if MS is forced to use a UNIX based OS derivative... it is endgame as far as dominance is concerned. That is a lose situation for MS, not a win.
That is certainly a loss for Bill Gates and perhaps the rest of the original cadre of MS corporate officers. Throughout the 80s and 90s, MS was steered consistently toward a "vision" of dominance that really wasn't profit oriented. MS has consistently passed up the opportunity to make profits in its efforts to become the dominant player in different digital markets. It has thrown more money down the toilet to prevent someone else from succeeding in an area where it wasn't good enough to win on merit than many companies had earned during those 20 years.
When MS gives up this foolishness and starts acting like a profit-oriented business, it will almost certainly lose its tarnish and become a respectable member of the business community.
That will be a long-term winning situation for MS. The only losers will be Gates (who has already thrown in the towel), Balmer, and the rest of the original dreamers with their juvenile fantasies about attaining world dominance.
That was originally spelled "FUBAR". It was an acronym that first gained broad usage among USA Quartermasters in World War II concerning discrepancies between supplies requested and supplies delivered. Then it was adopted in the 1960s by early COBOL programmers to describe the results of changing project specifications after big chunks had already been coded. It loosely stands for "Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition", and is closely associated with SNAFU: "Situation Normal: All Fouled Up".
I do enjoy knowing that the underlying concept of foobar has now become firmly entrenched in analyst/programmer teachings. There is no question that the subliminal message that too much foo will cause an irreversible state of bar is valuable. Understanding the relationship between foo and bar and FU and BAR is critical to developing good software.
I've sometimes wondered why foobar came down to us through C language teachings while nothing like snafoo has survived. There are some large software houses around that could be described as places of snafoo. But my puzzlement has never been strong enough to motivate me to look into the matter.
I thought foopaw was similar enough to foobar to trigger a different set of reactions than the ones seen in this thread. I have enjoyed the thread quite a bit-- it just didn't go in quite the direction I expected.
Am I the only one that thinks to themselves, "One of these days, some really smart person is going to come out with a new and better theory of reality that reveals all this quantum mechanics stuff to be a bunch of quackery."?
Taking the second thing first, QM is all a bunch of quarkery
oh, wait... that's not quite what was written in Parent Post.
Well, on to first things. Parent Post posits that some "really smart person" will someday come up with a "new and better theory of reality".
Assuming that happens tomorrow, how would this RSP communicate his findings to the rest of us in a way that we could understand? Our ability to comprehend is finite and bound by the limitations of our language and maths. If an RSP used a time machine to travel from the distant future to our current time, and tried to explain the Great TOE (Theory Of Everything) to us, he would either be dismissed as a harmless nut or forced to eat mind distorting chemicals since his efforts to communicate would be seen as threatening to himself or to others. Meanwhile, his time machine would be confiscated for study, and after the magic smoke was let out of it while taking it apart, it would be declared a fraud since it wouldn't work when re-assembled.
To make the point perfectly clear, any "new and better theory of reality" that might be presented at this point in time could not be understood within the framework of today's physics, so it could not be recognized as a valid theory of physics.
Basically, we're stuck with QM on one side, and relativity on the other. Which means that when it comes to jobs as theoretical physicists, only dancers need apply. Because physics is a realm of human thought where only persons willing to dance between vastly different frames of thought can do any good work. There are a few persons around who have the mental agility and grace do the dance well: Stephen Hawking comes to mind. He is a Hero in oh so many ways.
You are all off-topic. Where the hell are the moderators?
Go back to O.P. and read closely. You can't help but see that the progression from discussing Vista as a costly marketing failure has led naturally to discussing Coca Cola's failed introduction of "New Coke" (and the implied discussions about the moral prostitution of Bill Cosby in selling the stuff on prime time tv), which is presented as a very similar marketing failure. The case is made that in both instances the corporations purposefully set out to destroy their existing massive customer base by removing their best selling products and replacing them with products that the market quickly decided were inferior. An interesting extension that I had never heard before is that Coca Cola may have done this deliberately (screwing Bill Cosby both ways) as part of an ulterior campaign to introduce the New Classic Coke, which otherwise would have been rejected outright.
"New Classic Coke" replaced sugar, the traditional nemesis of all Good Moms Throughout The Land, with the new and more horrific nemesis: high fructose corn syrup. Twice the sweet at half the cost, maybe fewer dental caries, but much more asthma and obesity, and all kinds of other health and ecology impacts that we'll discover over the 10 years or so. But the profit margins are so much better with HFCS, and then there's the high margin tag-along markets like asthma inhalers and diet foods.
