I'm a little confused by the difficulties you see in incrementally deploying a thin-client solution on an office with existing PC hardware. I'm also not sure what your requirements for your thin clients, but I'd be interested to find out.
To my mind one of the most appealing things this server offers (with the addition of transparent Windows client software) allows is a gradual transition from a desktop Windows/MSOffice environment to a Linux/KDE/OOo environment, whether thin client, or desktop or both. By doing some mapping of/home/~user in the KDE session and My Documents in Windows, you can have both pointing at the same location. And because KDE/OOo/Linux have approximately zero license costs, you can test it on as many or as few users as makes sense, given the retraining and support efforts that would have to go into such a migration. FreeNX comes in as a way to minimize deployment effort and make sure users are logging in securely, while still not paying hefty license fees for WTS/RDP/each copy of Office that runs over RDP.
Now you've run a thin client shop and I haven't so I'm guessing that you've got some wisdom that I totally don't anticipate, so fire away.
While the sunrizen.com utility seems like it could be quite useful, I think it's much more limited in scope than what WinFS plans to be. As I understand it WinFS is essentially about trying to get a reasonable set of XML tags to store data in bits that are searchable semantically and reusable between different apps.
It's one thing to be able to search for a text string, or even to use metadata to search for audio, images, etc. It's another to be able to detect that a user has pasted a paragraph from a letter she wrote three weeks ago into an email, and link the email semantically to the letter, or track how that text moves and is modified through her correspondence and others in the organization. (Not sure WinFS will be able to do this, just trying to distinguish the scope of WinFS from just searching).
To me, the question is not whether MS can come up with a filesystem can do this, the question is whether anyone wants it. That is, does the market want to do this deep, sophisticated searching, or is it really in just a simple search interface to a good index of existing text, ala Google or this sunrizen business? That's what makes WinFS a big bet, not really the quality of the technology, which will be refined as necessary if people really implement it.
The other thing that makes me a little dubious of the necessity of WinFS is the fact that institutions have yet to really embrace weblogs, which have a similar ability to promote sharing memes but are built on simple technology. This is a "future of collaboration" technology, but so far in the institutional setting it's basically floundering. So either I'm missing some big space where WinFS is really crucial, or it's a bit of a boondoggle. Of course you've gotta bet all that money on something.
OK, I apologize if I got a little shrill there, but I think my basic point is actually one with a fair bit of merit.
You have rightfully pointed out that the New York Times ran a story on the subject. I'm just encouraging you to look hard at how stories of this nature get to be stories. Think, for example, of the Abu Ghraib stories, particularly the ones by Seymour Hersh about the alleged "Coppergreen" program. Obviously Sy Hersh talked to a couple angry folks at State and CIA, and they mouthed off about some program they think exists. Do you believe the New Yorker story? I am definitely left of center, and have a low opinion of Donald Rumsfeld, but I'd be hard pressed to call Sy Hersh's story corroborated just because it makes damning claims about Rummy.
Given the Times' reputation as having high editorial standards, this means that some scenario like one of the following probably occurred in running the Oil-For-Food story you linked to: a) the editor believed that this story has merit and asked Judith Miller to write about it b) the editor was skeptical, but Judith Miller pushed for it c) neither the reporter nor the editor thought the story was really that important, but one or both felt they had to cover it in case it became big news.
Now I don't work for the Times and I presume you don't, so we don't know which, if any of the above scenarios resulted in the Times covering the story. My point, as with Sy Hersh's allegations, is twofold. One is that any given story has a set of decisions behind it regarding why it ran, and people pushing for an angle, so it's rarely the unvarnished truth. The second is that while a story can quote a wide variety of people, the reporter may or may not have been able to directly verify the claims being made by any of the parties.
If you read the story you sent me closely, I think it's a pretty good example of this phenomenon. There are quite a few quotes from high UN officials saying they think the program was poorly run and could well have had the alleged problems, but there's no single quote from any of them affirming the charges. There's also a long section detail how ripe the program was for corruption, but in the final reckoning, only Mr. Volcker and Mr. Chalabi known what's in the records, and they are disclosing them yet.
The most direct evidence provided in the story is:
The Hussein government demanded kickbacks on almost every contract it negotiated, beginning in 2000, according to documents from Iraqi ministries obtained by The New York Times this year.
That seems pretty credible to me, but it's still not exactly on the record - the source of the documents is not named, and to my knowledge none of the companies allegedly blackmailed in this way spoke with the Times reporters.
Look, in the long run, I'm not really disputing that the UN handled the program poorly, or even that there was corruption (given what bastards Hussein and his ministers were, I'd say all claims are pretty plausible). I'm just troubled at how the claims of a few people can bypass close scrutiny by getting a loud airing in the media. In the case of the Iraq war, I do honestly believe that key players in the Pentagon and CIA allowed themselves to be fooled by Ahmed Chalabi.
I know this post is long, but let me add one more thought. The left has made a two-decade-long mistake in abdicating a clear-eyed geopolitical view in favor of shrill claims about how bad the baddies are, and it's a mistake the right (at least the neo-cons) unfortunately seems to have picked up. Iraq is indeed a linchpin to the Middle East ("the road to Jerusalem", etc), but it is simply too complicated to remedy with a quick in-and-out mission by troops with minimal training in necessities of occupation like language, customs, or local politics. We've botched this war because we rushed it, and that's due, at least in part, to believing unverified claims.
If you're really interested (or even still awake), here's a blog post I wrote about this a while back.
I would hardly call Claudia Rosette "freelance" considering that she works for the Hudson Institute, which shilled for the Neo-Wrongs and generally played boosters for the tremendouslysuccessful Iraq war. A neo-con think tank like Hudson is an utter failure if it can't plant stories in at least the WSJ and the NRO (indeed that's where it was initially run). In her latest article at the Hudson Institute's website Rosette admits that only Ahmed Chalabi has the documents with the supposed evidence and 4 months later he still won't show them to anybody. Of course it's hard for him find time to get those documents to Rosette what with all palling around with and debriefing the Iran intelligence services in Tehran. Rosette tries to tiptoe away from having been Chalabi'd by making reference to other mysterious "confidential documents the UN is socking away" and to the neo-con picked Duelfer's testimony, without any specific knowledge of the supposed UN documents or where Duelfer got his own info. C'mon man, hasn't this country been fooled enough times by Chalabi's claims?
