When someone calls me asking if they can switch my long-distance service, I tell them that I do not have phone service.
I assert this more strongly if they point out the inherent logical difficulty with that. I even got one guy to ask "Then how am I talking to you?" to which I responded "I Have No Idea."
Done well, it locks them up completely, and is loads of fun.
It'll give him an excellent opportunity to can your ass, then buy an even larger IIS server with the money you wanted to piss away by playing test rigger for four weeks.
Don't know why I bother to make the 200th post to a Slashdot discussion, but I felt the urge to speak to this...
But, at this point I don't see how anyone can trust Microsoft to put stability and sound architecture ahead of marketing concerns.
Mostly, I trust that the people that actually pay Microsoft for software are actually putting stability higher on their priority lists.
Used to be that the business value of (Windows 3.x + Excel 5.0 - three reboots daily) was clearly higher than (DOS + Lotus 1-2-3), so Microsoft sold like crazy even with reboots. Then (Windows 95 + custom VB app + storebought components + three app restarts daily) had clear business value over (greenscreen apps), so MS dev tools were hot. It was/is Hard to get stability among VB code, twelve VBXs/OCXs, and the inevitable poorly-implemented Win32 hacks, so coders (like, oh, me) did as much as the business value would justify, and then stuff just crashed.
I think MS's large customers have made it clear that Inter/intranet development means there is business value in 24/7/no hassles plus all "the other stuff" MS dev tools are good at (commodity business app development from prebuilt tools). Microsoft runs harder to stay ahead of Darwin than any other commercial entity - they'll find a way to deliver on 24/7/no hassles if that's what the Very Visible Hand Of Customer Dollars is pushing towards.
Microsoft may take a platypus-ugly route to evolve to what their paying customers want, but they tend to get there.
I remember reading the Green Card C&S post multiposted all over the place... I thought "Boy somebody just made a huge mistake, they'll regret doing that..."
Did anyone else find the page navigation a little out of sync with the subject?
Forbes is talking about the computer of 2010 to people whom they believe want or need a link at the bottom of the page to get back to the top. Considering that the Forbes readership is supposed to Have All The Money, I'm a bit worried by this...
Forbes' next article: "The Scrollbar In 2010", with a sidebar on the marvelous research being done on keyboard shortcuts...
Contrast this approach with what Hejlsberg had to say about C# and other languages compiled to Microsoft Intermediate Language (IL) a few articles back.
And when you install your code we give you the option to compile it at that point; to compile the IL to native at that point, so that when you run it there's no just-in-time compiler overhead. We also give you the option of running and compiling code dynamically, just-in-time compilation. And, of course, having an IL gives you many advantages, such as the ability to move to different CPU architectures and to introduce verifiability in type safety and then build the security system on top of that.
A higher level language aware of types seems to afford more opportunities to be smart in generating optomized native code. And people who compile their own kernels have to see the advantages of compiling to native code at install time as opposed to JIT while running.
Unless the new Amiga has some benefit not made clear by the article, it just looks to be laps behind.
If we want to win the "OS Holy War" we have to beat Microsoft at their own game and that is marketing.
Um, we're discussing Microsoft Select Agreements purchased by large organizations and you're discussing campaigns aimed at the man in the street. How would that work?
While I'm all for making computers easier to use, would typing "move all files beginning with the letter a to the directory called 'foo'" be any improvement over "mv a* foo" (or "move a* foo" for that matter)?
Does it hurt to think with your head so far inside the box?
One of the first obvious things to go when revising computerspeak for natural languages is the idea that you have to know what your filesystem abstraction is to store anything. (Calling things "foo" is probably high on the list too.;^)
More practically, my guess would be that MS is building off the SQL Server English Query codebase for this. From playing with English Query a bit, it seems to me that the really tricky part is fitting the English entities to the database entities smoothly. Lots of relationships can be translated into "one-to-many" fairly easily, and many can't.
It'll be interesting to see if any brave new abstractions come out of this. Microsoft would love to have vendor lock-in at the cognitive level.
For good or ill, Microsoft has influenced the desktop market in such a way that without an office-suite, your desktop is perceived as incomplete.
Microsoft did that? Really?
I thought that was done by all the companies who adopted Office over other solutions, companies desparate for thousands of interoperable work stations that Got Work Done at minimal total cost. As far as I can tell (from living through it), Microsoft just listened really well to what those companies who actually use general office applications actually wanted.
