What a bastard! He found a way to help employees in the service AND boost overall morale without it costing the company a lot of extra money.
The blind, anti-corporate cynicism onSlashdot is sometimes stupefying.
Talking out both sides of out mouths.
on
Pepping Up Windows
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The average Windows user tends to be less than satisfied with Windows. And that's no surprise, either, given the rather woeful state of its default applications. Consider that both Wordpad and Notepad refuse to open larger files, the integrated audio recorder limits recordings to 60 seconds, and Paint, the integrated graphics program, offers only the most rudimentary of features. Worse still, Internet Explorer can neither be considered modern nor safe for browsing, while Outlook Express is known for its affinity for contracting any number of worms and viruses. In short, the out-of-the-box Windows configuration is usually outdated and problem laden.
Ummm.. I'm a bit confused here? When MS started trying to make the OS everything to everyone, they were accused of predatory behavior and taken to court numerous times. Now we're complaining that MS Paint isn't powerful enough for graphics editing and that Windows Audio Recorder doesn't hold a candle to other third-party utils?
It's one thing to point out some nifty FOSS apps to people that may not have heard of them. It's an entirely another thing to jump on the anti-MS bandwagon and claim that this functionality should have been included in the OS.
"Not only does music file-swapping harm artists, but it also points to an erosion of respect for intellectual property that threatens Canada's economy and values at the core of our society," said Graham Henderson, president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, which commissioned the polls.
Even assuming that this study is valid, this is pretty much a non-story since causation hasn't been linked. I'm sure that industry is trying to spin it the same way as marijunana is blamed as a "gateway drug", e.g.: "Parents! Better watch your kids; if they're pirating music today, odds are it'll lead to a life of cheating and stealing."
Canadians between 12 and 24 years of age are responsible for 78 per cent of illegal music downloading, even though they make up only 21 per cent of the population, it says.
Any how was this determined? Extrapolating musical tastes? Asking anonymous P2P users their ages? I'd really question their methodology.
The illegal downloading has cost retail music stores more than half a billion dollars in lost sales since 1999, a study by Pollara for the recording industry estimates.
Again, how do you determine the difference between someone who downloaded instead of buying (legit lost sale) and someone who only downloaded in the first place because it was free (lost sale only via mystical accounting practices)?
How do I start my own polling firm where I get paid to tell clients what they want to hear? Seems like a sweet gig.
For the record, I'm also a CNE and greatly prefer NDS to AD. However, it would wrong of me to recommend to a client that they actually consider a new installation of Netware just because it's technically superior, or worse, just because I like it more.
A lot of techies forget that technical and business interests sometimes conflict. In such cases, business interests always need to be given a greater priority.
Not really--I myself and am MCSE and run my own consulting company where the majority of my clients run Active Directory. I'm quite aware of the costs. MS includes a license for Outlook when you buy a CAL for Exchange, so that extra expense is negated. OpenOffice also might make a viable office suite for this person, but the question was about directory services. Terminal Services is a non-issue in the same regard.
And it's not as cheap and easy to get quality techies as you might think. Putting your existing staff through a boot camp is only the tip of the iceberg expense-wise, and it's a very inefficent solution.
So, the question seems to be: OSS vs. Microsoft. Am I right? If so, the answer is easy: Which platform are the people who will be managaging the stuff have the most experience with? It may be sacrilege to say it here, but if you've a crew of MCSEs on staff who've never touched Linux, it's going to be more expensive and a bigger hastle go the OSS route.
I forget who said it but "OSS is free like a puppy is free". You need to have the staff to tend to the care and feeding. In the Detroit area at least, Windows guys are a dime a dozen. Competent Windows guys, while a bit more rare, are still easier to find than experienced Linux admins. (Of course, I'm looking at your question from a business consulting standpoint. If you're looking more for a technical recommendation, there's a lot more people here better qualified than me.)
I assume that you're using a corporate workstation? Talk to your sys admin. The Windows Update options are configured via a group policy object. IIRC, the default option is not force a reboot if someone's logged in, so they may have changed it for some reason.
Good to see that more companies are trying to keep their software free, but perhaps the Slashdot crowd could offer advice on a better business model than spam and merchandising?
Yeah, a pretty accepted software business model is: 1) Create software that people want 2) Trade that software for money.
An alternative buisness model is: 1) Help foster a community of developers to create software that people want 2) Connect potential buyers to that product and help them use it 3)Ask said people for money in return.
