I like what they do in VA (or so I've heard). If a candidate doesn't receive more than 50% of the vote, they have a run-off between the top two vote getters. Between doing away with the electoral college and doing the run-off, I think you'd see a lot more 3rd party votes. But then, I also thought it would be neat if VP was an elected office rather than a chosen one (even if it were done in the primaries within each party). A Gore-Bradley ticket is much more attractive to me than the current Democratic ticket.
The "waste of bandwidth" might have been a credible excuse in the early days, but a single napster download eclipses weeks worth of flames. At this point the expression just makes you sound old and cranky.
I don't know about that. A week's worth of flames on all of Slashdot? All of Usenet? All of those boards run out of media outlets? With anywhere between a few to a few thousand people reading them? It adds up. Flaming probably accounts for a smaller percentage of the waste now but it's still waste.
I object to the term "verbal violence". That term should be reserved for credible threats of violence. Mere vitriol causes no harm other than hurt feelings. For those, I suggest growing a thicker skin, or getting some self-confidence.
I certainly wouldn't say it causes no harm. If nothing else, it's a waste of bandwidth and occasionally clutters my searches for useful posts. I've once had an occasion to observe a flame-war that ended because it looked like one of the parties was going to physically search out another participant and do physical harm to him. But, yes, "verbal violence" is a bit too dramatic for my tastes and people do need to understand that the price of free speech is that you risk being offended. I just wish some people would think a little before they posted.
Saying what you think, even if it's negative, doesn't have to fall into the category of flaming. It's an issue of etiquette and substance. I see flaming as venting without contributing any food for thought in an obnoxious manner. You can disagree and express negative emotions without resorting to incindiary language.
I see flaming more like road rage. On the Internet, all you see is text and graphics. Users don't have to acknowledge to themselves that there are real people out there. So, they behave in ways that they wouldn't if they were in a face-to-face confrontation. I've noticed two types of flaming: the trolling that's there to get attention or a reaction and the intolerance of alternate views on the universe. Both are offensive to me and I've learned not to react to either.
You mean there are no x86-based computers sold by name brand manufacturers without Windows. I've bought an Intel box with BeOS installed about 2 years ago. I have many, many Macs (yes, it is a viable alternative to Windows for many tasks). Years ago, OS/2 was a viable alternative (I'm thinking the early '90s). There are other options if you go into it with an open mind. It largely depends on what you want your computer to do for you.
Granted, your average joe is not going to be savvy enough to learn about some of these alternatives unless you put them right under his nose, but people can be so attached to "conventional wisdom". Four years ago, I got into an argument with my car dealer rep because he insisted that I was wasting my money when I told him that I had gotten a BeBox. He was an admitted neophite in computers, but he knew that I had absolutely no use for anything other than Windows (nevermind that I got it because I love to program with the BeAPI).
The average joe I can forgive, but IT staffs at many businesses should know better. I can't believe how many times I've heard an MIS talking about all of the NT problems he's having and then looking at me like I'm insane when I ask him if he's considered looking for an alternative OS.
The "fast track" option is provided for exactly this case. Since the MS case is almost certainly going to go to the Supreme Court anyway, and since significant harm to consumers may happen (and on the basis of past evidence, is likely to happen) while we wait on the whole appeals process, it makes sense to take antitrust cases directly to the highest court in the land. A quick resolution is good for consumers and the judicial system, but not so good for Microsoft, which is why they're fighting it tooth and nail.
I can't say that I agree that this is what the law is for. The reason that the judicial process tends to take so long is to give both sides a really good chance to expose the whole story. Remember, you're only allowed to appeal if you can show new evidence or demonstrate that the last trial was somehow unfair, so should MS lose in the Court of Appeals, they can't just say, "we want to take it to the Supreme Court" and have it happen. Likewise, the DOJ is going to need some sort of reason to appeal should they lose.
The judicial process should only be short circuited if there's a really good reason. The Expediting Act leaves it at the discretion of the Supreme Court. Judges tend to have a certain amount of reverence for the system so I'd guess that the Supreme Court would be reluctant to expedite any case. It would have to be some kind of emergency. The only large and direct impact I can see this case having is as a reaction to the resolution, not from the resolution of the case iteself.
