I don't know where to begin on this one. If there weren't any burglars around, I wouldn't have to lock the doors of my house. If everyone would abide traffic rules, the need for airbags etc. would vanish.
This guy is not only complete missing any connection with the outside world, he also forgets that there are thousands of people working in the (IT) security industry, making a living. It may sound silly, but we keep our economy going this way. This is why there are so many economists/therapists/lawyers/communication advisors/etc. around.
I feel like feeding the troll here. Time to knock it off...
FUD IS the real problem here. The MSLinux battle is NOT going to be won on technical grounds. How many more times must we tell the story of how Apple had a better thing going on back in the day, but still MS took the cake. Or VHS vs. Betamax. And there are probably countless other examples.
The challenge here is not to make a good product, but to let people BUY it. The people who control the bag of dollars usually have no technical background or knowledge, and are being led by the nose by salesdroids and sales consultants. A pretty picture is enticing, a demonstration usually does the trick, and if all else failes, invite some people over for a business trip and through in a few bottles of champagne.
So MS comes up to my boss and they have a chat, in which the MS-droid not only preaches to glospel of Redmond, but also tells about that Devil from Finland, and that people with beards are generally not to be trusted. But my boss allready knew this, because he read the management summary of a few "independent" research reports on the subject.
A manager or financial decision maker has no interest in the technical aspects of a product he has to use, he just needs someone to tell him how cool it is over a few free beers and the deal is done. And while we, the collective of/. nerds whine on amongst ourselves about who has the better filesystem, or the best memory protection, yadayadayada, and we think we can predict which of the 2 will emerge victorious.
The obvious answer is: NO ONE. MS will continue to dominate the business market, especially on the user layer, Linux wins it in the embedded sector, heavy back-end systems (which no user ever sees), and probably in the R&D sector as well. And Apple will maintain their niche until the end of days.
Since Firefox has been decently stable, i've been using it for browsing. I see no need for an 'integrated browser suite'. After a recent HD-crash which lost me all my locally stored mail, I'm only using web-based email (hooray for gmail!). No more POP-clients on my PC. TML-editors suck ass on general principle, and I have no use for an IRC-client.
If I were the mozilla foundation, I'd settle for the standalone products. This will get them better brand recognition, and focussing of their coding efforts. But that's just my 2c.
Get your head out of your VMS manual for a second, and see that the world has changed. I used to work at the R&D-shop of a telco. A lot of cool stuff was going on there. They cooked up new mobile networks, they experimented with building a PBX out of a PC, etc. I had a great time there.
By the time I left however, they had been ordered to ready themselves for the 'real world'. After a few major reorganisations, everything that went on there must be able to be milked for hard cash in 10 weeks.
No more tinkering, just buying stuff from Siemens, Nokia and the like. Cook up a business case, build a demo, and roll through to the commercial branches of the company to make $BIGNUM in a nation wide rollout.
Cool companies are hardly ever cool nowadays. HP once had their own R&D labs. They built their own OS, remember. Maybe it sucked, but they built it anyway.
If DEC had been smart enough to be alive still today, they wouldn't be inventing large piles of cash into R&D, they would milk the cows they had, they would say they were focussing on 'service deliverance' or whatever the buzzword-du-jour was, and everyone would mope on about the good old days.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, and it pains me to see how everyone nowadays is focusing on making a few quick bucks, but alas...
IMHO, the core of the problem is that marketeers feel they have some sort of God given right to harass me anytime, anywhere with advertising. A few examples:
* I recently moved to another house. My new mailbox has no sticker on it (yet) saying I'm not interested in unadressed advertisments. The amount of paper printed advertisments I receive amounts to a lot more volume than the amount of 'regular' mail. * I get a lot of calls from telemarketeers offering me insurances, mortages, newspapers, cheap phone rates, etc. * A company here in.nl has developed a method of inserting extra advertisments in realtime in airings of soccermatches, in places on the screen which are not allready taken up by advertising or by the match itself.
This is why spam won't be kept at bay by anti-spam laws. Companies are trying feverously to shove as many advertising down your throat as they possibly can. You are not an individual, you are a consumer, and they won't rest until they've pried your last penny from your cold, dead, hands.
And since, through lobbying, companies have a larger say in the legislation than the voter has in all western countries, this is not going away. Look at the broader picture. Legislation agains spam will allways be easily avoided, because it is a rigid set of rules, not a flexible method. And putting a law into place takes several months or maybe years. Thinking of a way to get around it takes far shorter.