I have no love for the UN, but I don't think we need a naive conspiracy theory to see why France and Russia didn't want to knock out Saddam:
a) it wasn't in their economic or military interests
b) it was a bad war to get into. Iraq has been the straw that breaks the camel's back for years now, and to try to get right in the middle of it with no real regional or international support was asking for a quagmire, and France and Russia knew it
c) France is big baby in international affairs (mainly it's trying to hang out to some semblance of being a relevant player)
The answer is not to come out with some more Chalabi-promulgated nonsense to try to show that they're in on some global fraud, and it certainly isn't to insert ourselves into the middle of a regional hornet's nest.
See the remarks about Office preloading above - doesn't happen.
I followed that thread with a lot of interest, and I believe the poster who said that MS is just really good at optimizing apps. I think the preloading "myth" may have to do with the shortcut to Office that appears in C:\Documents and Settings\Start Menu\Startup after installing Office. If this isn't a preloader for Office, what is it?
It helps to think of the GPL as boilerplate. The kernel has a license, gcc has a license, emacs has a license, etc., and they all just happen to use exactly the same words. Ordinarily, you can't actually "violate the GPL"; all you can do is violate a particular license that happens to be the GPL.
Very well put. A license is like a contract - it establishes the contractual terms under which the licensees may use the licensed software. Courts do not make the laws which govern contracts in general, so it seems unlikely to me that they would "invalidate" the GPL in general. The court may well establish case law about how enforceable the GPL is, but AFAIK (and IANAL) they do not have the authority to "invalidate" it.
First of all, this "contacts" and "connection" nonsense turns the vague into the misleading. Now that you've posted and I've replied, we've had "contact". Does that come close to even agreeing to have lunch together, much less collaborate on an attack on the most powerful country in the world?
Page 61 of the report says:
Bin Ladin is said to have asked for space to establish training camps, as well as assistance procuring weapons,
but there is no evidence that Iraq responded to this request.
Using your definition of "contact" and "connection" Donald Rumsfeld himself is clearly in on the putative al Qaeda-Iraq network formed from these "contacts" and "connections".
If you met with someone who slept with my wife and perhaps even discussed infidelity, would I have have cause to attack you because of the "connection" between you and the adulterer?
Not that I think that there weren't legitimate reasons for a well-planned attack on Saddam, but I hate this use of vague language to avoid having to a call a spade a spade: we attacked Saddam Hussein because we didn't like what he was doing in Iraq. It didn't have the slightest bit to do with any realistic threats to the US.
Brilliant post, both your analysis of Saddam's options and the idea of spending some real money and effort on Afghanistan.
However, I'm not really sure that investing in Afghanistan would have a clear result in the Middle East because Afghans are not Arabs. The promising place for Arab democracy is North Africa. They are culturally connected to both the Arab world in the Middle East and to the West. Many of them have some semblances of democracy that could be helped along with economic and trade stimulus and other more forceful encouragements as necessary. Moving from Morocco east through Algeira, Tunisia, Libya and maybe to Egypt we could help build a swath of Arabic-speaking democracies friendly to the West, some of which have oil and could thus reduce our dependence on Saudi Arabian oil. A block of stable Arabic democracies, particularly if it included Egypt would help defuse the Israel security situation and lower the risk of war in the Gulf. Having Qaddafi come clean was a vast step in this direction, and has unfortunately been largely left aside to try to fight the Iraq fire.
Another thing that most discussions of Iraq leave out is what a realistic policy would have been. As you correctly state, the sanctions had Saddam pretty well contained. But it's clear that the apparatus of the state was falling apart. If Saddam had fallen under his own weight, we'd still have had a security situation to deal with.
The main problem with invading Iraq in my mind wasn't so much the wrongheaded and misleading justifications but the approach (too fast, too furious). Iraq is the either the hardest or second-hardest country in the region to bring to stability. Perhaps we could have warmed up a bit first, taught our sergeants and captains a bit of Arabic first before sending them into to face the really big challenge?
I agree with you that the screeds about us "having armed Saddam in the first place" are very overblown and aggravating. But its also pretty overblown and aggravating to ascribe Saddam's ambitions on regional domination merely to the fact that he's a bad egg (and he is a really bad egg). Both points are view are rather naive. Why is it surprising that a grasping head of state would take the weapons we sold them for one purpose and use them for other purposes? Neither of these "positions" attempt to take a hard look at the past and develop ideas for the future, they merely throw blame on one party as opposed to another. I'm not making any excuses for Saddam, who was truly an execrable man and merits as strict punishment as possible.
All of the roots of the current Iraq fiasco involve the NATO powers and the Muslim world.
During the Cold War, our strategy was to oppose Soviet incursions (direct or indirect) by supporting and arming those who we believed opposed our enemy. While the strategy worked in some ways, it had other very nasty side effects, among them the fact that these West-hating fundamentalists and other Arab equivalents of black-helicopter militias have easier access to weapons than they might otherwise have had. The fact that Iraq is ready to disintegrate into its component ethnic enclaves goes right back to its creation as a state in 1921. As you correctly say, al-Qaeda owes its existence to deep-pocketed Saudi oil barons funded by the world's love of cheap energy.
As for your charges that the was some great corruption scandal in the UN oil-for-food program, note that these charges are based on documents held by Ahmed Chalabi (who is wanted by both Jordan and the Iraqi provisional government for various kinds of fraud). Chalabi has refused to show these documents to any outsiders, including the press. They're about as reliable as the pictures of mobile bioweapons labs shown to the UN.
