Using an unstable platform in a highly visible display is asking for loss of face.
Every day I go past bus schedule kiosks displaying Windows errors. It's a shame and a waste of money to not use something more stable or even designed for embedded systems. QNX and Linux come to mind right away.
Microsoft doesn't give you a compilable version of their code. That's the point.
In otherwords, in regards to the code itself, the developers are either wasting their time completely or else doing unpaid debugging for Microsoft. Since it is not possible to compile the code, so there's no way ensure that the source code is even related to the binaries actually in use. There could be any number of backdoors or secret backdoors (funny how the not pro-MS links seem to go away quickly, some last only days).
I would suspect two other goals would be generating PR and taking developers off of more useful projects.
The main purpose, however, looks like it is to get development teams out of circulation via NDAs that taint them in regards to future F/OSS development. F/OSS is where China, and Asia in general, is currently heading.
MS-Office and MS-Windows are marked up about 5-6 times what would be normal for other products. Although everything else is losing scads of money, MS-Office and MS-Windows pull in 79% and 86% profit margins.
In other words, the monopoly rents cost consumers billions -- a big drain on the economy even ignoring broken patches, interoperability and security problems.
If you start looking at value, the markup for Windows and Office is much higher since their offerings are of lesser quality and more effort that comparable tools from other sources. Even when I worked for a dept with deep pockets, I simply got tired of MS stuff not working. MS Products simply are not ready for the Internet. So I upgraded to some different GNU/Linux distros, which despite the FUD and spin are easier to install and maintain than any of the Windows flavors I had to deal with. Though, lately, I've started using OS X, which is even easier.
...a utilities' purpose is to supply something to the people, be it water, power or phone service.
As a commercial entity, its purpose is to make money for its stockholders
That's it in a nutshell. Having a state-owned or a not-for-profit service or service company keeps the core goals as providing a service and bringing in enough income to meet that goal. Having a for maximal profit company changes that and providing a service becomes a secondary or tertiary effect of getting revenue.
* In the short run, prices plummet and more alternatives appear.
* In the long run, after a low number of de-facto monopolists remain, prices rise and reliability and service go down
Sweden seems to have skipped the first step. Last year and the year before many in S. Sweden got their power shut off because the various factions billing, accounts, etc. do not communicate as they once did when they were all one single company/utility. The post, trains, and medical service in Sweden has also gone the same way. You'd figure people wouldn't keep falling for the same gimmick, but I guess it's no wonder with the same interests running or influencing so much of the media.
With privatised-for-maximal-short-term-profit power, there is no incentive to invest in increased capacity until there actually are shortages. Without reserve capacity, the power grid will occasionaly have to collapse as part of self-preservation.
Sure, he may be associated with them, but does it really have anything to do with this article?
No. But there may be some sort of contractual obligation to plug the parent company at least once a day on Slashdot, to draw attention away. Or else Slashdot's been trolled.
The same topic was covered a few days ago in the original context. See Can you raed this?.
Licenses on the new service packes give
remote access to the contents of your machine to Redmond in such a way that it violates HIPAA.
That's not counting the design and production flaws resulting in remote exploits for WinNT, Win2000, WinXp, and Win2003.
So bascially, storing or manipulating personal data with MS windows is a gross or willful negligence lawsuit waiting to happen.
Speaking of control, who edits your news? What do they choose to emphasize? What do they leave out?
The link is actually an Associated Press story. It's also covered by AFP and will soon be picked up by others. The editors could sharpen up and not keep plugging lame sites or voluntarily giving MS a monopoly over your news sources as well.
As usual, the type of software is probably not the problem. It's the fact that the people running the system either don't know, or don't get the time for the necessary security measurements.
Look, you can't have it both ways - either it's so simple a monkey (aka MSCE) can run it or not. It's ridiculous to make this claim and then blame the admin, the user, the moon, lack of faith in His Billness, or whatever. I smell false or misleading advertising there.
There is no difference between those that cannot read and those that do not. If the state department could / did read, then MS products would not be allowed on networked computers. Windows, among other MS products, is not ready for the Internet.
This is a decision based upon consumer experiences, child protection and our strategic investment to build up MSN Messenger.[my emphasis]
Hmm. Interesting that MS has lost enough credibility in the mainstream that they can't use the "improves security" || "good for what ails ya" argument any more.
