Think of Microsoft as a "software cult". Opposers are qualified as evil, while supporters spend lots of resources in maintaining credibility behind a wall that is forbidden to cross.
I've had a hard time deciding whether it is a cult or pyramid scheme. It strongly resembles both, but am starting to think that it is a cult which operates or depends on a pyramid scheme.
I suppose if one wanted to look more deeply, there are even quite a few similarities between the cult of Chairman Bill and the cult of the late Chairman Mao.
Both used sound bites, vapid slogans misdirection and other skillful use of propaganda. Just look at computer magazines from 10 years ago compared to today. Product reviews and evaluations gradually disappeared all together to be replaced by hype or vapid reviews covering only Bill's products. Even Consumer reports has been starting to toe the line for Bill and leave out discussions of competitors' products.
Also, both are big fans of a centralized, command economy. Though Chairman Bill lacks the magnetic personality, he nevertheless commands a cult-like following especially among MBAs and small time turbocapitalists wannabes. Both have used lack of interoperability to further their interests. After Mao's book burnings in the 60's few (on the mainland) could read the handful of surviving books as these were in traditional characters and they had only been taught the strange 'simplified' characters. Bill's implementation of this includes not just the embrace, extend, extinguish strategy used with many protocols and standards (Kerberos, TCP, HTTP, HTML, etc) but even to drive forced upgrades with in his own product line like MS-Office, especially MSO 2003.
Mao insisted on blind faith and obedience and put forth the mythical Lei Feng as an example. Lei Feng just put his head down and did work for everybody else and let Mao and the party do the thinking. Chairman Bill's corresponding gimmick is The Next Version/Upgrade/Service pack, which will be more stable, more secure, easier to use, solve all problems, bring world peace, make coffee for you and sleep in the wet spot -- all one has to do is keep one's head down, work selflessly for MS and let Bill and his fine group in Redmond do the thinking.
I hate to rub it in, but the situation described there in China applys to many (all?) Western European countries and has done so for some time.
At least that seems to be the case for 8 of the 10 items. I'm not sure of merits of anti-theft slip covers, but free hemming would be an excellent addition.
I've brought up realtime parking signs before. Each lot feeds the number of vacancies to network which aggregates the data so that you can quickly find your way to lots with space. Key intersections have signs showing the number of free spaces in each direction and, as you get closer to the lots, individual lots. No excuse for either cities in the U.S. or Canada not to have this, especially in the U.S. where mass transit is non-existent except for a few places.
No, the reason Bush won is onefold: 2001.09.11. Many minds had a hard time coping with such an unfathomable occurrence and Bush was conveniently there to provide some strong associative bonds. It's all Psych 404.
No it's all Bullshit 101. Let's skip for a moment statistics about whether the world has become A Safer Place (tm) since 3 years ago. Instead let's look at what led up to Sept 11, 2001:
European airports were operating at such insanely high levels of security on the 10th that it's impossible for me to believe anything other than that they were on alert for a hijacking + kamikaze attack like succeeded in the U.S. Remember that even since back in the days when Big Bush and Reagan were singing the praises of Osama bin Laden, calling him a freedom fighter, Osama's m.o. has been to call his shots in advance.
However, since most of the US presidential campaign has been to focus on generating raw emotional responses detached from facts and data, it would be too much to expect that voters make informed decisions.
McCain can't run cause the Little Bush coalition doesn't want him. Remember they knocked him out of the primaries only with the help of a nearly bottomless war chest. Arnold is a more likely bet, it'd be easier to pull a Reagan again, but you'd need to change a few things to allow a non-US born president. If that happend, then Little Bush's favorite butt boy, Tony Bliar, would have the hand up.
everyone was going on and on about the 'record turnout'. Like 65% or something.
Anyway, without an audit trail, there is little point arguing about the votes, they could be real votes or someone could have FTP'd them in. If it were up to me, I'd disallow any vote whose provenance cannot be proven. Oh, and jail the 'e-vote machiine' vendors for fraud and willful negligence, etc. Gibbet them on Pay-per-view or something to cover the costs along with a random handful of MBAs.
