speaking of NASA foulups, Remember this one? "(CNN) -- NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agency's team used the more conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation, according to a review finding released Thursday."
I used to work for an inbound call center whose major client was a RBOC's Internet service over DSL. We were given unreasonably short average and max call time criteria given how prevalent spyware was on their customers' PCs. The proportion of calls from people complaining of slow surfing increased during the year I worked there, and as I recall, spyware was the culprit in the overwhelming majority of situations, although our troubleshooting scripts required us to waste precious minutes (thereby imperiling our jobs) checking for other causes before we finally worked our way down to the "let's clear your cookies and your cache" part of the script and advised on spyware. Worse, we weren't allowed for liability reasons to recommend any particular antivirus or antispyware tools, only to say "There's lots of 'em; get online and search for reviews." Having to educate customers about spyware is hell on your average handle time.
It's almost enough to make an unhappy US technical writer move to Australia, go on welfare, and begin a second career writing and editing for the Linux Documentation Project.
How is this incident conclusively a technology failure?
I read the article, and this sounds more like a human failure than a technological one. How did spotting and reporting three whole brigades require anything more advanced than, say, World War II-era technology? It seems reasonable to assume that a manuver element the size of a battalion, "at the very tip U.S. Army's final lunge north toward Baghdad" as described in the article, approaching a key strongpoint like that bridge, would've had some sort of reconnaisance available to it. If any air assets were available before 0300, they could've wrapped a note "Enemy in strength approaching objective" around a rock or something and dropped it on the bttn's position, for crying out loud. Or dropped flares, or sent a runner, or something.
I won't say there aren't problems with the technology, but from this article I can't tell whether this is a reconnaisance failure, a communications problem, or command-and-control breakdown. "Zero information getting to me" could be the result of a whole lot of different problems.
I'm sick of being unemployed, but I'm glad I don't have to work for a company whose high-profile CEO publicly makes these kinds of unwarranted assumptions. Nowhere in the article does Ballmer clearly identify how software prices have any relationship to hardware prices.
But lower prices have become part of Microsoft's strategy for gaining market share in developing nations. In recent months, the software maker has announced plans to introduce low-cost "starter editions" of Windows XP into countries including India, Russia and Thailand. These versions will be bundled only with entry-level PCs and will not be available for retail sale.
That's the closest he seems to come to linking the issues of software costs -- in this case, the cost of the OS -- to hardware costs. In the linked article, the software is described as being available only in Hindi. Even more significantly, says that linked article,... The ability to do home networking and to create multiple user accounts on a single PC has been removed, while display resolution is capped at a maximum of 800 by 600 pixels. More important, users can run only three programs or have three windows opened at once, a limitation that research company Gartner believes could frustrate users and drive them to buy bootleg copies of Windows XP instead.
So, is the cost of an OS really the problem? Well, you can get by with OpenOffice software instead of Windows, find open-source chat and email programs, and compute away.
By the way...concerning everybody's favorite free (as in beer) software, the article says
The Microsoft CEO bristled at the suggestion that Linux is gaining in popularity as a client operating system at the expense of Windows. "There's no appreciable amount of Linux on client systems anywhere in the world," he said.
Verification of this assertion is left as an exercise for the reader.
Back when home PCs were an expensive novelty, my dad, who then worked at Texas Instruments, thought that the TI 99/4A ought to be given away for free with every purchase of an arbitrary suite of software -- this was before we all started using them for spreadsheets and word processing, and long before the Internet became commonplace. I wonder if Ballmer would dare to try to give away hardware pre-loaded with Micrsoft OSes and apps, charging people only for the software. If he did, I predict that given rampant piracy and the Open Software initiative, his attempt would flop.
You've enjoyed success with your increasingly lengthy and richly detailed novels, yet it's your short stories Hack the Spew and The Great Simoleon Caper that still resonate for me. Do you envision returning to the short-story format at some point?
If Microsoft offered an eBook (undoubtedly in a proprietary format) for a really low price (since they could afford to take a short-term hit on revenue in order to create and flood a ready market), could they get eBooks in everybody's hands?
This isn't just a rant: I'm hoping people more knowledgeable than I can shed some light on this for me.
I, an admitted Linux dilettante*, am more than a little anxious about this newfangled Fedora thingy.
I've got the binaries-only user install of RH9 on my box. I'm unclear as to what my maintenance and upgrade path will be now that, as a home user, I have to choose between paying big coin for RHEL or accepting Fedora if I want to stick with RH.
What will happen to up2date? Is that little gem going to be supported by the Fedora community, or will I to have to keep my figurative ear to the ground to find out about new versions and fixes/patches? At least in Windows I have an update manager.
*I still haven't wholeheartedly embraced Linux because I need to keep Win2k going for my wife -- put it down to weak evangelism on my part and inertia and xenophobia on hers. Not to mention, how the heck do you make FrameMaker work under Linux?
"...Like two spent swimmers that do cling together/And thus choke their art..."