I hate spam as much as the next person, but I'm having serious doubts about this project. How easy might it be to target this system to a legitimate website and turn the thing into a botnet for DDoS-attacks, and stuff like that?
The problem with spammers is a hopelessly outdated protocol for sending and relaying e-mail on the one hand, and on the other, governments failing to produce adequate legislation to combat spammers, scammers, and the like on the Internet. Then think that most companies and business-oriented lobby groups fight hard to keep e-mail available as a direct marketing medium, the same way they would thoroughly object to a ban on telephone-based telemarketing.
We don't need a bunch of cowboys arming themselves with guns and taking out everyone they see as a danger to society/Internet, we need decent, solid legislation, and government commitment to take out spammers.
Q: What is the range of Bluetooth transmitter/receivers? A: Bluetooth is designed for very low power use, and the transmission range will only be 10m, about 30ft. High-powered Bluetooth devices will enable ranges up to 100m (300ft). Considering the design philosophy behind Bluetooth, even the 10m range is adequate for the purposes Bluetooth is intended for. Later versions of the Bluetooth spec may allow longer ranges. (Source: http://www.mobileinfo.com/Bluetooth/FAQ.htm#t6
But with battery power still limited, you might be able to use your WiFi enabled cellphone of PDA as a relay station. I'm sure somebody will be clever enough to overcome the 10m/30ft range issue...
Props to Siemens for being the first to jump on this bandwagon, but why still use the 'plain old phone'?
Nowadays, World+Dog has a PC with built in WiFi and Bluetooth support. Or else you buy an USB adapter at the local supermarket. Instead of using a telephone to access skype, use a Bluetooth headset like this one: http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/speakers/headse ts/65ff/
It shouldn't be too hard to program a speech-to-text interface to allow you to "call" one of your contacts by speaking the name. And if you don't want to be caught speechdialing, there must be other alternatives. You could run a small program on your cellphone to control skype while walking around the house.
The solution Siemens offered here is a nice way to cut costs on long distances calls, but not really groundbreaking. I'd like to see a company build an 'out-of-the-box' remote solution for Skype.
Knowing Google, they will probably introduce some nifty features in an IM-client that will put them ahead of the ones allready out there.
Gmail was the first to come with 1 GB storage, the other free e-mail providers had to rush to catch up, and gmail is not even out of beta yet! Still, the day everybody can sign up for a gmail account, I consider a few of the existing big email networks history. First of all: hotmail, who do not seem to have made any moves to comply themselves with the new standards in free email. Lycos and Yahoo! are at least making an effort, and they were considerable more friendly to work with in the first place.
Same will go with the IM-networks. I'm positive Google has a few aces up their sleeve, adding some fresh and exciting functionalities to IM. Think about the things in nowadays IM that irritate you, add Googles tremendous expertise in searching, and their seemless endless resources, who knows what they can cook up? Inherent P2P-functionality? Sharing knowlegde and information?
If Google can deliver in IM what they are doing in Mail and on the desktop, MSN and hotmail could be in some hot water...
Word Perfect had no objection to piracy for home use. So everybody used WP at home illegaly, and got skilled in it in their own time.
Companies who required word processing for their employees had the choice of either buying a product that people knew how to use (WP), or a product that no one knew how to use (Everything else), thus requiring expensive user-training. You do the math...
At our company, sybase is our main supplier for database software (ASE mostly). We are slowly changing to MS-SQL, because we're slowly becoming an all M$-shop. (And I'm slowly looking for another job...) We run Sybase on Alpha/Tru64. We've had our issues during the years, a lot of wich have been resolved by Unix-patches, so I guess Sybase as a DBMS is quite stable. Support by Sybase however is less cause for optimism, as they recently shut down their presence in.nl. We are now serviced from out of.uk. Sybase is, IMHO, rapidly losing their grip on the market. Existing implementations take years to rebuild on a new platform, but it is happening, and I think in a lot of places, and M$ is the main beneficiary. The way people are using databases is changing. People want multi-tier applications, and the Sybase portfolio can't compete with M$.NET. Sybase should be looking at new markets, and I think this is a good move. The advantage of people being familiar with your product can work wonders, look for example at how WordPerfect got big years back.
