Uh, you haven't been paying attention. They do that all the time, and in some cases with even better known celebrities. I'm sure you could Google a few instances if you are really interested.
These are MINOR errors of course compared to actual IMPORTANT stories that the MSM have bungled. I'll just point out a few relatively recent ones that were "scandalous": (1) Jason Blair of the New York times who apparently wrote numerous "on the scene" interviews around the country without leaving his living room, and I guess pocketing the unspent expense money while he was at it. (2) The doctored Word documents that were claimed to be produced from a typewriter during the Vietnam war that ultimately caused Dan Rather to take early retirement. (3) More recently photos from from over in Iraq were found to have been seriously doctored by a "trusted" source, and another regular source of news was found to be not a reporter at all and who seemed to be "on the scene" at multiple stories at the same time. Again, we only see the tip of the iceberg, and errors that go way beyond typos appear in news articles every day that don't bubble up to the publics attention.
If you want first hand proof, just try watching C-span "gavel to gavel" coverage on some topic you are familiar with and then check to see what the newspaper or on-the-air reporting looks like. You might be surprised at just how much you are missing (and how much you are getting that isn't really there).
"Debt" is a ten thousand year old playground game.
I don't know if this and the rest of your comment are original material or not but it is profound, so I decided to say so rather than use mod points as I originally set out to do. More and more in my own observations of the modern world the term "game the system" pops, unbeckoned into my head and I don't even remember when II first learned the term.
I do remember in short studies of game theory learning that it is easy to construct a game in which a mutually beneficial outcome works against outcomes with are "best" for all participants. What continues to surprise me is not that such games spring into existence in the real world, but that those who have at least some power over the game rules continue to do nothing to change them so that the outcomes that are best for the individual are more synchronized with those that are best foor the organization.
I guess that's a round about way of saying "why doesn't someone above simply fire the PHB?" And if the problem exists at a higher level, why doesn't someone above that do some firing as well? Examples in the real world are easy to find. Imagine a Microsoft without a CEO who makes a PR blunder every time he opens his mouth. Imagine if Ken Lay, or the Enron board had fired Jeffry Skilling when he first announced that he wanted the company to be "as asset free as possible" rather than giving him even more authority to implement such a PHBesque notion.
In all my career the Dilbert-like (and this is certainly not a new phenomenon) activities have only sometimes been initiated by my immediate boss, and almost never at the top of the company, but somewhere in the murky in-between, where rumor has it that people are all first cousins or go to the same church (because there is no other rational explanation for their existence).
I suspect that in some very successful companies there is still one of those overpaid (though not in such case so much overpaid) people who can peer down into the organization and burn off the underbrush so that those doing constructive things have more chance to grow. Most companies somewhere along the line lose these key people at the top and become the Enrons and Microsofts of today.
One big problem though in many countries it is harder and harder to fire people for a variety of reasons, even when they grossly under-perform, or mis-perform. We have to look no further than our governments (particularly federal) for just how bad this can, and probably will get even for companies like Google that start out with so much talent and enthusiasm. Even if they can at first have a fairly good control over their talent pool (as they grow rapidly) at some point there are going to be full of "Wallys" who no one can figure out what to do with, but who have kept enough within the rules to avoid being terminated.
I don't by any means think, as the article implies, that this is confined to IT. Quite the contrary, we see it everywhere more and more. The change, if it is going to happen at all (I'm not optimistic) has to come from our elected officials who can once again make it easy for companies to clean house. After all, in a society that more and more takes care of the unemployed and under-employed, worse things can happen than being the victim of a corporate "downsizing". the question is whether there is anyone at most companies making sure that the right PHBs and Wallys are let go during such events.
I can't help but darkly suspect that this is mostly about a major newspaper trying to declare, "You still need us". And I think that we do, neither blogs (opinion) nor Wikipedia (rumor) replace news from organizations that have an interest in being first (or at least timely) and in being correct.
Just a nit maybe, but I think you commingled a couple of organizations there that shouldn't be. I think we still need some organization(s) that focus on getting the news early (not necessarily first though) while at the same time getting the news right. I don't think Wikipedia has been known for getting stories early, nor do I think that is one of their stated goals, even if they have developed a bad track record for accuracy (and credentials checking) lately. The fact that Wikipedia can be compared at all with mainstream news services is a black eye for the latter not the former. Can a group of volunteers with little central authority get a story wrong once in a while? Yes. Can "proud" family owned institutions that have been around for a hundred years or so controlling billions of dollars of assets get it wrong with fair regularity too? Yes they can and have.
In the long run, if the mainstream media continues to show no better record of accuracy than things like Wikipedia (and throw in another few web-only publications that do originally sourced stories) they will fade into a well deserved oblivion. I think they can do better though if they (1) stop competing with one another for "first post", and (2) start doing a better job of separating their own political opinions from actual fact. That second issue has caused them on many occasions to follow one erroneous story with dozens of other erroneous stories propping up the first simply because they want the news to come out a certain way.
While we are at it, too bad there aren't two versions of the word "blog". Blog(1) would mean a series of articles, as you suggest, expressing someone's opinion, while blog(2) would refer to a style of web page that has a series of reverse chronological entries, usually created with the aid of some automated software input mechanism. There is of course no reason that all news couldn't be presented in the form of a blog, or series of blogs (on specific topic areas). Many MSM news organizations are moving to this with the blog entries appearing slightly ahead of the published equivalents. I don't think it's a bad way for them to be headed. Now if they could just collect the blog comments they get in order to refine the print stories (and let those wait another day to appear) the "final" printed news stories would probably be a whole lot more accurate (including typos and spelling errors).
Let me clarify- they shouldn't have time for BS. I'd rather the state government I pay taxes to use the more tried and trusted solution instead of using our infrastructure as a cultural software experiment. Less important states like Indiana or Iowa can do that.
The remark "less important states" aside, we (Americans) would ALL like to know that our tax money was being spent wisely. But applying "tried and trusted" to Microsoft products seems a bit odd unless you are a Microsoft employee or are related to this Jefferson fellow. It is precisely the fact that Windows and office have been tried that leads so many people to the conclusion that they should no longer be trusted.
How much would it cost to make one application run by the state web-based (I'm not talking about Internet, I'm talking about using a web browser for the user interface)? Such an application would not require the wholesale replacement of Windows desktops, but WOULD allow for selected replacement of some systems. Many "desktop" machines in government are not really desktop, they are really "countertop", sitting in locations where government people interact with citizens and run a single application all day long. Converting just one such system to web-based (or even Citrix based) would allow the client machines to be Windows, Linux, or anything else that supports a full blown web browser (or Citrix client). That could be thousands of Windows licenses saved right there, or if you decided the experiment hadn't worked, you could keep them running Windows.
On the other hand if you don't even want that potential expense you could JUST focus on a relatively isolated group of true desktop systems and convert them to Linux and Open Office for some period of time.
