MS can have "cleartracks" and "inprivate" as trademarks if they want....
There already is a very similar software product called "TracksClear". I would imagine that "ClearTracks" will be sufficently confusing.
TracksClear? ClearTracks?
OK, I'm starting to fall behind in knowledge of Windows stuff since going Windows-free a while back, but I have to admit I'm surprised they have spent so much effort developing not one, but two technologies to help junkies hide the evidence of their addiction.
What I really want to know at this point is what the oh-so-knowledgeable and unbiased expert analyst Laura DiDio has to say about this. After all, she had seen code snippets that made her come away thinking SCO really had a strong case. Later she said that "you'd have to be really crazy to try and sue IBM if you didn't have something."
Since she has also claimed "these people" (people involved with Linux) are "living in an alternative reality," I'm curious about Ms. DiDio's views on reality today.
Of course, I have to admit that Ms. DiDio, renowned IT expert with no IT or computer science training, does know something about "living in an alternative reality" (Ms. DiDio's part comes at the top of the 2nd page).
Blackadder: Right, Baldrick, let's try again, shall we? This is called adding. If I have two beans, and then I add two more beans, what do I have? Baldrick: Some beans. Blackadder: Yes...and no. Let's try again, shall we? I have two beans, then I add two more beans. What does that make? Baldrick: A very small casserole. Blackadder: Baldrick, the ape creatures of the Indus have mastered this. Now try again. One, two, three, four. So how many are there? Baldrick: Three Blackadder: What? Baldrick: And that one. Blackadder: Three and that one. So if I add that one to the three what will I have? Baldrick: Oh! Some beans. Blackadder: Yes. To you Baldrick, the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people wasn't it?
I'll second both. I read both in 5th grade, and I am now 39. I came into this thread specifically to mention A Wrinkle in Time, and found that it had already been mentioned in the parent post, so I'll just second and add some info about it. Actually, it's now a "third," not a "second," because another person already posted a reply to the PP. That person also read A Wrinkle in Time in 5th grade, but it looks like that was 14 years before I read it in 5th grade. Anyway, parents, despite the trouble Ms. L'Engle had getting the book published in the early 1960s, once it was published, it eventually won a Newbury Medal, a Sequoyah Award, and a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and was runner-up for a Hans Christian Andersen Award. I also read two other books by L'Engle based on the same characters: A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. There's apparently a 4th book in that series, plus another series involving the children of two of the characters from the original series.
The Earthsea series has also won a number of awards, including a Nebula Award, a Newbury Silver Medal, a National Book Award for children's books, and a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. Plus there's more good LeGuin stuff for them as they get older...
To be just a bit more specific, he's flawed for just about everyone. For Democrats and for those who are not aligned with either of the major parties but pay attention to the news, Powell was the one who went and told a pack of lies to the UN Security Council to get the US into a war with no clear objectives and therefore no clear path to victory, and one that ended up destabilizing the entire region and making the US less safe.
For the die-hard Republican core that still supports Bush (poll averages these days say these people are less than 25% of the population) and wants McCain elected, Powell is a "dove" who was correctly dumped in favor of Condi Rice at the beginning of Bush's second term for advocating crazy talk like diplomacy and negotiation with other countries.
So who's left to actually vote for a ticket because Colin Powell is the bottom half of it?
An interesting aside: people here in Brazil love to tell me the educational system here is broken, but that the one in the US is great. So I always stump them by asking how it could be, if the educational system in the USA is actually that much better than the one in Brazil, that a single-digit percentage of Brazilians found Powell's BS presentation to the Security Council convincing, and about 90% found it unconvincing, but about 70% of US citizens found it convincing.
If he doesn't squander it away on Xbox games and hookers he's set for life.
No room for Daniel Burd, huh? Well, he should start his own science fair, with video games and hookers! In fact, forget the science and the video games!
Must have been a very successful experiment. All the "H" are indeed gone!
Don't be silly. That would violate the principle of conservation of Hs. They appear to have migrated to the the deuterium and converted it to "deutherium."
I have been an IT professional, and I am a nerd who has been playing with computers since about 1980. I know how to do an OS install, update drivers, etc. And yet MS Office managed to get screwed up on one of the incarnations of my built-from-parts PeeCee running Windows 2000 that I couldn't use it, uninstall it, or reinstall it from CD. Amazing. I still can't figure out how that one happened.
The only solution I eventually found was to reinstall Windows, something I recently got tired of doing. As a result, that machine will be getting Ubuntu 7.04 installed on it so I can use Stoq, a Free Software "commercial automation" (cash register, store management, etc.) package to make it into my ice cream shop's cash register. I'd install a more recent version of Ubuntu, but 7.04 is the last one tested and approved for use with Stoq. Stoq appears to be my only realistic non-Windows-based option as a small retailer in Brazil.
Anyway, getting back to the Office story, when Office got all screwed up, I didn't have time to do a full reinstall of Windows and everything else (at the time, I didn't make slipstream CDs, so reinstalling Windows took forever), and I needed to edit some Office documents. In the absence of a solution to the Office-just-won't-work problem, I found a workaround that served me very well. So well, in fact, that it ended up being my long-term solution. You can see it here.
This is the same Bush who imposed crippling tariffs on European steel firms to protect American firms? And who suddenly saw the importance of free trade once the EU imposed sanctions on the products of several swing states just before the election? ...and whose vision for the FTAA (ALCA in Portuguese) includes removing all Brazilian tariffs on US goods, but maintaining protection of US industries and agriculture through US government subsidies?
The Bush Administration claims to be the defender of capitalism, and the Lula government in Brazil is routinely described as "communist" or "radical leftist" in the US media, and yet Milton Friedman explicitly stated in 2003 or early 2004 that Lula's position on the FTAA was right and Bush's postion on the FTAA was wrong. Stick that in your Adam Smith and smoke it!
yet... Windows Server got a lot better during that time frame, and I have to wonder how much of that was driven by trying to do projects like Hotmail on it and paying attention to the ways in which they spectacularly failed. Ehhhhh...
