"I am suprised that this is never mentioned as a cure for spam."
It is mentioned just about every time the subject comes up, but then it gets drowned out by the Crips and Bloods... err Black Hole advocates yelling at the legal advocates.
The sooner people stop arguing about social vs legal solutions the sooner a technical solution will arive.
"Also, IIRC, Cringely is not one person but a pseudo-name used by a panel of writers. One of them might be a little looney, but the rest might be very well-grounded, and perhaps we are just hearing "Spooky Mulder's" ideas?"
This article is by one guy, by that name. he used to write for a magazine (PC Week?) under that name and the magazine copyrited the name. That's the panel of writers you are thinking of.
IMHO, most of the critics here did not read the article, or read it too literally. His general point was that people buy Windows for the user interface, not for its VMS underpinnings or even for DOS.
PS: I noted the additional reasons they might want to do this in a later post.
The suggestion that MS might benefit from a GUI on top of Unix approach is NOT a new prediction, and in fact there are rumors that they are already working on it.
The reasons they might want to do this go far beyond the technical difficulty issues. They have $40 Billion dollars for petes sake, they could write the whole dang thing from the ground up in Visual Basic if they felt like it!
(Now just watch someone comment on how ridiculous it would be to re-write Windows in Visual Basic)
*Finally* someone who read (and understood) the article. I wouldn't even hold him to the Linux (as opposed to BSD) part. His point was that the underlying OS isn't now, nor was it *ever* what sold copies of Windows, and hence Office.
The other factor that nobody has brought up is that with PCs going the comodity route of stereo equipment people are going to be paying less attention to the OS than ever before. For home users the computer is an appliance. Cheap. You don't like the color, throw it out and get a pink one!
As Microsoft proved to IBM, what people use at home eventually finds its way into work.
It may be doubtfull that Microsoft will make such a change gleefully, but price pressures will force them to look to other sources of revenue. I predict that they, like IBM, will move into the consulting arena more and more and gradually shed their unprofitable experiments, hanging onto the OS and Office product lines only while they continue to make money.
Only consulting gives them the potentially high profit margins that they are used to having with the Winodows/Office monopoly. Magazines, News media, Xbox, palm devices have all been and will continue to be money losers for them.
Anybody notice that they followed one of their best quarterly reports with a "prediction" for a downturn, and for the first time ever a dividend on their stocks? They already have the numbers that tell them what their next few quarters will look like and they know that the dividend will help prop the stock price up at that high P/E ratio. They also know they need to start looking for the follow on to their success with Windows, and it AIN'T gonna be Office 2004 or whatever.
After a "long way 'round the barn" we have been transported back 15 years or so when there were a variety of operating systems and therfore a hope that standards-based methods would allow disparate systems to interoperate. A much healthier state of affairs than one-size-fits-all. So much for the "progress" that Microsoft is often credited with.
On-line gaming can indeed be an addictive passtime. But then so many other things can be too. If you don't change any other behavior and simply add several hours a day of on-line gaming you will probably at least suffer from sleep deprivation.
What most people do however is give up some other activity. When I really got involved in this stuff a few years ago I stopped watching TV. First I simply watched less, then at some point I realized what a great waste of time my remaining TV watching was. Anyone who stops watching TV completely for a few months will be shocked at how awful most of it is when you tune back in.
Both TV and movies of today are creations of other people. As you watch you are consuming, nothing more. At least with virtual reality there is usually some element of creativity involved.
As far as being outspoken... if you communicate at all with people in real life as well as online (for example e-mail between you and people you actually meet in person) you will notice that the nature of the communication is different. Almost *everyone* is more outspoken online, whether it is e-mail, newsgroups, or SlashDot. People often express things in their personal web pages that they would be embarrassed to say to someone in person.
You can in fact develop what might be called an alternate personality online. I'm not sure there is any evidence however that this second personality is any less "real" than your in-person one. In fact I think it might be a good bit *more* real (for better or worse).
When it comes to work, as opposed to play, I'd *much* rather interact with people online than in person. The key element of this other than the liberating aspect of the interaction is that fact that everything is recorded. The worst managers I have ever had are the ones that go down the hall and pop into people's office or cubes for friendly little one-on-ones. These 5-minute-managers send their whole staff in different directions without knowing it.
Real life meetings usually end up being chaotic unless they are planned in advance. Again, the key is to get things in writing, to produce meeting minutes, and when it comes design, make sure that everyone is on the same "page".
I think that in the future online VR type interaction will replace many work interaction not because it is more fun, but because it works better.
In addition to
There
there (sounds gamatically incorrect doesn't it?) are several other programs"
Second Life,
Project Entropia,
and
PlanetShift,
the last of which is an open source effort.
While some of these programs may share a component or two, such as physics engines,
for the most part they have nothing in common in terms of overal design.
You have to dig a bit to tell one from the other, since superficially they have a lot in common.
Some of these sacrifice copyright protection of 3D data in order to control bandwidth,
in other words they cache stuff to your hard disk. Some allow for creation of new content
dynamically, while others require content to be created offline and uploaded, while others
don't allow end users to create content at all.
Another system, also open source, which
is still in the design stage (with a working prototype though) is
VOS.
The people working on this are thinking in terms of a 3D metaverse that has properties
similar to the web, in that a single "world" can pull element from multiple servers not
co-located... sort of a 3D URL. Other concepts are the passing of text and other doucuments
between 3D-VR entities. Eventually work like this will bring 3D-VR beyond the
realm of game-play and make the notion of spending hours online "goggles on" seem
like a more productive activity than it does today.
Finally, there is a totally different slant on this being taken by
Adobe Atmosphere
where their goal is to build 3D-VR into the web as a standard plug-in
hopefully as prolific as Acrobat is today. Rather than replacing web based
content or ignoring it as some of the products above tend to do, Adobe hopes
to make 3D-VR a natural extension to existing web pages.
With so many programs taking radically different approaches and all about the same
time-frame for release, it will be hard to say that this concept won't work, unless
you are talking about a specific product.
None of these may turn out to be the Metaverse (in the Snowcrash sense), but from these
first steps I think something like the Metaverse might arrise. Hopefully in the end
it will not be run on a central set of servers somewhere, nor will one company have a copyright
on the technology. I think either of those two factors will be the biggest
limiting factor to thise technology.
I agree with you AND the troll. OS/2 was my operating system of choice for several years. It was superior to anything Microsoft had until about NT 4 time-frame. Unlike Windows, OS/2 never marginalized the command line interface. REXX was built in from the start and I still find REXX much easier to use for scripting than any of the Linux shell script languages. The combination of REXX and a third party editor KEDIT allowed you to switch between using a PC and the mainframe without having to switch tool sets.
For some users, the inability of OS/2 to continue to run old Windows programs was a show stopper. Microsoft made sure that new versions of Windows included new API calls that didn't necessarily help the programmer all that much, but sure made it hard for IBM to continue to emulate them. For those of us who stayed with OS/2 we were satisfied to give up Windows compatibility totally and learn to pick and choose OS/2 specific applications when we could, or do without otherwise. About the time OS/2 was developing a significant number of people willing to write applications that were OS/2 specific IBM essentially pulled the plug on the product. Their announcement basically said (1) we will continue to support OS/2 for existing users indefinitely (a promise well kept), and (2) we will develop all future PC application for Windows NT first, and then evaluate the need to also develop those applications for OS/2 (which everyone mostly read to mean: no more OS/2 development).
At about that time, IBM VPs were also making statements to the effect that they expected their own *mainframe*operating systems to be eventually replaced with Windows NT. In retrospect this was an idiotic forecast, probably made by people with very little technical knowledge. But the effect on the developers, and users of OS/2 were devastating.
For those at IBM who gloat that abandoning OS/2 (among other things) helped to turn the company around I say BULLSH*T. With continued (full) support from IBM, OS/2 could have been the same threat to Microsoft that Linux is today, and Microsoft, having some actual OS competition, would have avoided, or at least backtracked on some of the moronic design decisions that they have made (like tieing every GD option in any Windows application to a registry entry).
The other thing that caused people to stop using OS/2 was that it had a flaky file system, mostly because it attempted to maintain compatibility with DOS and Windows concepts. HPFS kept the old DOS parts of a file in one place, and kept the "extended" parts of the file somewhere else, and they were *Constantly* getting out of sync. Over many months, the guidance from IBM to users having problems with this was to re-install the OS. I got used to the notion that I had to keep my data and the operating system on separate partitions, or better yet, separate drives, because I knew I would have to re-install OS/2 about every 2 months. I suspect that the original poster was referring to one of those old installations. I think they cleaned it up eventually, but the IBM state of denial that there was actually a serious problem convinced me to give up on it (just like I gave up on OS X for similar reasons).
So, lets drink a toast to the VP geniuses at IBM who "turned the company around" and thearby: (1) gave up the chance to own a first class proprietary operating system, (2) allowed Microsoft to become so overconfident that they totally F***ed up Windows and (3) stopped supporting windows on anything but 32-bit Intel architecture (and not very well on that), and finally (4) provided a vacuum which Linux could fill as a viable alternative to Windows. Maybe Linux would have come along anyway, but I suspect with competition between Windows and some other similar OS in full swing there would have been less interest.
The IBM dependency on Linux now is pure poetic justice.