This is of course complete and utter bollocks. There are no laws against pornography where only adults participate. Since pornography is not a crime, it will not be blocked. This will only change if an extremely rightwing, christian government gets the upper hand. Some people argue that this is allready the case in the U.S. of course;)
Child pornography is illegal, and generally conceived as 'evil'. I do not condone child pornography, but if people want to watch porn, and other people are willing to provide, feel free to do so.
BT's role in this scenario is disputable, but that would also be the case if an ISP were to take steps against spam, and maybe limiting their customers freedom or privacy by their actions.
I myself am on the other side of the debate. I work at an auction hall, where a lot of the buying parties rent space for further handling of products. Everybody want to use wireless technology, especially for logistic purposes. The problem is that all the tennants are close up one another, and close up our production processes, where they can serioulsy hinder our logistic processing if they configure their AP's the wrong way.
I cannot have every company under our roof setting up their wireless networks without any regulation. I could make a list off rules of compliance for the tennants, but there is a lot of fear among the management to actually 'forbid' things to them. But as we all know, no rules of compliance are ever followed without the existance of a penal clause.
My guess would be to set up 1 network, and to let the tennants use that. This would be a paid-for service, because my devices and administration does not come for free. This way we can rule out any frequency-interference problems, security-issues (provided we do a good job at building and maintaining the network), etc. Needless to say, this is a plan which is surrounded by a lot of controversy.
Anyone has a 'best practice' (or 'good-practice':) ) for a situation like this?
A few weeks back I read an article on the register that stated that 2/3 of IT personel do not have the competence that is required by their function. Everybode who has ever written a resume knows that lying about what skills and experience you have are commonplace. Because the interview is done by a manager with no in-depth knowledge of the field you're working in. How different is that from a softwarecompany telling you that their product is the best out there? The proof of the pudding is in the eating, but once you've bought a piece of software, and have spent 3 months (or more) on installing, configuring, testing, are you then willing to take your loss if you're not a 100% satisfied? I've seen project being dragged on for a year or more (!!!) because a vendor still had to resolve a bug.
It isn't about quality, it's about marketing. If you buy MS once, it's only logical you keep buying it. Enforce a decision on the executive level. Take a manager out for a meal, or a game of golf, send him a nice bottle of wine at christmas, and pummel him to death with expensive looking reports about how GNU/Linux/OSS is a baaaad idea. He'll bend over eventually. That way, they don't have to take the pepsi-challenge. The executive won't know the difference anyway.
We, the/. crowd, allow ourselves to be infuriated about the plain and open FUD by AdTI and others. What you/should/ be doing instead of performing the/.-equivalent of AOL-like 'me-too-ing', is creating awareness among your managers, and helping them to find linux success stories.
Has everybody here missed out on the Nokia N-Gage phone? It sports better graphics than a GBA, rendering the latter obsolete.
It has 3-D graphics and bluetooth multiplayer support, and it's a mobile phone as well.
http://www.n-gage.com/
This hardly ever happens to me. I don't know if that is because I rarely buy any mainstream cd's, because I read a few (independant) reviews before I buy anything, or if I have a magical 6th sense.
Fact is: There is a lot of crap music on the market, to which I wouldn't even listen if they PAID me 99c p/song...
I don't think the problem with the 'current generation' of programmers lies with their unwillingness to 'learn how to do some real programming'. Companies who develop software wanted the release yesterday. Development tools focus on allowing fast development of applications. M$ is taking a lot of criticism on itself by delaying Longhorn.
You can no longer work on a product until 'it's done'. It has to ship, wether it's stable or not. If not, you issue a patch a week later. This is especially visible in games development.
Companies tend to turn a blind eye to some aspects of life when it comes to making a buck, especially if no one's going to hold them responsible for it. I remember a quote from that horrible movie "Armageddon", where Steve Buscemi, sitting in a space shuttle of sorts, comments that he is sitting on 200.000 parts made by the lowest bidder, $BIGNUM gallons of fuel and a nuclear warhead. Makes you feel save heh?
Who cares if you miss out on your holiday flight? Not the software manufacturer who just cashed in on his ATC-system...
Software written in the past also needs to be maintained. TFA states that testing for an upgrade and improvement to the West Drayton system was the cause of the problems.
(Which I find strange, cause testing in a system as critical as this should be done in a separate environmnent.)
