which has a total monopoly on cable connections, has only just introduced 6mbit connections at around $60 per month. That's the best you can get here. And switzerland is ridiculously capitalist and has very little in the way of regulation, just like the USA. Just across the border in France, an hours drive from where I live, you get 20mbit access, free phone use and free wireless modems for around $20 per month. And while the telcos are all privately owned, there is market regulation.
Think about that. It has nothing to do with socialism or size of your penis. It has a lot to do with regulation keeping the market free of monopolies who can and do abuse their positions if left unchecked. If you're still unsure about what I mean, ask someone here about Microsoft.
While we all see the slashdot stereotypes post their usual spiel with monotonous regularity posting reflexively whenever their favourite topic comes up, i.e. the Windows apologists "If I praise Microsoft I'll get modded down boohoo", the Linux obsessive "Linux is easy to install s/(.)\$shit/what?/g" and the Mac zealot "The Mac is faster than any PC, honest, you're just too plebian to see it", I don't think slashdot has spent enough time covering a real source of industry craptitude: The IT Industry analyst.
Given the way that they consistently manage to fail to analyse anything correctly with a percentage rate higher than pure blind guessing would get them, one must ask oneself if they have some kind of negative psychic powers? I mean, these are the people who predict that Microsoft, a company with some $50 billion in the bank and some 95% of all desktop computers might be in some obscure and terrible danger from Google, just because Google is a growing business. They might be excused for this though, because Microsoft's own CEO acts like a speed junkie on withdrawal anytime any other company gets a bit more attention that Microsoft in the press.
But these same fuckheads have consistently predicted Apple's failures and immenent downfall for some 15 years now, regardless of what product Apple releases or how well Apple's business does. These are the morons, as another poster has mentioned, who have predicted the downfall of every version of the iPod from when before there was a market to the iPod dominating 70% to 80 % of that market. It's almost as if they learned in Industry Analyst School to say that Apple is failing when having to analyse Apple's market and just repeat it over and over and over.
These are the people who will complain that the iPod is not a telephone or that something is wrong about watching videos on a small screen and who almost totally ignore the new iMac which has the typical simplicity of Apple's design applied to a home media center without the problems and unreliablity of Windows Media Center Edition. If they do have to mention it they'll allmost surely say that WinMCE has more features and that it will fail.
The solution to this problem is simple: Pass the cost on to consumers: If people have to pay 50 cents for a search on 50 cent, then 50 cent the "artist" (I don't like abusing the word artist for crap like that) will soon be back where he belongs, on the street trying to peddle crack and beat up women. Even better, make it a prerequisite to enter a credit card number to search for RIAA property.
One thing I have noticed is that this debate is making more and more people aware of just how bad the RIAA brand of the holy grail of capitalism is. I suspect that this situation won't last forever. Sooner or later it will become a public cause, like open source has in the tech world, and from then on its days as the Microsoft of the music world will be numbered.
You accused me of flamebait but I think there are many people who agree with me. Point in question: I rent a remote server. I could access it through X11 over the network, Webmin or ssh or any combination of protocols tunneled via ssh. If X11 were to go down, I can still go in and work via ssh on the commandline, and in fact this is what I usually do (it's what most unix and linux admins do). You're just talking about your desktop, not your server. If the gui goes down on Win2k3, what are you going to do? It means that the OS is down in practice, even if it really isn't and services are still responding.
I don't hate Windows (or Linux or OSX - I use all three every day), but I do think the registry is a bullshit braindead idea. Even Microsoft seems to agree since it seems as if they're moving to xml based config files, or at least this is what I read.
There's a big difference between Gnome, the window manager, and Linux, the OS underneath it. Linux will still work and you can still use the terminal if the window manager or even X11 doesn't work.
Microsoft certainly innovated that POS. If there was ever a piece of software so central to an operating system, yet so fragile, vastly overburdened and insecure with a tendency to break if you just look at it, then it's the Windows Registry. I don't know how often in all the years that I've used Windows just been dumbstruck at what a braindead idea it was to make the registry so central to the OS.
The irony is that the Registry reflects Microsoft's company structure, i.e centralised, as compared to any OSS OS where there are hundreds of competing config files in different formats which ensure that the OS won't become unusable if one of them goes down. And that is probably why OSS is inherently stronger than Microsoft. No matter what Microsoft does, Linux is simply too broadly based to die. Microsoft will pay one idiot like John Carrol thousands per month to blog about how he loves Microsoft (he's been developing for 11 year and that's why he *knows* Microsoft is better than OSS or anything else, according to him. He doesn't realise that there are people who have been coding on other platforms for over 20 years and have the exact same opinion about their favourite OS for the same reason).
Still, his zealotry paid off in that he got a well paid job to troll about Microsoft, even if he has become more defensive about it over the years, which makes me laugh, to be honest. The guy's like a little kid trying to win a fight by shouting the loudest.
As a European, I just wanted to say that I don't care at all where the Internet root servers are, as long as they work. While I see many Americans here reacting in anger with hurt pride, I think I should say that there are both advatages and disadvantages to the root servers being hosted internationally.
