Only Thing to Die Will be High Price
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Death of the PDA?
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· Score: 1
I think the only thing thats going to die is the high prices of these devices. I still carry around an old Palm III that works perfectly well for looking things up when I don't have a laptop or other computer handy. Sometimes I don't WANT to have a phone with me, to hear it ring or feel it vibrate, I just want to have a database/notepad of some sort and I haven't seen any cell phones that do that function all that well without a magnifying glass to go with them.
When my Palm III eventually dies I fully expect to go into Walmart or some such place and get something similar for $50 or less. Maybe it will be a Casio device instead of a Palm. In a way, it's too bad that Palm and Handspring got distracted by competing only at the high end with each other and with Microsoft. At what it probably costs to stamp out these circuit boards they could have chosen instead to saturate the market with a $50 device. Maybe it's not too late for such a strategy to succeed. Someone will do it, soon, and at a profit.
"When people interact with a microwave or iPod, they're interacting with the device. They don't care about its software; they just wanna nuke their burrito and play Britney Spears."
Right. Let's hope that by the time all our devices are linked together transparently we are no longer using operating systems that will accidentally play their burrito and nuke Britney Spears.
"Both come from small developers outside Silicon Valley, which makes one wonder why nobody inside the billion-dollar labs of "innovative" mega-corporations like Carly Fiorina's or Palmisano's thoughts about this."
Uh, I think she already laid those folks off. Companies that have taken the short cut of only supplying Windows drivers for their hardware have tied their fortunes and futures directly to Microsoft. The good news is that former giants such as HP don't actually design or manufacture any of their own hardware any more, nor do they have any control over what drivers come supplied with them. That means that no matter how buddy buddy they are with Microsoft there will probably be drivers for these products produced in the country of origin for the international market.
"Can OSes like Unix and Linux gain market share by "piggy-backing" on win32 driver development in an ironic twist of "embrace and extend" that this time takes advantage of Microsoft's driver market share to hurt them and let users move to other platforms?"
yep yep, however I don't think such measures will be necessary for long. The vast majority of PCs in the future will be small ready to go configurations and the notion that you would buy a network, video, or sound card will be largely a thing of the past (based on the prices in Microcenter for these items I'd say it already is). Fewer players means less for Linux hackers to reverse engineer and the companies that differentiate themselves by supplying Linux drivers out of the box will do very well in some areas. Restrictive technologies that have nothing to recommend them other than (perhaps) the force of US laws (DRM) will ultimately fail with devastating consequences to those companies that embrace them.
If Microsoft wants to continue the fight against Open Source (somehow Brare Fox and the Tar baby come to mind) then they had better merge with a hardware company and start coming out with the driver of the week that only they support. I can't see this being a winning strategy for long either for Microsoft or for any duopoly they want to construct. They'll go down the tubes together or separately, makes no difference to me.
They also moved some thing from user space back to supervisor space, most notably video drivers. 3.5.1 was rock solid for me, NT 4.0 was worse than Win 98 on the same machine. As far as I know this is still the case, and I know there have been a number of back-door issues as well as performance issues with running fancy video cards on servers. Some of the dumb-ass Admins can't resist running fancy screensavers on production servers can they?
One problem with giving TOO much advice on password selection is that some people that read such advice have absolutely no common sense. A government agency I was associated with a while back took away password setting rights from its users and ASSIGNED everyone passwords of the form CVC99CVC (V=vowel, C=consonant, 9=digit). I figured out which of the MCSEs had come up with this nonsense and (pretending not to know) explained to him how easy such passwords were to crack. The policy got changed real quick and nobody got fired. There are of course programs that will force users to come up with good passwords and I think such systems aught to be in place by default for both Windows and Unix systems.
Other than that, any specific advice on what a good password should look like may simply serve as a formula for some dunce to apply to all his users to create passwords worse than just using their pets name.
"The smell of most theaters alone is enough to get me to not go. A combination of a society who's more talk than action on it's hygene and lazy immigrants who don't care about their jobs enough to actually clean the theaters properly on occasion. Then there's the whole SARS season rolling in on us soon."
You have obviously missed the whole guts of the theater going experience with your bad attitude.
Just try and make popcorn at home that is like what you get in the theater. It's impossible. They use some special oil, not quite like margarine, not quite like butter, not quite like paint thinner, but with the best qualities of all three.
At home a Coke is a Coke, but at the theater, sometimes its a "Petsi" and sometimes its just sugar and brown syrup with no carbonation. It's like a different experience every time!
I like how the floor inside the theater is even stickier than that chewing gum you stepped on outside. A couple of steps (and then some backtracking to retrieve your shoe) and the gum is back on the floor where it belongs.
As for people shifting around in their seats... what are you SUPPOSED to do when one of those big cockroaches runs up your leg? Those thing tickle! And don't tell me you raise your own theater sized cockroaches at home, I ain't buying it. Some experiences just have to be had first hand.
"As much as I'd like to find a way to settle this once and for all, and as sick as I am of the BS that SCO is inflicting on anyone willing to listen, I have to agree that they probably can't release any of their code. IANAL, so I'm also probably wrong =]"
IANAL either, but if it is indeed true that there are hundreds of thousands of lines of disputed code, then I can't imagine why they couldn't pick a few hundred lines of it and just say "Here is an example, here is another, and here is another." Henceforth that code would be in the public domain. So what? If there is indeed so much stolen code are they really going to miss the revenue from a few hundred lines? I'm sure they could select the lines carefully so as not to give away any REALLY clever techniques that they use.