I assume you've had no previous experience in maintaining a 'vintage' system like that? The code is probably written by a lot of different programmers, each with his own style, poorly documented, and thus very hard to read and understand. Software doesn't rust, but it clutters up and gets dirty over the years. It won't come apart by itself, but by the hands of a developer writing a necessary upgrade.
At the risk of being overly cynical: "Respect" has never paid the bills. "Respect" does not allow you to drive a convertible. "Respect" is not for dinner.
Ethical business practice, my ass. I've since long found out that most of the salesdroids I encounter are lying thieves, burnt on making a quick buck with as little to do for it as possible.
MR has done this before, and now everyone knows the Lindows OS (now to be referred to as LinSpire).
He's pulling the same stunt again. It's an ingenious move. Look at what he has accomplished. Every/.-reader now knows that he has these 2 apps out. And as soon as Steve Jobs realises it, and sues MR/LinSpire, all the WORLD will know, because the news will be covered at every Magazine/E-zine with an Internet section.
By the time he changes the layout of those apps, a lot of people will have tried it out. Voila, instant market-share, no costs but a simple layout-redesign (which is probably resting on the shelfs as we speak).
I just entered 'www.yahoo.com' into my browser to see what it looked liked nowadays. Yahoo is still positioning itself as a portal, and rams a bunch of ads down my throat before I had a chance to hit the back button.
Their search engine seems to be working fine (but slow, compared to google), and no image-based ads between the results.
War/Competition usually means improvement of usability of their respective products. I'm all for that...
Disney made a genious, tough at the time risky, move to do business with Pixar. Pixar, with every new movie they put out, has raised the bar on animated movies. Traditional 2D-Disney animation is on a steep decline, and Pixar is now breaking free of Disney. (I've seen the figures somewhere, don't have a link, but take it from me, it's impressive...)
For this deal with MS to be a success, they must have content people are willing to watch. And that is something they're not putting out anymore with Pixar off their team.
They can still be considered a titan, but for how long?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know where to begin on this one.
If there weren't any burglars around, I wouldn't have to lock the doors of my house.
If everyone would abide traffic rules, the need for airbags etc. would vanish.
This guy is not only complete missing any connection with the outside world, he also forgets that there are thousands of people working in the (IT) security industry, making a living. It may sound silly, but we keep our economy going this way. This is why there are so many economists/therapists/lawyers/communication advisors/etc. around.
I feel like feeding the troll here. Time to knock it off...
FUD IS the real problem here. The MSLinux battle is NOT going to be won on technical grounds. How many more times must we tell the story of how Apple had a better thing going on back in the day, but still MS took the cake. Or VHS vs. Betamax. And there are probably countless other examples.
/. nerds whine on amongst ourselves about who has the better filesystem, or the best memory protection, yadayadayada, and we think we can predict which of the 2 will emerge victorious.
The challenge here is not to make a good product, but to let people BUY it. The people who control the bag of dollars usually have no technical background or knowledge, and are being led by the nose by salesdroids and sales consultants. A pretty picture is enticing, a demonstration usually does the trick, and if all else failes, invite some people over for a business trip and through in a few bottles of champagne.
So MS comes up to my boss and they have a chat, in which the MS-droid not only preaches to glospel of Redmond, but also tells about that Devil from Finland, and that people with beards are generally not to be trusted. But my boss allready knew this, because he read the management summary of a few "independent" research reports on the subject.
A manager or financial decision maker has no interest in the technical aspects of a product he has to use, he just needs someone to tell him how cool it is over a few free beers and the deal is done. And while we, the collective of
The obvious answer is: NO ONE.
MS will continue to dominate the business market, especially on the user layer, Linux wins it in the embedded sector, heavy back-end systems (which no user ever sees), and probably in the R&D sector as well. And Apple will maintain their niche until the end of days.
This would still require me to configura an IMAP client everywhere I want to check my email.
Since Firefox has been decently stable, i've been using it for browsing. I see no need for an 'integrated browser suite'. After a recent HD-crash which lost me all my locally stored mail, I'm only using web-based email (hooray for gmail!). No more POP-clients on my PC. TML-editors suck ass on general principle, and I have no use for an IRC-client.
If I were the mozilla foundation, I'd settle for the standalone products. This will get them better brand recognition, and focussing of their coding efforts. But that's just my 2c.
Sure sure, DEC was great, Compaq/HP are evil.
