Let me guess - you're an average developer, right?
I daresay I've seen (and written) a lot more code than you have.
The core of Windows is rock-solid, hmm? There's so much evidence against that, I won't even bother feeding you. Crawl back under your bridge.
And of course, the fact that anyone who feels like it can modify any part of the Linux or *BSD kernels they want, or any part of the subsystems they want, or any part of KDE, GNOME, etc., they want hasn't prevented all of those systems from being far more solid and secure than Windows.
Keep in mind that if I should patch my kernel in such a way that it becomes unstable, the only person who suffers is me, and all I have to do is reboot and pick a different kernel from my list in GRUB, or if necessary, use GRUB shell code to tell it at the command line which one to boot. No one is going to let me commit that unstable patch, and even if they do, it's not going to be accepted into the kernel. The same would be true if Windows were open-sourced.
But of course, you're such a _MORON_ that basic points like that utterly elude you.
Well, he doesn't suggest MSFT should or will open-source Windows "at this time." He suggests they will have to at some future point, and he makes some excellent points in TFA. I think he may well be right, and I used to work at Microsoft, so I know full well how hard it would be to turn that particular oil tanker.
Why open source and not freeware? Making it freeware would remove just as much revenue from the stream as open-sourcing it would, but it would leave both the entire support burden and the entire development burden on Microsoft. Compare that to the Linux model, where support and development (especially support) are very strongly community-oriented. Sure, there are companies paying kernel developers and some other developers, but there are plenty of developers in that ecosystem who contribute much or all of their time for free. Most of them, in fact. Nearly all Linux-support is community-based.
I'm not suggesting that open-sourcing Windows would alter the Windows ecosystem to the point where it would be just like the Linux ecosystem, but it would move somewhat in that direction. Look at all the buzz that OpenSolaris has generated for Sun. I would not be surprised to see Microsoft pursue a substantially identical strategy in the future. OpenWindows, anyone?
Developers already do everything they need to in Windows without seeing the source code? Yeah, riiiiiiiiiiight. They do everything they're *allowed* to do, not everything they need or want.
Speaking of developers, the people who you say are the only ones who should care about open source (I disagree, there are very strong reasons why everyone should care, but those aren't necessarily relevant here, so I'll leave that), one of the main points TFA makes is that it will be necessary to open-source Windows in some form to retain developer mindshare among the over 6 million independent developers who develop for the Windows platform. Open source software is already making inroads there, and will continue to do so. If Microsoft were to open-source not only Windows but much or all of its development environment, that could go a long way to holding those developers to the Windows platform. Why do this? To keep Windows a viable platform for the Microsoft products that (it hopes) will continue to make a lot of money.
Of course, one of those may find its revenue-producing ability reduced to the point where they might as well open-source it or make it freeware: MS Office. If they don't, they'll have to cut the price to a small fraction of what they currently get. Google Docs on one side and OpenOffice.org on the other will prove themselves good enough for most people. At least good enough that paying hundreds of dollars for MS Office will not make sense.
What will they make money on, then? Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc. Enterprise products that enterprises will pay for. However, that requires a strong OS ecosystem, something open-sourcing Windows would encourage. Or they can give up on the Windows franchise and sell versions of those products to run on Unix, Linux, and a Windows server product and basically exit the desktop OS business. That would make a lot of sense, but having worked there, I believe they're rather do anything - even open-source Windows - than do that.
Could be a little harden than you think, at least for a company that might not be used to all the customs rigamarole. Like you, I think they should. I believe in using Free Software to the greatest extend possible, but if you're going to use a proprietary product, it should be properly licensed. I, myself, have very little proprietary software. Even on my wife's Mac I use Free software where I can, but if I do choose a proprietary application (most recently SuperDuper), I pay the license fee.
However, if they find themselves unwilling or truly unable to do so because of pervasive local practices, there's likely to be little downside to it. The BSA has no teeth in China, AFAIK does not operate there, and I have never heard of anyone being sued, much less arrested, for using pirated software anywhere in China or SE Asia. That day will come, when China reaches sufficient prosperity, but for now, Microsoft is not only turning a blind eye to rampant and blatant software piracy in that part of the world (as do pretty much all the MSFT competitors), but they are tacitly encouraging it. Why? They'd rather have hundreds of millions of people pirate their software until they can or will pay for it, rather than have those people install Linux instead.
You are, to some extent, talking about creating two different things: public domain Vs. GPLed.
If you release something to the public domain, I (or anyone) is perfectly free to take it and make a proprietary version which may or may not be fully compatible with the PD version.
If you release it under the GPL, it's very difficult for someone to do that without violating the license.
That said, you need to talk to a good intellectual property lawyer, not Slashdot. You'll only get one shot at doing this so that it comes out the way you want, and a good lawyer's guidance through the process will make your success a lot more likely.
"Whichever China prefers?" While I haven't lived in China, I did live in a country right next to China, and I know that what is preferred there is a disc full of pirated software for about a buck. Even for computers in government offices. I doubt things are much different in China.
