Sites that can't handle or adapt on the fly to a heavy burst of traffic lose status as a news source.
Many sites were unable to cope with the traffic and were slashdotted out of existence.
The entire net was under the functional equivalent of a DDOS last autumn.
Some probably made improvements in their ability to handle bursty traffic, but many probably save their money.
To state the obvious, the major news sites would have to have not only leaner pages, but also have the infrastructure to withstand a slashdotting-with-hair-on-it. Leaner, lower bandwidth web pages benefit every one, every day, but for daily needs the infrastructure is going to be expensive overkill.
In contrast, more of the tech sites were already used to heavy loads and I would guess that his brought in a larger than normal number of new and infrequent visitors. Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed that after that many mainstream newspapers, magazines, and radio magazines started to carry more cutting edge tech info and topics and providing in a much more timely manner - days instead of weeks or months.
It would be interesting to map how much the coverage and timeliness of tech issues by the mainstream press changed, when it changed, and how much was related to being able stay on line.
isn't this exactly the kind of thing that Palladium aims to prevent?
No. Microsoft knows full well that Palladium won't work as a technology. These are the same people that brought you MS-Passport.
Palladium is to prevent you from paying attention to the punishment phase of the antitrust case and to prevent you from paying attention to Microsoft's accounting, uh, descrepancies.
First of all, you can avoid the mounting insanity at U.S. and disorganization airports. Second, non-U.S. security experts would be able to attend without worrying if the door prize is a matching pair of metal bracelets. Lastly, U.S. security geeks can get some time in some nice cities.
Once the goal is to turn out money and, far worse, stock options, then doing actual research and development takes a far second or third place.
And, as has been shown time and time again, research and development are essential prequisites for long term profitiability. Compare 3M versus Framfab.
Privatizing brings additional risks by bringing in too many people lacking in domain expertise. If enough MBAs get involved, research may disappear altogether from the top ten actual priorities. The late Henry Ford did not get rich from designing new cars, he got rich from mass production of millions of identical cars using one design. This works until there is a new design for a better car, but if you planned ahead the design is by your research program.
Their best chance to stay competitive in Aerospace would be to never go public. The CEO for Ikea goes into great detail about the advantages of not having share holders (even dumber than MBAs) interfering. Also, staying non-profit or not-for-profit ensures that any surplus is reinvested back into the company.
Any commercial site that uses blink on their tags deserves to be shot dead.
Google needs a filter to increase the attractiveness of really skanky sites either live or cached.
It could be scalable.
0.00 would be unmodified.
0.02 could just mellow it out, strip the blink tags.
0.05 could get the major spelling errors. 0.08 could fix the color scheme and so on
The project in Sweden, SAFARI, allowed relatively high precision retrieval of research information to the general public. The National Research council seems to have taken it offline, but you can still see local implementations like the one at
Örebro.
He was sorely lacking from the first movie. Among other things, the hobbits' visit to his place helps set the extreme age and power of Middle Earth and some of its entities.
I dunno I kind of thought with his size, speech impediment and all that maybe Gollum was Elmer Fudd. We haven't seen him around lately and even back then he seemed ready to go around the bend.
A recent interview didn't really give too many clues. It could be him or maybe not.
Lack of vision about security and other things probably means they've given up and gone over to pure delaying tactics.
Like their recent press release for their next generation of vaporware, this looks like a delaying tactic to give the illusion that the company is going somewhere. From that view, at best it can delay an audit until the company can get a world level monopoly (and thus positive cash flow) through DRM. At worst it can postpone the date when the company flatlines, but postpone long enough for major share holders to offload.
DRM is their last hope. It won't help them out of their security and design problems, but it will let them keep dominion of the desktop and keep using that as a hammer. Otherwise, OS X did an end run around them for the desktop. In general, MS products cannot compete on technical merits, especially security, or price. Even Balmer and Allchin now admit it publicly. And it looks like Microsoft is not likely to catch up, either.