For anyone that thinks this announcement constitutes renewed support for OS/2: I didn't get that impression at all. One of the statements on their web page is that they anticipate that more devices in the future will be based on USB rather than legacy ports. *twirls finger in air* woop dee doo. All they are doing is honoring their promise to support those that got stuck with an OS/2 dependency when they pulled true support for it. IBM is a great company (by comparison with Microsoft anyway) for honoring such promises. I don't think they have any more next-great-thing operating systems up their sleeve.
I think you answered your own question. Microsoft knows it's coming, but most Microsoft users do not have a clue. They buy Microsoft stock when it is high, and sell when it is low. They don't, by nature, spend a lot of time thinking about a future that looks like anything other than the present and when promted to do so, they come up with either nothing or "more of the same".
I think we are nearing a time when people go out and buy a computer as an appliance. Use it to read their mail, browse the web, pay their bills. If it does all that then they won't care WHAT operating system is on it. They'll play games on another box. It could be a great time for Apple, Linux, or even Microsoft. Price will be a big deciding factor though, that means major adjustments for both MS and Apple.
Microsoft, for one, wakes up every night in a cold sweat thinking about that. Microsoft users will figure it out when it happens. Or, errm... a few days later.
There is one advantage that a lot of the Apple computers have over thier PC counterparts: No fan.
Anything with a clock speed over 500 is going to be in service doing usefull work for a good long time unless it fries it's little brain out because a fan failed to move enough air over it.
I have a feeling my iBook will outlast just about everything else I have. It runs cool and the plastic that it is made of is sturdier than my Compaq laptop by far (and apparently less flexible than the titanium cases the Powerbook uses too.)
I'm running Linux on it rather than OS X, and I can testify that it runs Linux faster than PCs with 50% faster clock speeds.
Apple makes good, and sometimes durable hardware. I'm not so sure about their software.
Well, it is a worthy goal, but we have to accept the fact that some people won't be able to do something they like. There may be a shortage of jobs in that area that they like, or a variation, they may suck at doing what they like.
I don't think labor unions do anything to solve this problem except in a very artificial way. If there is an activity that takes 40 people working 10 hour days to do, a labor union MIGHT be able to negotiate that 80 people be hired to work 5 hours a day doing the same work. But *somebody* will have to pay for that, and it won't come out of executive salaries, nor will it come out of union leader salaries, or the salaries of the legal staff that both sides have to hire. The cost will simply be passed on to the consumer.
At this point you need to know if the product you are making is also being made somewhere else in the world (with or without unions) more cheaply. If it is (and it probably is) the company and unions will have to compromise the deal down to make the local company more competitive again.
Look at the jobs where unions still thrive and you will notice that they all involve activities that have to be done here (wherever here is). Trucking, teaching, some manufacturing, but not most.
It will be interesting to see if some union ever gets enough clout *worldwide* to force their way onto companies in such a way that they *have* to make a deal, particularly for jobs like programming, piece-work manufacturing, etc.
What it would take is something that we have rarely seen and that is for a union based economy or industry to significantly outperform it's non-union counterparts.
Until the intuitive notion that working your employees to death is a bad thing has been demonstrated I don't think much progress will be made.
The dirty little secret is that any time a union gets the upper hand they go on to ask for *too much* and thus kill the golden goose. It's very hard for a collective of union workers to stand on already won benefits when they all know they have the power to ask for more.
Campaigns like "Look for the union label" or "made in the USA" could be effective in acheiviing union goals *if* we were not all so bloody greedy as consumers. When it comes to a $5 item vs a $10 equivalent we take the $5 version almost every time, no matter where it was made, how it was made. Maybe the best reform is to look at how we consume. A few adjustments there might solve a world of problems.
"I'm sure mistakes do happen, but the ISPs are probably on the list for a reason. If they take steps, they can get off the list. I'm sure the reason SPEWS is hard to work with is that they have been lied to many, many times.
And a philosophical angle, if I may. People don't focus on this much, but it's important to realize that any discussion of spam is going to get heated. People detest spammers because they behave in an atrocious manner."
Thanks for "correcting my spelling", but my evaluation was based on reading the (mostly) SPEWS oriented newsgroup for several weeks and also visiting their various web sites in an effort to understand how the system worked.
What I saw there was a lot of taunting, making fun of people's grammar (and spelling). Thinking that since "anything goes" in a newsgroup I went to web pages that were created in support of the black-hole lists and found more of the same. I hate spammers, and I hate biggots, and these people act a whole lot like biggots as far as I can tell.
Most importantly, you did not address the issue of effectiveness. I have seen no evidence that these measures have diminished SPAM *at all*. SPAM is on the increase (even in a drastically reduced internet economy).
I think the concept of going after open-relay mail servers is excellent. The black-hole lists got started that way, and established their good reputation that way. The next step should be to propose mechanisms that make it impossible to generate anonymous email messages at all. Once such a protocol exists, the black-hole lists could be used to encourage ISPs to adopt such protocols quickly.
The only people getting angry about SPAM are the vigilantes, the victims, and the inocent bystanders. The SPAMers are still laughing all the way to the bank.
I don't agree that blocking email is a free speech issue quite so much as the EFF statement implies, on the other hand I reject totally that it is my responsibility as a consumer to make sure that my ISP is not either (a) hosting other users that SPAM, or (b) using a black hole list that keeps me from getting legitimate email.
I know for a fact that I have had legitimate messages that I sent blocked, and I know for a fact that I have had legitimate messages sent to me that were blocked. I know this from phone conversations and ICQ messages etc. I have no way to independantly verify WHO was responsible for the blockage. So being an "informed consumer" in this case is practically impossible. Changing ISPs every few weeks as they drift onto and off of the various block list is not practical either.
If the cost of stopping spam is to make use of email a hit-or-miss proposition then I would much rather have the spam. I understand that other people have a different opinion about this. All the more reason to put spam blockage in the hands of the end user where it can be most effectively managed. That is, at least until changes to the SMTP protocol make anonymous spam harder to initiate. At that point, enforcable laws, ISP penalties, and per-piece mail charges will work wonders. *Pretending* to solve the problem will only delay real solutions.
While I see your statement has been countered by someone already, you are correct. If you read the news group news.admin.net-abuse.email as well as the several web pages that they refer people to they make this precise statement.
IMHO the SPEWS argument is rather circular:
(1) We just maintain a list, no one has to use it.
(2) If your ISP is either on the list or uses it then its your responsibility to find another ISP.
(3) If you are having trouble finding an ISP that is neither on the list or using it, then go back to (1).
So, while it can't be demonstrated that the black hole lists are responsible for any reduction in SPAM, the maintainers of the list disclaim any responsibility for any of the bad effects that they DO have.
They delight in being hard to deal with too. We all know people like this in real life. Of the two choices I'd much rather have the SPAM than the SPEWS. I can easily filter my own SPAM, I can't easily avoid the effects of black-holed email.
I also wish they would focus their energy in reducing my real junk mail. I'd save a jumbo size garbage bag a week if it were not for unsolicited real mail. A much bigger problem than SPAM for anyone interested in the "big picture". I bet almost as much bandwidth has been used TALKING about SPAM as has been saved by the efforts to stop it. Some updates to the SMTP specs would do a lot more to solve this problem. But then...what would the SPEWS people do for kicks?
Too bad the article was not more clear about the problem they were trying to solve, or on what their solution was for that matter.
I've always had *another* idea of what the back button might do. Originally most web sites were organized in a somewhat linear fashion, like a book. The top page would have a list of links and you could think of these links as "Chapters". Once you skipped to a chapter, you might page forward in the chapter and finally might transition naturally to the next chapter.
I always thought it would be nice if each page had linking information built into it indicating what the next logical "page" would be as well as the previous logical page. The forward and back buttons would use *that* information first, and only if that information was not available would it go "up" by going back to a page in your history.
With such a system in place, a Google search on "homeschooling" might take me into the center of an article on the general topic of education. Using the forward and back buttons I could visit the entire site in the order the author had intended.
Come to think of it, I think there used to be HTML tags to alter the normal back and forward function, but they were more often used incorrectly, and I haven't seen sites use them much lately.
If the researchers will concentrate on changing the HTML specifications to add sensible tags in this area I'm sure the browsers will follow. Just convincing Micrososft to change the way the buttons work is the wrong way to go.
"He said the building has 'reasonable security. Not barbed wire and all of that, but reasonable security for a company.'"
Let me guess... a standard house grade door lock on the outer door. A "computer room" with a button lock and the combo set to 2-4-6-8, and no barier to just going through the ceiling tiles to get in. Government contractors often don't make enough overhead to do their facilities properly. If they go to the government people and try and get them to pay for it there is very little interest. The government folks worry about their own comfort and security, not that of mere contractors. It's a lousy system where the mission comes last.
Whoever stole the equipment probably just wanted to have a big-ass server at home and knew the layout of the place. Hopefully they formatted everything right away.
Complications not unique to medicine. Nor fixes.
on
Complications
·
· Score: 1
It's clear from the discussion here that the perceived problems of medicine aren't going to be solved any time soon. I say "perceived" because I think the problems are more in the perception than in the reality. Our false perceptions though can lead to REAL problems when we take draconian measures to fix them. The Clintonian notion of nationalizing the public health care system would have been such a "feel good" fix. Outrageous lawsuits, HMOs and mandated insurance coverage for employees are other examples.