In that country, if someone had told me I had three days to find a legit copy of Windows and MS Office, I would have been pretty hard up. My only reliable source would have been to ping somebody I knew at a major foreign company and ask them to burn me a copy of their legit CDs (thus, of course, making it pirated, but as close to legit as I could get). A legit copy of Windows or MS Office wasn't something a person could just walk into a computer store and buy. If they sold software, it was pirated. That's just the way it was. Amusingly, it was really hard to find Linux or other Free software there, even though they could legally copy it. I only knew one or two shops that sold any Linux CDs.
That was in 2002 and 2003; I doubt it's changed any, except Linux might be a little more common there now.
It would be truly hard to fire the staff for using the only kind of software they can get. To make them legal would probably require sending it all to them from the US office.
Not to mention that IT staff normally do not have the authority to fire anyone for policy violations and it may not even be legal to fire someone in China for using pirated software. Have them sued or arrested for it? In China? BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Wait, let me guess. You work for the BSA, don't you?:)
You think I'm a troll? You mods obviously aren't involved in the email security industry and have never been a postmaster. And/or you're S. Korean and can't face the truth about the amount of spam that pours out of your country. That does not, however, make my comment any less true.
The only way to get it past the filter (at least if your filter is any good, such as, for example, the anti-phishing ruleset I maintain for a living) is to not send it through the filter, and probably the DOJ didn't. I would expect they sent it from an internal account to all employees, thus bypassing any spam filters. In most networks, the spam filtering takes place near the network edge, just inside the firewall, on inbound (and sometimes outbound) mail streams. Internal mail is not routed through a spam filter in most environments, although my experience indicates that sometimes it ought to be.
Just what we need, a whole nation of bots on 1 gbps connections.
Granted, S. Korea isn't quite the spam sewer it was in, say, 2000, but it's still bad enough that if you don't need to receive mail from there, you're better off refusing all traffic from S. Korea.
Thank you for that very good analysis. My wife and I recently had our third child, and after analyzing all those factors, decided not to save the cord blood. You described our analysis procedure in weighing cost Vs. benefit far more succinctly and accurately than I could have.
Our other children are ages 6 and 5 and completely healthy. When they were born, cord blood storage either was unavailable, or was at least unavailable in the third-world ^H^H^H uh, "Developing" nation where they were both born. With the third one, when taking all factors (including two previous children in perfect health and no relevant family history on either side) we decided that it was not a good use of money.
Well, no, it's not. Vista was under development for over five years before it was released, which puts it back a lot farther in time than KDE 4. Granted, they have rather little to show for five years of development effort, but the statement that Vista copied Oxygen is whack. One of the things I like least about KDE 4 is the Oxygen theme, particularly because it resembles Vista, which I also find to be fugly. They should have copied the look of OS X, or even of KDE 3.5, if they were going to clone something.
Copying Vista is like being a mad scientist who builds a girl and could make her look like anything in the world and chooses Broom Hilda as his model.
Yes, KDE should have a Mac-style dock. There's a reason why there are so many dock clones out there, and why people put effort into making their Linux desktops Mac-like in appearance and behavior: Apple has some great UI designers and themers and they have, in most respects, produced the best desktop environment out there. That doesn't mean OS X perfect - there's a reason why my only Mac is a notebook but my home server, home workstation, and work workstation are all Linux boxes, too - but its GUI gets top marks for consistency, functionality, and good design. For example, to bring up the prefs in any OS X app, all I have to do is hit Command+, on a Mac. Even within KDE, there's nothing that out of the box simple for bringing up app prefs, and if you mix in apps from GNOME, XFCE, plain old X apps, etc, it gets even less predictable.
There's a lot that could be borrowed from the Apple playbook to improve Linux desktops, and yes, even some things from the Windows playbook, although most of the good ideas there have already been mined.
The world is a big place, with much of it having poor or no Internet connectivity. The majority of all adults? In North America, Europe, and some other places, maybe. Lots of people in Africa without email. Lots in Asia without email, too. If it's the majority, it's a pretty small majority.
The substitution effect was already starting in 1996, even if it was small. When was the last time a Comdex keynote speaker made a prediction that wasn't already well known to people who were watching?
WRT "The Road Ahead" that prediction was already pretty much fulfilled in 1995. The VCR had long been letting people watch when it was convenient. Catalog order shopping was, of course, long established, and lots of businesses were selling on the web in 1995. I bought a complete Micron desktop system online in early 1995 and had it shipped all the way to Japan. The cost of shipping was still way less than the cost of buying locally in Tokyo in those days. That was my first Pentium machine and my first Windows 95 machine. I later installed Windows 95-J on it in place of the English version it came with.
In late 1995 or early 1996, I had a Geocities page in the Tokyo neighborhood, and I was hardly an early adopter of that. The "publish information for others to use" was another prediction that had already happened before he wrote it. Lots of stuff was out there on BBSes and predecessors of the WWW (Gopher, for instance) long before Gates wrote "The Road Ahead."
Even at the time it was published, "The Road Ahead" wasn't consdidered very prophetic, since so much of what it covered had either already happened or was already being worked on. The only people who were impressed by that book were people far enough away from the industry to not realize that it really wasn't very revelatory.
