Microsoft is running out of steam and is reduced to using marketing and legal teams to push stale products. MS-WindowsXP and Xbox, two products expected to produce revenue and vendor lock-in, are just not actractive to the market.
What happens to passport?
It probably dies. Microsoft has known since 2000 (when the article below was published) at the latest that MS-Passport cannot be made secure even in theory. There are fatal errors in MS's implementation in additional to the fundamental problems with the basic idea.
David P. Kormann and Aviel D. Rubin,
"
Risks of the Passport Single
Signon Protocol,"
Computer Networks, Elsevier Science Press,
volume 33, pages 51-58, 2000. (accessed 21 sep 2001)
http://avirubin.com/passport.html
Xbox is flopping in Europe and Japan, even without taking into account the long term effects of shipping defective units. If things turn around for Xbox in the U.S. it can live, but Japan is the market that it needs to thrive.
The MS-WindowsXP sales are pretty far below expectations and even these are primarily from the OEMs. Not enough money there either.
.NET? who knows? But until it looks like developers of third party software will be able to work freely with.NET, there'll be no takers. That and there is the added cost of reinventing java and marketing it as C#.
ActiveDirectory? It does seem like it provides most of the functionality of OpenLDAP, but at a higher price and without multiplatform support. Novell's eDirectory does seem a more mature technology from a company with more experience in that area. Now that Novell is part of the "Liberty Alliance", AD is also roadkill.
Lastly, as everyone and their dog has mentioned, the changes between recent versions of MS-Office upgrades just don't justify the expense for most individuals and corporations.
SUVs are pushed by the auto industry because they're heavy enough to be classed as a truck and thus relieve some of the burden from emission standards for cars.
Status and saftey were the only angles SUVs could be marketed from but the saftey value was shown to be untrue. That left Volvo and Saab as the remaining competitors in safe status (in the US) cars. Both are U.S. owned now.
People are told to want a particular car. Henry Ford knew that and wans't shy about it either. That part has not changed. If the Big Three bought Trabant or Lada and pushed, everyone in the States would have two.
True you do not have to release anything. That's potentially a large confound which may fulfill the letter of the GPL but violate the spirit.
One way around the GPL might be to charge a symbolic, one-time fee for shares in the co-operative or corporation for the possibility to access the binaries of the mods internal to your organization. Followed by large subscription fees for the actual access.
The important part of the GPL is the spirit or ideal -- that work contributes to progress. This is just a codification of how most of the Internet and its dependent technologies (TCP/IP, BIND, NCSA Mosaic and so on) have and are being created. Without these, the Internet and Web would never have happened and we'd still be locked into the same weird, private, incompatible networks as a few decades ago. The hard and fast practical benefits of the GPL are the result of following the spirit or goal, which is specifically to allow the future to build on the work of the past.
Surf through a proxy and let the proxy route the ads to/dev/null. This way the ad companies won't notice a difference in impressions, while you won't have to waste your own CPU time with the ads.
This gets trickier with ads served from the same host as the content.
As a user I find it pretty convenient. I think it's pretty straightforward from an admin standpoint too, but I wouldn't know from experience.
From a developer's point of view this was great -- no (well, almost none) user management hassle, few worries about password files, etc.
We could concentrate on building the service rather than managing accounts, passwords, and groups.
The kerberos / LDAP servers verified the user and group memberships and passed that information on to the service being used.
I'd strongly advocate any large institution to check out the University of Michigan's computing infrastructure, both the general one and the engineering one. Do it before the MS Sale Strike Force hits your IT-Council, IT-Advisory group or IT managment group with free doughnuts and WinXP coasters.:P
Edison was removed from school at an early age and was mostly self taught by reading at the public library. It would be interesting to see an economic guesstimate on the value of his inventions and the immediate derivatives of his inventions.
Granted, very few people turn out to be as productive as Edison, but given how widely used his inventions and derivatives of his inventions are and their role in the world's economies, the return on investment for stoked public libraries that result in even one Edison every other generation is still probably triple digit or higher.
