About a third of it could be called "How Borland, IBM, Novell, Lotus, Netscape, et.al. shot themselves in the foot so badly even Microsoft could beat them."
"The average peasant is not normally willing to fight to his death for his national government. His national government may have been a succession of corrupt dictators and inefficient bureaucrats."
That sounds about right for us Americans.
Talk about lack of perspective. Go spend thirty seconds with Google. Pick a dictator, any dictator: Castro, Somosa, Saddam, Ceausescu, whatever.
Look at their record in office and compare to any US president of any era--Bush, Carter, Ford, Coolidge, Harding, whatever. The level of violence, corruption, intimidation, whatever aren't even in the same league.
I know it is cool to be all downtrodden, but really: get out of the dorm and get a sense of perspective. You have it orders of magnitude better than anyone who ever lived under those governments. On his worst day, chimp boy is better than any government in any developing country on their best day...expects to be modded down for disagreeing with the waah! America sucks! groupthing.
It's basically only a matter of time before the fear-mongers and political demagogues in the U.S. and elsewhere outlaw any form of encryption that doesn't include a backdoor for the NSA and other "trusted" government agencies. There has already been evidence of commercial encrytption (such as ...1991 called and it wants its fearmongering back...
We saw this prediction before and every time the spooks lose out to business interests that absolutely will not live without strong crypto.
Maybe this prediction might have made some sense in 1991 when crypto was not widely used, but strong crypto is pervasive today. Any US administration that tired to ban it would get roasted by a wide variety of business interests before the EFF had coffee made.
1) Let me guess, you don't actually use Vista. The volume of complaints about UAC is usually inversely related to a user's actual experience with Vista.
2) Which security reports are you reading? Everything I have seen shows it to be an improvement over XP sp2.
And no, I don't work for MS, I just can't stand it when ignorance is touted as wisdom. Which probably means I shouldn't read Slashdot.
1 have a huge amount of income and no investors to satisfy. 2 have a landlord willing to bend over backwards for you 3 take your vast sums and spend them on an architect. 4 take lots of pics and brag about how smart you are.
What he doesn't talk about are the crappy borrowed offices he used when they actually developed their product.
That's before one goes into the less obvious problems with his "everybody gets an office" model.
What about collaboration? I leave my office and go to yours? You leave yours and come to mine? Neither is very conducive to his vaunted hallway usability tests. (Wait, a blogger's advice isn't internally consistent! Not that!)
While the Slashbot loves the "everyone is stupid but me" mentality, these are actually not easy problems to resolve.
Hint: If our needs were solitary workers who can be left alone in their offices, we would send the work to Raj's office in Bangalore for 1/4 of your salary. The reason we don't is that we need you and your colleagues to solve these problems. And that requires both concentration and collaboration.
This is coming from someone who looked at private offices and decided that would kill our small team collaboration work [maybe offering better, but maybe not] and would cost us a ton of money.
Re:For those of you that are going to ask
on
eBay Sues Craigslist
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
I'm not surprised. Nor am I surprised when my postings disappear for no apparent reason.
Craigslist is a pretty amateur operation. [Which is how they seem to want it.]
We just threw out a flickering cfl the other day. New out of the box 60 watt equivalent cfl floodlight flickered at a high frequency after about 10 minutes plugged in.
We replaced it with another from the package and it worked fine.
The risk of double taxation also has really weird distorting effects on business: want an employee ownership element in a small company? Sorry! You are stuck being an S corp unless the owners want to be taxed twice: once when the corp makes money, once when the shareholders take their profits. It is what kept us from building an employee ownership element in our organization.
Why should my company pay taxes then I pay taxes on the same income?
Yeah, Bungie was a terrible investment. That Halo thing was a total flop.
Sybase licensing? What a terrible deal. "MS" SQL Server? Nobody buys that.
Powerpoint? Who uses that?
To drop the sarcasm for a moment, Foxpro was bought to kill it. It wasn't an accident that it was allowed to fall behind Access.
Over the long run, MS is better off investing in what it does than being a stock fund, even if there were no legal implications to being an investment house that also makes software. (Which was one reason they declared the dividend in 2004).
On planet Slashdot they are a company teetering on bankruptcy, but back in the real world they are a hugely profitable, powerful organization.
Because having 60B and not trying to get 70B is just dumb.