I'd include these attributes in "what they actually wanted":
one release and deployment cycle for the desktop instead of one per application,
one training and familiarization cycle for the desktop instead of one per application,
one partner company for the desktop instead of one per application,
you get the drift.
WordPerfect and Lotus had viable office software right up to the day Microsoft got this right - and even though Microsoft had to invest in building the Windows platform layer to get that integration, it turned out to be a worthwhile investment for them. (Heck, they even passed Windows off as an operating system, even though it manifestly was not at the time...)
A Linux-based successor to MS Office won't have to build an integrated platform - few would argue that Windows 3.x had anything on either Gnome or KDE. And there are obvious cost advantages available to whoever can use either platform to solve the real issues of office software.
Could someone focus on these issues of simplifying things for large organizations with a Linux-based office suite? Yep. Certainly all the wounded corporate support types out there have some ideas about what sucks about supporting Office - if someone found those things and fixed them, that would be a start.
Would a product that did this capture the relevant mind-share? Quite possibly, though one would have to withstand the full competitive force of Microsoft. We know that Microsoft will trade off anything up to and including the laws of the United States of America to keep large organizations on their customer list - I'm sure they'd try to compete on "not sucking" if someone made them do it.
Is anyone focusing on this yet? Not that I've heard - and I'd be surprised if any open source development project looked up from scratching its own itch enough to try to scratch the generic large organization's itch. To my mind, that's what will be absolutely required to change the office desktop world.
We'll know the system is working when a butterfly wanders into the in-box and (a few wingbeats later) flutters out -- and in that brief interval the system has transcribed the creature's appearance and analyzed its way of moving, and the real butterfly leaves a shadow-butterfly behind. Some time soon afterward you'll be examining some tedious electronic document and a cyber-butterfly will appear at the bottom left corner of your screen (maybe a Hamearis lucina) and pause there, briefly hiding the text (and showing its neatly-folded rusty-chocolate wings like Victorian paisley, with orange eyespots) -- and moments later will have crossed the screen and be gone.
Damn, I was just sitting here looking at my screen wishing for exactly that.
Bill Gates' company hasn't dominated any of the significant technological movements and evolutions of the late 90s: open source, nano-technology, AI, genetic research, hand-held and wireless computing, supercomputers.
It has, however, made more customers happy than all those "significant" things combined. Maybe not you, and maybe not even MS-aligned me... but more people accomplish every day with Microsoft than any other single software company. It may not be fashionable to say that here, but it's certainly true enough.
This seems an absurdly weak prop for the assertion that we are now in some way "post-Microsoft". Seriously, the majority even of Slashdot readers can find a solid counterexample to this assertion just by walking around their building and counting MS products, in uses even a hardliner would have to admit were productive.
Come on, was there any reason to drag nanotech into a software-related article other than Hemos-points?
... was an arrow-key action game called Adventure written for the PET. The version published had been rewritten by a classmate for the TRS-80 and wound up in the back of a SoftSider (?) magazine from 1981-1982. (Anybody still have those?)
The magazine was having a contest for programs with less than 1K of source as "KByters" they could run as the last column in the mag. I forget what the dollar amount of the prize was, but I remember the classmate kept every darn dime...
Last code I ever open-sourced.;^[
Still, the PET rocked. I still can type one-handed, I learned how by holding a magazine in one hand and pressing chiclet keys with the other. (I still can't type two-handed from learning that way...) And I still treasure the poorly-laminated piece of red construction paper that certifies me a member of PETCO, the high-school computer organization.
If this were a glibc dependency/version problem you were talking about, you'd get hit with the FUD brush before you got your mouse off the Submit button.
Now don't get me started on the MDAC stuff, which is the only MS product I've seen break in an all-MS environment...
The very fact that Microsoft can organize a position paper like this is important to the sort of folks who buy quad Xeons. If there's nobody home to answer this sort of stuff from the Linux side, that's a decision-maker right there.
MS is interested in folks with business cases that prove they can afford to buy hotter servers than P200s. Anything below $5K or so is very much a low-end box to someone planning a dollar-generating project... so their choice of playing field seems quite reasonable to me.
Bottom line: sure, it's Microsoft's bat and ball, but you've got to accept that if you want to play their game. If you don't wanna play, that's fine too... but ripping MS on slashdot is really a low-class way to decline the offer.
Slashdot Mirror
When someone calls me asking if they can switch my long-distance service, I tell them that I do not have phone service.
