It's interesting that the report starts out with a what-if scenario. "What if FOSS were banned in the DoD?" Answer - things would pretty much stop. FOSS has played and continues to play a critical role in the DOD.
A lot of people will begin to think about the converse, "What if Closed Source were banned from the DoD?" or even more specifically, "What if Closed Source from companies found guilty of breaking federal law were banned from the DoD?". I wouldn't be surprised if the answers were "not much change" and "things improve", respectively.
The larger question is how is a good manager or bad manager defined. Part of the problem is the content of the MBA education and its focus on very short terms cycles. In other words, the largest problem is that managerial success is not based on long term viability.
One solution would be for exectutive bonuses to be held in escrow for one year and the award being contingent on the following year's results.
Now that all the numbers are in from the dot-com implosion we have a lot of hard data regarding the backgrounds dot-com employees. Some companies that failed and other companies that are still going. That means we can find out if the number of MBAs help or hinder the survival of a company.
Since most MBAs lack domain expertise and since the much of the behaviour taught in business school is geared towards stripping a company of assets, I'd have to guess that you're better off without them.
Freedom of information is closely related to freedom of the press and unfortunately the U.S. is also pretty weak on guarantees of freedom of information in contrast to some countries at the top of the other list. The U.S. Freedom of Information Act is better than conditions in Great Britain or France where 'public' records are secret by default.
However they all could learn a lot from countries like Sweden which has had a much stronger version integrated into their country's constitution for over 336 years. Basically, the only exceptions are individual privacy, protection of plant and animal species, national defence, national economy, and prevention of crime. Every thing else is there for the asking.
Any corporate system that causes the main focus of communication to automatically expire with no way to retrieve it is a poor business model, not an aspect of trusted computing. Investigative and Corporate preferences aside (after Enron, do you REALLY think that it'd be hard for Congress to slap a "records requirement" on corporations?)...
This happens anyway, right now. There are a lot of arguments about how long (or short) a time that companies are required to keep records. Plus you can fiddle with the definitition of the record.
Worse actually, I've worked with people that have quit firms that had the functional equivalent. Potentially incriminiating plans were only discussed verbally and outside of formal meetings until such time as they became fact.
Stickies (e.g. 3M's Post-It) have been a godsend to these types. All the incriminating or legally questionable information stays on a sticky until it becomes official enough. If the records are forced public, they do so minus the half pound of stickies.
Despite being a turbocynic myself, I admire your point of view. However, being a turbocynic, I have to say that this is not about what is practical, efficient, or even desirable, this is purely about what is technically possible.
I can see reasons for and against (mostly against) running Win2000 on workstations. But given the licensing and security problems to date with WinXP and various service packs, I still find it hard to believe that anyone requiring privacy of data or security would consider istaying with MS-Windows even for the workstations. There are neither technical reasons nor financial reasons to use it on any of the infrastructure, at least none that stand scrutiny.
Arguments against using Macintosh or Linux usually center on retraining issues. However, heavy retraining occurred when migrating between Win3.11, WinNT, Win2000, and - for the chumps - WinXP. So if you have to retrain anyway, then why not go with something easier to both use and maintain like Macintosh OS X or Mandrake/Redhat?
When you consider the bizarre nature of the service pack EULAs, the migration to Macintosh or Linux should be the obvious choice to anyone that can read English.
Once I stopped trying to use dselect, I found that the install goes like a breeze. If I have the correct install CDs / FDs and know what I want in advance, I can be up and running with a fairly well configured server in less than half an hour on either i386 or PPC.
The part I wish I were better at, or had more detailed instructions on, is how to roll my own modifications into a DSC. There are plenty of instructions about how to make a DSC from scratch, but for me it's more useful to tweak an existing one. For example, adding extra make or compile options : --with-foo
Just to differentiate between profit and cash, I think you meant say sucessfully extend vendor lock-in or maintain and extend a monoploy.
License 6.0 may result in profit in that context. If Microsoft can lock people and businesses into being eternally dependent then that's profit and, eventually, cash. However, for the next year or so, it's going to be a drain on Microsoft's finances.
the numbers are in from the last quarter, and aside from a once-only rush to stock up before License 6.0, takes affect, the new license looks like it is going to lose money for them for at least the next year.