Maybe it's because I run my own business or maybe it's because I studied economics in school, but I tend to look at things a bit different than most other Slashdotters. You've all be spoiled by the easy access to pirated software, music and movies. In the real world, things cost producers both time and money to make. The reason why we all don't have to grow our own food, knit our own sweaters, or write our own code is because we've worked out a neat little system of exchange called "currency". It's just like the barter system, but a lot easier because currency is universally accepted. You don't have to worry about trying to locate someone who's willing to give you potatoes in exchange for your ability to configure sendmail. I only have a finite number of hours in my day, and a finite amount of resources. If I want to be able to eat, drive a car, and buy other people's software, I need to get someone in exchange for my skills. Elsewise I can't afford to give others something in return for their product/service.
It's really not a difficult concept to understand, but if you want the Cliff's Notes version of my point: "Nothing in life is free." If you want to see what happens with a society tries to avoid the basic laws of economics go vacation in North Korea (or to a lesser extent, Cuba).
This all boils down to one thing: lack of personal responsibility.
What ever happened to it? So many of our problems are rooted in everyone's attempt to pass the buck: the populace's willingness to give up civil liberties in order to get a nanny state in return, the abundance of frivolous lawsuits, corporate scandals, twelve step programs, people who constantly bitch about politicians but never vote, people who bitch about their jobs being offshored but don't do anything to increase the value of their own career, Karl Rove, etc, etc.... I just don't understand what has happened in my lifetime.
My father grew up within a society that valued "being a man": being responsible for your own station in life and your family's welfare, admitting your mistakes, and genuinely trying to be honorable/noble. If we had more personal responsbility in this world governments wouldn't be able to get away with attitudes like this.
I'd start with talking to vendors. Consult with some sendmail gurus, Notes guys, etc. Any of these people/companies would salvate at the thought of being a part of a project this large. First, talk to the client and hammer out the real needs with solid performance requirements, timeframes, growth expectations, (meaning real numbers) etc. Put together a well thought-out Request For Proposal and send them out to as many applicable vendors that interest you. Then just stand back and play the role of ringmaster. The vendors will give you all the ideas you need.
Just do one thing, please: make sure that the client is honest-to-goodness serious about this. I absolutely hate getting pie-in-the-sky RFPs from people who are just kicking the tires. It's a good way to burn bridges by not looking professional.
I've heard of several attempts of people setting up "Internet islands" using cheap hardware and FOSS near refugee encampments. The intention is to facilitate communication to their loved ones across the country. For even the technologically inclined, these are the only functional PCs they have access too.
If the vast majority of these people can only use Firefox or Konq at the moment, how good is this decision?
I run my own business and have so for the past year and a half. Last year I didn't make enough money to actually have to pay federal taxes (after deductions, of course). Year-to-date '05, I have netted $15,208.42. But I'll have to kick 15.3% of my gross income back to Uncle Sam. That's also not including my legal and accounting expenses, my business owner's insurance policy, advertising, office space, etc. Plus, $4,089.45 of that is in receivables from a company that is (was) based in New Orleans.
Yet... I keep plugging along. I love it. I feel like I'm playing a very long game of Starcraft sometimes: Slowly but surely researching new tech and constructing new buildings, instead of doing a mass rush at the onset of the game.
Before you laugh at my numbers, keep in mind that I'm determined to build my company debt free. I have the time and patience to do that and do it right. It can be very hard at times, but it's also very rewarding.
TheTechZone is running a cool human interest story...
lol... this story is neither about humans nor is it interesting. It's just another round of advertising PR thinly disguised as actual news. Editors/writers of tech sites get goodies for free all the time from manufacturers. Part of the unspoken (or occasionally, written) deal is that they showcase these gadgets from time-to-time.
The real news would be if someone could tell us all how much Slashdot is racking in from this arrangement. Come on OSDN, how stupid do you think your audience is?
Obligatory bash.org quote
Obligato
Obligatory bas
on
New Winzip in the Works
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· Score: 5, Funny
what should I give sister for unzipping?
Um. Ten bucks?
no I mean like, WinZip?
Old news is no news. :-(
on
Defeating Captcha
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· Score: 4, Informative
# Q. Where is the code?
# A. No code is available yet. I am still pondering the pertinence of allowing code in the wild. The good old full-disclosure debate... If you think I should release the code for PWNtcha, feel free to explain your arguments to me.