Actually, you're both right (and both wrong). The YLE FAQ is in both official languages, Swedish and Finnish, but says different things in each. Probably has different content in the unofficial English and unofficial Russian versions as well. That's life for a multilingual service, usually the pages are out of sync.
Perhaps YLE did just now change it in the Finnish version. However, the Swedish version expresses interest in Ogg and then follows it up with a little bullshit about software patents. Perhaps YLE has forgotten that Finland is still in the EU and that software, business methods, algorithms and mathematical formulae cannot be patented.
If you fire off a polite comment to YLE encouraging Ogg (and maybe Theora or Dirac), which I suggest you do, try to steer them off MSIE as well.
A significant fraction of the US population is losing confidence that elections are being run fairly. The next step in this thought process is to decide that change can only come from methods outside the democratic process. Then we have bigger problems.
While I don't think that it's gone quite far enough yet to warrant an uprising, the loss of confidence and more importantly the causes of the loss of confidence are something to take very seriously. Furthermore, the disparity between the economic classes in the US have exceeded ten years ago those leading to the French revolution. That's not a good mix.
The audit needs to be done -- and done thoroughly, not some lame 9/11 commission style hand job.
Yes, many sites had the material long earlier. But the reason Salon's War Room doesn't get mentioned or cited on the original post, yet its new-comer competition, MSNBC does, is probably not good.
It could be out of ignorance or favoritism. Or it could be that slashdot has an obligation to occasionally make plugs for MSNBC which has ties to MS-Slate which has the purpose of knocking off Salon as MSIE was to knock off Netscape.
Actually if you read the fact finding from the court cases against Microsoft in the U.S. during the 80's and 90's you'll find the death of that myth. MS got where it is by piggybacking MS-DOS onto the pre-existing IBM monopoly, then leveraging that into other desktop monopolies and eventual control of the OEMs.
If MS loses control over the OEMs before they can extend its monopoly to irrevocable proprietary file formats for audio/video or for productivity suites, then it's over. These days, if it's pre-installed, Linux is easier to use than MS Windows. Home users don't care what's on the box they buy, just that they can surf the web, listen to music and send e-mail .
From the way that poker players talk poker games must have an element of spontaneous value creation because I have never even heard of a poker player that classified him or herself as a "loser." Unless money is being created out of the void someone must walk home with empty pockets.
I'm sure there's an element of selective memory or other psychopathology.
Years ago, I and a friend studied one such fellow. (skips story about casino game simluation/modelling) Basically, he went into the casino with $50 and came out with $5 boasting, "hey look man, I won 5 bucks!"
Most are old enough or smart enough to deduce from the system requirements that OOo is faster, but you can also download it and see for yourself, especially on some old $100 computer.
Or you can try editing a long document with OOo and see for yourself. Menus are flexible. File sizes are between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude smaller. Support for styles is better, as is the ability to export to PDF including PDF forms.
Acquisition and installation has no cost except labor, which is perhaps less since OOo is easier to install than MSO. There are no annual fees or overhead such as the tracking of licenses. There are no hidden gotchas such as the need to purchase additional servers, and user licenses for those servers, to manage Digital Restrictions, etc.
If a site refuses my browser, whatever that browser may be, then I refuse to surf that site. It's that simple;)
Too often these sites are the result of some technically inept crew that excels at marketing to company management. The usual excuse is that no one's complained or that they don't care about n% of the browsers.
If advanced browsers are only n% of the market, then supporting W3C standards would allow that site to increase it's potential customer base by n%.
Apparently, non-MSIE browsers are already over 15% of the hits for sites visited by early adopters of other tech. So, it's not a matter of a long while before the more average folks follow, too.
One of my anecdotes regards my former bank. They went with a MSIE-only "net" bank. I walked down the block and to their competitor and got a platform independent web bank, plus better interest and reduced service charges, and for a few things no service charges. I'm not that good of a negotiator either. So vote with your wallet. Some bank will offer you a good enough deal to switch. Considering that I was investigating a house loan at the time, the MSIE-only bank lost out more than bottle & can money.
