Because they want to improve their image in the open source community, making people think better of Yahoo! when it comes time to choose between Yahoo!, Google, and Brand X for their next enterprise service purchase. I also imagine that they could release code in the future that makes it easy to incorporate Yahoo!'s ad technology so that Web 2.0 developers can contextually-advertise and make money from their efforts.
Google's acts of "driving people to its site" do nothing for Google's bottom line. Google, like Yahoo!, is an advertising company which makes the vast majority of its income from other web sites besides their search engines / portals.
True. Comcast provides on-demand programming (mediocre quality, though much of it is free) and I like the fact that they're supporting it. NBC already partnered with Google for Olympic video (delayed) so maybe we'll see more collaborations between the TV industry and the Internet service industry.
Yes. It's called the public access channel. Much like Wikipedia, they'll let anyone go on there and speak what they think is the truth for a half hour at a time.
I also have access to a free library system that lets me borrow books; however unlike Wikipedia, the library does not permit me to scribble "corrections" all over the books I borrow when I perceive information in them to be wrong.
And while 5,000,000 people were buffing their paladins to make the run into Molten Core, I was watching informative TV programs like "Nova." Save your stereotypes for someone else.
Re:Can we trust google with our "secrets"?
on
Can We Trust Google?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And I suppose that if I use the phone to call my friend, using the PSTN, that's also a public act? After all, anyone could listen in and eavesdrop on our conversation. It's just more efficient when there's a government agency that has already indexed all the conversations.
Companies like Google and DoubleClick track you around their large advertising networks using fewer than 400 cookies. Doesn't make them any better, by the metric of "cookies == spyware" that you appear to have bought into. In fact, people seem to be tolerant of advertising as long as it keeps cool new products free.
As a former 16-year-old Internet loudmouth, I would hope that we can disconnect Dylan's age from his opinions. It is in fact possible to be mature and communicate well at that age, but unfortunately this article is not very mature at all. To be fair, though, there are significantly older people with similarly narrow world views who get a ton of press on Slashdot.
Other factors that Microsoft paid little to no attention to and still don't today would be gaming consoles, advertising, portable music devices, and computer security.
I'll expand this to include both clauses separately.
Other factors that Microsoft paid little to no attention to would be gaming consoles, advertising, portable music devices, and computer security. Other factors that Microsoft still doesn't pay attention to today would be gaming consoles, advertising, portable music devices, and computer security.
It's that second sentence where the problem comes in. You see, Microsoft spends a ton of money on advertising and actually intends to make money off the Xbox 360 after taking a bath on the Xbox. Likewise they are still aggressively courting the iPod's music share by allowing more than one music store to work with Plays For Sure devices. Among the reasons why Vista was delayed: an active effort to include more security features into the operating system, some of which should be familiar to any Linux or Mac OS X user, at the expense of some of the glitzier features that were promised earlier. If that's not attention, what is?
I appreciate your skepticism about the Xbox 360's prospects, but that sentence just seems like a flippant remark that you use to ignore any positive effort Microsoft tries to make. It is but one of dozens of remarks made throughout the article with no citation, a blatant disregard for any facts with which you disagree, and a blind show of support for anybody but Microsoft. Have you considered a writing career with the Colbert Report?
Please learn to proofread. I know that 89 wpm is a good score in Mario Teaches Typing but articles should be filled with well-formed, coherent sentences. Pick up a book some time and see what a touch-typist can produce when he actually reads what he's written.
Your grammar and spelling problems aside, your article was nothing more than the same "Linux is better because everyone who uses Windows is an idiot" elitism I've seen for years. It brings nothing new to the table. I'm sorry that you had to hear this from the boards at Slashdot since by all qualitative standards this article should have been rejected.