::sigh:: The blurb leads one to believe that there's a new script kiddie tool in the wild. This is just someone's experiment with OCR and some AI. (And an old project at that; I remember reading this site about six months ago while working on my own Captcha implementation). There's a handful of researchers around the world doing the same type of work, including at team at UC Berkeley that devised a system that they claimed was 92% accurate... back in 2003. All in all, this isn't all that newsworthy.
Let's say I take a binary file and I grab both it's MD5 and SHA1 hashes. I then combine the output of those two into one really long string. Them I take the SHA1 hash of that string. How secure is this?
My job isn't to tell my clients how to run their businesses. They relate to me their growth expectations and I help them plan their IT strategy around those goals. It would be a bit presumptuous for me to tell them that they're wrong, even if I somehow understood their business as well as they do. Which isn't likely to happen since I'm an IT specialist.
Wow... this is a whole can of worms. You're not going to get an appropriate answer on semi-anonymous web forum. I operate my own technology consulting firm who specializes (coincidently enough) in professional service firms such as yours. I earn my living, in part, by answering these types of questions.
I'll need to know the current technological state of your company. How close to capacity is your IT dept running, both in manpower and equipment/services? What are your company's growth expecations over the next two years? 5-10 years? In what role does your company see the IT department, cost center or profit center? In the case of the former, how might we turn that around? How does your utilization of technology come to others in your industry? Etc, etc...
Take the sound bites that you're going to get here with a grain of salt. You're going to need answers that are specific to your business itself. I know it's probably not what you want to hear, but you really should call in some outside help so you can learn how to do it right. Patching together piecemeal advice might cost you your job in the end.
I'm a computer geek, not a terrorism expert but from my understanding, Al Queda is much more a brand name than it is an omnipresent, neboulous, James Bond-like organization. Bin Laden/Al-Zawahri isn't holed up in some Bat Cave, directing his mindless minons in yet another half-baked, but grand scheme at ruling the world. But painting Al Queda as such makes it easier to scare a populace who's grown up with comic book bad guys into complacency.
Al Queda is just a cause; it's a flag that militant Islamic zealots hoist in order to feel part of a worldwide movement. They're a ragtag bunch of criminals who want to spread their message as far and wide as possible. There are no definate leaders (Bin Laden is just a spokesman), nor do they have a cohesive strategy. Therefore it makes perfect sense that they use the Internet to communicate. This isn't news. It's just another way to make us feel that a Muhammad with a Kalashnikov just might be invading an ubiquitous part of most Americans' daily lives. Pair that anxiety with most people's complete lack understanding concering the Internet (ignorance begets fear) and suddenly it becomes much easier to curb our digital liberties just a bit more. Not to mention it helps to sell Washington Post newspapers.
I mean, come on... how many headlines read "Confirmed: Terrorists using telephones to communicate"?
Sooo... a leader of the Catholic Church favors the teachings of the Bible over science? This isn't even news over at the 700 Club; it's certainly not 'news for nerds'. Guess Zonk just felt like fanning a religious flame war this morning.
Really not all that suprising, I suppose. We originally had frustrated, economically depressed minorities who felt that they had to prove something to each other. Now we have frustrated, socially depressed nerds who also feel they have something to prove in their own circles.::sigh:: They're already staking out supposed rivalries and flaunting overinflated egos. (Threatening with DDOS attacks instead guns? WTF?) Talk about wannabees--this isn't cool or amusing, it's just sad. It could have been entertaining, but these people are taking themselves way too seriously.
Going to play the devil's advocate here, because I know how most of the rest of you feel:
I used to be the web architect for a.com a few years ago. I created a custom metrics program that intergrated into into our (also custom) ecommerce application. To track users, I gave them a single, persistant cookie that contained only a GUID. I used this information to determine our converstion ratio (number of visitors to buyers), figure out the top paths through the site, determine percentage of traffic that was return visitors, etc.
All this stuff was entirely anonymous unless they purchased something from us. But, even then their site history was really only incidently linked to their contact info because we never correlated the data together. Why would I? Knowing that "John Smith" visited our site 3 times a week isn't really any more insightful that knowing that "User #5233258" visited us 3 times a week. The data was only useful in aggregate. For example, knowing that the last page 20% of people visited was our contact page, yet only 10% of those people actually submitted the form would make me reevaluate that page. Maybe the contact form wasn't very user friendly? So, I'd tweak it and then recompare the metrics.