Another example was a relative of mine who bought a good handful of tickets for transatlantic flights all at once. First choice was SAS, but their site was MSIE-only so he went with a competitor and sent a copy of the receipt plus a polite letter (took 5 minutes - template, print, envelope, stamp, post) explaining how they could get his business in the future.
Ask and ye shall receive...
The squeaky wheel gets the grease...
etc.
Stable, easy to maintain, fast to install
on
Updates From Debian
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· Score: 4, Informative
Debian's strengths are that its very, very easy to maintain.
apt-get makes installation and maintenance very easy.
It's also very stable and you can get by with a minimal of packages. The approach is to patch exisiting versions rather than force
'upgrades' to newer versions which may or may not change behavior (see PHP for examples of behavior changes even between point versions).
And it runs on quite a variety of hardware besides lame old x86. I've run classes for semesters off of old junker Macintoshes -- 100% availability, no downtime from course start until the hardware was retired for good the next year.
It's also very fast to install once you get used to it. (Don't use dselect) I've installed Debian for use as a web/cgi/database server on Pentium machines in under 15 minutes. Including some tweaking, however that needs a fast network connection.
It's easy to choose linux 2.2, 2.4, 2.6 or a custom variant Linux kernel.
I've also read that you can drop in other kernels besides Linux, like BSD. Though I myself have not tried, but would like to read more about it.
How about MS' deals with Cisco for MS only broad band and its deals with SBC for MS only HDTV over IP? The web is not the only thing that can be destroyed by proprietary protocols and formats.
Is it fair to the teacher in a developing country who gets less than US$50 a month in salary?
Either would add 50% to the cost of a $100 computer. Before you go slinging your money into the lake, check out all your options.
Even if you're just desperate to get MS Office 2003 plus its hidden costs like MS Server 2003 and the CALs for MS Server 2003, you'll get a discount if you scare MS with a counter offer from a competitor.
One of the sources cited in the article is Wikipedia.
It is cool and dynamic, but may not be the best thing to be citing in a published article which then remains unchanged. Afterall, some of the viewpoints or arguments put forth in the article are dependent on the content of what they point to. If that content changes too much, it can pull the rug out from under the article.
With a static source it is nonetheless possible to link forward from the old citation to the new one. But having the content of the old citation change makes finding out who said what and when very difficult.
There are many reasons why Wikipedia is great. Among those the content is constantly being added and changed (sometimes hundreds of times an hour) and that is one of its biggest weaknesses.
It's easy to undo trolls, cranks, and obvious nonsense. However, more subtle nonsense, misinformation or omission of fact can be just as troublesome, maybe more so.
As very useful as Wikipedia is, a published (i.e. no further changes) article needs to point to a source thatl, right or wrong, remains the same. Not a slam on Wikipedia, rather a call for the right tool for the job.
In my field, Oceanography, we have not moved to the Arxiv model used in Physics... yet.
You could easily start one among your friends and colleagues and then get a grant to continue. (There is still funding for that sort ofthing). Or you could join and existing initiative like the
Public Library of Science. Either way, something's got to be done.
Right now as it stands, scientists work on getting their grants, doing the research, hiring and supervising researchers, writing up the research, submitting articles, and editing and reviewing articles for publication. All that is done for "free" as researchers must publish.
In exchange for all that, they then pay for the privilege of accessing their articles in the form of journals. However, as budgets shrink, the prices of journal subscriptions has been rapidly increasing. In response to the price increase, fewer journals are purchased making the remaining ones more essential. Since these then become essential, the prices increase even more to what the market is able to bear, not what is appropriate. Some of the annual subscription fees approach the cost of a small car. Access to electronic versions often cost extra and don't give you the option of keeping a copy on the shelf after the subscription runs out.
None of that is conjecture on my part. Next visit to your university or corporate library, chat with the staff and you'll hear more.
No one said life is fair, but then again no one says that it has to be stupid as well. There's plenty of blog or content managment software out there. Try it. If it's boring or too much work, drop it or hand it off. If it takes off like Arxiv did, learn to delegate authority (one can never delegate responsibility) and get some help seeking extra hands / funding.