And tablet PCs? Heck, those are still a niche market and a relative rarity. I work for a company of >60,000 employees, and there are probably 600 in my building. Very, very few of those employees have tablet PCs, and AFAICT, no one in my building.
I did have one when I worked for Microsoft, though. It was a company-issue Toshiba Tecra M4, and it was a piece of crap. It was crappy in general, being a Toshiba laptop after all (apologies to a close friend of mine who works for Toshiba; I love a lot of their electronics, but their laptops generally suck), and the tablet stuff was especially crappy. I couldn't stand to use it and it tended to crash XP when I did.
Assuming that's lawful, the impact on morale is probably a lot worse than the impact from layoffs. Layoffs are devastating for the ones laid off and make the survivors nervous, but at the same time, the survivors are glad to have survived and still have a job. If everyone gets a pay cut, many will feel less inclined to work hard. Plus, a pay cut is likely to cause your *most* qualified people to leave, because they can get a new job at a good salary in any job market. That is exactly the opposite of what you want in difficult financial circumstances.
I used to work at Microsoft and pinged a former co-worker of mine today. He said that some contractors have not been renewed, but so far all the blue badges are safe, at least in the part of the company he's in/I was in.
Microsoft is a ferociously competitive place, I'm not sure if there is 5000 headcount of dead or marginal wood there or not. One place some cuts could probably be made, though, is in middle management. Microsoft has a buttload of middle managers. Unfortunately, the one I'd most like to see laid off already left voluntarily last year:p
All torture on Cuban soil in this millennium has been done by American hands? Apart from that being an insupportable statement (there's no way you,or anyone, could possibly prove it), it's also highly unlikely to be true.
The Cuban government, like totalitarian governments everywhere, keeps political prisoners. Even their normal jail conditions would probably constitute something pretty close to torture by our standards, without even delving into what they do there.
That doesn't mean I support our current Cuba policy - I don't, and have long considered it foolish when we have normal diplomatic relations with totalitarian governments all over the world, including communist ones, and including communist ones with which we have engaged in shooting wars. Throughout the Cold War, we maintained full diplomatic relations with the USSR. Up until our entry into World War II, we maintained diplomatic relations with Germany, Italy, and Japan. There is no rational reason to maintain this policy towards Cuba.
Why, then, do we do so? Because of the disproportionate political influence of Cuban-Americans, particularly in Florida. OK, for no reason that would appear rational to anyone but a politician:p
Here in California, there are within the Vietnamese community a strong general dislike of communism and a small but vociferous hardcore anti-communist movement which still dreams of the overthrow of the communist government in Viet Nam. The government pays about as much attention to that movement (if you can even call it that) than do I, which is to say none whatsoever. I'm aware of its existence and I notice the old RVN flags that some people still fly on flagpoles in their front yards, but I pay no attention. Why is it so different with the Cuban community and their anti-communists? The communist takeover in Cuba happened a lot longer ago, and yet people seem to care about it so much more.
It's time we stop caring about communism in Cuba, restore diplomatic relations, and get on with it. All we're doing in the meantime is denying a market to US business and tourism. However, to state tht the only torture being done in Cuba is being done by Americans is ridiculous.
Yeah, my brother used to work at a company run by a Kelly. He survived many rounds of layoffs where the asshats like "Doug" were the ones who stuck around. Finally, he quit to take a position with a competitor and now makes more money and works for a nice, well-run privately held company with no VC backing - the owner is the owner, period, and he's a good guy.
As for me, while I'm no longer working in a management position (I did at my previous employer but am pretty happy as an individual contributor right now), if "Doug" had come into my office with a speech like that, I would have made up my mind right then and there who was being laid off, and it sure wouldn't have been "Stuart." Of course, slimebags like "Doug" probably only make that speech to people who they know will be swayed by it. Backstabbers are usually fairly good readers of people. I'm very happy I don't work in a company like that, and also that while my employer does have a hiring freeze on, salaries have not been frozen, and the CEO has publicly stated that there are no plans for layoffs and they will try very, very hard to avoid making any.
I understand the multiple monitors thing on operating systems which don't have decent native support for virtual desktops (which these days, pretty much means Windows, unless Vista does that. I've never tried Vista, so I don't know), but I've never been able to see the attraction - other than the cool factor - on systems that do virtual desktops.
I have two monitors at work, and have dabbled with using a second monitor on my MacBook Pro, but I found it to be 75% distraction and 25% useless geegaw. Virtual desktops work much better. I do run Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu) on my desktop, but I've never even bothered to try dual monitors, but I'll take your word for it that it doesn't work well. Wouldn't surprise me.
But, I'd like to understand your business case/preference/whatever for wanting multiple monitors instead of virtual desktops. What does two monitors get you that 12 (the number of desktops I run) doesn't?
Part 1: I decide if I think you're an asshole. If I think so, you won't pass the interview, no matter how great your technical chops are.
