Google's ranking algorithm merely weights pages on their popularity among sites that are themselves popular. Simply put it's tyranny of the majority, and when the majority shifts so does the ranking. This is not the first time that terms have acquired new associations. Because of the way the algorithm works, it won't be the last time.
I notice that the Infoworld article is 3 days old, but has not once been linked to from the start page. However, reviews of Microsoft products are, minus any critique of DRM- or Software-as-subscription- issues. Likewise for ZDNet and other sites. BYTE, perhaps, was getting a little too independent in its columns and is no longer available online.
Even with primo product placement and censored product reviews, we're still heading towards a tipping effect where Microsoft will disappear as a relevant player in the world's IT sectors.
F/OSS has been responsible for most of the Internet and Web. The bursting of the dot-com bubble co-incides with the short rise of the new-comer Microsoft, which has focused on growth through acquisition rather than innovation and on marketing rather than techology. Perhaps with the disappearance of this last dot-com pyramid scheme, we'll see new growth or even a small boom as businesses go back to what works.
SAGE might also use this email address to notify you of other related news. You will be provided with the ability to opt-out of such postings. - from the Sysadmin Salary Survey 2002
I'd rather have opt-in. I wouldn't put a real address in the form until they show some more details or guarantees that you can actually opt-out before the mail address goes to every spamhaus in the wolrd.
Could you expand upon your other claim? I find overwhelming evidence to support the idea that
MSIE has also been chronically plagued with severe
bugs, generally severe problems.
As to why it is common, if you recall the anti-trust trial in the U.S. where Microsoft was found guilty and the appeal where the verdict of guilty was upheld, you'll find that among the records is the fact the MSIE gained market because it was bundled with MS-Windows.
If left to compete on technical merits, MSIE will fall out of the market place and disappear.
MSIE has fallen so far behind in technology, usability and security that it's a marketing wonder that any corporate intranets allow it at all. Perhaps offering a Google-like competitor is the only way to keep from losing all ground to Mozilla, Opera and others.
Microsoft could easily shut out any normal search service by further leveraging their desktop monopoly. Simply add searching functions in MSIE that make it hard to use anything than their own service, much the same way that HTTP error messages have been co-opted in MSIE.
Makers of embedded devices and other systems are quite aware of this and have been turning to Mozilla and Opera.
The prosecution wanted to nail Jon on the paragraph 145 of the Norwegian penal code. It says that (summary) "anyone gaining illegal access to locked data, also computer data can be punished with jail for a maximum of six months". Note the "illegal" part here. The judge ruled that Jon had only gained access with DeCSS to data HE had bought. It was his copy of the work in question so he had a right to access it. He did not distribute any illegal copies, and he did not gain unlawful access
According that, the prosecution could only go after him for using DeCSS, not writing it.
Norway is not currently part of the EU, although there are close ties between them (e.g., they are in the EEA which brings them somewhat into the internal EU market zone, and they particpate in schemes like Europol).
Also, even if Norway had been in the EU, the EUCD was not in effect when DeCSS was written and released.
Nearly all the articles articles ignore the fact that DeCSS is used for viewing. The remainder only mention it in passing. It seems that anyone can copy DVDs to their hearts content without ever having to actually decode them.
The real issue seems to be control over the choice of viewing platform.
The RIAA and their possie have enormous patience and wallets. If they don't get what they want this year then they'll do it again next year and so on.
Depends on whether Norwegians stick to the law or turn quisling instead.
Frivilous lawsuits like this are running up costs for the Norwegians. I hope the Norwegian government has been billing RIAA and cohorts for Jon's legal costs.
Otherwise it will be death by a thousand cuts as the RIAA, Spanish fishing, and British and U.S. oil interests all DDOS the Norwegian national budget and legal system.
People aren't applying the patches in spite of clear warnings.
Even Microsoft's own servers got hit by Slammer. It has been quit common for Microsoft's security upgrades to break something else, fail to fix what they claim to fix, and/or introduce additional holes. The Slammer worm showed that even Microsoft knows that it's patches can be unhealthy for production systems. Other companies and software projects just don't have this kind of quality problem.
Even if the patches worked, and even if it had been an old-style, slow worm, you can't patch fast enough. But it wasn't. Slammer reached saturation in 8.5 minutes.