I think it is instructive to compare the health care industry with other fields that have similar properties. Some such comparisons have already been made here, two that stand out are comparisons with auto mechanics, and computer professionals, since many of us are computer professionals, and almost all of us have had experience dealing with auto repair shops in one way or another. Some interesting points to ponder:
When I take my car into the shop there is a good chance that a technician will spend somewhere from one quarter to half, and in some cases ALL of his day dealing with just my one car. Based on the waiting rooms I've seen, many doctors deal with 20 or more patients in a single day. A DBA diagnosing a database problem, or a programmer dealing with a bug, may in fact work on a single problem for several days, or even weeks. Should we expect more precise diagnoses from a doctor than from an auto mechanic or computer programmer under such conditions?
A car is a fairly complex organism these days. Combinations of mechanical, electrical, and electronic components, even those designed to make diagnosis of problems easier, often make diagnosis harder, and certainly more expensive. I just had $900 of work done on my car. All the components that were replaced were "sensor" components. If all the sensor components could have been switched off the car would have run fine. Am I better off with the sensors or without? Software is the same way these days. Computer programs used to be fairly monolithic. Program reads some data from a file, prints some output, maybe creates a new file. Even back then there were bugs that would take days to track down. These days systems are deployed with KNOWN bugs that are simply too hard to track down. If the system mostly works, thats good enough. The human body, thousands of times more complex than a car or any computer system. Not one of us is functioning perfectly. "Bugs" in our systems are being fought off constantly. Every now and then the bugs start to win. Every now and then our defenses turn against us. Sometimes there is nothing actually wrong, but our "sensors" tell us that something is wrong.
Think back to when you were in high school. Pick a class of the brainiest people you can think of from back then. How many of them would you feel comfortable with making the decision to give you a pill, or remove your kidney to cure a back pain that you have? I'm not sure I can think of even one. There is safety in strangers. The doctor who we only see in a white lab coat (and who we know doesn't spend part of their time working in a lab) has an aura of perfection that can't be matched by anyone we grew up with. No wonder we are outraged when they make mistakes. It goes against our unrealistic expectations.
Someone already did an analysis here of how it might take 10 years or more for a doctors income to offset his expenses to the point where his accumulated wealth has matched that of a nurse. Due to the baby-boom, we are in the position of needing MORE doctors right now rather than less, but the economic incentives just aren't there. The defense of a legal system that puts doctors out of business for making simple mistakes is shallow. Human beings will always make mistakes. The only profession that is relatively immune from our over-letigeous society at this point is the legal system itself. "You can't sue city hall" they say, and its hard to find examples of lawyers helping to sue other lawyers. For all the prattle from them about the service they are doing to humanity, the fact is that deep pockets get sued. Auto mechanics don't get sued (as individuals) nor do computer programmers (as individuals), but doctors do. If you think that computer programmers and auto mechanics don't make mistakes that cost peoples lives, then spend a bit more time thinking about it.
The solution to our medical "crisis" will come only after we accept the fact that doctors are human too. Mistakes in medicine will continue to happen until we stop expecting them to be corrected by the actions of individuals (be more careful, study harder, take more time with each patient) and start dealing with them in the same way we deal with any large system.
Technology WILL help improve the situation over time. The ability to "see" into the body in non-invasive ways makes diagnosing problems more precise with every new invention. The systems that need work are the human systems... the way people work together, or in the case of the medical field, don't work together.
Things that could use improvement:
(1)Many doctors are not computer literate. The biological and physical sciences have always been at odds and they shouldn't be. I think a patients first diagnosis should come right out of a computer. Symptoms codes have been standardized for a long time now. Medicine *IS* a science after all. If all the case histories in medicine had been accurately recorded there would be tremendous value in just doing a match based on symptoms presented by a new patient. As it is, case histories are being recorded mostly in insurance databases, and for some research studies where the results of a few can carry far too much weight. The technology to do this has been in place for years, there have been some feeble attempts at it. Privacy concerns, and technophobia still stand in the way.
(2) It should not be the responsibility of the patient to seek a second opinion. Peer review of medical procedures and recommendation ought to be built into the process. Almost all the successful litigations against medical practices involve mistakes made by a single individual who's work was not in any way double checked by someone else. One potential advantage of the HMO system was the opportunity for doctors to work in teams, yet the first thing you have to do when you join most HMOs is to pick your "primary care physician". Based on what? When I go to a doctor with symptoms I'd like to think that there are at least 2 and maybe 3 or more people *involved* in figuring out what might be causing my symptoms, and what the best thing to do about it is. Furthermore, I'd feel a lot more comfortable knowing that my single consistent "testimony" being reviewed by multiple professionals who are actually talking to one another might yield better results than my visiting two independent doctors on my own, on different days, with a different testimony. The current system almost guarantees that the patient will get different results from the second doctor, and as a result, lose faith in the process. Peer review is becoming the norm in the computer profession. When the mechanic finally found all the bad sensors in my car, TWO other people drove the car to make sure that it was functioning properly. The checks and balances in the medical system are piled on the shoulders of the patient, at least until AFTER a mistake has taken place, at which time deep pockets rather than corrective measures are the issue.
Rational is the latest in a series of products touted to revolutionize the way software is created. It is not a drawing tool, although it does have that capability. They also have a versioning component, an automated test tool (formerly Team Test I think) and a whole bunch of other things added in by acquisition. As a true believer in Client/Server methods it is clear that these tools can do a great deal of good when used properly, or a great deal of harm (at a high price) when used by "amateurs".
A history of blunders:
I worked at a shop that several years ago decided to go the "Client/Server" route to save money over the old mainframe methods. As far as they were concerned "Client/Server" mean "lets buy a bunch of PCs and play games on them during lunch". The application was a secondary consideration. This was a worldwide highly distributed application. Being a government organization, they had tons of money to spend though, so the reasons for switching had more to do with what the top people were reading in PC/Week and such than any concern about the money involved. The Clipper code was a disaster, with data constantly being lost for no apparent reason. The mainframe/mini approach consisting of a few hundred minicomputers was replaced with several thousand PCs, in reality the hardware costs went up. This all happened during a time when you had to replace all your PCs every year or two to still be able to even run the latest version of Windows and Office.
On top of this the number of people involved in the process soared, network bandwidth had to increase substantially, not to cope with the application, but with the increased size of prettily formatted Word documents that were flying around. In fact when the network folk decided to project future traffic, they ignored the application altogether (since there wasn't a design from which they could work anyway) and simply did a statistical analysis of e-mail traffic. As dumb as this seemed at the time, the results actually worked pretty well.
About the time the Clipper programs were fully deployed, Powersoft came along claiming to be best buddies with Microsoft. The company President even visited and told us that they and Microsoft were going to work together to make Powerbuilder the ultimate programming language of the future. The folks I worked for bought this BS hook, line, and sinker. The crappy Clipper programs were replaced (over a several year period) with crappy Powerbuilder programs who's design specs looked something like: "Make it look like the old minicomputer programs we had before". In other words, nobody really understood the original programs and didn't want to do the homework to figure them out either.
Realizing this last fact to some extent, the organization bought into another product called System Engineer (I forget the vendors name). SE was a high level design tool that claimed to actually be able to generate full-blown applications if given sufficiently detailed design specs. The only catch was that it only generated C++ or Cobol, and generating Powerbuilder was a "future feature". Just as well, because none of the programmers involved had the skill or patience to use the product, so they just did their database diagrams with a bootleg copy of Erwin. When pressed to do so they would run Systems Engineer in "reverse engineering" mode to produce the "artifact" documents needed to demonstrate what a great idea this client/server stuff was after all.
It was no surprise at all to me that about a year ago they asked someone (not me) for advice about where to go with this technology. Whoever did the research must have spent about 2 hours reading the trade rags before calling the sales reps to start convincing them that Rational was the "next big thing". In addition to the software being expensive, you almost have to agree to sign up for training in order to use the product. The training is VERY expensive, and with the bloated development staff that we had, this was made even worse.
The good news is that they have finally realized they went down the wrong path with Powerbuilder. They at least in that process got their data into a real RDBMS (Oracle).
The bad news is that they have decided to pick between Java and.Net for all future development and they behave as though they are sleeping with the Microsoft sales reps. Forget that the selection itself makes no sense (Java a language vs.Net a loosely designed framework), I'm sure they will pick.Net. again missing the chance to go with a language (Java or C++) that will be around almost forever. They'll send 100 people to C# classes, and they'll try and figure out how to pretend that they used Rational to design it all. Anything that goes wrong will be blamed on bad advice from consultants, anything that miraculously works will be claimed as the bright idea of a government employee who has never coded a line of either code or design specs.
In about 4-5 years they will start the process all over again. And, by the way the mainframe is still there, doing the hard parts of the application, cleaning up the messes that the PCs have made, with large parts of it written in *sigh* COBOL.
Your tax dollars at work again.
Back in the 80's IBM failed to understand a very important concept: That whatever gadget or technology finds its way onto peoples desks at home will eventually find its way into solving business problems too. Whether it works or not will be decided so far in the future that nobody will get blamed or lose their job for not really thinking things through.
I think IBM has learned its lesson though. They have their fingers in hundreds of pies, some of which are strategic, others seemingly nonsensical. They are positioned to make money both in hardware sales and consulting services whenever an organization gets so wrapped up in whiz-bang technologies that they can't extricate themselves. They have all the tools at their disposal to do mainframe/mini/or totally decentralized solutions and they are not dependent on any one vendor be it Oracle, Microsoft, Intel or even their own hardware divisions to come up with a solution that fits.
