If you will try to find the closest thing to what you have, you most likely will end with more headache than if you just list all the necessary functions and install whatever does them best.
Say, you have email. There is Exchange equivalent for Linux (Samsung Contact), but if one can survive with moving meeting scheduling functionality to something else (or abandoning it -- people should not spend so much time at meetings that they need to mess with each other calendars to schedule it), Cyrus + sendmail with IMAP will outperform everything else UNLESS people like to send multi-megabyte attachments to giant lists instead of placing files on some HTTP server.
Meeting scheduler and web server management programs can be installed separately (and nothing wrong will happen even if large attachment will get copied to 100 people, as long as it fits on the server's hard drive), but people should be aware that they are there. On the other hand, performance, security and flexibility of Internet connection will improve dramatically compared to Exchange.
Same kind of "similat to what you had on Windows" vs. "what performs this function the best" dilemma exists for pretty much every other service.
Why would anyone want to know if someone is trying to find his network? What horrendous insecurity may prompt one to waste his time on such a thing? Why not just make the goddamn network secure enough so whoever will run kismet/netstumbler/whatever will simply see that he can't use this network and leave it alone?
The problem is, someone still have to do in-house maintenance of the project. If he is receiving support from the vendor he still has to do his job, and this does not translate into any significant saving of employee's time compared to him learning about the product and getting support from mailing lists. Purely theoretical "time saving" of 48 minutes per day for a person who has to work on the project anyway means nothing -- and most likely negated by the quality of information available.
The analysis would be valid if it was similarly priced "end-user" product that did not require the user to be familiar with concepts and have skills necessary to use mailing lists and documentation, however search engine is not in this category.
Huh? MS made its last killer app when it bought Visio. Any moron can make a small PC that runs Office, and hell will freeze over sooner than MS will make an application that will be well-designed specifically for a tablet. Look at what they did for "pocket" computers, made scaled down lookalikes of their desktop applications and lied to the customers about them being "compatible" will Office (lossless round trip, anyone?).
The issue isn't that "M$ is bad". The issue is that a collection of the network effect, patent and copyright law applied to software, EULAs (and perhaps other effects) makes it possible for MS to behave in a manner that is hurting society.
Saying "M$ is bad" makes it easy for other people to ignore you. Saying "The network effect makes it possible for a major player in the market to control media delivery formats. Is that the way it should be?" might force other people to start thinking.
The issue is, people of whom this "network effect" is composed, are not civilized enough to stop it. I am not going to "win them over", because they _are_ the problem -- telling it to them is usually pointless, so instead of accusing them I merely demonstrate them my disrespect. If enough people will do that maybe they will figure out that something is wrong with what they are doing -- after all it worked pretty well with contamination of environment, may work with noosphere contaminants such as Microsoft.
Transmeta indeed needs a sub-notebook market, but how is it related to Microsoft, the company that doesn't make PCs, and consistently makes OS suitable exclusively for desktops? Whoever will make hardware for Microsoft will either make it a desktop/laptop PC (=> Intel or AMD), and make something for "average Joe", or make a "palmtop" with Windows CE (=> ARM or MIPS) and make a toy for an overpaid executive. "Tablets" made for Microsoft will be just small but overpowered laptops, therefore Intel.
All MS has to do is release a new codec for WMP, and mplayer is again out in the cold. For Windows, it is a simple autodownload the first time the new codec is encountered, no need to break compatibility. The situation is a bit more difficult for embedded devices without an easy software upgrade capability. Anyway, rest assured that MS *will* do this the moment they consider mplayer to be a genuine competitor.
But here is the problem -- WMP codecs already work under emulation, they will have to break their infrastructure again.
Besides, MS has still not played the patent card to stop interoperable implementations. Now that the DoJ is no longer breathing down their necks, MS will use that weapon whenever it applies.
Why not just break patents and have an organization that will do nothing but stall them in the courts until they will become irrelevant? This strategy seems to be working fine for Microsoft.
(As for the M$ spelling - it tends to make the people you are arguing with write you off as a juvenile gas-bag instead of listening to any valid arguments that you make.)
So? Why would I care about their opinions? For me any society where Microsoft-like stunts can be pulled, is uncivilized.
"WMP" content is already supported by mplayer -- M$ (yes, "M$" is an appropriate spelling no matter what proponents of "civilized discussion" consider to be politically correct) would have to break the compatibility again.
Actually many people are indirectly their investors (or investors into the company that they owe money) -- Worldcom and WSBC stocks are is, or at least were, in mutual and retirement funds. All those money invested in Worldcom are at this point are as good as nonexistent, and SBC value dropped considerably over last few years, so value of, say, many people's 401k retirement investment may be decreased by this, robbing large part of population.