There were significant asides about the government subsidizing several aspects of HFCS production and managing to do so while projecting the image that it was subsidizing traditional farmers, not multibillion dollar chemical corporations that have bought or leased much of the USA corn belt. These were not directly relevant, it is true: there is no indication that Microsoft has been accepting government subsidies, or even hinting that they would like them. On the contrary, Microsoft would prefer to buy government policies.
So the discerning reader is now prepared to question whether Vista is nothing more nor less than a strawman set up by Microsoft as part of a larger marketing campaign that will involve the announcement of "Classic Windows XP" later this year.
Classic Windows XP will provide all the features that Windows XP provides, but with all the actual processing done on Microsoft's own servers, using its proprietary tunneling protocols, encryptions, and secret handshakes to move data back and forth between client machine and Redmond. Most computer systems built after 2005 will be capable of running Classic Windows XP, although the addition of a second 250 GB hard drive will be necessary in some cases. The footprint of Classic Windows XP on ram and hard disk will be no more than 20% greater than most of today's Windows XP installations, but there will be a major shift in internal resource allocation:
30% for providing the very best possible superduper GUI unlike anything you have ever experienced
50% for protecting resources provided by Microsoft and Preferred Vendors from being stolen or abused, and for other DRM
40% for handling data exchanges between client machine and Redmond's Answer Fulfillment Suite
10% for miscellaneous other stuff.
Classic Windows XP will perform significantly more slowly than today's Windows XP since transferring all that data back and forth to Redmond over those tiny innerweb tubes will slow things down. However it will look pretty much like today's Windows XP, and people will have forgotten how fast today's operating system is by the time the "Classic" version becomes available.
So, this summary should demonstrate to everyone that this thread has actually been on target all along.
Those corn growing fuckers need to be put out of business, the fucking leeches.
Aside from the potty-mouth nature of the expression, I don't disagree. But the fsking leeches being referred to are employees of Monsanto and other Big Corporations with significant agribusiness divisions. Monsanto is particularly noteworthy since it also produces the ethanol and HFCS, and also does a lot of genetic manipulation of corn.
...corn subsidies encouraging farmers to grow corn syrup.
Note that most of those "farmers" are agribusiness divisions of major companies, such as Monsanto. Which also pushes genetically engineered corn, and produces ethanol and HFCS.
Re:Social hack - use "bullfight" for "speed trap".
on
Is Your GPS Naive?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Pity drivers' ability and attention span haven't kept pace...
Mod parent up.
Sane speed limits are based on the limits of human reaction times, the physics of inertia and friction, and patterns of traffic density, types of vehicles, and frequency of exceptional events (like toddlers chasing after balls that bounce into the street). Since signage cannot be changed on a minute by minute basis, posted speeds are often lower than what would be safe for the moment. That does not make them unreasonable, nor does it suggest that the driver, from his very limited point of view, should be deciding when he can break the speed limit and get away with it.
If and when a slashdot reader gets a license to drive, it binds him to a social contract that requires him to accept these limits. If he violates that contract, he needs to face sanctions. Those around him should also take note that this person does not abide by his agreements and is a risk in other areas, such as employment agreements, production of code that is free of time bombs and backdoors, etc, etc.
Some people do need color. Professionals and serious amateurs in the digital arts need their own color printers.
At the moment I'm a post-professional, serious amateur with about $3,000 invested in digital cameras, equipment, software, and supplies. I have a Canon i9900 that I think is wonderful: I could produce photorealistic prints up to 13 by 19 inches with it. But I usually don't; I like to digitally sculpt the images I get from the camera and usually only a few details remain photorealistic. I might spend a week or more working up an image in PaintShop Pro or the GIMP, and do a dozen or more test prints on cropped areas using different papers and printer settings before I'm ready to do a production run. When I'm in the mood, it is a very satisfying hobby.
The Canon i9900 uses 8 separate print cartridges that are priced at $12 each. Six of these I've been refilling myself for the past year or so using a kit from IMS that cost $18. I have not found a 3rd party supplier for the Red and Green inks, but they last about 5 times as long as the others. I have been very satisfied with the results from the reloaded cartridges, both for quality and resistance to fading or discoloring. I end up with funny colored fingers every now and then, but it is worth it.