While the parent post doesn't quite reach the level of astroturfing, it does feel like an attempt to find a silver lining in what really was an unmitigated fiasco for Microsoft. The company announced quite loudly that it would be migrating to NT, then failed repeatedly. It then more quietly began migrating to Windows 2000, then announced success, then had to retract that. It then issued a white paper on the migration, arguing that Windows 2000 was a better platform than UNIX, even though there were still Solaris and even BSD servers being used until 2003, well after the white paper was issued, and in many cases, BSD code was used to replace the parts of the Windows server OS that just weren't up to hosting a major application like Hotmail.
Please note that I am not saying there is anything wrong with Microsoft using BSD code - the BSD license clearly permits that. The point is that for whatever reason, despite immense financial resources and huge financial and PR incentives, Micrsoft appears to have been completely incapable of making an industrial-strength OS as late as 2002 that could match the power and security BSD and Solaris had in 1997, and when it did have success, it was by simply appropriating the superior code from the BSD base.
Additionally, and actually this is my main point in writing this post, whether or not Microsoft had bought and tried to migrate Hotmail, the evolutionary pressure to improve its OS's security and scalability would have been just as strong. So I really don't see the silver lining in this story the way the parent post does. If there is a silver lining for Microsoft, it's that they learned that BSD code is often just plain better than Microsoft code, and simply taking the BSD code is more effective and a lot cheaper than trying to catch up. One wonders why they don't take something like OpenBSD and make a Microsoft front end for it. Windows would then basically be a window manager, a lot cheaper and simpler to maintain, and the heavy lifting would be done by a system that has time and time again been shown to be better than any Windows ever built, especially in terms of security, which is really the biggest issue with Windows these days, what with there being multiple botnets of hundreds of thousands of Windows machines out there eating massive amounts of internet, LAN and machine resources.
They'll leave them alone until it makes sense to move over to windows/IIS. Hotmail stayed on BSD for years, but it's been IIS for quite a while now. they're not stupid, they'll treat it as business and move them over when it makes sense to do so. But the Golden rule in most markets is you sure as hell better eat your own dogfood if you expect your customers to, and eventually they'll have to move Yahoo! over if they do buy them. While it is true that Hotmail remained on BSD and Solaris for a long time, that's not because of some kind of smart business decision made by Microsoft. It's because Windows and IIS, even backed up by Microsoft's vast financial resources (permitting, for example, a much larger server farm with a much larger operating team and additional security measures), simply wasn't up to the task of hosting Hotmail.
Hotmail was launched on the 4th of July of 1996 and was bought by Microsoft in December of 1997. Microsoft believes strongly in the concept of "eating one's own dog food" (please note: this is a common term for using one's own products internally), and so immediately started making announcements that Hotmail would be migrated to Windows NT. The NT migration utterly failed, and there were even problems with the Windows 2000 migration. In June of 2001, Microsoft announced it had migrated the BSD portion of Hotmail to Windows 2000, but was forced to retract that statement a few days later. The final migration of all of Hotmail to Windows wasn't completed until 2003.
Not only because of Microsoft's belief in the "eat your own dog food" principle, but also because Microsoft had made public statements saying it was going to migrate hotmail to Microsoft operating system and web server software, it is clear that Microsoft really wanted that migration to work, but it still took over five years and three versions of Microsoft's server software.
If you're able to get your laptop stolen in that environment, you shouldn't have been using a computer.
I don't know about that. All it takes is some smart thieves working together. You put your laptop in a tray separate from your other stuff, put your shoes in another tray [rolls eyes] and go to the metal detector. Your items go through the X-ray machine on the conveyor belt. Now it just so happens that two or three idiots in front of you have all kinds of metal on them, so the metal detector keeps going off, and you can't get past for a few minutes. So you're not standing there waiting for your laptop when it comes out of the X-ray machine.
When you get to the other side, you find your shoes and whatever other items you may have had, but your laptop and your laptop bag are gone. Looks like somebody was waiting for it when it came through, but it wasn't you. You might find the bag at the bottom of one of the garbage cans in the terminal, possibly in a bathroom, but by that time, your laptop has been placed in a new bag and is on its way to some destination, possibly in the same city (if the thieves have accomplices who work at the airport), or possibly in another city.
Hmmmm... d'ya think maybe the person who took your laptop knew those "idiots" in front of you who kept setting off the metal detector with all those coins and pens and keys and belt buckles and business card holders and iPods and cell phones and tie clips and whatnot?
Speaking in the middle of Springfield earlier today, physician-attorney Dr. Eleanor Abernathy (see image), a leading researcher in the area of the effects of cat ownership on human physical and mental health, gave her take on the results:
Apple, which also announced new software to make the iPhone compatible with corporate e-mail systems, plans to open "the App Store" with the next release of iPhone software. The feature will allow people to purchase and download new applications for their phones.
Also, if you watch the video of Jobs's announcement, you'll see Exchange compatibility demonstrated.
In my opinion, John Doerr is much more than "a" venture capitalist. Let me explain that statement in detail. Bear with me- I'm verbose, so it'll take a few paragraphs.
Doerr is a really sharp guy who saw potential in companies like Compaq, Sun, Symantec, Netscape, Amazon, and Google. The thing is that Doerr knows how to look at a business plan, understand the market opportunity a company wants to try to exploit, and have an idea of how likely the company is to be successful at doing it. So yes, Netscape, Amazon, and Google were "internet companies," but they were also companies with business plans that had not-entirely-ridiculous paths to profitability. Keep in mind that VCs typically have an awful "batting average" and invest in a lot more duds than eventual superstars, but the really big successes are generally good enough to make the overall average ROI, including the flops, quite positive.
A big part of the problem in the late 1990s is that a lot of VCs looked at Doerr's investments and basically came to this conclusion: "Doerr made a load of money for Kleiner Perkins by investing in the internet, so we have to invest in the internet." So in the late 1990s, many businesses that were basically "just like [whatever], but on the internet) were given ridiculous amounts of funding even when there was no clear path to profitability in the business plan. Yes, it's true that a VC firm can still make money in an environment like that of the mid-to-late 1990s by funding a company and taking it public as soon as it starts to show revenue growth, getting a big ROI on something that is never going to be profitable. But eventually the house of cards falls and then there's an overreaction as people say "oh, we lost all this money investing in the internet, so now we should avoid such investments," even when a good business plan appears.
