How does that saying go?: "We've determined what you are, now we are just negotiating the price."
Most of the problems you cite with "free and open" software are not technical issues at all. The people who invented those "codecs and the like" don't sell them to individuals, but they do sell them to companies like Microsoft (and maybe Novell, Redhat, etc) meaning that you are really forced to buy a commercial product to have these capabilities. Reverse engineering these things would be a violation of US law, so while the framework for working with these special formats is often free, easy to get and (usually) easy to install, the much more trivial components you refer to must be downloaded separately, usually from countries that don't monitor such things.
So, while I think you are saying you value the freedom of selecting your own software, you are not really willing to pay too high a price (in time) for it. As long as Microsoft or Apple make it easy for you to do certain things, you will give up your freedom to do other things, that is, presumably as long as the "price" charged by those companies either in dollars or in other restrictions doesn't exceed a certain amount. So, how much?
I actually run Linux because I prefer it. I don't do a lot of things that require codecs, etc. I keep an old Apple computer around just for such quick and dirty tasks. But I CAN burn CDs on my Linux machine and I seem to have much much better luck at burning usable ones than some of my Windows friends do (I think Apple does a fairly good job of burning CDs too). I'd never trade the convenience of doing all of that on my Linux machine for all the problems that I hear about under Windows.
That said, if I could buy those capabilities for Linux I'd have no problem doing it. I spent thousands on Windows and I didn't stop because of the money, I stopped because the product was defective. Apple is much better, but their need to have a regular release cycle may well change that, and with the latest release apparently has (I won't be upgrading). I also have purchased copies of Red Hat, Suse (when it was called that) and Lindows (when it was called that) and in the latter two cases they came with most of the common royalty based software. Again, I didn't stop buying those versions of Linux because of the cost, but because they stopped me (with poor upgrade mechanisms, limited repositories, etc. ) from doing other things I wanted to do.
"I want to buy a product that someone is willing to stake their business reputation and livelihood on."
You really lost me with that one. If that dynamic actually worked Open Source could not have come into existence in the first place. How has that dynamic helped Internet Explorer be a better browser? How has it helped Windows in being more stable, less prone to viruses etc?
Finally "uncoordinated collection of hobbiests' works" either gives you away as a partisan or demonstrates that you have not done much research on the subject.
Quite frustrating. I've yet to lose serious amounts of data so far, but I'm sure it'll happen.
Only a Windows users could make such a statement. I pity you all for having had your mindset so significantly altered by the worlds most obnoxious monopolist. I wouldn't be able to sleep nights working for Microsoft.
I think the day will come when Apple marketing people will BEG for publicity such as they got from ThinkSecret.
The company seems to have no common sense when it comes to a sense of proportionality. Microsoft my be an incompetent bully when it comes to its competition, but Apple is downright schizophrenic when it comes to dealing with its friends.
This will go down as a milestone in the company's history and whether they continue to be successful it will remain an unsightly incident.
NOW I feel bad for not doing more meta-modding. Unless whoever modded this "informative" were themselves trying to be funny,/. seems to be losing its sense of humor.
Well, it's a good post anyway, regardless what you call it I guess.
They're both companies that have their fingers in a lot of pots - some successful, some not, but it's in the public interests that they both exist, if either one extinguished the other, it would be bad for everyone.
While I agree with your principle of competition being a good thing, that is sort of like going back to the early 90s and saying "OK, some of us have to agree to continue using OS/2 and WordPerfect, while the rest of us will switch to Windows and Word. Should we draw straws?"
In my opinion, the shift to running so many applications on the desktop should have never happened in the first place. It was an emotional decision more than a technical one. Everyone was saying "HEY! I want a computer on my desk too!" And many were filled with visions of being able to work wonders without the help of a central IT department.
But look where we are now! Those IT departments are bigger than ever, and less capable than ever. They are forced by the sloppiness of the operating system to lock everything on the network down to the point of uselessness. You mentioned "client/server" but on average, what is being run now bears no resemblance to the n-tier designs that were theorized when the concept came into being. The typical application set-up has most of the application running on a desktop often with WAY to much information (tiny fonts strange color schemes) on the screen for the user to absorb. A back-end component (if not the application itself) does SQL transactions, makes wild guesses as to which records should be locked, and a room full of "analysts" spend their days (and nights) trying to fix the database in time for the next days work.