SCO took a self contradictory approach to this whole mess. On the one hand they have tried to deal with this as a private court case, just between them and IBM (then Red Hat) and nobody else's business. On the other hand they have tried to play it up in the media for the FUD factor and to pump up their stock price. You can't have it both ways for very long. They have lost the media war, and lost it badly. Their stock price got all the bounce it's going to get out of this and now they have to figure out how to survive through 4 years of litigation.
Boise and his law firm are going to get another black eye out of this, and Darl's masters at Canopy are going to start to lose patience with the whole thing. As to whether Microsoft is going to benefit from any of this or not, I have my doubts. Linux may be slowed down by this but will benefit from the clean-up that results. Unlike Microsoft that likes to fix bugs and holes with patches, the offending parts of Linux (as they are discovered) will probably undergo major surgery and be improved in the process. The only investments that have paid off for Microsoft lately are updated milking machines for their cash cow. This is the only form of infrastructure they understand in Redmond. More power to them. Moooooo.
"The only way Microsoft can make money with the XBox is if they achieve market dominance and pricing power. That's not happening. They've found themselves in price competition against larger competitors with lower costs, an unusual position for Microsoft. "
Unusual in the 20 year sense, but not in the 10 year sense. Microsoft's biggest problem (not unlike any new company) is proving that their initial success with Windows was not just a fluke. They outlasted larger companies by lost-leader techniques to get their products in wide circulation. It did not take a genius to do this, just an autocratic outfit with staying power and a sugar daddy like IBM. Now that they operate like most other big corporations they are subject to the same internal political goings on that drive such companies to be short sighted generators of status-quo products.
Whoever at Microsoft came up with the strategy of going head to head with Sony should be fired. They would have been much better off doing some sort of joint development deal with them. They are not an R&D company nor are they a consumer electronics company (nor are they a cable network content provider, or a magazine publisher). They badly need to diversify themselves through mergers and acquisitions, not by trying to topple established world-wide players. If Bill (and Steve) would retire I think it would help things along. Is that likely to happen? No. Ego trumps greed every time.
I've had a similar change in my writing habits. It makes you realize that you used to be tempted to THINK a bit more before you wrote anything than you do these days. Sometimes I'm sure that is still the best approach although I rarely use it. hehe
I've always loved fountain pens. I have a small collection built up over the years of both modern, and vintage fountain pens. I've actually found that a restored fountain pen from the 20's or 30' can have the most pleasant feel when writing. A good one holds a huge amount of ink (as opposed to those wimpy cartridges that the modern ones tend to use. This is good because the older pens also USE a lot more ink. The ink almost leaps onto the paper, making a nice dark line and also lubricating the writing process. Unfortunately I type a lot faster than I write, and since almost everything ends up in a computer these days it's hard to justify writing instruments at all. Unless you are very famous, no one is likely to read your diary when you're gone.
Like many, I went through a phase of using a Palm Pilot (or similar device) for recording thoughts when away from any computer keyboard. I've since gone back to just using these devices for addresses and appointments (which mean that the sub $100 ones do just fine). So I'm back to carrying a pen whenever I go out and generally a small notebook (the paper variety) too.
Sometimes I carry a fountain pen, but more often I'm in a hurry and grab a ballpoint. For cheap ones I like Parker clickable ballpoints. The ink capacities are huge and they write smoothly. For $20 or so though I'd recommend the Rotring ballpoints which are all steel, have a textured grip, large ink supply and are nice and techno looking. You can enhance either Parker or Rotring pens by replacing the ink cartridge in it with one from Fisher (the makers of the original "Space Pen"). These really will write upside down, under water and on practically any surface. When writing on ordinary paper they have a nice feel too.
I remember in the 60's Bic did a series of commercials on how durable their pens were. They shot them from guns into tree trunks and then took what was left (not much) and wrote with it. They also "simulated" strapping one to a car to see how many miles you could write with one. Very impressive. Unfortunately I think cheap pens are not what they used to be. I've found that many of these if left unused for a year or so refuse to ever write again no matter how much you tap, shake or scribble with it trying to get it started again. Unfortunately many of these more expensive specialty pens (like the ones with the special grips) have the same ink mechanism used for the cheap ones. So, go with ink mechanisms from Parker, Fisher, Rotring, Lamy, Mont Blanc, or Cross, unless you are in a situation, such as a waiter, where your pens are constantly stolen.
Finally, and most importantly, if you are going to write anything that you need to last for a long time, do the following experiment:
Take all your candidate pens and make a test mark (sign your name or whatever) on several types of paper that you typically use. If you use colored ink, do this in all the colors you plan to use too. Just as a control, make the same marks with an ordinary pencil, and also pick any ordinary black-ink ballpoint (not the gel pens though, plain old ballpoint).
Tape these papers to a window or somewhere else where they will get direct sun. The back window of your car will do too. Check them in a month. You might be surprised, and if you are writing for any sort of archival purpose you might change your mind about what you want to use.
Trailers such as this often show scenes out of order. I have seen trailers so long that they included almost every critical scene in the movie, but because the order was scrambled you couldn't make any sense of it.
I think the only thing I learned from the second movie was that Disco is not dead in the VR future. I was almost asleep when someone who looked like Donald Sutherland appeared on the screen. Maybe we learned that the VR could be at least two levels deep. Uh, so what?
