I was a tech lead who was promoted to manager as the team grew. I had the pleasure and privilege of hiring every member of my staff; none were inherited from anyone else, and it was a great team. The list of things I miss about Microsoft is a lot shorter than the things I don't miss. I miss the incredible team I lead there, and I miss the awesome pizza in the cafeterias. The weather in Redmond stinks, the traffic around the Microsoft campus stinks unless you leave really early or stay really late, the coffee at Microsoft *especially* stinks (I couldn't drink coffee at work at all unless I brought it from home; it was that bad), and the pay isn't great. When I left Microsoft, I increased my salary by almost 1/3 and I'm currently and individual contributor, not a manager.
I don't view it as having been punished, though. I was a very good manager, especially on my people skills and hiring (something many techies who become managers struggle with), and while I am very happy to be an individual contributor again right now, I'd like to return to management at some future point, but maybe not on the engineering side. I'd like to move to a more customer-facing role, perhaps a product manager, in the future.
That the Red Hat CEO used to run Slack doesn't surprise me. Red Hat would look for somebody like that. My own background started on DOS and Windows, but I went totally Linux in the late 90s, moving from Red Hat to TurboLinux to Red Hat to Debian to *buntu, with dabbles in various other distros and BSDs along the way, plus Solaris. It was bizarre that I wound up working at Microsoft, considering I don't like Windows and do love *nix, but I can plead innocent: it happenned by way of acquisition:)
I work at a smaller company now (my preference) and it's very *nix centric, which I like. I don't have a Windows machine at work at all, not even in a VM, and that's the way - uh-huh uh-huh - I like it:)
Heh. I was a Microsoft employee (not on the Windows team, thank goodness) at the time Vista shipped for enterprise customers and hit RTM for general availability (I left before it was actually released), and I can tell you for sure that a lot of Microsoft employees use Mac and/or Linux at home. I was a first-level manager, and there was only one member of my team of eight who did not have at least one Mac/*BSD/Linux machine at home, and we all thought he was a square peg for that:)
A lot of people have posted a lot of (mostly good) advice about how to entice the superstar to join you once said superstar has been found, but not really all that much about that first initial step: finding.
For finding, talk to the ones you've got. Tell them you're looking for some more. They are going to be active in communities where those kinds of people are. Ask them for some names. Set up an initial contact from there, either directly or together with the referrer. If the cultural/personality fit is right, the probably won't be all that hard to entice. Good, smart, motivated people want to work with people like themselves. The more of them you have, the more of them you can get.
My company is a lot like what you describe, and a number of our people (including myself) were hired as a result of somebody saying "Hey, I know somebody I think we really ought to talk to."
Not to disagree with your overall thesis - you're spot-on - but the answer to "How many of you pay $5,000 in property tax" is "Pretty much anyone who owns a home." I own an average remodeled house (average lot for my area, slightly below average square-footage, average middle-class neighborhood, age of house > 50 years) and I'd be thrilled to pay *only* $5,000 in property taxes. If California didn't have among the lowest property tax rates in the nation, I couldn't afford a home at all. Going out of state would make a house a lot more affordable, but the property taxes would remain constant because they are higher almost everywhere (double is not unusual).
A few years ago, I became a Microsoft employee by way of acquisition (I don't work there anymore). Your second theory is correct: this event speaks volumes about the way MS functions and how their corporate culture contributes to their products. I'm sure the story is no lie, but I don't think it's the case that he left and everyone just went nuts and shoved Vista out the door ready or not. Vista was way behind schedule and had lost highly touted features such as WinFS along the way. My opinion of the whole situation is that decision makers had come to the conclusion that "We're way past when we planned to ship, way over budget, have shed major promised features of Longhorn, and people are starting to use Vista and Duke Nuke'em Forever in the same sentence. We've got to get something out the door."
And that's about what happened. They got something out the door. IMO they got it out the door a little too soon, but there weren't going to be any more features added, it had been in beta a long time, and the holiday season was coming up. The calendar told them they had to release in time for that.
After all that, it was a bit of a flop anyway. Sales were (and are) quite non-stellar. This goes back to (mostly) the lack of compelling features (these were the ones shed just to be able to ship something), combined with the confusing license soup. The lowest-end versions of Vista, in particular, offer nothing compelling over XP. In fact, a user of XP Pro - or probably even XP Home - would find things that were missing from Vista Home Basic and have to go out and spend to get that functionality again.
And now we see Microsoft making something of a public embarrassment of itself on the world stage, fighting its battle with Yahoo in the press. If you're considering a proxy fight to initiate a hostile takeover, you don't talk about it in the newspapers. You communicate that privately to the Yahoo board, and if they again tell you where to shove it, you just taking action. You don't slug it out in the newspapers like a Brittany Spears saga.
If there was any serious doubt that Microsoft has jumped the shark, I think Vista dispelled it handily.
That doesn't mean Microsoft is not still a formidable player. They've got tons of money, some profitable product lines, and plenty of smart people working there. MSFT isn't going to disappear, and it's not going to go down without a fight. However, don't be surprised if it goes through some pretty radical re-orgs in the 3-7 year time frame. Particularly if MSFT gets what it's wishing for and buys Yahoo, there will be incredible challenges on The Road Ahead.
Almost 90% true for all computer users? Nice to know you know what all computer users think, but how did you quantify the 90% level? How are you defining "almost?" A standard deviation or two, or does "almost 90% true" mean "something I made up because I'm a troll?"