XML is a format with nearly infinite possibilities for obfuscation, convolutedness and poorly defined standards. The most we can expect is the possibility to validate a file to absolutely certainly determine if it is compliant with the new Word format or not.
It's not a court-issued subpoena. It's a "subpoena" issued by some company without any process that involves court -- I can "subpoena" anything using that. Heck, Osama Bin Laden can write a "subpoena" to CIA for the list of people that tried to capture him, and the paper will be just as invalid.
Goodbye any hopes for common carrier status then. Right now ISPs at least can argue that they are common carrier, but the second when they assume any control over user that depends on the content he is transferring, they can't, and will be forced to share the responsibility for whatever user is doing.
That would be e^(this "subpoena" situation) amount of trouble for Verizon.
It's anti-intellectualism got more fierce, and alienated all geeks already. And, of course, author fails to grasp that "right" and "left" ideologies' "ancestry" has little to do with that -- it's just both ideologies in their simplistic/extreme forms became merely shells that intellectuals grew up and abandoned.
My setup that I have made a year ago, is relatively cheap (the only non-computer expensive component is Proxima Ovation, an old LCD projection panel) and nice enough to displace a TV from my living room. Original version used composite video from PS2 to the TV capture board instead of S-Video, and image quality was pretty terrible. VCR's tuner happened to be better than one built into the capture board, and I didn't care much for improving audio quality beyond a reasonable level, so audio goes through rather cheap components.
LCD panel, projector and PC produce more noise than what I would prefer, and adjusting image on a projector was a pain in the neck (Proxima's bit depth sucks), but in the end image quality ended up being far superior to a TV. I have found out that in this configuration xawtv works better with Xv disabled, and many games look terrible if blown to a full 1024x768 screen, so I keep them at the NTSC resolution. DVDs are played with Ogle on a computer.
Proxima Ovation has S-Video and composite inputs, however the scaling algorithm that it uses for them, is absolutely horrible.
...that this thing wouldn't be common carrier? Large communication system, with Bill Gates at the helm, and no obligation to be compatible with anything would be a really good vehicle of pushing nasty stuff in protocols.
MS doesn't pay taxes. It pays bribes (political donations) to promote its interests in US and abroad. If Microsoft will get powerful enough it may cause US to ban Chinese imports unless, say, China will adopt Microsoft's policies. China, of course, has little to worry about its export to US now, US economy can't function without them, but if in some distant future Microsoft will get, say, $100 from every Chinese, it will have enough money to buy Congress twice.
USSR didn't spend anything on SDI-related stuff -- it was not considered to be a threat in late 80's when everyone with a brain and outside Raytheon or Lockheed understood that this technology would be ineffective in the case of nuclear war. Russian military-related research and engineering was a self-contained program that did not depend on any imported components, so it would be impossible to "overspend" on it -- it didn't require any "hard" currency at all, and didn't involve an overhead of feeding military-industrial complex's companies and their stockholders. With a country as large as former USSR, physical limitations would prevent government to allocate too large percentage of resources on the military, at the expense of the rest of the economy, so economy (that was also mostly self-contained) had sufficient resources to continue operating as it did in raely 80's. The system however was very fragile, and when Gorbachev's reforms went beyond political doctrines and policies into economy, they broken the existing system withour creating anything usable in its place. USSR continued to exist after that, however the central government became so wrapped in internal bickering and mutual accusations between factions, it simply become irrelevant. At that point local governments (usually more conservative politically and more corrupt) taken over, leaving central government nothing to do but continuing discrediting itself until it became completely irrelevant. USSR dissolution therefore was a purely political process, with only remote relationship to the economy (central government's incompetence in the economy-related reforms was one of the reasons for bickering).
So actually "free trade" inside the country was one of the problems that happened before USSR was dissolved. Ex-Communist politicians adopted libertarian-like doctrine that was heavily pushed by US propaganda (even though it has little to do with how US economy operates), and the combination of massive deregulation, formerly state-owned monopolies, and money in the hand of organized crime and corrupt bureaucracy was the deadly mix for the economy.
1. Fast! Writing random mild insults almost a week after the original posting isn't as great as making a real-time flamewar immediately after posting.
2. Accessible to a potential reader. Referring to an obscure recurring theme of my rants made months away from this article (byte-value transparency of protocols vs. Unicode references in RFCs) would require a potential troll spectator a lot of googling before he will be able to appreciate your comment.
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If you will try to find the closest thing to what you have, you most likely will end with more headache than if you just list all the necessary functions and install whatever does them best.
Say, you have email. There is Exchange equivalent for Linux (Samsung Contact), but if one can survive with moving meeting scheduling functionality to something else (or abandoning it -- people should not spend so much time at meetings that they need to mess with each other calendars to schedule it), Cyrus + sendmail with IMAP will outperform everything else UNLESS people like to send multi-megabyte attachments to giant lists instead of placing files on some HTTP server.
