"Before I left Microsoft, I wrote a memo (won't tell you what it said) that laid out what I thought would be necessary to compete against Linux. It was based on the no quarter principle-- the idea that if Linux has any protected market, it will continue as a strategic threat. This means that one has to target every single one of Linux's markets regardless of how unprofitable or uninteresting it is. Many of my ideas have been implimented in some way or form. So the strategy is taking form, and I had a strong hand in it (for better or worse) but it will take some time before real leverage is brought to bear. However, I do believe that it is likely to be too late to create a real lock in."
Murderer!
Funny, I was about to post higher up that Microsoft's biggest problem is that all the easy profit in the software business is behind them. Balmer goes around saying the the world needs a $200 PC (I think the truth is closer to $100) seemingly without thinking about how much of that should go to MS vs the hardware companies. Up above someone tells a sad tale of bad support from Microsoft on a server issue. Microsoft is squeezed in the middle. They need to somehow produce a $10 version of windows that runs flawlessly like my TV set and at the same time replace IBM mainframe and Sun systems that don't get eaten by viruses.
Sun and IBM, who are still thought of as mostly hardware outfits support customers in a totally different way than Microsoft. Yes they may have farmed out call centers to India too, but because they are in the hardware business they also know how to fly a person, or a part across country to rescue a business (ven a small business) who gets stuck. IBMs consulting division plays a far greater role in setting up complete applications (not talking about just software here, but design, staff, documentation, high level management). This is hard work, and when it fails, IBM can be sued for misfeasance. Microsoft on the other hand just wants to develop the OS and middle-ware and stamp out CDs and wash their hands of the rest. They've done as good a job of that easy-work as anyone could have done I suspect, but that work is behind them now, and I don't think Steve or Bill have the stomach for the lower profit margins, higher risk, and harder work that will allow them to move to the next level.
What is Bill interested in? From the Channel 9 interview: Voice technology. So when will MS perfect voice technology? Will they be able to use the cookie cutter approach to locking everyone into only MS products just to get voice technology? I rather doubt it. First I think that technology, in a really useful form, may still be 20 or more years off. We are talking artificial intelligence here and I think the real solution is going to be some form of hardware/software and a whole lot of programming that doesn't fit in with any existing Microsoft PC strategy. Bill just wants to be off in a room somewhere full of smart guys who can make dreams like this come true. But that has nothing to do with making money in the IT industry here and now. If Bill day-dreams any longer that industry is going to pass him by. In fact it may already have.
Similarly Microsoft looks pretty pathetic when they go head to head with the likes of Sony. There IS money to be made on hardware, but its cents on the dollar and somehow I think MS would be better of just doing software for the Playstation rather than trying to replace the Playstation. And while we are at it, why not provide the full suite of MS applications for Linux, Sun, OS X? Why not have a consulting group that would go in and get the job done whether or not it involved any Microsoft products? Why not bid on government contracts that, again, didn't necessarily involve pushing MS products as much as managing projects and getting them done on time and under budget?
Microsoft wants to be the company that makes sausage making machines, but they don't want to make sausage, they want the rich cream of the IT budget, not the part
"Yahoo doesn't need an answer to Gmail. They have an order of magnitude more users (63.3 mln vs 5.4 mln)."
It's about an order of magnitude slower too. I can be in and done with Gmail (which is receiving most of my mail now) in the length of time it takes yahoo to respond to my first click. Not to mention the ads they run take up half the screen.
by sammy baby (14909) Alter Relationship on Friday September 09, @04:26PM (#13521806) Yeah. And how many viruses are written in assembler?
(in other words, Apple's move to Intel isn't going to mean a damn thing to virus writers, unless it's by virtue of more people installing Virtual PC.).......
by needacoolnickname (716083) Alter Relationship on Friday September 09, @04:32PM (#13521879) Question - is it Intel that makes worms, bugs, trojans, etc. so easy to exploit a machine or is it the Operating System?
I wonder because 1) Doesn't Linux run on Intel systems? and 2) Doesn't Windows also run on AMD systems and still get infested?