Get your head out of your VMS manual for a second, and see that the world has changed. I used to work at the R&D-shop of a telco. A lot of cool stuff was going on there. They cooked up new mobile networks, they experimented with building a PBX out of a PC, etc. I had a great time there.
By the time I left however, they had been ordered to ready themselves for the 'real world'. After a few major reorganisations, everything that went on there must be able to be milked for hard cash in 10 weeks.
No more tinkering, just buying stuff from Siemens, Nokia and the like. Cook up a business case, build a demo, and roll through to the commercial branches of the company to make $BIGNUM in a nation wide rollout.
Cool companies are hardly ever cool nowadays. HP once had their own R&D labs. They built their own OS, remember. Maybe it sucked, but they built it anyway.
If DEC had been smart enough to be alive still today, they wouldn't be inventing large piles of cash into R&D, they would milk the cows they had, they would say they were focussing on 'service deliverance' or whatever the buzzword-du-jour was, and everyone would mope on about the good old days.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, and it pains me to see how everyone nowadays is focusing on making a few quick bucks, but alas...
IMHO, the core of the problem is that marketeers feel they have some sort of God given right to harass me anytime, anywhere with advertising. A few examples:
.nl has developed a method of inserting extra advertisments in realtime in airings of soccermatches, in places on the screen which are not allready taken up by advertising or by the match itself.
* I recently moved to another house. My new mailbox has no sticker on it (yet) saying I'm not interested in unadressed advertisments. The amount of paper printed advertisments I receive amounts to a lot more volume than the amount of 'regular' mail.
* I get a lot of calls from telemarketeers offering me insurances, mortages, newspapers, cheap phone rates, etc.
* A company here in
This is why spam won't be kept at bay by anti-spam laws. Companies are trying feverously to shove as many advertising down your throat as they possibly can. You are not an individual, you are a consumer, and they won't rest until they've pried your last penny from your cold, dead, hands.
And since, through lobbying, companies have a larger say in the legislation than the voter has in all western countries, this is not going away. Look at the broader picture.
Legislation agains spam will allways be easily avoided, because it is a rigid set of rules, not a flexible method. And putting a law into place takes several months or maybe years. Thinking of a way to get around it takes far shorter.
I hate spam as much as the next person, but I'm having serious doubts about this project. How easy might it be to target this system to a legitimate website and turn the thing into a botnet for DDoS-attacks, and stuff like that?
The problem with spammers is a hopelessly outdated protocol for sending and relaying e-mail on the one hand, and on the other, governments failing to produce adequate legislation to combat spammers, scammers, and the like on the Internet.
Then think that most companies and business-oriented lobby groups fight hard to keep e-mail available as a direct marketing medium, the same way they would thoroughly object to a ban on telephone-based telemarketing.
We don't need a bunch of cowboys arming themselves with guns and taking out everyone they see as a danger to society/Internet, we need decent, solid legislation, and government commitment to take out spammers.
Q: What is the range of Bluetooth transmitter/receivers?
A: Bluetooth is designed for very low power use, and the transmission range will only be 10m, about 30ft. High-powered Bluetooth devices will enable ranges up to 100m (300ft). Considering the design philosophy behind Bluetooth, even the 10m range is adequate for the purposes Bluetooth is intended for. Later versions of the Bluetooth spec may allow longer ranges. (Source: http://www.mobileinfo.com/Bluetooth/FAQ.htm#t6
But with battery power still limited, you might be able to use your WiFi enabled cellphone of PDA as a relay station. I'm sure somebody will be clever enough to overcome the 10m/30ft range issue...
Props to Siemens for being the first to jump on this bandwagon, but why still use the 'plain old phone'?
e ts/65ff/
Nowadays, World+Dog has a PC with built in WiFi and Bluetooth support. Or else you buy an USB adapter at the local supermarket. Instead of using a telephone to access skype, use a Bluetooth headset like this one: http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/speakers/heads
It shouldn't be too hard to program a speech-to-text interface to allow you to "call" one of your contacts by speaking the name. And if you don't want to be caught speechdialing, there must be other alternatives. You could run a small program on your cellphone to control skype while walking around the house.
The solution Siemens offered here is a nice way to cut costs on long distances calls, but not really groundbreaking. I'd like to see a company build an 'out-of-the-box' remote solution for Skype.
