The article while dealing with one myth intentionally or accidentally promotes another myth or urban legend. While over 90% of the world's desktop computers may still run some form of MS windows, that's a long cry from saying 90% of the world's computers. All the world's computers include not only desktop models, but also servers and embedded systems. In the former, MS has had trouble gaining foothold and now has trouble keeping it. In the latter, it's largely a no-show.
It's no surprise that the author and rest of the large unwashed bokanovskified masses haven't thought about what's running in their high tech vehicles or other devices. Odds are its qnx, tron or some other non-MS OS.
But let's put a bullet through that myth: 90% of the worlds computers != 90% of the world's desktop computers.
Corporations have been actively lobbying to affect privacy regulations. You should too, if you want any.
Here's a flash back from 2002:
"Banks, insurance companies and other corporations spent more than
$20 million in campaign contributions and lobbying expenses during
the successful fight against a measure to protect the financial
privacy of consumers, state records show."
It's not slowing down. Media consolidation is also reducing the likelihood that your average Svensson is going to be aware or informed of issues not to the advatage of major sponsors or owners.
It's up to those that are aware to increase that level of awareness.
Aside from some mention of price, the discussion has stayed reasonably technical, but it would be essential to know what has changed in regard to the licensing.
No need to reinvent the wheel, especially a high maintenance one with high CAL fees.
Go with straight kerberos + ldap authentication. AD still has scalability issues which, though improved over earlier versions of itself, are still behind Novell NDS or Kerberos + LDAP. Interoperability with a heterogeneous set of workstations is historically pretty poor for AD. Kerberos and LDAP clients exist and function quite nicely on what ever platform you have.
Furthermore, if nothing else, pricing in the 2003 version will kill you, even if managing all the licenses doesn't. Of the two, 2000 is the way to go, but the third option (real kerberos)
is probably the way to go in your case.
OS vendors and ISPs fall into the roll of common carrier.
So, remember to include a discussion of common carriage. Obviously, lots of space will be devoted to other issues, but let's not pay so much attention to the parts and their provenance that we forget what the tools are there to do: The "C" in ICT stands for communication.
Computers are now networked and these are used to communicate across space (telecommunications) or across time (storage/archive). This happens by routing or buffering data packets. Common carriage is no less relevant for networked information systems (i.e. all modern computers) than it is for voice or power or freight or post.
The bottled water analogy fits the NYT : A pint of high-quality water can be obtained from many municipal water systems for a fraction of a penny,
yet people are happy to pay $2 for a bottle of the same water.
Likewise, the core of most NYT articles consist of re-writes of wire feeds from AP, UPI, Reuter, Tass, AFP, and so on.
McDonalds has volume. NYT has volume. But volume is not the same as quality. How to measure quality is a good question, but one common metric is the frequency of citation and in which publications the citations occur.
RSS can be throttled either by the server or by the firewall. It is just HTTP traffic. But RSS still transmits redundant information, especially if the server is polled often.
Still sticking with just HTTP and RSS as it is now, some kind of if-modified-since HTTP request would greatly reduce the load. That or a checksum. Or a date-time stamp.
It would also be possible and more complex to make a TCP or UDP based RSS designed to be robust and minimize effects of heavy use. A lot of information can be crammed into a single UDP packet, or it could just be a checksum or even just a date-time stamp.
Many MSIE users got infected in indirect association with their use of eBay, but the flaw did not rest with eBay, but with MSIE. There is nothing inherently dangerous in using external links, even for
graphics. Note that the SRC attribute of the IMG element is defined as a URL. So, even though most link only to local files, remote files are allowed by the standard and their absence would decrease the utility of services like eBay, not to mention greatly increase their band with and storage costs.
The fault lies squarely with people still using MSIE and with OEMs for not bundling a proper web browser.
However, in a different context, Ed Foster does have a good point... as he often does. In the case were sites have been compromised or used to spread malware, it is essential that the public be informed.
BTW in Chapter 10, article 1007 prohibits specifying a specific vendor or product in a tender. In other words any tenders specifiying cruft like M$, M$-Windows, M$-Exchange, etc. is in direct violation of NAFTA.
Or the FCC could just create their own broadband feed from each station and save the signal as MPEG in a FIFO 90 day cache on some humungous RAID-from-hell. This type and scale of archive benefits from economy of scale.
Maintaining extra hardware, a huge archive of expensive tapes, and extra staffing to manage it all are not something that the smaller stations will be able to afford.
A few decades ago, minimum transmitter strength required wattage way outside the budgets of many local stations, causing them to shut down.