Something else that/. readers should be much more attuned to is that this whole war involved very little discussion of the actual strategic threat of the supposed WMD. Your comment that:
And if you want to live under the threat of a mushroom cloud over a European city the next time a terrorist doesn't like someone's policies, then, by all means, do nothing about the mideast...
follows right along with this. The threat that Iraq or al-Qaeda would be able to launch ICBM attacks or drop a Fat Man type weapon on the US or Europe is vanishingly small. Technically what politicians are calling "mass destruction" means 1000-5000 people dead and a lot of mayhem and fear. The real, on-the-ground threat was that Saddam armed with regional-scale nukes could well have launched a regional war that would have brought world oil production to a screeching halt. This is a serious threat, but it's hard to see how knocking out Saddam without a clear plan towards stability made any progress towards mitigating that risk.
We should be taking a variety of measures to stop threats from terrorists (including a lot more work securing ports and the electrical grid), but the notion that baddies can build a nuke in their basement is pretty ridiculous.
Does anyone know if it's legal to base a second claim on documents obtained through discovery of a first claim if the first claim turns out to be without merit? That is, can you file one claim that allows you to do discovery and then file a raft of subsequent claims?
It does seem very strange that IBM would be basing such a massive portion of its business on unlicensed software when that license or hell, the whole company could have been acquired for a relatively modest sum. I'll be very curious to see what IBM's response to this is.
a "decent" profit margin keeps the industry innovating. a fat one makes it lazy, and a slim one brings down quality.
Genius, pure genius. It's been a long time since anyone's said anything this savvy on/.
I also disagree with the parent on consumers rejoicing. The cellphone industry is extremely poorly regulated and has a history of abusing consumers. The fact that they are able to force the manufacturers into an overcompetive market spells doom for us peons. I would much rather have to pay another 50-100 bucks for my phone and avoid the lock-in to aggressive contracts, misleading advertising and customer disservice that is the current cellphone industry.
I hate to fall into the any-statement-against-Linux-is-FUD category, but this really is a poorly written and research claim.
Mr. O'Dowd claims - without reference to any data, or even Gartner studies - that Windows is "more secure" than Linux, which is specious enough when there are data. He suggests that foreign agents could easily place backdoors into Linux, without any particulars of where they'd plausibly be planted, or why such backdoors would not be addressed by a security review.
Mr. O'Dowd also offers no reason why proprietary software isn't vulnerable to the same kind of infiltration, especially since programming work is increasingly Worse yet, code written by somebody infiltrating a proprietary software house would generally subject to less scrutiny than that submitted to an open source project, because they would already implicitly trusted.
On the other hand, because Open Source projects regularly deal with unknown contributors, most of them have formal or informal mechanism to get to know potential submittors. If some massive patch arrives at Linus' doorstep from some unknown contributor, he's not likely to just merge it into the main kernel tree, rather he'd find out more about the contributo or pass the code around for careful review. Note that this is quite aside from the "many eyeballs" theory, which AFAICT hasn't really been verified one way or the other.
This doesn't mean that MS is annoyed with Slate, it means they are changing their business strategy.
There's a meaningful answer. That Firefox nonsense was only useful in that it deflected the usual Micro$oft $ux vitriol into "what a stupid conspiracy" vitriol. If you look at the businesses that Microsoft owns, only one of them is involved in content production. In fact, the content that MSN's homepage buys is not even similar in subject matter or tone to Slate (or quality, I should add) - it's a totally different market. It's always been sorta of an orphan, mainly built as a hedge against AOL's acquisition of Time-Warner. As long as they're cleaning house, it makes perfect sense to sell off operations outside their core competencies.
The question in my mind is: what happens to MSN as a whole?
Yes, that is a very interesting question. My brother was remarking this morning that he thinks MSN really missed the boat by not buying an AP wire feed like Yahoo did. Of course he's a journalist, so he reads the wires like geeks read/., but given how much of MSN's content is crappy and random it's hard not to consider it a credible critique. For all that it owns two of the most visited properties on the web, MSN as a whole has never really hit any sweet spots - it's mostly a holdover from the dotcom days of "the web is going to change everything, so we'd better grab some property there". And it sure makes you think that Seattle Weekly article from a couple months back had some decent explanations for MSN's status as a stepchild.
This is perhaps the first debate I've seen which even begins to touch the "hidden" questions about taxation, skipping the well-worn "should we tax more or less" to ask how do we tax most effectively.
Of course there's always room for a debate on any particularly government expenditure, tax, or lack of tax. But there's rarely any public debate of making major reforms to the structure of taxation in this country: individual versus business, sales vs. income tax (both for individuals and businesses), payroll taxes vs. mandatory accounts, etc., that doesn't get muddied and stuck in more-vs-less.
For example, the point that individuals are taxed on all their income, while business are taxed only on income net of expenses raises a lot of opportunities for new debates, as does the notion that a 10 (or 15 or 20) percent flat tax on various business transaction might well make companies more effective at delivering certain products and services. Perhaps individual should be taxed on income net of expenses? If you're serious about abolishing corporations, what are a real estimates of the price of goods and the creation of jobs?
I sure would love to see these questions hashed out on the national stage rather simply hearing the tired mantras about more-tax-is-needed, less-tax-is-needed.
While the sitting on the hands question is a fair one, the proper answer is not a commercial - you'll never raise enough money to reach more than a thousand or tens of thousands of people - but media "scandal seeding".
1) Write one or more versions of a news story (many, many stories in the media are dropped in essentially as they were delivered to the media). Hopefully this includes a "human interest angle", like Grandma Sally being redirected goatse.cx or giving up her CC number to ch.ase.com. Use only a minimal of substantive or technical details to avoid people who don't want to think through them. Yes, this is doing reporters' work for them, but that's how you get stuff in circulation when you're outside the loop.
2) Call (email might work, but probably not as well) the editors of Style/Living/Consumer Affairs pages of newspapers and TV stations and pitch em the story. Again, this is reporter work, but it gets the story in the news.