I assert this more strongly if they point out the inherent logical difficulty with that. I even got one guy to ask "Then how am I talking to you?" to which I responded "I Have No Idea."
Done well, it locks them up completely, and is loads of fun.
Yeah, propose this to the boss.
It'll give him an excellent opportunity to can your ass, then buy an even larger IIS server with the money you wanted to piss away by playing test rigger for four weeks.
And this would be the Sound Business Decision.
Used to be that the business value of (Windows 3.x + Excel 5.0 - three reboots daily) was clearly higher than (DOS + Lotus 1-2-3), so Microsoft sold like crazy even with reboots. Then (Windows 95 + custom VB app + storebought components + three app restarts daily) had clear business value over (greenscreen apps), so MS dev tools were hot. It was/is Hard to get stability among VB code, twelve VBXs/OCXs, and the inevitable poorly-implemented Win32 hacks, so coders (like, oh, me) did as much as the business value would justify, and then stuff just crashed.
I think MS's large customers have made it clear that Inter/intranet development means there is business value in 24/7/no hassles plus all "the other stuff" MS dev tools are good at (commodity business app development from prebuilt tools). Microsoft runs harder to stay ahead of Darwin than any other commercial entity - they'll find a way to deliver on 24/7/no hassles if that's what the Very Visible Hand Of Customer Dollars is pushing towards.
Microsoft may take a platypus-ugly route to evolve to what their paying customers want, but they tend to get there.
I remember reading the Green Card C&S post multiposted all over the place... I thought "Boy somebody just made a huge mistake, they'll regret doing that..."
Aieee!
Did anyone else find the page navigation a little out of sync with the subject?
Forbes is talking about the computer of 2010 to people whom they believe want or need a link at the bottom of the page to get back to the top. Considering that the Forbes readership is supposed to Have All The Money, I'm a bit worried by this...
Forbes' next article: "The Scrollbar In 2010", with a sidebar on the marvelous research being done on keyboard shortcuts...
A higher level language aware of types seems to afford more opportunities to be smart in generating optomized native code. And people who compile their own kernels have to see the advantages of compiling to native code at install time as opposed to JIT while running.
Unless the new Amiga has some benefit not made clear by the article, it just looks to be laps behind.
You might want to review some elementary market segmentation ideas while Bill eats your lunch.
Does it hurt to think with your head so far inside the box?
One of the first obvious things to go when revising computerspeak for natural languages is the idea that you have to know what your filesystem abstraction is to store anything. (Calling things "foo" is probably high on the list too.
More practically, my guess would be that MS is building off the SQL Server English Query codebase for this. From playing with English Query a bit, it seems to me that the really tricky part is fitting the English entities to the database entities smoothly. Lots of relationships can be translated into "one-to-many" fairly easily, and many can't.
It'll be interesting to see if any brave new abstractions come out of this. Microsoft would love to have vendor lock-in at the cognitive level.
I thought that was done by all the companies who adopted Office over other solutions, companies desparate for thousands of interoperable work stations that Got Work Done at minimal total cost. As far as I can tell (from living through it), Microsoft just listened really well to what those companies who actually use general office applications actually wanted.
I'd include these attributes in "what they actually wanted":
- one release and deployment cycle for the desktop instead of one per application,
- one training and familiarization cycle for the desktop instead of one per application,
- one partner company for the desktop instead of one per application,
- you get the drift.
WordPerfect and Lotus had viable office software right up to the day Microsoft got this right - and even though Microsoft had to invest in building the Windows platform layer to get that integration, it turned out to be a worthwhile investment for them. (Heck, they even passed Windows off as an operating system, even though it manifestly was not at the time...)A Linux-based successor to MS Office won't have to build an integrated platform - few would argue that Windows 3.x had anything on either Gnome or KDE. And there are obvious cost advantages available to whoever can use either platform to solve the real issues of office software.
Could someone focus on these issues of simplifying things for large organizations with a Linux-based office suite? Yep. Certainly all the wounded corporate support types out there have some ideas about what sucks about supporting Office - if someone found those things and fixed them, that would be a start.
Would a product that did this capture the relevant mind-share? Quite possibly, though one would have to withstand the full competitive force of Microsoft. We know that Microsoft will trade off anything up to and including the laws of the United States of America to keep large organizations on their customer list - I'm sure they'd try to compete on "not sucking" if someone made them do it.