The whole point of my tracking was to better serve our visitors and eventual customers. I wanted to make it easier for them to do what they came to our site to do. Or it would help us target our advertising for effectively. If a lot of people clicking through from a banner ad we had on Site A tended to buy Widget B, we'd decide to modify the banner ad to specifically highlight Widget B. Maybe my attitude is different than most, but I can't be unique. I never looked down upon our visitors, feeling that I was hearding cattle together to be slaughtered, or at least ripped off. Quite the opposite. These visitors wanted to be on my site, elsewise they wouldn't have dropped by. It felt pretty cool that so many people were coming to a site that I was responsible for managing. These people were supplying my paycheck and I had to make sure that they preffered our site to our competitors'. If a lot of visitors deleted that single cookie I used, that made that job much more difficult.
If you look at Windows and Linux, both are based on 25-year-old technology. Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?
I guess someone should tell automakers that they should reinvent a mode of transportation from scratch. That four wheels, an engine, and brake and throttle thing is so passé nowadays. Plumbers are going to be pretty upset to learn that using pipes to carry water is so several-centuries ago.
There's no doubt that Mr. Metcalfe is quite bright and has contibuted greatly to the IT world, but I don't understand this rant. If he doesn't see the innovation, I guess he's never compared Slackware '96 to today's distros, or Windows 3.1 to WinXP. Apple certainly can't be ignored here either. Where are the new operating systems likely to come from? I'm going to take a wild guess, and say "probably from the OS's of today." They don't need to be completely rewritten every few years to count as progress. Even the emergence of UNIX itself was evolutionary, not revolutionary.
It's also interesting that he clearly shows a lack of faith in the OSS community, but then digs at the IETF for evolving into elitist and monolithic organization.::scatches head:: Reading through the article, he doesn't seem to be very consistant with his views.
Slashdot Mirror
What a bastard! He found a way to help employees in the service AND boost overall morale without it costing the company a lot of extra money.
The blind, anti-corporate cynicism onSlashdot is sometimes stupefying.
It's one thing to point out some nifty FOSS apps to people that may not have heard of them. It's an entirely another thing to jump on the anti-MS bandwagon and claim that this functionality should have been included in the OS.
How do I start my own polling firm where I get paid to tell clients what they want to hear? Seems like a sweet gig.
For the record, I'm also a CNE and greatly prefer NDS to AD. However, it would wrong of me to recommend to a client that they actually consider a new installation of Netware just because it's technically superior, or worse, just because I like it more.
A lot of techies forget that technical and business interests sometimes conflict. In such cases, business interests always need to be given a greater priority.
Not really--I myself and am MCSE and run my own consulting company where the majority of my clients run Active Directory. I'm quite aware of the costs. MS includes a license for Outlook when you buy a CAL for Exchange, so that extra expense is negated. OpenOffice also might make a viable office suite for this person, but the question was about directory services. Terminal Services is a non-issue in the same regard.
And it's not as cheap and easy to get quality techies as you might think. Putting your existing staff through a boot camp is only the tip of the iceberg expense-wise, and it's a very inefficent solution.
So, the question seems to be: OSS vs. Microsoft. Am I right? If so, the answer is easy: Which platform are the people who will be managaging the stuff have the most experience with? It may be sacrilege to say it here, but if you've a crew of MCSEs on staff who've never touched Linux, it's going to be more expensive and a bigger hastle go the OSS route.
I forget who said it but "OSS is free like a puppy is free". You need to have the staff to tend to the care and feeding. In the Detroit area at least, Windows guys are a dime a dozen. Competent Windows guys, while a bit more rare, are still easier to find than experienced Linux admins. (Of course, I'm looking at your question from a business consulting standpoint. If you're looking more for a technical recommendation, there's a lot more people here better qualified than me.)
I assume that you're using a corporate workstation? Talk to your sys admin. The Windows Update options are configured via a group policy object. IIRC, the default option is not force a reboot if someone's logged in, so they may have changed it for some reason.
1) Create software that people want
2) Trade that software for money.
An alternative buisness model is:
1) Help foster a community of developers to create software that people want
2) Connect potential buyers to that product and help them use it
3)Ask said people for money in return.
Maybe it's because I run my own business or maybe it's because I studied economics in school, but I tend to look at things a bit different than most other Slashdotters. You've all be spoiled by the easy access to pirated software, music and movies. In the real world, things cost producers both time and money to make. The reason why we all don't have to grow our own food, knit our own sweaters, or write our own code is because we've worked out a neat little system of exchange called "currency". It's just like the barter system, but a lot easier because currency is universally accepted. You don't have to worry about trying to locate someone who's willing to give you potatoes in exchange for your ability to configure sendmail. I only have a finite number of hours in my day, and a finite amount of resources. If I want to be able to eat, drive a car, and buy other people's software, I need to get someone in exchange for my skills. Elsewise I can't afford to give others something in return for their product/service.