If part 3 is as disappointing as part 2 then I fear the trilogy will drag the reputation of the first movie totally into the trash heap of history.
After hearing all the hype about how the directors were such deep philosophers etc. *yawn* I really expected a lot more than a music video that M2 mostly was.
The only philosophy I expect to come out of M3 is this nugget of wisdom: "Fool me twice, shame on me."
Definitely more idiots than crooks. While you can hide shady dealings though, you can't hide ignorance. Visit any government IT operation and you will find very few people who regularly read technical journals, have IT related degrees, or have even ever written a computer program of any kind. Off the record technical discussions often consist of a proud announcement that they were able to get AOL working on their home computer without any assistance.
The fact is that slick salespeople don't HAVE to resort to bribery to sell into the government crowd, because they are so easily mislead by completely legal means. What is scary is not that Microsoft has a predatory sales force, but that our government IT infrastructure has no intellectual defense against such a sales force. In this group, there is a sucker born every second.
Another version of this story also quoted Americans for Technology Leadership, an industry trade group backed in part by Microsoft. The organizations name alone gives me the creeps. I predict that Microsoft will meet with some success at convincing high level government officials (many of who could NOT install AOL without help) that using Microsoft products is the patriotic thing to do. This is what scares me.
They will try and convince government agencies that using Microsoft products is like supporting Boeing aircraft. Our technical dunces will not have the imagination to realize that Microsoft is closer to being the Yugo than it is to being the Boeing of the software industry.
Only total, or near total failure of these systems will result in any change of attitude. Small systems failures like the one yesterday at the State Department will be minimized if not covered up entirely. Unlike the Shuttle program, much of the work of the Federal government cannot be measured or observed in any way by the typical citizen. Rather, 10 years down the road when the successes of Open Source government initiatives in other countries has become irrefutable we may see some younger, and hopefully brighter, government workers here in the US start to get a clue. -- Q: What to you call a Yugo with brakes? A: Customized.
I'm 99.9 percent certain that CLASS is a mainframe based system. So whoever at the State Department put this announcement together without having all the salient facts in front of them isn't doing their job very well.
The core data process organization at State has always been IBM mainframe based. However they have been under fire for years by people who wanted a more distributed system. Guess who is winning?
The number of people it takes to maintain the tens of thousands of PCs there has skyrocketed, along with all associated costs. The fact that the number of records in the database is in the millions is stated as though it is a phenomenal effort, and of course it is when you try and do it with the wrong tools. The number of transactions to connect every embassy or visa issuing post in the world back to DC would be trivial compared with what goes on to replicate a mainframe database to more than 200 locations around the world and then to replicate back any updates made at those locations (and attempt to try and do this in something resembling real-time).
I'm quite sure that the CLASS database was never in any serious jeopardy. But I'm just as certain that the surrounding infrastructure is constantly exposed to attacks and it is quite possible that some of the attacks are not only successful, but never get detected.
The people administering the network there have a tiger by the tail. They are pressured to allow thousands of bureaucrats to browse the web and tend to personal business on the internet while at the same time trying to protect an integrated network that has no business connected to the internet at all.
Having done some consulting at a number of government agencies my fear is that the people at the top get much of their technical education from sales reps (from Microsoft mostly these days) and have very little communications with the technical people who have to implement these mandates.
As was shown to be the case at NASA recently, the low level technical type who raises his hand and tries to point out a technical problem is quickly taken off the invite list for future meetings. As can be seen from the initial reports on this and the "corrections" that followed, a lot more time is spent trying to put a happy face on these screw-ups than getting down to the root (no pun intended) of the problem.
"Frankly, whenever I read an article complaining about "inflation" in MMORPGs I know from the start that the author doesn't know what they're talking about."
I found this to be the case too. As a player of SL from almost day one I had gradually built up a nice bank account without actually having to try. Even so I was able to buy a good sized chunk of land and start filling it with stuff. The problem with some of the new players who seemed to REALLY be working at the game is that they "hit the jackpot" in one way or another and then ran out and spent all they had on the assumption that more income would follow.
Not only did their income not keep up, but the price of land and objects went up (as has been documented many times) as new users were rapidly added and there began to be shortages of land and other server resources.
Based on what I saw, if some of the people that got hit by "inflation" managed their real world bank accounts the same way they managed their SL accounts then they are probably living in a van down by the river by now.
I'm not sure I agree that MMORPGs can be used to model real economies. At best, you can get an idea of how human psychology reacts to various economic conditions, but a real economy is orders of magnitude more complicated than anything that can be produced online (so far anyway) and the fact that your worst downside risk is to have to start over (no worries about starvation or health care costs etc) leads people to engage in far riskier behavior than they would in real life.
Japan, the world's second largest economy, made a proposal
at an Asian economic summit this week to build an inexpensive
and trustworthy open-source operating system that would be
based on a system such as Linux, which can be copied and
modified freely.
"We'd like to see the market decide who the winners are in
the software industry," Tom Robertson, Microsoft's Tokyo-based
director for government affairs in Asia, told Reuters in a
telephone interview.
I think the market IS deciding, which is going to be Microsoft's biggest problem for the next few years.
"Governments should not be in the position to decide who
the winners are," Robertson said.
You know, I don't remember there being any protest from Microsoft when the US government stopped accepting
RFP documents in WordPerfect format. I guess they've had a change of heart for some reason.