Having been found guilty of illegally maintaining a monopoly, MS will no longer be able to rely on purely on existing marketshare either. In fact many key applications types (spreadsheets, wordprocessing, fincancial software) are starting to appear on faster, cheaper, more secure, more easily maintained platforms.
Quite a few execs and VPs have been hopping off recently. Bill himself stepped down as CEO the first year Microsoft posted a major loss.
Any time you whip out your wallet you are directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of other people through your purchasing habits, so that argument isn't so special.
The U.S. Armed Forces have some really great training (if you choose right), excellent financial support for college tuition, and other benefits.
Sure some misguided pacificsts may try to discourage you from joining. But a pacifist with a brain would know that embrace and extent works with wetware, too. What if 10 000 pacifist geeks were to sign up with a specific branch for 4 years active duty starting October and November? Most would end up at the same bases or in the same units with a high enough density to strongly change the nature of the institution. Remember that, in the U.S., racial integration happened first in the military.
The Bush administration is adding to the benefits, at least for the time being.
But if you plan to sign up remember... if it ain't in writing, it didn't happen.
Hiring people to generate a perceived feeling of security and stability, but actually providing both is another thing. People's perceptions a shaped by the (mis-)information available. Knowledge is power / GIGO... So if you can control access to what people can learn, then you can steer their perceptions. After a certain threshold, it becomes self-maintaining.
An alternate explanation is that there's many that wish they could do the Turbo Capitalist thing and be like Bill G, but lack the balls or have some interferring residue of moral fiber. By helping line Bill's pockets, it's a vote for that system or ideology and, maybe, somehow, they'll get rich, too.
Probably not dissimilar from the phenomenon where slow, out of shape, fat guys put on sports jerseys and yell at the lean, fast guys on the television.
Or it could be another version of the lottery mentality-- comfortable, but utter denial of reality.
So, how much does this have to do with the amiable parting of ways between HP and Mr. Perens?
Will HP have any future? While they're wasting time on.NET, that'll take away from effort with a return on investment. MS will toss them like an old paper bag as soon as their own team is together, which will be before HP can recover the costs...
The management at the previous place I worked made the Microsoft Mistake (tm). Their IT dept. put in probably 1000-2000 man-hours per month with Exchange Win2000 and other experimental products and still couldn't manage a week of uptime nor go two months without getting "0wn3d". Their solution was to buy extra licenses, hire extra consultants, and repeat the mantra "it'll work after the next upgrade/servicepack", pay for an upgrade, rinse, repeat.
Contrast that with the high availability for non-experimental products like Netware for file sharing or Exim,Postifix, or Sendmail for mail.
Sounds like the government's Fraud, Waste, and Abuse hotline, 1 (800) 647-8733 is going to be ringing off the hook.
Corporations are laying off qualified workers because corporate success is measured in days not years. Many short term gains pay less in the longer run.
One way this could be corrected is to hold executive bonuses in escrow and only award them if the company performs well over the next year or even two.
Another way, would be to cut back on the padding. (Sorry for the vague math below, but you could still make the same point adjusting the numbers below by one or two orders of magnitude.)
It's a simple question of return on investment. The average CEO takes about 500 times more than the average employee out of the budget. Business Week puts this at an average of $13.1 million per year per CEO. To state the obvious that's 10% of a $131 million budget. Or, assuming your engineers make $250 000 a year, that's 52 FTE engineers, but if your team has to squeak by on a paltry $125 000 a year per person, that's 105 FTE.
What kind of board would hire 104 staff to do nothing and fire productive staff to make room in the budget? Ouch.
Finland and others may be small countries, so it is probably far cheaper per capita to build a proper infrastructure in the U.S.
Yes, worldcom and others are in hot water, but that has more to do with accounting practices. Over expenditure on executive compensation, among other things, takes a bite out of profitability. European companies seem to be doing much better, but then they compensate their executives in a manner much closer to their engineers. Less wasted money means more marketing, services and R&D.