Have you ever heard of proofreading? The word is faze, not "phase." You have about a hundred spelling and grammar errors like that in your opinion piece whose stream-of-consciousness style seems excessive even by blog standards. You make no cogent points and only parrot the "Microsoft is teh suck, Windows users are idiots, using Linux makes you smart" line that got old years ago. I pity your English teachers for having to read your longer works.
I read through that article and it just sounds like one pretentious blogger's disdain for Microsoft. Let's run through all the things that got this fast-tracked to Slashdot:
Early mention of Steve Ballmer throwing a chair as a microcosm of Microsoft's supposed corporate culture
Rampant grammer* and spelling errors overshadowed by a blind sense of faith in the Linux community. Example: "The Linux community will publish every vulnerability, regardless of it's criticality, but the chances that a hacker will even choose to expliot those vulnerabilities is very low, (unnecessary comma) since most of them are of low criticality and it would be stupid to do so, anyways." So people don't attack Linux because "it would be stupid to do so." Thank you.
The actual "Executable Internet" isn't mentioned until the second-to-last paragraph: "The only reason a version of Windows that runs from the Internet would even exist would be because there is competition. Microsoft simply does not have enough fists to punch every opponent; resulting in a poorly designed operating platform and ignorant users who don't know the difference between WEP and WPA and those who are also accustomed to having Viagara advertisements greet them every time they boot their computers." Seems like this man is more upset that the hoi polloi use Linux than that Microsoft doesn't care about security.
This is pure Linux-user elitism, the sort of smug "Our Opponent Just Doesn't Get It; We Do; and We're Smarter Than You" attitude that loses political battles and makes the arguer only look like a pretentious fool in the eyes of the skeptic.
I dislike Microsoft as much as the next Slashdot user but this article is awful: it simply slams Microsoft as the Big Corporate Machine with quotes like "Microsoft does not publish all their security vulnerabilities because other executive stockholders, whom are also ignorant would become worried and eventually begin to question the platform's security." If I wanted to hear ramblings about the willfully ignorant I'd listen to a David Cross album.
* Intentional typo used to point out how correcting grammar on Slashdot usually leads to a spelling error, or vice versa
Well, I may have overspoke. They didn't threaten to fire me or anything; I'm on good terms with our admins. My point is that if podcasts and streaming radio take off, do you really want everyone to be downloading large files or streaming 128 kbps audio? Seems like an example of the tragedy of the commons.
My admins don't like internet radio at all: if you have only a dozen people listening to a middle-quality 64kbps stream, that's 768 kbps that's pretty much shut off from the rest of the company. Once everyone tells everyone and popularity soars, you're running out of bandwidth for doing business.
Podcasts are pretty scary too. I had to turn off automatic updating at work when I got yelled at for downloading a 90+ MB Channel Frederator episode -- just for wasting all our bandwidth.
Why do you assume that someone will go out and buy every edition of a movie? If someone owns a PSP and a DVD player but doesn't have a hi-def TV, then the DVD-UMD bundle might be a good buy. For a PS3 owner, the Blu-Ray disc is the better buy. Sony's movie studio owns the rights to that "suspicious" list of movies and it can milk them for all they're worth. You don't have to buy them.
I don't own the Fifth Element on any media, so I for one appreciate the fact that my patience is going to be rewarded with a higher-definition copy of the movie.
Then don't buy the bundle. You can buy The Fifth Element, The Fifth Element Superbit Edition, The Fifth Element Special Edition With Limited Edition Foil Packaging, and the new Fifth Element DVD-UMD bundle. Gas up the SUV and head down to Best Buy -- there's media to buy!
I saw I, Robot, another Sony picture, on HBO-HD recently. It really did look wonderful. With HDTV resolution you can see the sponsor logos reflected in other sponsor logos. It's quite Audi, if I may be so JVC Converse.
Re:this could be a dangerous IPO
on
Vonage IPO
·
· Score: 1
I have Verizon DSL but I only have Verizon's most basic phone package -- the only extra I have is their wire maintenance package. It costs about $17 per month. Without the wire maintenance package it would be about $13. If Vonage costs you $25 a month, that's still only about $40 for unlimited long distance.