These systems are laughable, and widespread.
In any event, in answer to your first sentence or two, I've been putting more and more online. I'm almost never away from an Internet connection and I'd rather be in a hotel room with a laptop that contains no valuable data than to be carrying it around with me and constantly having to worry about whether everything is in sync. Like many people these days there are three main computers I use, which are odd in my case, but for most users would correspond to home use, office use, and travel use. But as I get more stuff online I can start thinking of alternatives, like just using a friends computer when I visit instead of bringing my own. In a great number of cases these days when someone is traveling without a computer that is exactly what happens. They think of something they need to do, borrow a computer or use the lobby computer in a hotel, find a recent version of a document they need in a web-based e-mail message, and edit away. Once you get started thinking about it in fact, for me, I've started to get uncomfortable with the idea of leaving a file I might need on my PC at all. I'm starting to think of my local PC as only BACKUP storage for my stuff online. I work directly with the online files as much as possible, only saving a local copy now and then "just in case".
I really think it's a better way to go, and wonder why it didn't happen sooner, my only explanation, as I said was that it is some sort of emotional control-freak thing, that we'd do better to rid ourselves of.
PCs as we now know them should be relegated to being "game machines" and leave real work for some sort of "network appliance" that... just works.
Well, it should mean "New Conservative", but look at who it is often applied to an you will see that it is used in a totally different way. If I explained what I think the algorithm is I'd get modded into oblivion.
Suffice it to say that I think people who use this word regularly should be asked to spell out what they actually mean, and if they say they mean "new" then they should be asked how long the person to whom they have applied the label has been a conservative, my guess is that in most cases they don't even have a guess.
That was an excellent summary. As in the past, most Windows users won't know what they have gotten themselves into until it is too late. At least for those willing to be educated, word is getting out. I'm tempted to cut and paste your post an e-mail it to a few non-Slashdotters I know.
At least then, in the future when they come whining I can say "You were warned!"
MS stuff feels faster than Linux equivalents on the same OS, yes.
If what you meant by that is that (for example) IE on windows loads faster than Firefox on Linux I think that is a big part of the problem with respect to Windows bloat.
Somewhere back in the 90s when people (unfortunately the wrong people) were making their decisions about what to run on their newly minted corporate PC networks the simple minded (or was it corrupt?) editors of some of the most popular tech publications would pit a product like Wordperfect against Word and score one or the other higher due to how fast the product loaded. Ditto for comparisons of web browsers, spreadsheets and so on.
I think it was Microsoft's desire to win these contests at all cost that started them down the path to building the APIs for all their applications right into the operating system, and making applications settings into an always loaded database (the registry). Competing products had to rely on stubs that would get loaded at boot time to achieve a similar effect. I always thought that this latter approach was best as it allowed the user to decide how best to allocate his resources, but that notion never made it into most corporate IT decision trees.
Even today many users are oblivious the fact that their actual use of a product such as Word or IE is sluggish, but will immediately notice that Firefox or Open Office takes longer to launch. They gain ten seconds at start-up at the expense of many minutes of wasted time throughout the day. I don't know what can be done about the willfully clueless other than let them stew in their own juices.
I've had Windows-using friends COMPLAIN to me that my vintage Linux machine runs circles around their fairly new Windows systems, but they refuse to consider doing anything about it. Ironically they still call me for help with their registry setting and such. Hopefully more people will raise up on their hind legs eventually at take back control of their time and energies. Web-centric or net-centric tools for many things will also hopefully make this switch easier for them.
Does everybody on Slashdot believe that all of Africa is starving babies with flies covering their mouths?
Not everybody, but quite possibly a majority, as our attention deficit culture certainly overwhelms us with such images, failing to supply much in the way of background information.
Dvorak has taken the classic straw-man approach of defining OLPC as something that it is not, and then using unassailable logic to point out how that thing which it is not is a very stupid idea. Add to that the fact that he doesn't make a single suggestion about alternative strategies, but simply says that this (mischaracterized) idea is dumb.
It would be bad enough if he is doing this just to get hits (a strategy he jokingly admits to), it's downright frightening to think that an industry "legend" might actually think this way. I've been on board with some of his windmill tilting of the past, but this makes me wonder whether I'd ever want to waste the time on him again.
Had I not canceled my subscriptions to such publications long ago I sure would consider it now.