Set a new computer user down in front of a Windows machine for the first time and see how long it takes them to figure it out. I bet you haven't tried that, but anyone who has can tell you that they'll learn Linux at least as quickly as Windows. Can it take weeks? Yeah, but so does Windows. Or OS X, for that matter.
Have it work the way you want? Better use Linux, then. On Windows, you better like how it works, because you can't change it much. Or fix it when it doesn't work.
GUI? Got it. As many as you want, and many of them superior to the Windows GUI. I converted my dad to using Linux, but you'll never find a shell open on his computer. He's a 100% GUI guy.
Support? On Linux, you can get all you need, usually for free. If you really, really want to pay for it, you can. Red Hat, Novell, Canonical at least, among the vendors, provide commercial support, as do a number of third parties.
Do you want to game? Then you might want to use Windows. Or better still, a game console. I get more out of gaming on a console than I do out of gaming on a PC. YMMV.
Viruses, worms, and trojans? OK, you got me there. Getting a Linux box pwned takes a lot more effort than getting a Windows box pwned. Having to spend more on hardware to get the same speed? OK, you've got me again. Do you want to spend more on software than your hardware is worth, if you paid under $3000 for your computer? OK, you've got me again.
A better decision tree goes like this:
Do you want to primarily game? Get Windows and suffer with its faults, or buy a game console and go on to the next step.
Do you dislike tinkering, want it to Just Work, be highly stable, have very good UI design and top-quality hardware and are willing to pay for it, and don't mind spending for applications software? Then give Apple a look. They make very good stuff. I use a MacBook Pro at work and am pretty happy with it.
Do you like tinkering and/or have some level of computer expertise, or know someone who does to get you off on the right start? Want to get all of your software for free, legally? And have it outperform the expensive stuff in most areas? Be stable? Nearly completely free of trojans and viruses? With a good social network and lots of free, expert community support if you need it? And get more mileage out of your hardware than with other OSes? Then give Linux a look.
Have you fallen through the sieve all the way to this point? There's no pleasing you, most likely, and Windows is least likely to please you, but arrange to try out Windows, Mac, and Linux and see which one bugs you the least.
A bank that takes it seriously? Gee, I wish I could find one, seriously. I own the anti-phishing rules at a major email security company, and from here in the catbird's seat, I get to see that, sadly, no bank seems to really take security very seriously. There are all the outsourced mailing soliciting you for credit cards, etc. (typically, neither DKIM-signed nor sent from SPF-authorized IPs), but even worse, many banks will send out their "Your account statement is ready" through outsourcers as well. Most bank customers will rarely, if ever, see a mail that was actually sent from that bank's own mailing infrastructure.
In others, banks are all out there implicitly telling any person who cares to look - and worse, machine learning systems - that it's perfectly acceptable for mail that purports to be from a given bank to have never passed through a host in that bank's network, and to have no evidence at all that it was even sent with that bank's permission.
And then there are the websites. Like you said, they should chuck the convoluted login procedures which can all be defeated by sufficiently advanced malware anyway, and use one-time passwords instead. Even those can be defeated by a good enough man-in-the-middle attack (at a security meeting I attended last fall, a paper was presented on an exploit found in the wild that was aimed at customers of a particular European bank that used one-time passwords; it was successful, but probably not very scalable), but they set the bar very high.
I would *love* to find a US bank that had good emailing security practices (don't outsource, or if you do, give your outsourcer a DKIM subkey and also authorize them in your SPF record) and used one-time passwords for web banking. Many of us (including myself) have to use them to connect to our company VPNs, and in most cases there isn't even money directly at stake. Banks should take a lesson from that.
If anyone reading this has a (US) bank like that, please reply with the name.
That's not a perfect solution. It's not even a good solution, because it means that the lawsuits will not finish going through the courts and establishing precedents. What is needed is a situation in which - once this is all over - no one will ever again dare to pull what SCO tried to pull. A Novell acquisition of SCO would not provide that.
For a simple example, let's say you have a few PCs at home, NATted behind a broadband router. Every broadband router I've ever used has a nameserver built-in, and you configure the router so that the only DNS requests allowed through the internal interface are DNS requests to the router's internal interface address. Everything else gets dropped on the floor. That won't protect a vulnerable machine from having its DNS settings highjacked, but it will stop it from querying any rogue DNS servers. The end result will be that for that machine, DNS will break completely.
There are, of course, several problems with that approach:
1) Not all broadband routers support writing those sorts of firewall rules. I'd be surprised if most do.
2) Most home users don't have the technical expertise to do that, nor understand why it is necessary. The ones who do are far less likely to become victims in the first place
3) If a vulnerability is found in the router itself and the router gets owned and pointed to a rogue DNS, all bets are off
As a security precaution, it's not a bad idea for those who have the ability to implement and hardware that allows it, but overall dnssec is a better solution to the problem.
By "ghetto" the author of course meant "niche market/non-mainstream." Substituting that for ghetto, then, yes, comics are a niche market. I read them as a child. Most readers are probably still children, but even that readership base (as a percentage of population) is probably still smaller than it was. Adult readers of comics are, have always been, and will always be, a niche market. Now, that may well be a pet peeve of yours (from which I infer that you are a fan of comics), but that doesn't make it non-true.
In fact, the strongest argument is that the "serious" comics you mention are the ones that are the most "ghettoized" of the lot. That is, the most niche-y and least popular. Vapid superhero comics are the most popular and will probably always be so, just like pop fiction paperbacks outsell serious literature. That's not about to change.