I say "experiment", but really, some of us know that the results are that in most cases, it works just fine. I used Linux and Open Office in an "all Microsoft" shop for several years and the only noticeable change was that people started coming to me whenever they were having trouble fixing a messed up Word document, a messed up floppy disk (with Word files on it) or needed to burn a CD that was reusable outside the organization (for some reason the standard configured machines could only produce coasters most of the time). My Word documents and Excels files (produced by Open Office) never caused any compatibility problems and I never had to worry about my e-mail archive being corrupted by Outlook bugs. Cost to government (feds) for this "experiment" = $0. Well, really the cost was a negative number, as the Word documents I rescued would have taken many hours to reproduce and the readable CDs I produced saved tons of delay in sending information out to other agencies.
While I often characterize government workers as wasteful and lazy, there are pockets of enthusiasm for trying new and potentially better things. I have no doubt you could find departments with such people (even in the "important" state of Illinois) who would delight in trying a new OS/Office combo that would be much less susceptible to virus outbreaks and other malware. How many government workers would have loved to have a tabbed browser several years before Microsoft got around to it, or a machine that seemed to run about twice as fast due to less overhead that a properly installed Linux system has over Windows?
Switching to Linux is no magic pill. The potential savings in hardware and software costs would only be a fraction of total government waste. On the other hand eliminating the obstacles to such an experiment (see posts below) might be the key to even more savings.
It's a damned shame, but how can we bring it back?
I rather doubt we can, in our lifetimes anyway. Countries that are just now entering the level of prosperity that we enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century are quite willing to give tax breaks, look the other way on pollution controls, and in general "care about" companies that open up in otherwise impoverished parts of their countries. Here on the other hand, we have developed a cultural bias against all large companies, while at the same time not doing much to favor small companies either.
If you are a Boeing, you may make the best airplanes, but you have a heavily government subsidized Airbus to go up against. In this particular case of course, Airbus, having nothing to lose but European tax payers money went way out on a limb with some bad technology and now Boeing is seeing the benefit. But several years ago Boeing outlook wasn't so certain, and several years from now (if Airbus gets their act together) that might be the case again. Very rarely though does our government step in to prop up a company that might be in trouble (Chrysler being a counter example), instead letting the chips fall where they may (as with Enron, Worldcom, etc.)
On the other hand, if a company is healthy, there is a public outcry to keep them out of town (Walmart), tax them more, or confiscate their revenues for some worthy cause (as Hillary wants to to do to the other US oil companies). It seems to be often forgotten that these "big greedy companies" are where many of our retirement programs are invested. Yes, Enron was evil (at the top), yes they did bad things, and yes a lot of individuals were hurt when their stock value went to zero. But was the average Enron employee a part of this? Would forcing them all to archive their e-mail for a billion years have prevented it? Doubtful.
Do small companies get treated better? Maybe some do, but the ones I know are being run on a shoestring and nobody working there is getting rich. A dozen man construction company for example is subject to endless regulations, and because they handle millions of dollars in materials, even though the employees may be making a low hourly wage, they are not treated like a "small business". Doctors and Dentists in America used to be thought of as small businesses too, and that's the way they operated. But our legal system has changed all that. Now even the smallest country doctor needs a staff to keep track of paperwork, billing though various government agencies, and of course responding to litigation issues.
Our media has focused on the fact that many large companies are being run by executives that are millionaires, and who continue to make millions every year, often after poor performance. But this isn't true of the vast majority of businesses and we've lost sight of the fact that the REAL value of the company (almost any company) is is the hundreds (or thousands) of employees making a living wage, as well as stockholders (pensioners) just like you and me. Socialist countries (I include most of Europe) have awakened to the need to keep these companies happy, just as we (Americans) have started to find every reason imaginable to make such companies feel unwelcome.
I don't think for a minute that most big companies "care" about their employees, other than on a competitive level, where they have to offer just enough incentives to keep them from jumping ship. But the average American voter certainly doesn't care for corporate America either, and as you can see here from the other comments, we'll also blame them for not sticking around to take another beating. Do you think the average government worker in Washington "cares" about the average American citizen either? Yet we give them more and more authority over us to protect us from those institutions that are free to go somewhere else if the going gets too tough here.
To bring things back we have to once again realize that with the exception of a few e
"it's our job to help DOT maximize the value of its Enterprise Agreement through the adoption of our technology. We are engaged with large, strategic customers across government at every level,"
really means:
It's our job to sabotage this in any way possible, but we haven't adopted a strategy just yet. If necessary we will go to your boss, or your boss's boss, including, if necessary our many opportunities to influence the law in our favor.
That's exactly what it is. My last months with a large government contractor they had numerous meetings with employees to inform them that they were *not* too retain e-mail, even in private caches. They made it clear that the issue was *not* storage space, admin overhead or anything such as that. They were very open in saying that they wanted the e-mail trail gone in case of a lawsuit. Individuals found hording their own copy of e-mail could be terminated with no prior warning. This was before "Sarbox", so I'm not sure if things have changed since (I certainly hope so!)
But seriously, I wonder what percentage of this data is text. I'd guess it is a very very small amount. When I had a film camera, in twenty years I bet I took less than 100 rolls of film. With digital cameras I've take thousands of pictures, sometimes taking a dozen or more of the same subject, just because the cost to me is practically zero. Now there are vendors that will let me upload large numbers of these amateurish photos for free, and let's pretend that there are enough people interested in seeing my pictures that these companies can pay for this storage with advertising. That's scary.
Excluding attachments I think it would be practically impossible for anyone to use up Googles 2 gig of storage, but I've heard of people using it up in little more than a week by mailling large attachments back and forth (oh yeah, I HAVE to have every single iteration of that Word document, sure I do!)
But what's scarier is that for some nominal fee (like $20 a year) they place no limit at all on my ability to hog a disk drive somewhere. I know people who are messed up in the head enough to want to test these claims. Give them 5 gig for photos and they've filled it up in a week, give them "unlimited" and they upload pure junk to see if they can break the thing.
Like any house of cards, this thing is gonna come down sooner or later. I just hope that people who are making sensible use of these online services don't lose everything along with the abusers.
You seem to have not paid attention. There were wide, and well substantiated claims of Diebold problems in that election, many of which are open to interpretation as to whether or not they were fraudulent, and if so if they were politically motivated (as opposed to just covering for incompetence). The problem was that the elections were so overwhelmingly in favor of the Democrats that these irregularities had little impact.
Here's the thing that bothers me about this, though: EVERYONE should be upset when someone says something like that. His statement should be read as, "I will use the Republican party to tear down democracy." Republicans should take that as a slap in the face, and should be MORE outraged than Democrats!
Pot/Kettle
As an ofttimes Republican voter I was:
* Upset when a thorough study of the 2000 Florida results (by mostly liberal mainstream media) concluded that Bush had indeed won the state, but long after that history has been re-written to only focus on headlines from 24 hours after the election.
* Upset that a paper ballot system, with known, but fixable flaws, was thrown out not only in Florida but in other voting districts all over the country, even in cases (such as my last two voting districts) where the paper based systems did not share the "hanging chads" issue and had never had any known problems concerning fraud or miscounts.