Since the web and the Internet seem to be taking up a lot of the self learners these days in regards to technology, this is a very strong argument to keep access/infrastructure open and to provide low barriers for entry such as
Internet terminals at all public libraries.
So since research indicates that directors, CEOs and the like have very similar psychological profiles to sociopaths already sitting behind bars for more violent crimes, does that mean that board rooms will get routed in the name of national security?
Given Enron, the S&L "crisis" and various European bank bail outs this might be a good money saving step as well.;)
I also tend to look for the better warantees. Sometimes it pays sometimes not:
In my case, Dell screwed up pretty bad with my Inspirion and took 4 months to resolve the hardware problem and then sent the repaired unit to the wrong address the day before a three week trip. >8( Slightly better, but still unsatisfactory experience with the servers despite on site warantees.
One IBM Thinkpad I had required servicing and had almost 48 hour turn around (I called too late in the day to get 24hr). No "excuses or hoofing it over to a local vendor" That was sweet! High quality and/or low hassle is good.
However, given the high prices and low cannibalisation value of new computers, there's no way I'd buy a laptop, notebook, or server without a 3 year waranty and a reasonable probability that the company will still be around then.
An old school mate came back from Italy with much the same opinion of cell phones.
Part of mobile ICT is just common sense. These phones all come with an on/off button and most if not all service providers give you voice mail and caller ID as part of the basic package. If you go to a movie, cafe or meeting, turn of the *&@#$% phone. If you are expecting a particular phone call, tell those present at the start.
Some of the temptation is caused by countries which lack public transportation -- on the train, if I am not in a phone-free wagon, I can yack, dictate or program all I want without being a traffic hazard.
If I lived in the States or one of the other countries where cell phone misuse is a problem, I'd carry one of those highly illegal phone zappers everywhere I went.
Prior to AOL most net users learned from peers or at universities where openness and learning are encouraged (more or less). For self learning, there were always BBS's and Usenet.
The number of novices is has been increasing due to sucessful marketing from ISPs, but few of these seem to make a transition from newbie to intermediate user. This could be explained by either lack of interest or lack of access.
I'd say a little of both, with emphasis on lack of access -- it's often very difficult for novices to navigate out of corporate 'walled gardens' and find useful learning materials. Some of the other posts have slammed PHBs and others who don't ask questions for fear of looking more stupid.
However, what would you say to a large group of such people who suddenly got over this fear? What are the important, non-dogmatic points and issues that need to be addressed to close the gap, real or perceived?
You know that any animal you can name "elephants, tigers, grizzly bears" are, of course, already classified. If people are hunting it (sport, poaching, etc.) it is, by definition, known to science.
Two of many recent counter examples were a species of giant prawn in the Carribean and a species of deer in Vietnam. The prawns, though unclassified, were reguarly on local menus. The deer are pretty big, too.
Even if people manage to agree on how to define 'species', identification of species based on just one or two samples is difficult.
Preservation of whole ecosystems, not just the obviously fragile ones, is essential for this to happen -- without the basics the species will disappear -- and this will have severe ecomomic penalties here and now in addition to the lost knowledge. Check out the current economic status of the east coast of North America in regards to salmon, lobster and shellfish.
Besides, there are good tech jobs in modelling and simlulation (e.g. migration & population).
The X-series (X20 & X21) has worked great for the last year with RedHat. No problems that I could find or create except hibernate never worked and sometimes suspend left the CPU very (too) busy afterwards until reboot. But over all, I'd recommend the X-series if you don't want the larger screen that the T-series can have or if you want light weight. The docking station with DVD reader/CD-RW is great, but I get much more use out of the port replicator.
I had problems with the T-series choice of graphics and sound chips which needed drivers that were not on the RedHat CDs. This is in my view relatively minor, and not the reason I returned it -- if I had more free time this spring I would have kept it.
The trick will be to get MS's marketing strategy to include IP6. Otherwise, if MS sits and does nothing, then incomplete IP6 support will be another convenient hammer to pound their wedge deeper and lock people into pay-per-packet Internet aka.NET.