No kidding. Besides being in IT, I also hold a real estate license, and if I were to do - or even attempt to do - the equivalent of front-running, I would be at risk of discpline from the real estate commissioner's office and the board of realtors, possibly up to losing my license, as well as wide open for a lawsuit (real estate is a more litigious business than even the patent industry).
An example: I'm acting as your agent, or you are considering retaining me as your agent. There's a property you're interested in that appears to be a great deal. You tell me about it and ask my opinion. I tell you I'll check it out and get back to you by tomorrow. Recognizing that it is indeed a great deal, that evening I put in an offer to buy the property myself and leave you out in the cold.
That is both unethical and illegal, and is essentially the same thing that NetSol or any other registrar does when they practice front-running (they're in the position of being your agent, or prospective agent). It's hard to see how ICANN sees nothing wrong with that. True, it may not be illegal or against ICANN's rules, but it certainly ought to be.
Yeah, I didn't want to live in Redmond either, strongly enough that I left the company rather than accept a transfer..Net fan or not, if you're not a fan of that management style, you might not like working there, though. That corporate culture runs all the way down. There are good things about working there, too, it's not all bad (a lot of very smart people, more than a few of whom are running Linux and/or BSD at home, regardless of what they have to use at work; great food in the cafeterias, especially the pizza (the coffee sucks, though. Run away screaming), a great wireless network, really good selection of free drinks, beautiful campus, the best fringe benefits I've ever had), but I wouldn't really characterize Microsoft as a pleasant place to work. People don't seem to really have fun at work (some would argue that you're not supposed to, but at my current gig and my pre-Microsoft gig, lots of fun was had, lots of hard work was done, and industry-leading stuff was produced), and there are waaaay too many meetings.
As an example of too many meetings, my boss there typically spent 30-40 hours a week in meetings. I don't think he ever put in less than 60 hours a week, between time at the office and time spent working from home out of hours to try and get actual work done.
WRT the BSD idea, I agree completely from a technical standpoint. From a business standpoint, I'm less than convinced MSFT could execute successfully. All of the same culture/management problems that made Vista the non-success that it is (I don't want to call it a failure, but it's certainly no success, either) would exist if a project were undertaken to move Windows to a BSD kernel and userland with a Microsoft GUI on top of it, and then some. Microsoft's investment in the Windows franchise isn't just monetary, it's emotional, and it's very strong. So strong as to overcome reason. Thus, they will never go the BSD route, I'm pretty sure; it would mean not only admitting a *nix platform was better than Windows, but the implicit admission that it was better all along, and that Microsoft, starting from scratch, was unable to do better than an OS based on late sixties technology, not even after 20+ years of Windows development effort. Never mind the truth of that, MSFT the organization could not bring itself to admit it. And even if it did, the project would turn out to be another Vista, or worse. Heck, look how many false starts Apple had in that area before they actually got it done with OS X, and Apple is a far more nimble, innovative, and open-minded company than Microsoft.
Still, I'd actually like it if Microsoft moved to a BSD-based OS. It would benefit the entire industry, and Microsoft as well. But they'll never see that.
Under your seeming definition of lock-in, I'm locked-in by Coke Zero, because I like it better than Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi. All three of them are available for free in the coolers where I work, but somehow Coke Zero has me locked-in. Riiiiiiight.
Or the fact that I use Kubuntu because I prefer it to other distros has me somehow locked in, even though I could wipe it out and install some other Linux distro (or even FreeBSD), boot it, and when KDE started I would be right where I left off, even down to having all the apps that were open in my last session automatically start again.
When everybody but you talks about vendor lock-in, they are talking about a situation where a vendor creates structures and situations that, once you start using their product, it is difficult to move off of it again and use something else. Windows networking is like that. Using Outlook and Exchange is especially like that. There are credible alternatives to Outlook + Exchange today, some of which are probably better, and all of which are probably cheaper, but you hardly ever hear of anyone actually dumping Outlook + Exchange and moving to one of them. Why? Because even if the end result is superior, the move is sufficiently painful and expensive that most businesses won't try it. *That* is lock-in.
When we say lock-in, we mean something that's a lot like being locked in a room. You can't get out if you want to. If I take a book, go into a quiet room, close the door, and sit down to read, I'm not locked in. I'm in there because I want to be.
It's that way with me and Coke Zero. If Pepsi comes out with something better tomorrow, I can immediately switch. It's that way with me and Kubuntu. If I find a distro I like better tomorrow, I can immediately switch. It's that way with customers who aren't locked in, too. If another company comes up with a better combination of top customer service, functionality, and price, a customer can walk. We compete hard to make sure they don't want to, but they easily can.
That's the difference between locked-in and not locked-in: you're free to leave and can easily do so.
Is superior customer service, superior functionality, and superior value for price really lock-in? I work for a company that provides all three of those (our product is expensive, perhaps one of the most expensive in our market sector, but it's still superior value for price) and we have very low customer churn because our customers love us and tell us so all the time. They stay with us because they wan to; the nature of our product is such that it could be ripped out and replaced with a competing product (or a combination of open source ones) at any time. What keeps our products in place are the same three things that get them there in the in the first place: superior service, superior function, and superior value. Our customers are loyal - very loyal - but they are not locked in.
I also like the plug-in hybrid idea. Besides the road trip angle, there's also the power outage angle. Last weekend power was out in my entire neighborhood for over 16 hours. In January, after a winter storm with very high winds came through, there were trees down all over the place in the SF Bay area and something like a million PG&E customers were without power. In my area it was only about 8 hours, but some people were without power for a couple days or more. If that happens and you have a plug-in only car, you're screwed if you don't also have a generator.