* Upset that perfectly valid systems all over the country were scrapped in favor of retrofitted WINDOWS laptops and Windows touchscreen devices with only marginally tested software.
* Upset that in the 2004 election cycle, Democrats AGAIN cried foul in districts where lazy, incompetent election officials spent taxpayers money hand over fist too buy this junky hardware and software rather than do realistic requirements analysis, and particularly upset that while these changes took place (pre 2004) these same left wing complainers said NOTHING, waiting instead for the results that they didn't like.
or but that wasn't enough,
* Post 2004 I engaged in numerous debates with individuals who swore they were not complaining about the 2004 results, but were indeed interested in the issue. Again, these people grew silent as distance from the 2004 election increased. As I would bring up newly discovered issues with this Windoze based software (and hardware) they would thank me politely for reminding them and then go right back to Bush bashing, continuing to ignore the very REAL bipartisan problems that were being ignored by the mainstream media.
* While you say the results of 2006 were "overwhelming", in fact in many local elections the margin of victory, particularly for newly elected democrats were a dozen votes, and for state level offices a few hundred. Almost NONE of these votes were contested, even in cases where the Republican candidate had only to request a recount.
Did these Republican candidates even get a "good sportsmanship" pat on the back from the press? Saving the taxpayers millions of dollars in recount costs, in fact got them nothing except continued insults from people like you.
Your right, we should all be outraged (and I am) by slipshod voting practices, whether the cause is corruption or incompetence (and very little is being done at the election-official level about incompetence), how many of them can you name who have been "fired"?
We should also stop accepting the fact that other types of voting corruption has gone on for years in largely Democratic districts. It seems to be widely accepted, even among Democrats that this corruption goes on, but where is the outcry? As your post indicates (not intentionally I'm sure) many Democrats are of the "ends justifies the means" school of thinking and simply don't consider an election invalid if their candidate wins. Of course there are Republicans who fall into this category too, but silence from the left is deafening.
The results of this, which will serve us (you) lazy citizens right, will be another ma
And my comments which were FUBARed by WAPOs website:
Could we first pass a law that would prevent anyone else from Microsoft from using the word "innovation"? They have practically worn the word out and it only serves as a sick joke these days that one of America's most successful companies (in money terms at least) continues to use an attribute they lack to describe themselves.
Yes, innovation is important to America, and the world, but what does Bill Gates mean by "strong intellectual property laws and efficient capital markets"?
IP laws are intended to help get new ideas off the ground by promising an inventor, but more importantly a manufacturer, at least a chance on return of their investment in production of a new product. But software patents have turned this system on its head, with more patents issued than anyone can keep up with, and in some cases on almost trivial concepts, we have the opposite effect, namely that someone can invest significantly in a new product only too find out that the proceeds belong to Microsoft.
Efficient capital markets? Like one where hardware costs continue to go down while software costs continue to go up? Where Steve Balmer can suggest that the world needs a $100 PC, while omitting that he'd like to see $1000 worth of MS software running on it?
What Gates and Balmer want is a parody of "The Al Franken Decade", and we are living it too. These two men, and their company want to continue to rest on their accomplishments from the 80's (which were significant) while the rest of us struggle with software that doesn't work, old disks we can't read and laws that threaten to put us in jail if we code up anything that might work against their retirement programs. The MS decade is OVER! Long since in fact. Deal with it Mr. Gates, get back to your charity efforts. (and PLEASE, take Balmer with you!)
But I can't run this app, or that app, and my favorite game won't run on it.
Vista rocks!"
Don't forget, Microsoft has its fanboys too. The reason it doesn't get mentioned much is that we are usually making fun of them for something else, being dumb in general, not being able to type or spell, things like that.
"It's funny, because I don't use PivotTables all that much. However, I do use charting. And I use the data import/export abilities. I deal in incredibly large reports on a regular basis. (Too much data for Google's solution to handle.)"
Maybe someone else can remember the name, but after Google bought the company that they are using for the spreadsheet application they bought a SECOND company, lesser known, with a spreadsheet offering of their own. I got to try it about a day before they shut it down and it looked like a full Excel implementation to me, complete with charting. I didn't check pivot tables, but judging from the number of things on the function bar, I wouldn't be surprised. I've wondered ever since how (or if) they were going to merge the two products. Maybe not at all and just have one as an enhanced offering.
Any comparison of the feature set now is meaningless. I KNOW there are companies that can work within the current feature set. I'm also fairly confident the feature set will improves (as it has since yesterday in fact). Until Microsoft responds with something that doesn't require you to buy a full copy of Office (or Windows for that matter) this is going to be tempting for many small organizations, particularly those just getting started that don't have a legacy of Microsoft dependencies.
I'm surprised Grace Hopper never received the award. When I was coming up in the industry she was always cited as one of the great pioneers of computing.
I anticipate the Google apps are going to continue to improve. Since last night they have added fonts (was a very basic selection before), added the docs and spreadsheet into the domain settings so that things are easier to share within-company.
Also, after they bought Writely and the spreadsheet company they also baught a second spreadsheet company. Reviewing their product I noticed it had a much more complete set of Excel features. How hard would it be for them to tack an SQL service to this? My guess: Not too hard at all.
I remember getting burned a few years ago by a hosting company. I had every reason to believe from their website that they were a good sized outfit that was a subsidiary to one of the local phone companies in Florida. All the photos of their "datacenter" were so convincing, and in fact for a couple of years the services was quite OK. But then screwy things started happening that should have shouted out to me: "This company is operating on a shoestring budget in some kids parent's basement!".
Actually it turned out to be a small warehouse office space with a few servers and high school drop-outs for staff. The tie-in with the phone company was total BS and some sleuthing revealed that the other family business was closer to being a fertilizer business (no really!) than anything else. I got off that system just in time. I lost some things, but not much, people who waited a bit longer lost everything including access to their domains etc.
When I looked for a replacement I was much more careful to look for telltale signs that it was the same kind of, for lack of a better term "soft-fraud" operation. I think I got pretty good at it, but what scared me was the percentage of fairly well known companies that were using the same boilerplate text and generic graphics of their facilities. One thing I especially looked for was if no actual peoples names appeared on the web site. Big companies have "Chairmen" and "CEOs" who love to get their pictures on the corporate web site. These fly-by-night outfits on the other hand just have support contact numbers that go to an answering machine and not indication that anyone associated with the company wants their actual name to show up anywhere. You have to wonder why. Or maybe you don't.
I'm almost positive that Registerfly (and I think they had a hosting come-on too) was one of these fairly obvious scam operations. I'm SOOOO glad I stayed away.
My hope is that in the not too distant future Google and some other big names will get into the free-to-low-cost hosting and registration business and put these low-life vermin out of our misery.
"Finally, your idea that Windows and Linux will quickly catch up to OS X assume that OS X is a stationary target. Between now and Vienna, 10.5 will ship, and 10.6 as well, assuming Vienna ships on time (mid-2009). Vista is currently about equal to OS X in features and ease-of-use, but that won't be true 4 months from now, and it will be even less true 18-24 months from now."