Meeting scheduler and web server management programs can be installed separately (and nothing wrong will happen even if large attachment will get copied to 100 people, as long as it fits on the server's hard drive), but people should be aware that they are there. On the other hand, performance, security and flexibility of Internet connection will improve dramatically compared to Exchange.
Same kind of "similat to what you had on Windows" vs. "what performs this function the best" dilemma exists for pretty much every other service.
Why would anyone want to know if someone is trying to find his network? What horrendous insecurity may prompt one to waste his time on such a thing? Why not just make the goddamn network secure enough so whoever will run kismet/netstumbler/whatever will simply see that he can't use this network and leave it alone?
The problem is, someone still have to do in-house maintenance of the project. If he is receiving support from the vendor he still has to do his job, and this does not translate into any significant saving of employee's time compared to him learning about the product and getting support from mailing lists. Purely theoretical "time saving" of 48 minutes per day for a person who has to work on the project anyway means nothing -- and most likely negated by the quality of information available.
The analysis would be valid if it was similarly priced "end-user" product that did not require the user to be familiar with concepts and have skills necessary to use mailing lists and documentation, however search engine is not in this category.
s/compatable/comparable/
Most military electronics are shielded against pretty much any kind of electromagnetic pulse short of a nuclear blast.
This IS compatable to the pulse from a nuclear blast -- just localized in a small area, and only in microwave spectrum.
Huh? MS made its last killer app when it bought Visio. Any moron can make a small PC that runs Office, and hell will freeze over sooner than MS will make an application that will be well-designed specifically for a tablet. Look at what they did for "pocket" computers, made scaled down lookalikes of their desktop applications and lied to the customers about them being "compatible" will Office (lossless round trip, anyone?).
The issue isn't that "M$ is bad". The issue is that a collection of the network effect, patent and copyright law applied to software, EULAs (and perhaps other effects) makes it possible for MS to behave in a manner that is hurting society.
Saying "M$ is bad" makes it easy for other people to ignore you. Saying "The network effect makes it possible for a major player in the market to control media delivery formats. Is that the way it should be?" might force other people to start thinking.
The issue is, people of whom this "network effect" is composed, are not civilized enough to stop it. I am not going to "win them over", because they _are_ the problem -- telling it to them is usually pointless, so instead of accusing them I merely demonstrate them my disrespect. If enough people will do that maybe they will figure out that something is wrong with what they are doing -- after all it worked pretty well with contamination of environment, may work with noosphere contaminants such as Microsoft.
Transmeta indeed needs a sub-notebook market, but how is it related to Microsoft, the company that doesn't make PCs, and consistently makes OS suitable exclusively for desktops? Whoever will make hardware for Microsoft will either make it a desktop/laptop PC (=> Intel or AMD), and make something for "average Joe", or make a "palmtop" with Windows CE (=> ARM or MIPS) and make a toy for an overpaid executive. "Tablets" made for Microsoft will be just small but overpowered laptops, therefore Intel.
All MS has to do is release a new codec for WMP, and mplayer is again out in the cold. For Windows, it is a simple autodownload the first time the new codec is encountered, no need to break compatibility. The situation is a bit more difficult for embedded devices without an easy software upgrade capability. Anyway, rest assured that MS *will* do this the moment they consider mplayer to be a genuine competitor.
But here is the problem -- WMP codecs already work under emulation, they will have to break their infrastructure again.
Besides, MS has still not played the patent card to stop interoperable implementations. Now that the DoJ is no longer breathing down their necks, MS will use that weapon whenever it applies.
Why not just break patents and have an organization that will do nothing but stall them in the courts until they will become irrelevant? This strategy seems to be working fine for Microsoft.
(As for the M$ spelling - it tends to make the people you are arguing with write you off as a juvenile gas-bag instead of listening to any valid arguments that you make.)
So? Why would I care about their opinions? For me any society where Microsoft-like stunts can be pulled, is uncivilized.
"WMP" content is already supported by mplayer -- M$ (yes, "M$" is an appropriate spelling no matter what proponents of "civilized discussion" consider to be politically correct) would have to break the compatibility again.
The company that requested it is C&W Panama, a subsidiary of C&W, based in UK. Isn't UK the US' best friend?
when I have first read the title it looked for me as "Replacing WEP for great justice"?
Seriously, can't they just umm... adopt others' work?
Typo: s/WSBC/SBC/
Actually many people are indirectly their investors (or investors into the company that they owe money) -- Worldcom and WSBC stocks are is, or at least were, in mutual and retirement funds. All those money invested in Worldcom are at this point are as good as nonexistent, and SBC value dropped considerably over last few years, so value of, say, many people's 401k retirement investment may be decreased by this, robbing large part of population.