For some it may seem like technology has moved rapidly, but we are just now accomplishing things that were predicted as being right around the corner when I was in college in the 70's. I blame a lot of this on clever marketing by Microsoft, Intel and a few others (Powersoft, Rational among them) that substituted nicely packaged products (and games) for products that actually did something useful. I have high hopes that the Open Source movement will end this nonsense. A steady stream of products that "just work" and don't cost anything to try will keep the sales reps of the future a lot more honest than those of the past. I have more to say about this, but I guess this is too long already. IBM will conceivably Open Source parts of the product suit that are not particularly unique, but nothing they do is about charity, nor should it be. I hope that creating the Microsoft and Intel duopoly was the last act of charity that they engage in.
Pathological extremes do nothing to illuminate the problem. Often, crime statistics don't do much better. Remember that when someone reports on craime statisitics they are reporting on crimes that have been _reported_ to the police. Reducing the size of the police force can after a while make it obvious to any citizen that reporting a crime (short of murder) is probably a waste of time. As a results "crime" can actually be reduced.
Take any statement such as "government official did X and as a result crime was reduced to Y" with a large grain of salt, they may have simply made the process of reporting, or recoding a crime more difficult.
You oversimplify. $40 Billion in pieces of paper does not cause _anything_ to happen. Think of money as a placeholder for purchase of products or services. Yes, that money kept people at NASA employed and tricked down to all sorts of other businesses. Had that money not been spent on NASA, but on some other government program it would have also benefitied many people, directly or indirectly.
Had that money not been collected by the government in taxes, it would have been spent by citizens and benefited people all over the country. The notion (though commonly held) that large amounts of money spent by government, no matter how pointless the expenditure, somehow becomes valuable by a trickle down process, could be used to justify all sorts of nonsensical projects.
By your reasoning, the government should take all of our paychecks, build a skyscraper 100 miles high, and while they're at it 100 miles deep. It will keep many people employed for years. Of course their paychecks will have to be confiscated to support the project too. Hopefully some funds somewhere will be left over for farmers to grow food for all of us working on "The Project".
And hopefully, people will get it through their heads that money spent on useless projects does not take _money_ away from other efforts, but does take _manpower_ away from other efforts. Where we focus our attention _does_ make a difference, money is just a placeholder.
As far as the space program goes, I think parts of it are quite usefull. Manned programs are more showmanship than research though. More research could be done by unmanned vehicles for far fewer dollars, which means that either more roads could be built, or more unmanned satelites could be launched, or I'd have more money to spend at Starbucks. It's all about priorities.
Some things that I haven't seen covered here:
First of all, I question the value of a review written by anyone after one day of using a new product. The only reason I can think of to do this is that it allows you to say glowing things about the product and still be "objective". Perfect for anyone being rewarded (directly or indirectly) by the vendor. What a potential buyer of any new device really needs is a review written after a few weeks of usage, that would be in this case:
After the thing has been treated like a pad of paper for a while: Dropped a few times, been stacked with other materials including stapled paper and paper clipped paper and so forth, carried under ones arm for a while, tossed into the passenger seat of your car, thrown from that seat onto the floor when you slam on brakes thanks to that stupid driver in front of you. It needs to be evaluated after its run out of batteries a few times when you really needed it to keep working. One needs to know what a good "fall-back" plan is for the device (like always carry a real pad of paper with it, or a spare set of batteries, etc). Does the screen get scratched with use? That would be the case if like Palm devices it has a semi flexible plastic screen. Or is the screen hard like glass, scratch-proof, but easily broken in a fall? Do you HAVE to us a special pen with these? Won't a regular palmtop stylus do? or a fingernail in a pinch? I sometimes find in meeting that I take TOO many notes. When I get to a PC I can often summarize these notes with a sentence or two. How will this compare to loading all your notes, scribbles and all onto your PC for permanent review. Will I treasure or loath these added use of my disk space after a year or so?
I think there is a future for these devices. Lord knows, the industry has shown a willingness to keep trying no matter how many times they get it wrong. The question is: Is this the time they finally get it right?
Finally, after reading all the praise and contempt for Microsoft I haven't seen anyone else point out that there is very little risk for Microsoft here. They are only responsible for the operating system, and from what I can see its mostly a derivative of their other products. If it fails, no big deal for them. The hardware guys are taking all the $$ risk. They'll scratch and claw at one another until only one or two companies are making them at a profit. The worst thing that can happen for Microsoft is that price pressure will bring the average price for these things down to about $200 where they belong, at which point it won't be viable to run an expensive operating system on them. In the mean time MS will rake in the licensing fees. They'll do well in the medium term. I have no problem with a Microsoft that is forced (mostly against its will) to continue innovating, even if that innovation is largely just variations on a theme. The existence of open source alternatives is going to keep Microsoft honest from here on out. It will eventually transform them into a different company than they are now. Smaller, less critical to our infrastructure. If HP and a few others have to pay the price for Microsoft's continued success in the mean time, so be it, they did so quite willingly. There is already a non-MS box out there at a much lower price (made by a non-US company of course) and there will soon be more. I can wait.
Whether we choose to praise Microsoft or bury it, we can all save ourselves some time by simply waiting to see what they actually do versus what they *say* they are going to do, or worse, what someone else says that they say they are going to do. Nine times out of ten nothing comes of all these pronouncements anyway.
Everyone should welcome more secure Windows systems, becuase they are probably the most common source of DOS attacks. Even if MS makes fixes to some of the older Windows programs available it will years for them to trickle down to the average user (in most cases until the average user buys their next computer).
Well I think we are arguing terminology here more than anything else, for example my statement:
"I don't think its fair to say that those countries are against Microsoft, or the US for that matter"
was simply meant to counter the implication in your earlier post that countries using Open Source products are doing it primarily to express their hatred for the US. I meant to point out they might be doing it just to save money.
Regarding Boeing, as a former employee I follow it pretty closely. On an equal playing field worldwide they would be doing even better. But each country wants its own companies to succeed, as we do, and it is futile to wish it not so. Airbus may be a thorn in Boeing side, but the money dumped into Airbus to allow them to undercut Boeing prices will continue to be a drag on the Eropean economies.
I've read remarks from founders of software companies that eventually got baught by Microsoft. At least some of them say they would rather have stayed in business rather than take the few million they got for the rights to their products, but they knew that the alternative to taking the money would be to have a free equivalent bundled into Windows eventually. they took the easy way out.
The competition between Microsoft and (Corel, Wordperfect, Adobe, etc) was not on a level playing field either once Windows started to become the standard operating system. Had the APIs for Windows been completely open it would have been a different story. That issue was a key part of the antitrust suit and a key part of what remedy there was.
Balmer himself has conceded that Microsoft has gotten lazy in some spots. He knows its going to be an uphill battle against software which can be had for nothing. MS admits that Linux (and Open Source) are the biggest threats to their continued growth. It will be a dose of their own medicine, and I look forward to seeing how well they will take it.
Regardless of how well Microsoft does going forward I think Open Source has a secure future, the only horse I have in this race is the hope that the US plays a leading role in the development of Open Source and does not end up just following what everyone else is doing. There's plenty of money to be generated in the process too.
"What do YOU care what the rest of the world thinks?"...
"You're absolutely fooling yourself if you believe that EU nations (and the rest of the world) are fighting "the good fight" to protect their citizens from Microsoft exploitation. They fight to channel some of the software money away from Microsoft's coffers and back into their own!"
I don't see how your comments are responsive to my post at all. As a US citizen I am hopeful that the US will remain the worlds strongest economy. I don't think that can be done by moving towards isolationism. The only alternative to isolationism is to be competitive. That means software that is some combination of faster, more secure, reliable, easier to use, cheaper. I really don't care whether that happens through an Open Source process or a proprietary one, and I really don't care which companies participate in the process.
My belief is that a single company cannot get us there all on it's own. I think the best way to produce software that will compete in the world market is to produce software that DOES compete in the US market, which means there has to be competition, here in the US too.
As it is, there is only competition within the US among software companies that don't inconvenience Microsoft. Once a company shows up on their radar screen they have a choice of being acquired or singled out for special treatment (having products similar to theirs given away by Microsoft until their market share is marginalized). If I thought that this process would "scale" to the rest of the world I might be inclined, as a patriot, to say go for it Microsoft.
I don't think it will scale though. As you mentioned the EU has it's own agenda. So do the Chinese, Russians, countries of Africa Pacific Rim and South America. I don't think its fair to say that those countries are against Microsoft, or the US for that matter, but they certainly are going to act in their own self interest. If that means adapting Linux or other Open Source projects to their own needs, then thats what they will do. That is in fact what they are doing. Whether we like it or not, that trend is likely to continue. We may find in a few years that the American software preeminence has gone the same way as that of the American automobile. We'll see a lot of Americans running American made software while the rest of the world uses a mixture of products. Later the best of those products will show up on our store shelves with funny sounding names and we'll buy them too, because they will be faster, more secure, reliable, easier to use and cheaper than anything we produce.
In short: The question is not whether the Microsoft Monopoly is good for Microsoft, we know it is. The question is not whether the Microsoft monopoly can be extended to the world, we know it can't. The question is whether the Microsoft monopoly which has been allowed to stand within the United States will serve the countries best interest in the long run. I have my doubts.
You are right, but in the longer run, it would be better if the US wasn't continuing to "standardize" on Microsoft products while the rest of the world moves more to open source solutions. If there are real benefits to open source (as I beleive there are) then the US just ends up more behind the curve than they/we already are.
Real reason to buy one of these
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IMSAI Series Two
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I read thru all the arguments and analysis here about why this is or is not a good thing to buy.