Over the last few decades, rules regarding the percentage of media controlled by the same owner have been damaged several times. This makes it possible to buy up or squeeze out smaller stations, further reducing the number of voices heard.
This could be just another ill-conceived idea, but it could also be intended to increase the presence of one corporate voice like other consolidation efforts. Or both.
Control of the media is the 21st century's hydrogen bomb.
At which point, My father says something like "fuck you" and the salesman looses the easiest sale of his entire life.
It pays not to mess with the customers.
One of my recent colleague's illustrations was a fishing boat crew that decided to all purchase new cars - cash - at the same time and figured the best way would be to have one spokesman negotiate a volume discount. The first car dealer took one look at this scruffy guy asking about buying 10 cars and showed him the door. The dealer across the street somehow managed to sell 10 cars that same day.
Since some of the people and businesses involved were still in town, it makes it that much funnier .
That first dealer probably lost a few future sales as well. Definitely lost face.
Along similar lines, making weird, non-standard web pages that lockout browsers or screen resolutions are in effect a way of
showing the customer the door. BTW search engines are text only and if you're locking out text only visitors, you're locking out search engines and the people (with and without money) that use them.
That is interesting (that your users were confused by using a network file share, but found the thumb drives intuitive.)
I've seen it go both ways.
About 8 years ago I got about a dozen institutions to really thrive on file and print sharing, but that was Novell Netware 3.11/3.12 On the technical side, being rock solid stable and predictable helped. The rest was setting up a good design: I interviewed a handful of experienced but non-technical users about who they work with and how and worked out a good selection of folder names, groups and permissions plus a relevant directory hierarchy. After a short pilot, it took off like wildfire.
Similar experiences with AFS.
The opposite experience was at a place my colleagues consulted for. Even the tech dept. could not transfer an ISO image for me from one workstation to another a lot of the time.I spent a few hours one day talking with the non-IT staff, informally and found that no one no one transfer files or reliably save or retreive them on the server.
After checking many factors, it seemed that their choice of file servers (MS-Windows) just wasn't upto snuff. Most of their file transfers actually occured via sneakernet.
The majority there feared for their jobs (it was in the middle of a multi-year downsizing and management turf war) too much to complain about anything.
Is it the fact that there is a physical artifact that makes the idea of "your files are going here" easier to map into their worldview?
Yes, there might be some of that, but don't discount the importance of having a reliable and easy to use technology with a clearly organized directory structure, groups and sharing permissions.
Oh really? Then why is the whole linux-2.6 kernel tree vulnerable to a horribly pitiful bug that allows any user to chmod files in/proc?
There is also no reason why you *have* to run 2.6, when you can still drop a 2.4 or even 2.2 kernel in any of your favorite linux distros. I and my colleagues still use 2.2 sometimes, especially if there is no pressing need for 2.4.
You don't have that option with MS-Windows, if you change the kernel (NT/2000/XP/2003), you must also change everything else as well. Furthermore, since MS spent several years scattering MSIE code throughout multiple parts of the kernels, you don't really have the option of dropping MSIE completely.
Currently you can only drop MSIE completely by also dropping MS-Windows completely, which IMHO is not such a bad idea these days. Especially for older people and others not interested in system maintenance. Trying to force every MS-Windows user to be an amatuer security expert is inefficient at best a recipe for failure. The cyclopean 'upgrades' and 'patches' coming out of Redmond really prevent home users with modems and other slower connections from keeping up to date, but then MS tends to sit on known security issues for years and not issuing a patch until an exploit is active in the wild. Result? You can't patch fast enough.
Dropping MSIE is a start and makes an eventual transition to a more modern OS smoother.
Of course, Bush is planning the Second Korean War as we speak as his "October Surprise", so all this may become irrelevant - except to prove Moore was right.
The draft is then likely to be reinstated:
S.89
or HR.163
It's a good film and does raise some good points. However, since there is a short amount of time that the film has to work with, Moore chose to cover flashier stuff. I think he could have done just as much with heavier issues like the ongoing damage to the economy or to the environment. So far all the pre-2001 economic problems still exist but have been given only superficial treatment over by increased deficit, interest rate tricks and other gimmicks, while the problems have been getting worse. Likewise, for the environment where decades of progress in practice and legislation have been wound back.
Sounds like Moore's endorsement of online versions will work as a promotion. The quality of downloads, even for a documentary, just isn't great so it's likely to lead to more ticket sales. It works for smaller, independent bands, why not aslo documentaries? For that matter, it worked for the Grateful Dead, too, and that was no small money.