If the car markers don't want to build a plug-in hybrid, it would be nice to at least have an optional on-board generator and fuel tank, so you could get the batteries charged up. On long trips, running the generator while driving would help extend vehicle range, and also delivery superior fuel economy; generators, because they run the engines at constant speeds and loads, tend to be more fuel efficient than engines directly powering vehicles.
>How do you know she wasn't saying those sounds at other times? You weren't there.
Duh. Other people were. I hope you didn't strain yourself coming up with that.
That hypothesis is not entirely invalid (nor your own idea), but it also has a countercases. None of the Japanese words for "father" are anywhere near what an infant is capable of pronouncing, nor are any of the Japanese words for "mother" except one that was borrowed from English fairly recently (mama).
In Vietnamese, you could hardly fail to wind up with a word like that, since all words in that language consist of either a bare vowel, vowel + non-vowel, non-vowel + vowel, or non-vowel + vowel + non-vowel[1].
I'm sure those familiar with other languages could add many more countercases of standard words for "mother" and "father" that would not be pronounceable by an infant.
[1] Non-vowel here is used to cover the class of all consonants + glides (semi-vowels)
I give a little more weight to the "ma ma" = "baby is talking to mom" than that. The reason why is my first daughter's first word as an infant was the Vietnamese world for "dad" ( b). She didn't start using the word for "mother" (m ) until much later. Coincidence? Possibly, but she had the tone correct as well, not just the consonant+vowel sound, which is a stronger argument for actual speech rather than coincidence. Additionally, she would say it only when she saw me, not at other times.
I'm also parent in a bilingual family (English and Vietnamese, and I'm starting to introduce our kids to Japanese, my own second language), and our kids went through that phase as well, plus an extra twist or two.
Our kids were both born in Viet Nam, but our older one learned to talk there and was initially a monolingual Vietnamese speaker, while our younger one learned to talk in the United States and was initially a monolingual English speaker, who understood some Vietnamese but could not speak it. As the older one acquired English after we moved to the United States, she began to lose Vietnamese and gravitate exclusively toward English because there was only one other Vietnamese speaker in the house (my wife), but two English speakers (myself and her sister), and she sorted out very early that we didn't talk like her and mommy.
After a couple of consecutive summer-long visits to Viet Nam with my wife, our younger has acquired Vietnamese and it has stuck (it didn't stick much after her first summer) and our older one is once again fully bilingual. She's been able to interpret between Vietnamese and English since she was three. We plan to keep up regular visits to Viet Nam, at least every other year for a long time to come, to make sure their Vietnamese fully cements itself. Typically, ten years old is the cutoff point for that. I had a classmate in college who was fully bilingual, with native accent, in Japanese and English. She was 10 when her parents immigrated to the United States. Her younger brothers were 7 and 8 at that time, and they both lost their first language, growing up to be monolingual English speakers who could understand a small amount of Japanese.
...I'm not quite sure it's going to change how we think about learning, as they state in TFA. I majored in linguistics, and even way back then, it was well understood by researchers in language acquisition that context played a significant role in both first and second language acquisition, but especially first. A form of data mining may well be part of the mechanics of what was happening in the experiment, but the whole way it was set up, and the way the subjects figured out what word went with what picture, had a lot to do with context. I don't mean to put down their research - this is really quite interesting - but it's also not quite the huge deal TFA seemst o suggest it is.
1) Your employer's approval, at the appropriate level of management. Because this involves transfer of a company asset to you and without compensation to the company, "the appropriate level" is going to be senior management. Of course, start with your immediate manager, and work your way up from there. If your immediate manager opposes the idea, it might be best to forget it. The political cost of fighting that battle without your manager's support is likely to be high (as in "career-ending"), and you are not likely to succeed.
2) A tech-savvy lawyer, once you have procured approval. Your lawyer's job will be to review the contract giving you ownership of the code. That contract will probably be drawn up by your company's legal department, so your lawyer will be making sure nothing is left out and that you aren't getting screwed in some way
3) A very accommodating attitude. If there are any costs to your employer to do the transfer, you may be asked to pay them. If so, and you can afford it, suck it up and do it. If you can't afford it, thank everyone sincerely for their time and approval and effort on your before, and explain that you can't afford to pay that much, and walk away from it. And of course, if they say no, regardless of the reason, be gracious and thank the appropriate people for considering your request.
>If somebody's not willing to put up at least some content, they shouldn't own the domain.
You realize that what you are calling for is censorship of domain ownership based on what the owner posts there, or doesn't?
I run nothing on my domain but email. There's no website. I have no plans to ever put one up there, either. The content - or lack thereof - one may find on my domain is neither a measure of legitimacy. My domain, and my ownership of it, is just as legitimate as, say, cnn.com. They're doing what they want with their domain, I'm doing what I want with mine. There's is none of my business, and mine is none of theirs. Or yours. Or anyone's.
If you're going to make the argument that it is, then it's equally valid for someone to say "You put up some content, but I don't like it. It (offends me|disagrees with my politics|disagrees with my religion|didn't make me laugh|did make me laugh and I sprayed $COLA on my new $500 monitor) so you shouldn't own the domain."
I don't know if Linux works well on HP laptops or not, but I can tell you that my nephew has some HP laptop (don't know what model, sorry), and it's a stinking pile of bargain-bin crap. So, yes, at least some HP notebooks are bargain-bin category.