3) Lather, rinse, repeat. Fan the flames by providing more juicy details with human interest angles - disgruntled MS employee, evidence that problem is far wider than acknowledge "they don't want to you to know this...", speculations about apocalyptic collapses of the economy. Involve porn to feed the public's prurient side. Modify the story a bit for consumption by other stations/papers/etc as it evolves.
This is how most political scandals evolve - someone plants the story and fans the flames for a week or two in the public gets tired of it. To do real damage, you sync the stories with lulls in other news and cycles of public mood.
So, at 300 billion, Microsoft is clearly overrated - UNLESS there are some huge market opportunities out there.... But those have evaporated.
Microsoft has spent the last two or three years casting around looking for the next "killer app" in the enterprise desktop and consumer spaces - MSN, XBox, DRM,.NET, etc. As the parent astutely points out, there are precious few areas of vast untapped market need just poised for a killer app. Think for example, of the colossal nonevent that is the Friendster phenomenon. The rest of the large players software industry (Oracle, SAP, IBM, etc.) have done things like
transition to a consulting and process improvement role
focus on applying big iron to make the incalculable calculable a la Google or IBM (e.g. LifeSciences)
focus on niche markets (small companies do this as well) Microsoft seems to be betting that these guys have missed something big in the general-app consumer or enterprise space.
The features they have planned for Longhorn are merely an huge extension of that bet. A well-executed enterprise-wide search/filesystem integration would indeed be a useful addition, but will hardly be a must-have in 2008, if the trend towards somewhat-on-the-corpnet machines like laptops and wireless PDA's persists.
If Longhorn succeeds, it will indeed propel the growth numbers that Microst projects. But it could very easily end up being a good product that's just not that relevant.
I think the real issue is paring down legacy servers that run some old flavor of Unix. Obviously if you're going to big a new badass app you aren't going to spec and deploy it on an emulation layer (even if SFU can make Windows system calls, it doesn't equal a full Unix OS) but for the 15 year-old paycheck-printing system you can't get rid of, decent Unix deployability on Windows might make you think twice about buying another Unix box just for that system.
It seems to me they've patented the trivial differences that they simply happened to implement first, by virtue of having made the patent application. This patent could make very hard to add things like grouping based on usage or other dynamic taskbar arrangement schemes. To my mind it's a pretty clear example of a "chilling effect" in the creative process. My investment in the subject is merely that I spent a decent bit of time thinking about that subject and mouthing off on the kde-usability list (the connection with things actually happening was always a little weak on that list).
But I guess as the developers, you and Mattias are the only ones with a truly legimate claim to be outraged.
Speaking of KDE, did anyone notice that a KDE mailing list thread from 1999 was referenced in the application? Having followed those lists during that time, I know that a lot of similar ideas were batting around the lists before this patent application was placed. In fact, KDE (3.0, I believe, or maybe even the 2.x series) came out with the taskbar grouping feature prior to the release of XP.
Given Microsoft's tight reign over any software development, I find it unlikely that the idea made it from MS to KDE prior to the release of the version of KDE that had it.
If two parties were independently developing the same idea at the same time, and arrived at it approximately the same time, does this mean the idea was obvious? Or was it simply a sort of zeitgeist - that's the kind of thing people in the field were thinking about at that time.
I have thought a bit about rationality question too, and the way I almost invariably put it together is this. People mostly do what makes sense to them at the time. For people with what society calls poor judgement, this can be disastrous, while for others, it generally works out in the wash - i.e., you may not have maximized your happiness with the choice you made at a particular time, but you kept moving in that general direction.
From the little I know of behavioral economics, its premise is not to take the step of trying for a rigid quantitative definition of "utility", but rather sticking with fuzzier (and often more subtle) ideas like what makes sense and how you feel. This seems very sensible to me - don't even bother trying to get quantitative until you have a deeper intuitive grasp of something.
The NYT magazine from the weekend before last had a fascinating article (now in the paid archive) on the notion that generally happy people are less nice to others than sad people. One particular passage observed that we in the States have an obsession with being happy - it's in our very Constitution. Perhaps, the author wordlessly suggests, the pursuit of happiness is to single-minded a goal? Worth thinking about when considering people's utility functions or their rationality.
Kudos to you for giving a thorough and articulate reply to a skeptic. I find it very convincing when someone is willing to honestly address doubts with the work they are doing.
I hate to be contentious, but could you cite some sources on this?
One of the things that drives me nuts about evolutionary biology is the constant invocation of "when we were cave men", the supposed activities that humans undertook, and the supposed division of these roles. I would be hard pressed to believe that the minimal fossil and other records that exist over the time spans can give the kind of details necessary to validate this explanation. If I'm incorrect, please point me to these records, and I'll happily reconsider this assertion.
AFAICT, the whole business of evolutionary biology is to create a logical explanation for various perceptions about human behavior. For example, you are building a logical framework for your perception that dudes like sex more than chicks. But there are scarcely even clear records now that indicate whether on average men or women "want sex more" (or whether the mean is a properly representative statistic). A thorough explanation must obviously consider the role of reporting of desire, and to do this you must consider the long-term socialization of women to be less direct about their sexuality (which is well documented). Doesn't that go a long way in modifying or obscuring any biological phenomena that might exist? And what about the tremendously varying levels of sexual desire observed among men as well as among women (e.g., Match.com thought this important enough to include in their personality profile test for matches).
I see the researchers in the article undertaking much of this same assumption:
By manipulating the odds of getting the drink and the size of the drink, he has shown that the rate at which these neurons fire is proportionate to the expected utility of the juice payoff. The implication is electrifying, especially to economists: an abstract, mathematically derived formula appears to be literally hard-wired into the primate brain.
Leaving aside the brilliance of being able to detect a single neuron firing, he made a plot of how often the neuron fired versus some external parameter that he then varied. Great science. He then inferred a mathemetical relationship governing the relationship between the parameter and the firing of the neuron and presumably fit that plot to estimate how well the data were represented by the equation he chose. Also well done science. But to then claim that the logical conclusion is that this relationship is "hard wired" into the monkey's brain is wildly speculative, sort of like measuring the probability that I will ride my bike today versus the dollars I could make doing it, and concluding that I have an economic equation hard-wired into my brain. This negates both free will and any subtlety. What if I just don't feel like riding today?