Firstly, while I doubt it would be in the US' business interest to say threaten some country with cutting off their access to the root servers, and I seriously doubt that the US would do it to developed countries, I could for instance see China or more likely North Korea getting either spotty access when relations are bad, and added to that the fact that DNS lookups would be easier to trace if the servers were in the US etc.
Secondly, I don't see any technical advantage to hosting the root servers outside the US, but I do see disadvantages in places where the level of competence is bad.
Thirdly, apart from the obviously political side of this decision (the fact that some places want to "own" their own root server and not have to wait for the US to say ok to changes etc), I think there ight be financial motives as well. The battle between Airbus and Boeing is a good example of what would be simply two companies angry because the other is successful getting taken to the highest level of government because of the amounts of money involved, and the amount of nationalistic hubris it invokes is similar to this decision, because people mistake a company in their country as somehow being symbolic of their country. In other words I suspect that there is suspicion at certain levels that the US might try to use its dominance in the internet to further its businesses (see which company is communicating to which other through DNS lookups etc) much as the US claims that its defense spending on Boeing is not subsidies but Europe's spending on Airbus is subsidies.
Sadly, I doubt that a matter as nationalistically chared as this will be able to get reasonably discussed.
John Carrol is the guy who used to be an developer living in Geneva, Switzerland. Anyone who had the misfortune to follow the ZDNet talkback boards would never fail to see John jump to Microsoft's defence no matter what the topic was, be it the DOJ case (Jonh:Microsoft is being punished for innovating), Linux (John:Developing for Windows is far easier. Just look at how easy it is to make a COM object I can use anywhere) or Microsoft's business practices (John:Microsoft is innovating).
Now, years later, after having trolled incessantly for Microsoft for years, he finally got a job with them and a blog at ZDNet where he, surprise, trolls for Microsoft.
I actually do think that Microsoft does innovate in places (xmlhttpobject for example)but I don't think I'd listen to John Carrol when I wanted impartial advice on Microsoft or th IT market.
I'll go way out on a limb here and say it's not simply a video iPod but the device that Robert Cringely talked about earlier this year or late last year: a Mac tablet device, only small like the Nokia Linux one with built in video (quicktime) and sketching and hand written note taking capabilities, plus the ability to watch movies streamed over the air with a new Airport Express that streams video wirlessly. Not only that but the device will act as a remote control for Macs and iTunes.
I suppose it won't happen, but god I would love to finally be able to use a tablet device that isn't big and ungainly and didn't run Windows but a neat OS like OSX.
You really piss me off with this post. It's your own bloody website. That means it's your own opinion versus everyone else's, or do you think that the fact that that shit is up on a website makes it somehow solid evidence? You are starting to make me think that you deserve the court gag order because you simply refuse to ignore any legal rules.
If there is no action on the part of the Austrian minister of transportation, you would still be within your rights to take the case to the European court of Justice in Strassbourg. I know little of EU law, but if there is indeed a whistleblower clause, you would be within your rights to take the case there. In fact I'm surprised your lawyers haven't mentioned it. I know full well that Austria is known for its nepotism and cronyism, although your case sounds pretty extreme. If I were you I would make pretty damn sure that you get a second legal opinion about filing criminal charges against the company. Charging them for forging your signature is well within your rights and has no bearing on the case. The way it "sounds", i.e. that you're acting only in the public good is nice but it won't save you from getting blacklisted in the industry or get your money back.
Again, if you are on the level about this, and there is indeed a clause about whistleblowing in EU law, you would be able to take the case to the European court of justice regardless of whether you have filed charges against your ex company or not. Seriously, man. Get yourself another legal opinion, preferably by someone versed in EU law and who is competent.
I forgot to add above: If you are so sure that the company forged your signature on documents, you would be well within your rights to sue them for forgery and file criminal charges against them in Austria. It would give you a lot more clout in your barganing position than you now have. Again, why haven't you done this? Why are you too stupid, excuse me for saying this, for simply not speaking to a good competent lawyer about your charges. If all your claims are true, your chiefs worries are about you being held responsible for a faulty product. You could sue for this too.
I just don't understand why you instead choose to act like the stereotypical American with a big mouth and scream it all to the media.
If I gather things correctly, I think your attitude of ignoring work contract non disclosure clauses and court protocols is where your problem lies. If there really is a problem with the chip, and you made your bosses aware of this and they failed to take any action, but eventually fired you after you went to the media about the problem, it indicates a basic failure on your part to understand the contractual side of your job. If you had refused to put your signature on those problem components and resigned, you would have had much less of a problem legally in speaking about it. You would also not have been responsible in the way the Concorde chief engineer was. As it was it seems you ignored company contracts and secrecy clauses, irrespective of whether they are right or wrong, and spoke to main contractors, the FAA, Airbus, EASA and the media without any permission to do so from your employer. And after a court had issued a gagging order on you, you ignored even that.