I am not too naive to understand that the US wants to push this case along as fast as possible so that there isn't too much turmoil within the economy, but isn't that what a capatilist society is supposed to be about? The survival of the fittest? The best companies with the best products that the consumer likes best WINS?!
Who said anything about liking MS products? The public has brought this upon themselves by treating MS as the only viable option. It's sort of a vicious cycle. The OEMs don't want to risk their Windows contracts because they feel the market won't buy their computers without Windows and the public only sees Windows because the OEMs had to pay for a Windows license for every machine shipped, regardless of whether it had Windows on it or not. I wonder if you would have seen Dells with Red Hat on them if it wasn't for this case.
I'm not crazy about the idea of trying to punish a company because they are successful, but that's not what the DOJ has been arguing. They are arguing that MS became successful and then used the power afforded to them by their success to keep potential threats of competition at bay. That's what the Sherman Act is about. Contrary to popular belief, it is legal to have a monopoly in the U.S. You just need to make sure you compete on merits.
It's not useless. It's just not appropriate. The law leaves a lot of room for interpretation and has been used at least once in the past (AT&T comes to mind). The key to it is in determining whether or not the outcome of the case would have significant impact on the public at large. Let's face it. The outcome of this case is not going to be felt directly by the public. Even those in the computer industry are probably going to have to wait to feel the impact (if there is any). The only reason that the Supreme Court might want to think about hearing this case is that you know that either side is going to appeal the next decision, but the law that put this case in front of the Supreme Court doesn't allow that as a reason.
Much more intersting, I think, is that the DCMA could end up challenged in court. Imagine Metallica taking Harvard to court over this. Both have deep pockets so I think that it would end up being heard instead of settled. This is censorship and we saw how the courts reacted to the CDAs. As long as the universities don't back down, this could have a happy ending.
BTW, I don't think that wanting to protect one's copyright, regardless of who owns it, is an evil thing. I just think the DCMA is unreasonable about how it does it. It attempts to make tools that could make piracy possibile illegal, nevermind that these tools have other legitimate uses. If we applied that logic to everything, hardly anything would be legal.
So, for those who received the CueCat by mail, this rule nullifies the following part of the EULA:
The:CueCat reader is only on loan to you from Digital:Convergence and may be recalled at any time. Without limiting the foregoing, your possession or control of the:CueCat reader does not transfer any right, title or interest to you in the:CueCat reader. Except as expressly permitted in this License, you may not reverse engineer, disassemble, modify, rent, lease, loan, sublicense, or distribute the:CueCat reader.
I wonder if there's any other unfair trade practice laws that would apply to those who got them from RS.
I feel the same way. Ever since I heard that MS bought Bungie, all I could think of is how Symmantec bought Think Technologies all those years ago. The Think IDEs were renamed, degraded in quality over time, and the staff eventually left to create their own company, Metrowerks. I guess it's just the way it is (for now) in the software industry. I'm still glad that MS didn't buy Intuit. Don't know what I'd do without Quicken.
Sorry. Didn't mean to imply that this was going to be the breakthrough technology that would enable us to acheive any of those pipe dreams. A much greater understanding of the central nervous system and the brain is needed. Perhaps this technology could be utilized to gain some insight in these fields through experimentation.
This sounds like it could be really cool in cybernetics. I'm surprised they didn't mention it, but I suppose that's a bit pie in the sky. I wonder if this could be used to fix severe nerve damage since that works on electrical system? The possibilities racing through my mind for this sort of thing is too great to write down at once.
In DC's business model, hackers look exactly like your aunt Martha who doesn't get a computer.
She subscribes to Forbes, and gets a:Cue:Cat unsolicited in the mail. Not owning a computer, she tosses the physical device in the back of a drawer.
How does this look any different to DC than the "evil linux hackers"?!!!