(And unfortunately I need a Verizon phone line for a security system even without DSL. I don't trust VoIP in case of an emergency.)
This is the same man who derided small flash-mem MP3 players as difficult to use and so unappealing that they all end up in drawers, then happily unveiled the iPod shuffle, a feature-for-feature clone of 2002's Creative MuVo (no screen, virtually no controls, small).
Can you provide any resources or tips for running OO.o in a headless mode? What language do you use to invoke OpenOffice.org? I generate Excel reports on a daily basis using Perl and I'm always looking to try new and more full-featured tools.
I'd think that if the submitter were on the fence, the "can I work on open source stuff" question would push him over one way or the other. I've been told that, at least in theory, working on unrelated stuff is just a matter of writing a request and having the legal department sign off on it. If he's working at a company where the lawyers won't sign off on unrelated work, then that's a Very Bad Sign.
Yes, you can have a basic desktop now: web browsing, e-mail, basic office suite, but the fact that "everyone has their killer apps" is the reason why Windows is and will remain the market leader. I'm not talking about people who stubbornly refuse to try an e-mail program other than Outlook; I'm talking about people who haven't found a suitable finance suite for Linux, doctors who have specialized billing applications, businesses who use Access databases far more than they know they should, and so on. The web as an application platform has only started to erode those platform boundaries, but to redo every business process in a Linux-friendly way costs a lot more than renewing Windows licenses, in many cases. (That's "a lot more" in the short term, of course; any business who can amortize software costs over the long term deserves a round of applause.)
Nah, PageRank was solved and Google Search is just an index to a bunch of link farms and copycat blogs. Reminds me of AltaVista just before AltaVista plunged in popularity and became just another portal site.
One commenter on Wired offered the term "betaware" for software that keeps getting revised but is never released. That would put Google in the same camp as ICQ and WINE: just keep fixing bugs and (in the former case) keep piling on more features, but never officially release anything as GA.
I don't have a problem with people frequently releasing software: as a Linux user it's nice to see bugs addressed when they're fixed and satisfactorily tested. What I do have a problem with is companies hiding behind the "beta" tag. Either a product is released and you can hold the company accountable, or it's in beta and you shouldn't trust it for production work. In my opinion most Google products fall into the latter category for three years or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Because they want to improve their image in the open source community, making people think better of Yahoo! when it comes time to choose between Yahoo!, Google, and Brand X for their next enterprise service purchase. I also imagine that they could release code in the future that makes it easy to incorporate Yahoo!'s ad technology so that Web 2.0 developers can contextually-advertise and make money from their efforts.
Google's acts of "driving people to its site" do nothing for Google's bottom line. Google, like Yahoo!, is an advertising company which makes the vast majority of its income from other web sites besides their search engines / portals.
True. Comcast provides on-demand programming (mediocre quality, though much of it is free) and I like the fact that they're supporting it. NBC already partnered with Google for Olympic video (delayed) so maybe we'll see more collaborations between the TV industry and the Internet service industry.
Yes. It's called the public access channel. Much like Wikipedia, they'll let anyone go on there and speak what they think is the truth for a half hour at a time.
I also have access to a free library system that lets me borrow books; however unlike Wikipedia, the library does not permit me to scribble "corrections" all over the books I borrow when I perceive information in them to be wrong.
And while 5,000,000 people were buffing their paladins to make the run into Molten Core, I was watching informative TV programs like "Nova." Save your stereotypes for someone else.
And I suppose that if I use the phone to call my friend, using the PSTN, that's also a public act? After all, anyone could listen in and eavesdrop on our conversation. It's just more efficient when there's a government agency that has already indexed all the conversations.
Companies like Google and DoubleClick track you around their large advertising networks using fewer than 400 cookies. Doesn't make them any better, by the metric of "cookies == spyware" that you appear to have bought into. In fact, people seem to be tolerant of advertising as long as it keeps cool new products free.