I don't condone company secrecy clauses, but you alone are not going to change that. I think. Your inability to grasp your legal situation seems really strange though and strikes me as being less than intelligent. To recap, you could have refused to sign the components and resigned, or gotten fired, after which you would have been within your rights to sue for wrongful termination and to file a criminal case against the company for ignoring safety consequences in their product. Why on earth were you too dumb to speak to a lawyer when you saw problems with the company process?
If you actually bother to read your own link, you'll notice three things: 1.Airbus sent out notice about engine performance before the crash to the Airline, Air France and 2.Air France did not inform the pilots 3.The article blames Airbus for the failure of Air France. 4.It says nothing about the A320 doing loops.
Why you got modded to 5 is mainly a testament to/.'ers not reading the article and going for the hype instead of the facts.
The internet, i.e. the TCP/IP protocol might have come from military research, but the www came from Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which has no military usefulness, and both the www and mobile phones, which also came after the cold war, boomed in the 90's in a time when people were less worried about international war for a change and even the Israelis and the Palestinians were getting on for a change.
A good, fear-free market is a better driver of innovation than a paranoid military driven one if you ask me.
I speak German, Swiss-German, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, English and some Spanish and Turkish. One thing that really amazed me about Turkish is that, despite being seperated for over 1000 years, a Turk can still make himself understood throughout central asia from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan. The languages have changed very little from proto-Turkic. Whats more, once you learn the grammatical system on which Turkish is based, you immediatley notice the exact same or at least very similar features throughout the Ural-Altaic language group, from Finnish, Hungarian, through to Turkish and Mongolian: The way that these languages almost uniformally have no concept of grammatical gender (no word for he or she), the way that these languages universally use the concept of adding prepositions as suffixes onto the end of words instead of being seperate as is generally the case in Indo-European languages, the very large case system also added as suffixes to the ends of words, and the concept of vowel harmony, where, in the beginning of a word which has back vowel such as a,o and u, or front vowels such as ä, ü or ö, will force the rest of the word to also change their vowels to fit in with the pattern.
It is amazing that this structure of these languages has remained so solid such that Hungarian and Finnish, which have no common words, have a very similar grammatical structure after having being seperated for almost 3500 years.
This is absolutely not the case with Indo-European languages where a modern English person can usually not understand their own language from 1200 years ago, much less German or Dutch which were both very closely related to Old English at the time. Granted Old English changed very much with the viking invasions when it mixed with Old Norse and then once again when it mixed with old French after the Norman invasion, such that the structure of a modern English sentence resembles Scandinavian more than it does German, but its vocabulary resembles German/Dutch and French.
In summary, I think that language is a reflection of both society and environment. People will make up new words to fit changing circumstances, and language structure will change when different languages meet. Simply trying to match grammatical patterns will work well on some language groups such as Ural altaic, but not so well on others, such as Indo European where vocabulary patterns are better matched (try matching English's almost complete lack of grammatical cases with Czech's 7 cases). Pattern matching on languages should try to take not only historical environmental situations into account, but also language group mixing, language evolution patterns if possible, and integrate those with vocab and grammatical patterns.
For a really good question, one should ask oneself how on earth old languages evolved in the first place, since they were alomst uniformly far more complex grammatically than those we speak to day.
FTA:"The Wall Street Journal has a long front-page article describing how Jim Allchin approached Bill Gates in July, 2004, with the news that then-Longhorn, now-Vista, was 'so complex that its writers would never be able to make it run properly.'
It may be true that they had engineering problems that made them restart Longhorn, but, given that Microsoft's Mac Business Unit would have seen the early betas of Mac OSX Tiger by then, and given the way that the Longhorn early alphas looked before Mac OSX Tiger was announced, with that craptacular huge sidebar on the right hand side of the screen with the Longhorn clock and the ability to host.Net applets all of which Paul Thurrot and Microsoft made huge media announcements about, and the way the betas looked incredibly similar to Mac OSX Tiger in both looks and functionality (the spotlight copy, the isync copy, the installation authorisation copy), my guess is that Longhorn was mostly redone because Bill Gates, Jim Allchin, Steve Ballmer and co. were so fucking worried about losing 1 or 2 measly percent of their market share that they decided to copy as many features of OSX as possible.
In other words it would have gone like this: "The Wall Street Journal has a long front-page article describing how Jim Allchin approached Bill Gates in July, 2004, with the news that then-Longhorn, now-Vista, was 'so fucking ugly, and OSX so good, with Windows users switching in droves, that they would never be able to sell Vista unless it looked and acted like Mac OSX.'
One Random Meteor is all it takes to bring down (and up) a huge trail of destruction on the earth when the space elevator crumbles. For that reason (there are a lot of meteors in space and it doesn't need a big one to trash something as fragile as this) space elevators are a terrible idea.
I took a look at the channel9 video of the Sparkle demo and was quite bowled over. The technology allows designers and developers to draw working interfaces using 2D, 3D and video as easily as one would draw some graphic objects in Illustrator or Flash today, except that the UI elements you draw are the immediately live interface elements. Not even Flash can really compare with this and OSX Cocoa's InterfaceBuilder is not anywhere near as flexible when it comes to custom elements.