I've run a lot of different papers through this printer, including a number of different watercolor papers. Some of these have very rich textures. I ruined the original print head by getting a little too wild with heavy papers, but I've gotten some incredible art done. But now that I'm no longer able to write things off as business expenses, I'm a lot less experimental and I'm getting a lot more life out of the print head.
Back to the point: anyone serious about digital photography or art will want their own color printer sooner or later, because the choice of paper and control of printer settings has a major impact on the final piece of art.
soak them [the rollers] a while in rubbing alcohol then use just a swab of gasoline from the lawn mower to soften the hard rubber, then back in the alcohol bath. then dry for a couple of days.
I'd very much like to know more about this technique. Is isopropyl alcohol a specific solvent for toner residue, or is something else going on? What does the gasoline add to the process, and would a quick dip serve as well as manually swabbing all the rollers? Will any gasoline do or should it be non-ethanolized unleaded high octane or something? Would Coleman lantern fuel work as well?
I'm assuming that the second alcohol bath is to remove the gasoline?
Wherever did this technique come from? Is it described on the web somewhere?
Heinlein has already demonstrated that the ancients had established the upper limit. It is approximately 1.0314E+28 dimensions. This is
(6 raised to the 6th power) raised to the 6th power
which can be expressed as 6**6**6 or 6^6^6.
Note that the ancient symbol denoting exponentiation was more similar to today's typographer's "enspace" than any other symbol in current usage. This has led to the unfortunate confusion of the large number 6^6^6 with the much smaller quantity 666. All this is thoroughly explained to any careful reader of Heinlein's great work, The Number Of The Beast. Although Heinlein had to couch his findings in an extended allegory to get them published in the less enlightened times of 40 odd years ago, the discerning reader will be able to easily follow his logic. His reconciliation of sentient flying cars with biblical prophesy is masterful; the elegance with which he demonstrates the core relationship between Dorothy's Land of Oz and higher level topology is superb.
Note that in Qwerty Fortran and its derivatives, 6^6^6 is a singlekey bounced notation, which is easily demonstrated on most keyboards. This is a possibly significant clue to a secondary method of proving the ancient theorem.
Anyway, we know that 640k of anything is never enough. Not where there is profit to be made.
Web host calls me this afternoon, while I'm at my day job. I need to do a mandatory upgrade that will cost me 150% of what I was paying for their services, but he is going to throw in a lot of extras. (If I wanted extras, I would have shopped for a different host package.) He claims they notified me about this by email on Jan 4. I look, and find that the only communications I've had with them in all of Jan were support tickets because they couldn't keep my site online. He says that since I've got 35 support tickets, I need the improved service. I point out that those 35 support tickets are over the 8 years I've been with them, and more than 90% are reports of their services breaking down one way or another. (They had a pattern of things going off-line on Friday and Saturday nights and not getting fixed until Monday afternoons.) He starts up with something else, and I say "Forget it. I'm no longer interested in doing business with you. Goodbye."
He calls back and says that he is in administration, not sales, and he'll forgive me for being rude to him and hanging up on him. I tell him I don't have time for this, I'm quitting your service, goodbye.
A few minutes later I get a call from someone else who says he is the guy's boss and what's the problem and I'm the last account on that server, you see... I interrupt and say I've cancelled; shut it down. He asks whether there is some other problem, which actually totally flummoxes me... I tell him being pushed into a mandatory upgrade without being notified of it isn't enough? He says I was sent an email; I said I never received the email, but I did receive the notification of billing for continuing my existing contract only a few weeks ago. Oh, he says, that's automated... I say goodbye.
That acount is now defunct.
I'll have to get back in touch with them since I've paid ahead for services that they now say they won't provide. I have used 3 weeks of the current yearly contract; I expect them to refund me 94% of what they billed to my credit card on March 22.
And I'm very disappointed that I can't take my domain name with me. When I set that up so many years ago, I was a little green and I never realized that they were actually registering the domain for me, apparently as a courtesy, so it has never actually been mine. Even though I've been paying a premium price every year for its renewal (it seemed like it was worth an extra $8 per year to avoid more paperwork.)
All in all, I think it is a Good Thing to move on to another web host. As the saying goes, you can't choose your relatives, but you can choose your business associates.
This company might be just the thing for somebody else, so here's their contact data:
Global Internet Solutions(gee, it's been several years since I looked at their front page... it seems, idunno, less somehow than what I remember) GISol's contact page(all sorts of ways to ask about the sweet deals on the front page, like the "Six Months Free!" and "$5.95 Per Month!" Actually I've been paying a multiple of that and not getting everything they are offering in these new deals. Maybe I should start a new account with them.)