I don't think the post to which you are responding said anything about the relative quality of Vista vs OS X. Nor did it say that Apple sales would evaporate over night. It simply stated that Apple sales may be at a peak. I think it is widely accepted, even among Windows users that OS X is a better OS. I've dealt with such people, shown them OS X and gotten the expected ooohs and aaahs, only to then be told that they depend on a particular application that they can't live without. (Even if I can eventually convince them that this is not true, not all Windows users have someone around to make that case for them.)
The weak link in the Apple strategy (but since it is intentional, maybe "weak" is a poor choice of words) is that with the shift to Intel, and the ease of running Windows applications, as was the case with OS/2 people are going to find themselves more and more just running the Windows application, and at some point they are going to conclude that they are so often in that Windows mode that they might just as well be running Windows.
It's a big big mindshare issue. Take Robert Scoble for example. He recently bragged that he had spent something like $10K on Apple computers for his family. But he NEVER mentions actually using the things, because he's just running Windows on them. When he DOES mention that Apple computers it is usually in the context of something (overheating, poor support) that has gone wrong with one of them.
I work with a small construction company that has a dozen users, only one of which is an Apple fan. Yes, her machine is more reliable and easier to use. But they also have to spend more time on the fact that Excel spreadsheets she has edited don't quite work right for anyone else, and does she HAVE to run Outlook, or can she make do with the built-in Apple mail program, etc. etc. (I'm trying to get them all switched over to Google so these issues will go away). Do you think Microsoft would intentionally poison-pill Office for the Mac (which is a separate and some say better code base). Nah MS would never do anything like that!
The Microsoft monopoly will not end as a result of one user at a time switching to Apple. It will take whole companies making that commitment, or in the case of Linux, whole countries and government organizations. Last I heard, there was no small country or city that was switching to Apple. There is almost never any news about Apple server success stories (other than a few R&D grid systems, and many if not most of those seem to be running YDL Linux), while Oracle's entire datacenter is Linux based.
In summary, I think Apple (the company) has given up on world domination in the computer space (hence the name change.) Yes, they may continue to make computers for a while, but they are positioning that as as purely an optional part of their business. By the time they get out altogether hardly anyone will notice. My guess is that they will release OS X for generic PCs as the last change they make before making that move. Apple fans will continue to love that interface, but they will find it works just as well on a Dell or Toshiba, or Lenovo, or... and some of those machines (surprise!) look an awful lot like the Apple laptops now anyway.
It will be a nice present to the Open Source community when Apple finally realizes there is no big profit to be made in supporting an also-ran OS. Like Sun with Java, they will wait far to long to release the code for OS X, but maybe by the time they do there will be enough established Linux shops that they can get the benefit of the bits and pieces that can be salvaged from the Apple lo
"I'm actually pretty surprised that the Yahoo mail beta doesn't get more press. It is, by FAR, the best web-based e-mail I've ever seen. Check out this review [weblogsinc.com] for screenshots."
I prefer Gmail and I've tried them all, having signed up for both the Live beta and Yahoo's mail beta when became "available" umteen years ago, and at that time I was also new to Gmail and would have easily made the switch to something else. Both Yahoo and MSN take up too much screen real-estate with ads or other unnecessary graphics, but more importantly both are SLOW to VERY SLOW at times which is exacerbated by the fact that while you are waiting for them to start they put up a damned Flash animation to entertain and annoy you. That would be bad enough, but simple things like deleting messages, flagging them as spam etc can take tens of seconds or longer. With Yahoo and Hotmail to choose from I'd simply go back to a POP mail reader (of course I couldn't do that with these services without paying extra!)
With Gmail, I get the word "Loading..." on the screen for no more than a couple seconds and then I'm in. Once in, opening and closing, deleting, flagging, operations are almost instantaneous, and certainly hard to distinguish (in speed) from a local pop mail client (which themselves can get sluggish as your mail store builds up). Plus, if I ever DO want to go back to a POP mail reader I can be fairly comfortable that Google isn't going to make me pay for it. Google's pattern has been that as they get more popular they give MORE stuff away, Yahoo was always the opposite, as they established their large user base they decided to start charging for things that used to be free. I've enjoyed watching them screw themselves over. While I'm no big fan of Microsoft either, it seems to me they are doing a better job of matching Google service for service.
Both MSN and Yahoo have a problem that Google is free from however and that is trying to provide new services while at the same time maintaining the old. Yahoo particularly with mail, groups, Geocities, Yahoo360, Flickr, presents the user with a maze of twisty-options-all-alike, except for where they aren't. It has all the organization of my unfinished basement, and with the exception of a few things that I have organizational ties too (like Yahoo groups) I can't wait to get out of their interface.
My biggest problem with MSN is of course they really want you to be a faithful Windows (and sometimes IE7) user which I am not. So their is a tendency for things to not work at first on Firefox, or work at all for Linux or OS X. It is this tendency to tie everything to the Windows OS which makes me resistant to use any of their services even if they are otherwise acceptable. Yahoo and (especially) Google at least have no predisposition to make alternate OSs and alternate browsers second class citizens.
"It's no longer part of the process, it's a workaround."
Note: I'm not a sys-admin for Unix or Windows, but I've certainly been in Windows environments where the ACL and rights set-up was so complex that nobody (particularly the sys-admins) understood it. I'd bet it isn't all that uncommon for an overworked sysadmin to just find a trusted user in the group that's having problems and just give them all powers over a particular area so that they (the sysadmin) don't get called so often.
I think simplicity in a security system has it's advantages, even if it requires a few workarounds. Those can be well documented, use single owner executables etc. or as you said use some sort of version control (which exists as applications for photos, CRM, or other database driven systems). Which brings me to another gripe I have with many Windows systems, which is the tendency to rely on the file system to do too much, like a single folder with hundreds of thousands of photos in it. Try bringing that up in file manager while files are still being added. Why did they do it this way? Because they didn't know any better and figured that anything they could do on a small scale on the desktop should just work fine in a server environment with orders of magnitude larger load.
Too many organizations are allowing Windows servers to be administer and used as though they are just beefed up PCs, and they mistakenly think they can get kids right out of high school with some certification under their belt to run them... I digress.
"Yeah! And you know what? Car manufacturers are just as guilty! Can you believe that they charge more to have power door locks, power windows, and heated seats?"
I think comparisons with car manufacturers should be eschewed until the point in time when you can sue Microsoft for damages you incur while using their products. This applies to other software products as well, and as a Linux user I'm not too keen on having it applied to free software. But my point is that comparing software with almost any other commercial product doesn't work as long as companies make big bucks with almost no offsetting responsibilities. In a way I'm hopeful that Microsoft's pricing will become ever more monopolistic, forcing people to think about alternatives.
I can't find anywhere that it says the service is to become a paid service. The article talks about everything but that. Now I suspect that some or all of it MAY become non-free, in fact the sign-up makes that pretty clear. It also says that people who sign up during the beta will continue to get the service for free.
Only thing in this article about paying anything though is that Microsoft has a competing product for $39/mo and that Google employees get "paid massages", maybe whoever wrote the summary was thinking of paid messages or something.