It doesn't matter if the virus is written in assembler, although I suspect there are a few viruses that ARE written in assembler. All that matters is the machine code generated. Most AMD systems, including the 64-bit models are running in an Intel compatibility mode. There is a 64-bit version of Linux for AMD, but I am pretty sure that use of the 64-bit instructions is optional even in that mode, in other words a simple Intel machine language program will still work ( in both modes, I think).
Once Apples OS X is running on Intel computers it will in fact be possible to write a combined PC/Mac virus as long as (a) no operating system calls are done, (b)some unique code exists to deal with how to infect other systems. In other words, if there is a particular vulnerable port in Windows, it is unlikely that the same port will be vulnerable in the same way for OS X, but viruses already exist that can spread themselves in multiple ways, as e-mail attachments, port worms, SMB or other network linkages. The more OS X and Windows have in common on the Intel platform the more dangerous the situation will be. They can already share files (SMB) and they already have a lot in common in terms of UPnP in which, I think, vulnerabilities have been found in both OSs.
OS X running on PowerPC was a VERY important deterrent to cross platform viruses. That deterrent will soon be gone and anyone who thinks otherwise needs to cut back on their medication for a few days.
Um. I think that is the point. TWAIN is not an acronym, even thought it is capitalized as though it is one. To me, calling it the "Technology without an interesting name" is perfectly acceptable. Can you imagine of most of our protocols were named by picking some vaguely related word in literature somewhere?
The joke, and it IS a joke, gets a good laugh at presentations to the uniformed and often causes them to go read up on the subject (something it is increasingly hard to get decision makers to do).
Well, I'll be the 50th person to comment that it is a bit too soon (less than a week isn't it?) to criticize them for not having S2S support when they plainly state that that is one of their primary goals. DUH. Clearly they are not finished yet.
As to the article, which was far too long for the amount of actual information it contained, there were no revelations in it other than that which would be dictated by common sense. That common sense was cloak in a shroud of innuendo, inside sources, and conspiracy.
If in fact AOL, MSN and Yahoo cooperate with one another in some way to fend off the now "evil" Google, all users will be better off than before. They key prediction made by the article and the one on which the veracity of his sources can be measured is the notion that all three companies are going to suddenly obsolete their own IM clients and replace them with some surprising new thing.
That would indeed be a coup for this blogger to have gotten early word on such an event. In the mean time if you believe it, please contact me to make large bets on the subject.
The other thing not mentioned by the article or much of the speculation I've seen on it is that at least some of the IM protocols use peer to peer connections once the two parties have located one another. Remember, if everyone in the universe had a fixed IP address there would probably have never been a need for IM clients at all. Once two parties have identified that they are both on at the same time a direct connection can (and probably should) be established. The only reason we needed servers in the first place was because everyone's IP address keeps changing these days.
It probably doesn't matter that they are PowerPC or Intel processors. If the OSs used are Linux, and the applications are written in any language except the Microsoft lock-in variety, you just change processors, recompile, and you are back in business. Avoiding lock-ins gives you tremendous flexibility, bargaining power, and fallback options. Being locked into an OS, and thus destined to use whatever hardware your OS provider commands you to use is a sad sad thing, and hopefully a thing that won't last too much longer. Unless tech decision makers are even dumber than I think they are.
I've heard that the new Intel architecture is going to look just like the PowerPC. The plan is to get Steve Jobs to scream "DOH!" so loud it can be heard all across Silicon Valley.
"Any idea if Microsoft will be using regular HDs, or if they're going to have some sort of proprietary type that you can't just buy in a store?"
Don't even joke about that. Of COURSE they will use a standard hard drive. Otherwise what are us folk who want to have a Microsoft subsidized Linux box going to do??!!
I agree with you here. My personal W2000 system rarely crashed either (because I acted as my own administrator) however other people were often having trouble with their machines and the "official" admins were usually at a loss for what to do, other than replace the persons computer (and when they did that they often forgot to backup/restore the users data resulting in weeks of aggravation). Keep in mind these were people with MCSE certifications who SHOULD have known how to manage these systems better.
My thinking is that the Windows mindset lends itself to sloppy work on the part of the admins. Anything that they can't do with a few clicks seems like too much work for them, and the atmosphere created by existing and past flaws in Windows allows them to often escape responsibility for their poor workmanship... just blame it on hardware or Windows.