Art and technology have been fused for quite some time. Technology is a tool. Tools are used to make art. The Gutenberg printing press with its movable type is probably still the most single revolutionary information technology tool. And it's given rise to many art forms including typography, books, pamphlets, LP-jackets during the last 500 years.
Culture (language, customs, food, music, etc.) and technology have been fused as well, but that's a separate thesis.
If you're only doing a small site, then Ht://Dig is probably the way to go.
For a larger site or for distributed harvesting then there is Combine which is an old one from 1996. It does text, HTML, and PDF. It's free, but takes a bit of time to set up and can even handle metadata (i.e. keywords). There are binaries for linux and solaris, but most is in perl.
It's about to begin some modernization to make it easier to install and operate, perhaps even use MySQL as a backend.
(To nit pick, the WinInformant links to a written sound bite not an article.)
MS really only cares about the bottom line and obviously security issues are about to bite them financially. Right now, Bill can't do much except blow smoke. The distraction is really needed right now. Especially when you consider:
That the effort to squelch bug reporting is a tacit admission that none of the products in the current development cycle are likely to be secure
Prestigious and influential groups like the
National Academy of Sciences are calling for punishment of software firms that skimp on security.
Revenue from upgrades is nil and given that Intel is not expecting to do well either the next few quarters will be for MS also.
Simply put, Bill is on so many people's shit list with no easy way off. A few decades ago, IBM used to have most computing centers by the short-n-curlies, but pushed it too far and more or less disappeared. MS is in a prime position to do the same.
If you don't count Heathrow, which was rude, dirty, inneficient and insecure. DeGaul was a joke too and, to top off the experience, smells like the lion house at the zoo. It seems to me that prior to the 11/9 incidents that security was increasing, but in tact with customer hassle. (No I don't just mean 1 hour flights with no water or 3 hour flights with no movie.) From what I've heard from contacts in and visiting the U.S. air travel has become truly awful.
However, Kastrup (Copenhagen), Schipol (Amsterdam), Vantaa (Helsinki) and Arlanda (Stockholm) are excellent models. I think Schipol may be the most secure I have looked at and very efficient. Vantaa and Arlanda by far the most efficient (and pleasant). Kastrup's not too bad. Any of these could be models for how to improve operations and security in U.S. airports.
And yes, the privacy laws are quite good in Europe. One example is that I get a written letter explaining who and why everytime some company does a credit check.
Patenting genes or combinations of genes is one controversy regarding genetically engineered products. Escape of the genes into the wild is another. Since corn (aka maize) is basically a grass it's wind pollenated and, short of covering the field with double glazed, airtight dome, there's no way to keep the pollen from mixing with other crops down wind.
Addionally, genes occasionally hop to other species and even phyla.
So, the "closed source" crops won't retain too much of an advantage for many decades unless the companies are able to eliminate the seed stock for the traditional seeds. That said, it's interesting research.
Two 30-second spots... suggest illegal drug sale profits may help fuel terrorism.
I thought Ollie North helped remove any doubt about that. Besides the "war on terror" does have a clearly defined enemy. It just lacks a clearly defined end point or exit strategy... for obvious reasons.
Back to the psychology / technology -- ads use mamilian and primate level drives to make a sale or lure potential customers. Can anyone suggest some good books about primate social behaviour? something corresponding to Jakob Nielsen's book Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity or Krug & Black's Don't Make Me Think: Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, with theory plus good examples.
Actually, it's not as funny as it sounds. Microsoft has known since 2000 (when the article below was published) at the latest that MS-Passport cannot be made secure even in theory. You have to read the whole article because the abstract only addresses a minor issue.
David P. Kormann and Aviel D. Rubin, "
Risks of the Passport Single
Signon Protocol," Computer Networks, Elsevier Science Press,
volume 33, pages 51-58, 2000. (accessed 21 sep 2001)
http://avirubin.com/passport.html
Apparently the average business executive receives more than 500 times the average employee.
A few (5 or 15, sorry) years ago the tv program 60 Minutes interviewed some one who pointed out a difference of nearly 200. The interviewee also pointed out the role that a similar gap had in destabilizing France prior to the revolution.