"Can you imagine the shit that Microsoft would get if Vista asked for forgiveness?"
I think that's already happened from what my Windows-using friends report. The only explanation we've come up with for why their machines are so unpredictably slow is that it is saying a trillion trillion "hail Marys" in the background.
I agree! There are definitely thousands of folks out there who are perfectly happy with Vista. That only leaves the other few million customers...
No, the thousands of people he was talking about are Microsoft employees. For them, the current state of the product translates to almost infinite job security.
I would question whether Google even has a monopoly on search. Having the largest numbers does not a monopoly make.
They certainly don't have a monopoly on anything else. They are beaten easily by Facebook, Myspace, MS Office, Hotmail, Yahoo in areas where there is direct competition for specific products.
Why not just judge a company on what they HAVE done rather than on what they MIGHT do?
The reason Microsoft is still where it is is that people have not applied that principle. On the other hand, a company simply achieving a 51 percent market share doesn't make them unstoppable. Add to that the fact that it would be difficult or impossible for everyone on Earth to coordinate their product selections so that no company ever achieves a 51 percent market share.
I can't think of anything Google could do (other than buying Microsoft) that would lock users into their search technology, and certainly not their web page tool.
Likewise, I wouldn't have a problem using MS Office, if and only if I could use my preferred operating system (Linux) to run it. Office locks you into Windows; you only get full use of Live if you use Office and Windows; you can read your Hotmail with an offline reader as long as that offline reader is vended by MS. If you don't see a difference in the way Microsoft and Google do business, then you are not paying much attention.
I don't have a problem with people attacking Google when they screw up, but somewhere along the way they need to demonstrate that they're not just another Microsoft astroturfer. Comments with supporting evidence are much less likely to be modded troll or flamebait.
Let's agree to clean up the monopolists we already have, then worry about stopping the potential ones.
The people who run Facebook aren't stupid - there's so much money involved here that I am sure they will find a solution to this.
You mean the same way the smart people at Microsoft have dealt with viruses, spyware, adware, and so on?
The problem is not with the people at Facebook, the problem is with the users of Facebook, who may not be stupid either, but they are most likely ignorant of how to build a web page, run a blog, mailing lists an so on.
Facebook and the like automate for the "average" user all the Internet goodies that us bleeding edgers have been playing with for years. There is nothing in Facebook, Myspace or Orkut that I couldn't have done with my own web page, blog, scripts, etc. as far back as the mid-90s. They've just packaged it and put a name on it (and probably filed patents on it for all I know) for "the masses".
If like most users of Windows, Facebook users just complain about security issues and never "vote with their feet" there will be no reason for those not-stupid people at Facebook to improve things. In fact, since ignoring security and privacy can have a beneficial impact for advertisers (again, assuming users don't see fit to walk) there will nothing but PR campaigns to reassure users while at the same time doing little or nothing to actually solve the problem.
The issue is not how smart they are, but how much you trust them. Personally from what I've read about them so far, my answer is: "Not very much".
My response was to cancel my original account before I had populated it with very much information and open a new account with a fake name and nothing of interest to the company or its advertisers. I've yet to hear of a great number of other people doing the same, although I suspect a lot of people who have got a clue will just avoid using it until that is the only way to communicate with their grandchildren (if it gets to that point).
These days, using the word "consultant" outside of strictly regulated industries (eg: medical field) is just a method of social 'privilege escalation', as far as I'm concerned.
If you need any help telling the real consultants from the phony ones, just contact me, I'm a Consultant Consultant, although our industry association is considering a name change to "Consultant 3.0".
Not so sure about that. I personally think that computers should have become "invisible" appliances several years ago. The only thing that prevented that was the already widespread use of Windows, especially in the business environment. There were such machines made several years ago that were adequate for doing e-mail and basic web browsing. But because they couldn't read complexly formated e-mail messages or play certain videos and sound files, thanks to the hundreds of variations on how such files are formatted (and encrypted) such devices would only be suitable to a small minority of users.
Oh it will happen eventually, and the hardware and software vendors love the fact that it will take dozens of more product itterations before consumers begin to settle on anything. But the appliance computer, which I think will end up being a very small (and very inexpensive) laptop type device is beginning to take shape (OLPC and Ausus EEE PC being good first cuts). Devices smaller than that will be find for phones, cameras, and address books, but I've yet to see any keyboard replacement technique that would not discourage me from posting a message even this short on such a tiny device. Until voice recognition is perfected the appliance PC will need a keyboard.