To make matters worse, as some of these admins finally DO begin to standardize these systems around a more secure Windows set-up they are often unable to adapt to exceptions. As I've kept in touch with my former colleagues I hear that they often run into situations where the network administrators will centralize controls that prevent them from replacing their own application (i.e. applications that they are being paid to work on) and they treat every user as though the only thing they have the rights to do is open Word or Excel documents. In short, the admins, although there seem to be hundreds of them in a large organization, are total idiots.
This situation, of needing so many admins (because so many of the functions are on thousands of users desktops rather than centralized) and therefor looking for CHEEP admins, is one thing that goes into making TCO for distributed PC systems as high or higher than for the old mainframe systems (especially where the old mainframe has been replaced with a modern equivalent). I think that ultimately much of what we do with PCs will in one way or another be centralized again, whether it is by using something like Cytrix. Or, better yet, a non-Windows solution like LTSP where this concept is more natural.
In the environment I came from, where (1) we were writing our own applications from scratch, (2) security was a BIG concern, and (3) there were tens of thousands of desktops involved, something like Linux using a set of central systems with thin clients for most of the desktops would have been not only a much cheaper solution, but a much more secure and reliable one. One reason I left that line of work was that no matter how many high-priced consultants told them that Windows was the wrong solution they continued to stay with it, always leading me to speculate that something "funny" was going on behind the scenes. Now I can just watch these systems fail from a distance (it usually makes the news) and laugh.
"People tend to panic when all the PCs around them are crashing every few minutes instead of every few hours or days like normal (depending on patch level and usage pattern)."
I don't know if this was intended to be funny, but it cracked me up. I guess I've been out of the industry so long that I foget that Windows admins take hourly or daily crashes for granted. What a sad sad world it must be.
I'll play devils advocate and suggest that there *IS* a benefit to be had from a new player *if*:
First they realize that there is no need for a new protocol. AOL, Yahoo, and MS I think have all learned that having their own private protocol is not the path to infinite wealth. I've been using the Gaim client on Linux and the iChat client under OS X (to get to the AIM servers) for a long time. None of them make a dime off me as a result and I don't think there have been any attempts to close the protocols from open clients lately. They all seem to see some marginal benefit in allowing their servers to be used this way, and hoping that some people will also use their clients for added functionality.
If Google were to use the Jabber protocol, offer up its vast server farm to run it and allow anyone with a Jabber capable client to use it I think it would be great. If (as I presume) it would centralize access to other Google functionality it would be fantastic. If it, in the long run, convinced the walled communities provided by MS, AOL, and Yahoo to further drop those walls so that all of these things could easily work together (like some form of cooperative name-space for example) then it would be revolutionary.
I have been mystified too by the success of RSS since its early proponents claimed it was a "push" technology.
A TRUE push technology would have made enormous sense. You update your website, your website automatically notifies aggregators such as Bloglines and search engines such as google that it has been updates, the big players talk among themselves and spread the word.
Instead the feed mechanism has turned into something that consumes more bandwidth than th eoriginal HTML ever did. The fact that you are sending just text and not all the graphics is more than made up for by the fact thatpersonal aggregators on millions of PCs are checking your site 5 times a minute even while the user of that computer may be away on vacation for a month. The whole concept has gotten ridiculous.
"However, after doing a Google search, I find that that they actually have a concise list of nuclear facilities in a government website."
Hey think I hear a knock at you door.
But seriously folks. Once a secret is out you can't make it a secret again (*avoiding temptation to reference recent political events*).
I question whether Google should be RETAINING images at all, beyond possibly a small thumbnail. But if an image is on the web I expect to be able to find it using something that calls itself a search tool.
Search technology would quickly be rendered useless, or too expensive if every supplier had to hire a building full of censors.
Hint for those who think it their responsibility to guard secrets: Use Google and the others to find your own security leaks, plug them, and then SHUT UP ABOUT IT!
It might also not hurt to track down whoever leaked the picture and kill^H^H^H^H give them a good talking to.
They can charitably be characterized as an "integrator", and as such, there is no particular reason they shouldn't continue to integrate a wider (not narrower) mix of technologies into their offerings. Adding Intel=good, Ending PowerPC=bad.