Thanks for the info. This is one of my own websites— I use them mostly to explore different aspects of website development. I recently deleted a redirector that led to the "mysticgoat" web page. I neglected to update the link from slashdot when I did that.
Import tariffs wouldn't even figure into it if the government wasn't shelling out millions upon millions of dollars to corn farmers.
Most of those "corn farmers" who are benefitting from government subsidies are actually the agribusiness divisions of big corporations, like Monsanto. Who often have other divisions involved in processing corn into high fructose corn syrup. And sometimes, like Monsanto, have divisions involved in genetically engineering corn, such as making it produce its own pesticides.
There might not be anything wrong with HFCS itself. It might be a case of a little too much dioxin getting in the mix, or maybe a failure to recognize that the bacillus thurengis genes that were introduced to harden the plants against root worm might be putting traces of nasties into the supersweet nectar that is poured into the railroad tank cars to be put in our morning Chocolate Sugar Bomb cereal. Pardon, I guess that's now called "Special K" or something like that.
Getting back to topic (more or less): there is also the possibility that our very own Department of Homeland Security has slipped up again, and Al Qada operatives have been quietly setting out poison bait traps for the bees. Choose a poison that would allow a scout bee to survive for a while and mix it with an attractant like HFCS and you could end up with a low tech method of destroying lots of hives with a single bait station.
The best place for company proprietary data is where they can maintain explicit control over access to that data.
Nope. All the client company needs to be able to do is control access to the encryption keys that convert the data to useful information. Google can store the (encrypted) data and maintain the encryption process, and leave the company in full control of the keys. It can also offer much better data protection and preservation than most companies can do for themselves without taking on crippling overheads.
For the reasons already outlined, the best place for company proprietary data is where security, access, and cost curves intersect most favorably wrt the corporate mission. Nearly always, that will be found in buying these kinds of specialized services from a firm like Google. Not in taking on all the costs and risks of trying to do it in house.
As for Google being better at accessibility, security and cost, that is too broad of an assumption. Most companies that have proprietary data worth protecting make the point of hiring competent information security personnel, and the principle of "the less people who have access to the data the more secure it is" generally applies.
The incorrect assumption made above is that companies can evaluate and hire competent IT personnel for less than the cost of buying these services from Google, which specializes in hiring competent IT personnel, and also provides them with everything they need to keep on top of the rapidly changing IT landscape.
Another incorrect assumption is that good security can be had through obscurity.
Google Enterprise marks the beginning of a big change in the world of IT. A lot of the glamour and power that has been part of running the company's IT Department is going to rapidly become a thing of the past. And good riddance— neither IT nor the company has ever benefited from that kind of ego food.
Your point is lost when you compare online gambling to drugs and slavery.
That is undoubtedly true for some people. Others will recognize that I was talking about illegal online gambling and putting in context with other illegal business activities. All for the sake of talking about illegal business activities as a category, wrt the use of Google Enterprise and crooks' concerns about keeping their illegalities secret.
Yes, I agree that if you are a crook, it would be best to keep all information about your illegal activities completely to yourself. Crooks shouldn't use any of Google's services. Honest people and businesses are not constrained in this, though.
Basically, Google discriminates against crooks. That is not a bad thing.
Google's business model depends on providing access to their services to people outside of their network, while making sure those people outside of their network only get access to what they are supposed to access.
True enough. It also depends on assuring clients that no one within Google can inappropriately access client data. So Google Enterprise is basically an encryption service. With a business model akin to safety deposit boxes in a bank vault.
Corporate network admins, on the other hand, typically give first priority to doing something that Google fundamentally can't without interfering with their business model - prevent outsiders from obtaing ANY access whatsoever to the internal network.
Again this is true, and thank you for so eloquently stating a core part of my argument.
Some old school sys admins see their primary duty as protecting the corporate jewels at any expense. Meanwhile the suits who run the corporation think, as they have always done, that the primary duty of every corporate officer should be maximizing profits by increasing revenues or minimizing expenses. Anything less in a high performance individual might be tolerated so long as he is doing a good enough job, but it is not the ideal.
Do you see the conflict here? A historical context might make this more clear:
Between about 1925 and 1955, the majority of US corporations switched from cash payrolls and payments to creditors to the use of paychecks and various accounts payable methods that also reduced actual contact with cash. As a result, hardware expenses for shotguns, handguns, armored vehicles, strongboxes, and vaults dropped dramatically. And the role of the Chief Security Officer changed.