Is anyone focusing on this yet? Not that I've heard - and I'd be surprised if any open source development project looked up from scratching its own itch enough to try to scratch the generic large organization's itch. To my mind, that's what will be absolutely required to change the office desktop world.
Are they accepting diffs?
Damn, I was just sitting here looking at my screen wishing for exactly that.
Well, except for the butterfly thing.
Of course, Microsoft gives a useful web load testing tool away for free... I'm running it now, in fact.
Anybody want to plug perl/php/apache equivalents of note?
If an engineer puts 100 hours of work into hiding it, it only takes 100 people 1 hour of searching to equal that effort.
We've shown your picture to 300 women around the world. Expect your baby tomorrow.
Bill Gates' company hasn't dominated any of the significant technological movements and evolutions of the late 90s: open source, nano-technology, AI, genetic research, hand-held and wireless computing, supercomputers.
It has, however, made more customers happy than all those "significant" things combined. Maybe not you, and maybe not even MS-aligned me... but more people accomplish every day with Microsoft than any other single software company. It may not be fashionable to say that here, but it's certainly true enough.
This seems an absurdly weak prop for the assertion that we are now in some way "post-Microsoft". Seriously, the majority even of Slashdot readers can find a solid counterexample to this assertion just by walking around their building and counting MS products, in uses even a hardliner would have to admit were productive.
Come on, was there any reason to drag nanotech into a software-related article other than Hemos-points?
Hmm, I can see this...
Dilbert: We've been walking around this landfill for eight, nine minutes now looking for these tanks the PHB threw away.
Wally: [picks up gum wrapper] Looks like a piece of the tank - obviously shredded to uselessness. Are we done?
Dilbert: I feel done.
Eating kittens is just plain wrong!
And no one should do it!
EVER!
Will the FSF get the Best Open Source Charity award every year forever, and will Linus get the Advocate award every year forever?
Or is there some expectation that these folks will be "dethroned" at some point?
Or are Beanies not an annual award/excuse to drink beer?
... was an arrow-key action game called Adventure written for the PET. The version published had been rewritten by a classmate for the TRS-80 and wound up in the back of a SoftSider (?) magazine from 1981-1982. (Anybody still have those?)
;^[
The magazine was having a contest for programs with less than 1K of source as "KByters" they could run as the last column in the mag. I forget what the dollar amount of the prize was, but I remember the classmate kept every darn dime...
Last code I ever open-sourced.
Still, the PET rocked. I still can type one-handed, I learned how by holding a magazine in one hand and pressing chiclet keys with the other. (I still can't type two-handed from learning that way...) And I still treasure the poorly-laminated piece of red construction paper that certifies me a member of PETCO, the high-school computer organization.
Having gone through the (admittedly baroque) Site Server setup, I can tell you that the docs have improved anyway...
A quick search of support.microsoft.com shows that...
If this were a glibc dependency/version problem you were talking about, you'd get hit with the FUD brush before you got your mouse off the Submit button.
Now don't get me started on the MDAC stuff, which is the only MS product I've seen break in an all-MS environment...
A shame he mispelt Deming's name in the last paragraph: cuts the impact (of what is a fairly strong statement) quite a bit.
The perils of Linux in business:
CIO adopts Linux, only to find he has to teach people what CIOs talk about at tech meetings.
I don't really want to see your original art on this patent.
What about the bounty/sponsor ideas takes them outside the realm of (let's say) EBay?
"Hey, I've got a module writing gig, wanna bid?"
"Hey, I'm looking for a sponsor for my cool idea, wanna bid?"
In principle, you can make deals for units of coding effort in an online auction just like you'd make deals for Aunt Hattie's heirloom flowerpot.
In practice, I can think of a bunch of things that complicate this... some of which SourceXchange et al. are already trying to address.
What can you think of, and how would you solve it?
... you gotta answer these sorts of challenges.
The very fact that Microsoft can organize a position paper like this is important to the sort of folks who buy quad Xeons. If there's nobody home to answer this sort of stuff from the Linux side, that's a decision-maker right there.
MS is interested in folks with business cases that prove they can afford to buy hotter servers than P200s. Anything below $5K or so is very much a low-end box to someone planning a dollar-generating project... so their choice of playing field seems quite reasonable to me.
Bottom line: sure, it's Microsoft's bat and ball, but you've got to accept that if you want to play their game. If you don't wanna play, that's fine too... but ripping MS on slashdot is really a low-class way to decline the offer.