Of course it is possible to keep a Windows machine naked on the net without it getting cracked.
Depends on whether that net is connected to the Internet or not.
The more I learn about MS-Windows, the more I doubt that it possible. Here are four things to think about:
2. Even if you download the patch and install it before exposing the MS-Windows machine to the 'Net, the patch may not work.
MS Patches are infamous for being incomplete, breaking 3rd party applications, failing to patch what they claim to patch, or even resurrecting old security problems. e.g. Attack pierces fully patched Windows XP
4. Even if the points above are magically resolved, you still have reality bite you: You can't patch fast enough.
A lot of folks are heavily in denial about just how bad shape MS really is in. It's been a great ride, but it's time to get off. If you weren't early in and at the top of the pyramid scheme, then don't even think about it. Either way it's time to look away from Redmond and back to software that works and is actually designed to work.
You want to walk around broadcasting data who you are to anyone with a hidden RFID reader?
This reminds me of a comment along similar lines.
When the U.S. mint added the shiny metallic strips to the bills, a friend of mine claimed quite seriously that it was so that it would be possible to "scan your butt" (or wherever you carry your wallet) to see if you were carrying loads of cash. My response at the time was sceptical, especially since the comment came from someone very non-tech, but wonder if it is even technically possible.
If the material is conductive, it should respond/reflect/absorb a specific frequency much like chaff does.
Would it be possible to build a cash scanner? And if so... "where can I get me one?";)
Choice C: Working search engine in short order
on
Google In A Box
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· Score: 1
The main advantage to Google from an end user's point is the ranking algorithm which may be of dubious value for smaller sites.
For $17000 per year, you can pay for a lot of maintenance and customization of your own search engine. It would be re-inventing the wheel, and not necessarily a better wheel, to write a search engine from scratch.
No need to write one from scratch, there are plenty out there including some not on the list.
Some of these are quite customizable, you can prune various servers, directories or file types from indexing. It's even possible to custom pre-processing, for example getting rid of all navigation menus identified by 'class' from the index. At the low end- there's even Swish and htdig
If you're a sucker for punishment you can even front end one of the higher end search engines with other protocols. For example, Z39.50 allows search clients like BookWhere, Procite and Endnote to do the search, something which is useful if you have a lot of research documents. Perhaps there is a use for LDAP here, too.
However, no way would it take months to install and configure an existing search engine in its basic form. If you have a machine, it takes 20 minutes to slap Debian (or your favorite Linux or BSD) on it and a few more to install the search engine and its prerequisites. Then you spend the rest of the week reading about it and tweaking it.
There are a lot of technical reasons to go with OOo, especially the word processor which handles styles and large documents better than the current market leader. The open file format alone counts for a lot.
However, perhaps the biggest reason is that the menus in OOo are flexible. This is one big technical advantage could really exploit some usability studies.
It would also be possible, at least in theory, to have a training wheels mode for recovering MSO users, just like many other packages used to have. e.g. Lotus 1-2-3
Since OOo is growing into "new" markets (new for OOo), it'd be useful for the default menu structure to be based on some decent usability studies. Easier now than later.
There are a lot of new users, especially in Asia, who would have a fresh viewpoint. There are also an alarming number of users who can use what ever word processor they're put in front of, but have neither clue nor care what it is called. There are also a huge number of people both congicent and skilled who have plenty of pet peeves about their word processor, spreadsheet, vector drawing, or presentation graphics tools.
Maybe usability studies would lead to multiple skins for OOo.
It doesn't matter what Echelon runs. If you read the EU resolution on Echelon, or think about it, there were two points:
First, if you use a F/OSS you can be reasonably sure there are no back doors in your mail server or client if you choose to investigate. Second, if you take a similar approach to encryption algorithms and software and use ecncyption in all e-mail communication then you are much less likely to be of use to Echelon.
Yes, your network / infrastructure could probably still be cracked manually, but thats a hell of a lot different from letting everyone between here and your customer (can be 30 hops at times) read your messages.