Yes, TVs have processors in them these days as do dishwashers etc., but we were talking about that when I was in school in the 70's. I don't consider any device with a processor chip a computing device (and certainly not a PC). Let's just say that the "C" in "PC" can stand for either "Communication" or "Computing". A device such as the iPhone (if it were less expensive at the checkout counter and as a monthly bill) would be an excellent example of a "Personal Communications" device. Camera, Phone, Address book, short text messages, etc, all covered adequately. But I don't think I'd do my taxes on it, or write a book, and unless they sold for $9 I wouldn't want to think about how in a years time it wouldn't hold a charge as long as when it was new. In fact I'm getting pretty bloody tired of all the rechargeable devices I have already, they actually make special pieces of furniture now to hold such devices, it has gotten ridiculous.
PC as in "Personal Computing" though will always be a superset of the other type of thing. If a camera, phone, text messaging software, etc. is as cheap as it SHOULD be to put in a portable device (of which you should only need ONE) then you might as well tack it on to your laptop type device as well. Get rid of the moving parts, optimize power consumption on the display and these things can run for house on battery, but will MOSTLY be used while plugged in, and I THINK, should be able to draw power from multiple sources from telephone cables, USB plugs, or wall wart, basically whatever you happen to be closest to.
Really, once we get to the point where we don't need the latest Intel or AMD processor to do basic stuff (a point I maintained we reached quite a few years ago) all of this is doable.
As a consumer, I'll continue pinching my pennies, even though I don't always need to. My hope is that the eventually something like a Google phone will blow the bottom out of that market, and the Asus EEE PC once it hits the stores is probably going to replace my laptop (I'm still skeptical about the size of the keyboard on that though).
Why didn't the person just go the Anonymous Coward route?
I think the article states that that was not an option.
Using a free disposable e-mail account would of course be a good idea, but the committee has all the real names in a file somewhere and who knows what dumb-ass things they are doing with it.
I'm quite sure that some of the people involved don't have a clue about setting up e-mail AT ALL on their own. They use their government provided e-mail capabilities because unless they have gotten a friend, relative, or government contractor to set up their home machine for them they are totally lost. (And before anyone gets all riled up, there are many people not in government who fall into the same category.)
Since there may be people (no there most certainly are people) reading this who don't know any better than what you are suggesting, could you provide some data to support your claims above?
Now if you are considering all of the federal agencies (Labor, HHS, State and so on) simply extensions of the White House staff your assertion would be correct, but that is hardly an accurate representation of how our government works.
Congressional staffs as a whole are huge with respect to the White House. I think the average staff size for the Senate is in the hundreds (per Senator).
What you fail to mention is that in addition to the staff that each politician brings with them, people, in other words, dedicated to that politicians well-being, there are hired hourly employees that are provided by "beltway bandits" that bid for and win multi-year contracts to provide such services. They work in ALL of government, at the White House, in Congress, and in all of the Federal agencies. Maybe one of these people made this error, and I can assure you that if that is the case, they are much more concerned about losing their job over it than they are about which party benefited.
I don't have the numbers at my fingertips (but I can find them.. show me yours first) but if you want to be really impressed at how fast the federal bureaucracy has grown, compare White House and congressional staff sizes now with what they were a hundred, or even fifty years ago. Our government hasn't benefited AT ALL from automation, in fact from parts of it I have studied first-hand automation seems to have served as an excuse to hire even more people (not being subject to having successfully make and sell a product for income) and the public only hears about a tiny fraction of the "Doh" moments that go on in the process.
As soon as something new and interesting shows up in the sky? A week's unsettled cloudy weather is forecast!
I think that's because They also control the weather. As the comet gets closer They will all retreat to their underground shelters and the skys will clear up. We should be able to see the comet in all its glory for at least a few hours before it hits.
"but we think that it adds value to the Facebook experience and to users' overall news experience.'"
Something needs to add value. The S/N ratio on Facebook is pretty horrible. At least none of my friends, or groups I've joined, etc. are doing anything beyond tinkering with it.