Once an element is drawn, it immediately exists as XML (XAML) and can be modified by a coder with C# data bindings. It's like InterfaceBuilder combined with Illustrator.
These animations/UI control sets can then easily either be combined with a real client application or be part of Explorer. It's very radical, with one big Caveat:
Microsoft, for all their failures learned a big lesson with ActiveX and propierty technologies: If they don't run on other platforms, as do Flash and Javascript, almost no web developers will use them as they have to cater to more than just Microsoft's platform. This is the very reason Microsoft made C# and the CLR an ECMA standard. It was an attempt to get their technology accepted as a standard that would be implemented on other platforms.
Of course Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft if they didn't try and poison the pill by not opening their.Net frameworks, thereby crippling any other implementation of.Net (Yes, Mono, I'm referring to you) and thereby getting technology chiefs to rather go with a Microsoft platform where the technology is complete and more or less guaranteed to work.
And XAML and this WPF/E is exactly the same thing. Note that only a SUBSET of WPF will be ported to Mac and Linux. The Sparkle/Expresion/XAML technology has the ability to absolutely kill Flash as it is easier to develop for, much more extensible, and includes 3D, which doesn't exist on Flash. But Microsoft, being Microsoft, wants you to use their OS and their browser (and preferably all of their technology if they can get away with it.) The subset of WPF will only be bait to get people to move to Vista and IE where the implementation is complete.
What is even worse is that Microsoft wants XAML to kill html, since a XAML document will run as is in IE. Cringely was right when he said Microsoft wants to kill the web. Microsoft does not give a damn about html standards and XAML is the reason. They want EVERYBODY to use ONLY XAML. That way they would theoretically have absolute control over the internet and the web.
It would scare me silly, but I'm pretty sure that it will only be a partial success, as web developers will carry on using technologies that are cross platform (surprise, that is what the web is for!) such as Flash and html, and client developers are hardly going to use a technology that is only a subset of what is available on Windows.
At the I dismissed Robert Cringley's idea that Microsoft would try to kill html to take over the web as yet another conspiracy theory. Now I'm not so sure. This really does look like yet another attempt by Microsoft to kill the competition by undermining web standards with one that no one can really emulate.
What enforces that opinion is your comment that Microsoft will make an OPEN, yet LIMITED spec version freely available. Microsoft added another trick to its books when it got C# ECMA certified but obviously didn't do the same for the.Net library, thereby crippling any open version of C#. It looks like they'll do the same with XAML in order to make sure that the only place where it runs with full support is on Windows with IE.
2005: with the simultaneous launch of new versions of Windows and the Office suite of PC applications in the company's most significant new product cycle since Windows 95
IIRC, wasn't almost the very same sentence used in 2001 prior to the launch of Windows XP?
Jeebus, I know Microsoft likes to milk their products for all it's worth but this is ridiculous. If the ultimate edition and the no less than two home editions isn't milking consumers for all they're worth then I don't know what is.
Slashdot Mirror
There was one thing I noticed in these screenshots that looks like a real improvement in Vista over every previous incarnation of Windows: It looks like they've finally centralised the placement of all control panels and applications and, thank God, done away with the myriad modal dialog windows that one needed to configure for instance, any network connection.
I think Vista might actually be quite good after all.
Uhm, and VS2005 is free with the OS right? Why do you think OSX is so popular with indie developers? That's right, sherlock, the tools are free with the OS.
I do agree that Microsoft will be much more compelling with the release of Vista, but I don't think Micorosoft will be able to kill Apple as easily as all that. Quite a few features in Vista were copied from OSX (Remember the early Longhorn releases with that huge sidebar on the right? That dissapeared after Microsoft saw OSX 10.4). And while sparkle will make development of user interfaces much easier, It doesn't mean much since the people who develop web interfaces with Flash are not the people who develop applicationn interface with Sparkle. The real competitor to Flash is the Expression engine (Called Acrylic or something) that will make web graphic easier but only for those who run IE. MS is trying to counter the IE only syndrome by offering crapped out versions of the Sparkle runtime for other platforms, but I seriously doubt there will be much uptake with those. The only way it would work would be if it was fully cross platform and Microsoft is far too greedy to ever let that happen.
So no, I don't think Vista will kill OSX. It will make Apple have to fight harder to compete, but that's good.
An no, I don't want to give you money from my former prince/master/dictator whatever. I'm South African, I haven't lived in SA for over 15 years, but I was an IBM mainframe operator there in the 80's and I still visit regularly and have family and friends there. The plus side of the racist white minority rule in SA is that the country got the best infrastructure in Africa, which it still has except that the current government caters to more than a small white minority and thus has other pressing problems as well to deal with.
South Africa is the original home of Mark Shuttleworth and his foundation Ubuntu has an ongoing task in South Africa to teach and install Ubuntu in schools (Hint to Microsoft: It's one fuck of a lot cheaper than a Windows solution). I chat regularly with my mom down there who has a Windows PC. South Africa's biggest problem is a monopoly telecommunication company that refuses to allow competition or lower prices on internet access, thus ensuring some of the highest access prices in the world.