Most likely this story was a tidbit to draw fire away from the quarterly financial statement or from the DRM/Palladium stealth payload in Windows Server 2003 + Office 2003.
Sure folks may wish to run Microsoft products for ideological reasons, but there aren't any technical ones and now the market is changing. C*Os have figured out the OS X, RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, OpenBSD, etc. are much easier install and maintain than Windows Xp and far more flexible and secure -- both on the workstation and the server. Novell Netware should also be mentioned as excellent. C'mon when was the last time you heard of MS machine reaching an uptime of more than 200 days? That would be embarassingly short for QNX and Novell.
Microsoft has been to computing what Big Tobacco was to sports.
Of course Coca-Cola could lower their prices and still make money. But if they did, then Pepsi would just lower their prices, and both companies would make less. So they both keep their prices artificially high.
Last time I checked, they tag team in the U.S. You never see RC or any other non-pepsi/non-coke soda in the end-of-aisle displays. Over the course of a year, it's pretty much 50%/50% as to which is running a special price and which has the promotion during a given holiday.
Now that Pepsi and Coke bought up the smaller brands, they all taste like carbonated corn syrup. Even "New Coke" -- try mixing a Cuba Libre with New Coke and one with kosher Coke for a real contrast.
If LCD screens were dirt cheap, but only provided by two or three companies, that might be ok, but only as long as the quality doesn't deteriorate as happened in the soft drink business.
Microsoft Corp. has announced that later this month Bill Gates will give a world-wide video conference to finally explain dot-Net. "It's time to ascend to the next level", Gates said, "we've cut elsewhere drastically in order to augment our sales staff in time for the event". Business leaders should expect calls, visits, and treats during the next month from Microsoft sales staff to ensure that all end users have installed the license for the current Windows Media Player and the licenses for the latest service packs. Calls will be followed by onsite visits. Microsoft sales staff, all licensed notary publics, and Business Software Alliance inspection teams to ensure that each and every the click-through agreement is followed up with a notarized contract.
As part of the treat, each site will receive packets of flavored drink mix for a special toast at the end of the teleconference. MSCEs will give instructions on the preparation of the mix and will assist the sales staff in dispensing to executive staff.
The real harm with trying Windows Server 2003 is the DRM. The software stage of Palladium will kill off third party software, and do it without improving security. It will also lock businesses and others into the perpetual subscription model with data as a hostage. If you let your subsciption slide or an error occurs in product activation, then you're locked out. DMCA and EUCD makes it a crime to try to get at your data.
Ok. Combine DRM with planned OS obselesence. Even though NT4 is supposed to EOL in June, this looks much like a breach of contract [microsoft.com] at worst and a complete faux pas at best. The "Who are you going to count on in 5 years?" question is sure answered. It sure shows that the Linux distros provide better support.
Moving to Netware, OS X or to one of the OSS operating systems is really the sole option to avoid going into an expensive world of hurt.
Interpret the premature EOL as a heads up. If the DRM planned for Office2003/Server2003 had already been implemented in NT, there'd be no choice but to pay, whatever the price.
It's not a matter of if you must upgrade, but when. However, realize that buying new products from the same company will not necessarily protect from this happening again. It would be a bad idea not to use the situation to explore options. Many are making the move.
There may be some ideological reasons to try Microsoft's server experiments, but no technical ones. Even the ideological ones don't float: no matter how much you admire Bill G's enormous personal wealth, giving him more of your company's money is not going to make you rich(er).
So many corners have been cut on service and products that it looks like Microsoft may not live out the summer. WinNT and other legacy software can keep running with the help of work-arounds as long as no one was dumb enough to sign a subscription.
Newsgroups + email + wiki = 10 times what WebCT is.
Unlike pretty much every system out there, newsgroups can be decentralized, useful if you have several campuses or geographic groups of users. Seems to me the way to go might be to fix up a web-based news client w/roaming profiles and use private newsgroups in combination with a mailing list gateway. That way users could use either their favorit Usenet client or their favorite mail client.
An old standby is COW.
COW is an excellent quick-n-dirty solution. It has very low system requirements and is very easily modified.