And sitting on cash when you could invest it today and get the means to obtain even greater future profits is just dumb. Microsoft is not dumb, despite detractors' wishes.
By holding cash, you believe you have no better place to invest it. MS evidently doesn't believe that as it has bought a dozen companies and invested tons in new products.
I find amazing that anybody can seriously suggest that this is a company in a weak position.
Anybody who does just has very little sense for how far this company has come in the past 10 years in terms of the breadth of their product offerings and their success in penetrating markets.
1998 (right before the Internet was going to destroy MS): near monopoly (>90%)in OS, Office suites, internal only server use 2008: near monopoly (>90%)in OS, Office suites, major player (>30%) in game console, smart mobile, database server, web server, mail server, information portal, bit player (but growing) in CRM, BI, operations management server
None of this means that these businesses aren't operating in a competitive environment, but I'd take a lot of convincing before I believed these guys were toast.
Academia all Leftists because leftists are higher quality minds? Really?
Here's a couple of other explanations
1) Don't ask don't tell. Given that being a Republican professor is like being a gay Iranian these days, I'm not surprised you don't meet many.
2) People who didn't fit in just left academia for other pursuits, like me.
I was 9/10ths of the way through a phd in a "political" subject [modern history of the Middle East] and decided that I didn't want to spend my life surrounded by ideologues stuck "rebelling" against their parents.
Tech pays better and even the marginally competent [hi!] can live a lot better than all but the best scholars--who get stuck carrying water for whatever political view is fashionable.
I think academics drift left in part because they hang around with adolescents all day [socialist at twenty and all that], partly because they self select for people who still take Marx seriously, and partly because they demonize views they find unpopular.
Oh, and the pay sucks and the hiring process is absolutely insane too.
... AT&T will be spending literally millions of dollars implementing technologies that become invalidated over and over.
As opposed to spending millions of dollars carrying "pirate" traffic? The "sharers" aren't free. They use huge quantities of bandwidth that AT&T would rather sell (many times over) to customers who won't use it.
Bittorrent is something like 1/3 to 1/2 of all traffic. If I was in the traffic biz and I could cut my volume by 1/3 and bing in the same revenue, I'd jump at it.
Now the slashbots are all outraged for the usual reasons, but this is hardly corporate seppuku.
My problem with Nielsen is that he tends to go completely jihad on some iron rule of design instead of appreciating when it is ok to break the rules. He claims to be sensitive to this, but it doesn't come out in his writing so well.
I would recommend the duck book since it provides a ton of examples of stuff you see every day: http://designinginterfaces.com/
I suspect the ISP's reaction to losing high bandwidth, low revenue customers would be: bye! Customers download almost nothing, yet pay for an always on connection are the customers they want. Anime fans who keep Mom's modem tied up at 100% capacity day in day out downloading the latest thing use a lot of resources and generate little revenue.
I think it is both: Obviously if Javascript becomes less of a horror show to work with, Silverlight becomes less necessary.
Even if it helps MS, I want Javascript to die, die, die. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go back to writing my 900-line "add a week to a given date" function in Javascript.
The file stealers constitute some massive percentage of total Tube usage, so it is more accurate to say something like:
9 of 10 treadmills are being used by people doing [illegal activity that they explicitly agreed they wouldn't do when they signed up]. One opens up and Mr. I'm going to do [insert illegal...] gets to the front of the line. He is told to wait while somebody else uses the treadmill for something that isn't [illegal... ]. He fumes, rages, and uses the stationary bike to post to Slashdot. Then he hangs out in the weight area making grunting noises (You Tube is still ok too).
Now, to lay off the analogies:
Looks to me like Comcast oversells capacity (like basically every other utility does), and it trying to get around this problem by hitting back at the folks who are clogging up The Tubes with stuff they agreed they wouldn't do in the first place. I'm not exactly sympathetic to the whining from the folks trying to get a movie without paying for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Go read In Search of Stupidity. slashdot review)
About a third of it could be called "How Borland, IBM, Novell, Lotus, Netscape, et.al. shot themselves in the foot so badly even Microsoft could beat them."
...inspiring that Hitler took it as his model.
Godwin! I win.
"The average peasant is not normally willing to fight to his death for his national government. His national government may have been a succession of corrupt dictators and inefficient bureaucrats."
..expects to be modded down for disagreeing with the waah! America sucks! groupthing.