It's a bottom-line issue. Do you want to spend your company's money getting people to hire your services, expanding your profitability or is it enough just to pad the board's wallets?
Broadband will take off only if there is an investment in making it affordably available.
The U.S. needs to seriously invest in communications networks. Take mobile phones. Finland, Denmark, Tawain and many, many other countries have invested in a communications infrastructure for GSM and GPRS so that you can communicate from anywhere with in the national boundaries. The U.S. hasn't and you can see the disadvantage. In many other countries the number of mobile phones is starting to out number the fixed lines. I see no reason for broad band to be any different.
Providers have to get over the fact that the price has to come down and availablity has to increase. They're not going to make 40% profit margin from each and every customer, but the overall profit will be higher if they can reach every household.
With HTML you're stuck with web-only publishing. If you use Docbook or TEI, then you can publish both online and on paper.
There are already many tools for tanslating Docbook to HTML or to paper surrogates like PS or PDF. If you consider XLST, then you can quickly make your own tools.
Not only that, with Docbook and TEI your markup is based on content, making the mythical sematic web one step closer to reality.
One library system I checked in detail last year did accumulate records on both catalog searches (web based) and check out. Part of this appears that it could be as the result of ineptitude or lack of foresight. For the catalog searches, many user could log in and search and the logins were not seperate from the rest of the log, additionally the web logs were not rotated -- ever. There were two SQL tables that handle checked out items, one for active items, one for completed transactions. Upon completion, the active item appeared to be copied to the other table, which did not seem to be rotated -- ever. The new machine itself came with mistakes like open mail relays, telnet, ftp, and NFS, so theoretically it would be possible to just crack it and get the records. This is one of the bigger and more reputable companies.
Doing the Ol' Ollie North to your paper records is fine in the short term, but only as long as there are no laws or court orders requiring retention.
How many businesses that have 'downsized', that is issued mass firings, or just plan gone bankrupt would still be in the black if managment compensation were on par with employee compensation?
According to Businessweek, average executive compensation is 531 times higher than average hourly employee compensation. Cost-wise, that's 1 FTE for a manageer {sic} and 530 FTEs to entropy. That's really got to cut into the bottom line.
I bet even after hiring staff to cook lunch or reduce the general workload, there's plenty of that 530 FTE left over.
You are right, the problem with delayed postal mail is still here.
However, the window of time I was referring to was at this time last year when I made similar comments. Then I was more concerned that those backing PATRIOT and other similar anti-american legislation had to slam-dunk it through congress before the window closed. I guess it hasn't.
Others are going to be using this delay, business investors and leaders tend to follow each other's investments and strategies. Warning, rambling rant...
Bush needs to kickstart active hostilities somewhere, anywhere post haste in order to be able to use them as part of next year's election campaign. It will also delay or prevent a proper investigation about shelving of Clinton administration plans to counter the Taliban and why European airports appeared to be on terribly high alert on 10 sept 2001. Bush needs allies within the U.S. first before he can go on to the UN before starting hostilities. UN agreement is needed avoid further disapproval in Europe. RIAA,Disney, and co. are having severe trouble economically due to failing business models and outmoded leadership and want legislation to postpone their demise a la 1970's U.S. automobile policy. Microsoft needs favors from both Bush administration and the RIAA crowd to, first keep an audit from popping their red dot-com bubble, and second to get one last leverage out of their recent admissions to fatally failed security for the MS-Windows product line to instead push insecure, Palladium-based, MS-owned DRM through legislation.
The breatheless prattle is part of the side show, entertainment, to stretch 10 minutes out to a half hour including ads.
A decade or so ago some treasure hunter raised a ship safe from a wreck. He managed to ruin an entire case of silver certificates, various documents and other compostables by bringing them to room temperature for a few weeks so as to open them for the cameras. Too bad. They would have been worth more if he had taken care of the artifacts rather than the publicity.