Sounds like few of you were around in 1975 when the original of this came out. This one was built to LOOK exactly liek the original for one reason:
Thousands of geeks back then lusted to own one of these things. Having ANY kind of computer in your home was just a DREAM back then and well out of most peoples price range. Two machines I considered were the IMSAI and a similar box by Altair. I never had quite the loose cash to do it though and didn't wind up able to buy my own PC until the IBM/AT came out. Had to take something like a car load out to do that too.
So the real reason is nostalgia. Same reason people drive arout 50 year old cars. Very easy to understand.
Slashdot Mirror
It is mentioned just about every time the subject comes up, but then it gets drowned out by the Crips and Bloods... err Black Hole advocates yelling at the legal advocates.
The sooner people stop arguing about social vs legal solutions the sooner a technical solution will arive.
This article is by one guy, by that name. he used to write for a magazine (PC Week?) under that name and the magazine copyrited the name. That's the panel of writers you are thinking of.
IMHO, most of the critics here did not read the article, or read it too literally. His general point was that people buy Windows for the user interface, not for its VMS underpinnings or even for DOS.
PS: I noted the additional reasons they might want to do this in a later post. The suggestion that MS might benefit from a GUI on top of Unix approach is NOT a new prediction, and in fact there are rumors that they are already working on it.
The reasons they might want to do this go far beyond the technical difficulty issues. They have $40 Billion dollars for petes sake, they could write the whole dang thing from the ground up in Visual Basic if they felt like it!
(Now just watch someone comment on how ridiculous it would be to re-write Windows in Visual Basic)
*Finally* someone who read (and understood) the article. I wouldn't even hold him to the Linux (as opposed to BSD) part. His point was that the underlying OS isn't now, nor was it *ever* what sold copies of Windows, and hence Office.
The other factor that nobody has brought up is that with PCs going the comodity route of stereo equipment people are going to be paying less attention to the OS than ever before. For home users the computer is an appliance. Cheap. You don't like the color, throw it out and get a pink one!
As Microsoft proved to IBM, what people use at home eventually finds its way into work.
It may be doubtfull that Microsoft will make such a change gleefully, but price pressures will force them to look to other sources of revenue. I predict that they, like IBM, will move into the consulting arena more and more and gradually shed their unprofitable experiments, hanging onto the OS and Office product lines only while they continue to make money.
Only consulting gives them the potentially high profit margins that they are used to having with the Winodows/Office monopoly. Magazines, News media, Xbox, palm devices have all been and will continue to be money losers for them.
Anybody notice that they followed one of their best quarterly reports with a "prediction" for a downturn, and for the first time ever a dividend on their stocks? They already have the numbers that tell them what their next few quarters will look like and they know that the dividend will help prop the stock price up at that high P/E ratio. They also know they need to start looking for the follow on to their success with Windows, and it AIN'T gonna be Office 2004 or whatever.
After a "long way 'round the barn" we have been transported back 15 years or so when there were a variety of operating systems and therfore a hope that standards-based methods would allow disparate systems to interoperate. A much healthier state of affairs than one-size-fits-all. So much for the "progress" that Microsoft is often credited with.
What most people do however is give up some other activity. When I really got involved in this stuff a few years ago I stopped watching TV. First I simply watched less, then at some point I realized what a great waste of time my remaining TV watching was. Anyone who stops watching TV completely for a few months will be shocked at how awful most of it is when you tune back in.
Both TV and movies of today are creations of other people. As you watch you are consuming, nothing more. At least with virtual reality there is usually some element of creativity involved.
As far as being outspoken... if you communicate at all with people in real life as well as online (for example e-mail between you and people you actually meet in person) you will notice that the nature of the communication is different. Almost *everyone* is more outspoken online, whether it is e-mail, newsgroups, or SlashDot. People often express things in their personal web pages that they would be embarrassed to say to someone in person.
You can in fact develop what might be called an alternate personality online. I'm not sure there is any evidence however that this second personality is any less "real" than your in-person one. In fact I think it might be a good bit *more* real (for better or worse).
When it comes to work, as opposed to play, I'd *much* rather interact with people online than in person. The key element of this other than the liberating aspect of the interaction is that fact that everything is recorded. The worst managers I have ever had are the ones that go down the hall and pop into people's office or cubes for friendly little one-on-ones. These 5-minute-managers send their whole staff in different directions without knowing it.
Real life meetings usually end up being chaotic unless they are planned in advance. Again, the key is to get things in writing, to produce meeting minutes, and when it comes design, make sure that everyone is on the same "page".
I think that in the future online VR type interaction will replace many work interaction not because it is more fun, but because it works better.
You have to dig a bit to tell one from the other, since superficially they have a lot in common. Some of these sacrifice copyright protection of 3D data in order to control bandwidth, in other words they cache stuff to your hard disk. Some allow for creation of new content dynamically, while others require content to be created offline and uploaded, while others don't allow end users to create content at all.
Another system, also open source, which is still in the design stage (with a working prototype though) is VOS. The people working on this are thinking in terms of a 3D metaverse that has properties similar to the web, in that a single "world" can pull element from multiple servers not co-located... sort of a 3D URL. Other concepts are the passing of text and other doucuments between 3D-VR entities. Eventually work like this will bring 3D-VR beyond the realm of game-play and make the notion of spending hours online "goggles on" seem like a more productive activity than it does today.
Finally, there is a totally different slant on this being taken by Adobe Atmosphere where their goal is to build 3D-VR into the web as a standard plug-in hopefully as prolific as Acrobat is today. Rather than replacing web based content or ignoring it as some of the products above tend to do, Adobe hopes to make 3D-VR a natural extension to existing web pages.
With so many programs taking radically different approaches and all about the same time-frame for release, it will be hard to say that this concept won't work, unless you are talking about a specific product.
None of these may turn out to be the Metaverse (in the Snowcrash sense), but from these first steps I think something like the Metaverse might arrise. Hopefully in the end it will not be run on a central set of servers somewhere, nor will one company have a copyright on the technology. I think either of those two factors will be the biggest limiting factor to thise technology.
I agree with you AND the troll. OS/2 was my operating system of choice for several years. It was superior to anything Microsoft had until about NT 4 time-frame. Unlike Windows, OS/2 never marginalized the command line interface. REXX was built in from the start and I still find REXX much easier to use for scripting than any of the Linux shell script languages. The combination of REXX and a third party editor KEDIT allowed you to switch between using a PC and the mainframe without having to switch tool sets.
For some users, the inability of OS/2 to continue to run old Windows programs was a show stopper. Microsoft made sure that new versions of Windows included new API calls that didn't necessarily help the programmer all that much, but sure made it hard for IBM to continue to emulate them. For those of us who stayed with OS/2 we were satisfied to give up Windows compatibility totally and learn to pick and choose OS/2 specific applications when we could, or do without otherwise. About the time OS/2 was developing a significant number of people willing to write applications that were OS/2 specific IBM essentially pulled the plug on the product. Their announcement basically said (1) we will continue to support OS/2 for existing users indefinitely (a promise well kept), and (2) we will develop all future PC application for Windows NT first, and then evaluate the need to also develop those applications for OS/2 (which everyone mostly read to mean: no more OS/2 development).
At about that time, IBM VPs were also making statements to the effect that they expected their own *mainframe*operating systems to be eventually replaced with Windows NT. In retrospect this was an idiotic forecast, probably made by people with very little technical knowledge. But the effect on the developers, and users of OS/2 were devastating.
For those at IBM who gloat that abandoning OS/2 (among other things) helped to turn the company around I say BULLSH*T. With continued (full) support from IBM, OS/2 could have been the same threat to Microsoft that Linux is today, and Microsoft, having some actual OS competition, would have avoided, or at least backtracked on some of the moronic design decisions that they have made (like tieing every GD option in any Windows application to a registry entry).
The other thing that caused people to stop using OS/2 was that it had a flaky file system, mostly because it attempted to maintain compatibility with DOS and Windows concepts. HPFS kept the old DOS parts of a file in one place, and kept the "extended" parts of the file somewhere else, and they were *Constantly* getting out of sync. Over many months, the guidance from IBM to users having problems with this was to re-install the OS. I got used to the notion that I had to keep my data and the operating system on separate partitions, or better yet, separate drives, because I knew I would have to re-install OS/2 about every 2 months. I suspect that the original poster was referring to one of those old installations. I think they cleaned it up eventually, but the IBM state of denial that there was actually a serious problem convinced me to give up on it (just like I gave up on OS X for similar reasons).
So, lets drink a toast to the VP geniuses at IBM who "turned the company around" and thearby: (1) gave up the chance to own a first class proprietary operating system, (2) allowed Microsoft to become so overconfident that they totally F***ed up Windows and (3) stopped supporting windows on anything but 32-bit Intel architecture (and not very well on that), and finally (4) provided a vacuum which Linux could fill as a viable alternative to Windows. Maybe Linux would have come along anyway, but I suspect with competition between Windows and some other similar OS in full swing there would have been less interest.
The IBM dependency on Linux now is pure poetic justice.
For anyone that thinks this announcement constitutes renewed support for OS/2: I didn't get that impression at all. One of the statements on their web page is that they anticipate that more devices in the future will be based on USB rather than legacy ports. *twirls finger in air* woop dee doo. All they are doing is honoring their promise to support those that got stuck with an OS/2 dependency when they pulled true support for it. IBM is a great company (by comparison with Microsoft anyway) for honoring such promises. I don't think they have any more next-great-thing operating systems up their sleeve.