This would be a good opportunity to turn people on to cross-platform IM clients like GAIM. I doubt anyone in the tech communities is naive enough to take the children argument as more than a red herring to keep IM from joinging the OS/Broswer/Mediaformat/Office format anti-trust action. It does, however, provide a very good cover for pushing people into MS-Passport, despite its reputation, and for locking out non-Microsoft IM clients.
Alternately, this can be seen as just another product or service being dropped or postponed as the company sheds weight to try to stay afloat.
Lastly, regarding the link. This is being covered by everyone and his dog, even Reuters, so no need to plug poor sources..
Hey, I have a CS degree from the top school in the country for it, I work for IBM, and I can't keep this damn box working. I am not saying this to show off, I am saying this to emphasize that the situation is unreasonable. If I can't keep my machine running nicely, then 99% of the population doesn't have a chance.
It sounds like you're a candidate for an upgrade to one of the Linux distros or to OS X.
The great difficulty of keeping a MS-Windows machine running was the final factor in initially moving to Linux at home. I used Debian and RedHat at work for four years and experienced that they were faster, more stable, easier to install and maintain, and more secure than the MS Windows variants.
The ease of Apple's Software Update is a real bonus it's nice to concentrate on work rather than maintenance. OS X is good on its own, but has the added advantage in that it is a non-controversial, commercial, off-the-shelf system that will work in a corporate environment. The hardware on the iBooks and PowerBooks are nice and the biggest risk is gloating about it. It's not perfect, I miss multiple desktops like on KDE, but for a maintstream office environment, it's light years ahead of Windows.
I'm currently working on a project to retrieve documents accross a company's backed-up data from the past 10 years, and there is very very little metadata available for us to do any searching on.
Yes, but you can't claim that an absence of metadata is due to a failure to write metadata: I myself used to keep a lot of metadata in my text processing documents and found that if you migrate periodically to new versions of the MS-Word format suite, you will periodically lose the metadata. No errors, no warnings, it's just gone. XML in the MS-Office suites is not going to come to the forefront. Microsoft, an Oasis member, backing out of the Oasis standard shows where they are heading. The misdirection about the schema should remove any doubt.
On the other hand, OO.o's XML format + schema will be available even to competitors and theoretically beyond the life span of OO.o. One way for OO.o to encourage users to think in a structured is through style sheets. Style sheets and document templates can save a lot of wasted time and effort. But again, what would people do with the spare productivity if formatting were done in 5 minutes, instead of spending 2 days formatting manually and re-formating manually various reports and presentations?
Here you can see that MS-Window and MS-Office pull in monopoly rents. i.e. 4-5 times the free market price. With everything else losing money, any price cuts in those two are going to cut deeply. Thus the panic to spread expensive lock-in techologies (e.g. Palladium/ WMP9) and licenses (License 6).
Given that software distribution can have nearly zero cost,
RedHat, SuSe, Apple and others seem to have more viable model. Even the RIAA could learn from them, though for both Microsoft and RIAA, I think they've waited too long and would do the U.S. economy the best by leaving the playingfield altogether.
This bug came from China, and Microsoft has sent the source code to China..
That there is another Microsoft worm this week should come as no surprise. If you recall from the anti-trust trial and the appeal, Jim Allchin pointed out that Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed. It was even claimed that showing the Microsoft source code
could damage national security.
So, was it perjury or treason? You decide.
Either way it's not a set of ethics that would induce me to resume business with them... ever.
Even if it works for the other 23.5 hours in the day, a billboard isn't worth much if it displays a defaced image or BSOD during part of rush hour. I often see bus schedule kiosks down for the count with a Windows error, and occasionally even air line arrival/depature dispalys. Such public failures reflects very poorly on the company choosing such a poor solution. Especially the airlines, it makes me wonder if their safety or maintenance is also falling victim to trends in MLM schemes.
MS-Windows is unsuitable unless the advertising contracts have clauses about defacement, BSOD, MSTDs and other causes of down time. QNX, BSD, Linux and other systems are much more suitable for embedded systems being smaller, more secure and capable of providing the uptime required to fulfill a normal advertising contract.
More likely MS-Windows was mentioned because it's a MLM scheme that's wrapping up and the top piers are making one last push before it goes under.
All people see in 2D, at least the ones I know. Most that I've met even think in 2D. This 3D monitor should be interesting, but what kind of brain implants and neural retraining will it require? And, is the radiation used for scanning safe?