It's not the governments of Japan or China that need to be put on alert, it is our own. As Departments of State, Treasury, and the White House among others, busily archive critical documents in.DOC format that will not easily be converted to anything else in a few years, low level management of these departments need to be aware that going the "safe route" of managing everything using Microsoft tools will in hindsight only allow you to say "But everyone else around me was doing that too".
I suspect there will be more and more defectors from this way of thinking, even within the US government as time goes on. However as that happens there will also be signs of desparation from Microsoft as they try and appeal to some sort of warped patriotism that says we should all keep using overpriced, buggy and undocumented junk.
We need to stop thinking of Windows as America's software equivalent to the Boeing 7x7, and start thinking of it as America's software equivalent of the Yugo...
Q: How do you make a Yugo go faster?
A: A towtruck.
Q: What do you call the shock absorbers inside a Yugo?
A: Passengers.
The security threat posed by a particular bug in Windows is "Critical", but this is mitigated by the fact that: "The user must open a document sent to them by an attacker in order for this vulnerability to be exploited.", or "The Microsoft Access Snapshot Viewer is not installed with Microsoft Office by default. ", or "Any information disclosure would be completely random. "
Well that last one is certainly good to know. If my information is going to be disclosed I'd certainly prefer that it be my random information rather than my much more valuable, um, organized information.
I'm wondering if there are not a team of "Mitigation Specialists" at Microsoft charged with coming up with these things. I think this is something I could handle pretty well. I think I'll send them a resume.
Here is a sample of my work:
Mitigating Factors:
* User must have not only installed Windows and Office, but actually be using these products for any harm to, or exposer of user data to occur.
~*~ Small pets, farm animals, or other domesticated wildlife will not be harmed by the use of these products, even if human user fails to exercise due caution.
*# Extra-Terrestrial life-forms are completely safe even when in the same room as an operating Windows environment.
::=. Use of un-patched Outlook Express has been shown to have no effect on local precipitation nor earthquake activity. We will advise customers of an future change in this situation.
I really think I could come up with a lot of these. How about you? Do you have a future as a Microsoft Mitigation Specialist?
Does EVERYONE remember this wrong, or is it just me?
Microsoft did NOT get in trouble for simply bundling software. The specific issue was IE vs NETSCAPE. Netscape was at an unfair disadvantage not simply because IE came with Windows, but because it was INSEPARABLE from Windows. Parts of IE buried in the OS code meant that you were loading most of IE every time you booted, and then to use Netscape you were using up tons of memory on top of that. This made Netscape far less convenient to use, even if you preferred its interface (which I did at the time). With earlier versions of Windows/IE you could totally uninstall IE, or simply be careful never to run it and just use Netscape for everything. It worked FINE. Too fine for Microsoft's tastes, so they tinkered with Windows until they finally fouled Netscape up by convincing companies like Ziff Davis to tout loading speed as the number one criteria in selecting a browser.
In my book, they may have won the Browser Battle, but they will lose the OS War as a result of over bloating their software. I'm thrill that they are thumbing there nose at the Justice Department and re-integrating IE with the OS in the next release. They can blow all their own limbs off for all I care, I don't use their crap any more.
"Though frankly, they still dont have a decent competitor for everyday desktop computing, which is a shame."
I see statements like this a lot and I feel I must be missing something. My time is split between Linux: 50% OS X 40% and Windows 10% (or less) and I just don't see that much difference between them. The mouse actions are the same, the key combinations are the same, configuring the desktop is very similar in each case. The file managers are the same, font selection, color choices, web browsers, screen do-dads for weather or news, and on and on. If these interfaces were any more similar than they are now they would be subject to "look and feel" lawsuits.
So what MAJOR differences do other people perceive in these desktop environments? The whole premise that color schemes and drop down animations make ANY difference in usability is what has allowed Microsoft to milk its customers for the last 2 major releases of Windows and now they are working on a third.
Is it possible that Windows-only users actually ENJOY being pushed around?
Problem with that FTC form is that there is a dropdown list that you have to fill in for "How Did You Pay the Company", and "mailed them a shoe box full of cow dung" doesn't show up on the list!
I was about to ask the same question. I think its BS. I'm tempted to change my signature to this however just for fun. This guy doesn't sound too technical, I wonder if he didn't just paint himself into a corner and make that one up.
My guess is that the true objective of all of this analysis on their part is to try and figure out how to fool ALL of the people ALL of the time, since MS has been through the other permutations long ago.
Um, couldn't it be that they are making lousy movies simply becuase they are not very talented? I think most of the people in Hollywood are total airheads. They even brag about how stupid they are like its a reverse honor roll or something.
Hollywood started glamorizing stupidity in the 70's, now its just become self perpetuating. I rarely go to any of the new movies. I collect the old ones and just watch them over and over. Far better than the drek now adays.
Yeah, except the environmentalist don't protest much other than here in the US. Whether it is ecology issues, racism, sexism or peace marches, most of the action is here in the USA where well-to-do clueless college kids are in abundance. I used to think this was mainly due to Communist repression of dissent, but I'm beginning to think it has more to do with how much spare time some of these people have on their hands.
The good news about this, as well as the recent announcements by China and India is that the world will not depend on NASA for future benefits from space research (Tang anyone?). Our own space programs will probably benefit greatly (after we get over the shock) from other countries orbiting earth, going to the moon and beyond without our help. I can gripe all I want about how we have been held back by the costs of the Shuttle program, but it's hard to demonstrate the benefits of a path not taken. Now we will be able to see for real the outcomes of alternative strategies. Maybe they will fail and make the Shuttle look good by comparison, but I doubt it.