The brain scanning stuff is obviously a young field, so it's understandable that people want to advance theories to explain all this new stuff they're seeing, but it'd be nice to see a clearer representation of what the research says and what the research think might explain it.
Well, at least we've succeeded in taking them down temporarily via slashdotting. And you can count on this story appear 3 or 4 more times in the next couple days. Maybe we should just get Taco to run the story daily to shut these dudes down.
On the other hand (maybe I should have said OTOH, so the/bots can understand), it's a lot more money for a lot less work than other "Make Money Fast From Home" operations.
If you can run this for 2 hours an evening 8 times a month, $650 or $500 Euros doesn't seem so bad... Pardon me if I missed it in the article, but he only did runs every few days, and then he paid his housemates to pack em. It doesn't seem like a business that scales, but it's decent pocket change.
I've actually been very surprised that there's been so much fuss about lead levels in water (which if you look at the statics are actually close to old EPA standards), but little has been said about the tens of millions of dollar literally thrown down the drain on this DCPS PeopleSoft project.
Anyone who's had any substantial interaction with DCPS (I went to DCPS through college) knows that the system's administration is miles beyond incompetent (the system can't retain a superintendent for more than a year). This specifically includes the school board and the city council. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to undertake a complex, incredibly pricey ($25M in schools is a pile of mpney), all-or-nothing effort in a system nationally renowned for disorganization?
To me the underlying message is not only that strong leadership is needed for these kinds of projects, but also the scope of work needs to be hemmed in very tightly before any work is done.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a little confused by the difficulties you see in incrementally deploying a thin-client solution on an office with existing PC hardware. I'm also not sure what your requirements for your thin clients, but I'd be interested to find out.
/home/~user in the KDE session and My Documents in Windows, you can have both pointing at the same location. And because KDE/OOo/Linux have approximately zero license costs, you can test it on as many or as few users as makes sense, given the retraining and support efforts that would have to go into such a migration. FreeNX comes in as a way to minimize deployment effort and make sure users are logging in securely, while still not paying hefty license fees for WTS/RDP/each copy of Office that runs over RDP.
To my mind one of the most appealing things this server offers (with the addition of transparent Windows client software) allows is a gradual transition from a desktop Windows/MSOffice environment to a Linux/KDE/OOo environment, whether thin client, or desktop or both. By doing some mapping of
Now you've run a thin client shop and I haven't so I'm guessing that you've got some wisdom that I totally don't anticipate, so fire away.
While the sunrizen.com utility seems like it could be quite useful, I think it's much more limited in scope than what WinFS plans to be. As I understand it WinFS is essentially about trying to get a reasonable set of XML tags to store data in bits that are searchable semantically and reusable between different apps.
It's one thing to be able to search for a text string, or even to use metadata to search for audio, images, etc. It's another to be able to detect that a user has pasted a paragraph from a letter she wrote three weeks ago into an email, and link the email semantically to the letter, or track how that text moves and is modified through her correspondence and others in the organization. (Not sure WinFS will be able to do this, just trying to distinguish the scope of WinFS from just searching).
To me, the question is not whether MS can come up with a filesystem can do this, the question is whether anyone wants it. That is, does the market want to do this deep, sophisticated searching, or is it really in just a simple search interface to a good index of existing text, ala Google or this sunrizen business? That's what makes WinFS a big bet, not really the quality of the technology, which will be refined as necessary if people really implement it.
The other thing that makes me a little dubious of the necessity of WinFS is the fact that institutions have yet to really embrace weblogs, which have a similar ability to promote sharing memes but are built on simple technology. This is a "future of collaboration" technology, but so far in the institutional setting it's basically floundering. So either I'm missing some big space where WinFS is really crucial, or it's a bit of a boondoggle. Of course you've gotta bet all that money on something.
You have rightfully pointed out that the New York Times ran a story on the subject. I'm just encouraging you to look hard at how stories of this nature get to be stories. Think, for example, of the Abu Ghraib stories, particularly the ones by Seymour Hersh about the alleged "Coppergreen" program. Obviously Sy Hersh talked to a couple angry folks at State and CIA, and they mouthed off about some program they think exists. Do you believe the New Yorker story? I am definitely left of center, and have a low opinion of Donald Rumsfeld, but I'd be hard pressed to call Sy Hersh's story corroborated just because it makes damning claims about Rummy.
Given the Times' reputation as having high editorial standards, this means that some scenario like one of the following probably occurred in running the Oil-For-Food story you linked to:
a) the editor believed that this story has merit and asked Judith Miller to write about it
b) the editor was skeptical, but Judith Miller pushed for it
c) neither the reporter nor the editor thought the story was really that important, but one or both felt they had to cover it in case it became big news.
Now I don't work for the Times and I presume you don't, so we don't know which, if any of the above scenarios resulted in the Times covering the story. My point, as with Sy Hersh's allegations, is twofold. One is that any given story has a set of decisions behind it regarding why it ran, and people pushing for an angle, so it's rarely the unvarnished truth. The second is that while a story can quote a wide variety of people, the reporter may or may not have been able to directly verify the claims being made by any of the parties.
If you read the story you sent me closely, I think it's a pretty good example of this phenomenon. There are quite a few quotes from high UN officials saying they think the program was poorly run and could well have had the alleged problems, but there's no single quote from any of them affirming the charges. There's also a long section detail how ripe the program was for corruption, but in the final reckoning, only Mr. Volcker and Mr. Chalabi known what's in the records, and they are disclosing them yet.
The most direct evidence provided in the story is:
That seems pretty credible to me, but it's still not exactly on the record - the source of the documents is not named, and to my knowledge none of the companies allegedly blackmailed in this way spoke with the Times reporters.