Microsoft used a similar strategy to shoehorn NT into businesses. The MS-Windows market was big, but in order to get an official Windows-95 sticker on your product you had to also develop one for NT.
Microsoft will alse use the new, incompatible MS-Office 2003 file format as leverage for forcing DRM. The first step will be to reach critical mass with DRM encumbered software through new purchases or license 6. Part of this first step will be to
force MS-server 2003 into each work site. Once the software is in place, then second step is the hardware. Once both are in place, your data is hostage.
The only apparent way to eliminate this problem in the near term is to steadfastly refuse any hardware with any DRM whatsoever. Failure to avoid DRM hardware will be walking into an economic tarpit.
Among other things Mozilla and Opera also have excellent track records on patches and fewer, less severe, vulnerabilities. Microsoft's patches tend to break things and/or fail to fix the problem and/or reintroduce old vulnerabilities. It's no wonder that even headquarters decided against trying their own patches on productions systems and got hit. (has zdnet knuckled under?)
MSIE is so unpolished that you can still get hit by simply visiting a web page. If you turn off scripting in MSIE, you can get rid of many vulnerabilities, but you also get rid of the only non-religious reason to run MSIE. In which case, you'd be far better off running Opera, Mozilla, or other top of the line browsers.
MSIE lags far behind other browsers in function and ease of use. There'd be no point in Open Sourcing it unless Microsoft was planning to drop MSIE and hand maintenance over to devotees.
People are
catching on to the fact that Microsoft is a marketing engine and not a software company. OS X has the software and is easiest for users, but even the linux distros are just as easy as Windows and are pretty much there with everything except games. Linux distros and OS X have all Windows versions beat, hands-down, on ease of maintenance.
Wow, people manage to get to their 4th year (of anything that requires even incidental use of Windows) without developing an I - must - press - Ctrl-S - every - 15 - seconds reflex?
I haven't used MS-Windows/MS-Office in years and I still have the reflex to hit Ctrl-S at the end of each sentence or any time I pause for a moment while typing.
Usually, I catch it in time to abstract it to "Save" and use the correct short cut. But being a reflex it unfortunately still kicks in sometimes as Ctrl-S... even in Bash or vi.
This must be a serious one. I thought the weekly security patches were now announced on Wednesdays. Or has the patch frequency now stepped up to semi-weekly?
Sitting on security vulnerabilities until several fixes are available and releasing them as one advisory is a good trick to try to reduce the overal number of advisories, without actually having to improve the quality or security of the product.
For a while patches were announced on Thursdays and for a while before that it was Fridays. Fridays must have run too much overtime and shown up on the boardroom radar. Thursday in Seattle is already Friday in Europe so maybe this is a play to get MSTD-induced overtime back off the radar of European managers. With a legal cap of around 37.5 hours per week per tech, business can't afford too many IIS servers.
It is strange that any would try to. Microsoft-IIS is not a viable alternative to Zeus or Apache.
It takes continuous exposure, such as would be seen by family members or care-givers.
Or, perhaps, work in buildings with "air conditioning" instead of windows that open and have folk show up to work sick. I realize that "air conditioners" are a big ticket status item among managers, but I would posit that they reduce effectivity by lowering the air quality (low rates of fresh air, higher mold or other contaminants), reducing acclimitization, and work place noise. At least a few years ago in the U.S., it was also a status thing to show up to work sick.
Proper sick leave policies which do not penalize/prevent employees from taking time to get healthy would go a long way in reducing the potential for such a disease spreading. Ditching the air conditioning and opening the windows would allow clean air in (excepting certain cities).
Quite a few more jobs would stay in the U.S. and pay for salaried workers would be much higher if executive compensation were brough back down to a rational level. Currently, CEO's average $13.1 million. Other excutives pull in lower, but still high, sums of about 400-600 times that of their employees.
It would not make business sense to replace 399 productive full time equivalents (FTEs) with 399 people to sit and do nothing while a 400th does the work of one FTE. Yet, that is what is going on. This is bleeding the U.S. IT sector dry. It is also very damaging to the rest of th U.S. economy. In other words, harmful to the U.S. national interests (assuming maintaining a viable IT sector is one of them).