I worked at a software startup in 1999. We had tests done with major retailers that proved we could increase the profitability of a given category anywhere from 25% to over 100%, depending on what the retailer's strategy was for that category (read up on "category management" for more info on category strategies). In the meetings with arrogant moron VCs, the founders would tell them about this and show them the actual data that supported the claim, plus testimonials from executives in the (multi-billion dollar) retailers where the tests were done, and the VCs' eyes would kind of glaze over. As soon as the founders stopped talking, the VCs would say something like "uh huh... so, what's your internet story." I suggested to the guy who had the original idea for the company that we should change the name to "e-[original name of company].com" and we'd be swimming in money.
The saddest thing was that apparently one such moron was from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, which was widely seen as the VC firm at the time, in no small part due to the remarkable business vision of John Doerr. It would have been more accurate, from what I heard from very reliable sources, to say that Kleiner Perkins was a good VC firm with VCs of varying quality (yes, a high average, though), and John Doerr was the venture capitalist.
I'm not a fan of VCs in general, but I have a lot of respect for John Doerr. And if he's setting up a fund this big for iPhone app development, that makes me think very good things are coming for Apple through the iPhone. Very good things.
As always, YMMV.
As I said, YMMV. But Reagan is the guy who sent the US toward bankruptcy by doing huge amounts of deficit spending, effectively letting future generations pay, with interest, for the absurd amounts t.he Reagan government spent. Before you go and blame the Democratic Congresses of the Reagan years (except for a Republican Senate for a little while), keep in mind that Congress ended up allocating less money than Reagan had requested on all eight of his budgets.
I think that future historians will have to address the problem of how the economic disaster of the early 21st Century in the US happened, and I believe a lot of them will point to the ridiculous fiscal irresponsibility of the Reagan and GWB administrations. I'd like to be wrong on that one, but the situation is pretty scary right now. In any case, I think history will not be particularly kind to Reagan.
Keep in mind that part of Reagan's aura now is that a lot of people believe his enormous increases in military expenditures (during the Clinton years, the US was outspending its top ten potential enemies combined by more than a factor of two, and that was after "cuts" from what Bush 41 had planned to spend, and before Bush 43 sent military spending through the roof) were what bankrupted the Soviet Union and basically brought about the end of the Cold War. That view is not held by academic historians or by the intelligence community, and belongs more to Republican politicians and citizens who haven't actually studied the Cold War in detail. In fact, actual US intelligence analysis shows that it was surprising the Soviets lasted as long as they did, and the Soviet threat was largely exaggerated. Amusingly enough, a good part of the exaggeration was done by a "Team B" during the Ford Administration. The leader of the "Team B" that did the intelligence cherry-picking to exaggerate the threat after the actual intelligence agencies concluded that the threat was not as large as the Administration thought it should be? A guy of whom you may have heard... Paul Wolfowitz. Sayyyy... didn't a guy with a really similar name do a really similar thing in about 2002 or so? Hmmmm....
By the way, both Nixon and Carter were better presidents than most people think. And in the end, whatever the ordering, the difference between Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Ford, and Bush 41 are small compared to the difference between Clinton and that group. And the difference between Bush 43 and any of the others dwarfs the difference between Clinton and that group of 5. There have been no great presidents during my lifetime, but there has been one historically awful one. Has there been any president that deserves the title of "worst ever" more than Bush 43? Seriously, is there anything Bush 43 has done well? Well, other than demonizing Democrats and getting himself into the White House, of course. He's done that very well.
Just out of curiosity, what didn't you like about Reagan? I was only born on the tail end of his presidency, but as I read many of his speeches, it all seems quite compelling. What am I missing? There are a few things, but this is the biggest, I think.
Oh, Reagan talked a good game on "fiscal responsibility," but he was responsible for the largest pre-GWB expansion of deficit spending, that is, spending money the government didn't have and charging it to future generations with interest. I think you could make an argument that deficit spending is a form of taxation without representation. In any case, it's reprehensible to pass the bill on to future generations.
The parent post makes a good point, and I'd like to add something. It's pretty clear from the delegate count that Obama will be the nominee unless Clinton can convince an overwhelming majority of the superdelegates to effectively overturn the primary and caucus results by joining her even though Obama will have won more delegates. I've seen analyses showing that even if Clinton wins all the remaining contests by 16.5%, she can't catch Obama in pledged delegates. So should they wrap this up? No, I think it's good for the Demcoratic party and the eventual nominee to have the contest go on.
First, as the parent post noted, it's free press coverage for Obama and Clinton.
Next, both campaigns will be organizing and helping build a stronger party infrastructure in the remaining states. That can only help Obam... er... the Democratic nominee in November.
Also, either Clinton can keep attacking Obama like she has been (she even went so far as to say she and McCain were ready to be president, but Obama wasn't) or she can stop and "campaign" against him in a less-nasty way. Since "hope" is a big Obama campaign theme, it seems appropriate to see the glass as half full and notice the good things that can come from either one. The benefits of the second scenario are obvious - the two can play up some small differences, but also point out that the differences between them are much smaller than the differences between them and McCain, who basically appears to be running for 4 more years of the George W. Bush administration. Under the first scenario, Obama gets his response teams and processes warmed up for when the Republicans crank up the "great wurlitzer" (AKA the "noise machine") and start attacking "Barack Hussein Osama... er... Obama" and trying to associate him with Farrakhan and telling us he is a Muslim and studied in a Madrassah and is going to be a "Manchurian Candidate" kind of plant for terrorists or boogeymen or whatever. Remember how Bill Clinton was being painted as a plant of the Soviet Communists in the 1992 campaign? Yeah. Multiply that by a jillion (they've got FOX News now to do free Republican campaign commercials 24-7) and you've got an idea of how SCARY they're going to try to make Obama in the Fall.