Not that Microsoft is in danger of going down the tubes anytime soon, but this has been a real pain in the neck for them and they're better off not having to combat the.Net/Java thing. Let Java be Java, and let.Net be, uh, well, let it be.
It's sad to see what kind of shape Sun is in lately, but maybe they'll be able to focus on being a business instead of a party to a cancerous lawsuit.
I looked at one of the demos, and it's pretty cute, but this mediated reality stuff still leaves me cold. William Gibson spoiled me; I want to jack in and have a more synesthetic experience than just watching pixels on a flat screen.
Cautionary lesson, then: First thing you do when inheriting a boss' old PC is make him stand there while you show him you're pressing the ENTER key for the command FORMAT C: so you can tell him truthfully you've just voluntarily blown away any legacy files he may have left on your computer.
...most of whom are totally oblivious to spyware until I begin my spiel. I support DSL customers for an ISP who shall remain nameless. One of the biggest issues we struggle with on our calls is performance issues when surfing. (Or, in extreme cases, not.)
Customers call up irate because their browsers seem to be slow or they can't pull Web pages at all, and they want to know if the network is having problems. After the obligatory trip to the speed-check site to prove that their DSL connection is running at normal speed, it's time to explain what's going on inside their computers.
I usually prescribe Ad-Aware to my customers, but too many times, they'll mention they're already using something that popped up in an advertisement while they were surfing. It's all I can do to keep from saying, "Think, man, think! Didn't you get the least bit suspicious that someone offered this 'help' to you from out of the blue?"
There's a fine, often invisible line, between 'humorous' and 'offensive' -- and David Chang, Ghettopoly's creator, seems to have blundered over it. Hell, I admit to being brought up by pretty racist parents, but some descriptions of the game I've found in stories on the Web made me cringe. I think if Saturday Night Live had done a skit about creating a game like this, it would've made a lot of people squirm.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the way I remembered it too -- Greedo never got a shot off; Han gutshot him under the table. One round expended.
speaking of NASA foulups, Remember this one? "(CNN) -- NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agency's team used the more conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation, according to a review finding released Thursday."
I used to work for an inbound call center whose major client was a RBOC's Internet service over DSL. We were given unreasonably short average and max call time criteria given how prevalent spyware was on their customers' PCs. The proportion of calls from people complaining of slow surfing increased during the year I worked there, and as I recall, spyware was the culprit in the overwhelming majority of situations, although our troubleshooting scripts required us to waste precious minutes (thereby imperiling our jobs) checking for other causes before we finally worked our way down to the "let's clear your cookies and your cache" part of the script and advised on spyware. Worse, we weren't allowed for liability reasons to recommend any particular antivirus or antispyware tools, only to say "There's lots of 'em; get online and search for reviews." Having to educate customers about spyware is hell on your average handle time.
Thanks to the Millenium Simulation, the latter half of the old university-final-exam problem is now achievable.
The USN has has an Automatic Carrier Landing System for years now, and I've seen references to a GPS-enabled Joint Precision Approach Landing System to replace it -- they've tested it by having an F/A-18 land aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt with it. Apparently the novelty here is that the British are developing a system of their own.
I wish I could mod this entire article (-1, Troll) -- it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
It's almost enough to make an unhappy US technical writer move to Australia, go on welfare, and begin a second career writing and editing for the Linux Documentation Project.
Almost.
How is this incident conclusively a technology failure?
I read the article, and this sounds more like a human failure than a technological one. How did spotting and reporting three whole brigades require anything more advanced than, say, World War II-era technology? It seems reasonable to assume that a manuver element the size of a battalion, "at the very tip U.S. Army's final lunge north toward Baghdad" as described in the article, approaching a key strongpoint like that bridge, would've had some sort of reconnaisance available to it. If any air assets were available before 0300, they could've wrapped a note "Enemy in strength approaching objective" around a rock or something and dropped it on the bttn's position, for crying out loud. Or dropped flares, or sent a runner, or something.
I won't say there aren't problems with the technology, but from this article I can't tell whether this is a reconnaisance failure, a communications problem, or command-and-control breakdown. "Zero information getting to me" could be the result of a whole lot of different problems.
I'm sick of being unemployed, but I'm glad I don't have to work for a company whose high-profile CEO publicly makes these kinds of unwarranted assumptions. Nowhere in the article does Ballmer clearly identify how software prices have any relationship to hardware prices.
... The ability to do home networking and to create multiple user accounts on a single PC has been removed, while display resolution is capped at a maximum of 800 by 600 pixels. More important, users can run only three programs or have three windows opened at once, a limitation that research company Gartner believes could frustrate users and drive them to buy bootleg copies of Windows XP instead.
But lower prices have become part of Microsoft's strategy for gaining market share in developing nations. In recent months, the software maker has announced plans to introduce low-cost "starter editions" of Windows XP into countries including India, Russia and Thailand. These versions will be bundled only with entry-level PCs and will not be available for retail sale.