However, if you go accross the border to the north, in Zimbabwe, which is in total financial ruin with an autocratic president who hates whites and the blames everyone but himself for the crap that is going on there, you'll find an infrastructure that was similarly built up by the original white minority government, but one that has almost no new investment since Mugabe came to power ensuring that growth in the IT sector there is non existent.
And that is the case all over Africa, you have some countries which have fairly decent political systems, such as South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, etc and you have others which are either run by despotic tyrants, plagued by tribal warfare or thoroughly corrupt or a mixture of these.
In those countries where there is a semi decent system, the education is usually quite good. In those which are chaotic the people are lucky if they can read or write and those who do know the internet, know it usually from an internet cafe.
Linux has advantages due to its flexibility and low price. Claiming that teaching people Microsoft is better because there are more Microsoft trained people is only true if there really are trained Microsoft people around. Usually, the level of trained Microsoft people doesn't reach the level of even an MCSE, since we all know what an MCSE POS costs, so that advantage is null. Training people from scratch with Linux is in my opinion better since a basic grasp of Linux will enable someone to manage in extremely difficult circumstances where hardware and other constraints would make it extremely difficult to keep a system running with Windows.
When I saw compared negativley with I expected the usual bout of trolling, defensive excuses and outright off topic criticism of those other places, but this really takes the cake. What is it, in this day and age, that makes so called educated americans who use the internet, so utterly unable to comprehend that some little thing, somewhere else on the planet might be better than in their country?
Why do they use the excuse that America is much bigger and more rural than any of those countries and simply ignore Canada sitting right next door with routine 2mbit connections in towns 400 kilometers from anywhere else in a country that is bigger than America and has a far smaller population? Why do they make up utter bullshit statements about so called socialist governments and other crap.
The simple answer would be that realising that you are in a unfavourable position is the first step to changing it. Denial, however, never helped anyone.
For the record, I live in Switzerland, which, while having one of the highest rates of broadband penetration is ridiculously expensive and the only cable company, which has a total monopoly on cable connections, has only just introduced 6mbit connections at around $60 per month. That's the best you can get here. And switzerland is ridiculously capitalist and has very little in the way of regulation, just like the USA. Just across the border in France, an hours drive from where I live, you get 20mbit access, free phone use and free wireless modems for around $20 per month. And while the telcos are all privately owned, there is market regulation.
Think about that. It has nothing to do with socialism or size of your penis. It has a lot to do with regulation keeping the market free of monopolies who can and do abuse their positions if left unchecked. If you're still unsure about what I mean, ask someone here about Microsoft.
While we all see the slashdot stereotypes post their usual spiel with monotonous regularity posting reflexively whenever their favourite topic comes up, i.e. the Windows apologists "If I praise Microsoft I'll get modded down boohoo", the Linux obsessive "Linux is easy to install s/(.)\$shit/what?/g" and the Mac zealot "The Mac is faster than any PC, honest, you're just too plebian to see it", I don't think slashdot has spent enough time covering a real source of industry craptitude: The IT Industry analyst.
Given the way that they consistently manage to fail to analyse anything correctly with a percentage rate higher than pure blind guessing would get them, one must ask oneself if they have some kind of negative psychic powers? I mean, these are the people who predict that Microsoft, a company with some $50 billion in the bank and some 95% of all desktop computers might be in some obscure and terrible danger from Google, just because Google is a growing business. They might be excused for this though, because Microsoft's own CEO acts like a speed junkie on withdrawal anytime any other company gets a bit more attention that Microsoft in the press.
But these same fuckheads have consistently predicted Apple's failures and immenent downfall for some 15 years now, regardless of what product Apple releases or how well Apple's business does. These are the morons, as another poster has mentioned, who have predicted the downfall of every version of the iPod from when before there was a market to the iPod dominating 70% to 80 % of that market. It's almost as if they learned in Industry Analyst School to say that Apple is failing when having to analyse Apple's market and just repeat it over and over and over.
These are the people who will complain that the iPod is not a telephone or that something is wrong about watching videos on a small screen and who almost totally ignore the new iMac which has the typical simplicity of Apple's design applied to a home media center without the problems and unreliablity of Windows Media Center Edition. If they do have to mention it they'll allmost surely say that WinMCE has more features and that it will fail.
I would say to them: Wanna bet? How much?
The solution to this problem is simple: Pass the cost on to consumers: If people have to pay 50 cents for a search on 50 cent, then 50 cent the "artist" (I don't like abusing the word artist for crap like that) will soon be back where he belongs, on the street trying to peddle crack and beat up women. Even better, make it a prerequisite to enter a credit card number to search for RIAA property.
One thing I have noticed is that this debate is making more and more people aware of just how bad the RIAA brand of the holy grail of capitalism is. I suspect that this situation won't last forever. Sooner or later it will become a public cause, like open source has in the tech world, and from then on its days as the Microsoft of the music world will be numbered.