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Uh, you haven't been paying attention. They do that all the time, and in some cases with even better known celebrities. I'm sure you could Google a few instances if you are really interested.
These are MINOR errors of course compared to actual IMPORTANT stories that the MSM have bungled. I'll just point out a few relatively recent ones that were "scandalous": (1) Jason Blair of the New York times who apparently wrote numerous "on the scene" interviews around the country without leaving his living room, and I guess pocketing the unspent expense money while he was at it. (2) The doctored Word documents that were claimed to be produced from a typewriter during the Vietnam war that ultimately caused Dan Rather to take early retirement. (3) More recently photos from from over in Iraq were found to have been seriously doctored by a "trusted" source, and another regular source of news was found to be not a reporter at all and who seemed to be "on the scene" at multiple stories at the same time. Again, we only see the tip of the iceberg, and errors that go way beyond typos appear in news articles every day that don't bubble up to the publics attention.
If you want first hand proof, just try watching C-span "gavel to gavel" coverage on some topic you are familiar with and then check to see what the newspaper or on-the-air reporting looks like. You might be surprised at just how much you are missing (and how much you are getting that isn't really there).
I don't know if this and the rest of your comment are original material or not but it is profound, so I decided to say so rather than use mod points as I originally set out to do. More and more in my own observations of the modern world the term "game the system" pops, unbeckoned into my head and I don't even remember when II first learned the term.
I do remember in short studies of game theory learning that it is easy to construct a game in which a mutually beneficial outcome works against outcomes with are "best" for all participants. What continues to surprise me is not that such games spring into existence in the real world, but that those who have at least some power over the game rules continue to do nothing to change them so that the outcomes that are best for the individual are more synchronized with those that are best foor the organization.
I guess that's a round about way of saying "why doesn't someone above simply fire the PHB?" And if the problem exists at a higher level, why doesn't someone above that do some firing as well? Examples in the real world are easy to find. Imagine a Microsoft without a CEO who makes a PR blunder every time he opens his mouth. Imagine if Ken Lay, or the Enron board had fired Jeffry Skilling when he first announced that he wanted the company to be "as asset free as possible" rather than giving him even more authority to implement such a PHBesque notion.
In all my career the Dilbert-like (and this is certainly not a new phenomenon) activities have only sometimes been initiated by my immediate boss, and almost never at the top of the company, but somewhere in the murky in-between, where rumor has it that people are all first cousins or go to the same church (because there is no other rational explanation for their existence).
I suspect that in some very successful companies there is still one of those overpaid (though not in such case so much overpaid) people who can peer down into the organization and burn off the underbrush so that those doing constructive things have more chance to grow. Most companies somewhere along the line lose these key people at the top and become the Enrons and Microsofts of today.
One big problem though in many countries it is harder and harder to fire people for a variety of reasons, even when they grossly under-perform, or mis-perform. We have to look no further than our governments (particularly federal) for just how bad this can, and probably will get even for companies like Google that start out with so much talent and enthusiasm. Even if they can at first have a fairly good control over their talent pool (as they grow rapidly) at some point there are going to be full of "Wallys" who no one can figure out what to do with, but who have kept enough within the rules to avoid being terminated.
I don't by any means think, as the article implies, that this is confined to IT. Quite the contrary, we see it everywhere more and more. The change, if it is going to happen at all (I'm not optimistic) has to come from our elected officials who can once again make it easy for companies to clean house. After all, in a society that more and more takes care of the unemployed and under-employed, worse things can happen than being the victim of a corporate "downsizing". the question is whether there is anyone at most companies making sure that the right PHBs and Wallys are let go during such events.
Just a nit maybe, but I think you commingled a couple of organizations there that shouldn't be. I think we still need some organization(s) that focus on getting the news early (not necessarily first though) while at the same time getting the news right. I don't think Wikipedia has been known for getting stories early, nor do I think that is one of their stated goals, even if they have developed a bad track record for accuracy (and credentials checking) lately. The fact that Wikipedia can be compared at all with mainstream news services is a black eye for the latter not the former. Can a group of volunteers with little central authority get a story wrong once in a while? Yes. Can "proud" family owned institutions that have been around for a hundred years or so controlling billions of dollars of assets get it wrong with fair regularity too? Yes they can and have.
In the long run, if the mainstream media continues to show no better record of accuracy than things like Wikipedia (and throw in another few web-only publications that do originally sourced stories) they will fade into a well deserved oblivion. I think they can do better though if they (1) stop competing with one another for "first post", and (2) start doing a better job of separating their own political opinions from actual fact. That second issue has caused them on many occasions to follow one erroneous story with dozens of other erroneous stories propping up the first simply because they want the news to come out a certain way.
While we are at it, too bad there aren't two versions of the word "blog". Blog(1) would mean a series of articles, as you suggest, expressing someone's opinion, while blog(2) would refer to a style of web page that has a series of reverse chronological entries, usually created with the aid of some automated software input mechanism. There is of course no reason that all news couldn't be presented in the form of a blog, or series of blogs (on specific topic areas). Many MSM news organizations are moving to this with the blog entries appearing slightly ahead of the published equivalents. I don't think it's a bad way for them to be headed. Now if they could just collect the blog comments they get in order to refine the print stories (and let those wait another day to appear) the "final" printed news stories would probably be a whole lot more accurate (including typos and spelling errors).
And all this time I thought Bill and Steve chanted "innovate" a few dozen times and new products just sprang into existence!
Need more CO2, everybody start breathing faster now!
The remark "less important states" aside, we (Americans) would ALL like to know that our tax money was being spent wisely. But applying "tried and trusted" to Microsoft products seems a bit odd unless you are a Microsoft employee or are related to this Jefferson fellow. It is precisely the fact that Windows and office have been tried that leads so many people to the conclusion that they should no longer be trusted.
How much would it cost to make one application run by the state web-based (I'm not talking about Internet, I'm talking about using a web browser for the user interface)? Such an application would not require the wholesale replacement of Windows desktops, but WOULD allow for selected replacement of some systems. Many "desktop" machines in government are not really desktop, they are really "countertop", sitting in locations where government people interact with citizens and run a single application all day long. Converting just one such system to web-based (or even Citrix based) would allow the client machines to be Windows, Linux, or anything else that supports a full blown web browser (or Citrix client). That could be thousands of Windows licenses saved right there, or if you decided the experiment hadn't worked, you could keep them running Windows.
On the other hand if you don't even want that potential expense you could JUST focus on a relatively isolated group of true desktop systems and convert them to Linux and Open Office for some period of time.
I say "experiment", but really, some of us know that the results are that in most cases, it works just fine. I used Linux and Open Office in an "all Microsoft" shop for several years and the only noticeable change was that people started coming to me whenever they were having trouble fixing a messed up Word document, a messed up floppy disk (with Word files on it) or needed to burn a CD that was reusable outside the organization (for some reason the standard configured machines could only produce coasters most of the time). My Word documents and Excels files (produced by Open Office) never caused any compatibility problems and I never had to worry about my e-mail archive being corrupted by Outlook bugs. Cost to government (feds) for this "experiment" = $0. Well, really the cost was a negative number, as the Word documents I rescued would have taken many hours to reproduce and the readable CDs I produced saved tons of delay in sending information out to other agencies.