Adjusting executive compensation to merely 2 or 3 times that of the average employee would keep hundreds on staff. Anything less could be considered by some to be seditious or anti-American.
Try connecting more than one keyboard and mouse to one computer.
Being able to connect more than one mouse and have them each control their own pointer on the screen would be a general good-to-have feature for not only games but desktops like KDE and Gnome. Maybe it's not possible with USB or USB2, but if it is, I'd like to have one mouse per monitor on dual/triple headed systems...
Show me a tool comparable to MS Access in terms of ease of creating forms and reports;
Here, have two. They're small.
Both FileMaker and FoxPro are much easier in terms of creating forms and reports than MS-Access. Additionally, FileMaker data files and user interface are identical on both Macintosh and MS-Windows. It's even available for OS X, MS-Access isn't.
If you want a web-accessible database, but are not ready to scale up to PHP+(MySQL|Postgresql) then ou can put an existing database online in a matter of seconds in FileMaker.
Yes, it is a company known for poor software. Its forte is marketing and lobbying, two areas where it is the best. Its market share across the board appears to depend entirely on leveraging the desktop OS monopoly rather than on technical merits. But its packages and its operating systems fall consistently behind, lacking technical merits.
Even as recently as last month, MSIE came in 6 out of 6 in a comparison of web browsers. Opera and Mozilla, among others, have it beat by a long shot in all categories (well, Opera costs, but I get my boss to pay). It's even documented in U.S. Federal Court records that MSIE acheived market share over Netscape by bundling MSIE with new copies of MS-Windows.
Quattro, Lotus 1-2-3 and other spread sheets were faster and more mature. It wasn't until MS-Excel v4 when Microsoft's alternativs started to come up to near the same grade as competitors.
Likewise with small desktop databases. Foxpro, dBase, FileMaker, Reflex, and others were still a length ahead of MS-Access. After all Microsoft is still playing catchup, though they did manage to buy out Foxpro. Oracle9i and IBM's DB2 by far offer the best performance and functionality for high end SQL servers. Postgresql and MySQL have the mid-range covered and would be what Microsoft's SQL server is trying hardest to compete with. The Microsoft SQL server is not up to snuff nor is it secure.
But almost-as-good won't displaced established tools. That's where leveraging and sales pitches comes in.
Early versions MS-Word were a unique exception among Microsoft's products in that they were actually competitive with contemporary products. However, whether MS-Word variants were actually better than WordPerfect, AMI and others is probably more an issue of taste than something objective. It and MS-Windows were used to shoehorn MS-Excel into sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Previous examples have been funnier:
I notice that the Infoworld article is 3 days old, but has not once been linked to from the start page. However, reviews of Microsoft products are, minus any critique of DRM- or Software-as-subscription- issues. Likewise for ZDNet and other sites. BYTE, perhaps, was getting a little too independent in its columns and is no longer available online.
Even with primo product placement and censored product reviews, we're still heading towards a tipping effect where Microsoft will disappear as a relevant player in the world's IT sectors.
F/OSS has been responsible for most of the Internet and Web. The bursting of the dot-com bubble co-incides with the short rise of the new-comer Microsoft, which has focused on growth through acquisition rather than innovation and on marketing rather than techology. Perhaps with the disappearance of this last dot-com pyramid scheme, we'll see new growth or even a small boom as businesses go back to what works.
As to why it is common, if you recall the anti-trust trial in the U.S. where Microsoft was found guilty and the appeal where the verdict of guilty was upheld, you'll find that among the records is the fact the MSIE gained market because it was bundled with MS-Windows.
If left to compete on technical merits, MSIE will fall out of the market place and disappear. MSIE has fallen so far behind in technology, usability and security that it's a marketing wonder that any corporate intranets allow it at all. Perhaps offering a Google-like competitor is the only way to keep from losing all ground to Mozilla, Opera and others.
Microsoft could easily shut out any normal search service by further leveraging their desktop monopoly. Simply add searching functions in MSIE that make it hard to use anything than their own service, much the same way that HTTP error messages have been co-opted in MSIE.
Makers of embedded devices and other systems are quite aware of this and have been turning to Mozilla and Opera.
The real issue seems to be control over the choice of viewing platform.