Actually fax is probably better. Congress, as you see, is not set up to handle e-mail, even without spam.
Now that any right- or left-winger with an axe to grind can send an evelope full of confectioner's sugar, snail mail is not an option. Ask youself, how many of those mails delayed by the anthrax panic were critical of the PATRIOT act and other scams? Right, probably no one knows. During a key window of time, when the need for citizen input was most critical, citizen input was removed from the decision process.
Nah, keep pressure up for a spamless socieity. It would increase general productivity, in other words provide an economic boost, to have a spam free Internet again. How many man hours are wasted dealing with spam and spam related problems (filled HD, filters, etc.).
If congress is flooded with spam they'll probably just write off all e-mail. These people have never experience spamless e-mail and like most people can't think outside the short term present.
In a similar case in a province I worked in, face time was the only way to communicate with the leaders of the local instutions, universities, and companies, but only after first being properly introduced by a mutual collegue.
These leaders' introduction to e-mail was usually through a dot-com IT-solution. Usually a hit-n-run job using junk like MS-0utlook, which though full of eye-candy and familiar menus, is a poor substitute for a mail client. Since they probably got in on the IPO of the dot-bomb that did the hit-n-run, they're loathe to admit that the software doesn't work, and as weak leaders loathe to admit they don't know how, why or when to use e-mail.
In a classic chicken and egg problem, none of their colleagues send e-mail either, so it just sits there as an expensive status object. So each time they checked their mail (3-4 times a month), there are no work-related messages that weren't seen on paper first, no work-related messages, but about 50 spam. None of them have a visionary bone in their body so the collective decision, after enough time, is that e-mail == spam.
When PC/DR/MS-DOS was common, we used to have fun with a terminate and stay resident program that added or removed these smiley characters depending on how much certain commonly used keys were used. The smileys would ricochet around between the lines and words on the screen until they disappeared.
It was fun watching user reactions (or lack thereof) to the appearing and vanishing faces.
Slashdot Mirror
To state the obvious, the major news sites would have to have not only leaner pages, but also have the infrastructure to withstand a slashdotting-with-hair-on-it. Leaner, lower bandwidth web pages benefit every one, every day, but for daily needs the infrastructure is going to be expensive overkill.
In contrast, more of the tech sites were already used to heavy loads and I would guess that his brought in a larger than normal number of new and infrequent visitors. Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed that after that many mainstream newspapers, magazines, and radio magazines started to carry more cutting edge tech info and topics and providing in a much more timely manner - days instead of weeks or months.
It would be interesting to map how much the coverage and timeliness of tech issues by the mainstream press changed, when it changed, and how much was related to being able stay on line.
Palladium is to prevent you from paying attention to the punishment phase of the antitrust case and to prevent you from paying attention to Microsoft's accounting, uh, descrepancies.
First of all, you can avoid the mounting insanity at U.S. and disorganization airports. Second, non-U.S. security experts would be able to attend without worrying if the door prize is a matching pair of metal bracelets. Lastly, U.S. security geeks can get some time in some nice cities.
Privatizing brings additional risks by bringing in too many people lacking in domain expertise. If enough MBAs get involved, research may disappear altogether from the top ten actual priorities. The late Henry Ford did not get rich from designing new cars, he got rich from mass production of millions of identical cars using one design. This works until there is a new design for a better car, but if you planned ahead the design is by your research program.
Their best chance to stay competitive in Aerospace would be to never go public. The CEO for Ikea goes into great detail about the advantages of not having share holders (even dumber than MBAs) interfering. Also, staying non-profit or not-for-profit ensures that any surplus is reinvested back into the company.
It could be scalable. 0.00 would be unmodified. 0.02 could just mellow it out, strip the blink tags. 0.05 could get the major spelling errors. 0.08 could fix the color scheme and so on
Here are two examples:
He needs to be introduced somehow by the finish.
A recent interview didn't really give too many clues. It could be him or maybe not.