Quite true, but I think DC is more afraid of the fall out of what the "evil linux hacker" may inadvertently bring. For instance, I work for a very large educational book publisher. One of my co-workers pointed out the CueCat would be a good way to bring students to relavant web pages, just by scanning the ISBN on the book. That way, we don't need to worry about the youngest students getting lost in the navigation because they can't read well. In DC's perfect world, our company would sign up with their service. AFAICT, that's where they get all of their revenue. With source being disclosed on the net, our company could write our own stuff to accomplish this.
As I see it, they have a flawed business model. They want to give away the hardware that gives access to their service, but then they want to make sure that the hardware only responds to their service. That's all well and good, but I don't see how they can prevent anyone else from using it for their own purposes. They may have a case against someone who decided to set up a rival service, but I'm not sure how the law would treat that.
They probably would have been better off selling the CueCat Reader for a small fee (maybe at cost) and then providing some sort of special service (beyond simple linking) with their software. That way they don't lose any money if the hobbyist wants to disect their CueCat and they give your average joe a reason to purchase it.
The whole thing with IBM/MS is not an example of exponentially evil companies; more like what happens after a volcano erupts and the ecosystem starts to rebuild itself.
Companies are not evil; they are money machines which will do whatever it takes to get more and more money. The point is that large companies will seize power if another company relinquishes it. Large concentrations of power can be very dangerous because it puts the company in a position to dictate to the public and even to the government (I'm thinking of MS trying to scare everybody last year by stating that breaking them up would damage the economy).
What I was trying to say was that, on the slim chance that MS is around as a powerhouse in 20 years, it'll probably be under different roles/circumstances.
Ahh. I misunderstood. I interpreted your post as stating that there was little chance of having a Big Brother type state in 20 years, rather than the MS name being the on the company who controls all of the marbles. Without a major, major change in society, there will always be companies that have a lot of power. Some companies wax and some wane but the power always seems to be changing hands. The one thing that doesn't change is that if there's power to be had, somebody will snatch it up.
And exactly who corrupts the government? That's right... Big Business.
Don't forget that the US voters are also partially to blame. We can be such sheep sometime. We vote for candidates the way we root for football teams where we should be looking at candidates as interviewees for a job. I too support the idea of getting special interest perks out of politics (or perhaps politics out of government), but I think that ultimately the responsibility lies with the voters.
Remember, if you're able to vote and don't, you're not allowed to complain.
If history (remember that kiddies) has taught us anything it's that the big companies that once roared tend to get the smack-down after fscking the public over many years.
But other companies just take their place. Remember when IBM was punished by not being allowed to enforce certain patents for 10 years. MS stepped in and took over (think OLE).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the 1970's the same cute "scenario" could've been written about IBM except that the last copy of Sgt Peppers would've been on an 8-track.
All that kept going through my mind was the 1984 commercial.
There's a difference between using big words (which he did, but I don't have a problem with) and dry writing. I feel like he used too much uninteresting language for things that could have been said more simply. Perhaps it's my practical side talking, but I prefer to KIS when it comes to communication. It's much more effective.
Then again, language for the sake of language is something I really don't get. The draw of poetry has always eluded me. Taking into account his writing background, I guess in retrospect this could be why his style grates on me.
I remember not so long ago that MS's ad campaign mentioned that they asked users what they wanted in their UI for Office and implemented it. They may also observe users working but I must question what circumstances these users are working under. Or perhaps it's that MS is not observing the right things. But MS can come up with some really bad UI. Windows menu bars (for instance) are really bad.
I agree that much of the bad UI is third party. MS is responsible to a degree for that too. Windows lacks strong UI guidlines, plus MS makes enough changes to the Windows UI each release that it makes it difficult to write a sophisticated Windows app that looks NT native and Win95 native.
I find it ironic that a paper on ease of use uses such unapproachable language. I found to be over-analytical and bombastic (I love self-describing words).
I think good UI is intuitable, i.e. users can easily use intuition to figure out how to accomplish a task. You should study users habits to come up with such an interface. If you ask a user what should be in an interface, they rarely tell you what you're looking for. Instead you end up with a lot of bells and whistles and a paradigm that doesn't work the way most people would find natural. This a large part of the reason that Windows (and other MS apps) look and act the way they do (aside from the crashing).