Obviously even if you just count money, the excessive salaries damage the U.S. economy and productivity, and now is the wrong time for further damage. The extra money really could be better invested, for example in reducing unit cost, R&D, training and so on. (How about lower phone / cable bills?)
Social unrest is also bad economically. It's now more that 30 years since the Watts (L.A.), Detroit, Newark (NJ), and Chicago riots in the mid-60's. In 1968 far more areas in U.S cities experienced rioting and looting which required the use of the National Guard. Most of those areas still have not recovered economically.
Another equally unpalatable alternative is if Microsoft first requires vendors to make DirectX drivers as a pre-condition to being granted a license for OpenGL. MS did this with those heinous little "works with Window95" or "designed for Windows95" (or what ever the exact wording was) stickers on software packaging -- in order to get the sticker, there had to be a version for NT as well.
This will first ensure nearly 100% penetration for DirectX, at which point MS can gradually be difficult with the OpenGL licenses.
In a previous life, I used to use and support many MS products/platforms, but cannot for the life of me think that MS actually has support for their products in practice. Lately, the only support I have experienced in practice is from the hardware manufacturers who resell MS products. Telephone and online support appear to me to be a myth. I've been observing four MS-based computing environments for three years now and it seems that either applications and services work out of the box or don't work ever. YMMV.
One also gets plenty of misinformation and superstition from co-workers and local support staff regarding closed source, especially MS products. Searching the 'Net for answers to OS problems comes with the same caveats (authority, accuracy, timeliness, etc.) as with searching for other purposes.
In the "old days" closed source software used to come with concise, helpful, printed documentation.
(I will point out that the last two laptops and dozen or so low-end Intel servers I've bought have not even come with MS-Windows CDs even though it was pre-loaded.)
At least with linux and other open source software you can fiddle with it yourself or even RTFM, since the manuals are included in the distribution. If the manuals are not enough, then there's always Usenet and archives of Usenet groups. Both are exactly the kind of opportunities communities need to get a quick start when starting from scratch.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is running out of steam and is reduced to using marketing and legal teams to push stale products. MS-WindowsXP and Xbox, two products expected to produce revenue and vendor lock-in, are just not actractive to the market.
It probably dies. Microsoft has known since 2000 (when the article below was published) at the latest that MS-Passport cannot be made secure even in theory. There are fatal errors in MS's implementation in additional to the fundamental problems with the basic idea.
Xbox is flopping in Europe and Japan, even without taking into account the long term effects of shipping defective units. If things turn around for Xbox in the U.S. it can live, but Japan is the market that it needs to thrive.
The MS-WindowsXP sales are pretty far below expectations and even these are primarily from the OEMs. Not enough money there either.
.NET? who knows? But until it looks like developers of third party software will be able to work freely with .NET, there'll be no takers. That and there is the added cost of reinventing java and marketing it as C#.
ActiveDirectory? It does seem like it provides most of the functionality of OpenLDAP, but at a higher price and without multiplatform support. Novell's eDirectory does seem a more mature technology from a company with more experience in that area. Now that Novell is part of the "Liberty Alliance", AD is also roadkill.
Lastly, as everyone and their dog has mentioned, the changes between recent versions of MS-Office upgrades just don't justify the expense for most individuals and corporations.
Status and saftey were the only angles SUVs could be marketed from but the saftey value was shown to be untrue. That left Volvo and Saab as the remaining competitors in safe status (in the US) cars. Both are U.S. owned now.
People are told to want a particular car. Henry Ford knew that and wans't shy about it either. That part has not changed. If the Big Three bought Trabant or Lada and pushed, everyone in the States would have two.
One way around the GPL might be to charge a symbolic, one-time fee for shares in the co-operative or corporation for the possibility to access the binaries of the mods internal to your organization. Followed by large subscription fees for the actual access.
The important part of the GPL is the spirit or ideal -- that work contributes to progress. This is just a codification of how most of the Internet and its dependent technologies (TCP/IP, BIND, NCSA Mosaic and so on) have and are being created. Without these, the Internet and Web would never have happened and we'd still be locked into the same weird, private, incompatible networks as a few decades ago. The hard and fast practical benefits of the GPL are the result of following the spirit or goal, which is specifically to allow the future to build on the work of the past.