It is about time mankind gets out of low-earth-orbit, either by giving up on space altogether or by going back to the moon and beyond where more interesting things can be accomplished.
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I think the only thing thats going to die is the high prices of these devices. I still carry around an old Palm III that works perfectly well for looking things up when I don't have a laptop or other computer handy. Sometimes I don't WANT to have a phone with me, to hear it ring or feel it vibrate, I just want to have a database/notepad of some sort and I haven't seen any cell phones that do that function all that well without a magnifying glass to go with them.
When my Palm III eventually dies I fully expect to go into Walmart or some such place and get something similar for $50 or less. Maybe it will be a Casio device instead of a Palm. In a way, it's too bad that Palm and Handspring got distracted by competing only at the high end with each other and with Microsoft. At what it probably costs to stamp out these circuit boards they could have chosen instead to saturate the market with a $50 device. Maybe it's not too late for such a strategy to succeed. Someone will do it, soon, and at a profit.
"When people interact with a microwave or iPod, they're interacting with the device. They don't care about its software; they just wanna nuke their burrito and play Britney Spears."
Right. Let's hope that by the time all our devices are linked together transparently we are no longer using operating systems that will accidentally play their burrito and nuke Britney Spears.
World Cyber Games?
I'm not about to read the article and spoil my imagination about what this might involve. I'm sure it should be X-rated though.
From the article:
"Both come from small developers outside Silicon Valley, which makes one wonder why nobody inside the billion-dollar labs of "innovative" mega-corporations like Carly Fiorina's or Palmisano's thoughts about this."
Uh, I think she already laid those folks off. Companies that have taken the short cut of only supplying Windows drivers for their hardware have tied their fortunes and futures directly to Microsoft. The good news is that former giants such as HP don't actually design or manufacture any of their own hardware any more, nor do they have any control over what drivers come supplied with them. That means that no matter how buddy buddy they are with Microsoft there will probably be drivers for these products produced in the country of origin for the international market.
"Can OSes like Unix and Linux gain market share by "piggy-backing" on win32 driver development in an ironic twist of "embrace and extend" that this time takes advantage of Microsoft's driver market share to hurt them and let users move to other platforms?"
yep yep, however I don't think such measures will be necessary for long. The vast majority of PCs in the future will be small ready to go configurations and the notion that you would buy a network, video, or sound card will be largely a thing of the past (based on the prices in Microcenter for these items I'd say it already is). Fewer players means less for Linux hackers to reverse engineer and the companies that differentiate themselves by supplying Linux drivers out of the box will do very well in some areas. Restrictive technologies that have nothing to recommend them other than (perhaps) the force of US laws (DRM) will ultimately fail with devastating consequences to those companies that embrace them.
If Microsoft wants to continue the fight against Open Source (somehow Brare Fox and the Tar baby come to mind) then they had better merge with a hardware company and start coming out with the driver of the week that only they support. I can't see this being a winning strategy for long either for Microsoft or for any duopoly they want to construct. They'll go down the tubes together or separately, makes no difference to me.
They also moved some thing from user space back to supervisor space, most notably video drivers. 3.5.1 was rock solid for me, NT 4.0 was worse than Win 98 on the same machine. As far as I know this is still the case, and I know there have been a number of back-door issues as well as performance issues with running fancy video cards on servers. Some of the dumb-ass Admins can't resist running fancy screensavers on production servers can they?
One problem with giving TOO much advice on password selection is that some people that read such advice have absolutely no common sense. A government agency I was associated with a while back took away password setting rights from its users and ASSIGNED everyone passwords of the form CVC99CVC (V=vowel, C=consonant, 9=digit). I figured out which of the MCSEs had come up with this nonsense and (pretending not to know) explained to him how easy such passwords were to crack. The policy got changed real quick and nobody got fired. There are of course programs that will force users to come up with good passwords and I think such systems aught to be in place by default for both Windows and Unix systems.
Other than that, any specific advice on what a good password should look like may simply serve as a formula for some dunce to apply to all his users to create passwords worse than just using their pets name.
"The smell of most theaters alone is enough to get me to not go. A combination of a society who's more talk than action on it's hygene and lazy immigrants who don't care about their jobs enough to actually clean the theaters properly on occasion. Then there's the whole SARS season rolling in on us soon."
You have obviously missed the whole guts of the theater going experience with your bad attitude.
Just try and make popcorn at home that is like what you get in the theater. It's impossible. They use some special oil, not quite like margarine, not quite like butter, not quite like paint thinner, but with the best qualities of all three.
At home a Coke is a Coke, but at the theater, sometimes its a "Petsi" and sometimes its just sugar and brown syrup with no carbonation. It's like a different experience every time!
I like how the floor inside the theater is even stickier than that chewing gum you stepped on outside. A couple of steps (and then some backtracking to retrieve your shoe) and the gum is back on the floor where it belongs.
As for people shifting around in their seats... what are you SUPPOSED to do when one of those big cockroaches runs up your leg? Those thing tickle! And don't tell me you raise your own theater sized cockroaches at home, I ain't buying it. Some experiences just have to be had first hand.
"As much as I'd like to find a way to settle this once and for all, and as sick as I am of the BS that SCO is inflicting on anyone willing to listen, I have to agree that they probably can't release any of their code. IANAL, so I'm also probably wrong =]"
IANAL either, but if it is indeed true that there are hundreds of thousands of lines of disputed code, then I can't imagine why they couldn't pick a few hundred lines of it and just say "Here is an example, here is another, and here is another." Henceforth that code would be in the public domain. So what? If there is indeed so much stolen code are they really going to miss the revenue from a few hundred lines? I'm sure they could select the lines carefully so as not to give away any REALLY clever techniques that they use.