It was the BSA that first tried to end software piracy in the USA (a worthy goal) and found their efforts thwarted by none other than Microsoft who wanted to pick and choose who they would let steal their software. They knew full well that small companies were pirating Windows and Office and they were just fine with that, until those companies started showing nice profits. The last thing they wanted was the BSA to conduct a raid too soon and risk putting the pirate-users out of business.
How ironic that MS now need the marginal revenue from pirated copies to prop up thier inflated stock price. Time for Microszombies to pay the price of the monoculture they inhabit.
You lost me there. How is it any different than if Dell, HP or IBM provided a turnkey Linux box? There is no technical obstacle to this. It is more of a chicken and egg problem. Big names will provide turnkey Linux boxes once Linux gets more popular (which would happen quickly if big names provided turnkey Linux boxes).
And by provided, I of course mean provided with continuing support.
The other chicken and egg problem of course is convincing people that standard interfaces (HTML, RTF, even DOC formats) are stable enough that you don't really need Microsoft products to work with them.
It is essential to Microsoft that they disrupt this thinking before it gets too far. Dot-Net and other changes in the next versions of Windows and Office will certainly be aimed at breaking as many non-Microsoft things as possible.
As far as eye candy, I miss my Crystal icon set when I'm using my Powerbook. I've gotten used to the menu bar at the top of the screen but there are situations where it is counterproductive. While in Linux I can choose to have that title bar at top or not, OS X doesn't give me a choice. Apple has made the GUI more "user friendly" by eliminating the clutter of options available to the Windows or Linux (speaking particularly of KDE here) user.
But that brings me to my main point which is that Linux (or Open Source in general) arrives eventually at better design decisions than are likely to be made by any proprietary product. In Linux the GUI is clearly sitting on top of a generic windowing program which clearly sits on top of a general purpose multitasking OS. The Vendors, in their infinite wisdom go too far to blur these relationships while using Open Source I can choose between Linux/BSD X11/Xorg KDE/Gnome/... and in the latter two cases I can switch quite quickly between combinations of those things.
If the average user could have a fully configured Linux system that "just worked" placed in front of them I think they would forget Windows and OS X rather quickly. But Apple with its IEverything and Microsoft with , well, with whatever they finally come up with will continue to provide an artificially moving target as long as they can get away with it. They will have Jobs continue to do his song and dance and hire people like Scoble to oooh and ahh over some "cool" new button every 30 seconds. As long as these techniques continue to work on the "average" user the companies will continue to overcharge users so they can afford to convince users that they need to be overcharged. Like I said, chicken and egg.
It will take a growing number of non-conformists, or some other disruptive force (like the Chinese economy) to break this cycle. I have high hope that it will happen, but not next week.
There is nothing funny (in the mysterious sense) about this. Anyone who uses forums at all probably is signed up for a dozen of them.
If forum reading is your primary activity, then you should seek help. Otherwise, the activity is a spare-time sort of thing. Forums have different requirements for ID and password. Some now use e-mail addresses as your ID, others require longer passwords, or more cryptic passwords. Most people don't want to (or shouldn't) use their ID and password for (example) your bank, to identify themselves on a forum.
So, relying on cryptic e-mailed link-backs, cookies, or little scraps of yellow paper to sign onto forums makes perfect sense. As the administrator for such a large forum, maybe you have forgotten that not everyone involved takes the thing as seriously as you do. How many of those 52K use the thing once a day by any means? That might be the more important number.
Slashdot Mirror
"Before I left Microsoft, I wrote a memo (won't tell you what it said) that laid out what I thought would be necessary to compete against Linux. It was based on the no quarter principle-- the idea that if Linux has any protected market, it will continue as a strategic threat. This means that one has to target every single one of Linux's markets regardless of how unprofitable or uninteresting it is. Many of my ideas have been implimented in some way or form. So the strategy is taking form, and I had a strong hand in it (for better or worse) but it will take some time before real leverage is brought to bear. However, I do believe that it is likely to be too late to create a real lock in."
Murderer!