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I was a tech lead who was promoted to manager as the team grew. I had the pleasure and privilege of hiring every member of my staff; none were inherited from anyone else, and it was a great team. The list of things I miss about Microsoft is a lot shorter than the things I don't miss. I miss the incredible team I lead there, and I miss the awesome pizza in the cafeterias. The weather in Redmond stinks, the traffic around the Microsoft campus stinks unless you leave really early or stay really late, the coffee at Microsoft *especially* stinks (I couldn't drink coffee at work at all unless I brought it from home; it was that bad), and the pay isn't great. When I left Microsoft, I increased my salary by almost 1/3 and I'm currently and individual contributor, not a manager.
:)
:)
I don't view it as having been punished, though. I was a very good manager, especially on my people skills and hiring (something many techies who become managers struggle with), and while I am very happy to be an individual contributor again right now, I'd like to return to management at some future point, but maybe not on the engineering side. I'd like to move to a more customer-facing role, perhaps a product manager, in the future.
That the Red Hat CEO used to run Slack doesn't surprise me. Red Hat would look for somebody like that. My own background started on DOS and Windows, but I went totally Linux in the late 90s, moving from Red Hat to TurboLinux to Red Hat to Debian to *buntu, with dabbles in various other distros and BSDs along the way, plus Solaris. It was bizarre that I wound up working at Microsoft, considering I don't like Windows and do love *nix, but I can plead innocent: it happenned by way of acquisition
I work at a smaller company now (my preference) and it's very *nix centric, which I like. I don't have a Windows machine at work at all, not even in a VM, and that's the way - uh-huh uh-huh - I like it
Heh. I was a Microsoft employee (not on the Windows team, thank goodness) at the time Vista shipped for enterprise customers and hit RTM for general availability (I left before it was actually released), and I can tell you for sure that a lot of Microsoft employees use Mac and/or Linux at home. I was a first-level manager, and there was only one member of my team of eight who did not have at least one Mac/*BSD/Linux machine at home, and we all thought he was a square peg for that :)
A lot of people have posted a lot of (mostly good) advice about how to entice the superstar to join you once said superstar has been found, but not really all that much about that first initial step: finding.
For finding, talk to the ones you've got. Tell them you're looking for some more. They are going to be active in communities where those kinds of people are. Ask them for some names. Set up an initial contact from there, either directly or together with the referrer. If the cultural/personality fit is right, the probably won't be all that hard to entice. Good, smart, motivated people want to work with people like themselves. The more of them you have, the more of them you can get.
My company is a lot like what you describe, and a number of our people (including myself) were hired as a result of somebody saying "Hey, I know somebody I think we really ought to talk to."
Not to disagree with your overall thesis - you're spot-on - but the answer to "How many of you pay $5,000 in property tax" is "Pretty much anyone who owns a home." I own an average remodeled house (average lot for my area, slightly below average square-footage, average middle-class neighborhood, age of house > 50 years) and I'd be thrilled to pay *only* $5,000 in property taxes. If California didn't have among the lowest property tax rates in the nation, I couldn't afford a home at all. Going out of state would make a house a lot more affordable, but the property taxes would remain constant because they are higher almost everywhere (double is not unusual).
A few years ago, I became a Microsoft employee by way of acquisition (I don't work there anymore). Your second theory is correct: this event speaks volumes about the way MS functions and how their corporate culture contributes to their products. I'm sure the story is no lie, but I don't think it's the case that he left and everyone just went nuts and shoved Vista out the door ready or not. Vista was way behind schedule and had lost highly touted features such as WinFS along the way. My opinion of the whole situation is that decision makers had come to the conclusion that "We're way past when we planned to ship, way over budget, have shed major promised features of Longhorn, and people are starting to use Vista and Duke Nuke'em Forever in the same sentence. We've got to get something out the door."
And that's about what happened. They got something out the door. IMO they got it out the door a little too soon, but there weren't going to be any more features added, it had been in beta a long time, and the holiday season was coming up. The calendar told them they had to release in time for that.
After all that, it was a bit of a flop anyway. Sales were (and are) quite non-stellar. This goes back to (mostly) the lack of compelling features (these were the ones shed just to be able to ship something), combined with the confusing license soup. The lowest-end versions of Vista, in particular, offer nothing compelling over XP. In fact, a user of XP Pro - or probably even XP Home - would find things that were missing from Vista Home Basic and have to go out and spend to get that functionality again.
And now we see Microsoft making something of a public embarrassment of itself on the world stage, fighting its battle with Yahoo in the press. If you're considering a proxy fight to initiate a hostile takeover, you don't talk about it in the newspapers. You communicate that privately to the Yahoo board, and if they again tell you where to shove it, you just taking action. You don't slug it out in the newspapers like a Brittany Spears saga.
If there was any serious doubt that Microsoft has jumped the shark, I think Vista dispelled it handily.
That doesn't mean Microsoft is not still a formidable player. They've got tons of money, some profitable product lines, and plenty of smart people working there. MSFT isn't going to disappear, and it's not going to go down without a fight. However, don't be surprised if it goes through some pretty radical re-orgs in the 3-7 year time frame. Particularly if MSFT gets what it's wishing for and buys Yahoo, there will be incredible challenges on The Road Ahead.
Almost 90% true for all computer users? Nice to know you know what all computer users think, but how did you quantify the 90% level? How are you defining "almost?" A standard deviation or two, or does "almost 90% true" mean "something I made up because I'm a troll?"
Set a new computer user down in front of a Windows machine for the first time and see how long it takes them to figure it out. I bet you haven't tried that, but anyone who has can tell you that they'll learn Linux at least as quickly as Windows. Can it take weeks? Yeah, but so does Windows. Or OS X, for that matter.