What they conveniently fail to mention is that they loathe the idea of releasing their source code, and that is why they hate the GPL. That is my theory.
What they're also loathe to mention is that they cannot release their code:
"[Allchin] later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed."
Basically, Microsoft is so far behind in the security game that they have no realistic chance of catching up. IBM and others have already found ways to
make money from Free Software and Open Source Software. Their only chance is to use DRM and DRM legislation to lock users into a subscription model of pay per use/month/quarte/year/whatever not so much for the software, but for continued access to documents encoded in one of Microsofts proprietary and undocumented formats.
Here are the signs: financially unsound business model, bad track record with existing customers, lack of suitable products.
First off they've grown through acquisition rather than innovation. That business model pretty much guarantees that they'll drop like a stone after their zenith. Additionally, their income follows a few quarters behind the hardware manufacturers which have not yet bottomed out.
Since they turned an $18 bn loss in 1998, they've been found guilty of breaking federal law, specifically by violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. On the side, they admitted to and removed at least one backdoor in their relseased binaries, and without a code audit there is no way to confirm or deny the precense or absence of more. Even if a government or large enough consortium of corporations were to pay a code audit , the existing code meets neither privacy nor security requirements needed inside the U.S. Outside the U.S., specifically in Europe, privacy standards are much higher and there is not much chance that these problems will be addressed in the near future. These are the result of design flaws not typos. Patches can't fix this, only a rewrite can.
So there's more to say regarding DRM, software subscription, further leveraging the desktop monopoly+DRM, undocumented APIs, OEM tricks, and last but not least perpetual lock-in from the MS-Word and MS-Excel file formats + DRM. So far, Germany, China, Peru, Venezuela, India, Norway, Finland, and others have expressed doubts as to the wisdom of trying such experimental technology, which of what little has been examined has been found wanting.
Also their desktop markets are saturated. In the office suite, MS-Word 2.0 for windows and MS-Word 5 for Macintosh were good enough. Folks grudgingly went along with the newer versions as long as times were good. The Windows product line has come to near its end - Win2000 is good enough and few customer have deep enough pockets nor are there enough big chumps to go for License 6.0 that sneaks in with WinXP. Macintosh OS X gives you most of the commercial desktop applications that you will need, plus you have the added stability and ease of maintenance.
In the server room, any one that can read English is sticking with one of the *NIXes.
This underscores just how dangerous MS-passport is in extending the monopoly into new markets. However, notice that, as usual, this port is not being provided by Microsoft. Others are doing the work, which I would guess is, because of the nature of the NDA for using Shared Source (TM), an all or nothing gamble.
However, amidst the dust and noise of the current storm of PR, spin, ads, and FUD, they are also dropping support for several key products like NT 4, Exchange 5.5 and Win2000 pro now and in the near future. At least when Cisco is hurting, their sales team treats for lunch. Or when McDonalds jacks up the price of a coke, they run a sale on the burgers.
Microsoft appears to have been circling the ol' financial drain for some time, with shaky bookkeeping, shrinking markets, and admissions that their products cannot compete on technical merits.
Perhaps this last week's media blitz is a sign that the execs have offloaded enough of their stock options for us to hear that last *glunk* and see MSFT along side EOG.
Seriously, aerial bombing campaign or not, the court's decisions do need to be enforced. Interoperability is essential for economic growth and since Microsoft has been the largest single obstacle to interoperability, you could say that it looks like Microsoft has been a factor in holding back eonomic growth.
The last two days on many sites have been a veritable storm of Microsoft PR, advertisements, spin disguised as articles, astroturfing, and FUD. What's up. Are they in a tail spin? Or is it a counter strike from all the negative PR from last week?
The business side is still being worked on. And we are working on the concepts, too. The truth is, we probably made [it] a little harder to understand...
That's right, MS's original flagship products weren't written by MS. They started as they meant to continue.