Part 2: I decided if I like you. If I do, you may advance to the shortlist, if you meet the other requirements of the job. If I don't, you probably won't make the short list, but you won't be immediately washed out the way you would be if you failed Part 1.
While I'm being funny-but-serious here, personality fit is so important to building a good team that I do seriously recommend this short but simple test.
It must have been good for their bottom line or they wouldn't have done it, I suppose. I appreciate your frustration, having had my Geocities page mothballed by Yahoo, but as people have noted, the EULA does say they can do that. Plus, Yahoo did give plenty of notice that they were going to do it.
What bugs me more, actually, is that my old Geocities page is *still* there, as it was in 1997 (yeah, I know, it didn't get mothballed until much later, but I wasn't updating it often). Amusingly, the web counter still displays, although it no longer increments. I'd like to go back and remove it, but there doesn't seem to be any provision for that. Oh well. Life goes on. That page may outlive me, heh.
No, I was definitely there in 2K2-2K3, and made a short trip back for a vacation in the fall of 2004. I'll drop you an email so we can stop communicating through/.
I hear you on that cultural thing. My (VNese) wife has no interest in computers other than the apps. She doesn't really care at all about the underlying OS, and long had the only Windows machine in our house. After it died, I replaced it with a MacBook Pro and she's quite happy with it and likely wouldn't go back to Windows. I would have chosen Linux, but one of her core apps is Yahoo Messenger and voice and video are a must, which rules out basically any Linux IM solution.
There was another foreigner involved with VietLUG back when I was there, Andy something, and he was in Saigon at the time. We got to dinner at a brew pub once with some local VNese Linux users, but it was a very small group. As you say, VietLUG is made up mostly of Viet Kieu.
Interestingly, one area where there does seem to be some kind of hacker culture is robotics. I lived in Japan for 8 years, and every years there's some robotics competition, and for three years running while I was there, some team from a VNese university won the competition. Of course, it could just be that robotics are big at that school. I'm not into them myself, so I never checked to see how many ordinary people might be into that sort of thing.
I lived and worked in Viet Nam as well (2003), and while I did see some computers running Linux there, they were all in the hands of individuals, except for a couple of LAN servers I did admin work on (one at my employer, another at one of our customers).
At the time I was there, two things about most computers in government office were very noticeable: 1) They were really old, and 2) Many of them were running Windows 9x, not 2000 or XP. Getting from there to modernity is probably easier with Linux, especially considering that licensed copies of Windows aren't exactly thick on the ground in VN. The whole time I was there, I only saw three Windows machines that I was sure had licensed copies, and those were three brand new Compaqs that I installed fresh from the box, paid for by Japanese ODA. Amazing that they weren't Japanese PCs, considering the source of the funds. Even more amazing that the only Japanese products on that project were some wireless routers (802.11B WAN product made for outdoor point to point use; our longest hop was around 5 km IIRC, using parabolic antennas).
KPLUG, huh? I'm from San Diego, too, but live in the Bay Area now. I'm from the Montgomery Field area, too, have been to a few KPUG meetings in 2003 before I took a job out of town. Me may have crossed paths in real life at some point.
I'm own the anti-phishing rules at a well-known email security company, and while I agree with the principle that over-phishing is causing problems, as it does with fishing (although as with phishing, the best phishers are catching a lot more phish than the worst pishers), I don't think very many people are doing much more to protect their information. What does seem to happen, though, is that - just as with fish that see lures dragged in front of them all day long - people are coming to think everything is a fraud (I see legit bank emails reported as phishing all the time). Some of them, anyway. I also see a lot of correspondence threads in which people have already handed over money to 419ers or are preparing to do so.
And of course, phishers are also diversifying somewhat. Earlier this year, account credential phishing became popular. The goal: not immediate financial reward via account plunder, but to get access to a legit login on a host with a good email reputation for the purpose of either using it to send fraudulent email, or using it to send regular spam for hire.
Financial losses continue to be high, and I'm not convinced that the 3.2 billion figure is off by a factor of 50, even if it might be on the high side. But earnings by the theoretical average phisher? Yeah, they've got to be off. There are so many phishers these days, so many people are deluged by phishing attempts, and at least for those who have a good spam filter, a figure north of 99% of those phishing attempts don't make it to the inbox anyway.
The ones that get me are the people who release blatant phishing from quarantine. I'd love to know how many of them later respond and get phished. I suspect that number is rather high.
And then there are the money mule scams. People fall for those all the time. The phish aren't getting that much smarter, as far as I can tell.
I never knew my maternal grandfather, he passed away before my parents even met. He was a great hunter and fisherman, and I'm sure I'd be a far better outdoorsman if I'd had the opportunity to learn from him instead of teaching myself (I'm the only one in my family who's into that). I love the old pictures of him and his buddies that my mom has, with huge stringers of fish, or their hunting tally for the day. I wish there was video to go with those, but that was long before the era of home movies.
So yeah, people are going to care an awful lot about those old home movies some day.
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Let me guess - you're an average developer, right?
I daresay I've seen (and written) a lot more code than you have.
The core of Windows is rock-solid, hmm? There's so much evidence against that, I won't even bother feeding you. Crawl back under your bridge.