Have it work the way you want? Better use Linux, then. On Windows, you better like how it works, because you can't change it much. Or fix it when it doesn't work.
GUI? Got it. As many as you want, and many of them superior to the Windows GUI. I converted my dad to using Linux, but you'll never find a shell open on his computer. He's a 100% GUI guy.
Support? On Linux, you can get all you need, usually for free. If you really, really want to pay for it, you can. Red Hat, Novell, Canonical at least, among the vendors, provide commercial support, as do a number of third parties.
Do you want to game? Then you might want to use Windows. Or better still, a game console. I get more out of gaming on a console than I do out of gaming on a PC. YMMV.
Viruses, worms, and trojans? OK, you got me there. Getting a Linux box pwned takes a lot more effort than getting a Windows box pwned. Having to spend more on hardware to get the same speed? OK, you've got me again. Do you want to spend more on software than your hardware is worth, if you paid under $3000 for your computer? OK, you've got me again.
A better decision tree goes like this:
Do you want to primarily game? Get Windows and suffer with its faults, or buy a game console and go on to the next step.
Do you dislike tinkering, want it to Just Work, be highly stable, have very good UI design and top-quality hardware and are willing to pay for it, and don't mind spending for applications software? Then give Apple a look. They make very good stuff. I use a MacBook Pro at work and am pretty happy with it.
Do you like tinkering and/or have some level of computer expertise, or know someone who does to get you off on the right start? Want to get all of your software for free, legally? And have it outperform the expensive stuff in most areas? Be stable? Nearly completely free of trojans and viruses? With a good social network and lots of free, expert community support if you need it? And get more mileage out of your hardware than with other OSes? Then give Linux a look.
Have you fallen through the sieve all the way to this point? There's no pleasing you, most likely, and Windows is least likely to please you, but arrange to try out Windows, Mac, and Linux and see which one bugs you the least.
A bank that takes it seriously? Gee, I wish I could find one, seriously. I own the anti-phishing rules at a major email security company, and from here in the catbird's seat, I get to see that, sadly, no bank seems to really take security very seriously. There are all the outsourced mailing soliciting you for credit cards, etc. (typically, neither DKIM-signed nor sent from SPF-authorized IPs), but even worse, many banks will send out their "Your account statement is ready" through outsourcers as well. Most bank customers will rarely, if ever, see a mail that was actually sent from that bank's own mailing infrastructure.
In others, banks are all out there implicitly telling any person who cares to look - and worse, machine learning systems - that it's perfectly acceptable for mail that purports to be from a given bank to have never passed through a host in that bank's network, and to have no evidence at all that it was even sent with that bank's permission.
And then there are the websites. Like you said, they should chuck the convoluted login procedures which can all be defeated by sufficiently advanced malware anyway, and use one-time passwords instead. Even those can be defeated by a good enough man-in-the-middle attack (at a security meeting I attended last fall, a paper was presented on an exploit found in the wild that was aimed at customers of a particular European bank that used one-time passwords; it was successful, but probably not very scalable), but they set the bar very high.
I would *love* to find a US bank that had good emailing security practices (don't outsource, or if you do, give your outsourcer a DKIM subkey and also authorize them in your SPF record) and used one-time passwords for web banking. Many of us (including myself) have to use them to connect to our company VPNs, and in most cases there isn't even money directly at stake. Banks should take a lesson from that.
If anyone reading this has a (US) bank like that, please reply with the name.
That's not a perfect solution. It's not even a good solution, because it means that the lawsuits will not finish going through the courts and establishing precedents. What is needed is a situation in which - once this is all over - no one will ever again dare to pull what SCO tried to pull. A Novell acquisition of SCO would not provide that.
For a simple example, let's say you have a few PCs at home, NATted behind a broadband router. Every broadband router I've ever used has a nameserver built-in, and you configure the router so that the only DNS requests allowed through the internal interface are DNS requests to the router's internal interface address. Everything else gets dropped on the floor. That won't protect a vulnerable machine from having its DNS settings highjacked, but it will stop it from querying any rogue DNS servers. The end result will be that for that machine, DNS will break completely.
There are, of course, several problems with that approach:
1) Not all broadband routers support writing those sorts of firewall rules. I'd be surprised if most do.
2) Most home users don't have the technical expertise to do that, nor understand why it is necessary. The ones who do are far less likely to become victims in the first place
3) If a vulnerability is found in the router itself and the router gets owned and pointed to a rogue DNS, all bets are off
As a security precaution, it's not a bad idea for those who have the ability to implement and hardware that allows it, but overall dnssec is a better solution to the problem.
By "ghetto" the author of course meant "niche market/non-mainstream." Substituting that for ghetto, then, yes, comics are a niche market. I read them as a child. Most readers are probably still children, but even that readership base (as a percentage of population) is probably still smaller than it was. Adult readers of comics are, have always been, and will always be, a niche market. Now, that may well be a pet peeve of yours (from which I infer that you are a fan of comics), but that doesn't make it non-true.
In fact, the strongest argument is that the "serious" comics you mention are the ones that are the most "ghettoized" of the lot. That is, the most niche-y and least popular. Vapid superhero comics are the most popular and will probably always be so, just like pop fiction paperbacks outsell serious literature. That's not about to change.
No kidding. Besides being in IT, I also hold a real estate license, and if I were to do - or even attempt to do - the equivalent of front-running, I would be at risk of discpline from the real estate commissioner's office and the board of realtors, possibly up to losing my license, as well as wide open for a lawsuit (real estate is a more litigious business than even the patent industry).