Like their recent press release for their next generation of vaporware, this looks like a delaying tactic to give the illusion that the company is going somewhere. From that view, at best it can delay an audit until the company can get a world level monopoly (and thus positive cash flow) through DRM. At worst it can postpone the date when the company flatlines, but postpone long enough for major share holders to offload.
DRM is their last hope. It won't help them out of their security and design problems, but it will let them keep dominion of the desktop and keep using that as a hammer. Otherwise, OS X did an end run around them for the desktop. In general, MS products cannot compete on technical merits, especially security, or price. Even Balmer and Allchin now admit it publicly. And it looks like Microsoft is not likely to catch up, either.
Having been found guilty of illegally maintaining a monopoly, MS will no longer be able to rely on purely on existing marketshare either. In fact many key applications types (spreadsheets, wordprocessing, fincancial software) are starting to appear on faster, cheaper, more secure, more easily maintained platforms. Quite a few execs and VPs have been hopping off recently. Bill himself stepped down as CEO the first year Microsoft posted a major loss.
The U.S. Armed Forces have some really great training (if you choose right), excellent financial support for college tuition, and other benefits.
Sure some misguided pacificsts may try to discourage you from joining. But a pacifist with a brain would know that embrace and extent works with wetware, too. What if 10 000 pacifist geeks were to sign up with a specific branch for 4 years active duty starting October and November? Most would end up at the same bases or in the same units with a high enough density to strongly change the nature of the institution. Remember that, in the U.S., racial integration happened first in the military.
The Bush administration is adding to the benefits, at least for the time being. But if you plan to sign up remember ... if it ain't in writing, it didn't happen.
An alternate explanation is that there's many that wish they could do the Turbo Capitalist thing and be like Bill G, but lack the balls or have some interferring residue of moral fiber. By helping line Bill's pockets, it's a vote for that system or ideology and, maybe, somehow, they'll get rich, too.
Probably not dissimilar from the phenomenon where slow, out of shape, fat guys put on sports jerseys and yell at the lean, fast guys on the television.
Or it could be another version of the lottery mentality-- comfortable, but utter denial of reality.
Alarm, yes, but it still beats MS-Exchange for security and ease of configuration. ;)
Will HP have any future? While they're wasting time on .NET, that'll take away from effort with a return on investment. MS will toss them like an old paper bag as soon as their own team is together, which will be before HP can recover the costs...
Contrast that with the high availability for non-experimental products like Netware for file sharing or Exim,Postifix, or Sendmail for mail.
Sounds like the government's Fraud, Waste, and Abuse hotline, 1 (800) 647-8733 is going to be ringing off the hook.
Another way, would be to cut back on the padding. (Sorry for the vague math below, but you could still make the same point adjusting the numbers below by one or two orders of magnitude.)
It's a simple question of return on investment. The average CEO takes about 500 times more than the average employee out of the budget. Business Week puts this at an average of $13.1 million per year per CEO. To state the obvious that's 10% of a $131 million budget. Or, assuming your engineers make $250 000 a year, that's 52 FTE engineers, but if your team has to squeak by on a paltry $125 000 a year per person, that's 105 FTE.
What kind of board would hire 104 staff to do nothing and fire productive staff to make room in the budget? Ouch.
Yes, worldcom and others are in hot water, but that has more to do with accounting practices. Over expenditure on executive compensation, among other things, takes a bite out of profitability. European companies seem to be doing much better, but then they compensate their executives in a manner much closer to their engineers. Less wasted money means more marketing, services and R&D.
It's a bottom-line issue. Do you want to spend your company's money getting people to hire your services, expanding your profitability or is it enough just to pad the board's wallets?
The U.S. needs to seriously invest in communications networks. Take mobile phones. Finland, Denmark, Tawain and many, many other countries have invested in a communications infrastructure for GSM and GPRS so that you can communicate from anywhere with in the national boundaries. The U.S. hasn't and you can see the disadvantage. In many other countries the number of mobile phones is starting to out number the fixed lines. I see no reason for broad band to be any different.