And of course, the fact that anyone who feels like it can modify any part of the Linux or *BSD kernels they want, or any part of the subsystems they want, or any part of KDE, GNOME, etc., they want hasn't prevented all of those systems from being far more solid and secure than Windows.
Keep in mind that if I should patch my kernel in such a way that it becomes unstable, the only person who suffers is me, and all I have to do is reboot and pick a different kernel from my list in GRUB, or if necessary, use GRUB shell code to tell it at the command line which one to boot. No one is going to let me commit that unstable patch, and even if they do, it's not going to be accepted into the kernel. The same would be true if Windows were open-sourced.
But of course, you're such a _MORON_ that basic points like that utterly elude you.
Well, he doesn't suggest MSFT should or will open-source Windows "at this time." He suggests they will have to at some future point, and he makes some excellent points in TFA. I think he may well be right, and I used to work at Microsoft, so I know full well how hard it would be to turn that particular oil tanker.
Why open source and not freeware? Making it freeware would remove just as much revenue from the stream as open-sourcing it would, but it would leave both the entire support burden and the entire development burden on Microsoft. Compare that to the Linux model, where support and development (especially support) are very strongly community-oriented. Sure, there are companies paying kernel developers and some other developers, but there are plenty of developers in that ecosystem who contribute much or all of their time for free. Most of them, in fact. Nearly all Linux-support is community-based.
I'm not suggesting that open-sourcing Windows would alter the Windows ecosystem to the point where it would be just like the Linux ecosystem, but it would move somewhat in that direction. Look at all the buzz that OpenSolaris has generated for Sun. I would not be surprised to see Microsoft pursue a substantially identical strategy in the future. OpenWindows, anyone?
Developers already do everything they need to in Windows without seeing the source code? Yeah, riiiiiiiiiiight. They do everything they're *allowed* to do, not everything they need or want.
Speaking of developers, the people who you say are the only ones who should care about open source (I disagree, there are very strong reasons why everyone should care, but those aren't necessarily relevant here, so I'll leave that), one of the main points TFA makes is that it will be necessary to open-source Windows in some form to retain developer mindshare among the over 6 million independent developers who develop for the Windows platform. Open source software is already making inroads there, and will continue to do so. If Microsoft were to open-source not only Windows but much or all of its development environment, that could go a long way to holding those developers to the Windows platform. Why do this? To keep Windows a viable platform for the Microsoft products that (it hopes) will continue to make a lot of money.
Of course, one of those may find its revenue-producing ability reduced to the point where they might as well open-source it or make it freeware: MS Office. If they don't, they'll have to cut the price to a small fraction of what they currently get. Google Docs on one side and OpenOffice.org on the other will prove themselves good enough for most people. At least good enough that paying hundreds of dollars for MS Office will not make sense.
What will they make money on, then? Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc. Enterprise products that enterprises will pay for. However, that requires a strong OS ecosystem, something open-sourcing Windows would encourage. Or they can give up on the Windows franchise and sell versions of those products to run on Unix, Linux, and a Windows server product and basically exit the desktop OS business. That would make a lot of sense, but having worked there, I believe they're rather do anything - even open-source Windows - than do that.
Could be a little harden than you think, at least for a company that might not be used to all the customs rigamarole. Like you, I think they should. I believe in using Free Software to the greatest extend possible, but if you're going to use a proprietary product, it should be properly licensed. I, myself, have very little proprietary software. Even on my wife's Mac I use Free software where I can, but if I do choose a proprietary application (most recently SuperDuper), I pay the license fee.
However, if they find themselves unwilling or truly unable to do so because of pervasive local practices, there's likely to be little downside to it. The BSA has no teeth in China, AFAIK does not operate there, and I have never heard of anyone being sued, much less arrested, for using pirated software anywhere in China or SE Asia. That day will come, when China reaches sufficient prosperity, but for now, Microsoft is not only turning a blind eye to rampant and blatant software piracy in that part of the world (as do pretty much all the MSFT competitors), but they are tacitly encouraging it. Why? They'd rather have hundreds of millions of people pirate their software until they can or will pay for it, rather than have those people install Linux instead.
You are, to some extent, talking about creating two different things: public domain Vs. GPLed.
If you release something to the public domain, I (or anyone) is perfectly free to take it and make a proprietary version which may or may not be fully compatible with the PD version.
If you release it under the GPL, it's very difficult for someone to do that without violating the license.
That said, you need to talk to a good intellectual property lawyer, not Slashdot. You'll only get one shot at doing this so that it comes out the way you want, and a good lawyer's guidance through the process will make your success a lot more likely.
"Whichever China prefers?" While I haven't lived in China, I did live in a country right next to China, and I know that what is preferred there is a disc full of pirated software for about a buck. Even for computers in government offices. I doubt things are much different in China.