This gets trickier with ads served from the same host as the content.
Is there anyone from Chalmers who can describe the computing environment there?
From a developer's point of view this was great -- no (well, almost none) user management hassle, few worries about password files, etc. We could concentrate on building the service rather than managing accounts, passwords, and groups. The kerberos / LDAP servers verified the user and group memberships and passed that information on to the service being used.
I'd strongly advocate any large institution to check out the University of Michigan's computing infrastructure, both the general one and the engineering one. Do it before the MS Sale Strike Force hits your IT-Council, IT-Advisory group or IT managment group with free doughnuts and WinXP coasters. :P
Granted, very few people turn out to be as productive as Edison, but given how widely used his inventions and derivatives of his inventions are and their role in the world's economies, the return on investment for stoked public libraries that result in even one Edison every other generation is still probably triple digit or higher.
Since the web and the Internet seem to be taking up a lot of the self learners these days in regards to technology, this is a very strong argument to keep access/infrastructure open and to provide low barriers for entry such as Internet terminals at all public libraries.
Given Enron, the S&L "crisis" and various European bank bail outs this might be a good money saving step as well. ;)
In my case, Dell screwed up pretty bad with my Inspirion and took 4 months to resolve the hardware problem and then sent the repaired unit to the wrong address the day before a three week trip. >8( Slightly better, but still unsatisfactory experience with the servers despite on site warantees.
One IBM Thinkpad I had required servicing and had almost 48 hour turn around (I called too late in the day to get 24hr). No "excuses or hoofing it over to a local vendor" That was sweet! High quality and/or low hassle is good.
However, given the high prices and low cannibalisation value of new computers, there's no way I'd buy a laptop, notebook, or server without a 3 year waranty and a reasonable probability that the company will still be around then.
Part of mobile ICT is just common sense. These phones all come with an on/off button and most if not all service providers give you voice mail and caller ID as part of the basic package. If you go to a movie, cafe or meeting, turn of the *&@#$% phone. If you are expecting a particular phone call, tell those present at the start.
Some of the temptation is caused by countries which lack public transportation -- on the train, if I am not in a phone-free wagon, I can yack, dictate or program all I want without being a traffic hazard.
If I lived in the States or one of the other countries where cell phone misuse is a problem, I'd carry one of those highly illegal phone zappers everywhere I went.
kstars is fun, too. Sometime, I'd like to take one of these planetarium progams and find a way to keep an updated star map as a desktop background.
The number of novices is has been increasing due to sucessful marketing from ISPs, but few of these seem to make a transition from newbie to intermediate user. This could be explained by either lack of interest or lack of access.
I'd say a little of both, with emphasis on lack of access -- it's often very difficult for novices to navigate out of corporate 'walled gardens' and find useful learning materials. Some of the other posts have slammed PHBs and others who don't ask questions for fear of looking more stupid.
However, what would you say to a large group of such people who suddenly got over this fear? What are the important, non-dogmatic points and issues that need to be addressed to close the gap, real or perceived?
Even if people manage to agree on how to define 'species', identification of species based on just one or two samples is difficult.
Preservation of whole ecosystems, not just the obviously fragile ones, is essential for this to happen -- without the basics the species will disappear -- and this will have severe ecomomic penalties here and now in addition to the lost knowledge. Check out the current economic status of the east coast of North America in regards to salmon, lobster and shellfish.
Besides, there are good tech jobs in modelling and simlulation (e.g. migration & population).
I had problems with the T-series choice of graphics and sound chips which needed drivers that were not on the RedHat CDs. This is in my view relatively minor, and not the reason I returned it -- if I had more free time this spring I would have kept it.
The trick will be to get MS's marketing strategy to include IP6. Otherwise, if MS sits and does nothing, then incomplete IP6 support will be another convenient hammer to pound their wedge deeper and lock people into pay-per-packet Internet aka .NET.
Culture (language, customs, food, music, etc.) and technology have been fused as well, but that's a separate thesis.