Funny, I was about to post higher up that Microsoft's biggest problem is that all the easy profit in the software business is behind them. Balmer goes around saying the the world needs a $200 PC (I think the truth is closer to $100) seemingly without thinking about how much of that should go to MS vs the hardware companies. Up above someone tells a sad tale of bad support from Microsoft on a server issue. Microsoft is squeezed in the middle. They need to somehow produce a $10 version of windows that runs flawlessly like my TV set and at the same time replace IBM mainframe and Sun systems that don't get eaten by viruses.
Sun and IBM, who are still thought of as mostly hardware outfits support customers in a totally different way than Microsoft. Yes they may have farmed out call centers to India too, but because they are in the hardware business they also know how to fly a person, or a part across country to rescue a business (ven a small business) who gets stuck. IBMs consulting division plays a far greater role in setting up complete applications (not talking about just software here, but design, staff, documentation, high level management). This is hard work, and when it fails, IBM can be sued for misfeasance. Microsoft on the other hand just wants to develop the OS and middle-ware and stamp out CDs and wash their hands of the rest. They've done as good a job of that easy-work as anyone could have done I suspect, but that work is behind them now, and I don't think Steve or Bill have the stomach for the lower profit margins, higher risk, and harder work that will allow them to move to the next level.
What is Bill interested in? From the Channel 9 interview: Voice technology. So when will MS perfect voice technology? Will they be able to use the cookie cutter approach to locking everyone into only MS products just to get voice technology? I rather doubt it. First I think that technology, in a really useful form, may still be 20 or more years off. We are talking artificial intelligence here and I think the real solution is going to be some form of hardware/software and a whole lot of programming that doesn't fit in with any existing Microsoft PC strategy. Bill just wants to be off in a room somewhere full of smart guys who can make dreams like this come true. But that has nothing to do with making money in the IT industry here and now. If Bill day-dreams any longer that industry is going to pass him by. In fact it may already have.
Similarly Microsoft looks pretty pathetic when they go head to head with the likes of Sony. There IS money to be made on hardware, but its cents on the dollar and somehow I think MS would be better of just doing software for the Playstation rather than trying to replace the Playstation. And while we are at it, why not provide the full suite of MS applications for Linux, Sun, OS X? Why not have a consulting group that would go in and get the job done whether or not it involved any Microsoft products? Why not bid on government contracts that, again, didn't necessarily involve pushing MS products as much as managing projects and getting them done on time and under budget?
Microsoft wants to be the company that makes sausage making machines, but they don't want to make sausage, they want the rich cream of the IT budget, not the part
"Yahoo doesn't need an answer to Gmail. They have an order of magnitude more users (63.3 mln vs 5.4 mln)."
It's about an order of magnitude slower too. I can be in and done with Gmail (which is receiving most of my mail now) in the length of time it takes yahoo to respond to my first click. Not to mention the ads they run take up half the screen.
I can't hear you.
In response to these two:
.......
by sammy baby (14909) Alter Relationship on Friday September 09, @04:26PM (#13521806)
Yeah. And how many viruses are written in assembler?
(in other words, Apple's move to Intel isn't going to mean a damn thing to virus writers, unless it's by virtue of more people installing Virtual PC.)
by needacoolnickname (716083) Alter Relationship on Friday September 09, @04:32PM (#13521879)
Question - is it Intel that makes worms, bugs, trojans, etc. so easy to exploit a machine or is it the Operating System?
I wonder because 1) Doesn't Linux run on Intel systems? and 2) Doesn't Windows also run on AMD systems and still get infested?
It doesn't matter if the virus is written in assembler, although I suspect there are a few viruses that ARE written in assembler. All that matters is the machine code generated. Most AMD systems, including the 64-bit models are running in an Intel compatibility mode. There is a 64-bit version of Linux for AMD, but I am pretty sure that use of the 64-bit instructions is optional even in that mode, in other words a simple Intel machine language program will still work ( in both modes, I think).
Once Apples OS X is running on Intel computers it will in fact be possible to write a combined PC/Mac virus as long as (a) no operating system calls are done, (b)some unique code exists to deal with how to infect other systems. In other words, if there is a particular vulnerable port in Windows, it is unlikely that the same port will be vulnerable in the same way for OS X, but viruses already exist that can spread themselves in multiple ways, as e-mail attachments, port worms, SMB or other network linkages. The more OS X and Windows have in common on the Intel platform the more dangerous the situation will be. They can already share files (SMB) and they already have a lot in common in terms of UPnP in which, I think, vulnerabilities have been found in both OSs.