SCO took a self contradictory approach to this whole mess. On the one hand they have tried to deal with this as a private court case, just between them and IBM (then Red Hat) and nobody else's business. On the other hand they have tried to play it up in the media for the FUD factor and to pump up their stock price. You can't have it both ways for very long. They have lost the media war, and lost it badly. Their stock price got all the bounce it's going to get out of this and now they have to figure out how to survive through 4 years of litigation.
Boise and his law firm are going to get another black eye out of this, and Darl's masters at Canopy are going to start to lose patience with the whole thing. As to whether Microsoft is going to benefit from any of this or not, I have my doubts. Linux may be slowed down by this but will benefit from the clean-up that results. Unlike Microsoft that likes to fix bugs and holes with patches, the offending parts of Linux (as they are discovered) will probably undergo major surgery and be improved in the process. The only investments that have paid off for Microsoft lately are updated milking machines for their cash cow. This is the only form of infrastructure they understand in Redmond. More power to them. Moooooo.
"The only way Microsoft can make money with the XBox is if they achieve market dominance and pricing power. That's not happening. They've found themselves in price competition against larger competitors with lower costs, an unusual position for Microsoft. "
Unusual in the 20 year sense, but not in the 10 year sense. Microsoft's biggest problem (not unlike any new company) is proving that their initial success with Windows was not just a fluke. They outlasted larger companies by lost-leader techniques to get their products in wide circulation. It did not take a genius to do this, just an autocratic outfit with staying power and a sugar daddy like IBM. Now that they operate like most other big corporations they are subject to the same internal political goings on that drive such companies to be short sighted generators of status-quo products.
Whoever at Microsoft came up with the strategy of going head to head with Sony should be fired. They would have been much better off doing some sort of joint development deal with them. They are not an R&D company nor are they a consumer electronics company (nor are they a cable network content provider, or a magazine publisher). They badly need to diversify themselves through mergers and acquisitions, not by trying to topple established world-wide players. If Bill (and Steve) would retire I think it would help things along. Is that likely to happen? No. Ego trumps greed every time.
Shhhhh!
:)
My plan was to drive around with a hand held scanner and collect these things.
I've had a similar change in my writing habits. It makes you realize that you used to be tempted to THINK a bit more before you wrote anything than you do these days. Sometimes I'm sure that is still the best approach although I rarely use it. hehe
I've always loved fountain pens. I have a small collection built up over the years of both modern, and vintage fountain pens. I've actually found that a restored fountain pen from the 20's or 30' can have the most pleasant feel when writing. A good one holds a huge amount of ink (as opposed to those wimpy cartridges that the modern ones tend to use. This is good because the older pens also USE a lot more ink. The ink almost leaps onto the paper, making a nice dark line and also lubricating the writing process. Unfortunately I type a lot faster than I write, and since almost everything ends up in a computer these days it's hard to justify writing instruments at all. Unless you are very famous, no one is likely to read your diary when you're gone.
Like many, I went through a phase of using a Palm Pilot (or similar device) for recording thoughts when away from any computer keyboard. I've since gone back to just using these devices for addresses and appointments (which mean that the sub $100 ones do just fine). So I'm back to carrying a pen whenever I go out and generally a small notebook (the paper variety) too.
Sometimes I carry a fountain pen, but more often I'm in a hurry and grab a ballpoint. For cheap ones I like Parker clickable ballpoints. The ink capacities are huge and they write smoothly. For $20 or so though I'd recommend the Rotring ballpoints which are all steel, have a textured grip, large ink supply and are nice and techno looking. You can enhance either Parker or Rotring pens by replacing the ink cartridge in it with one from Fisher (the makers of the original "Space Pen"). These really will write upside down, under water and on practically any surface. When writing on ordinary paper they have a nice feel too.
I remember in the 60's Bic did a series of commercials on how durable their pens were. They shot them from guns into tree trunks and then took what was left (not much) and wrote with it. They also "simulated" strapping one to a car to see how many miles you could write with one. Very impressive. Unfortunately I think cheap pens are not what they used to be. I've found that many of these if left unused for a year or so refuse to ever write again no matter how much you tap, shake or scribble with it trying to get it started again. Unfortunately many of these more expensive specialty pens (like the ones with the special grips) have the same ink mechanism used for the cheap ones. So, go with ink mechanisms from Parker, Fisher, Rotring, Lamy, Mont Blanc, or Cross, unless you are in a situation, such as a waiter, where your pens are constantly stolen.
Finally, and most importantly, if you are going to write anything that you need to last for a long time, do the following experiment:
Take all your candidate pens and make a test mark (sign your name or whatever) on several types of paper that you typically use. If you use colored ink, do this in all the colors you plan to use too. Just as a control, make the same marks with an ordinary pencil, and also pick any ordinary black-ink ballpoint (not the gel pens though, plain old ballpoint).
Tape these papers to a window or somewhere else where they will get direct sun. The back window of your car will do too. Check them in a month. You might be surprised, and if you are writing for any sort of archival purpose you might change your mind about what you want to use.
Trailers such as this often show scenes out of order. I have seen trailers so long that they included almost every critical scene in the movie, but because the order was scrambled you couldn't make any sense of it.