You accused me of flamebait but I think there are many people who agree with me. Point in question: I rent a remote server. I could access it through X11 over the network, Webmin or ssh or any combination of protocols tunneled via ssh. If X11 were to go down, I can still go in and work via ssh on the commandline, and in fact this is what I usually do (it's what most unix and linux admins do). You're just talking about your desktop, not your server. If the gui goes down on Win2k3, what are you going to do? It means that the OS is down in practice, even if it really isn't and services are still responding.
I don't hate Windows (or Linux or OSX - I use all three every day), but I do think the registry is a bullshit braindead idea. Even Microsoft seems to agree since it seems as if they're moving to xml based config files, or at least this is what I read.
There's a big difference between Gnome, the window manager, and Linux, the OS underneath it. Linux will still work and you can still use the terminal if the window manager or even X11 doesn't work.
Microsoft certainly innovated that POS. If there was ever a piece of software so central to an operating system, yet so fragile, vastly overburdened and insecure with a tendency to break if you just look at it, then it's the Windows Registry. I don't know how often in all the years that I've used Windows just been dumbstruck at what a braindead idea it was to make the registry so central to the OS.
The irony is that the Registry reflects Microsoft's company structure, i.e centralised, as compared to any OSS OS where there are hundreds of competing config files in different formats which ensure that the OS won't become unusable if one of them goes down. And that is probably why OSS is inherently stronger than Microsoft. No matter what Microsoft does, Linux is simply too broadly based to die. Microsoft will pay one idiot like John Carrol thousands per month to blog about how he loves Microsoft (he's been developing for 11 year and that's why he *knows* Microsoft is better than OSS or anything else, according to him. He doesn't realise that there are people who have been coding on other platforms for over 20 years and have the exact same opinion about their favourite OS for the same reason).
Still, his zealotry paid off in that he got a well paid job to troll about Microsoft, even if he has become more defensive about it over the years, which makes me laugh, to be honest. The guy's like a little kid trying to win a fight by shouting the loudest.
As a European, I just wanted to say that I don't care at all where the Internet root servers are, as long as they work. While I see many Americans here reacting in anger with hurt pride, I think I should say that there are both advatages and disadvantages to the root servers being hosted internationally.
Firstly, while I doubt it would be in the US' business interest to say threaten some country with cutting off their access to the root servers, and I seriously doubt that the US would do it to developed countries, I could for instance see China or more likely North Korea getting either spotty access when relations are bad, and added to that the fact that DNS lookups would be easier to trace if the servers were in the US etc.
Secondly, I don't see any technical advantage to hosting the root servers outside the US, but I do see disadvantages in places where the level of competence is bad.
Thirdly, apart from the obviously political side of this decision (the fact that some places want to "own" their own root server and not have to wait for the US to say ok to changes etc), I think there ight be financial motives as well. The battle between Airbus and Boeing is a good example of what would be simply two companies angry because the other is successful getting taken to the highest level of government because of the amounts of money involved, and the amount of nationalistic hubris it invokes is similar to this decision, because people mistake a company in their country as somehow being symbolic of their country. In other words I suspect that there is suspicion at certain levels that the US might try to use its dominance in the internet to further its businesses (see which company is communicating to which other through DNS lookups etc) much as the US claims that its defense spending on Boeing is not subsidies but Europe's spending on Airbus is subsidies.
Sadly, I doubt that a matter as nationalistically chared as this will be able to get reasonably discussed.
John Carrol is the guy who used to be an developer living in Geneva, Switzerland. Anyone who had the misfortune to follow the ZDNet talkback boards would never fail to see John jump to Microsoft's defence no matter what the topic was, be it the DOJ case (Jonh:Microsoft is being punished for innovating), Linux (John:Developing for Windows is far easier. Just look at how easy it is to make a COM object I can use anywhere) or Microsoft's business practices (John:Microsoft is innovating).
Now, years later, after having trolled incessantly for Microsoft for years, he finally got a job with them and a blog at ZDNet where he, surprise, trolls for Microsoft.
I actually do think that Microsoft does innovate in places (xmlhttpobject for example)but I don't think I'd listen to John Carrol when I wanted impartial advice on Microsoft or th IT market.
I'll go way out on a limb here and say it's not simply a video iPod but the device that Robert Cringely talked about earlier this year or late last year: a Mac tablet device, only small like the Nokia Linux one with built in video (quicktime) and sketching and hand written note taking capabilities, plus the ability to watch movies streamed over the air with a new Airport Express that streams video wirlessly. Not only that but the device will act as a remote control for Macs and iTunes.
I suppose it won't happen, but god I would love to finally be able to use a tablet device that isn't big and ungainly and didn't run Windows but a neat OS like OSX.
You really piss me off with this post. It's your own bloody website. That means it's your own opinion versus everyone else's, or do you think that the fact that that shit is up on a website makes it somehow solid evidence? You are starting to make me think that you deserve the court gag order because you simply refuse to ignore any legal rules.
