The basis for your comment is esteem for the skills required to develop software. I wonder, however, if you underestimate the skills required to write and publish effective criticism.
The fundamental nature of open source software is that if you care enough about it to host a blog criticizing it, you will have already deployed a level of skill and effort that could improve the software itself.
You must not remember the days when everybody loved that scrappy upstate Bill Gates.
That is because there were no such days. From the very beginning, having stolen CP/M and computer time at a university to get their business running, Microsoft has always been regarded as a band of criminals largely devoid of real know-how. The fact that Google and Apple are not targets of widespread hatred in the tech community is evidence that there is more to the anti-Microsoft sentiment than simply rooting for the underdog.
Microsoft hasn't mattered in 10 years. Google is on top of the tech game now and everyone knows it. Apple is expensive and pretentious, but remains, for the most part, respected. The best Microsoft can hope for with regard to public sentiment is to transition from outright, boiling hatred to pity. If anti-Microsoft sentiment were the fickle leftist hatred of success that it is cast to be, then why would we also hate SCO, which is anything but successful?
The hatred of Microsoft is well earned, and its reasons go back to the very beginning of the company. If the SCO experience is any indication, it will long outlast the company's success.
The incompetence game, that is. Each organization has a conspiracy of incompetence to some degree. There is an understood agreement to collectively hide each other's lack of ability and/or performance. The thing that such a conspiracy most fears is someone who is thorough, effective, and right most of the time. Computer geeks who developed their skills with unforgiving, cantankerous technology such as was deployed between the 60s and the early 90s came up in a very Darwinian environment. Machines don't play the game, either. If you fuck up the dip switch settings on an old ISA modem, clippy isn't going to tell you about it when you reboot the computer. In the days before Google, you had to simply know that you'd created an IRQ conflict.
It is this core cultural conflict that forever separates first generation computer geeks from the rest of the business world. We don't play the conspiracy of incompetence game. We cannot sit in a 10 hour meeting that accomplishes nothing other than to fill calendars and create paperwork. We tend to think in terms of the very real effort required to do our jobs properly, and this puts us at odds with almost everyone else.
Interestingly, I think this is one key advantage that Indian outsourcees have. No matter how good they are (and some are very good), they will gratefully and enthusiastically play the game. They will gleefully sit in that meeting, toil away for months on "bridges to nowhere" projects, and participate in the game of hiding the resultant culpability. I've often wondered as to the reason for this. In my more racist moments, I have thought that it is the product of economic desperation. "If some stupid American wants to pay me like royalty to sit in an eterna-meeting, it sure as hell beats harvesting rice by hand in feces infested rice paddies." But I've come to think of it more from the Indian perspective. Consider the experience Indians must have of US corporations through outsourcing agencies and call centers. They see collossally stupid organizations filled with very stupid people doing very stupid things. It is no wonder they think of America as a swarming sea of incompetence. It would be quite natural, given their frame of reference, to keep their smarts behind closed doors at home in Bangalore, and to outwardly speak the language of idiocy when on the phone. Given this perspective, they would quite obviously see the game for what it is and take to it quite naturally, even if they have no incompetence to hide. Where we would see working on a pointless, tedious, meaningless project that is doomed to failure from the start as being complicit in incompetence, they would see it as their bread and butter. To them, switching gears to incompetence mode would be as easy as switching gears to speaking in English.
Are they actually walking through sodium oxide snow? It looks like the sodium leaked, reacted with the air to produce sodium oxide, which is rather violently corrosive to things like humans, even if they are in a fire suit. I personally stay away from any chemical that is so unstable that it wants to be sodium hydroxide.
How are they going to deorbit it? Getting out of an orbit as high as the ISS requires at least 100 m/s of delta V. Do they have a slingshot or something to launch it with? Where's the telemetry and onboard webcam links?
Then you must either grow leaves and conduct photosynthesis, or learn to eat methane.
Even if you rule out natural selection, pretty much every food item we eat has been genetically modified over thousands of years by artificial selection. Have you ever seen a wild cow?
Why in the world would you talk up your next product just weeks after the launch of your current one? What kind of confidence must such a statement betray about the expected market acceptance of Vista? You're telling me to entrust my computer, my data, and my business on Vista, but you prefer to stake your company's image and reputation on vaporware instead?
Content companies feel threatened by the fact that they are no longer required to distribute information, including their content. They subsequently invent DRM, an artificial restriction on machines they don't make running software they don't write. It is the historical equivalent of the horse and buggy lobby telling the railroad companies what they can and cannot carry on freight trains. The absurdity and malice of DRM should shock the conscience of anyone who knows anything about technology.
But RMS is the nut for throwing his weight against it?
QC? As in Quality Control? That is the most ironic comment I've ever seen on Slashdot. Trying to say that antivirus is quality control for a computer is like saying that a fire department is quality control for a house.
It looks to me like IE7 did pretty damn well (and this is coming from a linux/firefoxista). The author actually had to use firefox during the process and (unrelated) toolbars were actually installed in his firefox browser.
Slashdot Mirror
The basis for your comment is esteem for the skills required to develop software. I wonder, however, if you underestimate the skills required to write and publish effective criticism. The fundamental nature of open source software is that if you care enough about it to host a blog criticizing it, you will have already deployed a level of skill and effort that could improve the software itself.
If you are in a position to criticize Linux, you are in a position to contribute to it. Where do you think all the Linux developers come from?
Sorry, it's a dupe...
Ironic?
I guess this means that the sea org finally has an enemy.
The very first thing I wondered after reading this was how many Pringles cans would turn skyward.