Another thing this article doesn't take into account is that most software development teams tend to treat UI as an afterthought or an experimentation in aesteics.
Lastly, if you are going to have users use FTP, I think that it's perfectly reasonable to expect those users to understand what they are doing, i.e. transfering files. It sounded like they didn't have a firm grasp of file management and I can hardly blame the UI for that. RTFM, but good documentation is another story.
Let me first start out saying not all geeks program. Some such as my self also do hardware and networking.
I frequently forget about this group. Since I program, that's largely the group of people I associate with. A few of them are hardware gurus. Naturally, when I refer to the tech industry, I do mean to include everyone with some sort of arcane knowledge.
And I too skipped college, mostly because I did not want a 60 to 70 thousand-dollar student loan to burden me all through life.
Only formal education I have is just a High School diploma and yet I'm making more than college professors, and a person who just got out of college combined. What I have leaned from life and who I will hire in the future, would be a person not that has the little piece of paper saying, " I spent upwards of 70K to get this." I would hire the person who has experience over education any day of the week.
It's not exactly "here's 20K over four years, now give me my paper". You do have to work for the degree - it's just that the work isn't always that constructive. Sometimes education gets way too theoretical to be useful for practical application.
As for your position, I can respect that. It would be nice though if college did live up to some people's expectations - an environment of higher learning that provides unique opportunities that would be difficult to come by anywhere else. Colleges have become greedy. Since you're expected to have a college education in order to be taken seriously, colleges can pretty much charge whatever they want. It's no longer about education and exploration. It's about prestige and money. Several of my profs didn't even teach the courses themselves. They sent TAs to do it. They were too busy working on that research project that would get them published which leads to tenure.
How do you get experience you ask? By starting on the ground floor and work your way up. That's it there is no secret just hard work starting out at the bottom.
That's another thing that college grads aren't prepared for. Just because you got the degree, it doesn't entitle you to start higher up. I'm all for bringing back the journeyman system, especially for the tech arena. That way you get your education and your experience.
There was I niavely thinking it was about opening one's mind. You should study what fascinates you, not what's going to pay the most when you leave college, uh I mean university. It's no wonder there's so many ignorant college grads walking around, I can see the t-shirt now 'I want to college and all I got was this lousy job'.
First, excuse me while I LMAO and make a note to myself to start marketing these shirts on college campuses everywhere.
I used to think that was what college was about too, but that's one of the hardest lessons that I learned while getting my degree. It's about getting the piece of paper so you can get your foot in the door. If you're lucky, you learn a lot about yourself and about how the world works in a relatively safe environment. At my alma mater, they seem to be more caught up in their own finances (and they're a public university). The education was just meeting their end of the agreement, but it was clear that their heart wasn't in it (with the exception of a few individual professors). It's quite sad. I guess it comes from a college degree being the status quo. Nowadays, the average college student is just an average person of average intellegence. When universities deal with that kind of quantity, what's their incentive to create a challenging curriculum for the above average student?
This has gotten me thinking recently that this mediocrity has seeped into the tech industry. It has become a popular career choice, encouraged by schools and government (in the U.S. at least). Back before it was popular, most of the programmers out there were folks who got into it in spite of how unpopular it was. Now, I am underwhelmed by so much of the programming talent that I see. Of course, there are still many traditional geeks, but they're so much harder to find when they're standing in a crowd of people who got into programming for all of the wrong reasons.
Even worse, I've noticed that the CS curriculums seem to be dumbing down a bit to accomodate this new breed of programmer. For example, teaching Java as Programming I, without bothering to teach object oriented thinking and skipping over many of the useful basics like trees and linked lists. What's next? Drop assembly because it's too hard and nobody uses it anyway? (For those who are sarcasm-impaired, I realize that all programmers should be exposed to at least a little assembly or machine code, if for no other reason than to give you a real understanding of what is happening when your code executes. And yes, I know assembly for various archetectures is still used.)