29.Urges the Commission and Member States to devise appropriate measures to promote, develop and manufacture European encryption technology and software and above all to support projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption software
30.Calls on the Commission and Member States to promote software projects whose source text is made public (open-source software), as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no backdoors are built into programmes;
31.Calls on the Commission to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the "least reliable" category;
32.Calls on the European institutions and the public administrations of the Member States systematically to encrypt e-mails, so that ultimately encryption becomes the norm;
F/OSS is mentioned elsewhere in the respolution well.
The main reason there are any "anti-virus" companies is that one large company with a lot of market share peddles software with fundamental design flaws, not just production flaws, which make it easy to spread malware. Look, just because you downloaded the latest service pack (or in the case of XP SP2, OS upgrade) out of band and installed it before plugging your cherry XP box to the 'net doesn't mean it won't get hit. Plenty of exploits, both public and yet to be announced, can hit fully patched XP boxes
There's enough question of how much the service packs really fix.
Go see a shrink about your Stockholm Syndrome there so you can move on and heave those defective products.
It could have also been the Stac lawsuit over the theft of Stacker compression tools, but I was thinking of something more recent. Maybe I'll remember later.
Ballmer and Ol' Chairman Bill are probably pulling an Ollie North right now.
Aside from not wanting to deliver the data in a format that can be read on a non- MS-Windows platform, there is the strategy of delay. It's a favorite of MS, but recently Cringley brought it up in the case of records retention:
Burst claims Microsoft avoids damning documents being discovered when a record retention rule is in place. The short version of this Burst argument is that Microsoft deliberately identifies the wrong people so that retained records are useless, and records that probably should have been retained are destroyed.
There was another settlement a few years ago in which MS got an opponent to agree to destroy its court records from an earlier case against MS. Wish I could remember which company it or had a link to the description.
If you look past the marketing and lobbying, there isn't much future for that company.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose if one wanted to look more deeply, there are even quite a few similarities between the cult of Chairman Bill and the cult of the late Chairman Mao.
Both used sound bites, vapid slogans misdirection and other skillful use of propaganda. Just look at computer magazines from 10 years ago compared to today. Product reviews and evaluations gradually disappeared all together to be replaced by hype or vapid reviews covering only Bill's products. Even Consumer reports has been starting to toe the line for Bill and leave out discussions of competitors' products.
Also, both are big fans of a centralized, command economy. Though Chairman Bill lacks the magnetic personality, he nevertheless commands a cult-like following especially among MBAs and small time turbocapitalists wannabes. Both have used lack of interoperability to further their interests. After Mao's book burnings in the 60's few (on the mainland) could read the handful of surviving books as these were in traditional characters and they had only been taught the strange 'simplified' characters. Bill's implementation of this includes not just the embrace, extend, extinguish strategy used with many protocols and standards (Kerberos, TCP, HTTP, HTML, etc) but even to drive forced upgrades with in his own product line like MS-Office, especially MSO 2003.
Mao insisted on blind faith and obedience and put forth the mythical Lei Feng as an example. Lei Feng just put his head down and did work for everybody else and let Mao and the party do the thinking. Chairman Bill's corresponding gimmick is The Next Version/Upgrade/Service pack, which will be more stable, more secure, easier to use, solve all problems, bring world peace, make coffee for you and sleep in the wet spot -- all one has to do is keep one's head down, work selflessly for MS and let Bill and his fine group in Redmond do the thinking.
Shit. I bet there's a thesis in all that.
At least that seems to be the case for 8 of the 10 items. I'm not sure of merits of anti-theft slip covers, but free hemming would be an excellent addition.
I've brought up realtime parking signs before. Each lot feeds the number of vacancies to network which aggregates the data so that you can quickly find your way to lots with space. Key intersections have signs showing the number of free spaces in each direction and, as you get closer to the lots, individual lots. No excuse for either cities in the U.S. or Canada not to have this, especially in the U.S. where mass transit is non-existent except for a few places.