No, it's coming from investors, who would sue them otherwise for such a misuse of their money.
XML is a format with nearly infinite possibilities for obfuscation, convolutedness and poorly defined standards. The most we can expect is the possibility to validate a file to absolutely certainly determine if it is compliant with the new Word format or not.
By reducing the market share of broken implementations, of course.
It's not a court-issued subpoena. It's a "subpoena" issued by some company without any process that involves court -- I can "subpoena" anything using that. Heck, Osama Bin Laden can write a "subpoena" to CIA for the list of people that tried to capture him, and the paper will be just as invalid.
Goodbye any hopes for common carrier status then.
Right now ISPs at least can argue that they are common carrier, but the second when they assume any control over user that depends on the content he is transferring, they can't, and will be forced to share the responsibility for whatever user is doing.
That would be e^(this "subpoena" situation) amount of trouble for Verizon.
It's anti-intellectualism got more fierce, and alienated all geeks already. And, of course, author fails to grasp that "right" and "left" ideologies' "ancestry" has little to do with that -- it's just both ideologies in their simplistic/extreme forms became merely shells that intellectuals grew up and abandoned.
My setup that I have made a year ago, is relatively cheap (the only non-computer expensive component is Proxima Ovation, an old LCD projection panel) and nice enough to displace a TV from my living room. Original version used composite video from PS2 to the TV capture board instead of S-Video, and image quality was pretty terrible. VCR's tuner happened to be better than one built into the capture board, and I didn't care much for improving audio quality beyond a reasonable level, so audio goes through rather cheap components.
LCD panel, projector and PC produce more noise than what I would prefer, and adjusting image on a projector was a pain in the neck (Proxima's bit depth sucks), but in the end image quality ended up being far superior to a TV. I have found out that in this configuration xawtv works better with Xv disabled, and many games look terrible if blown to a full 1024x768 screen, so I keep them at the NTSC resolution. DVDs are played with Ogle on a computer.
Proxima Ovation has S-Video and composite inputs, however the scaling algorithm that it uses for them, is absolutely horrible.
...that this thing wouldn't be common carrier? Large communication system, with Bill Gates at the helm, and no obligation to be compatible with anything would be a really good vehicle of pushing nasty stuff in protocols.
So IMHO good riddance.
MS doesn't pay taxes. It pays bribes (political donations) to promote its interests in US and abroad. If Microsoft will get powerful enough it may cause US to ban Chinese imports unless, say, China will adopt Microsoft's policies. China, of course, has little to worry about its export to US now, US economy can't function without them, but if in some distant future Microsoft will get, say, $100 from every Chinese, it will have enough money to buy Congress twice.
USSR didn't spend anything on SDI-related stuff -- it was not considered to be a threat in late 80's when everyone with a brain and outside Raytheon or Lockheed understood that this technology would be ineffective in the case of nuclear war. Russian military-related research and engineering was a self-contained program that did not depend on any imported components, so it would be impossible to "overspend" on it -- it didn't require any "hard" currency at all, and didn't involve an overhead of feeding military-industrial complex's companies and their stockholders. With a country as large as former USSR, physical limitations would prevent government to allocate too large percentage of resources on the military, at the expense of the rest of the economy, so economy (that was also mostly self-contained) had sufficient resources to continue operating as it did in raely 80's. The system however was very fragile, and when Gorbachev's reforms went beyond political doctrines and policies into economy, they broken the existing system withour creating anything usable in its place. USSR continued to exist after that, however the central government became so wrapped in internal bickering and mutual accusations between factions, it simply become irrelevant. At that point local governments (usually more conservative politically and more corrupt) taken over, leaving central government nothing to do but continuing discrediting itself until it became completely irrelevant. USSR dissolution therefore was a purely political process, with only remote relationship to the economy (central government's incompetence in the economy-related reforms was one of the reasons for bickering).
So actually "free trade" inside the country was one of the problems that happened before USSR was dissolved. Ex-Communist politicians adopted libertarian-like doctrine that was heavily pushed by US propaganda (even though it has little to do with how US economy operates), and the combination of massive deregulation, formerly state-owned monopolies, and money in the hand of organized crime and corrupt bureaucracy was the deadly mix for the economy.
Trolling is supposed to be:
1. Fast! Writing random mild insults almost a week after the original posting isn't as great as making a real-time flamewar immediately after posting.
2. Accessible to a potential reader. Referring to an obscure recurring theme of my rants made months away from this article (byte-value transparency of protocols vs. Unicode references in RFCs) would require a potential troll spectator a lot of googling before he will be able to appreciate your comment.