I think you answered your own question. Microsoft knows it's coming, but most Microsoft users do not have a clue. They buy Microsoft stock when it is high, and sell when it is low. They don't, by nature, spend a lot of time thinking about a future that looks like anything other than the present and when promted to do so, they come up with either nothing or "more of the same".
I think we are nearing a time when people go out and buy a computer as an appliance. Use it to read their mail, browse the web, pay their bills. If it does all that then they won't care WHAT operating system is on it. They'll play games on another box. It could be a great time for Apple, Linux, or even Microsoft. Price will be a big deciding factor though, that means major adjustments for both MS and Apple.
Microsoft, for one, wakes up every night in a cold sweat thinking about that. Microsoft users will figure it out when it happens. Or, errm... a few days later.
As a mostly PC user, that also has an iBook...
There is one advantage that a lot of the Apple computers have over thier PC counterparts: No fan.
Anything with a clock speed over 500 is going to be in service doing usefull work for a good long time unless it fries it's little brain out because a fan failed to move enough air over it.
I have a feeling my iBook will outlast just about everything else I have. It runs cool and the plastic that it is made of is sturdier than my Compaq laptop by far (and apparently less flexible than the titanium cases the Powerbook uses too.)
I'm running Linux on it rather than OS X, and I can testify that it runs Linux faster than PCs with 50% faster clock speeds.
Apple makes good, and sometimes durable hardware. I'm not so sure about their software.
Well, it is a worthy goal, but we have to accept the fact that some people won't be able to do something they like. There may be a shortage of jobs in that area that they like, or a variation, they may suck at doing what they like.
I don't think labor unions do anything to solve this problem except in a very artificial way. If there is an activity that takes 40 people working 10 hour days to do, a labor union MIGHT be able to negotiate that 80 people be hired to work 5 hours a day doing the same work. But *somebody* will have to pay for that, and it won't come out of executive salaries, nor will it come out of union leader salaries, or the salaries of the legal staff that both sides have to hire. The cost will simply be passed on to the consumer.
At this point you need to know if the product you are making is also being made somewhere else in the world (with or without unions) more cheaply. If it is (and it probably is) the company and unions will have to compromise the deal down to make the local company more competitive again.
Look at the jobs where unions still thrive and you will notice that they all involve activities that have to be done here (wherever here is). Trucking, teaching, some manufacturing, but not most.
It will be interesting to see if some union ever gets enough clout *worldwide* to force their way onto companies in such a way that they *have* to make a deal, particularly for jobs like programming, piece-work manufacturing, etc.
What it would take is something that we have rarely seen and that is for a union based economy or industry to significantly outperform it's non-union counterparts.
Until the intuitive notion that working your employees to death is a bad thing has been demonstrated I don't think much progress will be made.
The dirty little secret is that any time a union gets the upper hand they go on to ask for *too much* and thus kill the golden goose. It's very hard for a collective of union workers to stand on already won benefits when they all know they have the power to ask for more.
Campaigns like "Look for the union label" or "made in the USA" could be effective in acheiviing union goals *if* we were not all so bloody greedy as consumers. When it comes to a $5 item vs a $10 equivalent we take the $5 version almost every time, no matter where it was made, how it was made. Maybe the best reform is to look at how we consume. A few adjustments there might solve a world of problems.
And a philosophical angle, if I may. People don't focus on this much, but it's important to realize that any discussion of spam is going to get heated. People detest spammers because they behave in an atrocious manner."
Thanks for "correcting my spelling", but my evaluation was based on reading the (mostly) SPEWS oriented newsgroup for several weeks and also visiting their various web sites in an effort to understand how the system worked.
What I saw there was a lot of taunting, making fun of people's grammar (and spelling). Thinking that since "anything goes" in a newsgroup I went to web pages that were created in support of the black-hole lists and found more of the same. I hate spammers, and I hate biggots, and these people act a whole lot like biggots as far as I can tell.
Most importantly, you did not address the issue of effectiveness. I have seen no evidence that these measures have diminished SPAM *at all*. SPAM is on the increase (even in a drastically reduced internet economy).
I think the concept of going after open-relay mail servers is excellent. The black-hole lists got started that way, and established their good reputation that way. The next step should be to propose mechanisms that make it impossible to generate anonymous email messages at all. Once such a protocol exists, the black-hole lists could be used to encourage ISPs to adopt such protocols quickly.
The only people getting angry about SPAM are the vigilantes, the victims, and the inocent bystanders. The SPAMers are still laughing all the way to the bank.
I don't agree that blocking email is a free speech issue quite so much as the EFF statement implies, on the other hand I reject totally that it is my responsibility as a consumer to make sure that my ISP is not either (a) hosting other users that SPAM, or (b) using a black hole list that keeps me from getting legitimate email.
I know for a fact that I have had legitimate messages that I sent blocked, and I know for a fact that I have had legitimate messages sent to me that were blocked. I know this from phone conversations and ICQ messages etc. I have no way to independantly verify WHO was responsible for the blockage. So being an "informed consumer" in this case is practically impossible. Changing ISPs every few weeks as they drift onto and off of the various block list is not practical either.
If the cost of stopping spam is to make use of email a hit-or-miss proposition then I would much rather have the spam. I understand that other people have a different opinion about this. All the more reason to put spam blockage in the hands of the end user where it can be most effectively managed. That is, at least until changes to the SMTP protocol make anonymous spam harder to initiate. At that point, enforcable laws, ISP penalties, and per-piece mail charges will work wonders. *Pretending* to solve the problem will only delay real solutions.
While I see your statement has been countered by someone already, you are correct. If you read the news group news.admin.net-abuse.email as well as the several web pages that they refer people to they make this precise statement.
IMHO the SPEWS argument is rather circular:
(1) We just maintain a list, no one has to use it.
(2) If your ISP is either on the list or uses it then its your responsibility to find another ISP.
(3) If you are having trouble finding an ISP that is neither on the list or using it, then go back to (1).
So, while it can't be demonstrated that the black hole lists are responsible for any reduction in SPAM, the maintainers of the list disclaim any responsibility for any of the bad effects that they DO have.
They delight in being hard to deal with too. We all know people like this in real life. Of the two choices I'd much rather have the SPAM than the SPEWS. I can easily filter my own SPAM, I can't easily avoid the effects of black-holed email.
I also wish they would focus their energy in reducing my real junk mail. I'd save a jumbo size garbage bag a week if it were not for unsolicited real mail. A much bigger problem than SPAM for anyone interested in the "big picture". I bet almost as much bandwidth has been used TALKING about SPAM as has been saved by the efforts to stop it. Some updates to the SMTP specs would do a lot more to solve this problem. But then...what would the SPEWS people do for kicks?
Too bad the article was not more clear about the problem they were trying to solve, or on what their solution was for that matter.
I've always had *another* idea of what the back button might do. Originally most web sites were organized in a somewhat linear fashion, like a book. The top page would have a list of links and you could think of these links as "Chapters". Once you skipped to a chapter, you might page forward in the chapter and finally might transition naturally to the next chapter.
I always thought it would be nice if each page had linking information built into it indicating what the next logical "page" would be as well as the previous logical page. The forward and back buttons would use *that* information first, and only if that information was not available would it go "up" by going back to a page in your history.
With such a system in place, a Google search on "homeschooling" might take me into the center of an article on the general topic of education. Using the forward and back buttons I could visit the entire site in the order the author had intended.
Come to think of it, I think there used to be HTML tags to alter the normal back and forward function, but they were more often used incorrectly, and I haven't seen sites use them much lately.
If the researchers will concentrate on changing the HTML specifications to add sensible tags in this area I'm sure the browsers will follow. Just convincing Micrososft to change the way the buttons work is the wrong way to go.
Let me guess... a standard house grade door lock on the outer door. A "computer room" with a button lock and the combo set to 2-4-6-8, and no barier to just going through the ceiling tiles to get in. Government contractors often don't make enough overhead to do their facilities properly. If they go to the government people and try and get them to pay for it there is very little interest. The government folks worry about their own comfort and security, not that of mere contractors. It's a lousy system where the mission comes last.
Whoever stole the equipment probably just wanted to have a big-ass server at home and knew the layout of the place. Hopefully they formatted everything right away.
It's clear from the discussion here that the perceived problems of medicine aren't going to be solved any time soon. I say "perceived" because I think the problems are more in the perception than in the reality. Our false perceptions though can lead to REAL problems when we take draconian measures to fix them. The Clintonian notion of nationalizing the public health care system would have been such a "feel good" fix. Outrageous lawsuits, HMOs and mandated insurance coverage for employees are other examples.
I think it is instructive to compare the health care industry with other fields that have similar properties. Some such comparisons have already been made here, two that stand out are comparisons with auto mechanics, and computer professionals, since many of us are computer professionals, and almost all of us have had experience dealing with auto repair shops in one way or another. Some interesting points to ponder:
When I take my car into the shop there is a good chance that a technician will spend somewhere from one quarter to half, and in some cases ALL of his day dealing with just my one car. Based on the waiting rooms I've seen, many doctors deal with 20 or more patients in a single day. A DBA diagnosing a database problem, or a programmer dealing with a bug, may in fact work on a single problem for several days, or even weeks. Should we expect more precise diagnoses from a doctor than from an auto mechanic or computer programmer under such conditions?