European airports were operating at such insanely high levels of security on the 10th that it's impossible for me to believe anything other than that they were on alert for a hijacking + kamikaze attack like succeeded in the U.S. Remember that even since back in the days when Big Bush and Reagan were singing the praises of Osama bin Laden, calling him a freedom fighter, Osama's m.o. has been to call his shots in advance.
However, since most of the US presidential campaign has been to focus on generating raw emotional responses detached from facts and data, it would be too much to expect that voters make informed decisions.
McCain can't run cause the Little Bush coalition doesn't want him. Remember they knocked him out of the primaries only with the help of a nearly bottomless war chest. Arnold is a more likely bet, it'd be easier to pull a Reagan again, but you'd need to change a few things to allow a non-US born president. If that happend, then Little Bush's favorite butt boy, Tony Bliar, would have the hand up.
Anyway, without an audit trail, there is little point arguing about the votes, they could be real votes or someone could have FTP'd them in. If it were up to me, I'd disallow any vote whose provenance cannot be proven. Oh, and jail the 'e-vote machiine' vendors for fraud and willful negligence, etc. Gibbet them on Pay-per-view or something to cover the costs along with a random handful of MBAs.Perhaps YLE did just now change it in the Finnish version. However, the Swedish version expresses interest in Ogg and then follows it up with a little bullshit about software patents. Perhaps YLE has forgotten that Finland is still in the EU and that software, business methods, algorithms and mathematical formulae cannot be patented.
If you fire off a polite comment to YLE encouraging Ogg (and maybe Theora or Dirac), which I suggest you do, try to steer them off MSIE as well.
The audit needs to be done -- and done thoroughly, not some lame 9/11 commission style hand job.
It could be out of ignorance or favoritism. Or it could be that slashdot has an obligation to occasionally make plugs for MSNBC which has ties to MS-Slate which has the purpose of knocking off Salon as MSIE was to knock off Netscape.
If MS loses control over the OEMs before they can extend its monopoly to irrevocable proprietary file formats for audio/video or for productivity suites, then it's over. These days, if it's pre-installed, Linux is easier to use than MS Windows. Home users don't care what's on the box they buy, just that they can surf the web, listen to music and send e-mail .
Years ago, I and a friend studied one such fellow. (skips story about casino game simluation/modelling) Basically, he went into the casino with $50 and came out with $5 boasting, "hey look man, I won 5 bucks!"
But, if you need a hit-me-over-the-head obvious comparison, enumerating how OOo is better, then look at PC Pro's review of OOo1.1.2. Or you can read Replacing FrameMaker with OOo Writer, which makes several direct and indirect comparisons.
Or you can try editing a long document with OOo and see for yourself. Menus are flexible. File sizes are between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude smaller. Support for styles is better, as is the ability to export to PDF including PDF forms.
Acquisition and installation has no cost except labor, which is perhaps less since OOo is easier to install than MSO. There are no annual fees or overhead such as the tracking of licenses. There are no hidden gotchas such as the need to purchase additional servers, and user licenses for those servers, to manage Digital Restrictions, etc.
If advanced browsers are only n% of the market, then supporting W3C standards would allow that site to increase it's potential customer base by n%. Apparently, non-MSIE browsers are already over 15% of the hits for sites visited by early adopters of other tech. So, it's not a matter of a long while before the more average folks follow, too.
One of my anecdotes regards my former bank. They went with a MSIE-only "net" bank. I walked down the block and to their competitor and got a platform independent web bank, plus better interest and reduced service charges, and for a few things no service charges. I'm not that good of a negotiator either. So vote with your wallet. Some bank will offer you a good enough deal to switch. Considering that I was investigating a house loan at the time, the MSIE-only bank lost out more than bottle & can money.
Another example was a relative of mine who bought a good handful of tickets for transatlantic flights all at once. First choice was SAS, but their site was MSIE-only so he went with a competitor and sent a copy of the receipt plus a polite letter (took 5 minutes - template, print, envelope, stamp, post) explaining how they could get his business in the future.
Ask and ye shall receive...
The squeaky wheel gets the grease...
etc.