Corporations should be required to conform to the Bill of Rights.
Depends on whether Norwegians stick to the law or turn quisling instead.
Frivilous lawsuits like this are running up costs for the Norwegians. I hope the Norwegian government has been billing RIAA and cohorts for Jon's legal costs.
Otherwise it will be death by a thousand cuts as the RIAA, Spanish fishing, and British and U.S. oil interests all DDOS the Norwegian national budget and legal system.
Even if the patches worked, and even if it had been an old-style, slow worm, you can't patch fast enough. But it wasn't. Slammer reached saturation in 8.5 minutes. Most likely this story was a tidbit to draw fire away from the quarterly financial statement or from the DRM/Palladium stealth payload in Windows Server 2003 + Office 2003.
Sure folks may wish to run Microsoft products for ideological reasons, but there aren't any technical ones and now the market is changing. C*Os have figured out the OS X, RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, OpenBSD, etc. are much easier install and maintain than Windows Xp and far more flexible and secure -- both on the workstation and the server. Novell Netware should also be mentioned as excellent. C'mon when was the last time you heard of MS machine reaching an uptime of more than 200 days? That would be embarassingly short for QNX and Novell.
Microsoft has been to computing what Big Tobacco was to sports.
Now that Pepsi and Coke bought up the smaller brands, they all taste like carbonated corn syrup. Even "New Coke" -- try mixing a Cuba Libre with New Coke and one with kosher Coke for a real contrast.
If LCD screens were dirt cheap, but only provided by two or three companies, that might be ok, but only as long as the quality doesn't deteriorate as happened in the soft drink business.
Microsoft Corp. has announced that later this month Bill Gates will give a world-wide video conference to finally explain dot-Net. "It's time to ascend to the next level", Gates said, "we've cut elsewhere drastically in order to augment our sales staff in time for the event". Business leaders should expect calls, visits, and treats during the next month from Microsoft sales staff to ensure that all end users have installed the license for the current Windows Media Player and the licenses for the latest service packs. Calls will be followed by onsite visits. Microsoft sales staff, all licensed notary publics, and Business Software Alliance inspection teams to ensure that each and every the click-through agreement is followed up with a notarized contract.
As part of the treat, each site will receive packets of flavored drink mix for a special toast at the end of the teleconference. MSCEs will give instructions on the preparation of the mix and will assist the sales staff in dispensing to executive staff.
Ok. Combine DRM with planned OS obselesence. Even though NT4 is supposed to EOL in June, this looks much like a breach of contract [microsoft.com] at worst and a complete faux pas at best. The "Who are you going to count on in 5 years?" question is sure answered. It sure shows that the Linux distros provide better support.
Moving to Netware, OS X or to one of the OSS operating systems is really the sole option to avoid going into an expensive world of hurt.
It's not a matter of if you must upgrade, but when. However, realize that buying new products from the same company will not necessarily protect from this happening again. It would be a bad idea not to use the situation to explore options. Many are making the move.
There may be some ideological reasons to try Microsoft's server experiments, but no technical ones. Even the ideological ones don't float: no matter how much you admire Bill G's enormous personal wealth, giving him more of your company's money is not going to make you rich(er).
So many corners have been cut on service and products that it looks like Microsoft may not live out the summer. WinNT and other legacy software can keep running with the help of work-arounds as long as no one was dumb enough to sign a subscription.
An old standby is COW. COW is an excellent quick-n-dirty solution. It has very low system requirements and is very easily modified.
Microsoft will alse use the new, incompatible MS-Office 2003 file format as leverage for forcing DRM. The first step will be to reach critical mass with DRM encumbered software through new purchases or license 6. Part of this first step will be to force MS-server 2003 into each work site. Once the software is in place, then second step is the hardware. Once both are in place, your data is hostage.
The only apparent way to eliminate this problem in the near term is to steadfastly refuse any hardware with any DRM whatsoever. Failure to avoid DRM hardware will be walking into an economic tarpit.
MSIE is so unpolished that you can still get hit by simply visiting a web page. If you turn off scripting in MSIE, you can get rid of many vulnerabilities, but you also get rid of the only non-religious reason to run MSIE. In which case, you'd be far better off running Opera, Mozilla, or other top of the line browsers. MSIE lags far behind other browsers in function and ease of use. There'd be no point in Open Sourcing it unless Microsoft was planning to drop MSIE and hand maintenance over to devotees.