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I like what they do in VA (or so I've heard). If a candidate doesn't receive more than 50% of the vote, they have a run-off between the top two vote getters. Between doing away with the electoral college and doing the run-off, I think you'd see a lot more 3rd party votes. But then, I also thought it would be neat if VP was an elected office rather than a chosen one (even if it were done in the primaries within each party). A Gore-Bradley ticket is much more attractive to me than the current Democratic ticket.
-Jennifer
The "waste of bandwidth" might have been a credible excuse in the early days, but a single napster download eclipses weeks worth of flames. At this point the expression just makes you sound old and cranky.
I don't know about that. A week's worth of flames on all of Slashdot? All of Usenet? All of those boards run out of media outlets? With anywhere between a few to a few thousand people reading them? It adds up. Flaming probably accounts for a smaller percentage of the waste now but it's still waste.
-Jennifer
I object to the term "verbal violence". That term should be reserved for credible threats of violence. Mere vitriol causes no harm other than hurt feelings. For those, I suggest growing a thicker skin, or getting some self-confidence.
I certainly wouldn't say it causes no harm. If nothing else, it's a waste of bandwidth and occasionally clutters my searches for useful posts. I've once had an occasion to observe a flame-war that ended because it looked like one of the parties was going to physically search out another participant and do physical harm to him. But, yes, "verbal violence" is a bit too dramatic for my tastes and people do need to understand that the price of free speech is that you risk being offended. I just wish some people would think a little before they posted.
-Jennifer
Saying what you think, even if it's negative, doesn't have to fall into the category of flaming. It's an issue of etiquette and substance. I see flaming as venting without contributing any food for thought in an obnoxious manner. You can disagree and express negative emotions without resorting to incindiary language.
-Jennifer
I see flaming more like road rage. On the Internet, all you see is text and graphics. Users don't have to acknowledge to themselves that there are real people out there. So, they behave in ways that they wouldn't if they were in a face-to-face confrontation. I've noticed two types of flaming: the trolling that's there to get attention or a reaction and the intolerance of alternate views on the universe. Both are offensive to me and I've learned not to react to either.
-Jennifer
Granted, your average joe is not going to be savvy enough to learn about some of these alternatives unless you put them right under his nose, but people can be so attached to "conventional wisdom". Four years ago, I got into an argument with my car dealer rep because he insisted that I was wasting my money when I told him that I had gotten a BeBox. He was an admitted neophite in computers, but he knew that I had absolutely no use for anything other than Windows (nevermind that I got it because I love to program with the BeAPI).
The average joe I can forgive, but IT staffs at many businesses should know better. I can't believe how many times I've heard an MIS talking about all of the NT problems he's having and then looking at me like I'm insane when I ask him if he's considered looking for an alternative OS.
-Jennifer
The "fast track" option is provided for exactly this case. Since the MS case is almost certainly going to go to the Supreme Court anyway, and since significant harm to consumers may happen (and on the basis of past evidence, is likely to happen) while we wait on the whole appeals process, it makes sense to take antitrust cases directly to the highest court in the land. A quick resolution is good for consumers and the judicial system, but not so good for Microsoft, which is why they're fighting it tooth and nail.
I can't say that I agree that this is what the law is for. The reason that the judicial process tends to take so long is to give both sides a really good chance to expose the whole story. Remember, you're only allowed to appeal if you can show new evidence or demonstrate that the last trial was somehow unfair, so should MS lose in the Court of Appeals, they can't just say, "we want to take it to the Supreme Court" and have it happen. Likewise, the DOJ is going to need some sort of reason to appeal should they lose.
The judicial process should only be short circuited if there's a really good reason. The Expediting Act leaves it at the discretion of the Supreme Court. Judges tend to have a certain amount of reverence for the system so I'd guess that the Supreme Court would be reluctant to expedite any case. It would have to be some kind of emergency. The only large and direct impact I can see this case having is as a reaction to the resolution, not from the resolution of the case iteself.