The Obama campaign appears to be much better organized than the Clinton campaign. Clinton tried to run an "inevitability" campaign like Bush did in the Republican primaries in 2000. When that didn't work as well as expected for Clinton, it really looked like they weren't ready with any kind of backup plan. Also, Hillary Clinton is still following the strategy that allowed Bill Clinton to win the presidency twice: ignore huge parts of the country, take others for granted, and focus on a few "swing" states to get the minimum amount of votes to win. Obama's team appears to have understood the rules of the primaries and caucuses better than Clinton's, which is surprising, given how much Clinton plays up her experience as a Senator, an activist, and yes, as the wife of Bill Clinton. I can't imagine how they could not know how Texas's apportionment of delegates works, and yet they claim they didn't. While Clinton won the popular vote in three of four states (Rhode Island, Texas, and Ohio, but not Vermont), Rhode Island and Vermont basically canceled each other out (each was a blowout and both states have few delegates). Clinton won the popular vote in Texas and Ohio, but the final delegate count will be either a very small (single-digit) number of net delegates going to Clinton or even possibly Obama padding his three-digit lead by a few more delegates.
Obama's campaign ran hard and organized even in the states where he was way ahead. The result was blowout victories, which makes a difference in the primaries, because the apportionment of delegates depends on the margin of victory. Clinton scored one blowout yesterday and was blown out in another state, so the net effect is probably about 1 net delegate for Clinton. In the bigger states, Clinton scored two narrow victories, and in Texas, the combined primary-caucus may end up giving Obama a net win in delegates.
Clinton's campaign has tried to change the rules during the contest more than once, which is really lame. There's talk that the Clinton campaign will now sue over the nature of the Texas caucus-primary, but they had the same access to the rules as the Obama campaign did. They just seem not to have planned as well.
Obama appears to be more of a party-builder, like Howard Dean and his "50 State Strategy." While moron pundits like Paul Begala derided paying party workers to "pick their noses" in places like Montana and Mississippi, Dean set up the structure not only for the Democrats' retaking both houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, but also for extending their majorities and making gains in the state legislatures nationwide. Obama seems to have embraced that strategy, and it would make a difference in places like Texas, where Rick Noriega could have a chance of unseating Senator Cornyn if the presidential candidate doesn't ignore the state, and at the very least the Democrats could force the Republicans to spend money to defend what previously would have been considered a very safe seat. Clinton's campaign, as recently as last week, when it thought she might lose in Texas, was saying that "Texas does not figure into the electoral calculus of a Democratic (Presidential) candidate." That is a ridiculously narrow view, and since so many of Hillary's advisors and consultants also worked for Bill, I wonder if the Clintons' philosophy is responsible for the fact that Bill Clinton managed to win the White House, but then the Democrats almost immediately lost control of both houses of Congress, setting the stage for the Bush presidency, when White House power was basically unchecked by a Congress all too willing to let Bush and Cheney do whatever they wanted. Including taking a surplus and making it into record deficits. Oh, and a multi-trillion dollar war that destabilized the region and created more terrorists by making bin Laden and his ilk look really smart as the US government acted just as al Qaeda and others said it would.
Here's the thing: I'm pushing 40, and Bill Clinton was far and away the best president of
If you believe that Microsoft is buying Yahoo because MSN's content is shit poor, then the content people are safe. The engineers and IT people become redundant as Yahoo moves over to a Microsoft-based back end. (For those who think that's impossible, remember that Microsoft moved Hotmail from BSD to Windows 2k with relative efficiency.)
I agree with the parent post in general, and even this point isn't bad, except for the "relative efficiency" part, even with the built-in "relative" disclaimer. Not only were there problems with the migration to Win2K (including a statement in 2001 that the migration had been completed, which was later retracted), but we also have to remember that Microsoft tried really hard to migrate Hotmail to Windows NT and failed. Microsoft acquired HoTMaiL in 1997, but couldn't migrate to NT at all, and only managed to make the Win2K migration 4 years after the acquisition. Since Microsoft had stated publicly that Hotmail was going to be migrated to NT, it's pretty easy to look at the whole story and say "ouch."
I remember reading some internet columnist talking about the failed NT migration in 1999 or so, and I just found a description with references at the Wikipedia page on Hotmail. Specifically, the development history part and in the footnotes.
It occurs to me now that Microsoft must have really believed the NT migration would not be hard, or the public statements about it before it was done would not have been made. The recent internal Microsoft e-mail exchange about the meaning of "Vista Ready" shows me that there are still a lot of decision-makers at Microsoft who really don't understand where their product sits in technical terms. They know its market position, but they don't appear know the real technical differences between Windows and other OSes.
The biggest problem with POS on non-"Ruimdows" (*see note below) platforms in Brazil is with credit and debit card integration.
There are two basic ways to accept credit and debit card transactions in Brazil. One is called TEF (pronounced "tef," not "tay-ay-effy," which is how it would be pronounced if you were to read it as the names of the letters T, E, and F) and the other is called POS (pronounced "poz," not "pay-oh-essy," where "oh" is pronounced like the "o" in "box", which would be the pronunciation of the name were to be read as the names of the letters P, O, and S in Portuguese). TEF also happens to be the abbreviation used for "transferência eletrônica de fundos," or "electronic fund transfer" (EFT) in Portuguese, and "POS" comes from the English term "Point Of Sale."
Under POS, the integration is weak at best. Basically, you have to terminate the transaction in your point of sale system (and yes, it does get confusing that POS is not used in this context to refer to your point-of-sale system; for that you would use the abbreviation PDV for "ponto de venda," which means "point of sale" in Portuguese) and separately perform the transaction in the appropriate credit or debit card system (VISA; Mastercard; American Express; Hipercard - a card used by Wal*Mart here in Brazil; etc.). The store has to have a separate card reader and PINpad for each supported card system. At most, the amount of the transaction is sent by the point-of-sale system to the card system terminal, and even this level of integration usually doesn't exist, so the transaction amount has to be entered manually on the terminal by the cashier.
As for TEF, it's a vastly superior system in many ways, but it has its problems too. TEF integration allows for each point of sale to have a single terminal that works for all store-supported card systems. Also, the integration includes the finalization of a transaction. That is, after the transaction is either approved or not, the approval or non-approval is fed back into the point-of-sale software, which then either marks the transaction as completed or allows for another attempt at payment. So that's great. The problem comes in the communication. There are technically three ways that a TEF solution can talk to the card providers (VISA, Mastercard, Hipercard, American Express, Ticket, etc.), but I've only seen two actually implemented in Brazil. For larger retailers, "TEF Dedicado" ("dedicated TEF") is available. Under that solution, the retailer has a dedicated X.25 or Frame Relay communication channel to the card provider, and the approval process is carried out through that channel. The thing is that due to the cost of having such a channel, the basic guideline is that a dedicated TEF solution is economically viable for a retailer with ten or more points of sale. For a small retailer, the benefits of dedicated TEF just aren't worth the high cost. For those retailers, there are technically two other options, but as I said, I've never seen one of them, which happens to be the one that should be the nearly-ubiquitous one, implemented.