The announcement of Google Enterprise might mark the beginning of another period of rapid evolution in corporate structures. Just as we no longer need a Chief Security Officer who is proficient in designing the corporate vault and training men to use shotguns, soon perhaps we will not need sysadmins with skills in the physical handling and preservation of backup tapes, etc.
This doens't mean the sys admin jobs will disappear. But the skill set will change somewhat. And the ones who successfully manage the transition are likely to be the ones who are flexible enough to re-evaluate their values and find a new alignment that is more congruent with the general corporate mission.
If Google makes a mistake and makes your personal data available to everyone on the internet, they aren't liable at all.
This is very true. It is written into the contract anyone signing up for a personal no-cost Google account agrees to.
A business that agreed to a contract with such a clause doesn't deserve to survive. Google knows this, which is why the Google Enterprise contracts are written differently. Google wants to keep those customers around, and keep them healthy and happy, so they'll re-subscribe. That's where the real money is: repeat business without all the start-up costs of a new contract.
If you don't like the terms of Google's personal no-cost account, then perhaps you should consider paying money for services. You will get better terms.
If the bee die-off was directly linked to cell phone technology, I would have expected it to show up over a longer period with a demographic that clearly followed the pattern of cell phone adoption.
But if the bee die-off is related to BlueTooth or other wireless headset technology, then we might get the kind of intercontinental surge in die-offs that are being reported.
Personally, I think its more likely due to high fructose corn syrup being fed to the bees deliberately, or possibly through discarded junk food wrappers and spills of soft drinks and sports drinks. But I'm biased. I have recently found that I have an intolerance to HFCS: the stuff makes me feel shitty with symptoms like exercise induced asthma. And it so heavily used in prepared foods in the USA that it is hard to avoid it.
I think an underlying tacit assumption of this thread was that the discussion would be limited to legal business activities. Companies that deal in illegal gambling, drugs, slavery, or other outlaw activities are a wholly different matter.
Rule #1 of corporate America - Proprietary information does not leave the company boundaries unless an NDA is in place.
Well, that's stupid.
Proprietary information should be stored in whatever place is the best place for it. Criteria that need to be measured include security, accessability, and cost. Most corporations cannot do as well with any of these as a specialist company like Google. Most corporations should not be able to do as well with any of these as Google, since their IT departments are cost centers, not profit centers.
There is one option that would perhaps be better than some companies than Google, if it was available to them. But IBM doesn't offer this kind of service.
from TFA introblurb:
Also at issue is the use of Republican National Committee e-mail domains (such as gwb43.com and georgewbush.com) rather than the official White House domain.
So is it time that Congress directed the FBI to confiscate all servers, backup devices, and media of the gwb43.com and georgewbush.com domains, since these were used in violation of the Patriot Act and White House operational manuals, and may contain evidence relevant to a congressional investigation? Somewhere on those hard drives or tapes would be copies of the missing emails.
There shouldn't really be any problem with obtaining this stuff since the owners are patriotic supporters of the US Government.
Too true. At 6 billion, the global population is roughly around 3 times the carrying capacity of the ecosphere.
The extraordinary population growth of the last 100 years, from less than 2 billion to more than 6 billion, has been fueled by the reintroduction of carbon and other bioactive substances that had been removed from the ecosphere millions of years before the living world had evolved to its present state. We are putting this stuff back into the ecosphere at a rate of several hundred trillion tons per year. Our most successful farm programs on the richest land we cultivate— the North American Great Plains— now uses several times more Calories derived from fossil carbon than its harvests provide from sunlight. The primary source of our species' nutrition has been changing from sunlight to petrochemicals in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, and the diesel and coal used manufacture, distribute, and apply the other petrochemicals.
Thirty-odd years ago a retiring Willamette Valley farmer told me as we watched a 500 horsepower tractor slowly tow 12 tons of fertilizer into a muddy field that "Now, all we use the ground for is to hold the stalks up". That was back in the good old days when the population was well under 3 billion, and the context of his comment concerned the way diesel powered farming techniques had destroyed much of the inherent richness of the soil he had been working since the 1930s. Today, if he was still around, he would be likely say "Now all we use the plants for is to convert barrels of crude into something more tasty."
There is no long term stability in this situation. I am not saying that a catastrophe is inevitable, but a major change of some sort is definitely going to happen. Perhaps it can be a managed change.