-Jennifer
I am not too naive to understand that the US wants to push this case along as fast as possible so that there isn't too much turmoil within the economy, but isn't that what a capatilist society is supposed to be about? The survival of the fittest? The best companies with the best products that the consumer likes best WINS?!
Who said anything about liking MS products? The public has brought this upon themselves by treating MS as the only viable option. It's sort of a vicious cycle. The OEMs don't want to risk their Windows contracts because they feel the market won't buy their computers without Windows and the public only sees Windows because the OEMs had to pay for a Windows license for every machine shipped, regardless of whether it had Windows on it or not. I wonder if you would have seen Dells with Red Hat on them if it wasn't for this case.
I'm not crazy about the idea of trying to punish a company because they are successful, but that's not what the DOJ has been arguing. They are arguing that MS became successful and then used the power afforded to them by their success to keep potential threats of competition at bay. That's what the Sherman Act is about. Contrary to popular belief, it is legal to have a monopoly in the U.S. You just need to make sure you compete on merits.
-Jennifer
It's not useless. It's just not appropriate. The law leaves a lot of room for interpretation and has been used at least once in the past (AT&T comes to mind). The key to it is in determining whether or not the outcome of the case would have significant impact on the public at large. Let's face it. The outcome of this case is not going to be felt directly by the public. Even those in the computer industry are probably going to have to wait to feel the impact (if there is any). The only reason that the Supreme Court might want to think about hearing this case is that you know that either side is going to appeal the next decision, but the law that put this case in front of the Supreme Court doesn't allow that as a reason.
-Jennifer
Much more intersting, I think, is that the DCMA could end up challenged in court. Imagine Metallica taking Harvard to court over this. Both have deep pockets so I think that it would end up being heard instead of settled. This is censorship and we saw how the courts reacted to the CDAs. As long as the universities don't back down, this could have a happy ending.
BTW, I don't think that wanting to protect one's copyright, regardless of who owns it, is an evil thing. I just think the DCMA is unreasonable about how it does it. It attempts to make tools that could make piracy possibile illegal, nevermind that these tools have other legitimate uses. If we applied that logic to everything, hardly anything would be legal.
-Jennifer
So, for those who received the CueCat by mail, this rule nullifies the following part of the EULA:
The :CueCat reader is only on loan to you from Digital:Convergence and may be recalled at any time. Without limiting the foregoing, your possession or control of the :CueCat reader does not transfer any right, title or interest to you in the :CueCat reader. Except as expressly permitted in this License, you may not reverse engineer, disassemble, modify, rent, lease, loan, sublicense, or distribute the :CueCat reader.
I wonder if there's any other unfair trade practice laws that would apply to those who got them from RS.
-Jennifer
I feel the same way. Ever since I heard that MS bought Bungie, all I could think of is how Symmantec bought Think Technologies all those years ago. The Think IDEs were renamed, degraded in quality over time, and the staff eventually left to create their own company, Metrowerks. I guess it's just the way it is (for now) in the software industry. I'm still glad that MS didn't buy Intuit. Don't know what I'd do without Quicken.
-Jennifer
Sorry. Didn't mean to imply that this was going to be the breakthrough technology that would enable us to acheive any of those pipe dreams. A much greater understanding of the central nervous system and the brain is needed. Perhaps this technology could be utilized to gain some insight in these fields through experimentation.
-Jennifer
I can't believe how bad my grammar was in that post. Anyway, came up with my own set of applications if it ever goes anywhere.
I guess that's starting to sound a little too much like The Matrix. Anyone got any others?
-Jennifer
This sounds like it could be really cool in cybernetics. I'm surprised they didn't mention it, but I suppose that's a bit pie in the sky. I wonder if this could be used to fix severe nerve damage since that works on electrical system? The possibilities racing through my mind for this sort of thing is too great to write down at once.
-Jennifer
In DC's business model, hackers look exactly like your aunt Martha who doesn't get a computer. She subscribes to Forbes, and gets a :Cue:Cat unsolicited in the mail. Not owning a computer, she tosses the physical device in the back of a drawer.
How does this look any different to DC than the "evil linux hackers"?!!!