If they want to get serious about being a useful TOOL rather than TOY, I'd say the first step would be to give every Facebook user an e-mail address that can be used to communicate with the outside world (both ways). While I might not be interested in using this as yet another e-mail address, if it had forwarding capabilities I could direct such messages as "someone has thrown a food item at you" to the appropriate bin, while at the same time get actual content containing messages from friends who are insisting on using it as a replacement for e-mail. I could also respond to such messages using my e-mail method of choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the problems you cite with "free and open" software are not technical issues at all. The people who invented those "codecs and the like" don't sell them to individuals, but they do sell them to companies like Microsoft (and maybe Novell, Redhat, etc) meaning that you are really forced to buy a commercial product to have these capabilities. Reverse engineering these things would be a violation of US law, so while the framework for working with these special formats is often free, easy to get and (usually) easy to install, the much more trivial components you refer to must be downloaded separately, usually from countries that don't monitor such things.
So, while I think you are saying you value the freedom of selecting your own software, you are not really willing to pay too high a price (in time) for it. As long as Microsoft or Apple make it easy for you to do certain things, you will give up your freedom to do other things, that is, presumably as long as the "price" charged by those companies either in dollars or in other restrictions doesn't exceed a certain amount. So, how much?
I actually run Linux because I prefer it. I don't do a lot of things that require codecs, etc. I keep an old Apple computer around just for such quick and dirty tasks. But I CAN burn CDs on my Linux machine and I seem to have much much better luck at burning usable ones than some of my Windows friends do (I think Apple does a fairly good job of burning CDs too). I'd never trade the convenience of doing all of that on my Linux machine for all the problems that I hear about under Windows.
That said, if I could buy those capabilities for Linux I'd have no problem doing it. I spent thousands on Windows and I didn't stop because of the money, I stopped because the product was defective. Apple is much better, but their need to have a regular release cycle may well change that, and with the latest release apparently has (I won't be upgrading). I also have purchased copies of Red Hat, Suse (when it was called that) and Lindows (when it was called that) and in the latter two cases they came with most of the common royalty based software. Again, I didn't stop buying those versions of Linux because of the cost, but because they stopped me (with poor upgrade mechanisms, limited repositories, etc. ) from doing other things I wanted to do.
You really lost me with that one. If that dynamic actually worked Open Source could not have come into existence in the first place. How has that dynamic helped Internet Explorer be a better browser? How has it helped Windows in being more stable, less prone to viruses etc?
Finally "uncoordinated collection of hobbiests' works" either gives you away as a partisan or demonstrates that you have not done much research on the subject.
Chapter 3
There is no Chapter 3.
Only a Windows users could make such a statement. I pity you all for having had your mindset so significantly altered by the worlds most obnoxious monopolist. I wouldn't be able to sleep nights working for Microsoft.
This just in:
TechBlog Slashdot bricked by series of misleading sensationalist headlines.
No hope of recovery.
I think the day will come when Apple marketing people will BEG for publicity such as they got from ThinkSecret.
The company seems to have no common sense when it comes to a sense of proportionality. Microsoft my be an incompetent bully when it comes to its competition, but Apple is downright schizophrenic when it comes to dealing with its friends.
This will go down as a milestone in the company's history and whether they continue to be successful it will remain an unsightly incident.
And I was trying to figure out which smiley you were referring to. :)
NOW I feel bad for not doing more meta-modding. Unless whoever modded this "informative" were themselves trying to be funny, /. seems to be losing its sense of humor.
Well, it's a good post anyway, regardless what you call it I guess.
While I agree with your principle of competition being a good thing, that is sort of like going back to the early 90s and saying "OK, some of us have to agree to continue using OS/2 and WordPerfect, while the rest of us will switch to Windows and Word. Should we draw straws?"
In my opinion, the shift to running so many applications on the desktop should have never happened in the first place. It was an emotional decision more than a technical one. Everyone was saying "HEY! I want a computer on my desk too!" And many were filled with visions of being able to work wonders without the help of a central IT department.
But look where we are now! Those IT departments are bigger than ever, and less capable than ever. They are forced by the sloppiness of the operating system to lock everything on the network down to the point of uselessness. You mentioned "client/server" but on average, what is being run now bears no resemblance to the n-tier designs that were theorized when the concept came into being. The typical application set-up has most of the application running on a desktop often with WAY to much information (tiny fonts strange color schemes) on the screen for the user to absorb. A back-end component (if not the application itself) does SQL transactions, makes wild guesses as to which records should be locked, and a room full of "analysts" spend their days (and nights) trying to fix the database in time for the next days work.