Look, in the long run, I'm not really disputing that the UN handled the program poorly, or even that there was corruption (given what bastards Hussein and his ministers were, I'd say all claims are pretty plausible). I'm just troubled at how the claims of a few people can bypass close scrutiny by getting a loud airing in the media. In the case of the Iraq war, I do honestly believe that key players in the Pentagon and CIA allowed themselves to be fooled by Ahmed Chalabi.
I know this post is long, but let me add one more thought. The left has made a two-decade-long mistake in abdicating a clear-eyed geopolitical view in favor of shrill claims about how bad the baddies are, and it's a mistake the right (at least the neo-cons) unfortunately seems to have picked up. Iraq is indeed a linchpin to the Middle East ("the road to Jerusalem", etc), but it is simply too complicated to remedy with a quick in-and-out mission by troops with minimal training in necessities of occupation like language, customs, or local politics. We've botched this war because we rushed it, and that's due, at least in part, to believing unverified claims.
If you're really interested (or even still awake), here's a blog post I wrote about this a while back.
I would hardly call Claudia Rosette "freelance" considering that she works for the Hudson Institute, which shilled for the Neo-Wrongs and generally played boosters for the tremendously successful Iraq war. A neo-con think tank like Hudson is an utter failure if it can't plant stories in at least the WSJ and the NRO (indeed that's where it was initially run). In her latest article at the Hudson Institute's website Rosette admits that only Ahmed Chalabi has the documents with the supposed evidence and 4 months later he still won't show them to anybody. Of course it's hard for him find time to get those documents to Rosette what with all palling around with and debriefing the Iran intelligence services in Tehran. Rosette tries to tiptoe away from having been Chalabi'd by making reference to other mysterious "confidential documents the UN is socking away" and to the neo-con picked Duelfer's testimony, without any specific knowledge of the supposed UN documents or where Duelfer got his own info. C'mon man, hasn't this country been fooled enough times by Chalabi's claims?
I have no love for the UN, but I don't think we need a naive conspiracy theory to see why France and Russia didn't want to knock out Saddam:
a) it wasn't in their economic or military interests
b) it was a bad war to get into. Iraq has been the straw that breaks the camel's back for years now, and to try to get right in the middle of it with no real regional or international support was asking for a quagmire, and France and Russia knew it
c) France is big baby in international affairs (mainly it's trying to hang out to some semblance of being a relevant player)
The answer is not to come out with some more Chalabi-promulgated nonsense to try to show that they're in on some global fraud, and it certainly isn't to insert ourselves into the middle of a regional hornet's nest.
I followed that thread with a lot of interest, and I believe the poster who said that MS is just really good at optimizing apps. I think the preloading "myth" may have to do with the shortcut to Office that appears in C:\Documents and Settings\Start Menu\Startup after installing Office. If this isn't a preloader for Office, what is it?
Very well put. A license is like a contract - it establishes the contractual terms under which the licensees may use the licensed software.
Courts do not make the laws which govern contracts in general, so it seems unlikely to me that they would "invalidate" the GPL in general. The court may well establish case law about how enforceable the GPL is, but AFAIK (and IANAL) they do not have the authority to "invalidate" it.
Page 61 of the report says:
Using your definition of "contact" and "connection" Donald Rumsfeld himself is clearly in on the putative al Qaeda-Iraq network formed from these "contacts" and "connections".
If you met with someone who slept with my wife and perhaps even discussed infidelity, would I have have cause to attack you because of the "connection" between you and the adulterer?
Not that I think that there weren't legitimate reasons for a well-planned attack on Saddam, but I hate this use of vague language to avoid having to a call a spade a spade: we attacked Saddam Hussein because we didn't like what he was doing in Iraq. It didn't have the slightest bit to do with any realistic threats to the US.
Brilliant post, both your analysis of Saddam's options and the idea of spending some real money and effort on Afghanistan.
However, I'm not really sure that investing in Afghanistan would have a clear result in the Middle East because Afghans are not Arabs. The promising place for Arab democracy is North Africa. They are culturally connected to both the Arab world in the Middle East and to the West. Many of them have some semblances of democracy that could be helped along with economic and trade stimulus and other more forceful encouragements as necessary. Moving from Morocco east through Algeira, Tunisia, Libya and maybe to Egypt we could help build a swath of Arabic-speaking democracies friendly to the West, some of which have oil and could thus reduce our dependence on Saudi Arabian oil. A block of stable Arabic democracies, particularly if it included Egypt would help defuse the Israel security situation and lower the risk of war in the Gulf. Having Qaddafi come clean was a vast step in this direction, and has unfortunately been largely left aside to try to fight the Iraq fire.
Another thing that most discussions of Iraq leave out is what a realistic policy would have been. As you correctly state, the sanctions had Saddam pretty well contained. But it's clear that the apparatus of the state was falling apart. If Saddam had fallen under his own weight, we'd still have had a security situation to deal with.
The main problem with invading Iraq in my mind wasn't so much the wrongheaded and misleading justifications but the approach (too fast, too furious). Iraq is the either the hardest or second-hardest country in the region to bring to stability. Perhaps we could have warmed up a bit first, taught our sergeants and captains a bit of Arabic first before sending them into to face the really big challenge?
All of the roots of the current Iraq fiasco involve the NATO powers and the Muslim world.
During the Cold War, our strategy was to oppose Soviet incursions (direct or indirect) by supporting and arming those who we believed opposed our enemy. While the strategy worked in some ways, it had other very nasty side effects, among them the fact that these West-hating fundamentalists and other Arab equivalents of black-helicopter militias have easier access to weapons than they might otherwise have had. The fact that Iraq is ready to disintegrate into its component ethnic enclaves goes right back to its creation as a state in 1921. As you correctly say, al-Qaeda owes its existence to deep-pocketed Saudi oil barons funded by the world's love of cheap energy.
As for your charges that the was some great corruption scandal in the UN oil-for-food program, note that these charges are based on documents held by Ahmed Chalabi (who is wanted by both Jordan and the Iraqi provisional government for various kinds of fraud). Chalabi has refused to show these documents to any outsiders, including the press. They're about as reliable as the pictures of mobile bioweapons labs shown to the UN.