The main problem with downloads would be getting modified versions, that were edited accidently (e.g. missing a bit or munged data). Or, worse getting one that was edited on purpose with out of context quotes or rude inserts.
I wonder, does Microsoft have a problem getting good employees? I would think that most developers worth their salt would work anywhere rather than for M$.
Maybe. At least it seems to have to work harder to retain any it might have still:
Microsoft says about half of eligible employees have sold their underwater stock options, in the culmination of changes to its compensation methods
...
Employees in the United States who are due to receive less than $20,000 from the program will be paid in one instalment later this month, while those due more money will be paid in two or three instalments over the next three years.
Staggering the payments is designed to increase retention, as employees need to remain with Microsoft to receive the payout.
I find it probable that the developers are dropping out, as we have seen in the management. M$ is too far behind the times in technology. In marketing, they're the best, but compatibility issues, stability issues, and security issues are pushing customers away and moving them to more productive tools instead.
I still read BYTE when I can get it. The columns and articles are good and have even covered Linux back before it was mainstream. Go to the library and look at back issues from the 1980's for some really cool hands on stuff.
Online, LinuxInsider has been having very well written articles.
ZDNet UK and ZDNet AU
The Register and occasionally eWeek. The Register is one of the few that actually seems to do any investigative reporting.
I used to read Wired, InfoWorld, InformationWeek regularly, but only rarely now.
Nature, Scientific American, NewScientist, and National Geographic have been pretty good in print.
Indeed. Unless the editors are required to plug MS news, the scientific magazine's article is much more relevant since reduction of pollution is often considered a scientific issue. If nothing else, New Scientist had it two weeks earlier that MS news.
You might at least show the school board the move forward in Ontario and point out StarOffice. Moving to StarOffice or OpenOffice would be a matter of days as it can be done completely independent of the underlying platform.
There are already Danish and Swedish translations of OpenOffice Perhaps a class project could be to take a crack at bokmål, nynorsk or sami gielli depending on your geographic location.
Some of these are already under way.
I'm surprised that any particular U.S. company would be allowed to dictate the terms of Norwegian education. Especially for products that are notoriously expensive and high maintenance.
60 workstations can be a lot of money thrown into the sea if they are expensive and high maintenance. It might be a good time to point out that there are more local options, like Skolelinux, which are lower maintenance.
The best thing about digital is that you can afford to make mistakes, and the cost of practice has gone to zero. The key is to take pictures, look at them, then take more. If you commit yourself to taking 10 pictures a day, you'll start to notice things, and develop an eye for it.
You can do the same when practicing prints as well. Some friends of mine got MFAs in photography and made the same recommendation, but also for the darkroom as well. One used a grant plus some of her own money for a Hassleblad + lens. She did a lot of preliminary effects with Photoshop to get an idea of what to pursue and plan her lab sessions rather carefully. The result was cutting an average of 15 hours in the dark room down to around 2.
I store mine in folders by date, in c:\photos\yyyy\yyyymmdd\DSCNxxxx.jpg, and it works very well for me.
I let iPhoto take care of the folders for me.;) However, what I would like is a camera that saved as PNG. Checked about 15 digital cameras last week in the 4 and 5 mega pixel range and found that most suffered from compression artifacts because of JPEG.
Roll your own RPMs or debian packages. This give you the benefit of customization plus the benefits of a package manager. Using a package manager really reduces the headaches of documenting what is installed where and what version. If you add sudo to the mix, then you have a good idea of who to ask about the changes as well.
If you buy players from your direct rival (i.e. same league), you get approx. double the benefit.
1. Strenghten your team, 2. Weaken your rival's team.
Who wouldn't prefer that?
The public. That's who the so called punishment is supposed to benefit.
I vaguely recall some articles a few years ago about MS putting quite a few Washington DC lobbyists on retainer, for the same reason. MS would rather have them sitting on the substitute bench then allow them to work for others.
These recent hires look like more of the same, but slightly more desperate given the direction their products are (not) heading. We've known for years that Microsoft can not compete on merits, so they are trying to make it technically and legally imposible for others to do anything. Furthermore, about the only positive outcome from the most recent MS anti-trust trial in the U.S. is that it is now common knowledge how during the 1990's, MS took a healthy, competitive market that was good for users and crushed it with OEM lock-in, bundled apps, and secret API's.
sometimes I'd just ask their login name and they'd just blurt out, "My login is sueray22 and my password is newyork!"
Most sites I've been at go to great lengths to ensure that users know never to give out their passwords for any reason. However, in one geographic area I've actually seen / heard admins ask users over the phone or via e-mail for their passwords. Nothing I could say or do could convince them that not only was that unnecessary, but a Very Bad Thing ®.