As a former 16-year-old Internet loudmouth, I would hope that we can disconnect Dylan's age from his opinions. It is in fact possible to be mature and communicate well at that age, but unfortunately this article is not very mature at all. To be fair, though, there are significantly older people with similarly narrow world views who get a ton of press on Slashdot.
Let's examine this sentence again.
Other factors that Microsoft paid little to no attention to and still don't today would be gaming consoles, advertising, portable music devices, and computer security.
I'll expand this to include both clauses separately.
Other factors that Microsoft paid little to no attention to would be gaming consoles, advertising, portable music devices, and computer security. Other factors that Microsoft still doesn't pay attention to today would be gaming consoles, advertising, portable music devices, and computer security.
It's that second sentence where the problem comes in. You see, Microsoft spends a ton of money on advertising and actually intends to make money off the Xbox 360 after taking a bath on the Xbox. Likewise they are still aggressively courting the iPod's music share by allowing more than one music store to work with Plays For Sure devices. Among the reasons why Vista was delayed: an active effort to include more security features into the operating system, some of which should be familiar to any Linux or Mac OS X user, at the expense of some of the glitzier features that were promised earlier. If that's not attention, what is?
I appreciate your skepticism about the Xbox 360's prospects, but that sentence just seems like a flippant remark that you use to ignore any positive effort Microsoft tries to make. It is but one of dozens of remarks made throughout the article with no citation, a blatant disregard for any facts with which you disagree, and a blind show of support for anybody but Microsoft. Have you considered a writing career with the Colbert Report?
Please learn to proofread. I know that 89 wpm is a good score in Mario Teaches Typing but articles should be filled with well-formed, coherent sentences. Pick up a book some time and see what a touch-typist can produce when he actually reads what he's written.
Your grammar and spelling problems aside, your article was nothing more than the same "Linux is better because everyone who uses Windows is an idiot" elitism I've seen for years. It brings nothing new to the table. I'm sorry that you had to hear this from the boards at Slashdot since by all qualitative standards this article should have been rejected.
Have you ever heard of proofreading? The word is faze , not "phase." You have about a hundred spelling and grammar errors like that in your opinion piece whose stream-of-consciousness style seems excessive even by blog standards. You make no cogent points and only parrot the "Microsoft is teh suck, Windows users are idiots, using Linux makes you smart" line that got old years ago. I pity your English teachers for having to read your longer works.
How silly. "...this man is more upset that the hoi polloi use Windows..."
Bzzt! Wrong! I lose! Good day sir!
I read through that article and it just sounds like one pretentious blogger's disdain for Microsoft. Let's run through all the things that got this fast-tracked to Slashdot:
This is pure Linux-user elitism, the sort of smug "Our Opponent Just Doesn't Get It; We Do; and We're Smarter Than You" attitude that loses political battles and makes the arguer only look like a pretentious fool in the eyes of the skeptic.
I dislike Microsoft as much as the next Slashdot user but this article is awful: it simply slams Microsoft as the Big Corporate Machine with quotes like "Microsoft does not publish all their security vulnerabilities because other executive stockholders, whom are also ignorant would become worried and eventually begin to question the platform's security." If I wanted to hear ramblings about the willfully ignorant I'd listen to a David Cross album.
* Intentional typo used to point out how correcting grammar on Slashdot usually leads to a spelling error, or vice versaWell, I may have overspoke. They didn't threaten to fire me or anything; I'm on good terms with our admins. My point is that if podcasts and streaming radio take off, do you really want everyone to be downloading large files or streaming 128 kbps audio? Seems like an example of the tragedy of the commons.
At home and at work, can't you listen to Sirius over the Internet? I thought they let subscribers listen on-line for no extra money.
(Assuming you're allowed to stream audio at work, of course.)