Something else that
follows right along with this. The threat that Iraq or al-Qaeda would be able to launch ICBM attacks or drop a Fat Man type weapon on the US or Europe is vanishingly small. Technically what politicians are calling "mass destruction" means 1000-5000 people dead and a lot of mayhem and fear. The real, on-the-ground threat was that Saddam armed with regional-scale nukes could well have launched a regional war that would have brought world oil production to a screeching halt. This is a serious threat, but it's hard to see how knocking out Saddam without a clear plan towards stability made any progress towards mitigating that risk.
We should be taking a variety of measures to stop threats from terrorists (including a lot more work securing ports and the electrical grid), but the notion that baddies can build a nuke in their basement is pretty ridiculous.
1) SCO received those emails under a court order.
Does anyone know if it's legal to base a second claim on documents obtained through discovery of a first claim if the first claim turns out to be without merit? That is, can you file one claim that allows you to do discovery and then file a raft of subsequent claims?
It does seem very strange that IBM would be basing such a massive portion of its business on unlicensed software when that license or hell, the whole company could have been acquired for a relatively modest sum. I'll be very curious to see what IBM's response to this is.
Genius, pure genius. It's been a long time since anyone's said anything this savvy on
I also disagree with the parent on consumers rejoicing. The cellphone industry is extremely poorly regulated and has a history of abusing consumers. The fact that they are able to force the manufacturers into an overcompetive market spells doom for us peons. I would much rather have to pay another 50-100 bucks for my phone and avoid the lock-in to aggressive contracts, misleading advertising and customer disservice that is the current cellphone industry.
I hate to fall into the any-statement-against-Linux-is-FUD category, but this really is a poorly written and research claim.
Mr. O'Dowd claims - without reference to any data, or even Gartner studies - that Windows is "more secure" than Linux, which is specious enough when there are data. He suggests that foreign agents could easily place backdoors into Linux, without any particulars of where they'd plausibly be planted, or why such backdoors would not be addressed by a security review.
Mr. O'Dowd also offers no reason why proprietary software isn't vulnerable to the same kind of infiltration, especially since programming work is increasingly Worse yet, code written by somebody infiltrating a proprietary software house would generally subject to less scrutiny than that submitted to an open source project, because they would already implicitly trusted.
On the other hand, because Open Source projects regularly deal with unknown contributors, most of them have formal or informal mechanism to get to know potential submittors. If some massive patch arrives at Linus' doorstep from some unknown contributor, he's not likely to just merge it into the main kernel tree, rather he'd find out more about the contributo or pass the code around for careful review. Note that this is quite aside from the "many eyeballs" theory, which AFAICT hasn't really been verified one way or the other.
There's a meaningful answer. That Firefox nonsense was only useful in that it deflected the usual Micro$oft $ux vitriol into "what a stupid conspiracy" vitriol. If you look at the businesses that Microsoft owns, only one of them is involved in content production. In fact, the content that MSN's homepage buys is not even similar in subject matter or tone to Slate (or quality, I should add) - it's a totally different market. It's always been sorta of an orphan, mainly built as a hedge against AOL's acquisition of Time-Warner. As long as they're cleaning house, it makes perfect sense to sell off operations outside their core competencies.
Yes, that is a very interesting question. My brother was remarking this morning that he thinks MSN really missed the boat by not buying an AP wire feed like Yahoo did. Of course he's a journalist, so he reads the wires like geeks read
This is perhaps the first debate I've seen which even begins to touch the "hidden" questions about taxation, skipping the well-worn "should we tax more or less" to ask how do we tax most effectively.
Of course there's always room for a debate on any particularly government expenditure, tax, or lack of tax. But there's rarely any public debate of making major reforms to the structure of taxation in this country: individual versus business, sales vs. income tax (both for individuals and businesses), payroll taxes vs. mandatory accounts, etc., that doesn't get muddied and stuck in more-vs-less.
For example, the point that individuals are taxed on all their income, while business are taxed only on income net of expenses raises a lot of opportunities for new debates, as does the notion that a 10 (or 15 or 20) percent flat tax on various business transaction might well make companies more effective at delivering certain products and services. Perhaps individual should be taxed on income net of expenses? If you're serious about abolishing corporations, what are a real estimates of the price of goods and the creation of jobs?
I sure would love to see these questions hashed out on the national stage rather simply hearing the tired mantras about more-tax-is-needed, less-tax-is-needed.
While the sitting on the hands question is a fair one, the proper answer is not a commercial - you'll never raise enough money to reach more than a thousand or tens of thousands of people - but media "scandal seeding".
1) Write one or more versions of a news story (many, many stories in the media are dropped in essentially as they were delivered to the media). Hopefully this includes a "human interest angle", like Grandma Sally being redirected goatse.cx or giving up her CC number to ch.ase.com. Use only a minimal of substantive or technical details to avoid people who don't want to think through them. Yes, this is doing reporters' work for them, but that's how you get stuff in circulation when you're outside the loop.
2) Call (email might work, but probably not as well) the editors of Style/Living/Consumer Affairs pages of newspapers and TV stations and pitch em the story. Again, this is reporter work, but it gets the story in the news.
3) Lather, rinse, repeat. Fan the flames by providing more juicy details with human interest angles - disgruntled MS employee, evidence that problem is far wider than acknowledge "they don't want to you to know this...", speculations about apocalyptic collapses of the economy. Involve porn to feed the public's prurient side. Modify the story a bit for consumption by other stations/papers/etc as it evolves.
This is how most political scandals evolve - someone plants the story and fans the flames for a week or two in the public gets tired of it. To do real damage, you sync the stories with lulls in other news and cycles of public mood.
Microsoft has spent the last two or three years casting around looking for the next "killer app" in the enterprise desktop and consumer spaces - MSN, XBox, DRM,
The features they have planned for Longhorn are merely an huge extension of that bet. A well-executed enterprise-wide search/filesystem integration would indeed be a useful addition, but will hardly be a must-have in 2008, if the trend towards somewhat-on-the-corpnet machines like laptops and wireless PDA's persists.