Quite true, but I think DC is more afraid of the fall out of what the "evil linux hacker" may inadvertently bring. For instance, I work for a very large educational book publisher. One of my co-workers pointed out the CueCat would be a good way to bring students to relavant web pages, just by scanning the ISBN on the book. That way, we don't need to worry about the youngest students getting lost in the navigation because they can't read well. In DC's perfect world, our company would sign up with their service. AFAICT, that's where they get all of their revenue. With source being disclosed on the net, our company could write our own stuff to accomplish this.
-Jennifer
As I see it, they have a flawed business model. They want to give away the hardware that gives access to their service, but then they want to make sure that the hardware only responds to their service. That's all well and good, but I don't see how they can prevent anyone else from using it for their own purposes. They may have a case against someone who decided to set up a rival service, but I'm not sure how the law would treat that.
They probably would have been better off selling the CueCat Reader for a small fee (maybe at cost) and then providing some sort of special service (beyond simple linking) with their software. That way they don't lose any money if the hobbyist wants to disect their CueCat and they give your average joe a reason to purchase it.
-Jennifer
The whole thing with IBM/MS is not an example of exponentially evil companies; more like what happens after a volcano erupts and the ecosystem starts to rebuild itself.
Companies are not evil; they are money machines which will do whatever it takes to get more and more money. The point is that large companies will seize power if another company relinquishes it. Large concentrations of power can be very dangerous because it puts the company in a position to dictate to the public and even to the government (I'm thinking of MS trying to scare everybody last year by stating that breaking them up would damage the economy).
What I was trying to say was that, on the slim chance that MS is around as a powerhouse in 20 years, it'll probably be under different roles/circumstances.
Ahh. I misunderstood. I interpreted your post as stating that there was little chance of having a Big Brother type state in 20 years, rather than the MS name being the on the company who controls all of the marbles. Without a major, major change in society, there will always be companies that have a lot of power. Some companies wax and some wane but the power always seems to be changing hands. The one thing that doesn't change is that if there's power to be had, somebody will snatch it up.
-Jennifer
And exactly who corrupts the government? That's right... Big Business.
Don't forget that the US voters are also partially to blame. We can be such sheep sometime. We vote for candidates the way we root for football teams where we should be looking at candidates as interviewees for a job. I too support the idea of getting special interest perks out of politics (or perhaps politics out of government), but I think that ultimately the responsibility lies with the voters.
Remember, if you're able to vote and don't, you're not allowed to complain.
-Jennifer
If history (remember that kiddies) has taught us anything it's that the big companies that once roared tend to get the smack-down after fscking the public over many years.
But other companies just take their place. Remember when IBM was punished by not being allowed to enforce certain patents for 10 years. MS stepped in and took over (think OLE).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the 1970's the same cute "scenario" could've been written about IBM except that the last copy of Sgt Peppers would've been on an 8-track.
All that kept going through my mind was the 1984 commercial.
-Jennifer
There's a difference between using big words (which he did, but I don't have a problem with) and dry writing. I feel like he used too much uninteresting language for things that could have been said more simply. Perhaps it's my practical side talking, but I prefer to KIS when it comes to communication. It's much more effective.
Then again, language for the sake of language is something I really don't get. The draw of poetry has always eluded me. Taking into account his writing background, I guess in retrospect this could be why his style grates on me.
-Jennifer
I agree that much of the bad UI is third party. MS is responsible to a degree for that too. Windows lacks strong UI guidlines, plus MS makes enough changes to the Windows UI each release that it makes it difficult to write a sophisticated Windows app that looks NT native and Win95 native.
-Jennifer
I find it ironic that a paper on ease of use uses such unapproachable language. I found to be over-analytical and bombastic (I love self-describing words).
I think good UI is intuitable, i.e. users can easily use intuition to figure out how to accomplish a task. You should study users habits to come up with such an interface. If you ask a user what should be in an interface, they rarely tell you what you're looking for. Instead you end up with a lot of bells and whistles and a paradigm that doesn't work the way most people would find natural. This a large part of the reason that Windows (and other MS apps) look and act the way they do (aside from the crashing).