In that country, if someone had told me I had three days to find a legit copy of Windows and MS Office, I would have been pretty hard up. My only reliable source would have been to ping somebody I knew at a major foreign company and ask them to burn me a copy of their legit CDs (thus, of course, making it pirated, but as close to legit as I could get). A legit copy of Windows or MS Office wasn't something a person could just walk into a computer store and buy. If they sold software, it was pirated. That's just the way it was. Amusingly, it was really hard to find Linux or other Free software there, even though they could legally copy it. I only knew one or two shops that sold any Linux CDs.
That was in 2002 and 2003; I doubt it's changed any, except Linux might be a little more common there now.
It would be truly hard to fire the staff for using the only kind of software they can get. To make them legal would probably require sending it all to them from the US office.
Not to mention that IT staff normally do not have the authority to fire anyone for policy violations and it may not even be legal to fire someone in China for using pirated software. Have them sued or arrested for it? In China? BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Wait, let me guess. You work for the BSA, don't you? :)
You think I'm a troll? You mods obviously aren't involved in the email security industry and have never been a postmaster. And/or you're S. Korean and can't face the truth about the amount of spam that pours out of your country. That does not, however, make my comment any less true.
The only way to get it past the filter (at least if your filter is any good, such as, for example, the anti-phishing ruleset I maintain for a living) is to not send it through the filter, and probably the DOJ didn't. I would expect they sent it from an internal account to all employees, thus bypassing any spam filters. In most networks, the spam filtering takes place near the network edge, just inside the firewall, on inbound (and sometimes outbound) mail streams. Internal mail is not routed through a spam filter in most environments, although my experience indicates that sometimes it ought to be.
Just what we need, a whole nation of bots on 1 gbps connections.
Granted, S. Korea isn't quite the spam sewer it was in, say, 2000, but it's still bad enough that if you don't need to receive mail from there, you're better off refusing all traffic from S. Korea.
Thank you for that very good analysis. My wife and I recently had our third child, and after analyzing all those factors, decided not to save the cord blood. You described our analysis procedure in weighing cost Vs. benefit far more succinctly and accurately than I could have.
Our other children are ages 6 and 5 and completely healthy. When they were born, cord blood storage either was unavailable, or was at least unavailable in the third-world ^H^H^H uh, "Developing" nation where they were both born. With the third one, when taking all factors (including two previous children in perfect health and no relevant family history on either side) we decided that it was not a good use of money.
Uh, no, Konqueror was the stupidest file manager I ever "saw" - it's not even that great of a web browser, I wish Firefox had a native KDE version.
Well, no, it's not. Vista was under development for over five years before it was released, which puts it back a lot farther in time than KDE 4. Granted, they have rather little to show for five years of development effort, but the statement that Vista copied Oxygen is whack. One of the things I like least about KDE 4 is the Oxygen theme, particularly because it resembles Vista, which I also find to be fugly. They should have copied the look of OS X, or even of KDE 3.5, if they were going to clone something.
Copying Vista is like being a mad scientist who builds a girl and could make her look like anything in the world and chooses Broom Hilda as his model.
Yes, KDE should have a Mac-style dock. There's a reason why there are so many dock clones out there, and why people put effort into making their Linux desktops Mac-like in appearance and behavior: Apple has some great UI designers and themers and they have, in most respects, produced the best desktop environment out there. That doesn't mean OS X perfect - there's a reason why my only Mac is a notebook but my home server, home workstation, and work workstation are all Linux boxes, too - but its GUI gets top marks for consistency, functionality, and good design. For example, to bring up the prefs in any OS X app, all I have to do is hit Command+, on a Mac. Even within KDE, there's nothing that out of the box simple for bringing up app prefs, and if you mix in apps from GNOME, XFCE, plain old X apps, etc, it gets even less predictable.
There's a lot that could be borrowed from the Apple playbook to improve Linux desktops, and yes, even some things from the Windows playbook, although most of the good ideas there have already been mined.
Not so sure.
The world is a big place, with much of it having poor or no Internet connectivity. The majority of all adults? In North America, Europe, and some other places, maybe. Lots of people in Africa without email. Lots in Asia without email, too. If it's the majority, it's a pretty small majority.
The substitution effect was already starting in 1996, even if it was small. When was the last time a Comdex keynote speaker made a prediction that wasn't already well known to people who were watching?
WRT "The Road Ahead" that prediction was already pretty much fulfilled in 1995. The VCR had long been letting people watch when it was convenient. Catalog order shopping was, of course, long established, and lots of businesses were selling on the web in 1995. I bought a complete Micron desktop system online in early 1995 and had it shipped all the way to Japan. The cost of shipping was still way less than the cost of buying locally in Tokyo in those days. That was my first Pentium machine and my first Windows 95 machine. I later installed Windows 95-J on it in place of the English version it came with.
In late 1995 or early 1996, I had a Geocities page in the Tokyo neighborhood, and I was hardly an early adopter of that. The "publish information for others to use" was another prediction that had already happened before he wrote it. Lots of stuff was out there on BBSes and predecessors of the WWW (Gopher, for instance) long before Gates wrote "The Road Ahead."
Even at the time it was published, "The Road Ahead" wasn't consdidered very prophetic, since so much of what it covered had either already happened or was already being worked on. The only people who were impressed by that book were people far enough away from the industry to not realize that it really wasn't very revelatory.