A car is a fairly complex organism these days. Combinations of mechanical, electrical, and electronic components, even those designed to make diagnosis of problems easier, often make diagnosis harder, and certainly more expensive. I just had $900 of work done on my car. All the components that were replaced were "sensor" components. If all the sensor components could have been switched off the car would have run fine. Am I better off with the sensors or without? Software is the same way these days. Computer programs used to be fairly monolithic. Program reads some data from a file, prints some output, maybe creates a new file. Even back then there were bugs that would take days to track down. These days systems are deployed with KNOWN bugs that are simply too hard to track down. If the system mostly works, thats good enough. The human body, thousands of times more complex than a car or any computer system. Not one of us is functioning perfectly. "Bugs" in our systems are being fought off constantly. Every now and then the bugs start to win. Every now and then our defenses turn against us. Sometimes there is nothing actually wrong, but our "sensors" tell us that something is wrong.
Think back to when you were in high school. Pick a class of the brainiest people you can think of from back then. How many of them would you feel comfortable with making the decision to give you a pill, or remove your kidney to cure a back pain that you have? I'm not sure I can think of even one. There is safety in strangers. The doctor who we only see in a white lab coat (and who we know doesn't spend part of their time working in a lab) has an aura of perfection that can't be matched by anyone we grew up with. No wonder we are outraged when they make mistakes. It goes against our unrealistic expectations.
Someone already did an analysis here of how it might take 10 years or more for a doctors income to offset his expenses to the point where his accumulated wealth has matched that of a nurse. Due to the baby-boom, we are in the position of needing MORE doctors right now rather than less, but the economic incentives just aren't there. The defense of a legal system that puts doctors out of business for making simple mistakes is shallow. Human beings will always make mistakes. The only profession that is relatively immune from our over-letigeous society at this point is the legal system itself. "You can't sue city hall" they say, and its hard to find examples of lawyers helping to sue other lawyers. For all the prattle from them about the service they are doing to humanity, the fact is that deep pockets get sued. Auto mechanics don't get sued (as individuals) nor do computer programmers (as individuals), but doctors do. If you think that computer programmers and auto mechanics don't make mistakes that cost peoples lives, then spend a bit more time thinking about it.
The solution to our medical "crisis" will come only after we accept the fact that doctors are human too. Mistakes in medicine will continue to happen until we stop expecting them to be corrected by the actions of individuals (be more careful, study harder, take more time with each patient) and start dealing with them in the same way we deal with any large system.
Technology WILL help improve the situation over time. The ability to "see" into the body in non-invasive ways makes diagnosing problems more precise with every new invention. The systems that need work are the human systems... the way people work together, or in the case of the medical field, don't work together.
Things that could use improvement:
(1)Many doctors are not computer literate. The biological and physical sciences have always been at odds and they shouldn't be. I think a patients first diagnosis should come right out of a computer. Symptoms codes have been standardized for a long time now. Medicine *IS* a science after all. If all the case histories in medicine had been accurately recorded there would be tremendous value in just doing a match based on symptoms presented by a new patient. As it is, case histories are being recorded mostly in insurance databases, and for some research studies where the results of a few can carry far too much weight. The technology to do this has been in place for years, there have been some feeble attempts at it. Privacy concerns, and technophobia still stand in the way.
(2) It should not be the responsibility of the patient to seek a second opinion. Peer review of medical procedures and recommendation ought to be built into the process. Almost all the successful litigations against medical practices involve mistakes made by a single individual who's work was not in any way double checked by someone else. One potential advantage of the HMO system was the opportunity for doctors to work in teams, yet the first thing you have to do when you join most HMOs is to pick your "primary care physician". Based on what? When I go to a doctor with symptoms I'd like to think that there are at least 2 and maybe 3 or more people *involved* in figuring out what might be causing my symptoms, and what the best thing to do about it is. Furthermore, I'd feel a lot more comfortable knowing that my single consistent "testimony" being reviewed by multiple professionals who are actually talking to one another might yield better results than my visiting two independent doctors on my own, on different days, with a different testimony. The current system almost guarantees that the patient will get different results from the second doctor, and as a result, lose faith in the process. Peer review is becoming the norm in the computer profession. When the mechanic finally found all the bad sensors in my car, TWO other people drove the car to make sure that it was functioning properly. The checks and balances in the medical system are piled on the shoulders of the patient, at least until AFTER a mistake has taken place, at which time deep pockets rather than corrective measures are the issue.
Rational is the latest in a series of products touted to revolutionize the way software is created. It is not a drawing tool, although it does have that capability. They also have a versioning component, an automated test tool (formerly Team Test I think) and a whole bunch of other things added in by acquisition. As a true believer in Client/Server methods it is clear that these tools can do a great deal of good when used properly, or a great deal of harm (at a high price) when used by "amateurs".
.Net for all future development and they behave as though they are sleeping with the Microsoft sales reps. Forget that the selection itself makes no sense (Java a language vs .Net a loosely designed framework), I'm sure they will pick .Net. again missing the chance to go with a language (Java or C++) that will be around almost forever. They'll send 100 people to C# classes, and they'll try and figure out how to pretend that they used Rational to design it all. Anything that goes wrong will be blamed on bad advice from consultants, anything that miraculously works will be claimed as the bright idea of a government employee who has never coded a line of either code or design specs.
A history of blunders:
I worked at a shop that several years ago decided to go the "Client/Server" route to save money over the old mainframe methods. As far as they were concerned "Client/Server" mean "lets buy a bunch of PCs and play games on them during lunch". The application was a secondary consideration. This was a worldwide highly distributed application. Being a government organization, they had tons of money to spend though, so the reasons for switching had more to do with what the top people were reading in PC/Week and such than any concern about the money involved. The Clipper code was a disaster, with data constantly being lost for no apparent reason. The mainframe/mini approach consisting of a few hundred minicomputers was replaced with several thousand PCs, in reality the hardware costs went up. This all happened during a time when you had to replace all your PCs every year or two to still be able to even run the latest version of Windows and Office.
On top of this the number of people involved in the process soared, network bandwidth had to increase substantially, not to cope with the application, but with the increased size of prettily formatted Word documents that were flying around. In fact when the network folk decided to project future traffic, they ignored the application altogether (since there wasn't a design from which they could work anyway) and simply did a statistical analysis of e-mail traffic. As dumb as this seemed at the time, the results actually worked pretty well.
About the time the Clipper programs were fully deployed, Powersoft came along claiming to be best buddies with Microsoft. The company President even visited and told us that they and Microsoft were going to work together to make Powerbuilder the ultimate programming language of the future. The folks I worked for bought this BS hook, line, and sinker. The crappy Clipper programs were replaced (over a several year period) with crappy Powerbuilder programs who's design specs looked something like: "Make it look like the old minicomputer programs we had before". In other words, nobody really understood the original programs and didn't want to do the homework to figure them out either.
Realizing this last fact to some extent, the organization bought into another product called System Engineer (I forget the vendors name). SE was a high level design tool that claimed to actually be able to generate full-blown applications if given sufficiently detailed design specs. The only catch was that it only generated C++ or Cobol, and generating Powerbuilder was a "future feature". Just as well, because none of the programmers involved had the skill or patience to use the product, so they just did their database diagrams with a bootleg copy of Erwin. When pressed to do so they would run Systems Engineer in "reverse engineering" mode to produce the "artifact" documents needed to demonstrate what a great idea this client/server stuff was after all.
It was no surprise at all to me that about a year ago they asked someone (not me) for advice about where to go with this technology. Whoever did the research must have spent about 2 hours reading the trade rags before calling the sales reps to start convincing them that Rational was the "next big thing". In addition to the software being expensive, you almost have to agree to sign up for training in order to use the product. The training is VERY expensive, and with the bloated development staff that we had, this was made even worse.
The good news is that they have finally realized they went down the wrong path with Powerbuilder. They at least in that process got their data into a real RDBMS (Oracle).
The bad news is that they have decided to pick between Java and
In about 4-5 years they will start the process all over again. And, by the way the mainframe is still there, doing the hard parts of the application, cleaning up the messes that the PCs have made, with large parts of it written in *sigh* COBOL.
Your tax dollars at work again.
Back in the 80's IBM failed to understand a very important concept: That whatever gadget or technology finds its way onto peoples desks at home will eventually find its way into solving business problems too. Whether it works or not will be decided so far in the future that nobody will get blamed or lose their job for not really thinking things through.
I think IBM has learned its lesson though. They have their fingers in hundreds of pies, some of which are strategic, others seemingly nonsensical. They are positioned to make money both in hardware sales and consulting services whenever an organization gets so wrapped up in whiz-bang technologies that they can't extricate themselves. They have all the tools at their disposal to do mainframe/mini/or totally decentralized solutions and they are not dependent on any one vendor be it Oracle, Microsoft, Intel or even their own hardware divisions to come up with a solution that fits.
For some it may seem like technology has moved rapidly, but we are just now accomplishing things that were predicted as being right around the corner when I was in college in the 70's. I blame a lot of this on clever marketing by Microsoft, Intel and a few others (Powersoft, Rational among them) that substituted nicely packaged products (and games) for products that actually did something useful. I have high hopes that the Open Source movement will end this nonsense. A steady stream of products that "just work" and don't cost anything to try will keep the sales reps of the future a lot more honest than those of the past. I have more to say about this, but I guess this is too long already. IBM will conceivably Open Source parts of the product suit that are not particularly unique, but nothing they do is about charity, nor should it be. I hope that creating the Microsoft and Intel duopoly was the last act of charity that they engage in.