OS X running on PowerPC was a VERY important deterrent to cross platform viruses. That deterrent will soon be gone and anyone who thinks otherwise needs to cut back on their medication for a few days.
Um. I think that is the point. TWAIN is not an acronym, even thought it is capitalized as though it is one. To me, calling it the "Technology without an interesting name" is perfectly acceptable. Can you imagine of most of our protocols were named by picking some vaguely related word in literature somewhere?
The joke, and it IS a joke, gets a good laugh at presentations to the uniformed and often causes them to go read up on the subject (something it is increasingly hard to get decision makers to do).
Well, I'll be the 50th person to comment that it is a bit too soon (less than a week isn't it?) to criticize them for not having S2S support when they plainly state that that is one of their primary goals. DUH. Clearly they are not finished yet.
As to the article, which was far too long for the amount of actual information it contained, there were no revelations in it other than that which would be dictated by common sense. That common sense was cloak in a shroud of innuendo, inside sources, and conspiracy.
If in fact AOL, MSN and Yahoo cooperate with one another in some way to fend off the now "evil" Google, all users will be better off than before. They key prediction made by the article and the one on which the veracity of his sources can be measured is the notion that all three companies are going to suddenly obsolete their own IM clients and replace them with some surprising new thing.
That would indeed be a coup for this blogger to have gotten early word on such an event. In the mean time if you believe it, please contact me to make large bets on the subject.
The other thing not mentioned by the article or much of the speculation I've seen on it is that at least some of the IM protocols use peer to peer connections once the two parties have located one another. Remember, if everyone in the universe had a fixed IP address there would probably have never been a need for IM clients at all. Once two parties have identified that they are both on at the same time a direct connection can (and probably should) be established. The only reason we needed servers in the first place was because everyone's IP address keeps changing these days.
It probably doesn't matter that they are PowerPC or Intel processors. If the OSs used are Linux, and the applications are written in any language except the Microsoft lock-in variety, you just change processors, recompile, and you are back in business. Avoiding lock-ins gives you tremendous flexibility, bargaining power, and fallback options. Being locked into an OS, and thus destined to use whatever hardware your OS provider commands you to use is a sad sad thing, and hopefully a thing that won't last too much longer. Unless tech decision makers are even dumber than I think they are.
I've heard that the new Intel architecture is going to look just like the PowerPC. The plan is to get Steve Jobs to scream "DOH!" so loud it can be heard all across Silicon Valley.
To be on the safe side I stick with :) :)) at most :)))))
or
I hate it when someone does a
on me.
Oh shppt Icamt swe
"Any idea if Microsoft will be using regular HDs, or if they're going to have some sort of proprietary type that you can't just buy in a store?"
Don't even joke about that. Of COURSE they will use a standard hard drive. Otherwise what are us folk who want to have a Microsoft subsidized Linux box going to do??!!
I agree with you here. My personal W2000 system rarely crashed either (because I acted as my own administrator) however other people were often having trouble with their machines and the "official" admins were usually at a loss for what to do, other than replace the persons computer (and when they did that they often forgot to backup/restore the users data resulting in weeks of aggravation). Keep in mind these were people with MCSE certifications who SHOULD have known how to manage these systems better.
My thinking is that the Windows mindset lends itself to sloppy work on the part of the admins. Anything that they can't do with a few clicks seems like too much work for them, and the atmosphere created by existing and past flaws in Windows allows them to often escape responsibility for their poor workmanship... just blame it on hardware or Windows.
To make matters worse, as some of these admins finally DO begin to standardize these systems around a more secure Windows set-up they are often unable to adapt to exceptions. As I've kept in touch with my former colleagues I hear that they often run into situations where the network administrators will centralize controls that prevent them from replacing their own application (i.e. applications that they are being paid to work on) and they treat every user as though the only thing they have the rights to do is open Word or Excel documents. In short, the admins, although there seem to be hundreds of them in a large organization, are total idiots.