It's also very stable and you can get by with a minimal of packages. The approach is to patch exisiting versions rather than force 'upgrades' to newer versions which may or may not change behavior (see PHP for examples of behavior changes even between point versions).
And it runs on quite a variety of hardware besides lame old x86. I've run classes for semesters off of old junker Macintoshes -- 100% availability, no downtime from course start until the hardware was retired for good the next year.
It's also very fast to install once you get used to it. (Don't use dselect) I've installed Debian for use as a web/cgi/database server on Pentium machines in under 15 minutes. Including some tweaking, however that needs a fast network connection.
It's easy to choose linux 2.2, 2.4, 2.6 or a custom variant Linux kernel. I've also read that you can drop in other kernels besides Linux, like BSD. Though I myself have not tried, but would like to read more about it.
How about MS' deals with Cisco for MS only broad band and its deals with SBC for MS only HDTV over IP? The web is not the only thing that can be destroyed by proprietary protocols and formats.
Larger customers get special treatment. Ballmer recently told a group of current MS customers / resellers to contact him personally if StarOffice gains ground. I'm sure the same goes for OpenOffice.org (OOo).
Or you might find that OOo is faster, better, cheaper and, though it goes without saying, is supported on more platforms and uses an open file format.
Right now, you'd be a fool not to use that leverage to get a discount from MS. That's your worst option, a discount.
There are many reasons why Wikipedia is great. Among those the content is constantly being added and changed (sometimes hundreds of times an hour) and that is one of its biggest weaknesses.
It's easy to undo trolls, cranks, and obvious nonsense. However, more subtle nonsense, misinformation or omission of fact can be just as troublesome, maybe more so.
As very useful as Wikipedia is, a published (i.e. no further changes) article needs to point to a source thatl, right or wrong, remains the same. Not a slam on Wikipedia, rather a call for the right tool for the job.
Right now as it stands, scientists work on getting their grants, doing the research, hiring and supervising researchers, writing up the research, submitting articles, and editing and reviewing articles for publication. All that is done for "free" as researchers must publish.
In exchange for all that, they then pay for the privilege of accessing their articles in the form of journals. However, as budgets shrink, the prices of journal subscriptions has been rapidly increasing. In response to the price increase, fewer journals are purchased making the remaining ones more essential. Since these then become essential, the prices increase even more to what the market is able to bear, not what is appropriate. Some of the annual subscription fees approach the cost of a small car. Access to electronic versions often cost extra and don't give you the option of keeping a copy on the shelf after the subscription runs out.
None of that is conjecture on my part. Next visit to your university or corporate library, chat with the staff and you'll hear more.
No one said life is fair, but then again no one says that it has to be stupid as well. There's plenty of blog or content managment software out there. Try it. If it's boring or too much work, drop it or hand it off. If it takes off like Arxiv did, learn to delegate authority (one can never delegate responsibility) and get some help seeking extra hands / funding.
1. You can't connect an unpatched MS-Windows machine to the 'Net. Even Redmond admits that in their blame-the-admin campaign. See also articles like, "Unpatched {Windows} PC "Survival Time" Just 16 Minutes".
2. Even if you download the patch and install it before exposing the MS-Windows machine to the 'Net, the patch may not work. MS Patches are infamous for being incomplete, breaking 3rd party applications, failing to patch what they claim to patch, or even resurrecting old security problems. e.g. Attack pierces fully patched Windows XP
3. Even if the patch does work, there are many widely known problems left unaddressed by the patch, such as this problem that MS still hasn't acknowledged.
4. Even if the points above are magically resolved, you still have reality bite you: You can't patch fast enough.
A lot of folks are heavily in denial about just how bad shape MS really is in. It's been a great ride, but it's time to get off. If you weren't early in and at the top of the pyramid scheme, then don't even think about it. Either way it's time to look away from Redmond and back to software that works and is actually designed to work.
This reminds me of a comment along similar lines.
When the U.S. mint added the shiny metallic strips to the bills, a friend of mine claimed quite seriously that it was so that it would be possible to "scan your butt" (or wherever you carry your wallet) to see if you were carrying loads of cash. My response at the time was sceptical, especially since the comment came from someone very non-tech, but wonder if it is even technically possible.