It's really not a difficult concept to understand, but if you want the Cliff's Notes version of my point: "Nothing in life is free." If you want to see what happens with a society tries to avoid the basic laws of economics go vacation in North Korea (or to a lesser extent, Cuba).
This all boils down to one thing: lack of personal responsibility.
:-(
What ever happened to it? So many of our problems are rooted in everyone's attempt to pass the buck: the populace's willingness to give up civil liberties in order to get a nanny state in return, the abundance of frivolous lawsuits, corporate scandals, twelve step programs, people who constantly bitch about politicians but never vote, people who bitch about their jobs being offshored but don't do anything to increase the value of their own career, Karl Rove, etc, etc.... I just don't understand what has happened in my lifetime.
My father grew up within a society that valued "being a man": being responsible for your own station in life and your family's welfare, admitting your mistakes, and genuinely trying to be honorable/noble. If we had more personal responsbility in this world governments wouldn't be able to get away with attitudes like this.
Where's Sartre when you need him?
I'd start with talking to vendors. Consult with some sendmail gurus, Notes guys, etc. Any of these people/companies would salvate at the thought of being a part of a project this large. First, talk to the client and hammer out the real needs with solid performance requirements, timeframes, growth expectations, (meaning real numbers) etc. Put together a well thought-out Request For Proposal and send them out to as many applicable vendors that interest you. Then just stand back and play the role of ringmaster. The vendors will give you all the ideas you need.
Just do one thing, please: make sure that the client is honest-to-goodness serious about this. I absolutely hate getting pie-in-the-sky RFPs from people who are just kicking the tires. It's a good way to burn bridges by not looking professional.
I've heard of several attempts of people setting up "Internet islands" using cheap hardware and FOSS near refugee encampments. The intention is to facilitate communication to their loved ones across the country. For even the technologically inclined, these are the only functional PCs they have access too.
If the vast majority of these people can only use Firefox or Konq at the moment, how good is this decision?
I run my own business and have so for the past year and a half. Last year I didn't make enough money to actually have to pay federal taxes (after deductions, of course). Year-to-date '05, I have netted $15,208.42. But I'll have to kick 15.3% of my gross income back to Uncle Sam. That's also not including my legal and accounting expenses, my business owner's insurance policy, advertising, office space, etc. Plus, $4,089.45 of that is in receivables from a company that is (was) based in New Orleans.
Yet... I keep plugging along. I love it. I feel like I'm playing a very long game of Starcraft sometimes: Slowly but surely researching new tech and constructing new buildings, instead of doing a mass rush at the onset of the game.
Before you laugh at my numbers, keep in mind that I'm determined to build my company debt free. I have the time and patience to do that and do it right. It can be very hard at times, but it's also very rewarding.
The real news would be if someone could tell us all how much Slashdot is racking in from this arrangement. Come on OSDN, how stupid do you think your audience is?
Let's say I take a binary file and I grab both it's MD5 and SHA1 hashes. I then combine the output of those two into one really long string. Them I take the SHA1 hash of that string. How secure is this?
Not when it comes to regular expressions. They're almost always considerably easier to write than to read.
My job isn't to tell my clients how to run their businesses. They relate to me their growth expectations and I help them plan their IT strategy around those goals. It would be a bit presumptuous for me to tell them that they're wrong, even if I somehow understood their business as well as they do. Which isn't likely to happen since I'm an IT specialist.
Wow... this is a whole can of worms. You're not going to get an appropriate answer on semi-anonymous web forum. I operate my own technology consulting firm who specializes (coincidently enough) in professional service firms such as yours. I earn my living, in part, by answering these types of questions.
I'll need to know the current technological state of your company. How close to capacity is your IT dept running, both in manpower and equipment/services? What are your company's growth expecations over the next two years? 5-10 years? In what role does your company see the IT department, cost center or profit center? In the case of the former, how might we turn that around? How does your utilization of technology come to others in your industry? Etc, etc...
Take the sound bites that you're going to get here with a grain of salt. You're going to need answers that are specific to your business itself. I know it's probably not what you want to hear, but you really should call in some outside help so you can learn how to do it right. Patching together piecemeal advice might cost you your job in the end.