While I often characterize government workers as wasteful and lazy, there are pockets of enthusiasm for trying new and potentially better things. I have no doubt you could find departments with such people (even in the "important" state of Illinois) who would delight in trying a new OS/Office combo that would be much less susceptible to virus outbreaks and other malware. How many government workers would have loved to have a tabbed browser several years before Microsoft got around to it, or a machine that seemed to run about twice as fast due to less overhead that a properly installed Linux system has over Windows?
Switching to Linux is no magic pill. The potential savings in hardware and software costs would only be a fraction of total government waste. On the other hand eliminating the obstacles to such an experiment (see posts below) might be the key to even more savings.
I rather doubt we can, in our lifetimes anyway. Countries that are just now entering the level of prosperity that we enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century are quite willing to give tax breaks, look the other way on pollution controls, and in general "care about" companies that open up in otherwise impoverished parts of their countries. Here on the other hand, we have developed a cultural bias against all large companies, while at the same time not doing much to favor small companies either.
If you are a Boeing, you may make the best airplanes, but you have a heavily government subsidized Airbus to go up against. In this particular case of course, Airbus, having nothing to lose but European tax payers money went way out on a limb with some bad technology and now Boeing is seeing the benefit. But several years ago Boeing outlook wasn't so certain, and several years from now (if Airbus gets their act together) that might be the case again. Very rarely though does our government step in to prop up a company that might be in trouble (Chrysler being a counter example), instead letting the chips fall where they may (as with Enron, Worldcom, etc.)
On the other hand, if a company is healthy, there is a public outcry to keep them out of town (Walmart), tax them more, or confiscate their revenues for some worthy cause (as Hillary wants to to do to the other US oil companies). It seems to be often forgotten that these "big greedy companies" are where many of our retirement programs are invested. Yes, Enron was evil (at the top), yes they did bad things, and yes a lot of individuals were hurt when their stock value went to zero. But was the average Enron employee a part of this? Would forcing them all to archive their e-mail for a billion years have prevented it? Doubtful.
Do small companies get treated better? Maybe some do, but the ones I know are being run on a shoestring and nobody working there is getting rich. A dozen man construction company for example is subject to endless regulations, and because they handle millions of dollars in materials, even though the employees may be making a low hourly wage, they are not treated like a "small business". Doctors and Dentists in America used to be thought of as small businesses too, and that's the way they operated. But our legal system has changed all that. Now even the smallest country doctor needs a staff to keep track of paperwork, billing though various government agencies, and of course responding to litigation issues.
Our media has focused on the fact that many large companies are being run by executives that are millionaires, and who continue to make millions every year, often after poor performance. But this isn't true of the vast majority of businesses and we've lost sight of the fact that the REAL value of the company (almost any company) is is the hundreds (or thousands) of employees making a living wage, as well as stockholders (pensioners) just like you and me. Socialist countries (I include most of Europe) have awakened to the need to keep these companies happy, just as we (Americans) have started to find every reason imaginable to make such companies feel unwelcome.
I don't think for a minute that most big companies "care" about their employees, other than on a competitive level, where they have to offer just enough incentives to keep them from jumping ship. But the average American voter certainly doesn't care for corporate America either, and as you can see here from the other comments, we'll also blame them for not sticking around to take another beating. Do you think the average government worker in Washington "cares" about the average American citizen either? Yet we give them more and more authority over us to protect us from those institutions that are free to go somewhere else if the going gets too tough here.
To bring things back we have to once again realize that with the exception of a few e
Alternate translation:
8 .html?mod=djemTECH
"it's our job to help DOT maximize the value of its Enterprise Agreement through the adoption of our technology. We are engaged with large, strategic customers across government at every level,"
really means:
It's our job to sabotage this in any way possible, but we haven't adopted a strategy just yet. If necessary we will go to your boss, or your boss's boss, including, if necessary our many opportunities to influence the law in our favor.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB11732819538882956
How unusual to see software that will run on OS X or Linux, but there is no Windows version. Shape of things to come I hope.
That's exactly what it is. My last months with a large government contractor they had numerous meetings with employees to inform them that they were *not* too retain e-mail, even in private caches. They made it clear that the issue was *not* storage space, admin overhead or anything such as that. They were very open in saying that they wanted the e-mail trail gone in case of a lawsuit. Individuals found hording their own copy of e-mail could be terminated with no prior warning. This was before "Sarbox", so I'm not sure if things have changed since (I certainly hope so!)
They are "live" now. Still a bit rough around the edges, but getting there.
HA!
But seriously, I wonder what percentage of this data is text. I'd guess it is a very very small amount. When I had a film camera, in twenty years I bet I took less than 100 rolls of film. With digital cameras I've take thousands of pictures, sometimes taking a dozen or more of the same subject, just because the cost to me is practically zero. Now there are vendors that will let me upload large numbers of these amateurish photos for free, and let's pretend that there are enough people interested in seeing my pictures that these companies can pay for this storage with advertising. That's scary.
Excluding attachments I think it would be practically impossible for anyone to use up Googles 2 gig of storage, but I've heard of people using it up in little more than a week by mailling large attachments back and forth (oh yeah, I HAVE to have every single iteration of that Word document, sure I do!)
But what's scarier is that for some nominal fee (like $20 a year) they place no limit at all on my ability to hog a disk drive somewhere. I know people who are messed up in the head enough to want to test these claims. Give them 5 gig for photos and they've filled it up in a week, give them "unlimited" and they upload pure junk to see if they can break the thing.
Like any house of cards, this thing is gonna come down sooner or later. I just hope that people who are making sensible use of these online services don't lose everything along with the abusers.
You seem to have not paid attention. There were wide, and well substantiated claims of Diebold problems in that election, many of which are open to interpretation as to whether or not they were fraudulent, and if so if they were politically motivated (as opposed to just covering for incompetence). The problem was that the elections were so overwhelmingly in favor of the Democrats that these irregularities had little impact.
Here's the thing that bothers me about this, though: EVERYONE should be upset when someone says something like that. His statement should be read as, "I will use the Republican party to tear down democracy." Republicans should take that as a slap in the face, and should be MORE outraged than Democrats!
Pot/Kettle
As an ofttimes Republican voter I was:
* Upset when a thorough study of the 2000 Florida results (by mostly liberal mainstream media) concluded that Bush had indeed won the state, but long after that history has been re-written to only focus on headlines from 24 hours after the election.
* Upset that a paper ballot system, with known, but fixable flaws, was thrown out not only in Florida but in other voting districts all over the country, even in cases (such as my last two voting districts) where the paper based systems did not share the "hanging chads" issue and had never had any known problems concerning fraud or miscounts.
* Upset that perfectly valid systems all over the country were scrapped in favor of retrofitted WINDOWS laptops and Windows touchscreen devices with only marginally tested software.