An example: I'm acting as your agent, or you are considering retaining me as your agent. There's a property you're interested in that appears to be a great deal. You tell me about it and ask my opinion. I tell you I'll check it out and get back to you by tomorrow. Recognizing that it is indeed a great deal, that evening I put in an offer to buy the property myself and leave you out in the cold.
That is both unethical and illegal, and is essentially the same thing that NetSol or any other registrar does when they practice front-running (they're in the position of being your agent, or prospective agent). It's hard to see how ICANN sees nothing wrong with that. True, it may not be illegal or against ICANN's rules, but it certainly ought to be.
Yeah, I didn't want to live in Redmond either, strongly enough that I left the company rather than accept a transfer. .Net fan or not, if you're not a fan of that management style, you might not like working there, though. That corporate culture runs all the way down. There are good things about working there, too, it's not all bad (a lot of very smart people, more than a few of whom are running Linux and/or BSD at home, regardless of what they have to use at work; great food in the cafeterias, especially the pizza (the coffee sucks, though. Run away screaming), a great wireless network, really good selection of free drinks, beautiful campus, the best fringe benefits I've ever had), but I wouldn't really characterize Microsoft as a pleasant place to work. People don't seem to really have fun at work (some would argue that you're not supposed to, but at my current gig and my pre-Microsoft gig, lots of fun was had, lots of hard work was done, and industry-leading stuff was produced), and there are waaaay too many meetings.
As an example of too many meetings, my boss there typically spent 30-40 hours a week in meetings. I don't think he ever put in less than 60 hours a week, between time at the office and time spent working from home out of hours to try and get actual work done.
WRT the BSD idea, I agree completely from a technical standpoint. From a business standpoint, I'm less than convinced MSFT could execute successfully. All of the same culture/management problems that made Vista the non-success that it is (I don't want to call it a failure, but it's certainly no success, either) would exist if a project were undertaken to move Windows to a BSD kernel and userland with a Microsoft GUI on top of it, and then some. Microsoft's investment in the Windows franchise isn't just monetary, it's emotional, and it's very strong. So strong as to overcome reason. Thus, they will never go the BSD route, I'm pretty sure; it would mean not only admitting a *nix platform was better than Windows, but the implicit admission that it was better all along, and that Microsoft, starting from scratch, was unable to do better than an OS based on late sixties technology, not even after 20+ years of Windows development effort. Never mind the truth of that, MSFT the organization could not bring itself to admit it. And even if it did, the project would turn out to be another Vista, or worse. Heck, look how many false starts Apple had in that area before they actually got it done with OS X, and Apple is a far more nimble, innovative, and open-minded company than Microsoft.
Still, I'd actually like it if Microsoft moved to a BSD-based OS. It would benefit the entire industry, and Microsoft as well. But they'll never see that.
Aaaah, I see you work(ed?) there too :)
Under your seeming definition of lock-in, I'm locked-in by Coke Zero, because I like it better than Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi. All three of them are available for free in the coolers where I work, but somehow Coke Zero has me locked-in. Riiiiiiight.
Or the fact that I use Kubuntu because I prefer it to other distros has me somehow locked in, even though I could wipe it out and install some other Linux distro (or even FreeBSD), boot it, and when KDE started I would be right where I left off, even down to having all the apps that were open in my last session automatically start again.
When everybody but you talks about vendor lock-in, they are talking about a situation where a vendor creates structures and situations that, once you start using their product, it is difficult to move off of it again and use something else. Windows networking is like that. Using Outlook and Exchange is especially like that. There are credible alternatives to Outlook + Exchange today, some of which are probably better, and all of which are probably cheaper, but you hardly ever hear of anyone actually dumping Outlook + Exchange and moving to one of them. Why? Because even if the end result is superior, the move is sufficiently painful and expensive that most businesses won't try it. *That* is lock-in.
When we say lock-in, we mean something that's a lot like being locked in a room. You can't get out if you want to. If I take a book, go into a quiet room, close the door, and sit down to read, I'm not locked in. I'm in there because I want to be.
It's that way with me and Coke Zero. If Pepsi comes out with something better tomorrow, I can immediately switch.
It's that way with me and Kubuntu. If I find a distro I like better tomorrow, I can immediately switch.
It's that way with customers who aren't locked in, too. If another company comes up with a better combination of top customer service, functionality, and price, a customer can walk. We compete hard to make sure they don't want to, but they easily can.
That's the difference between locked-in and not locked-in: you're free to leave and can easily do so.
Is superior customer service, superior functionality, and superior value for price really lock-in? I work for a company that provides all three of those (our product is expensive, perhaps one of the most expensive in our market sector, but it's still superior value for price) and we have very low customer churn because our customers love us and tell us so all the time. They stay with us because they wan to; the nature of our product is such that it could be ripped out and replaced with a competing product (or a combination of open source ones) at any time. What keeps our products in place are the same three things that get them there in the in the first place: superior service, superior function, and superior value. Our customers are loyal - very loyal - but they are not locked in.
I also like the plug-in hybrid idea. Besides the road trip angle, there's also the power outage angle. Last weekend power was out in my entire neighborhood for over 16 hours. In January, after a winter storm with very high winds came through, there were trees down all over the place in the SF Bay area and something like a million PG&E customers were without power. In my area it was only about 8 hours, but some people were without power for a couple days or more. If that happens and you have a plug-in only car, you're screwed if you don't also have a generator.