When it comes down to it beaches are due to defects in design or implementation. The more a sysadmin does / is supposed to do (e.g. for *BSD), the more design and implementation is the sysadmin's responsibility. The more a system is claimed to be hands-off (e.g. MS-Windows), the more the responsibility is on the software provider.
In the case of the "lazy" admin, I've watched how over worked MS-only shops become - patches often break things, fail to fix what they claim to, or (re-)introduce additional exploits and therefore must be tested very thoroughly before going onto a production system. Some shops try to save money and have only one server, thus they pay big time for mistakes...
In those cases, breaches are due to the patches themselves breaking things or not working. Can you say NT sp2?
Yes, the number of users did have something to do with the numbers, but the initial setup was so poor that nearly anything else would result in savings.
Most of her cost reduction resulted directly from dropping from an unreliable, unstable, hard to maintain (on both client and server and server platform) technology with high licensing fees to boot, to a more traditional one. (In otherwords, dropped MS-Exchange for a normal IMAP/SMTP server.)
In my case, I merely got five bids and the lowest one happened to be the most reputable firm any way, just 2 countries over. The highest bid was 20 x higher and the lowest 10 x. The overhead to do it the first time myself would be even higher.
Not everything can or should be outsourced, but it's worth checking and don't be afraid to go over borders where it's allowed.
No. A five year programme in e.g. Germany is five years of full time study devoted to a single subject. After five years of physics, including writing a one-year thesis, I am at least worth a US physics master.
Will it stay this way, or will Germany be "harmonized" to conform to the Bologna agreement?
Again, innovation is creating an actual new idea, not simply integrating multiple functions into a single product, or copying them from competing products.
Hmm. Can't say about "wavy-underlined" spell check, but spell checking where spelling errors are detected and highlighted on the fly have been around since the 80's. Both in WYSIWYG form for the mac and text for PC-DOS / DR-DOS.
DOM was around a few years before most considered MSIE usable, so your claim strikes me as specious. Likewise with smart tags or dumb tags, if it's in MS-Word, then only Microsoft can produce it and by definition they're first. If it is similar to the "Smart Tags" in MSIE that got canned.
Innovation is certainly involved, but Steve and Bill seem to use the word in the wrong context.
Slashdot Mirror
Every day I go past bus schedule kiosks displaying Windows errors. It's a shame and a waste of money to not use something more stable or even designed for embedded systems. QNX and Linux come to mind right away.
I would suspect two other goals would be generating PR and taking developers off of more useful projects.
The main purpose, however, looks like it is to get development teams out of circulation via NDAs that taint them in regards to future F/OSS development. F/OSS is where China, and Asia in general, is currently heading.
MS-Office and MS-Windows are marked up about 5-6 times what would be normal for other products. Although everything else is losing scads of money, MS-Office and MS-Windows pull in 79% and 86% profit margins. In other words, the monopoly rents cost consumers billions -- a big drain on the economy even ignoring broken patches, interoperability and security problems.
If you start looking at value, the markup for Windows and Office is much higher since their offerings are of lesser quality and more effort that comparable tools from other sources. Even when I worked for a dept with deep pockets, I simply got tired of MS stuff not working. MS Products simply are not ready for the Internet. So I upgraded to some different GNU/Linux distros, which despite the FUD and spin are easier to install and maintain than any of the Windows flavors I had to deal with. Though, lately, I've started using OS X, which is even easier.
With privatised-for-maximal-short-term-profit power, there is no incentive to invest in increased capacity until there actually are shortages. Without reserve capacity, the power grid will occasionaly have to collapse as part of self-preservation.
The same topic was covered a few days ago in the original context. See Can you raed this?.
Licenses on the new service packes give remote access to the contents of your machine to Redmond in such a way that it violates HIPAA. That's not counting the design and production flaws resulting in remote exploits for WinNT, Win2000, WinXp, and Win2003.
So bascially, storing or manipulating personal data with MS windows is a gross or willful negligence lawsuit waiting to happen.
The link is actually an Associated Press story. It's also covered by AFP and will soon be picked up by others. The editors could sharpen up and not keep plugging lame sites or voluntarily giving MS a monopoly over your news sources as well.
IIRC it was illegal to use credit cards as identification, which is what one aspect of this move boils down to.
There is no difference between those that cannot read and those that do not. If the state department could / did read, then MS products would not be allowed on networked computers. Windows, among other MS products, is not ready for the Internet.