These systems are laughable, and widespread.
In any event, in answer to your first sentence or two, I've been putting more and more online. I'm almost never away from an Internet connection and I'd rather be in a hotel room with a laptop that contains no valuable data than to be carrying it around with me and constantly having to worry about whether everything is in sync. Like many people these days there are three main computers I use, which are odd in my case, but for most users would correspond to home use, office use, and travel use. But as I get more stuff online I can start thinking of alternatives, like just using a friends computer when I visit instead of bringing my own. In a great number of cases these days when someone is traveling without a computer that is exactly what happens. They think of something they need to do, borrow a computer or use the lobby computer in a hotel, find a recent version of a document they need in a web-based e-mail message, and edit away. Once you get started thinking about it in fact, for me, I've started to get uncomfortable with the idea of leaving a file I might need on my PC at all. I'm starting to think of my local PC as only BACKUP storage for my stuff online. I work directly with the online files as much as possible, only saving a local copy now and then "just in case".
I really think it's a better way to go, and wonder why it didn't happen sooner, my only explanation, as I said was that it is some sort of emotional control-freak thing, that we'd do better to rid ourselves of.
PCs as we now know them should be relegated to being "game machines" and leave real work for some sort of "network appliance" that... just works.
Well, it should mean "New Conservative", but look at who it is often applied to an you will see that it is used in a totally different way. If I explained what I think the algorithm is I'd get modded into oblivion.
Suffice it to say that I think people who use this word regularly should be asked to spell out what they actually mean, and if they say they mean "new" then they should be asked how long the person to whom they have applied the label has been a conservative, my guess is that in most cases they don't even have a guess.
That was an excellent summary. As in the past, most Windows users won't know what they have gotten themselves into until it is too late. At least for those willing to be educated, word is getting out. I'm tempted to cut and paste your post an e-mail it to a few non-Slashdotters I know.
At least then, in the future when they come whining I can say "You were warned!"
If what you meant by that is that (for example) IE on windows loads faster than Firefox on Linux I think that is a big part of the problem with respect to Windows bloat.
Somewhere back in the 90s when people (unfortunately the wrong people) were making their decisions about what to run on their newly minted corporate PC networks the simple minded (or was it corrupt?) editors of some of the most popular tech publications would pit a product like Wordperfect against Word and score one or the other higher due to how fast the product loaded. Ditto for comparisons of web browsers, spreadsheets and so on.
I think it was Microsoft's desire to win these contests at all cost that started them down the path to building the APIs for all their applications right into the operating system, and making applications settings into an always loaded database (the registry). Competing products had to rely on stubs that would get loaded at boot time to achieve a similar effect. I always thought that this latter approach was best as it allowed the user to decide how best to allocate his resources, but that notion never made it into most corporate IT decision trees.
Even today many users are oblivious the fact that their actual use of a product such as Word or IE is sluggish, but will immediately notice that Firefox or Open Office takes longer to launch. They gain ten seconds at start-up at the expense of many minutes of wasted time throughout the day. I don't know what can be done about the willfully clueless other than let them stew in their own juices.
I've had Windows-using friends COMPLAIN to me that my vintage Linux machine runs circles around their fairly new Windows systems, but they refuse to consider doing anything about it. Ironically they still call me for help with their registry setting and such. Hopefully more people will raise up on their hind legs eventually at take back control of their time and energies. Web-centric or net-centric tools for many things will also hopefully make this switch easier for them.
Not too late...
If these alien civilizations support the MS Outlook protocol we can simply send out a retract message and clean it all up before they notice.
Not everybody, but quite possibly a majority, as our attention deficit culture certainly overwhelms us with such images, failing to supply much in the way of background information.
Dvorak has taken the classic straw-man approach of defining OLPC as something that it is not, and then using unassailable logic to point out how that thing which it is not is a very stupid idea. Add to that the fact that he doesn't make a single suggestion about alternative strategies, but simply says that this (mischaracterized) idea is dumb.
It would be bad enough if he is doing this just to get hits (a strategy he jokingly admits to), it's downright frightening to think that an industry "legend" might actually think this way. I've been on board with some of his windmill tilting of the past, but this makes me wonder whether I'd ever want to waste the time on him again.