Specifically, the two remaining options are "TEF discado" ("dial-up TEF") and "IP-TEF" (TEF over IP). The one that retailers who can't afford a dedicated TEF solution tend to use is the dial-up solution. First, let's be honest. Even in Brazil, which does deserve the label of "third world nation" in some respects, IP is nearly ubiquitous, and is very easily accessible at least in state capitols and most other decent-sized cities. So having a dial-up solution in a city like São Paulo is absolutely ridiculous. But now we get to the really ugly part. For some reason, the approval of TEF dialers and of IP-TEF solutions is done by a specific company that develops and provides TEF solutions, and that company, not all that surprisingly, refuses to approve TEF dialers other than the one that is already approved and is Windows-only. There has been speculation that this company receives money f
Slashdot Mirror
There already is a very similar software product called "TracksClear". I would imagine that "ClearTracks" will be sufficently confusing.
TracksClear? ClearTracks?
OK, I'm starting to fall behind in knowledge of Windows stuff since going Windows-free a while back, but I have to admit I'm surprised they have spent so much effort developing not one, but two technologies to help junkies hide the evidence of their addiction.
What's next? Patenting between-the-toes injections?
Acutally, "in your heart, you know he's right" wasn't Nixon's. It was Goldwater's. And it wasn't successful, possibly because it was easily parodied:
"In your guts, you know he's nuts"
"In your heart, you know he might" (might use nuclear weapons)
"In your heart, you know he's too far right"
What I really want to know at this point is what the oh-so-knowledgeable and unbiased expert analyst Laura DiDio has to say about this. After all, she had seen code snippets that made her come away thinking SCO really had a strong case. Later she said that "you'd have to be really crazy to try and sue IBM if you didn't have something."
Since she has also claimed "these people" (people involved with Linux) are "living in an alternative reality," I'm curious about Ms. DiDio's views on reality today.
Of course, I have to admit that Ms. DiDio, renowned IT expert with no IT or computer science training, does know something about "living in an alternative reality" (Ms. DiDio's part comes at the top of the 2nd page).
Lord Blackadder, a favorite in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, teaches the foul-smelling peasant Baldrick mathematics:
The lesson
Transcript:
Blackadder: Right, Baldrick, let's try again, shall we? This is called adding. If I have two beans, and then I add two more beans, what do I have?
Baldrick: Some beans.
Blackadder: Yes...and no. Let's try again, shall we? I have two beans, then I add two more beans. What does that make?
Baldrick: A very small casserole.
Blackadder: Baldrick, the ape creatures of the Indus have mastered this. Now try again. One, two, three, four. So how many are there?
Baldrick: Three
Blackadder: What?
Baldrick: And that one.
Blackadder: Three and that one. So if I add that one to the three what will I have?
Baldrick: Oh! Some beans.
Blackadder: Yes. To you Baldrick, the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people wasn't it?
I'll second both. I read both in 5th grade, and I am now 39. I came into this thread specifically to mention A Wrinkle in Time , and found that it had already been mentioned in the parent post, so I'll just second and add some info about it. Actually, it's now a "third," not a "second," because another person already posted a reply to the PP. That person also read A Wrinkle in Time in 5th grade, but it looks like that was 14 years before I read it in 5th grade. Anyway, parents, despite the trouble Ms. L'Engle had getting the book published in the early 1960s, once it was published, it eventually won a Newbury Medal, a Sequoyah Award, and a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and was runner-up for a Hans Christian Andersen Award. I also read two other books by L'Engle based on the same characters: A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. There's apparently a 4th book in that series, plus another series involving the children of two of the characters from the original series.
The Earthsea series has also won a number of awards, including a Nebula Award, a Newbury Silver Medal, a National Book Award for children's books, and a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. Plus there's more good LeGuin stuff for them as they get older...
To be just a bit more specific, he's flawed for just about everyone. For Democrats and for those who are not aligned with either of the major parties but pay attention to the news, Powell was the one who went and told a pack of lies to the UN Security Council to get the US into a war with no clear objectives and therefore no clear path to victory, and one that ended up destabilizing the entire region and making the US less safe.
For the die-hard Republican core that still supports Bush (poll averages these days say these people are less than 25% of the population) and wants McCain elected, Powell is a "dove" who was correctly dumped in favor of Condi Rice at the beginning of Bush's second term for advocating crazy talk like diplomacy and negotiation with other countries.
So who's left to actually vote for a ticket because Colin Powell is the bottom half of it?
An interesting aside: people here in Brazil love to tell me the educational system here is broken, but that the one in the US is great. So I always stump them by asking how it could be, if the educational system in the USA is actually that much better than the one in Brazil, that a single-digit percentage of Brazilians found Powell's BS presentation to the Security Council convincing, and about 90% found it unconvincing, but about 70% of US citizens found it convincing.
It's not just the House of Lords. Here are two YouTube videos of Sir Norman Fry (of the House of Commons) explaining a few things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72ZO6w0rl6Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF6eRIAA6mE
I have been an IT professional, and I am a nerd who has been playing with computers since about 1980. I know how to do an OS install, update drivers, etc. And yet MS Office managed to get screwed up on one of the incarnations of my built-from-parts PeeCee running Windows 2000 that I couldn't use it, uninstall it, or reinstall it from CD. Amazing. I still can't figure out how that one happened.
The only solution I eventually found was to reinstall Windows, something I recently got tired of doing. As a result, that machine will be getting Ubuntu 7.04 installed on it so I can use Stoq, a Free Software "commercial automation" (cash register, store management, etc.) package to make it into my ice cream shop's cash register. I'd install a more recent version of Ubuntu, but 7.04 is the last one tested and approved for use with Stoq. Stoq appears to be my only realistic non-Windows-based option as a small retailer in Brazil.