And tablet PCs? Heck, those are still a niche market and a relative rarity. I work for a company of >60,000 employees, and there are probably 600 in my building. Very, very few of those employees have tablet PCs, and AFAICT, no one in my building.
I did have one when I worked for Microsoft, though. It was a company-issue Toshiba Tecra M4, and it was a piece of crap. It was crappy in general, being a Toshiba laptop after all (apologies to a close friend of mine who works for Toshiba; I love a lot of their electronics, but their laptops generally suck), and the tablet stuff was especially crappy. I couldn't stand to use it and it tended to crash XP when I did.
Assuming that's lawful, the impact on morale is probably a lot worse than the impact from layoffs. Layoffs are devastating for the ones laid off and make the survivors nervous, but at the same time, the survivors are glad to have survived and still have a job. If everyone gets a pay cut, many will feel less inclined to work hard. Plus, a pay cut is likely to cause your *most* qualified people to leave, because they can get a new job at a good salary in any job market. That is exactly the opposite of what you want in difficult financial circumstances.
I used to work at Microsoft and pinged a former co-worker of mine today. He said that some contractors have not been renewed, but so far all the blue badges are safe, at least in the part of the company he's in/I was in.
Microsoft is a ferociously competitive place, I'm not sure if there is 5000 headcount of dead or marginal wood there or not. One place some cuts could probably be made, though, is in middle management. Microsoft has a buttload of middle managers. Unfortunately, the one I'd most like to see laid off already left voluntarily last year :p
All torture on Cuban soil in this millennium has been done by American hands? Apart from that being an insupportable statement (there's no way you,or anyone, could possibly prove it), it's also highly unlikely to be true.
The Cuban government, like totalitarian governments everywhere, keeps political prisoners. Even their normal jail conditions would probably constitute something pretty close to torture by our standards, without even delving into what they do there.
That doesn't mean I support our current Cuba policy - I don't, and have long considered it foolish when we have normal diplomatic relations with totalitarian governments all over the world, including communist ones, and including communist ones with which we have engaged in shooting wars. Throughout the Cold War, we maintained full diplomatic relations with the USSR. Up until our entry into World War II, we maintained diplomatic relations with Germany, Italy, and Japan. There is no rational reason to maintain this policy towards Cuba.
Why, then, do we do so? Because of the disproportionate political influence of Cuban-Americans, particularly in Florida. OK, for no reason that would appear rational to anyone but a politician :p
Here in California, there are within the Vietnamese community a strong general dislike of communism and a small but vociferous hardcore anti-communist movement which still dreams of the overthrow of the communist government in Viet Nam. The government pays about as much attention to that movement (if you can even call it that) than do I, which is to say none whatsoever. I'm aware of its existence and I notice the old RVN flags that some people still fly on flagpoles in their front yards, but I pay no attention. Why is it so different with the Cuban community and their anti-communists? The communist takeover in Cuba happened a lot longer ago, and yet people seem to care about it so much more.
It's time we stop caring about communism in Cuba, restore diplomatic relations, and get on with it. All we're doing in the meantime is denying a market to US business and tourism. However, to state tht the only torture being done in Cuba is being done by Americans is ridiculous.
Are you playing too many video games that require you to check your sense of humor at the door?
Yeah, my brother used to work at a company run by a Kelly. He survived many rounds of layoffs where the asshats like "Doug" were the ones who stuck around. Finally, he quit to take a position with a competitor and now makes more money and works for a nice, well-run privately held company with no VC backing - the owner is the owner, period, and he's a good guy.
As for me, while I'm no longer working in a management position (I did at my previous employer but am pretty happy as an individual contributor right now), if "Doug" had come into my office with a speech like that, I would have made up my mind right then and there who was being laid off, and it sure wouldn't have been "Stuart." Of course, slimebags like "Doug" probably only make that speech to people who they know will be swayed by it. Backstabbers are usually fairly good readers of people. I'm very happy I don't work in a company like that, and also that while my employer does have a hiring freeze on, salaries have not been frozen, and the CEO has publicly stated that there are no plans for layoffs and they will try very, very hard to avoid making any.
I understand the multiple monitors thing on operating systems which don't have decent native support for virtual desktops (which these days, pretty much means Windows, unless Vista does that. I've never tried Vista, so I don't know), but I've never been able to see the attraction - other than the cool factor - on systems that do virtual desktops.
I have two monitors at work, and have dabbled with using a second monitor on my MacBook Pro, but I found it to be 75% distraction and 25% useless geegaw. Virtual desktops work much better. I do run Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu) on my desktop, but I've never even bothered to try dual monitors, but I'll take your word for it that it doesn't work well. Wouldn't surprise me.
But, I'd like to understand your business case/preference/whatever for wanting multiple monitors instead of virtual desktops. What does two monitors get you that 12 (the number of desktops I run) doesn't?
I use a two-part personality test in interviews:
Part 1: I decide if I think you're an asshole. If I think so, you won't pass the interview, no matter how great your technical chops are.