If the car markers don't want to build a plug-in hybrid, it would be nice to at least have an optional on-board generator and fuel tank, so you could get the batteries charged up. On long trips, running the generator while driving would help extend vehicle range, and also delivery superior fuel economy; generators, because they run the engines at constant speeds and loads, tend to be more fuel efficient than engines directly powering vehicles.
>How do you know she wasn't saying those sounds at other times? You weren't there.
Duh. Other people were. I hope you didn't strain yourself coming up with that.
That hypothesis is not entirely invalid (nor your own idea), but it also has a countercases. None of the Japanese words for "father" are anywhere near what an infant is capable of pronouncing, nor are any of the Japanese words for "mother" except one that was borrowed from English fairly recently (mama).
In Vietnamese, you could hardly fail to wind up with a word like that, since all words in that language consist of either a bare vowel, vowel + non-vowel, non-vowel + vowel, or non-vowel + vowel + non-vowel[1].
I'm sure those familiar with other languages could add many more countercases of standard words for "mother" and "father" that would not be pronounceable by an infant.
[1] Non-vowel here is used to cover the class of all consonants + glides (semi-vowels)
Oops, the encoding got mangled on the Vietnamese. Looked good before I hit submit, anyway :p
I give a little more weight to the "ma ma" = "baby is talking to mom" than that. The reason why is my first daughter's first word as an infant was the Vietnamese world for "dad" ( b). She didn't start using the word for "mother" (m ) until much later. Coincidence? Possibly, but she had the tone correct as well, not just the consonant+vowel sound, which is a stronger argument for actual speech rather than coincidence. Additionally, she would say it only when she saw me, not at other times.
I'm also parent in a bilingual family (English and Vietnamese, and I'm starting to introduce our kids to Japanese, my own second language), and our kids went through that phase as well, plus an extra twist or two.
Our kids were both born in Viet Nam, but our older one learned to talk there and was initially a monolingual Vietnamese speaker, while our younger one learned to talk in the United States and was initially a monolingual English speaker, who understood some Vietnamese but could not speak it. As the older one acquired English after we moved to the United States, she began to lose Vietnamese and gravitate exclusively toward English because there was only one other Vietnamese speaker in the house (my wife), but two English speakers (myself and her sister), and she sorted out very early that we didn't talk like her and mommy.
After a couple of consecutive summer-long visits to Viet Nam with my wife, our younger has acquired Vietnamese and it has stuck (it didn't stick much after her first summer) and our older one is once again fully bilingual. She's been able to interpret between Vietnamese and English since she was three. We plan to keep up regular visits to Viet Nam, at least every other year for a long time to come, to make sure their Vietnamese fully cements itself. Typically, ten years old is the cutoff point for that. I had a classmate in college who was fully bilingual, with native accent, in Japanese and English. She was 10 when her parents immigrated to the United States. Her younger brothers were 7 and 8 at that time, and they both lost their first language, growing up to be monolingual English speakers who could understand a small amount of Japanese.
Hmmm, let's call it, ummmm... I know! Data mining!
...I'm not quite sure it's going to change how we think about learning, as they state in TFA. I majored in linguistics, and even way back then, it was well understood by researchers in language acquisition that context played a significant role in both first and second language acquisition, but especially first. A form of data mining may well be part of the mechanics of what was happening in the experiment, but the whole way it was set up, and the way the subjects figured out what word went with what picture, had a lot to do with context. I don't mean to put down their research - this is really quite interesting - but it's also not quite the huge deal TFA seemst o suggest it is.
1) Your employer's approval, at the appropriate level of management. Because this involves transfer of a company asset to you and without compensation to the company, "the appropriate level" is going to be senior management. Of course, start with your immediate manager, and work your way up from there. If your immediate manager opposes the idea, it might be best to forget it. The political cost of fighting that battle without your manager's support is likely to be high (as in "career-ending"), and you are not likely to succeed.
2) A tech-savvy lawyer, once you have procured approval. Your lawyer's job will be to review the contract giving you ownership of the code. That contract will probably be drawn up by your company's legal department, so your lawyer will be making sure nothing is left out and that you aren't getting screwed in some way
3) A very accommodating attitude. If there are any costs to your employer to do the transfer, you may be asked to pay them. If so, and you can afford it, suck it up and do it. If you can't afford it, thank everyone sincerely for their time and approval and effort on your before, and explain that you can't afford to pay that much, and walk away from it. And of course, if they say no, regardless of the reason, be gracious and thank the appropriate people for considering your request.
>If somebody's not willing to put up at least some content, they shouldn't own the domain.
You realize that what you are calling for is censorship of domain ownership based on what the owner posts there, or doesn't?
I run nothing on my domain but email. There's no website. I have no plans to ever put one up there, either. The content - or lack thereof - one may find on my domain is neither a measure of legitimacy. My domain, and my ownership of it, is just as legitimate as, say, cnn.com. They're doing what they want with their domain, I'm doing what I want with mine. There's is none of my business, and mine is none of theirs. Or yours. Or anyone's.
If you're going to make the argument that it is, then it's equally valid for someone to say "You put up some content, but I don't like it. It (offends me|disagrees with my politics|disagrees with my religion|didn't make me laugh|did make me laugh and I sprayed $COLA on my new $500 monitor) so you shouldn't own the domain."
That idea doesn't sound so good anymore, does it?
I don't know if Linux works well on HP laptops or not, but I can tell you that my nephew has some HP laptop (don't know what model, sorry), and it's a stinking pile of bargain-bin crap. So, yes, at least some HP notebooks are bargain-bin category.