And MSIE was innovated from NCSA Mosaic via Spyglass. FTP/Telnet/TCPIP were innovated from UC Berkeley, disk compression was innovated from Stacc, and so on. Even Frontpage, Powerpoint, and others were innovated.
Let's see a laundry list of the original companies. A complete list of products or components and the original company or institutions from which Microsoft later innovated would be very interesting.
Oh, and the purchase prices would be interesting as well.
'Scuse me while I go innovate some office supplies.
Venezuela, Russia, Norway produce a lot of oil. But a Gulf war could raise the prices of oil, even if a negligable percent comes to our country from there. It would be the "because-we-can" increase that you see right before weekends and holidays.
Textbook makers have done price increases when there are wildfires in various parks and nature reserves, even the ones where no timber/pulp is harvested. The bookstores get in on the action too. When the price goes up, they go and reprice whatever is in their stock room and on the shelf. Why not oil, too?
Supposedly the slop left over from the fermentation process is more nutritious for pigs than the unfermented corn. Plus pigs like it better. But this is just rumor, I haven't personally checked for nutritional value or flavor.
Other than that, I think you might have mixed up your radicals.
1. mail an empty envelope to yourself with weak tape sealing the flap
2. hang on to envelope for 10 years
3. place patented material in envelope and seal
4. forgery complete, sue for prior art.
Remember to store a supply of paper and ink from this year's vintage, too. Not that any of that would be valid, but it would be amusing.
Did they actually pull the code or is this just one of the check boxes you will find checked for you after installing the next service pack?
Microsoft and the others know that the public won't go for DRM, so it has to be brought in gradually -- spread DRM software and hardware with DRM turned off, then when it's reached critical marketshare, flip the switch either on the servers or both the servers and workstations.
You mean back when we had exactly 22 minutes of world news for the entire day?
Air time not the same as data. Transmitting 24/7 does not mean that there is more than 30 minutes of content. Those 22 minutes gave more info than 1 hour of CNN. Headline news was one of the worse examples of low content.
You mean before the days of live congressional coverage via C-Span?
Good point. C-Span is a good counter example to my argument. But it is the exception these days.
And are you aware that virtually every TV network went commercial-free during 9/11 coverage?
Yes, acutely aware. The transmissions were filled with tripe and repetition of the same three or four facts. By the time the evening news rolled around, some stations even had war videos complete with music and flags.
Reporters don't work for free. They work for news agencies. News agencies sell to stations/networks. Facts are expensive, filler like opinions or music videos are cheap. The rest is basic math.
Yes, but there's a difference between constant coverage and actual content. Of course the stations will allocate air time, but that air time will we egregiously weak on facts and data.
Take the Gulf War, which comedians refer to as more of a vicious beating than a war. Sure there were many hours of 'coverage', but that coverage was mostly the same sound bites, film clips and specualtions again and again. We saw the same fscking 'smart' bomb go down the same chimney 10 times an hour.
I disagree. In the U.S. there are more people with Internet access than quality TV. Especially if you look at the signal to noise ratio of the content and not just at reception quality.
Most programs are filler or infomercial. Take one hour of broadcast from CNN for example. Once you've removed all the ads, the logos, intros, thankyous, redundancies, credits, and teasers, you have about 6 minutes of content. A far cry from the days of Walter Cronkite.
As the big syndicates spread from the U.S. to Asia and Europe, any stations with relatively high quality are drown out or crushed. Content costs. Good content costs more.
AM, FM and shortwave are a different matter. If you can't access the web, then radio's where it's at. Most villages may have only one TV, but they'll have plenty of radios.
This is also a chance to improve the GUI, how both humans and applications need or want to interact with it. A lot has been learned regarding users, usability and interface design in the last twenty years. it could be put to use.
The Macintosh interface was designed before we had a lot of experience with graphic user interfaces and knew how people try to interact with the computer. The MS-Windows GUI followed Macintosh close enough to get sued. Apple took a big leap with the Lisa and the first Macintosh. Now a couple of decades have gone by and a lot has been learned. OS X did not take the plunge, but GNU/Linux could.