Having volatile resources to protect, like disk quotas or print quotas, can help, but then you need to give users a fighting chance by providing constant education verbally and written as well has having a secure system. I suspect that one reason a lot of users don't take it seriously is that many (most) highly hyped "IT-Solutions" / E-Thneeds come across as Mickey Mouse.
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It's no surprise that the author and rest of the large unwashed bokanovskified masses haven't thought about what's running in their high tech vehicles or other devices. Odds are its qnx, tron or some other non-MS OS.
But let's put a bullet through that myth: 90% of the worlds computers != 90% of the world's desktop computers.
Here's a flash back from 2002:
It's not slowing down. Media consolidation is also reducing the likelihood that your average Svensson is going to be aware or informed of issues not to the advatage of major sponsors or owners.
It's up to those that are aware to increase that level of awareness.
Aside from some mention of price, the discussion has stayed reasonably technical, but it would be essential to know what has changed in regard to the licensing.
Go with straight kerberos + ldap authentication. AD still has scalability issues which, though improved over earlier versions of itself, are still behind Novell NDS or Kerberos + LDAP. Interoperability with a heterogeneous set of workstations is historically pretty poor for AD. Kerberos and LDAP clients exist and function quite nicely on what ever platform you have.
Furthermore, if nothing else, pricing in the 2003 version will kill you, even if managing all the licenses doesn't. Of the two, 2000 is the way to go, but the third option (real kerberos) is probably the way to go in your case.
So, remember to include a discussion of common carriage. Obviously, lots of space will be devoted to other issues, but let's not pay so much attention to the parts and their provenance that we forget what the tools are there to do: The "C" in ICT stands for communication.
Computers are now networked and these are used to communicate across space (telecommunications) or across time (storage/archive). This happens by routing or buffering data packets. Common carriage is no less relevant for networked information systems (i.e. all modern computers) than it is for voice or power or freight or post.
Likewise, the core of most NYT articles consist of re-writes of wire feeds from AP, UPI, Reuter, Tass, AFP, and so on.
McDonalds has volume. NYT has volume. But volume is not the same as quality. How to measure quality is a good question, but one common metric is the frequency of citation and in which publications the citations occur.
Still sticking with just HTTP and RSS as it is now, some kind of if-modified-since HTTP request would greatly reduce the load. That or a checksum. Or a date-time stamp.
It would also be possible and more complex to make a TCP or UDP based RSS designed to be robust and minimize effects of heavy use. A lot of information can be crammed into a single UDP packet, or it could just be a checksum or even just a date-time stamp.
The fault lies squarely with people still using MSIE and with OEMs for not bundling a proper web browser.
However, in a different context, Ed Foster does have a good point ... as he often does. In the case were sites have been compromised or used to spread malware, it is essential that the public be informed.
BTW in Chapter 10, article 1007 prohibits specifying a specific vendor or product in a tender. In other words any tenders specifiying cruft like M$, M$-Windows, M$-Exchange, etc. is in direct violation of NAFTA.
Maintaining extra hardware, a huge archive of expensive tapes, and extra staffing to manage it all are not something that the smaller stations will be able to afford.
A few decades ago, minimum transmitter strength required wattage way outside the budgets of many local stations, causing them to shut down.
Over the last few decades, rules regarding the percentage of media controlled by the same owner have been damaged several times. This makes it possible to buy up or squeeze out smaller stations, further reducing the number of voices heard.
This could be just another ill-conceived idea, but it could also be intended to increase the presence of one corporate voice like other consolidation efforts. Or both.
Control of the media is the 21st century's hydrogen bomb.
One of my recent colleague's illustrations was a fishing boat crew that decided to all purchase new cars - cash - at the same time and figured the best way would be to have one spokesman negotiate a volume discount. The first car dealer took one look at this scruffy guy asking about buying 10 cars and showed him the door. The dealer across the street somehow managed to sell 10 cars that same day. Since some of the people and businesses involved were still in town, it makes it that much funnier .
That first dealer probably lost a few future sales as well. Definitely lost face.
Along similar lines, making weird, non-standard web pages that lockout browsers or screen resolutions are in effect a way of showing the customer the door. BTW search engines are text only and if you're locking out text only visitors, you're locking out search engines and the people (with and without money) that use them.