Providers have to get over the fact that the price has to come down and availablity has to increase. They're not going to make 40% profit margin from each and every customer, but the overall profit will be higher if they can reach every household.
There are already many tools for tanslating Docbook to HTML or to paper surrogates like PS or PDF. If you consider XLST, then you can quickly make your own tools.
Not only that, with Docbook and TEI your markup is based on content, making the mythical sematic web one step closer to reality.
Doing the Ol' Ollie North to your paper records is fine in the short term, but only as long as there are no laws or court orders requiring retention.
According to Businessweek, average executive compensation is 531 times higher than average hourly employee compensation. Cost-wise, that's 1 FTE for a manageer {sic} and 530 FTEs to entropy. That's really got to cut into the bottom line.
I bet even after hiring staff to cook lunch or reduce the general workload, there's plenty of that 530 FTE left over.
However, the window of time I was referring to was at this time last year when I made similar comments. Then I was more concerned that those backing PATRIOT and other similar anti-american legislation had to slam-dunk it through congress before the window closed. I guess it hasn't.
Others are going to be using this delay, business investors and leaders tend to follow each other's investments and strategies.
Warning, rambling rant...
Bush needs to kickstart active hostilities somewhere, anywhere post haste in order to be able to use them as part of next year's election campaign. It will also delay or prevent a proper investigation about shelving of Clinton administration plans to counter the Taliban and why European airports appeared to be on terribly high alert on 10 sept 2001. Bush needs allies within the U.S. first before he can go on to the UN before starting hostilities. UN agreement is needed avoid further disapproval in Europe. RIAA,Disney, and co. are having severe trouble economically due to failing business models and outmoded leadership and want legislation to postpone their demise a la 1970's U.S. automobile policy. Microsoft needs favors from both Bush administration and the RIAA crowd to, first keep an audit from popping their red dot-com bubble, and second to get one last leverage out of their recent admissions to fatally failed security for the MS-Windows product line to instead push insecure, Palladium-based, MS-owned DRM through legislation.
End of rant.
Ok, time to chill out, it's not like there's anything to gain from prolonged conflict
A decade or so ago some treasure hunter raised a ship safe from a wreck. He managed to ruin an entire case of silver certificates, various documents and other compostables by bringing them to room temperature for a few weeks so as to open them for the cameras. Too bad. They would have been worth more if he had taken care of the artifacts rather than the publicity.
Now that any right- or left-winger with an axe to grind can send an evelope full of confectioner's sugar, snail mail is not an option. Ask youself, how many of those mails delayed by the anthrax panic were critical of the PATRIOT act and other scams? Right, probably no one knows. During a key window of time, when the need for citizen input was most critical, citizen input was removed from the decision process.
If congress is flooded with spam they'll probably just write off all e-mail. These people have never experience spamless e-mail and like most people can't think outside the short term present.
In a similar case in a province I worked in, face time was the only way to communicate with the leaders of the local instutions, universities, and companies, but only after first being properly introduced by a mutual collegue.
These leaders' introduction to e-mail was usually through a dot-com IT-solution. Usually a hit-n-run job using junk like MS-0utlook, which though full of eye-candy and familiar menus, is a poor substitute for a mail client. Since they probably got in on the IPO of the dot-bomb that did the hit-n-run, they're loathe to admit that the software doesn't work, and as weak leaders loathe to admit they don't know how, why or when to use e-mail.
In a classic chicken and egg problem, none of their colleagues send e-mail either, so it just sits there as an expensive status object. So each time they checked their mail (3-4 times a month), there are no work-related messages that weren't seen on paper first, no work-related messages, but about 50 spam. None of them have a visionary bone in their body so the collective decision, after enough time, is that e-mail == spam.
It was fun watching user reactions (or lack thereof) to the appearing and vanishing faces.