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A lot of people will begin to think about the converse, "What if Closed Source were banned from the DoD?" or even more specifically, "What if Closed Source from companies found guilty of breaking federal law were banned from the DoD?". I wouldn't be surprised if the answers were "not much change" and "things improve", respectively.
Nah. If your music is heavy and your country is swell you can let also the hygiene slide a little.
One solution would be for exectutive bonuses to be held in escrow for one year and the award being contingent on the following year's results.
Since most MBAs lack domain expertise and since the much of the behaviour taught in business school is geared towards stripping a company of assets, I'd have to guess that you're better off without them.
However they all could learn a lot from countries like Sweden which has had a much stronger version integrated into their country's constitution for over 336 years. Basically, the only exceptions are individual privacy, protection of plant and animal species, national defence, national economy, and prevention of crime. Every thing else is there for the asking.
Worse actually, I've worked with people that have quit firms that had the functional equivalent. Potentially incriminiating plans were only discussed verbally and outside of formal meetings until such time as they became fact.
Stickies (e.g. 3M's Post-It) have been a godsend to these types. All the incriminating or legally questionable information stays on a sticky until it becomes official enough. If the records are forced public, they do so minus the half pound of stickies.
Despite being a turbocynic myself, I admire your point of view. However, being a turbocynic, I have to say that this is not about what is practical, efficient, or even desirable, this is purely about what is technically possible.
Arguments against using Macintosh or Linux usually center on retraining issues. However, heavy retraining occurred when migrating between Win3.11, WinNT, Win2000, and - for the chumps - WinXP. So if you have to retrain anyway, then why not go with something easier to both use and maintain like Macintosh OS X or Mandrake/Redhat?
When you consider the bizarre nature of the service pack EULAs, the migration to Macintosh or Linux should be the obvious choice to anyone that can read English.
That seems to explain why Microsoft was attacking MySQL so much a few weeks ago.
The part I wish I were better at, or had more detailed instructions on, is how to roll my own modifications into a DSC. There are plenty of instructions about how to make a DSC from scratch, but for me it's more useful to tweak an existing one. For example, adding extra make or compile options : --with-foo
License 6.0 may result in profit in that context. If Microsoft can lock people and businesses into being eternally dependent then that's profit and, eventually, cash. However, for the next year or so, it's going to be a drain on Microsoft's finances. the numbers are in from the last quarter, and aside from a once-only rush to stock up before License 6.0, takes affect, the new license looks like it is going to lose money for them for at least the next year.
-- Caron Carlson. "Allchin: Disclosure May Endanger U.S." EWeek. 13 May 2002.
Basically, Microsoft is so far behind in the security game that they have no realistic chance of catching up. IBM and others have already found ways to
make money from Free Software and Open Source Software. Their only chance is to use DRM and DRM legislation to lock users into a subscription model of pay per use/month/quarte/year/whatever not so much for the software, but for continued access to documents encoded in one of Microsofts proprietary and undocumented formats.
First off they've grown through acquisition rather than innovation. That business model pretty much guarantees that they'll drop like a stone after their zenith. Additionally, their income follows a few quarters behind the hardware manufacturers which have not yet bottomed out.
Since they turned an $18 bn loss in 1998, they've been found guilty of breaking federal law, specifically by violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. On the side, they admitted to and removed at least one backdoor in their relseased binaries, and without a code audit there is no way to confirm or deny the precense or absence of more. Even if a government or large enough consortium of corporations were to pay a code audit , the existing code meets neither privacy nor security requirements needed inside the U.S. Outside the U.S., specifically in Europe, privacy standards are much higher and there is not much chance that these problems will be addressed in the near future. These are the result of design flaws not typos. Patches can't fix this, only a rewrite can.
So there's more to say regarding DRM, software subscription, further leveraging the desktop monopoly+DRM, undocumented APIs, OEM tricks, and last but not least perpetual lock-in from the MS-Word and MS-Excel file formats + DRM. So far, Germany, China, Peru, Venezuela, India, Norway, Finland, and others have expressed doubts as to the wisdom of trying such experimental technology, which of what little has been examined has been found wanting.