About 8 years ago I got about a dozen institutions to really thrive on file and print sharing, but that was Novell Netware 3.11/3.12 On the technical side, being rock solid stable and predictable helped. The rest was setting up a good design: I interviewed a handful of experienced but non-technical users about who they work with and how and worked out a good selection of folder names, groups and permissions plus a relevant directory hierarchy. After a short pilot, it took off like wildfire.
Similar experiences with AFS.
The opposite experience was at a place my colleagues consulted for. Even the tech dept. could not transfer an ISO image for me from one workstation to another a lot of the time.I spent a few hours one day talking with the non-IT staff, informally and found that no one no one transfer files or reliably save or retreive them on the server. After checking many factors, it seemed that their choice of file servers (MS-Windows) just wasn't upto snuff. Most of their file transfers actually occured via sneakernet.
The majority there feared for their jobs (it was in the middle of a multi-year downsizing and management turf war) too much to complain about anything.
Yes, there might be some of that, but don't discount the importance of having a reliable and easy to use technology with a clearly organized directory structure, groups and sharing permissions.You don't have that option with MS-Windows, if you change the kernel (NT/2000/XP/2003), you must also change everything else as well. Furthermore, since MS spent several years scattering MSIE code throughout multiple parts of the kernels, you don't really have the option of dropping MSIE completely.
Currently you can only drop MSIE completely by also dropping MS-Windows completely, which IMHO is not such a bad idea these days. Especially for older people and others not interested in system maintenance. Trying to force every MS-Windows user to be an amatuer security expert is inefficient at best a recipe for failure. The cyclopean 'upgrades' and 'patches' coming out of Redmond really prevent home users with modems and other slower connections from keeping up to date, but then MS tends to sit on known security issues for years and not issuing a patch until an exploit is active in the wild. Result? You can't patch fast enough.
Dropping MSIE is a start and makes an eventual transition to a more modern OS smoother.
Sounds like Moore's endorsement of online versions will work as a promotion. The quality of downloads, even for a documentary, just isn't great so it's likely to lead to more ticket sales. It works for smaller, independent bands, why not aslo documentaries? For that matter, it worked for the Grateful Dead, too, and that was no small money.
The main problem with downloads would be getting modified versions, that were edited accidently (e.g. missing a bit or munged data). Or, worse getting one that was edited on purpose with out of context quotes or rude inserts.
I wonder, does Microsoft have a problem getting good employees? I would think that most developers worth their salt would work anywhere rather than for M$.
Maybe. At least it seems to have to work harder to retain any it might have still: I find it probable that the developers are dropping out, as we have seen in the management. M$ is too far behind the times in technology. In marketing, they're the best, but compatibility issues, stability issues, and security issues are pushing customers away and moving them to more productive tools instead.Online, LinuxInsider has been having very well written articles.
ZDNet UK and ZDNet AU The Register and occasionally eWeek. The Register is one of the few that actually seems to do any investigative reporting.
I used to read Wired, InfoWorld, InformationWeek regularly, but only rarely now.
Nature, Scientific American, NewScientist, and National Geographic have been pretty good in print.
In addition to New Scientist, you can usually find good stuff on the same topic in Science News, Scientific American, Nature, and Science, to name a few.
There are already Danish and Swedish translations of OpenOffice Perhaps a class project could be to take a crack at bokmål, nynorsk or sami gielli depending on your geographic location. Some of these are already under way.
I'm surprised that any particular U.S. company would be allowed to dictate the terms of Norwegian education. Especially for products that are notoriously expensive and high maintenance.
60 workstations can be a lot of money thrown into the sea if they are expensive and high maintenance. It might be a good time to point out that there are more local options, like Skolelinux, which are lower maintenance.
Roll your own RPMs or debian packages. This give you the benefit of customization plus the benefits of a package manager. Using a package manager really reduces the headaches of documenting what is installed where and what version. If you add sudo to the mix, then you have a good idea of who to ask about the changes as well.
No, really, at least as soon as the election is out of the way.
These recent hires look like more of the same, but slightly more desperate given the direction their products are (not) heading. We've known for years that Microsoft can not compete on merits, so they are trying to make it technically and legally imposible for others to do anything. Furthermore, about the only positive outcome from the most recent MS anti-trust trial in the U.S. is that it is now common knowledge how during the 1990's, MS took a healthy, competitive market that was good for users and crushed it with OEM lock-in, bundled apps, and secret API's.
Having volatile resources to protect, like disk quotas or print quotas, can help, but then you need to give users a fighting chance by providing constant education verbally and written as well has having a secure system. I suspect that one reason a lot of users don't take it seriously is that many (most) highly hyped "IT-Solutions" / E-Thneeds come across as Mickey Mouse.