Anyway, getting back to the Office story, when Office got all screwed up, I didn't have time to do a full reinstall of Windows and everything else (at the time, I didn't make slipstream CDs, so reinstalling Windows took forever), and I needed to edit some Office documents. In the absence of a solution to the Office-just-won't-work problem, I found a workaround that served me very well. So well, in fact, that it ended up being my long-term solution. You can see it here.
It seems the cat's already out of the bag...
Oops
The Bush Administration claims to be the defender of capitalism, and the Lula government in Brazil is routinely described as "communist" or "radical leftist" in the US media, and yet Milton Friedman explicitly stated in 2003 or early 2004 that Lula's position on the FTAA was right and Bush's postion on the FTAA was wrong. Stick that in your Adam Smith and smoke it!
While the parent post doesn't quite reach the level of astroturfing, it does feel like an attempt to find a silver lining in what really was an unmitigated fiasco for Microsoft. The company announced quite loudly that it would be migrating to NT, then failed repeatedly. It then more quietly began migrating to Windows 2000, then announced success, then had to retract that. It then issued a white paper on the migration, arguing that Windows 2000 was a better platform than UNIX, even though there were still Solaris and even BSD servers being used until 2003, well after the white paper was issued, and in many cases, BSD code was used to replace the parts of the Windows server OS that just weren't up to hosting a major application like Hotmail.
Please note that I am not saying there is anything wrong with Microsoft using BSD code - the BSD license clearly permits that. The point is that for whatever reason, despite immense financial resources and huge financial and PR incentives, Micrsoft appears to have been completely incapable of making an industrial-strength OS as late as 2002 that could match the power and security BSD and Solaris had in 1997, and when it did have success, it was by simply appropriating the superior code from the BSD base.
Additionally, and actually this is my main point in writing this post, whether or not Microsoft had bought and tried to migrate Hotmail, the evolutionary pressure to improve its OS's security and scalability would have been just as strong. So I really don't see the silver lining in this story the way the parent post does. If there is a silver lining for Microsoft, it's that they learned that BSD code is often just plain better than Microsoft code, and simply taking the BSD code is more effective and a lot cheaper than trying to catch up. One wonders why they don't take something like OpenBSD and make a Microsoft front end for it. Windows would then basically be a window manager, a lot cheaper and simpler to maintain, and the heavy lifting would be done by a system that has time and time again been shown to be better than any Windows ever built, especially in terms of security, which is really the biggest issue with Windows these days, what with there being multiple botnets of hundreds of thousands of Windows machines out there eating massive amounts of internet, LAN and machine resources.
They'll leave them alone until it makes sense to move over to windows/IIS. Hotmail stayed on BSD for years, but it's been IIS for quite a while now. they're not stupid, they'll treat it as business and move them over when it makes sense to do so. But the Golden rule in most markets is you sure as hell better eat your own dogfood if you expect your customers to, and eventually they'll have to move Yahoo! over if they do buy them. While it is true that Hotmail remained on BSD and Solaris for a long time, that's not because of some kind of smart business decision made by Microsoft. It's because Windows and IIS, even backed up by Microsoft's vast financial resources (permitting, for example, a much larger server farm with a much larger operating team and additional security measures), simply wasn't up to the task of hosting Hotmail.
Hotmail was launched on the 4th of July of 1996 and was bought by Microsoft in December of 1997. Microsoft believes strongly in the concept of "eating one's own dog food" (please note: this is a common term for using one's own products internally), and so immediately started making announcements that Hotmail would be migrated to Windows NT. The NT migration utterly failed, and there were even problems with the Windows 2000 migration. In June of 2001, Microsoft announced it had migrated the BSD portion of Hotmail to Windows 2000, but was forced to retract that statement a few days later. The final migration of all of Hotmail to Windows wasn't completed until 2003.
Not only because of Microsoft's belief in the "eat your own dog food" principle, but also because Microsoft had made public statements saying it was going to migrate hotmail to Microsoft operating system and web server software, it is clear that Microsoft really wanted that migration to work, but it still took over five years and three versions of Microsoft's server software.
When you get to the other side, you find your shoes and whatever other items you may have had, but your laptop and your laptop bag are gone. Looks like somebody was waiting for it when it came through, but it wasn't you. You might find the bag at the bottom of one of the garbage cans in the terminal, possibly in a bathroom, but by that time, your laptop has been placed in a new bag and is on its way to some destination, possibly in the same city (if the thieves have accomplices who work at the airport), or possibly in another city.
Hmmmm... d'ya think maybe the person who took your laptop knew those "idiots" in front of you who kept setting off the metal detector with all those coins and pens and keys and belt buckles and business card holders and iPods and cell phones and tie clips and whatnot?
In my opinion, John Doerr is much more than "a" venture capitalist. Let me explain that statement in detail. Bear with me- I'm verbose, so it'll take a few paragraphs.
Doerr is a really sharp guy who saw potential in companies like Compaq, Sun, Symantec, Netscape, Amazon, and Google. The thing is that Doerr knows how to look at a business plan, understand the market opportunity a company wants to try to exploit, and have an idea of how likely the company is to be successful at doing it. So yes, Netscape, Amazon, and Google were "internet companies," but they were also companies with business plans that had not-entirely-ridiculous paths to profitability. Keep in mind that VCs typically have an awful "batting average" and invest in a lot more duds than eventual superstars, but the really big successes are generally good enough to make the overall average ROI, including the flops, quite positive.
A big part of the problem in the late 1990s is that a lot of VCs looked at Doerr's investments and basically came to this conclusion: "Doerr made a load of money for Kleiner Perkins by investing in the internet, so we have to invest in the internet." So in the late 1990s, many businesses that were basically "just like [whatever], but on the internet) were given ridiculous amounts of funding even when there was no clear path to profitability in the business plan. Yes, it's true that a VC firm can still make money in an environment like that of the mid-to-late 1990s by funding a company and taking it public as soon as it starts to show revenue growth, getting a big ROI on something that is never going to be profitable. But eventually the house of cards falls and then there's an overreaction as people say "oh, we lost all this money investing in the internet, so now we should avoid such investments," even when a good business plan appears.