This would be a good opportunity to turn people on to cross-platform IM clients like GAIM. I doubt anyone in the tech communities is naive enough to take the children argument as more than a red herring to keep IM from joinging the OS/Broswer/Mediaformat/Office format anti-trust action. It does, however, provide a very good cover for pushing people into MS-Passport, despite its reputation, and for locking out non-Microsoft IM clients.
Alternately, this can be seen as just another product or service being dropped or postponed as the company sheds weight to try to stay afloat.
Lastly, regarding the link. This is being covered by everyone and his dog, even Reuters, so no need to plug poor sources..
The great difficulty of keeping a MS-Windows machine running was the final factor in initially moving to Linux at home. I used Debian and RedHat at work for four years and experienced that they were faster, more stable, easier to install and maintain, and more secure than the MS Windows variants.
The ease of Apple's Software Update is a real bonus it's nice to concentrate on work rather than maintenance. OS X is good on its own, but has the added advantage in that it is a non-controversial, commercial, off-the-shelf system that will work in a corporate environment. The hardware on the iBooks and PowerBooks are nice and the biggest risk is gloating about it. It's not perfect, I miss multiple desktops like on KDE, but for a maintstream office environment, it's light years ahead of Windows.
On the other hand, OO.o's XML format + schema will be available even to competitors and theoretically beyond the life span of OO.o. One way for OO.o to encourage users to think in a structured is through style sheets. Style sheets and document templates can save a lot of wasted time and effort. But again, what would people do with the spare productivity if formatting were done in 5 minutes, instead of spending 2 days formatting manually and re-formating manually various reports and presentations?
Given that software distribution can have nearly zero cost, RedHat, SuSe, Apple and others seem to have more viable model. Even the RIAA could learn from them, though for both Microsoft and RIAA, I think they've waited too long and would do the U.S. economy the best by leaving the playingfield altogether.
So, was it perjury or treason? You decide.
Either way it's not a set of ethics that would induce me to resume business with them ... ever.
MS-Windows is unsuitable unless the advertising contracts have clauses about defacement, BSOD, MSTDs and other causes of down time. QNX, BSD, Linux and other systems are much more suitable for embedded systems being smaller, more secure and capable of providing the uptime required to fulfill a normal advertising contract.
More likely MS-Windows was mentioned because it's a MLM scheme that's wrapping up and the top piers are making one last push before it goes under.
That and it distracts us from checking too closely into other companies' portfolios and lobbying activities.
It makes sense, all four cause damage or rapidly cause long term harm.
All people see in 2D, at least the ones I know. Most that I've met even think in 2D. This 3D monitor should be interesting, but what kind of brain implants and neural retraining will it require? And, is the radiation used for scanning safe?
In the case of the "lazy" admin, I've watched how over worked MS-only shops become - patches often break things, fail to fix what they claim to, or (re-)introduce additional exploits and therefore must be tested very thoroughly before going onto a production system. Some shops try to save money and have only one server, thus they pay big time for mistakes...
In those cases, breaches are due to the patches themselves breaking things or not working. Can you say NT sp2?
Yes, but this Wednesday, they need to keep people too busy to upgrade to Linux or to read about the WM9 saga.
Most of her cost reduction resulted directly from dropping from an unreliable, unstable, hard to maintain (on both client and server and server platform) technology with high licensing fees to boot, to a more traditional one. (In otherwords, dropped MS-Exchange for a normal IMAP/SMTP server.)
In my case, I merely got five bids and the lowest one happened to be the most reputable firm any way, just 2 countries over. The highest bid was 20 x higher and the lowest 10 x. The overhead to do it the first time myself would be even higher.
Not everything can or should be outsourced, but it's worth checking and don't be afraid to go over borders where it's allowed.
Hmm. Can't say about "wavy-underlined" spell check, but spell checking where spelling errors are detected and highlighted on the fly have been around since the 80's. Both in WYSIWYG form for the mac and text for PC-DOS / DR-DOS.
DOM was around a few years before most considered MSIE usable, so your claim strikes me as specious. Likewise with smart tags or dumb tags, if it's in MS-Word, then only Microsoft can produce it and by definition they're first. If it is similar to the "Smart Tags" in MSIE that got canned.
Innovation is certainly involved, but Steve and Bill seem to use the word in the wrong context.