If Longhorn succeeds, it will indeed propel the growth numbers that Microst projects. But it could very easily end up being a good product that's just not that relevant.
I think the real issue is paring down legacy servers that run some old flavor of Unix. Obviously if you're going to big a new badass app you aren't going to spec and deploy it on an emulation layer (even if SFU can make Windows system calls, it doesn't equal a full Unix OS) but for the 15 year-old paycheck-printing system you can't get rid of, decent Unix deployability on Windows might make you think twice about buying another Unix box just for that system.
Are you bothered by this patent? I certainly am.
It seems to me they've patented the trivial differences that they simply happened to implement first, by virtue of having made the patent application. This patent could make very hard to add things like grouping based on usage or other dynamic taskbar arrangement schemes. To my mind it's a pretty clear example of a "chilling effect" in the creative process. My investment in the subject is merely that I spent a decent bit of time thinking about that subject and mouthing off on the kde-usability list (the connection with things actually happening was always a little weak on that list).
But I guess as the developers, you and Mattias are the only ones with a truly legimate claim to be outraged.
Speaking of KDE, did anyone notice that a KDE mailing list thread from 1999 was referenced in the application? Having followed those lists during that time, I know that a lot of similar ideas were batting around the lists before this patent application was placed. In fact, KDE (3.0, I believe, or maybe even the 2.x series) came out with the taskbar grouping feature prior to the release of XP.
Given Microsoft's tight reign over any software development, I find it unlikely that the idea made it from MS to KDE prior to the release of the version of KDE that had it.
If two parties were independently developing the same idea at the same time, and arrived at it approximately the same time, does this mean the idea was obvious? Or was it simply a sort of zeitgeist - that's the kind of thing people in the field were thinking about at that time.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
I have thought a bit about rationality question too, and the way I almost invariably put it together is this. People mostly do what makes sense to them at the time. For people with what society calls poor judgement, this can be disastrous, while for others, it generally works out in the wash - i.e., you may not have maximized your happiness with the choice you made at a particular time, but you kept moving in that general direction.
From the little I know of behavioral economics, its premise is not to take the step of trying for a rigid quantitative definition of "utility", but rather sticking with fuzzier (and often more subtle) ideas like what makes sense and how you feel. This seems very sensible to me - don't even bother trying to get quantitative until you have a deeper intuitive grasp of something.
The NYT magazine from the weekend before last had a fascinating article (now in the paid archive) on the notion that generally happy people are less nice to others than sad people. One particular passage observed that we in the States have an obsession with being happy - it's in our very Constitution. Perhaps, the author wordlessly suggests, the pursuit of happiness is to single-minded a goal? Worth thinking about when considering people's utility functions or their rationality.
Mod this up!
Kudos to you for giving a thorough and articulate reply to a skeptic. I find it very convincing when someone is willing to honestly address doubts with the work they are doing.
One of the things that drives me nuts about evolutionary biology is the constant invocation of "when we were cave men", the supposed activities that humans undertook, and the supposed division of these roles. I would be hard pressed to believe that the minimal fossil and other records that exist over the time spans can give the kind of details necessary to validate this explanation. If I'm incorrect, please point me to these records, and I'll happily reconsider this assertion.
AFAICT, the whole business of evolutionary biology is to create a logical explanation for various perceptions about human behavior. For example, you are building a logical framework for your perception that dudes like sex more than chicks. But there are scarcely even clear records now that indicate whether on average men or women "want sex more" (or whether the mean is a properly representative statistic). A thorough explanation must obviously consider the role of reporting of desire, and to do this you must consider the long-term socialization of women to be less direct about their sexuality (which is well documented). Doesn't that go a long way in modifying or obscuring any biological phenomena that might exist? And what about the tremendously varying levels of sexual desire observed among men as well as among women (e.g., Match.com thought this important enough to include in their personality profile test for matches).
I see the researchers in the article undertaking much of this same assumption:
Leaving aside the brilliance of being able to detect a single neuron firing, he made a plot of how often the neuron fired versus some external parameter that he then varied. Great science. He then inferred a mathemetical relationship governing the relationship between the parameter and the firing of the neuron and presumably fit that plot to estimate how well the data were represented by the equation he chose. Also well done science. But to then claim that the logical conclusion is that this relationship is "hard wired" into the monkey's brain is wildly speculative, sort of like measuring the probability that I will ride my bike today versus the dollars I could make doing it, and concluding that I have an economic equation hard-wired into my brain. This negates both free will and any subtlety. What if I just don't feel like riding today?
The brain scanning stuff is obviously a young field, so it's understandable that people want to advance theories to explain all this new stuff they're seeing, but it'd be nice to see a clearer representation of what the research says and what the research think might explain it.
Well, at least we've succeeded in taking them down temporarily via slashdotting. And you can count on this story appear 3 or 4 more times in the next couple days. Maybe we should just get Taco to run the story daily to shut these dudes down.
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On the other hand (maybe I should have said OTOH, so the /bots can understand), it's a lot more money for a lot less work than other "Make Money Fast From Home" operations.
If you can run this for 2 hours an evening 8 times a month, $650 or $500 Euros doesn't seem so bad... Pardon me if I missed it in the article, but he only did runs every few days, and then he paid his housemates to pack em. It doesn't seem like a business that scales, but it's decent pocket change.
I've actually been very surprised that there's been so much fuss about lead levels in water (which if you look at the statics are actually close to old EPA standards), but little has been said about the tens of millions of dollar literally thrown down the drain on this DCPS PeopleSoft project.
Anyone who's had any substantial interaction with DCPS (I went to DCPS through college) knows that the system's administration is miles beyond incompetent (the system can't retain a superintendent for more than a year). This specifically includes the school board and the city council. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to undertake a complex, incredibly pricey ($25M in schools is a pile of mpney), all-or-nothing effort in a system nationally renowned for disorganization?
To me the underlying message is not only that strong leadership is needed for these kinds of projects, but also the scope of work needs to be hemmed in very tightly before any work is done.