That's the closest he seems to come to linking the issues of software costs -- in this case, the cost of the OS -- to hardware costs. In the linked article, the software is described as being available only in Hindi. Even more significantly, says that linked article,
So, is the cost of an OS really the problem? Well, you can get by with OpenOffice software instead of Windows, find open-source chat and email programs, and compute away.
By the way...concerning everybody's favorite free (as in beer) software, the article says
The Microsoft CEO bristled at the suggestion that Linux is gaining in popularity as a client operating system at the expense of Windows. "There's no appreciable amount of Linux on client systems anywhere in the world," he said.
Verification of this assertion is left as an exercise for the reader.
Back when home PCs were an expensive novelty, my dad, who then worked at Texas Instruments, thought that the TI 99/4A ought to be given away for free with every purchase of an arbitrary suite of software -- this was before we all started using them for spreadsheets and word processing, and long before the Internet became commonplace. I wonder if Ballmer would dare to try to give away hardware pre-loaded with Micrsoft OSes and apps, charging people only for the software. If he did, I predict that given rampant piracy and the Open Software initiative, his attempt would flop.
I can hardly wait for Windows to do for the family minivan what it once famously did for the USS Yorktown.
You've enjoyed success with your increasingly lengthy and richly detailed novels, yet it's your short stories Hack the Spew and The Great Simoleon Caper that still resonate for me. Do you envision returning to the short-story format at some point?
Heck, I'd like to read a sequel to The Diamond Age. What happens to Nell next?
40 MB TIFF my @$$.
If Microsoft offered an eBook (undoubtedly in a proprietary format) for a really low price (since they could afford to take a short-term hit on revenue in order to create and flood a ready market), could they get eBooks in everybody's hands?
This isn't just a rant: I'm hoping people more knowledgeable than I can shed some light on this for me.
I, an admitted Linux dilettante*, am more than a little anxious about this newfangled Fedora thingy.
I've got the binaries-only user install of RH9 on my box. I'm unclear as to what my maintenance and upgrade path will be now that, as a home user, I have to choose between paying big coin for RHEL or accepting Fedora if I want to stick with RH.
What will happen to up2date? Is that little gem going to be supported by the Fedora community, or will I to have to keep my figurative ear to the ground to find out about new versions and fixes/patches? At least in Windows I have an update manager.
*I still haven't wholeheartedly embraced Linux because I need to keep Win2k going for my wife -- put it down to weak evangelism on my part and inertia and xenophobia on hers. Not to mention, how the heck do you make FrameMaker work under Linux?
Ummm...shouldn't that subtitle be a Windows desktop for Linux users?
I'm reading at +5, so apologies if this is redundant.
"...Like two spent swimmers that do cling together/And thus choke their art..."
.Net/Java thing. Let Java be Java, and let .Net be, uh, well, let it be.
Not that Microsoft is in danger of going down the tubes anytime soon, but this has been a real pain in the neck for them and they're better off not having to combat the
It's sad to see what kind of shape Sun is in lately, but maybe they'll be able to focus on being a business instead of a party to a cancerous lawsuit.
Now just add some powered arms and you've got yourself a loader Sigourney Weaver would be proud of.
I looked at one of the demos, and it's pretty cute, but this mediated reality stuff still leaves me cold. William Gibson spoiled me; I want to jack in and have a more synesthetic experience than just watching pixels on a flat screen.
Especially with that one brunette.
Cautionary lesson, then: First thing you do when inheriting a boss' old PC is make him stand there while you show him you're pressing the ENTER key for the command FORMAT C: so you can tell him truthfully you've just voluntarily blown away any legacy files he may have left on your computer.
Time to create a new icon for Lindows stories, since it's beginning to look like Mike Robertson's brainchild may have some staying power...
...most of whom are totally oblivious to spyware until I begin my spiel. I support DSL customers for an ISP who shall remain nameless. One of the biggest issues we struggle with on our calls is performance issues when surfing. (Or, in extreme cases, not.)
Customers call up irate because their browsers seem to be slow or they can't pull Web pages at all, and they want to know if the network is having problems. After the obligatory trip to the speed-check site to prove that their DSL connection is running at normal speed, it's time to explain what's going on inside their computers.
I usually prescribe Ad-Aware to my customers, but too many times, they'll mention they're already using something that popped up in an advertisement while they were surfing. It's all I can do to keep from saying, "Think, man, think! Didn't you get the least bit suspicious that someone offered this 'help' to you from out of the blue?"
There's a fine, often invisible line, between 'humorous' and 'offensive' -- and David Chang, Ghettopoly's creator, seems to have blundered over it. Hell, I admit to being brought up by pretty racist parents, but some descriptions of the game I've found in stories on the Web made me cringe. I think if Saturday Night Live had done a skit about creating a game like this, it would've made a lot of people squirm.
My little boy will be sorely disappointed that the Star Wars line won't be continued, but then, he didn't hate Jar Jar Binks, so go figure.
When I used to daydream that one day, technical writers would be as valuable to a company as programmers, this isn't quite what I had in mind.