I'm a computer geek, not a terrorism expert but from my understanding, Al Queda is much more a brand name than it is an omnipresent, neboulous, James Bond-like organization. Bin Laden/Al-Zawahri isn't holed up in some Bat Cave, directing his mindless minons in yet another half-baked, but grand scheme at ruling the world. But painting Al Queda as such makes it easier to scare a populace who's grown up with comic book bad guys into complacency.
Al Queda is just a cause; it's a flag that militant Islamic zealots hoist in order to feel part of a worldwide movement. They're a ragtag bunch of criminals who want to spread their message as far and wide as possible. There are no definate leaders (Bin Laden is just a spokesman), nor do they have a cohesive strategy. Therefore it makes perfect sense that they use the Internet to communicate. This isn't news. It's just another way to make us feel that a Muhammad with a Kalashnikov just might be invading an ubiquitous part of most Americans' daily lives. Pair that anxiety with most people's complete lack understanding concering the Internet (ignorance begets fear) and suddenly it becomes much easier to curb our digital liberties just a bit more. Not to mention it helps to sell Washington Post newspapers.
I mean, come on... how many headlines read "Confirmed: Terrorists using telephones to communicate"?
I dunno. I'd rather have to worry about securing the MS boxes that I admin vs. defending them against DDOS attacks from legions of zombies.
Sooo... a leader of the Catholic Church favors the teachings of the Bible over science? This isn't even news over at the 700 Club; it's certainly not 'news for nerds'. Guess Zonk just felt like fanning a religious flame war this morning.
Really not all that suprising, I suppose. We originally had frustrated, economically depressed minorities who felt that they had to prove something to each other. Now we have frustrated, socially depressed nerds who also feel they have something to prove in their own circles. ::sigh:: They're already staking out supposed rivalries and flaunting overinflated egos. (Threatening with DDOS attacks instead guns? WTF?) Talk about wannabees--this isn't cool or amusing, it's just sad. It could have been entertaining, but these people are taking themselves way too seriously.
Going to play the devil's advocate here, because I know how most of the rest of you feel:
.com a few years ago. I created a custom metrics program that intergrated into into our (also custom) ecommerce application. To track users, I gave them a single, persistant cookie that contained only a GUID. I used this information to determine our converstion ratio (number of visitors to buyers), figure out the top paths through the site, determine percentage of traffic that was return visitors, etc.
I used to be the web architect for a
All this stuff was entirely anonymous unless they purchased something from us. But, even then their site history was really only incidently linked to their contact info because we never correlated the data together. Why would I? Knowing that "John Smith" visited our site 3 times a week isn't really any more insightful that knowing that "User #5233258" visited us 3 times a week. The data was only useful in aggregate. For example, knowing that the last page 20% of people visited was our contact page, yet only 10% of those people actually submitted the form would make me reevaluate that page. Maybe the contact form wasn't very user friendly? So, I'd tweak it and then recompare the metrics.
The whole point of my tracking was to better serve our visitors and eventual customers. I wanted to make it easier for them to do what they came to our site to do. Or it would help us target our advertising for effectively. If a lot of people clicking through from a banner ad we had on Site A tended to buy Widget B, we'd decide to modify the banner ad to specifically highlight Widget B. Maybe my attitude is different than most, but I can't be unique. I never looked down upon our visitors, feeling that I was hearding cattle together to be slaughtered, or at least ripped off. Quite the opposite. These visitors wanted to be on my site, elsewise they wouldn't have dropped by. It felt pretty cool that so many people were coming to a site that I was responsible for managing. These people were supplying my paycheck and I had to make sure that they preffered our site to our competitors'. If a lot of visitors deleted that single cookie I used, that made that job much more difficult.
Does that still make me evil?
There's no doubt that Mr. Metcalfe is quite bright and has contibuted greatly to the IT world, but I don't understand this rant. If he doesn't see the innovation, I guess he's never compared Slackware '96 to today's distros, or Windows 3.1 to WinXP. Apple certainly can't be ignored here either. Where are the new operating systems likely to come from? I'm going to take a wild guess, and say "probably from the OS's of today." They don't need to be completely rewritten every few years to count as progress. Even the emergence of UNIX itself was evolutionary, not revolutionary.
It's also interesting that he clearly shows a lack of faith in the OSS community, but then digs at the IETF for evolving into elitist and monolithic organization.