For a larger site or for distributed harvesting then there is Combine which is an old one from 1996. It does text, HTML, and PDF. It's free, but takes a bit of time to set up and can even handle metadata (i.e. keywords). There are binaries for linux and solaris, but most is in perl.
It's about to begin some modernization to make it easier to install and operate, perhaps even use MySQL as a backend.
MS really only cares about the bottom line and obviously security issues are about to bite them financially. Right now, Bill can't do much except blow smoke. The distraction is really needed right now. Especially when you consider:
That the effort to squelch bug reporting is a tacit admission that none of the products in the current development cycle are likely to be secure
Prestigious and influential groups like the National Academy of Sciences are calling for punishment of software firms that skimp on security.
MS products will be magically secure and stable after February.
They've been found guilty of illegally maintaining a monopoly and the punishment is under discussion.
Several U.S. states and some European governments and commissions are pursuing / considering their own legal action.
The MS legal counsel is stepping down
MS-Passport, their new cash cow, can't even be made secure (thus their hop to Kerberos)
Revenue from upgrades is nil and given that Intel is not expecting to do well either the next few quarters will be for MS also.
Simply put, Bill is on so many people's shit list with no easy way off. A few decades ago, IBM used to have most computing centers by the short-n-curlies, but pushed it too far and more or less disappeared. MS is in a prime position to do the same.
However, Kastrup (Copenhagen), Schipol (Amsterdam), Vantaa (Helsinki) and Arlanda (Stockholm) are excellent models. I think Schipol may be the most secure I have looked at and very efficient. Vantaa and Arlanda by far the most efficient (and pleasant). Kastrup's not too bad. Any of these could be models for how to improve operations and security in U.S. airports.
And yes, the privacy laws are quite good in Europe. One example is that I get a written letter explaining who and why everytime some company does a credit check.
Addionally, genes occasionally hop to other species and even phyla. So, the "closed source" crops won't retain too much of an advantage for many decades unless the companies are able to eliminate the seed stock for the traditional seeds. That said, it's interesting research.
I thought Ollie North helped remove any doubt about that. Besides the "war on terror" does have a clearly defined enemy. It just lacks a clearly defined end point or exit strategy... for obvious reasons.
Back to the psychology / technology -- ads use mamilian and primate level drives to make a sale or lure potential customers. Can anyone suggest some good books about primate social behaviour? something corresponding to Jakob Nielsen's book Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity or Krug & Black's Don't Make Me Think: Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, with theory plus good examples.
Obviously even if you just count money, the excessive salaries damage the U.S. economy and productivity, and now is the wrong time for further damage. The extra money really could be better invested, for example in reducing unit cost, R&D, training and so on. (How about lower phone / cable bills?)
Social unrest is also bad economically. It's now more that 30 years since the Watts (L.A.), Detroit, Newark (NJ), and Chicago riots in the mid-60's. In 1968 far more areas in U.S cities experienced rioting and looting which required the use of the National Guard. Most of those areas still have not recovered economically.
In a previous life, I used to use and support many MS products/platforms, but cannot for the life of me think that MS actually has support for their products in practice. Lately, the only support I have experienced in practice is from the hardware manufacturers who resell MS products. Telephone and online support appear to me to be a myth. I've been observing four MS-based computing environments for three years now and it seems that either applications and services work out of the box or don't work ever. YMMV.
One also gets plenty of misinformation and superstition from co-workers and local support staff regarding closed source, especially MS products. Searching the 'Net for answers to OS problems comes with the same caveats (authority, accuracy, timeliness, etc.) as with searching for other purposes.
In the "old days" closed source software used to come with concise, helpful, printed documentation. (I will point out that the last two laptops and dozen or so low-end Intel servers I've bought have not even come with MS-Windows CDs even though it was pre-loaded.)
At least with linux and other open source software you can fiddle with it yourself or even RTFM, since the manuals are included in the distribution. If the manuals are not enough, then there's always Usenet and archives of Usenet groups. Both are exactly the kind of opportunities communities need to get a quick start when starting from scratch.