That sounds about right for us Americans.
Talk about lack of perspective. Go spend thirty seconds with Google. Pick a dictator, any dictator: Castro, Somosa, Saddam, Ceausescu, whatever.
Look at their record in office and compare to any US president of any era--Bush, Carter, Ford, Coolidge, Harding, whatever. The level of violence, corruption, intimidation, whatever aren't even in the same league.
I know it is cool to be all downtrodden, but really: get out of the dorm and get a sense of perspective. You have it orders of magnitude better than anyone who ever lived under those governments. On his worst day, chimp boy is better than any government in any developing country on their best day.
Just a suggestion, but maybe using 3rd world children to carry out jihad against the technology industry isn't a great plan.
We saw this prediction before and every time the spooks lose out to business interests that absolutely will not live without strong crypto.
Maybe this prediction might have made some sense in 1991 when crypto was not widely used, but strong crypto is pervasive today. Any US administration that tired to ban it would get roasted by a wide variety of business interests before the EFF had coffee made.
1) Let me guess, you don't actually use Vista. The volume of complaints about UAC is usually inversely related to a user's actual experience with Vista.
2) Which security reports are you reading? Everything I have seen shows it to be an improvement over XP sp2.
And no, I don't work for MS, I just can't stand it when ignorance is touted as wisdom. Which probably means I shouldn't read Slashdot.
In all likelihood, you will be the only person in the whole world programming for PocketPC using MonoDevelop on a powerbook.
Does that sound like a good idea?
I mean, being a slobbering anti-Micro$oft slashbot cretin is one thing, but that's just asking for troubles.
Or they read him and found his advice useless.
1 have a huge amount of income and no investors to satisfy.
2 have a landlord willing to bend over backwards for you
3 take your vast sums and spend them on an architect.
4 take lots of pics and brag about how smart you are.
What he doesn't talk about are the crappy borrowed offices he used when they actually developed their product.
That's before one goes into the less obvious problems with his "everybody gets an office" model.
What about collaboration? I leave my office and go to yours? You leave yours and come to mine? Neither is very conducive to his vaunted hallway usability tests. (Wait, a blogger's advice isn't internally consistent! Not that!)
While the Slashbot loves the "everyone is stupid but me" mentality, these are actually not easy problems to resolve.
Hint: If our needs were solitary workers who can be left alone in their offices, we would send the work to Raj's office in Bangalore for 1/4 of your salary. The reason we don't is that we need you and your colleagues to solve these problems. And that requires both concentration and collaboration.
This is coming from someone who looked at private offices and decided that would kill our small team collaboration work [maybe offering better, but maybe not] and would cost us a ton of money.
I'm not surprised. Nor am I surprised when my postings disappear for no apparent reason.
Craigslist is a pretty amateur operation. [Which is how they seem to want it.]
Goddamn AJAX!!! ...The Fremen are early 20th century Britains idealized version of the baduin: self reliant, noble savages.
It is Lawrence of Arabia in outer space. You have to take the Middle East stuff with a huge grain of salt. The Fremen are the ideali
We just threw out a flickering cfl the other day. New out of the box 60 watt equivalent cfl floodlight flickered at a high frequency after about 10 minutes plugged in.
We replaced it with another from the package and it worked fine.
So no, it isn't just a myth.
The risk of double taxation also has really weird distorting effects on business: want an employee ownership element in a small company? Sorry! You are stuck being an S corp unless the owners want to be taxed twice: once when the corp makes money, once when the shareholders take their profits. It is what kept us from building an employee ownership element in our organization.
Why should my company pay taxes then I pay taxes on the same income?
Yeah, Bungie was a terrible investment. That Halo thing was a total flop.
Sybase licensing? What a terrible deal. "MS" SQL Server? Nobody buys that.
Powerpoint? Who uses that?
To drop the sarcasm for a moment, Foxpro was bought to kill it. It wasn't an accident that it was allowed to fall behind Access.
Over the long run, MS is better off investing in what it does than being a stock fund, even if there were no legal implications to being an investment house that also makes software. (Which was one reason they declared the dividend in 2004).
On planet Slashdot they are a company teetering on bankruptcy, but back in the real world they are a hugely profitable, powerful organization.
Because having 60B and not trying to get 70B is just dumb.
And sitting on cash when you could invest it today and get the means to obtain even greater future profits is just dumb. Microsoft is not dumb, despite detractors' wishes.