If the material is conductive, it should respond/reflect/absorb a specific frequency much like chaff does. Would it be possible to build a cash scanner? And if so ... "where can I get me one?" ;)
No need to write one from scratch, there are plenty out there including some not on the list. Some of these are quite customizable, you can prune various servers, directories or file types from indexing. It's even possible to custom pre-processing, for example getting rid of all navigation menus identified by 'class' from the index. At the low end- there's even Swish and htdig
If you're a sucker for punishment you can even front end one of the higher end search engines with other protocols. For example, Z39.50 allows search clients like BookWhere, Procite and Endnote to do the search, something which is useful if you have a lot of research documents. Perhaps there is a use for LDAP here, too.
However, no way would it take months to install and configure an existing search engine in its basic form. If you have a machine, it takes 20 minutes to slap Debian (or your favorite Linux or BSD) on it and a few more to install the search engine and its prerequisites. Then you spend the rest of the week reading about it and tweaking it.
However, perhaps the biggest reason is that the menus in OOo are flexible. This is one big technical advantage could really exploit some usability studies. It would also be possible, at least in theory, to have a training wheels mode for recovering MSO users, just like many other packages used to have. e.g. Lotus 1-2-3
Since OOo is growing into "new" markets (new for OOo), it'd be useful for the default menu structure to be based on some decent usability studies. Easier now than later. There are a lot of new users, especially in Asia, who would have a fresh viewpoint. There are also an alarming number of users who can use what ever word processor they're put in front of, but have neither clue nor care what it is called. There are also a huge number of people both congicent and skilled who have plenty of pet peeves about their word processor, spreadsheet, vector drawing, or presentation graphics tools.
Maybe usability studies would lead to multiple skins for OOo.
First, if you use a F/OSS you can be reasonably sure there are no back doors in your mail server or client if you choose to investigate. Second, if you take a similar approach to encryption algorithms and software and use ecncyption in all e-mail communication then you are much less likely to be of use to Echelon.
Yes, your network / infrastructure could probably still be cracked manually, but thats a hell of a lot different from letting everyone between here and your customer (can be 30 hops at times) read your messages.
Echelon, even the very concept of it, is a living example of why government agencies need to be sceptical about accepting black box technologies which may or may not work as advertised. Going back to 2000/2001, the resolution ,"European Parliament resolution on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications" (ECHELON interception system) (2001/2098(INI)) brings up F/OSS explicitly:
29.Urges the Commission and Member States to devise appropriate measures to promote, develop and manufacture European encryption technology and software and above all to support projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption software30.Calls on the Commission and Member States to promote software projects whose source text is made public (open-source software), as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no backdoors are built into programmes;
31.Calls on the Commission to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the "least reliable" category;
32.Calls on the European institutions and the public administrations of the Member States systematically to encrypt e-mails, so that ultimately encryption becomes the norm; F/OSS is mentioned elsewhere in the respolution well.
The main reason there are any "anti-virus" companies is that one large company with a lot of market share peddles software with fundamental design flaws, not just production flaws, which make it easy to spread malware. Look, just because you downloaded the latest service pack (or in the case of XP SP2, OS upgrade) out of band and installed it before plugging your cherry XP box to the 'net doesn't mean it won't get hit. Plenty of exploits, both public and yet to be announced, can hit fully patched XP boxes
There's enough question of how much the service packs really fix.
Go see a shrink about your Stockholm Syndrome there so you can move on and heave those defective products.
It could have also been the Stac lawsuit over the theft of Stacker compression tools, but I was thinking of something more recent. Maybe I'll remember later.
Aside from not wanting to deliver the data in a format that can be read on a non- MS-Windows platform, there is the strategy of delay. It's a favorite of MS, but recently Cringley brought it up in the case of records retention:
There was another settlement a few years ago in which MS got an opponent to agree to destroy its court records from an earlier case against MS. Wish I could remember which company it or had a link to the description.If you look past the marketing and lobbying, there isn't much future for that company.