I think the only thing I learned from the second movie was that Disco is not dead in the VR future. I was almost asleep when someone who looked like Donald Sutherland appeared on the screen. Maybe we learned that the VR could be at least two levels deep. Uh, so what?
If part 3 is as disappointing as part 2 then I fear the trilogy will drag the reputation of the first movie totally into the trash heap of history.
After hearing all the hype about how the directors were such deep philosophers etc. *yawn* I really expected a lot more than a music video that M2 mostly was.
The only philosophy I expect to come out of M3 is this nugget of wisdom: "Fool me twice, shame on me."
Definitely more idiots than crooks. While you can hide shady dealings though, you can't hide ignorance. Visit any government IT operation and you will find very few people who regularly read technical journals, have IT related degrees, or have even ever written a computer program of any kind. Off the record technical discussions often consist of a proud announcement that they were able to get AOL working on their home computer without any assistance.
The fact is that slick salespeople don't HAVE to resort to bribery to sell into the government crowd, because they are so easily mislead by completely legal means. What is scary is not that Microsoft has a predatory sales force, but that our government IT infrastructure has no intellectual defense against such a sales force. In this group, there is a sucker born every second.
Another version of this story also quoted Americans for Technology Leadership, an industry trade group backed in part by Microsoft. The organizations name alone gives me the creeps. I predict that Microsoft will meet with some success at convincing high level government officials (many of who could NOT install AOL without help) that using Microsoft products is the patriotic thing to do. This is what scares me.
They will try and convince government agencies that using Microsoft products is like supporting Boeing aircraft. Our technical dunces will not have the imagination to realize that Microsoft is closer to being the Yugo than it is to being the Boeing of the software industry.
Only total, or near total failure of these systems will result in any change of attitude. Small systems failures like the one yesterday at the State Department will be minimized if not covered up entirely. Unlike the Shuttle program, much of the work of the Federal government cannot be measured or observed in any way by the typical citizen. Rather, 10 years down the road when the successes of Open Source government initiatives in other countries has become irrefutable we may see some younger, and hopefully brighter, government workers here in the US start to get a clue.
--
Q: What to you call a Yugo with brakes?
A: Customized.
I'm 99.9 percent certain that CLASS is a mainframe based system. So whoever at the State Department put this announcement together without having all the salient facts in front of them isn't doing their job very well.
The core data process organization at State has always been IBM mainframe based. However they have been under fire for years by people who wanted a more distributed system. Guess who is winning?
The number of people it takes to maintain the tens of thousands of PCs there has skyrocketed, along with all associated costs. The fact that the number of records in the database is in the millions is stated as though it is a phenomenal effort, and of course it is when you try and do it with the wrong tools. The number of transactions to connect every embassy or visa issuing post in the world back to DC would be trivial compared with what goes on to replicate a mainframe database to more than 200 locations around the world and then to replicate back any updates made at those locations (and attempt to try and do this in something resembling real-time).
I'm quite sure that the CLASS database was never in any serious jeopardy. But I'm just as certain that the surrounding infrastructure is constantly exposed to attacks and it is quite possible that some of the attacks are not only successful, but never get detected.
The people administering the network there have a tiger by the tail. They are pressured to allow thousands of bureaucrats to browse the web and tend to personal business on the internet while at the same time trying to protect an integrated network that has no business connected to the internet at all.
Having done some consulting at a number of government agencies my fear is that the people at the top get much of their technical education from sales reps (from Microsoft mostly these days) and have very little communications with the technical people who have to implement these mandates.
As was shown to be the case at NASA recently, the low level technical type who raises his hand and tries to point out a technical problem is quickly taken off the invite list for future meetings. As can be seen from the initial reports on this and the "corrections" that followed, a lot more time is spent trying to put a happy face on these screw-ups than getting down to the root (no pun intended) of the problem.
"Frankly, whenever I read an article complaining about "inflation" in MMORPGs I know from the start that the author doesn't know what they're talking about."
I found this to be the case too. As a player of SL from almost day one I had gradually built up a nice bank account without actually having to try. Even so I was able to buy a good sized chunk of land and start filling it with stuff. The problem with some of the new players who seemed to REALLY be working at the game is that they "hit the jackpot" in one way or another and then ran out and spent all they had on the assumption that more income would follow.
Not only did their income not keep up, but the price of land and objects went up (as has been documented many times) as new users were rapidly added and there began to be shortages of land and other server resources.
Based on what I saw, if some of the people that got hit by "inflation" managed their real world bank accounts the same way they managed their SL accounts then they are probably living in a van down by the river by now.
I'm not sure I agree that MMORPGs can be used to model real economies. At best, you can get an idea of how human psychology reacts to various economic conditions, but a real economy is orders of magnitude more complicated than anything that can be produced online (so far anyway) and the fact that your worst downside risk is to have to start over (no worries about starvation or health care costs etc) leads people to engage in far riskier behavior than they would in real life.
Japan, the world's second largest economy, made a proposal at an Asian economic summit this week to build an inexpensive and trustworthy open-source operating system that would be based on a system such as Linux, which can be copied and modified freely.
"We'd like to see the market decide who the winners are in the software industry," Tom Robertson, Microsoft's Tokyo-based director for government affairs in Asia, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
I think the market IS deciding, which is going to be Microsoft's biggest problem for the next few years.
"Governments should not be in the position to decide who the winners are," Robertson said.