By holding cash, you believe you have no better place to invest it. MS evidently doesn't believe that as it has bought a dozen companies and invested tons in new products.
I find amazing that anybody can seriously suggest that this is a company in a weak position.
Anybody who does just has very little sense for how far this company has come in the past 10 years in terms of the breadth of their product offerings and their success in penetrating markets.
1998 (right before the Internet was going to destroy MS):
near monopoly (>90%)in OS, Office suites, internal only server use
2008:
near monopoly (>90%)in OS, Office suites, major player (>30%) in game console, smart mobile, database server, web server, mail server, information portal, bit player (but growing) in CRM, BI, operations management server
None of this means that these businesses aren't operating in a competitive environment, but I'd take a lot of convincing before I believed these guys were toast.
Academia all Leftists because leftists are higher quality minds? Really?
Here's a couple of other explanations
1) Don't ask don't tell. Given that being a Republican professor is like being a gay Iranian these days, I'm not surprised you don't meet many.
2) People who didn't fit in just left academia for other pursuits, like me.
I was 9/10ths of the way through a phd in a "political" subject [modern history of the Middle East] and decided that I didn't want to spend my life surrounded by ideologues stuck "rebelling" against their parents.
Tech pays better and even the marginally competent [hi!] can live a lot better than all but the best scholars--who get stuck carrying water for whatever political view is fashionable.
I think academics drift left in part because they hang around with adolescents all day [socialist at twenty and all that], partly because they self select for people who still take Marx seriously, and partly because they demonize views they find unpopular.
Oh, and the pay sucks and the hiring process is absolutely insane too.
... AT&T will be spending literally millions of dollars implementing technologies that become invalidated over and over.
As opposed to spending millions of dollars carrying "pirate" traffic? The "sharers" aren't free. They use huge quantities of bandwidth that AT&T would rather sell (many times over) to customers who won't use it.
Bittorrent is something like 1/3 to 1/2 of all traffic. If I was in the traffic biz and I could cut my volume by 1/3 and bing in the same revenue, I'd jump at it.
Now the slashbots are all outraged for the usual reasons, but this is hardly corporate seppuku.
I believe -most- people would pay (if they could) rather than steal/pirate/infringe/whatever.
Really? On my planet, people share music because they don't want to pay for it. They dream up lots of excuses to justify their actions.
But on planet slashdot, bittorrent is exclusively used for linux distros and public domain films from the 1920s.
Don't forget mice: the circular mouse, or the mouse with the click action underneath so it jams on cords all the time?
I think they select their hardware by what photographs well.
My problem with Nielsen is that he tends to go completely jihad on some iron rule of design instead of appreciating when it is ok to break the rules. He claims to be sensitive to this, but it doesn't come out in his writing so well.
I would recommend the duck book since it provides a ton of examples of stuff you see every day: http://designinginterfaces.com/
As somebody who spent all last week trying to get an incompetent university IT admin to configure an email account for me, let me say: thank Xenu!
I suspect the ISP's reaction to losing high bandwidth, low revenue customers would be: bye!
Customers download almost nothing, yet pay for an always on connection are the customers they want. Anime fans who keep Mom's modem tied up at 100% capacity day in day out downloading the latest thing use a lot of resources and generate little revenue.
I think it is both: Obviously if Javascript becomes less of a horror show to work with, Silverlight becomes less necessary.
Even if it helps MS, I want Javascript to die, die, die. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go back to writing my 900-line "add a week to a given date" function in Javascript.
The file stealers constitute some massive percentage of total Tube usage, so it is more accurate to say something like:
9 of 10 treadmills are being used by people doing [illegal activity that they explicitly agreed they wouldn't do when they signed up]. One opens up and Mr. I'm going to do [insert illegal...] gets to the front of the line. He is told to wait while somebody else uses the treadmill for something that isn't [illegal... ]. He fumes, rages, and uses the stationary bike to post to Slashdot. Then he hangs out in the weight area making grunting noises (You Tube is still ok too).
Now, to lay off the analogies:
Looks to me like Comcast oversells capacity (like basically every other utility does), and it trying to get around this problem by hitting back at the folks who are clogging up The Tubes with stuff they agreed they wouldn't do in the first place. I'm not exactly sympathetic to the whining from the folks trying to get a movie without paying for it.