This situation, of needing so many admins (because so many of the functions are on thousands of users desktops rather than centralized) and therefor looking for CHEEP admins, is one thing that goes into making TCO for distributed PC systems as high or higher than for the old mainframe systems (especially where the old mainframe has been replaced with a modern equivalent). I think that ultimately much of what we do with PCs will in one way or another be centralized again, whether it is by using something like Cytrix. Or, better yet, a non-Windows solution like LTSP where this concept is more natural.
In the environment I came from, where (1) we were writing our own applications from scratch, (2) security was a BIG concern, and (3) there were tens of thousands of desktops involved, something like Linux using a set of central systems with thin clients for most of the desktops would have been not only a much cheaper solution, but a much more secure and reliable one. One reason I left that line of work was that no matter how many high-priced consultants told them that Windows was the wrong solution they continued to stay with it, always leading me to speculate that something "funny" was going on behind the scenes. Now I can just watch these systems fail from a distance (it usually makes the news) and laugh.
"People tend to panic when all the PCs around them are crashing every few minutes instead of every few hours or days like normal (depending on patch level and usage pattern)."
I don't know if this was intended to be funny, but it cracked me up. I guess I've been out of the industry so long that I foget that Windows admins take hourly or daily crashes for granted. What a sad sad world it must be.
I'll play devils advocate and suggest that there *IS* a benefit to be had from a new player *if*:
First they realize that there is no need for a new protocol. AOL, Yahoo, and MS I think have all learned that having their own private protocol is not the path to infinite wealth. I've been using the Gaim client on Linux and the iChat client under OS X (to get to the AIM servers) for a long time. None of them make a dime off me as a result and I don't think there have been any attempts to close the protocols from open clients lately. They all seem to see some marginal benefit in allowing their servers to be used this way, and hoping that some people will also use their clients for added functionality.
If Google were to use the Jabber protocol, offer up its vast server farm to run it and allow anyone with a Jabber capable client to use it I think it would be great. If (as I presume) it would centralize access to other Google functionality it would be fantastic. If it, in the long run, convinced the walled communities provided by MS, AOL, and Yahoo to further drop those walls so that all of these things could easily work together (like some form of cooperative name-space for example) then it would be revolutionary.
I have been mystified too by the success of RSS since its early proponents claimed it was a "push" technology.
A TRUE push technology would have made enormous sense. You update your website, your website automatically notifies aggregators such as Bloglines and search engines such as google that it has been updates, the big players talk among themselves and spread the word.
Instead the feed mechanism has turned into something that consumes more bandwidth than th eoriginal HTML ever did. The fact that you are sending just text and not all the graphics is more than made up for by the fact thatpersonal aggregators on millions of PCs are checking your site 5 times a minute even while the user of that computer may be away on vacation for a month. The whole concept has gotten ridiculous.
"Not everyone drinks coffee. I had it once hot, once iced, and detested it both times."
You can't build a decent addiction by trying something one or two times.
Try putting a few spoonfuls of coffee in your milk. Mix it with your cocoa drink. Folgers crystals will turn that Sprite or 7-Up into a MAN'S drink.
Stick with the program for a few months and soon you will be replacing your bedside alarm clock with a percolator.
Very VERY well said. Their actions have spoken and will continue to speak louder than their words.
Hmmmm, sometimes it pays to RTFA.
I stand humiliated.
"However, after doing a Google search, I find that that they actually have a concise list of nuclear facilities in a government website."
Hey think I hear a knock at you door.
But seriously folks. Once a secret is out you can't make it a secret again (*avoiding temptation to reference recent political events*).
I question whether Google should be RETAINING images at all, beyond possibly a small thumbnail. But if an image is on the web I expect to be able to find it using something that calls itself a search tool.
Search technology would quickly be rendered useless, or too expensive if every supplier had to hire a building full of censors.
Hint for those who think it their responsibility to guard secrets: Use Google and the others to find your own security leaks, plug them, and then SHUT UP ABOUT IT!
It might also not hurt to track down whoever leaked the picture and kill^H^H^H^H give them a good talking to.
It is extremely slow trending to dead following this /. article.