Knowing Google, they will probably introduce some nifty features in an IM-client that will put them ahead of the ones allready out there.
Gmail was the first to come with 1 GB storage, the other free e-mail providers had to rush to catch up, and gmail is not even out of beta yet! Still, the day everybody can sign up for a gmail account, I consider a few of the existing big email networks history. First of all: hotmail, who do not seem to have made any moves to comply themselves with the new standards in free email. Lycos and Yahoo! are at least making an effort, and they were considerable more friendly to work with in the first place.
Same will go with the IM-networks. I'm positive Google has a few aces up their sleeve, adding some fresh and exciting functionalities to IM. Think about the things in nowadays IM that irritate you, add Googles tremendous expertise in searching, and their seemless endless resources, who knows what they can cook up?
Inherent P2P-functionality? Sharing knowlegde and information?
If Google can deliver in IM what they are doing in Mail and on the desktop, MSN and hotmail could be in some hot water...
Word Perfect had no objection to piracy for home use. So everybody used WP at home illegaly, and got skilled in it in their own time.
Companies who required word processing for their employees had the choice of either buying a product that people knew how to use (WP), or a product that no one knew how to use (Everything else), thus requiring expensive user-training. You do the math...
At our company, sybase is our main supplier for database software (ASE mostly). We are slowly changing to MS-SQL, because we're slowly becoming an all M$-shop. (And I'm slowly looking for another job...) .nl. We are now serviced from out of .uk. .NET.
We run Sybase on Alpha/Tru64. We've had our issues during the years, a lot of wich have been resolved by Unix-patches, so I guess Sybase as a DBMS is quite stable.
Support by Sybase however is less cause for optimism, as they recently shut down their presence in
Sybase is, IMHO, rapidly losing their grip on the market. Existing implementations take years to rebuild on a new platform, but it is happening, and I think in a lot of places, and M$ is the main beneficiary.
The way people are using databases is changing. People want multi-tier applications, and the Sybase portfolio can't compete with M$
Sybase should be looking at new markets, and I think this is a good move. The advantage of people being familiar with your product can work wonders, look for example at how WordPerfect got big years back.
This is of course complete and utter bollocks. ;)
There are no laws against pornography where only adults participate. Since pornography is not a crime, it will not be blocked. This will only change if an extremely rightwing, christian government gets the upper hand. Some people argue that this is allready the case in the U.S. of course
Child pornography is illegal, and generally conceived as 'evil'. I do not condone child pornography, but if people want to watch porn, and other people are willing to provide, feel free to do so.
BT's role in this scenario is disputable, but that would also be the case if an ISP were to take steps against spam, and maybe limiting their customers freedom or privacy by their actions.
I myself am on the other side of the debate. I work at an auction hall, where a lot of the buying parties rent space for further handling of products. Everybody want to use wireless technology, especially for logistic purposes. The problem is that all the tennants are close up one another, and close up our production processes, where they can serioulsy hinder our logistic processing if they configure their AP's the wrong way.
:) ) for a situation like this?
I cannot have every company under our roof setting up their wireless networks without any regulation. I could make a list off rules of compliance for the tennants, but there is a lot of fear among the management to actually 'forbid' things to them. But as we all know, no rules of compliance are ever followed without the existance of a penal clause.
My guess would be to set up 1 network, and to let the tennants use that. This would be a paid-for service, because my devices and administration does not come for free. This way we can rule out any frequency-interference problems, security-issues (provided we do a good job at building and maintaining the network), etc. Needless to say, this is a plan which is surrounded by a lot of controversy.
Anyone has a 'best practice' (or 'good-practice'
Since when does quality matter, especially in IT?
/. crowd, allow ourselves to be infuriated about the plain and open FUD by AdTI and others. What you /should/ be doing instead of performing the /.-equivalent of AOL-like 'me-too-ing', is creating awareness among your managers, and helping them to find linux success stories.
A few weeks back I read an article on the register that stated that 2/3 of IT personel do not have the competence that is required by their function.
Everybode who has ever written a resume knows that lying about what skills and experience you have are commonplace. Because the interview is done by a manager with no in-depth knowledge of the field you're working in. How different is that from a softwarecompany telling you that their product is the best out there? The proof of the pudding is in the eating, but once you've bought a piece of software, and have spent 3 months (or more) on installing, configuring, testing, are you then willing to take your loss if you're not a 100% satisfied? I've seen project being dragged on for a year or more (!!!) because a vendor still had to resolve a bug.