If there is no action on the part of the Austrian minister of transportation, you would still be within your rights to take the case to the European court of Justice in Strassbourg. I know little of EU law, but if there is indeed a whistleblower clause, you would be within your rights to take the case there. In fact I'm surprised your lawyers haven't mentioned it. I know full well that Austria is known for its nepotism and cronyism, although your case sounds pretty extreme. If I were you I would make pretty damn sure that you get a second legal opinion about filing criminal charges against the company. Charging them for forging your signature is well within your rights and has no bearing on the case. The way it "sounds", i.e. that you're acting only in the public good is nice but it won't save you from getting blacklisted in the industry or get your money back.
Again, if you are on the level about this, and there is indeed a clause about whistleblowing in EU law, you would be able to take the case to the European court of justice regardless of whether you have filed charges against your ex company or not. Seriously, man. Get yourself another legal opinion, preferably by someone versed in EU law and who is competent.
I forgot to add above: If you are so sure that the company forged your signature on documents, you would be well within your rights to sue them for forgery and file criminal charges against them in Austria. It would give you a lot more clout in your barganing position than you now have. Again, why haven't you done this? Why are you too stupid, excuse me for saying this, for simply not speaking to a good competent lawyer about your charges. If all your claims are true, your chiefs worries are about you being held responsible for a faulty product. You could sue for this too.
I just don't understand why you instead choose to act like the stereotypical American with a big mouth and scream it all to the media.
If I gather things correctly, I think your attitude of ignoring work contract non disclosure clauses and court protocols is where your problem lies. If there really is a problem with the chip, and you made your bosses aware of this and they failed to take any action, but eventually fired you after you went to the media about the problem, it indicates a basic failure on your part to understand the contractual side of your job. If you had refused to put your signature on those problem components and resigned, you would have had much less of a problem legally in speaking about it. You would also not have been responsible in the way the Concorde chief engineer was. As it was it seems you ignored company contracts and secrecy clauses, irrespective of whether they are right or wrong, and spoke to main contractors, the FAA, Airbus, EASA and the media without any permission to do so from your employer. And after a court had issued a gagging order on you, you ignored even that.
I don't condone company secrecy clauses, but you alone are not going to change that. I think. Your inability to grasp your legal situation seems really strange though and strikes me as being less than intelligent. To recap, you could have refused to sign the components and resigned, or gotten fired, after which you would have been within your rights to sue for wrongful termination and to file a criminal case against the company for ignoring safety consequences in their product. Why on earth were you too dumb to speak to a lawyer when you saw problems with the company process?
If you actually bother to read your own link, you'll notice three things:
/.'ers not reading the article and going for the hype instead of the facts.
1.Airbus sent out notice about engine performance before the crash to the Airline, Air France and
2.Air France did not inform the pilots
3.The article blames Airbus for the failure of Air France.
4.It says nothing about the A320 doing loops.
Why you got modded to 5 is mainly a testament to
The internet, i.e. the TCP/IP protocol might have come from military research, but the www came from Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which has no military usefulness, and both the www and mobile phones, which also came after the cold war, boomed in the 90's in a time when people were less worried about international war for a change and even the Israelis and the Palestinians were getting on for a change.
A good, fear-free market is a better driver of innovation than a paranoid military driven one if you ask me.
I speak German, Swiss-German, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, English and some Spanish and Turkish. One thing that really amazed me about Turkish is that, despite being seperated for over 1000 years, a Turk can still make himself understood throughout central asia from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan. The languages have changed very little from proto-Turkic. Whats more, once you learn the grammatical system on which Turkish is based, you immediatley notice the exact same or at least very similar features throughout the Ural-Altaic language group, from Finnish, Hungarian, through to Turkish and Mongolian: The way that these languages almost uniformally have no concept of grammatical gender (no word for he or she), the way that these languages universally use the concept of adding prepositions as suffixes onto the end of words instead of being seperate as is generally the case in Indo-European languages, the very large case system also added as suffixes to the ends of words, and the concept of vowel harmony, where, in the beginning of a word which has back vowel such as a,o and u, or front vowels such as ä, ü or ö, will force the rest of the word to also change their vowels to fit in with the pattern.
It is amazing that this structure of these languages has remained so solid such that Hungarian and Finnish, which have no common words, have a very similar grammatical structure after having being seperated for almost 3500 years.
This is absolutely not the case with Indo-European languages where a modern English person can usually not understand their own language from 1200 years ago, much less German or Dutch which were both very closely related to Old English at the time. Granted Old English changed very much with the viking invasions when it mixed with Old Norse and then once again when it mixed with old French after the Norman invasion, such that the structure of a modern English sentence resembles Scandinavian more than it does German, but its vocabulary resembles German/Dutch and French.
In summary, I think that language is a reflection of both society and environment. People will make up new words to fit changing circumstances, and language structure will change when different languages meet. Simply trying to match grammatical patterns will work well on some language groups such as Ural altaic, but not so well on others, such as Indo European where vocabulary patterns are better matched (try matching English's almost complete lack of grammatical cases with Czech's 7 cases). Pattern matching on languages should try to take not only historical environmental situations into account, but also language group mixing, language evolution patterns if possible, and integrate those with vocab and grammatical patterns.