Uh, yeah, sure. I hang on his every word. He's always been such a reliable indicator of what Microsoft was about to do.
Reasonable people will wait and evaluate what actually shows up in stores (and WHEN that happens). MS burned its creds years ago.
They are not a hardware company now!
They can charitably be characterized as an "integrator", and as such, there is no particular reason they shouldn't continue to integrate a wider (not narrower) mix of technologies into their offerings. Adding Intel=good, Ending PowerPC=bad.
It was the BSA that first tried to end software piracy in the USA (a worthy goal) and found their efforts thwarted by none other than Microsoft who wanted to pick and choose who they would let steal their software. They knew full well that small companies were pirating Windows and Office and they were just fine with that, until those companies started showing nice profits. The last thing they wanted was the BSA to conduct a raid too soon and risk putting the pirate-users out of business.
How ironic that MS now need the marginal revenue from pirated copies to prop up thier inflated stock price. Time for Microszombies to pay the price of the monoculture they inhabit.
You lost me there. How is it any different than if Dell, HP or IBM provided a turnkey Linux box? There is no technical obstacle to this. It is more of a chicken and egg problem. Big names will provide turnkey Linux boxes once Linux gets more popular (which would happen quickly if big names provided turnkey Linux boxes).
And by provided, I of course mean provided with continuing support.
The other chicken and egg problem of course is convincing people that standard interfaces (HTML, RTF, even DOC formats) are stable enough that you don't really need Microsoft products to work with them.
It is essential to Microsoft that they disrupt this thinking before it gets too far. Dot-Net and other changes in the next versions of Windows and Office will certainly be aimed at breaking as many non-Microsoft things as possible.
As far as eye candy, I miss my Crystal icon set when I'm using my Powerbook. I've gotten used to the menu bar at the top of the screen but there are situations where it is counterproductive. While in Linux I can choose to have that title bar at top or not, OS X doesn't give me a choice. Apple has made the GUI more "user friendly" by eliminating the clutter of options available to the Windows or Linux (speaking particularly of KDE here) user.
But that brings me to my main point which is that Linux (or Open Source in general) arrives eventually at better design decisions than are likely to be made by any proprietary product. In Linux the GUI is clearly sitting on top of a generic windowing program which clearly sits on top of a general purpose multitasking OS. The Vendors, in their infinite wisdom go too far to blur these relationships while using Open Source I can choose between Linux/BSD X11/Xorg KDE/Gnome/... and in the latter two cases I can switch quite quickly between combinations of those things.
If the average user could have a fully configured Linux system that "just worked" placed in front of them I think they would forget Windows and OS X rather quickly. But Apple with its IEverything and Microsoft with , well, with whatever they finally come up with will continue to provide an artificially moving target as long as they can get away with it. They will have Jobs continue to do his song and dance and hire people like Scoble to oooh and ahh over some "cool" new button every 30 seconds. As long as these techniques continue to work on the "average" user the companies will continue to overcharge users so they can afford to convince users that they need to be overcharged. Like I said, chicken and egg.
It will take a growing number of non-conformists, or some other disruptive force (like the Chinese economy) to break this cycle. I have high hope that it will happen, but not next week.
"Plan 9 From Outer Space is better than half the movies available in the theatres now."
:)
I don't see how that statment and the statement that it is a really crappy movie are contradictory in any way.
By the way I just downloaded it a few days ago and watched it for the first time. Incredibly bad! A must-have for any serious collector.
There is nothing funny (in the mysterious sense) about this. Anyone who uses forums at all probably is signed up for a dozen of them.
If forum reading is your primary activity, then you should seek help. Otherwise, the activity is a spare-time sort of thing. Forums have different requirements for ID and password. Some now use e-mail addresses as your ID, others require longer passwords, or more cryptic passwords. Most people don't want to (or shouldn't) use their ID and password for (example) your bank, to identify themselves on a forum.
So, relying on cryptic e-mailed link-backs, cookies, or little scraps of yellow paper to sign onto forums makes perfect sense. As the administrator for such a large forum, maybe you have forgotten that not everyone involved takes the thing as seriously as you do. How many of those 52K use the thing once a day by any means? That might be the more important number.