I worked at a software startup in 1999. We had tests done with major retailers that proved we could increase the profitability of a given category anywhere from 25% to over 100%, depending on what the retailer's strategy was for that category (read up on "category management" for more info on category strategies). In the meetings with arrogant moron VCs, the founders would tell them about this and show them the actual data that supported the claim, plus testimonials from executives in the (multi-billion dollar) retailers where the tests were done, and the VCs' eyes would kind of glaze over. As soon as the founders stopped talking, the VCs would say something like "uh huh... so, what's your internet story." I suggested to the guy who had the original idea for the company that we should change the name to "e-[original name of company].com" and we'd be swimming in money.
The saddest thing was that apparently one such moron was from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, which was widely seen as the VC firm at the time, in no small part due to the remarkable business vision of John Doerr. It would have been more accurate, from what I heard from very reliable sources, to say that Kleiner Perkins was a good VC firm with VCs of varying quality (yes, a high average, though), and John Doerr was the venture capitalist.
I'm not a fan of VCs in general, but I have a lot of respect for John Doerr. And if he's setting up a fund this big for iPhone app development, that makes me think very good things are coming for Apple through the iPhone. Very good things.
As always, YMMV.
As I said, YMMV. But Reagan is the guy who sent the US toward bankruptcy by doing huge amounts of deficit spending, effectively letting future generations pay, with interest, for the absurd amounts t.he Reagan government spent. Before you go and blame the Democratic Congresses of the Reagan years (except for a Republican Senate for a little while), keep in mind that Congress ended up allocating less money than Reagan had requested on all eight of his budgets.
I think that future historians will have to address the problem of how the economic disaster of the early 21st Century in the US happened, and I believe a lot of them will point to the ridiculous fiscal irresponsibility of the Reagan and GWB administrations. I'd like to be wrong on that one, but the situation is pretty scary right now. In any case, I think history will not be particularly kind to Reagan.
Keep in mind that part of Reagan's aura now is that a lot of people believe his enormous increases in military expenditures (during the Clinton years, the US was outspending its top ten potential enemies combined by more than a factor of two, and that was after "cuts" from what Bush 41 had planned to spend, and before Bush 43 sent military spending through the roof) were what bankrupted the Soviet Union and basically brought about the end of the Cold War. That view is not held by academic historians or by the intelligence community, and belongs more to Republican politicians and citizens who haven't actually studied the Cold War in detail. In fact, actual US intelligence analysis shows that it was surprising the Soviets lasted as long as they did, and the Soviet threat was largely exaggerated. Amusingly enough, a good part of the exaggeration was done by a "Team B" during the Ford Administration. The leader of the "Team B" that did the intelligence cherry-picking to exaggerate the threat after the actual intelligence agencies concluded that the threat was not as large as the Administration thought it should be? A guy of whom you may have heard... Paul Wolfowitz. Sayyyy... didn't a guy with a really similar name do a really similar thing in about 2002 or so? Hmmmm....
By the way, both Nixon and Carter were better presidents than most people think. And in the end, whatever the ordering, the difference between Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Ford, and Bush 41 are small compared to the difference between Clinton and that group. And the difference between Bush 43 and any of the others dwarfs the difference between Clinton and that group of 5. There have been no great presidents during my lifetime, but there has been one historically awful one. Has there been any president that deserves the title of "worst ever" more than Bush 43? Seriously, is there anything Bush 43 has done well? Well, other than demonizing Democrats and getting himself into the White House, of course. He's done that very well.
Oh, Reagan talked a good game on "fiscal responsibility," but he was responsible for the largest pre-GWB expansion of deficit spending, that is, spending money the government didn't have and charging it to future generations with interest. I think you could make an argument that deficit spending is a form of taxation without representation. In any case, it's reprehensible to pass the bill on to future generations.
As always, YMMV.
The parent post makes a good point, and I'd like to add something. It's pretty clear from the delegate count that Obama will be the nominee unless Clinton can convince an overwhelming majority of the superdelegates to effectively overturn the primary and caucus results by joining her even though Obama will have won more delegates. I've seen analyses showing that even if Clinton wins all the remaining contests by 16.5%, she can't catch Obama in pledged delegates. So should they wrap this up? No, I think it's good for the Demcoratic party and the eventual nominee to have the contest go on.
First, as the parent post noted, it's free press coverage for Obama and Clinton.
Next, both campaigns will be organizing and helping build a stronger party infrastructure in the remaining states. That can only help Obam... er... the Democratic nominee in November.
Also, either Clinton can keep attacking Obama like she has been (she even went so far as to say she and McCain were ready to be president, but Obama wasn't) or she can stop and "campaign" against him in a less-nasty way. Since "hope" is a big Obama campaign theme, it seems appropriate to see the glass as half full and notice the good things that can come from either one. The benefits of the second scenario are obvious - the two can play up some small differences, but also point out that the differences between them are much smaller than the differences between them and McCain, who basically appears to be running for 4 more years of the George W. Bush administration. Under the first scenario, Obama gets his response teams and processes warmed up for when the Republicans crank up the "great wurlitzer" (AKA the "noise machine") and start attacking "Barack Hussein Osama... er... Obama" and trying to associate him with Farrakhan and telling us he is a Muslim and studied in a Madrassah and is going to be a "Manchurian Candidate" kind of plant for terrorists or boogeymen or whatever. Remember how Bill Clinton was being painted as a plant of the Soviet Communists in the 1992 campaign? Yeah. Multiply that by a jillion (they've got FOX News now to do free Republican campaign commercials 24-7) and you've got an idea of how SCARY they're going to try to make Obama in the Fall.
The Obama campaign appears to be much better organized than the Clinton campaign. Clinton tried to run an "inevitability" campaign like Bush did in the Republican primaries in 2000. When that didn't work as well as expected for Clinton, it really looked like they weren't ready with any kind of backup plan. Also, Hillary Clinton is still following the strategy that allowed Bill Clinton to win the presidency twice: ignore huge parts of the country, take others for granted, and focus on a few "swing" states to get the minimum amount of votes to win. Obama's team appears to have understood the rules of the primaries and caucuses better than Clinton's, which is surprising, given how much Clinton plays up her experience as a Senator, an activist, and yes, as the wife of Bill Clinton. I can't imagine how they could not know how Texas's apportionment of delegates works, and yet they claim they didn't. While Clinton won the popular vote in three of four states (Rhode Island, Texas, and Ohio, but not Vermont), Rhode Island and Vermont basically canceled each other out (each was a blowout and both states have few delegates). Clinton won the popular vote in Texas and Ohio, but the final delegate count will be either a very small (single-digit) number of net delegates going to Clinton or even possibly Obama padding his three-digit lead by a few more delegates.