Part 2: I decided if I like you. If I do, you may advance to the shortlist, if you meet the other requirements of the job. If I don't, you probably won't make the short list, but you won't be immediately washed out the way you would be if you failed Part 1.
While I'm being funny-but-serious here, personality fit is so important to building a good team that I do seriously recommend this short but simple test.
It must have been good for their bottom line or they wouldn't have done it, I suppose. I appreciate your frustration, having had my Geocities page mothballed by Yahoo, but as people have noted, the EULA does say they can do that. Plus, Yahoo did give plenty of notice that they were going to do it.
What bugs me more, actually, is that my old Geocities page is *still* there, as it was in 1997 (yeah, I know, it didn't get mothballed until much later, but I wasn't updating it often). Amusingly, the web counter still displays, although it no longer increments. I'd like to go back and remove it, but there doesn't seem to be any provision for that. Oh well. Life goes on. That page may outlive me, heh.
No, I was definitely there in 2K2-2K3, and made a short trip back for a vacation in the fall of 2004. I'll drop you an email so we can stop communicating through /.
I hear you on that cultural thing. My (VNese) wife has no interest in computers other than the apps. She doesn't really care at all about the underlying OS, and long had the only Windows machine in our house. After it died, I replaced it with a MacBook Pro and she's quite happy with it and likely wouldn't go back to Windows. I would have chosen Linux, but one of her core apps is Yahoo Messenger and voice and video are a must, which rules out basically any Linux IM solution.
There was another foreigner involved with VietLUG back when I was there, Andy something, and he was in Saigon at the time. We got to dinner at a brew pub once with some local VNese Linux users, but it was a very small group. As you say, VietLUG is made up mostly of Viet Kieu.
Interestingly, one area where there does seem to be some kind of hacker culture is robotics. I lived in Japan for 8 years, and every years there's some robotics competition, and for three years running while I was there, some team from a VNese university won the competition. Of course, it could just be that robotics are big at that school. I'm not into them myself, so I never checked to see how many ordinary people might be into that sort of thing.
I'll check out Kevin's site, thanks for that.
I lived and worked in Viet Nam as well (2003), and while I did see some computers running Linux there, they were all in the hands of individuals, except for a couple of LAN servers I did admin work on (one at my employer, another at one of our customers).
At the time I was there, two things about most computers in government office were very noticeable: 1) They were really old, and 2) Many of them were running Windows 9x, not 2000 or XP. Getting from there to modernity is probably easier with Linux, especially considering that licensed copies of Windows aren't exactly thick on the ground in VN. The whole time I was there, I only saw three Windows machines that I was sure had licensed copies, and those were three brand new Compaqs that I installed fresh from the box, paid for by Japanese ODA. Amazing that they weren't Japanese PCs, considering the source of the funds. Even more amazing that the only Japanese products on that project were some wireless routers (802.11B WAN product made for outdoor point to point use; our longest hop was around 5 km IIRC, using parabolic antennas).
Are you familiar with Vietlug? http://www.vnlinux.org/
KPLUG, huh? I'm from San Diego, too, but live in the Bay Area now. I'm from the Montgomery Field area, too, have been to a few KPUG meetings in 2003 before I took a job out of town. Me may have crossed paths in real life at some point.
I'm own the anti-phishing rules at a well-known email security company, and while I agree with the principle that over-phishing is causing problems, as it does with fishing (although as with phishing, the best phishers are catching a lot more phish than the worst pishers), I don't think very many people are doing much more to protect their information. What does seem to happen, though, is that - just as with fish that see lures dragged in front of them all day long - people are coming to think everything is a fraud (I see legit bank emails reported as phishing all the time). Some of them, anyway. I also see a lot of correspondence threads in which people have already handed over money to 419ers or are preparing to do so.
And of course, phishers are also diversifying somewhat. Earlier this year, account credential phishing became popular. The goal: not immediate financial reward via account plunder, but to get access to a legit login on a host with a good email reputation for the purpose of either using it to send fraudulent email, or using it to send regular spam for hire.
Financial losses continue to be high, and I'm not convinced that the 3.2 billion figure is off by a factor of 50, even if it might be on the high side. But earnings by the theoretical average phisher? Yeah, they've got to be off. There are so many phishers these days, so many people are deluged by phishing attempts, and at least for those who have a good spam filter, a figure north of 99% of those phishing attempts don't make it to the inbox anyway.
The ones that get me are the people who release blatant phishing from quarantine. I'd love to know how many of them later respond and get phished. I suspect that number is rather high.
And then there are the money mule scams. People fall for those all the time. The phish aren't getting that much smarter, as far as I can tell.
I never knew my maternal grandfather, he passed away before my parents even met. He was a great hunter and fisherman, and I'm sure I'd be a far better outdoorsman if I'd had the opportunity to learn from him instead of teaching myself (I'm the only one in my family who's into that). I love the old pictures of him and his buddies that my mom has, with huge stringers of fish, or their hunting tally for the day. I wish there was video to go with those, but that was long before the era of home movies.
So yeah, people are going to care an awful lot about those old home movies some day.