You know, I don't remember there being any protest from Microsoft when the US government stopped accepting RFP documents in WordPerfect format. I guess they've had a change of heart for some reason.
Full story at Netscape.com
It's not the governments of Japan or China that need to be put on alert, it is our own. As Departments of State, Treasury, and the White House among others, busily archive critical documents in .DOC format that will not easily be converted to anything else in a few years, low level management of these departments need to be aware that going the "safe route" of managing everything using Microsoft tools will in hindsight only allow you to say "But everyone else around me was doing that too".
I suspect there will be more and more defectors from this way of thinking, even within the US government as time goes on. However as that happens there will also be signs of desparation from Microsoft as they try and appeal to some sort of warped patriotism that says we should all keep using overpriced, buggy and undocumented junk.
We need to stop thinking of Windows as America's software equivalent to the Boeing 7x7, and start thinking of it as America's software equivalent of the Yugo...
Q: How do you make a Yugo go faster?
A: A towtruck.
Q: What do you call the shock absorbers inside a Yugo?
A: Passengers.
Well that last one is certainly good to know. If my information is going to be disclosed I'd certainly prefer that it be my random information rather than my much more valuable, um, organized information.
I'm wondering if there are not a team of "Mitigation Specialists" at Microsoft charged with coming up with these things. I think this is something I could handle pretty well. I think I'll send them a resume.
Here is a sample of my work:
Mitigating Factors:
* User must have not only installed Windows and Office, but actually be using these products for any harm to, or exposer of user data to occur.
~*~ Small pets, farm animals, or other domesticated wildlife will not be harmed by the use of these products, even if human user fails to exercise due caution.
*# Extra-Terrestrial life-forms are completely safe even when in the same room as an operating Windows environment.
I really think I could come up with a lot of these. How about you? Do you have a future as a Microsoft Mitigation Specialist?
Does EVERYONE remember this wrong, or is it just me?
Microsoft did NOT get in trouble for simply bundling software. The specific issue was IE vs NETSCAPE. Netscape was at an unfair disadvantage not simply because IE came with Windows, but because it was INSEPARABLE from Windows. Parts of IE buried in the OS code meant that you were loading most of IE every time you booted, and then to use Netscape you were using up tons of memory on top of that. This made Netscape far less convenient to use, even if you preferred its interface (which I did at the time). With earlier versions of Windows/IE you could totally uninstall IE, or simply be careful never to run it and just use Netscape for everything. It worked FINE. Too fine for Microsoft's tastes, so they tinkered with Windows until they finally fouled Netscape up by convincing companies like Ziff Davis to tout loading speed as the number one criteria in selecting a browser.
In my book, they may have won the Browser Battle, but they will lose the OS War as a result of over bloating their software. I'm thrill that they are thumbing there nose at the Justice Department and re-integrating IE with the OS in the next release. They can blow all their own limbs off for all I care, I don't use their crap any more.
"Though frankly, they still dont have a decent competitor for everyday desktop computing, which is a shame."
I see statements like this a lot and I feel I must be missing something. My time is split between Linux: 50% OS X 40% and Windows 10% (or less) and I just don't see that much difference between them. The mouse actions are the same, the key combinations are the same, configuring the desktop is very similar in each case. The file managers are the same, font selection, color choices, web browsers, screen do-dads for weather or news, and on and on. If these interfaces were any more similar than they are now they would be subject to "look and feel" lawsuits.
So what MAJOR differences do other people perceive in these desktop environments? The whole premise that color schemes and drop down animations make ANY difference in usability is what has allowed Microsoft to milk its customers for the last 2 major releases of Windows and now they are working on a third.
Is it possible that Windows-only users actually ENJOY being pushed around?
Problem with that FTC form is that there is a dropdown list that you have to fill in for "How Did You Pay the Company", and "mailed them a shoe box full of cow dung" doesn't show up on the list!
I was about to ask the same question. I think its BS. I'm tempted to change my signature to this however just for fun. This guy doesn't sound too technical, I wonder if he didn't just paint himself into a corner and make that one up.
My guess is that the true objective of all of this analysis on their part is to try and figure out how to fool ALL of the people ALL of the time, since MS has been through the other permutations long ago.
Um, couldn't it be that they are making lousy movies simply becuase they are not very talented? I think most of the people in Hollywood are total airheads. They even brag about how stupid they are like its a reverse honor roll or something.
Hollywood started glamorizing stupidity in the 70's, now its just become self perpetuating. I rarely go to any of the new movies. I collect the old ones and just watch them over and over. Far better than the drek now adays.
Yeah, except the environmentalist don't protest much other than here in the US. Whether it is ecology issues, racism, sexism or peace marches, most of the action is here in the USA where well-to-do clueless college kids are in abundance. I used to think this was mainly due to Communist repression of dissent, but I'm beginning to think it has more to do with how much spare time some of these people have on their hands.
The good news about this, as well as the recent announcements by China and India is that the world will not depend on NASA for future benefits from space research (Tang anyone?). Our own space programs will probably benefit greatly (after we get over the shock) from other countries orbiting earth, going to the moon and beyond without our help. I can gripe all I want about how we have been held back by the costs of the Shuttle program, but it's hard to demonstrate the benefits of a path not taken. Now we will be able to see for real the outcomes of alternative strategies. Maybe they will fail and make the Shuttle look good by comparison, but I doubt it.
It is about time mankind gets out of low-earth-orbit, either by giving up on space altogether or by going back to the moon and beyond where more interesting things can be accomplished.