FTFA:
"At a news conference announcing Childs' arrest, District Attorney Kamala Harris was tightlipped about what his motive may have been."
I think there's more going on here than we're being told.
Reiserfs is a killer file system.
You must not remember the days when everybody loved that scrappy upstate Bill Gates.
That is because there were no such days. From the very beginning, having stolen CP/M and computer time at a university to get their business running, Microsoft has always been regarded as a band of criminals largely devoid of real know-how. The fact that Google and Apple are not targets of widespread hatred in the tech community is evidence that there is more to the anti-Microsoft sentiment than simply rooting for the underdog.
Microsoft hasn't mattered in 10 years. Google is on top of the tech game now and everyone knows it. Apple is expensive and pretentious, but remains, for the most part, respected. The best Microsoft can hope for with regard to public sentiment is to transition from outright, boiling hatred to pity. If anti-Microsoft sentiment were the fickle leftist hatred of success that it is cast to be, then why would we also hate SCO, which is anything but successful?
The hatred of Microsoft is well earned, and its reasons go back to the very beginning of the company. If the SCO experience is any indication, it will long outlast the company's success.
The incompetence game, that is. Each organization has a conspiracy of incompetence to some degree. There is an understood agreement to collectively hide each other's lack of ability and/or performance. The thing that such a conspiracy most fears is someone who is thorough, effective, and right most of the time. Computer geeks who developed their skills with unforgiving, cantankerous technology such as was deployed between the 60s and the early 90s came up in a very Darwinian environment. Machines don't play the game, either. If you fuck up the dip switch settings on an old ISA modem, clippy isn't going to tell you about it when you reboot the computer. In the days before Google, you had to simply know that you'd created an IRQ conflict.
It is this core cultural conflict that forever separates first generation computer geeks from the rest of the business world. We don't play the conspiracy of incompetence game. We cannot sit in a 10 hour meeting that accomplishes nothing other than to fill calendars and create paperwork. We tend to think in terms of the very real effort required to do our jobs properly, and this puts us at odds with almost everyone else.
Interestingly, I think this is one key advantage that Indian outsourcees have. No matter how good they are (and some are very good), they will gratefully and enthusiastically play the game. They will gleefully sit in that meeting, toil away for months on "bridges to nowhere" projects, and participate in the game of hiding the resultant culpability. I've often wondered as to the reason for this. In my more racist moments, I have thought that it is the product of economic desperation. "If some stupid American wants to pay me like royalty to sit in an eterna-meeting, it sure as hell beats harvesting rice by hand in feces infested rice paddies." But I've come to think of it more from the Indian perspective. Consider the experience Indians must have of US corporations through outsourcing agencies and call centers. They see collossally stupid organizations filled with very stupid people doing very stupid things. It is no wonder they think of America as a swarming sea of incompetence. It would be quite natural, given their frame of reference, to keep their smarts behind closed doors at home in Bangalore, and to outwardly speak the language of idiocy when on the phone. Given this perspective, they would quite obviously see the game for what it is and take to it quite naturally, even if they have no incompetence to hide. Where we would see working on a pointless, tedious, meaningless project that is doomed to failure from the start as being complicit in incompetence, they would see it as their bread and butter. To them, switching gears to incompetence mode would be as easy as switching gears to speaking in English.
Are they actually walking through sodium oxide snow? It looks like the sodium leaked, reacted with the air to produce sodium oxide, which is rather violently corrosive to things like humans, even if they are in a fire suit. I personally stay away from any chemical that is so unstable that it wants to be sodium hydroxide.
How are they going to deorbit it? Getting out of an orbit as high as the ISS requires at least 100 m/s of delta V. Do they have a slingshot or something to launch it with? Where's the telemetry and onboard webcam links?
Then you must either grow leaves and conduct photosynthesis, or learn to eat methane. Even if you rule out natural selection, pretty much every food item we eat has been genetically modified over thousands of years by artificial selection. Have you ever seen a wild cow?
echo 255 > /proc/flight/control/elevator
(screaming kid suddenly thrown into ceiling)
2007 was my first full year as an atheist. I had been Christian for 25 years.
I just bought my first piece of music in 6 years. My recording industry boycott is now over. Nicely done, guys.
So, firing laser beams into fuel tanks is a safety feature now?
Why in the world would you talk up your next product just weeks after the launch of your current one? What kind of confidence must such a statement betray about the expected market acceptance of Vista? You're telling me to entrust my computer, my data, and my business on Vista, but you prefer to stake your company's image and reputation on vaporware instead?
Shocking.
What? Who is asking for Windows licenses? That has nothing at all to do with the question.
What, your network only has 8 bit octets? Ours go to 11.
Content companies feel threatened by the fact that they are no longer required to distribute information, including their content. They subsequently invent DRM, an artificial restriction on machines they don't make running software they don't write. It is the historical equivalent of the horse and buggy lobby telling the railroad companies what they can and cannot carry on freight trains. The absurdity and malice of DRM should shock the conscience of anyone who knows anything about technology.
But RMS is the nut for throwing his weight against it?
QC? As in Quality Control? That is the most ironic comment I've ever seen on Slashdot. Trying to say that antivirus is quality control for a computer is like saying that a fire department is quality control for a house.
Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I certainly wouldn't use any software written by a felon.
(That noise is not me giggling insanely waiting for someone to bite. Really)
It looks to me like IE7 did pretty damn well (and this is coming from a linux/firefoxista). The author actually had to use firefox during the process and (unrelated) toolbars were actually installed in his firefox browser.
Computer viruses don't work like they used to.
I don't suppose anyone's considered the possible bad press over this...