Another thing this article doesn't take into account is that most software development teams tend to treat UI as an afterthought or an experimentation in aesteics.
Lastly, if you are going to have users use FTP, I think that it's perfectly reasonable to expect those users to understand what they are doing, i.e. transfering files. It sounded like they didn't have a firm grasp of file management and I can hardly blame the UI for that. RTFM, but good documentation is another story.
-Jennifer
Let me first start out saying not all geeks program. Some such as my self also do hardware and networking.
I frequently forget about this group. Since I program, that's largely the group of people I associate with. A few of them are hardware gurus. Naturally, when I refer to the tech industry, I do mean to include everyone with some sort of arcane knowledge.
And I too skipped college, mostly because I did not want a 60 to 70 thousand-dollar student loan to burden me all through life.
Only formal education I have is just a High School diploma and yet I'm making more than college professors, and a person who just got out of college combined. What I have leaned from life and who I will hire in the future, would be a person not that has the little piece of paper saying, " I spent upwards of 70K to get this." I would hire the person who has experience over education any day of the week.
It's not exactly "here's 20K over four years, now give me my paper". You do have to work for the degree - it's just that the work isn't always that constructive. Sometimes education gets way too theoretical to be useful for practical application.
As for your position, I can respect that. It would be nice though if college did live up to some people's expectations - an environment of higher learning that provides unique opportunities that would be difficult to come by anywhere else. Colleges have become greedy. Since you're expected to have a college education in order to be taken seriously, colleges can pretty much charge whatever they want. It's no longer about education and exploration. It's about prestige and money. Several of my profs didn't even teach the courses themselves. They sent TAs to do it. They were too busy working on that research project that would get them published which leads to tenure.
How do you get experience you ask? By starting on the ground floor and work your way up. That's it there is no secret just hard work starting out at the bottom.
That's another thing that college grads aren't prepared for. Just because you got the degree, it doesn't entitle you to start higher up. I'm all for bringing back the journeyman system, especially for the tech arena. That way you get your education and your experience.-Jennifer
There was I niavely thinking it was about opening one's mind. You should study what fascinates you, not what's going to pay the most when you leave college, uh I mean university. It's no wonder there's so many ignorant college grads walking around, I can see the t-shirt now 'I want to college and all I got was this lousy job'.
First, excuse me while I LMAO and make a note to myself to start marketing these shirts on college campuses everywhere.
I used to think that was what college was about too, but that's one of the hardest lessons that I learned while getting my degree. It's about getting the piece of paper so you can get your foot in the door. If you're lucky, you learn a lot about yourself and about how the world works in a relatively safe environment. At my alma mater, they seem to be more caught up in their own finances (and they're a public university). The education was just meeting their end of the agreement, but it was clear that their heart wasn't in it (with the exception of a few individual professors). It's quite sad. I guess it comes from a college degree being the status quo. Nowadays, the average college student is just an average person of average intellegence. When universities deal with that kind of quantity, what's their incentive to create a challenging curriculum for the above average student?
This has gotten me thinking recently that this mediocrity has seeped into the tech industry. It has become a popular career choice, encouraged by schools and government (in the U.S. at least). Back before it was popular, most of the programmers out there were folks who got into it in spite of how unpopular it was. Now, I am underwhelmed by so much of the programming talent that I see. Of course, there are still many traditional geeks, but they're so much harder to find when they're standing in a crowd of people who got into programming for all of the wrong reasons.
Even worse, I've noticed that the CS curriculums seem to be dumbing down a bit to accomodate this new breed of programmer. For example, teaching Java as Programming I, without bothering to teach object oriented thinking and skipping over many of the useful basics like trees and linked lists. What's next? Drop assembly because it's too hard and nobody uses it anyway? (For those who are sarcasm-impaired, I realize that all programmers should be exposed to at least a little assembly or machine code, if for no other reason than to give you a real understanding of what is happening when your code executes. And yes, I know assembly for various archetectures is still used.)
-Jennifer