It isn't about quality, it's about marketing. If you buy MS once, it's only logical you keep buying it. Enforce a decision on the executive level. Take a manager out for a meal, or a game of golf, send him a nice bottle of wine at christmas, and pummel him to death with expensive looking reports about how GNU/Linux/OSS is a baaaad idea. He'll bend over eventually. That way, they don't have to take the pepsi-challenge. The executive won't know the difference anyway.
We, the
Has everybody here missed out on the Nokia N-Gage phone? It sports better graphics than a GBA, rendering the latter obsolete. It has 3-D graphics and bluetooth multiplayer support, and it's a mobile phone as well. http://www.n-gage.com/
This hardly ever happens to me. I don't know if that is because I rarely buy any mainstream cd's, because I read a few (independant) reviews before I buy anything, or if I have a magical 6th sense.
Fact is: There is a lot of crap music on the market, to which I wouldn't even listen if they PAID me 99c p/song...
I don't think the problem with the 'current generation' of programmers lies with their unwillingness to 'learn how to do some real programming'.
Companies who develop software wanted the release yesterday. Development tools focus on allowing fast development of applications. M$ is taking a lot of criticism on itself by delaying Longhorn.
You can no longer work on a product until 'it's done'. It has to ship, wether it's stable or not. If not, you issue a patch a week later. This is especially visible in games development.
Companies tend to turn a blind eye to some aspects of life when it comes to making a buck, especially if no one's going to hold them responsible for it.
I remember a quote from that horrible movie "Armageddon", where Steve Buscemi, sitting in a space shuttle of sorts, comments that he is sitting on 200.000 parts made by the lowest bidder, $BIGNUM gallons of fuel and a nuclear warhead. Makes you feel save heh?
Who cares if you miss out on your holiday flight? Not the software manufacturer who just cashed in on his ATC-system...
Software written in the past also needs to be maintained. TFA states that testing for an upgrade and improvement to the West Drayton system was the cause of the problems.
(Which I find strange, cause testing in a system as critical as this should be done in a separate environmnent.)
I assume you've had no previous experience in maintaining a 'vintage' system like that? The code is probably written by a lot of different programmers, each with his own style, poorly documented, and thus very hard to read and understand.
Software doesn't rust, but it clutters up and gets dirty over the years. It won't come apart by itself, but by the hands of a developer writing a necessary upgrade.
They seem to manage allright though. Approx. 45 minutes after the story got posted, and they're still up. That's some nifty advertising :)
I doesn't make it okay, I'm as disgusted by it as you are. I'm just telling you what I see.
At the risk of being overly cynical:
"Respect" has never paid the bills.
"Respect" does not allow you to drive a convertible.
"Respect" is not for dinner.
Ethical business practice, my ass. I've since long found out that most of the salesdroids I encounter are lying thieves, burnt on making a quick buck with as little to do for it as possible.
MR has done this before, and now everyone knows the Lindows OS (now to be referred to as LinSpire).
/.-reader now knows that he has these 2 apps out. And as soon as Steve Jobs realises it, and sues MR/LinSpire, all the WORLD will know, because the news will be covered at every Magazine/E-zine with an Internet section.
He's pulling the same stunt again.
It's an ingenious move. Look at what he has accomplished. Every
By the time he changes the layout of those apps, a lot of people will have tried it out. Voila, instant market-share, no costs but a simple layout-redesign (which is probably resting on the shelfs as we speak).
I just entered 'www.yahoo.com' into my browser to see what it looked liked nowadays. Yahoo is still positioning itself as a portal, and rams a bunch of ads down my throat before I had a chance to hit the back button.
Their search engine seems to be working fine (but slow, compared to google), and no image-based ads between the results.
War/Competition usually means improvement of usability of their respective products. I'm all for that...
Disney made a genious, tough at the time risky, move to do business with Pixar. Pixar, with every new movie they put out, has raised the bar on animated movies. Traditional 2D-Disney animation is on a steep decline, and Pixar is now breaking free of Disney. (I've seen the figures somewhere, don't have a link, but take it from me, it's impressive...)
For this deal with MS to be a success, they must have content people are willing to watch. And that is something they're not putting out anymore with Pixar off their team.
They can still be considered a titan, but for how long?