* Upset that in the 2004 election cycle, Democrats AGAIN cried foul in districts where lazy, incompetent election officials spent taxpayers money hand over fist too buy this junky hardware and software rather than do realistic requirements analysis, and particularly upset that while these changes took place (pre 2004) these same left wing complainers said NOTHING, waiting instead for the results that they didn't like.
or but that wasn't enough,
* Post 2004 I engaged in numerous debates with individuals who swore they were not complaining about the 2004 results, but were indeed interested in the issue. Again, these people grew silent as distance from the 2004 election increased. As I would bring up newly discovered issues with this Windoze based software (and hardware) they would thank me politely for reminding them and then go right back to Bush bashing, continuing to ignore the very REAL bipartisan problems that were being ignored by the mainstream media.
* While you say the results of 2006 were "overwhelming", in fact in many local elections the margin of victory, particularly for newly elected democrats were a dozen votes, and for state level offices a few hundred. Almost NONE of these votes were contested, even in cases where the Republican candidate had only to request a recount.
Did these Republican candidates even get a "good sportsmanship" pat on the back from the press? Saving the taxpayers millions of dollars in recount costs, in fact got them nothing except continued insults from people like you.
Your right, we should all be outraged (and I am) by slipshod voting practices, whether the cause is corruption or incompetence (and very little is being done at the election-official level about incompetence), how many of them can you name who have been "fired"?
We should also stop accepting the fact that other types of voting corruption has gone on for years in largely Democratic districts. It seems to be widely accepted, even among Democrats that this corruption goes on, but where is the outcry? As your post indicates (not intentionally I'm sure) many Democrats are of the "ends justifies the means" school of thinking and simply don't consider an election invalid if their candidate wins. Of course there are Republicans who fall into this category too, but silence from the left is deafening.
The results of this, which will serve us (you) lazy citizens right, will be another ma
And my comments which were FUBARed by WAPOs website:
Could we first pass a law that would prevent anyone else from Microsoft from using the word "innovation"? They have practically worn the word out and it only serves as a sick joke these days that one of America's most successful companies (in money terms at least) continues to use an attribute they lack to describe themselves.
Yes, innovation is important to America, and the world, but what does Bill Gates mean by "strong intellectual property laws and efficient capital markets"?
IP laws are intended to help get new ideas off the ground by promising an inventor, but more importantly a manufacturer, at least a chance on return of their investment in production of a new product. But software patents have turned this system on its head, with more patents issued than anyone can keep up with, and in some cases on almost trivial concepts, we have the opposite effect, namely that someone can invest significantly in a new product only too find out that the proceeds belong to Microsoft.
Efficient capital markets? Like one where hardware costs continue to go down while software costs continue to go up? Where Steve Balmer can suggest that the world needs a $100 PC, while omitting that he'd like to see $1000 worth of MS software running on it?
What Gates and Balmer want is a parody of "The Al Franken Decade", and we are living it too. These two men, and their company want to continue to rest on their accomplishments from the 80's (which were significant) while the rest of us struggle with software that doesn't work, old disks we can't read and laws that threaten to put us in jail if we code up anything that might work against their retirement programs. The MS decade is OVER! Long since in fact. Deal with it Mr. Gates, get back to your charity efforts. (and PLEASE, take Balmer with you!)
"Vista is awsome! I absolutely love it!
But I can't run this app, or that app, and my favorite game won't run on it.
Vista rocks!"
Don't forget, Microsoft has its fanboys too. The reason it doesn't get mentioned much is that we are usually making fun of them for something else, being dumb in general, not being able to type or spell, things like that.
*duck*
"...then don't use it."
It doesn't work on Linux.
So I won't.
Thanks for helping me out with that!
"It's funny, because I don't use PivotTables all that much. However, I do use charting. And I use the data import/export abilities. I deal in incredibly large reports on a regular basis. (Too much data for Google's solution to handle.)"
Maybe someone else can remember the name, but after Google bought the company that they are using for the spreadsheet application they bought a SECOND company, lesser known, with a spreadsheet offering of their own. I got to try it about a day before they shut it down and it looked like a full Excel implementation to me, complete with charting. I didn't check pivot tables, but judging from the number of things on the function bar, I wouldn't be surprised. I've wondered ever since how (or if) they were going to merge the two products. Maybe not at all and just have one as an enhanced offering.
Any comparison of the feature set now is meaningless. I KNOW there are companies that can work within the current feature set. I'm also fairly confident the feature set will improves (as it has since yesterday in fact). Until Microsoft responds with something that doesn't require you to buy a full copy of Office (or Windows for that matter) this is going to be tempting for many small organizations, particularly those just getting started that don't have a legacy of Microsoft dependencies.
I'm surprised Grace Hopper never received the award. When I was coming up in the industry she was always cited as one of the great pioneers of computing.
I anticipate the Google apps are going to continue to improve. Since last night they have added fonts (was a very basic selection before), added the docs and spreadsheet into the domain settings so that things are easier to share within-company.
Also, after they bought Writely and the spreadsheet company they also baught a second spreadsheet company. Reviewing their product I noticed it had a much more complete set of Excel features. How hard would it be for them to tack an SQL service to this? My guess: Not too hard at all.
I remember getting burned a few years ago by a hosting company. I had every reason to believe from their website that they were a good sized outfit that was a subsidiary to one of the local phone companies in Florida. All the photos of their "datacenter" were so convincing, and in fact for a couple of years the services was quite OK. But then screwy things started happening that should have shouted out to me: "This company is operating on a shoestring budget in some kids parent's basement!".
Actually it turned out to be a small warehouse office space with a few servers and high school drop-outs for staff. The tie-in with the phone company was total BS and some sleuthing revealed that the other family business was closer to being a fertilizer business (no really!) than anything else. I got off that system just in time. I lost some things, but not much, people who waited a bit longer lost everything including access to their domains etc.
When I looked for a replacement I was much more careful to look for telltale signs that it was the same kind of, for lack of a better term "soft-fraud" operation. I think I got pretty good at it, but what scared me was the percentage of fairly well known companies that were using the same boilerplate text and generic graphics of their facilities. One thing I especially looked for was if no actual peoples names appeared on the web site. Big companies have "Chairmen" and "CEOs" who love to get their pictures on the corporate web site. These fly-by-night outfits on the other hand just have support contact numbers that go to an answering machine and not indication that anyone associated with the company wants their actual name to show up anywhere. You have to wonder why. Or maybe you don't.
I'm almost positive that Registerfly (and I think they had a hosting come-on too) was one of these fairly obvious scam operations. I'm SOOOO glad I stayed away.
My hope is that in the not too distant future Google and some other big names will get into the free-to-low-cost hosting and registration business and put these low-life vermin out of our misery.
"Finally, your idea that Windows and Linux will quickly catch up to OS X assume that OS X is a stationary target. Between now and Vienna, 10.5 will ship, and 10.6 as well, assuming Vienna ships on time (mid-2009). Vista is currently about equal to OS X in features and ease-of-use, but that won't be true 4 months from now, and it will be even less true 18-24 months from now."