My admins don't like internet radio at all: if you have only a dozen people listening to a middle-quality 64kbps stream, that's 768 kbps that's pretty much shut off from the rest of the company. Once everyone tells everyone and popularity soars, you're running out of bandwidth for doing business.
Podcasts are pretty scary too. I had to turn off automatic updating at work when I got yelled at for downloading a 90+ MB Channel Frederator episode -- just for wasting all our bandwidth.
Why do you assume that someone will go out and buy every edition of a movie? If someone owns a PSP and a DVD player but doesn't have a hi-def TV, then the DVD-UMD bundle might be a good buy. For a PS3 owner, the Blu-Ray disc is the better buy. Sony's movie studio owns the rights to that "suspicious" list of movies and it can milk them for all they're worth. You don't have to buy them.
I don't own the Fifth Element on any media, so I for one appreciate the fact that my patience is going to be rewarded with a higher-definition copy of the movie.
Then don't buy the bundle. You can buy The Fifth Element, The Fifth Element Superbit Edition, The Fifth Element Special Edition With Limited Edition Foil Packaging, and the new Fifth Element DVD-UMD bundle. Gas up the SUV and head down to Best Buy -- there's media to buy!
I saw I, Robot, another Sony picture, on HBO-HD recently. It really did look wonderful. With HDTV resolution you can see the sponsor logos reflected in other sponsor logos. It's quite Audi, if I may be so JVC Converse.
I have Verizon DSL but I only have Verizon's most basic phone package -- the only extra I have is their wire maintenance package. It costs about $17 per month. Without the wire maintenance package it would be about $13. If Vonage costs you $25 a month, that's still only about $40 for unlimited long distance.
(And unfortunately I need a Verizon phone line for a security system even without DSL. I don't trust VoIP in case of an emergency.)
This is the same man who derided small flash-mem MP3 players as difficult to use and so unappealing that they all end up in drawers, then happily unveiled the iPod shuffle, a feature-for-feature clone of 2002's Creative MuVo (no screen, virtually no controls, small).
Can you provide any resources or tips for running OO.o in a headless mode? What language do you use to invoke OpenOffice.org? I generate Excel reports on a daily basis using Perl and I'm always looking to try new and more full-featured tools.
I'd think that if the submitter were on the fence, the "can I work on open source stuff" question would push him over one way or the other. I've been told that, at least in theory, working on unrelated stuff is just a matter of writing a request and having the legal department sign off on it. If he's working at a company where the lawyers won't sign off on unrelated work, then that's a Very Bad Sign.
Yes, you can have a basic desktop now: web browsing, e-mail, basic office suite, but the fact that "everyone has their killer apps" is the reason why Windows is and will remain the market leader. I'm not talking about people who stubbornly refuse to try an e-mail program other than Outlook; I'm talking about people who haven't found a suitable finance suite for Linux, doctors who have specialized billing applications, businesses who use Access databases far more than they know they should, and so on. The web as an application platform has only started to erode those platform boundaries, but to redo every business process in a Linux-friendly way costs a lot more than renewing Windows licenses, in many cases. (That's "a lot more" in the short term, of course; any business who can amortize software costs over the long term deserves a round of applause.)
Nah, PageRank was solved and Google Search is just an index to a bunch of link farms and copycat blogs. Reminds me of AltaVista just before AltaVista plunged in popularity and became just another portal site.
One commenter on Wired offered the term "betaware" for software that keeps getting revised but is never released. That would put Google in the same camp as ICQ and WINE: just keep fixing bugs and (in the former case) keep piling on more features, but never officially release anything as GA.
I don't have a problem with people frequently releasing software: as a Linux user it's nice to see bugs addressed when they're fixed and satisfactorily tested. What I do have a problem with is companies hiding behind the "beta" tag. Either a product is released and you can hold the company accountable, or it's in beta and you shouldn't trust it for production work. In my opinion most Google products fall into the latter category for three years or so.