Pathological extremes do nothing to illuminate the problem. Often, crime statistics don't do much better. Remember that when someone reports on craime statisitics they are reporting on crimes that have been _reported_ to the police. Reducing the size of the police force can after a while make it obvious to any citizen that reporting a crime (short of murder) is probably a waste of time. As a results "crime" can actually be reduced.
Take any statement such as "government official did X and as a result crime was reduced to Y" with a large grain of salt, they may have simply made the process of reporting, or recoding a crime more difficult.
You oversimplify. $40 Billion in pieces of paper does not cause _anything_ to happen. Think of money as a placeholder for purchase of products or services. Yes, that money kept people at NASA employed and tricked down to all sorts of other businesses. Had that money not been spent on NASA, but on some other government program it would have also benefitied many people, directly or indirectly.
Had that money not been collected by the government in taxes, it would have been spent by citizens and benefited people all over the country. The notion (though commonly held) that large amounts of money spent by government, no matter how pointless the expenditure, somehow becomes valuable by a trickle down process, could be used to justify all sorts of nonsensical projects.
By your reasoning, the government should take all of our paychecks, build a skyscraper 100 miles high, and while they're at it 100 miles deep. It will keep many people employed for years. Of course their paychecks will have to be confiscated to support the project too. Hopefully some funds somewhere will be left over for farmers to grow food for all of us working on "The Project".
And hopefully, people will get it through their heads that money spent on useless projects does not take _money_ away from other efforts, but does take _manpower_ away from other efforts. Where we focus our attention _does_ make a difference, money is just a placeholder.
As far as the space program goes, I think parts of it are quite usefull. Manned programs are more showmanship than research though. More research could be done by unmanned vehicles for far fewer dollars, which means that either more roads could be built, or more unmanned satelites could be launched, or I'd have more money to spend at Starbucks. It's all about priorities.
Some things that I haven't seen covered here: First of all, I question the value of a review written by anyone after one day of using a new product. The only reason I can think of to do this is that it allows you to say glowing things about the product and still be "objective". Perfect for anyone being rewarded (directly or indirectly) by the vendor. What a potential buyer of any new device really needs is a review written after a few weeks of usage, that would be in this case: After the thing has been treated like a pad of paper for a while: Dropped a few times, been stacked with other materials including stapled paper and paper clipped paper and so forth, carried under ones arm for a while, tossed into the passenger seat of your car, thrown from that seat onto the floor when you slam on brakes thanks to that stupid driver in front of you. It needs to be evaluated after its run out of batteries a few times when you really needed it to keep working. One needs to know what a good "fall-back" plan is for the device (like always carry a real pad of paper with it, or a spare set of batteries, etc). Does the screen get scratched with use? That would be the case if like Palm devices it has a semi flexible plastic screen. Or is the screen hard like glass, scratch-proof, but easily broken in a fall? Do you HAVE to us a special pen with these? Won't a regular palmtop stylus do? or a fingernail in a pinch? I sometimes find in meeting that I take TOO many notes. When I get to a PC I can often summarize these notes with a sentence or two. How will this compare to loading all your notes, scribbles and all onto your PC for permanent review. Will I treasure or loath these added use of my disk space after a year or so? I think there is a future for these devices. Lord knows, the industry has shown a willingness to keep trying no matter how many times they get it wrong. The question is: Is this the time they finally get it right? Finally, after reading all the praise and contempt for Microsoft I haven't seen anyone else point out that there is very little risk for Microsoft here. They are only responsible for the operating system, and from what I can see its mostly a derivative of their other products. If it fails, no big deal for them. The hardware guys are taking all the $$ risk. They'll scratch and claw at one another until only one or two companies are making them at a profit. The worst thing that can happen for Microsoft is that price pressure will bring the average price for these things down to about $200 where they belong, at which point it won't be viable to run an expensive operating system on them. In the mean time MS will rake in the licensing fees. They'll do well in the medium term. I have no problem with a Microsoft that is forced (mostly against its will) to continue innovating, even if that innovation is largely just variations on a theme. The existence of open source alternatives is going to keep Microsoft honest from here on out. It will eventually transform them into a different company than they are now. Smaller, less critical to our infrastructure. If HP and a few others have to pay the price for Microsoft's continued success in the mean time, so be it, they did so quite willingly. There is already a non-MS box out there at a much lower price (made by a non-US company of course) and there will soon be more. I can wait.
Whether we choose to praise Microsoft or bury it, we can all save ourselves some time by simply waiting to see what they actually do versus what they *say* they are going to do, or worse, what someone else says that they say they are going to do. Nine times out of ten nothing comes of all these pronouncements anyway.
Everyone should welcome more secure Windows systems, becuase they are probably the most common source of DOS attacks. Even if MS makes fixes to some of the older Windows programs available it will years for them to trickle down to the average user (in most cases until the average user buys their next computer).
Let us hope they are serious about this.
Well I think we are arguing terminology here more than anything else, for example my statement: "I don't think its fair to say that those countries are against Microsoft, or the US for that matter" was simply meant to counter the implication in your earlier post that countries using Open Source products are doing it primarily to express their hatred for the US. I meant to point out they might be doing it just to save money. Regarding Boeing, as a former employee I follow it pretty closely. On an equal playing field worldwide they would be doing even better. But each country wants its own companies to succeed, as we do, and it is futile to wish it not so. Airbus may be a thorn in Boeing side, but the money dumped into Airbus to allow them to undercut Boeing prices will continue to be a drag on the Eropean economies. I've read remarks from founders of software companies that eventually got baught by Microsoft. At least some of them say they would rather have stayed in business rather than take the few million they got for the rights to their products, but they knew that the alternative to taking the money would be to have a free equivalent bundled into Windows eventually. they took the easy way out. The competition between Microsoft and (Corel, Wordperfect, Adobe, etc) was not on a level playing field either once Windows started to become the standard operating system. Had the APIs for Windows been completely open it would have been a different story. That issue was a key part of the antitrust suit and a key part of what remedy there was. Balmer himself has conceded that Microsoft has gotten lazy in some spots. He knows its going to be an uphill battle against software which can be had for nothing. MS admits that Linux (and Open Source) are the biggest threats to their continued growth. It will be a dose of their own medicine, and I look forward to seeing how well they will take it. Regardless of how well Microsoft does going forward I think Open Source has a secure future, the only horse I have in this race is the hope that the US plays a leading role in the development of Open Source and does not end up just following what everyone else is doing. There's plenty of money to be generated in the process too.
"What do YOU care what the rest of the world thinks?" ...
"You're absolutely fooling yourself if you believe that EU nations (and the rest of the world) are fighting "the good fight" to protect their citizens from Microsoft exploitation. They fight to channel some of the software money away from Microsoft's coffers and back into their own!"
I don't see how your comments are responsive to my post at all. As a US citizen I am hopeful that the US will remain the worlds strongest economy. I don't think that can be done by moving towards isolationism. The only alternative to isolationism is to be competitive. That means software that is some combination of faster, more secure, reliable, easier to use, cheaper. I really don't care whether that happens through an Open Source process or a proprietary one, and I really don't care which companies participate in the process.
My belief is that a single company cannot get us there all on it's own. I think the best way to produce software that will compete in the world market is to produce software that DOES compete in the US market, which means there has to be competition, here in the US too.
As it is, there is only competition within the US among software companies that don't inconvenience Microsoft. Once a company shows up on their radar screen they have a choice of being acquired or singled out for special treatment (having products similar to theirs given away by Microsoft until their market share is marginalized). If I thought that this process would "scale" to the rest of the world I might be inclined, as a patriot, to say go for it Microsoft.
I don't think it will scale though. As you mentioned the EU has it's own agenda. So do the Chinese, Russians, countries of Africa Pacific Rim and South America. I don't think its fair to say that those countries are against Microsoft, or the US for that matter, but they certainly are going to act in their own self interest. If that means adapting Linux or other Open Source projects to their own needs, then thats what they will do. That is in fact what they are doing. Whether we like it or not, that trend is likely to continue. We may find in a few years that the American software preeminence has gone the same way as that of the American automobile. We'll see a lot of Americans running American made software while the rest of the world uses a mixture of products. Later the best of those products will show up on our store shelves with funny sounding names and we'll buy them too, because they will be faster, more secure, reliable, easier to use and cheaper than anything we produce.
In short: The question is not whether the Microsoft Monopoly is good for Microsoft, we know it is. The question is not whether the Microsoft monopoly can be extended to the world, we know it can't. The question is whether the Microsoft monopoly which has been allowed to stand within the United States will serve the countries best interest in the long run. I have my doubts.
You are right, but in the longer run, it would be better if the US wasn't continuing to "standardize" on Microsoft products while the rest of the world moves more to open source solutions. If there are real benefits to open source (as I beleive there are) then the US just ends up more behind the curve than they/we already are.
I read thru all the arguments and analysis here about why this is or is not a good thing to buy. Sounds like few of you were around in 1975 when the original of this came out. This one was built to LOOK exactly liek the original for one reason: Thousands of geeks back then lusted to own one of these things. Having ANY kind of computer in your home was just a DREAM back then and well out of most peoples price range. Two machines I considered were the IMSAI and a similar box by Altair. I never had quite the loose cash to do it though and didn't wind up able to buy my own PC until the IBM/AT came out. Had to take something like a car load out to do that too. So the real reason is nostalgia. Same reason people drive arout 50 year old cars. Very easy to understand.