I don't think the post to which you are responding said anything about the relative quality of Vista vs OS X. Nor did it say that Apple sales would evaporate over night. It simply stated that Apple sales may be at a peak. I think it is widely accepted, even among Windows users that OS X is a better OS. I've dealt with such people, shown them OS X and gotten the expected ooohs and aaahs, only to then be told that they depend on a particular application that they can't live without. (Even if I can eventually convince them that this is not true, not all Windows users have someone around to make that case for them.)
The weak link in the Apple strategy (but since it is intentional, maybe "weak" is a poor choice of words) is that with the shift to Intel, and the ease of running Windows applications, as was the case with OS/2 people are going to find themselves more and more just running the Windows application, and at some point they are going to conclude that they are so often in that Windows mode that they might just as well be running Windows.
It's a big big mindshare issue. Take Robert Scoble for example. He recently bragged that he had spent something like $10K on Apple computers for his family. But he NEVER mentions actually using the things, because he's just running Windows on them. When he DOES mention that Apple computers it is usually in the context of something (overheating, poor support) that has gone wrong with one of them.
I work with a small construction company that has a dozen users, only one of which is an Apple fan. Yes, her machine is more reliable and easier to use. But they also have to spend more time on the fact that Excel spreadsheets she has edited don't quite work right for anyone else, and does she HAVE to run Outlook, or can she make do with the built-in Apple mail program, etc. etc. (I'm trying to get them all switched over to Google so these issues will go away). Do you think Microsoft would intentionally poison-pill Office for the Mac (which is a separate and some say better code base). Nah MS would never do anything like that!
The Microsoft monopoly will not end as a result of one user at a time switching to Apple. It will take whole companies making that commitment, or in the case of Linux, whole countries and government organizations. Last I heard, there was no small country or city that was switching to Apple. There is almost never any news about Apple server success stories (other than a few R&D grid systems, and many if not most of those seem to be running YDL Linux), while Oracle's entire datacenter is Linux based.
In summary, I think Apple (the company) has given up on world domination in the computer space (hence the name change.) Yes, they may continue to make computers for a while, but they are positioning that as as purely an optional part of their business. By the time they get out altogether hardly anyone will notice. My guess is that they will release OS X for generic PCs as the last change they make before making that move. Apple fans will continue to love that interface, but they will find it works just as well on a Dell or Toshiba, or Lenovo, or... and some of those machines (surprise!) look an awful lot like the Apple laptops now anyway.
It will be a nice present to the Open Source community when Apple finally realizes there is no big profit to be made in supporting an also-ran OS. Like Sun with Java, they will wait far to long to release the code for OS X, but maybe by the time they do there will be enough established Linux shops that they can get the benefit of the bits and pieces that can be salvaged from the Apple lo
"I'm actually pretty surprised that the Yahoo mail beta doesn't get more press. It is, by FAR, the best web-based e-mail I've ever seen. Check out this review [weblogsinc.com] for screenshots."
I prefer Gmail and I've tried them all, having signed up for both the Live beta and Yahoo's mail beta when became "available" umteen years ago, and at that time I was also new to Gmail and would have easily made the switch to something else. Both Yahoo and MSN take up too much screen real-estate with ads or other unnecessary graphics, but more importantly both are SLOW to VERY SLOW at times which is exacerbated by the fact that while you are waiting for them to start they put up a damned Flash animation to entertain and annoy you. That would be bad enough, but simple things like deleting messages, flagging them as spam etc can take tens of seconds or longer. With Yahoo and Hotmail to choose from I'd simply go back to a POP mail reader (of course I couldn't do that with these services without paying extra!)
With Gmail, I get the word "Loading..." on the screen for no more than a couple seconds and then I'm in. Once in, opening and closing, deleting, flagging, operations are almost instantaneous, and certainly hard to distinguish (in speed) from a local pop mail client (which themselves can get sluggish as your mail store builds up). Plus, if I ever DO want to go back to a POP mail reader I can be fairly comfortable that Google isn't going to make me pay for it. Google's pattern has been that as they get more popular they give MORE stuff away, Yahoo was always the opposite, as they established their large user base they decided to start charging for things that used to be free. I've enjoyed watching them screw themselves over. While I'm no big fan of Microsoft either, it seems to me they are doing a better job of matching Google service for service.
Both MSN and Yahoo have a problem that Google is free from however and that is trying to provide new services while at the same time maintaining the old. Yahoo particularly with mail, groups, Geocities, Yahoo360, Flickr, presents the user with a maze of twisty-options-all-alike, except for where they aren't. It has all the organization of my unfinished basement, and with the exception of a few things that I have organizational ties too (like Yahoo groups) I can't wait to get out of their interface.
My biggest problem with MSN is of course they really want you to be a faithful Windows (and sometimes IE7) user which I am not. So their is a tendency for things to not work at first on Firefox, or work at all for Linux or OS X. It is this tendency to tie everything to the Windows OS which makes me resistant to use any of their services even if they are otherwise acceptable. Yahoo and (especially) Google at least have no predisposition to make alternate OSs and alternate browsers second class citizens.
"It's no longer part of the process, it's a workaround."
Note: I'm not a sys-admin for Unix or Windows, but I've certainly been in Windows environments where the ACL and rights set-up was so complex that nobody (particularly the sys-admins) understood it. I'd bet it isn't all that uncommon for an overworked sysadmin to just find a trusted user in the group that's having problems and just give them all powers over a particular area so that they (the sysadmin) don't get called so often.
I think simplicity in a security system has it's advantages, even if it requires a few workarounds. Those can be well documented, use single owner executables etc. or as you said use some sort of version control (which exists as applications for photos, CRM, or other database driven systems). Which brings me to another gripe I have with many Windows systems, which is the tendency to rely on the file system to do too much, like a single folder with hundreds of thousands of photos in it. Try bringing that up in file manager while files are still being added. Why did they do it this way? Because they didn't know any better and figured that anything they could do on a small scale on the desktop should just work fine in a server environment with orders of magnitude larger load.
Too many organizations are allowing Windows servers to be administer and used as though they are just beefed up PCs, and they mistakenly think they can get kids right out of high school with some certification under their belt to run them... I digress.
"Yeah! And you know what? Car manufacturers are just as guilty! Can you believe that they charge more to have power door locks, power windows, and heated seats?"
I think comparisons with car manufacturers should be eschewed until the point in time when you can sue Microsoft for damages you incur while using their products. This applies to other software products as well, and as a Linux user I'm not too keen on having it applied to free software. But my point is that comparing software with almost any other commercial product doesn't work as long as companies make big bucks with almost no offsetting responsibilities. In a way I'm hopeful that Microsoft's pricing will become ever more monopolistic, forcing people to think about alternatives.
I can't find anywhere that it says the service is to become a paid service. The article talks about everything but that. Now I suspect that some or all of it MAY become non-free, in fact the sign-up makes that pretty clear. It also says that people who sign up during the beta will continue to get the service for free.
Only thing in this article about paying anything though is that Microsoft has a competing product for $39/mo and that Google employees get "paid massages", maybe whoever wrote the summary was thinking of paid messages or something.