People are catching on to the fact that Microsoft is a marketing engine and not a software company. OS X has the software and is easiest for users, but even the linux distros are just as easy as Windows and are pretty much there with everything except games. Linux distros and OS X have all Windows versions beat, hands-down, on ease of maintenance.
I haven't used MS-Windows/MS-Office in years and I still have the reflex to hit Ctrl-S at the end of each sentence or any time I pause for a moment while typing.
Usually, I catch it in time to abstract it to "Save" and use the correct short cut. But being a reflex it unfortunately still kicks in sometimes as Ctrl-S ... even in Bash or vi.
Sitting on security vulnerabilities until several fixes are available and releasing them as one advisory is a good trick to try to reduce the overal number of advisories, without actually having to improve the quality or security of the product.
For a while patches were announced on Thursdays and for a while before that it was Fridays. Fridays must have run too much overtime and shown up on the boardroom radar. Thursday in Seattle is already Friday in Europe so maybe this is a play to get MSTD-induced overtime back off the radar of European managers. With a legal cap of around 37.5 hours per week per tech, business can't afford too many IIS servers.
It is strange that any would try to. Microsoft-IIS is not a viable alternative to Zeus or Apache.
Or, perhaps, work in buildings with "air conditioning" instead of windows that open and have folk show up to work sick. I realize that "air conditioners" are a big ticket status item among managers, but I would posit that they reduce effectivity by lowering the air quality (low rates of fresh air, higher mold or other contaminants), reducing acclimitization, and work place noise. At least a few years ago in the U.S., it was also a status thing to show up to work sick.
Proper sick leave policies which do not penalize/prevent employees from taking time to get healthy would go a long way in reducing the potential for such a disease spreading. Ditching the air conditioning and opening the windows would allow clean air in (excepting certain cities).
It would not make business sense to replace 399 productive full time equivalents (FTEs) with 399 people to sit and do nothing while a 400th does the work of one FTE. Yet, that is what is going on. This is bleeding the U.S. IT sector dry. It is also very damaging to the rest of th U.S. economy. In other words, harmful to the U.S. national interests (assuming maintaining a viable IT sector is one of them).
Adjusting executive compensation to merely 2 or 3 times that of the average employee would keep hundreds on staff. Anything less could be considered by some to be seditious or anti-American.
Try connecting more than one keyboard and mouse to one computer.
Being able to connect more than one mouse and have them each control their own pointer on the screen would be a general good-to-have feature for not only games but desktops like KDE and Gnome. Maybe it's not possible with USB or USB2, but if it is, I'd like to have one mouse per monitor on dual/triple headed systems...What kind of capabilities will SuSe 8.2 have for syncing with a Zaurus?
Even as recently as last month, MSIE came in 6 out of 6 in a comparison of web browsers. Opera and Mozilla, among others, have it beat by a long shot in all categories (well, Opera costs, but I get my boss to pay). It's even documented in U.S. Federal Court records that MSIE acheived market share over Netscape by bundling MSIE with new copies of MS-Windows.
Quattro, Lotus 1-2-3 and other spread sheets were faster and more mature. It wasn't until MS-Excel v4 when Microsoft's alternativs started to come up to near the same grade as competitors.
Likewise with small desktop databases. Foxpro, dBase, FileMaker, Reflex, and others were still a length ahead of MS-Access. After all Microsoft is still playing catchup, though they did manage to buy out Foxpro. Oracle9i and IBM's DB2 by far offer the best performance and functionality for high end SQL servers. Postgresql and MySQL have the mid-range covered and would be what Microsoft's SQL server is trying hardest to compete with. The Microsoft SQL server is not up to snuff nor is it secure.
But almost-as-good won't displaced established tools. That's where leveraging and sales pitches comes in.
Early versions MS-Word were a unique exception among Microsoft's products in that they were actually competitive with contemporary products. However, whether MS-Word variants were actually better than WordPerfect, AMI and others is probably more an issue of taste than something objective. It and MS-Windows were used to shoehorn MS-Excel into sites.