Had I not canceled my subscriptions to such publications long ago I sure would consider it now.
I think that's already happened from what my Windows-using friends report. The only explanation we've come up with for why their machines are so unpredictably slow is that it is saying a trillion trillion "hail Marys" in the background.
Intel will have copied these features and have similar problems.
No, the thousands of people he was talking about are Microsoft employees. For them, the current state of the product translates to almost infinite job security.
I would question whether Google even has a monopoly on search. Having the largest numbers does not a monopoly make.
They certainly don't have a monopoly on anything else. They are beaten easily by Facebook, Myspace, MS Office, Hotmail, Yahoo in areas where there is direct competition for specific products.
Why not just judge a company on what they HAVE done rather than on what they MIGHT do?
The reason Microsoft is still where it is is that people have not applied that principle. On the other hand, a company simply achieving a 51 percent market share doesn't make them unstoppable. Add to that the fact that it would be difficult or impossible for everyone on Earth to coordinate their product selections so that no company ever achieves a 51 percent market share.
I can't think of anything Google could do (other than buying Microsoft) that would lock users into their search technology, and certainly not their web page tool.
Likewise, I wouldn't have a problem using MS Office, if and only if I could use my preferred operating system (Linux) to run it. Office locks you into Windows; you only get full use of Live if you use Office and Windows; you can read your Hotmail with an offline reader as long as that offline reader is vended by MS. If you don't see a difference in the way Microsoft and Google do business, then you are not paying much attention.
I don't have a problem with people attacking Google when they screw up, but somewhere along the way they need to demonstrate that they're not just another Microsoft astroturfer. Comments with supporting evidence are much less likely to be modded troll or flamebait.
Let's agree to clean up the monopolists we already have, then worry about stopping the potential ones.
You mean the same way the smart people at Microsoft have dealt with viruses, spyware, adware, and so on?
The problem is not with the people at Facebook, the problem is with the users of Facebook, who may not be stupid either, but they are most likely ignorant of how to build a web page, run a blog, mailing lists an so on.
Facebook and the like automate for the "average" user all the Internet goodies that us bleeding edgers have been playing with for years. There is nothing in Facebook, Myspace or Orkut that I couldn't have done with my own web page, blog, scripts, etc. as far back as the mid-90s. They've just packaged it and put a name on it (and probably filed patents on it for all I know) for "the masses".
If like most users of Windows, Facebook users just complain about security issues and never "vote with their feet" there will be no reason for those not-stupid people at Facebook to improve things. In fact, since ignoring security and privacy can have a beneficial impact for advertisers (again, assuming users don't see fit to walk) there will nothing but PR campaigns to reassure users while at the same time doing little or nothing to actually solve the problem.
The issue is not how smart they are, but how much you trust them. Personally from what I've read about them so far, my answer is: "Not very much".
My response was to cancel my original account before I had populated it with very much information and open a new account with a fake name and nothing of interest to the company or its advertisers. I've yet to hear of a great number of other people doing the same, although I suspect a lot of people who have got a clue will just avoid using it until that is the only way to communicate with their grandchildren (if it gets to that point).
You can't have "Brown-Outs" on the Internets, it's TUBES Dammit!
If you need any help telling the real consultants from the phony ones, just contact me, I'm a Consultant Consultant, although our industry association is considering a name change to "Consultant 3.0".
Thx
Not so sure about that. I personally think that computers should have become "invisible" appliances several years ago. The only thing that prevented that was the already widespread use of Windows, especially in the business environment. There were such machines made several years ago that were adequate for doing e-mail and basic web browsing. But because they couldn't read complexly formated e-mail messages or play certain videos and sound files, thanks to the hundreds of variations on how such files are formatted (and encrypted) such devices would only be suitable to a small minority of users.
Oh it will happen eventually, and the hardware and software vendors love the fact that it will take dozens of more product itterations before consumers begin to settle on anything. But the appliance computer, which I think will end up being a very small (and very inexpensive) laptop type device is beginning to take shape (OLPC and Ausus EEE PC being good first cuts). Devices smaller than that will be find for phones, cameras, and address books, but I've yet to see any keyboard replacement technique that would not discourage me from posting a message even this short on such a tiny device. Until voice recognition is perfected the appliance PC will need a keyboard.