For a really good question, one should ask oneself how on earth old languages evolved in the first place, since they were alomst uniformly far more complex grammatically than those we speak to day.
FTA:"The Wall Street Journal has a long front-page article describing how Jim Allchin approached Bill Gates in July, 2004, with the news that then-Longhorn, now-Vista, was 'so complex that its writers would never be able to make it run properly.'
.Net applets all of which Paul Thurrot and Microsoft made huge media announcements about, and the way the betas looked incredibly similar to Mac OSX Tiger in both looks and functionality (the spotlight copy, the isync copy, the installation authorisation copy), my guess is that Longhorn was mostly redone because Bill Gates, Jim Allchin, Steve Ballmer and co. were so fucking worried about losing 1 or 2 measly percent of their market share that they decided to copy as many features of OSX as possible.
It may be true that they had engineering problems that made them restart Longhorn, but, given that Microsoft's Mac Business Unit would have seen the early betas of Mac OSX Tiger by then, and given the way that the Longhorn early alphas looked before Mac OSX Tiger was announced, with that craptacular huge sidebar on the right hand side of the screen with the Longhorn clock and the ability to host
In other words it would have gone like this:
"The Wall Street Journal has a long front-page article describing how Jim Allchin approached Bill Gates in July, 2004, with the news that then-Longhorn, now-Vista, was 'so fucking ugly, and OSX so good, with Windows users switching in droves, that they would never be able to sell Vista unless it looked and acted like Mac OSX.'
One Random Meteor is all it takes to bring down (and up) a huge trail of destruction on the earth when the space elevator crumbles. For that reason (there are a lot of meteors in space and it doesn't need a big one to trash something as fragile as this) space elevators are a terrible idea.
I took a look at the channel9 video of the Sparkle demo and was quite bowled over. The technology allows designers and developers to draw working interfaces using 2D, 3D and video as easily as one would draw some graphic objects in Illustrator or Flash today, except that the UI elements you draw are the immediately live interface elements. Not even Flash can really compare with this and OSX Cocoa's InterfaceBuilder is not anywhere near as flexible when it comes to custom elements.
.Net frameworks, thereby crippling any other implementation of .Net (Yes, Mono, I'm referring to you) and thereby getting technology chiefs to rather go with a Microsoft platform where the technology is complete and more or less guaranteed to work.
Once an element is drawn, it immediately exists as XML (XAML) and can be modified by a coder with C# data bindings. It's like InterfaceBuilder combined with Illustrator.
These animations/UI control sets can then easily either be combined with a real client application or be part of Explorer. It's very radical, with one big Caveat:
Microsoft, for all their failures learned a big lesson with ActiveX and propierty technologies: If they don't run on other platforms, as do Flash and Javascript, almost no web developers will use them as they have to cater to more than just Microsoft's platform. This is the very reason Microsoft made C# and the CLR an ECMA standard. It was an attempt to get their technology accepted as a standard that would be implemented on other platforms.
Of course Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft if they didn't try and poison the pill by not opening their
And XAML and this WPF/E is exactly the same thing. Note that only a SUBSET of WPF will be ported to Mac and Linux. The Sparkle/Expresion/XAML technology has the ability to absolutely kill Flash as it is easier to develop for, much more extensible, and includes 3D, which doesn't exist on Flash. But Microsoft, being Microsoft, wants you to use their OS and their browser (and preferably all of their technology if they can get away with it.) The subset of WPF will only be bait to get people to move to Vista and IE where the implementation is complete.
What is even worse is that Microsoft wants XAML to kill html, since a XAML document will run as is in IE. Cringely was right when he said Microsoft wants to kill the web. Microsoft does not give a damn about html standards and XAML is the reason. They want EVERYBODY to use ONLY XAML. That way they would theoretically have absolute control over the internet and the web.
It would scare me silly, but I'm pretty sure that it will only be a partial success, as web developers will carry on using technologies that are cross platform (surprise, that is what the web is for!) such as Flash and html, and client developers are hardly going to use a technology that is only a subset of what is available on Windows.
At the I dismissed Robert Cringley's idea that Microsoft would try to kill html to take over the web as yet another conspiracy theory. Now I'm not so sure. This really does look like yet another attempt by Microsoft to kill the competition by undermining web standards with one that no one can really emulate.
.Net library, thereby crippling any open version of C#. It looks like they'll do the same with XAML in order to make sure that the only place where it runs with full support is on Windows with IE.
What enforces that opinion is your comment that Microsoft will make an OPEN, yet LIMITED spec version freely available. Microsoft added another trick to its books when it got C# ECMA certified but obviously didn't do the same for the
That said, it looks like a brilliant technology.
2005: with the simultaneous launch of new versions of Windows and the Office suite of PC applications in the company's most significant new product cycle since Windows 95
IIRC, wasn't almost the very same sentence used in 2001 prior to the launch of Windows XP?
Jeebus, I know Microsoft likes to milk their products for all it's worth but this is ridiculous. If the ultimate edition and the no less than two home editions isn't milking consumers for all they're worth then I don't know what is.