Also their desktop markets are saturated. In the office suite, MS-Word 2.0 for windows and MS-Word 5 for Macintosh were good enough. Folks grudgingly went along with the newer versions as long as times were good. The Windows product line has come to near its end - Win2000 is good enough and few customer have deep enough pockets nor are there enough big chumps to go for License 6.0 that sneaks in with WinXP. Macintosh OS X gives you most of the commercial desktop applications that you will need, plus you have the added stability and ease of maintenance.
In the server room, any one that can read English is sticking with one of the *NIXes.
However, amidst the dust and noise of the current storm of PR, spin, ads, and FUD, they are also dropping support for several key products like NT 4, Exchange 5.5 and Win2000 pro now and in the near future. At least when Cisco is hurting, their sales team treats for lunch. Or when McDonalds jacks up the price of a coke, they run a sale on the burgers.
Microsoft appears to have been circling the ol' financial drain for some time, with shaky bookkeeping, shrinking markets, and admissions that their products cannot compete on technical merits. Perhaps this last week's media blitz is a sign that the execs have offloaded enough of their stock options for us to hear that last *glunk* and see MSFT along side EOG.
Seriously, aerial bombing campaign or not, the court's decisions do need to be enforced. Interoperability is essential for economic growth and since Microsoft has been the largest single obstacle to interoperability, you could say that it looks like Microsoft has been a factor in holding back eonomic growth.
And MSIE was innovated from NCSA Mosaic via Spyglass. FTP/Telnet/TCPIP were innovated from UC Berkeley, disk compression was innovated from Stacc, and so on. Even Frontpage, Powerpoint, and others were innovated.
Let's see a laundry list of the original companies. A complete list of products or components and the original company or institutions from which Microsoft later innovated would be very interesting. Oh, and the purchase prices would be interesting as well.
'Scuse me while I go innovate some office supplies.
Textbook makers have done price increases when there are wildfires in various parks and nature reserves, even the ones where no timber/pulp is harvested. The bookstores get in on the action too. When the price goes up, they go and reprice whatever is in their stock room and on the shelf. Why not oil, too?
Other than that, I think you might have mixed up your radicals.
Microsoft and the others know that the public won't go for DRM, so it has to be brought in gradually -- spread DRM software and hardware with DRM turned off, then when it's reached critical marketshare, flip the switch either on the servers or both the servers and workstations.
Air time not the same as data. Transmitting 24/7 does not mean that there is more than 30 minutes of content. Those 22 minutes gave more info than 1 hour of CNN. Headline news was one of the worse examples of low content.
You mean before the days of live congressional coverage via C-Span?
Good point. C-Span is a good counter example to my argument. But it is the exception these days.
And are you aware that virtually every TV network went commercial-free during 9/11 coverage?
Yes, acutely aware. The transmissions were filled with tripe and repetition of the same three or four facts. By the time the evening news rolled around, some stations even had war videos complete with music and flags.
Reporters don't work for free. They work for news agencies. News agencies sell to stations/networks. Facts are expensive, filler like opinions or music videos are cheap. The rest is basic math.
Take the Gulf War, which comedians refer to as more of a vicious beating than a war. Sure there were many hours of 'coverage', but that coverage was mostly the same sound bites, film clips and specualtions again and again. We saw the same fscking 'smart' bomb go down the same chimney 10 times an hour.
Most programs are filler or infomercial. Take one hour of broadcast from CNN for example. Once you've removed all the ads, the logos, intros, thankyous, redundancies, credits, and teasers, you have about 6 minutes of content. A far cry from the days of Walter Cronkite.
As the big syndicates spread from the U.S. to Asia and Europe, any stations with relatively high quality are drown out or crushed. Content costs. Good content costs more.
AM, FM and shortwave are a different matter. If you can't access the web, then radio's where it's at. Most villages may have only one TV, but they'll have plenty of radios.
The Macintosh interface was designed before we had a lot of experience with graphic user interfaces and knew how people try to interact with the computer. The MS-Windows GUI followed Macintosh close enough to get sued. Apple took a big leap with the Lisa and the first Macintosh. Now a couple of decades have gone by and a lot has been learned. OS X did not take the plunge, but GNU/Linux could.