Obama's campaign ran hard and organized even in the states where he was way ahead. The result was blowout victories, which makes a difference in the primaries, because the apportionment of delegates depends on the margin of victory. Clinton scored one blowout yesterday and was blown out in another state, so the net effect is probably about 1 net delegate for Clinton. In the bigger states, Clinton scored two narrow victories, and in Texas, the combined primary-caucus may end up giving Obama a net win in delegates.
Clinton's campaign has tried to change the rules during the contest more than once, which is really lame. There's talk that the Clinton campaign will now sue over the nature of the Texas caucus-primary, but they had the same access to the rules as the Obama campaign did. They just seem not to have planned as well.
Obama appears to be more of a party-builder, like Howard Dean and his "50 State Strategy." While moron pundits like Paul Begala derided paying party workers to "pick their noses" in places like Montana and Mississippi, Dean set up the structure not only for the Democrats' retaking both houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, but also for extending their majorities and making gains in the state legislatures nationwide. Obama seems to have embraced that strategy, and it would make a difference in places like Texas, where Rick Noriega could have a chance of unseating Senator Cornyn if the presidential candidate doesn't ignore the state, and at the very least the Democrats could force the Republicans to spend money to defend what previously would have been considered a very safe seat. Clinton's campaign, as recently as last week, when it thought she might lose in Texas, was saying that "Texas does not figure into the electoral calculus of a Democratic (Presidential) candidate." That is a ridiculously narrow view, and since so many of Hillary's advisors and consultants also worked for Bill, I wonder if the Clintons' philosophy is responsible for the fact that Bill Clinton managed to win the White House, but then the Democrats almost immediately lost control of both houses of Congress, setting the stage for the Bush presidency, when White House power was basically unchecked by a Congress all too willing to let Bush and Cheney do whatever they wanted. Including taking a surplus and making it into record deficits. Oh, and a multi-trillion dollar war that destabilized the region and created more terrorists by making bin Laden and his ilk look really smart as the US government acted just as al Qaeda and others said it would.
Here's the thing: I'm pushing 40, and Bill Clinton was far and away the best president of
I remember reading some internet columnist talking about the failed NT migration in 1999 or so, and I just found a description with references at the Wikipedia page on Hotmail. Specifically, the development history part and in the footnotes.
It occurs to me now that Microsoft must have really believed the NT migration would not be hard, or the public statements about it before it was done would not have been made. The recent internal Microsoft e-mail exchange about the meaning of "Vista Ready" shows me that there are still a lot of decision-makers at Microsoft who really don't understand where their product sits in technical terms. They know its market position, but they don't appear know the real technical differences between Windows and other OSes.
The biggest problem with POS on non-"Ruimdows" (*see note below) platforms in Brazil is with credit and debit card integration.
There are two basic ways to accept credit and debit card transactions in Brazil. One is called TEF (pronounced "tef," not "tay-ay-effy," which is how it would be pronounced if you were to read it as the names of the letters T, E, and F) and the other is called POS (pronounced "poz," not "pay-oh-essy," where "oh" is pronounced like the "o" in "box", which would be the pronunciation of the name were to be read as the names of the letters P, O, and S in Portuguese). TEF also happens to be the abbreviation used for "transferência eletrônica de fundos," or "electronic fund transfer" (EFT) in Portuguese, and "POS" comes from the English term "Point Of Sale."
Under POS, the integration is weak at best. Basically, you have to terminate the transaction in your point of sale system (and yes, it does get confusing that POS is not used in this context to refer to your point-of-sale system; for that you would use the abbreviation PDV for "ponto de venda," which means "point of sale" in Portuguese) and separately perform the transaction in the appropriate credit or debit card system (VISA; Mastercard; American Express; Hipercard - a card used by Wal*Mart here in Brazil; etc.). The store has to have a separate card reader and PINpad for each supported card system. At most, the amount of the transaction is sent by the point-of-sale system to the card system terminal, and even this level of integration usually doesn't exist, so the transaction amount has to be entered manually on the terminal by the cashier.
As for TEF, it's a vastly superior system in many ways, but it has its problems too. TEF integration allows for each point of sale to have a single terminal that works for all store-supported card systems. Also, the integration includes the finalization of a transaction. That is, after the transaction is either approved or not, the approval or non-approval is fed back into the point-of-sale software, which then either marks the transaction as completed or allows for another attempt at payment. So that's great. The problem comes in the communication. There are technically three ways that a TEF solution can talk to the card providers (VISA, Mastercard, Hipercard, American Express, Ticket, etc.), but I've only seen two actually implemented in Brazil. For larger retailers, "TEF Dedicado" ("dedicated TEF") is available. Under that solution, the retailer has a dedicated X.25 or Frame Relay communication channel to the card provider, and the approval process is carried out through that channel. The thing is that due to the cost of having such a channel, the basic guideline is that a dedicated TEF solution is economically viable for a retailer with ten or more points of sale. For a small retailer, the benefits of dedicated TEF just aren't worth the high cost. For those retailers, there are technically two other options, but as I said, I've never seen one of them, which happens to be the one that should be the nearly-ubiquitous one, implemented.
Specifically, the two remaining options are "TEF discado" ("dial-up TEF") and "IP-TEF" (TEF over IP). The one that retailers who can't afford a dedicated TEF solution tend to use is the dial-up solution. First, let's be honest. Even in Brazil, which does deserve the label of "third world nation" in some respects, IP is nearly ubiquitous, and is very easily accessible at least in state capitols and most other decent-sized cities. So having a dial-up solution in a city like São Paulo is absolutely ridiculous. But now we get to the really ugly part. For some reason, the approval of TEF dialers and of IP-TEF solutions is done by a specific company that develops and provides TEF solutions, and that company, not all that surprisingly, refuses to approve TEF dialers other than the one that is already approved and is Windows-only. There has been speculation that this company receives money f
I read about this already. Either this is a dupe or they're just repeating an expedition made years ago (1931 or something).
Here's a description of the trip from one of the members of the expedition.
Here's a Wikipedia entry on the expedition.