Yes, TVs have processors in them these days as do dishwashers etc., but we were talking about that when I was in school in the 70's. I don't consider any device with a processor chip a computing device (and certainly not a PC). Let's just say that the "C" in "PC" can stand for either "Communication" or "Computing". A device such as the iPhone (if it were less expensive at the checkout counter and as a monthly bill) would be an excellent example of a "Personal Communications" device. Camera, Phone, Address book, short text messages, etc, all covered adequately. But I don't think I'd do my taxes on it, or write a book, and unless they sold for $9 I wouldn't want to think about how in a years time it wouldn't hold a charge as long as when it was new. In fact I'm getting pretty bloody tired of all the rechargeable devices I have already, they actually make special pieces of furniture now to hold such devices, it has gotten ridiculous.
PC as in "Personal Computing" though will always be a superset of the other type of thing. If a camera, phone, text messaging software, etc. is as cheap as it SHOULD be to put in a portable device (of which you should only need ONE) then you might as well tack it on to your laptop type device as well. Get rid of the moving parts, optimize power consumption on the display and these things can run for house on battery, but will MOSTLY be used while plugged in, and I THINK, should be able to draw power from multiple sources from telephone cables, USB plugs, or wall wart, basically whatever you happen to be closest to.
Really, once we get to the point where we don't need the latest Intel or AMD processor to do basic stuff (a point I maintained we reached quite a few years ago) all of this is doable.
As a consumer, I'll continue pinching my pennies, even though I don't always need to. My hope is that the eventually something like a Google phone will blow the bottom out of that market, and the Asus EEE PC once it hits the stores is probably going to replace my laptop (I'm still skeptical about the size of the keyboard on that though).
I think the article states that that was not an option.
Using a free disposable e-mail account would of course be a good idea, but the committee has all the real names in a file somewhere and who knows what dumb-ass things they are doing with it.
I'm quite sure that some of the people involved don't have a clue about setting up e-mail AT ALL on their own. They use their government provided e-mail capabilities because unless they have gotten a friend, relative, or government contractor to set up their home machine for them they are totally lost. (And before anyone gets all riled up, there are many people not in government who fall into the same category.)
Since there may be people (no there most certainly are people) reading this who don't know any better than what you are suggesting, could you provide some data to support your claims above?
Now if you are considering all of the federal agencies (Labor, HHS, State and so on) simply extensions of the White House staff your assertion would be correct, but that is hardly an accurate representation of how our government works.
Congressional staffs as a whole are huge with respect to the White House. I think the average staff size for the Senate is in the hundreds (per Senator).
What you fail to mention is that in addition to the staff that each politician brings with them, people, in other words, dedicated to that politicians well-being, there are hired hourly employees that are provided by "beltway bandits" that bid for and win multi-year contracts to provide such services. They work in ALL of government, at the White House, in Congress, and in all of the Federal agencies. Maybe one of these people made this error, and I can assure you that if that is the case, they are much more concerned about losing their job over it than they are about which party benefited.
I don't have the numbers at my fingertips (but I can find them.. show me yours first) but if you want to be really impressed at how fast the federal bureaucracy has grown, compare White House and congressional staff sizes now with what they were a hundred, or even fifty years ago. Our government hasn't benefited AT ALL from automation, in fact from parts of it I have studied first-hand automation seems to have served as an excuse to hire even more people (not being subject to having successfully make and sell a product for income) and the public only hears about a tiny fraction of the "Doh" moments that go on in the process.
I think that's because They also control the weather. As the comet gets closer They will all retreat to their underground shelters and the skys will clear up. We should be able to see the comet in all its glory for at least a few hours before it hits.
"but we think that it adds value to the Facebook experience and to users' overall news experience.'"
Something needs to add value. The S/N ratio on Facebook is pretty horrible. At least none of my friends, or groups I've joined, etc. are doing anything beyond tinkering with it.
If they want to get serious about being a useful TOOL rather than TOY, I'd say the first step would be to give every Facebook user an e-mail address that can be used to communicate with the outside world (both ways). While I might not be interested in using this as yet another e-mail address, if it had forwarding capabilities I could direct such messages as "someone has thrown a food item at you" to the appropriate bin, while at the same time get actual content containing messages from friends who are insisting on using it as a replacement for e-mail. I could also respond to such messages using my e-mail method of choice.