However, most environmentalists grandly over-estimate our ability to cause global-scale disasters.
This bald assertion is made without providing any foundation or subsequent argument. It is also a serious misrepresentation of the work of environmental science and catastrophic modeling.
I live in an area that has not experienced a significant earthquake in recorded history. But over the last 30 years, geologists and other scientists have become aware that major quakes have indeed shaken this region, and have convinced governments that it would be prudent to prepare for a bad shaking. Bridges and buildings have been retrofitted with devices that will make them less likely to fail. Building codes have been changed to make new construction more safe. This is Good Stuff, and the kind of thing that government is supposed to do for its citizens.
None of this could have occurred without scientists and engineers from a multitude of backgrounds talking about what would happen to the Marquam Bridge in a bad quake: would the torque of the rolling earth cause the major beams to slide off their supports; could safety cables be used to keep them (and the surface of the interstate highway) from falling 200 feet into the Willamette River? These are necessarily alarmist discussions, but they are also absolutely necessary if we want a reasonable and prudent approach to limiting the risks we all face. (BTW, the cables are now in place.)
Any citizenry that is concerned about avoiding the dangers of a rapidly shifting climate needs to be willing to listen to talk about possible environmental catastrophes. These talks cannot and should not be conducted in the back rooms by some mysterious intelligentsia; they need to be conducted in the open forums where public policy is shaped. If it takes burning 15 Calories of crude oil to produce 1 Calorie of clean biofuel from corn, then the environmental implications of that need to be factored into decisions about subsidizing the nascent corn-based ethanol fuel industry. If there is a possibility that ocean levels will rise a few feet in the next couple of dozen years, then citizens of coastal c
However the Microsoft that emerges after the current management is thrown out and the outmoded corporate vision is revised will be a very different company. So different that it will probably change its name. Sort of like the way the Exxon Valdez has become the Sea River Mediterranean. Whatever floats your boat.
Certainly the products will change. Microsoft has most of what is needed to be very successful at developing and servicing large custom packages, such as integrated hospital management, or fly by wire systems, or government agencies. True, it does lack the concept of quality assurance that these kinds of applications require, but new management working under a new vision could recruit the needed skills and experience.
Microsoft desperately needs some products that can be marketed on their intrinsic merits. With the withdrawal of MS Office 2003 and Vista, it has zip nada none in the marketplace.
With a few exceptions like MS Project and MS Flight Simulator, I think it unlikely that any of Microsoft's current products would be continued. Their engineering has been too heavily influenced by an outmoded marketing strategy; it is highly doubtful that a team could tease out what is good in Excel (for example) from what was done to gain a marketing advantage, and then rebuild the result into something that could 1) compete on its merits with existing products; 2) come in at a low enough cost to be profitable. Plus there is a growing stigma attached to MS Office, Windows, Exchange Server, and Outlook— the company that emerges from Microsoft's self-built funeral pyre would be better off selling that code and distancing itself from it.
There are good people at Microsoft who can do good work, provided they have the vision and leadership to take them in the right direction. I think the absurd pile of liquid assets Microsoft "manages" is big enough that the corporation could rebuild itself.
Gee, this is second post I've done about Microsoft management in the last month where I've made no references to threats of lethal force against competitors by monkey-dancing, chair-throwing, potty-mouthed CEOs. I must be mellowing.
Slashdot Mirror
That is certainly a loss for Bill Gates and perhaps the rest of the original cadre of MS corporate officers. Throughout the 80s and 90s, MS was steered consistently toward a "vision" of dominance that really wasn't profit oriented. MS has consistently passed up the opportunity to make profits in its efforts to become the dominant player in different digital markets. It has thrown more money down the toilet to prevent someone else from succeeding in an area where it wasn't good enough to win on merit than many companies had earned during those 20 years.
When MS gives up this foolishness and starts acting like a profit-oriented business, it will almost certainly lose its tarnish and become a respectable member of the business community.
That will be a long-term winning situation for MS. The only losers will be Gates (who has already thrown in the towel), Balmer, and the rest of the original dreamers with their juvenile fantasies about attaining world dominance.
That was originally spelled "FUBAR". It was an acronym that first gained broad usage among USA Quartermasters in World War II concerning discrepancies between supplies requested and supplies delivered. Then it was adopted in the 1960s by early COBOL programmers to describe the results of changing project specifications after big chunks had already been coded. It loosely stands for "Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition", and is closely associated with SNAFU: "Situation Normal: All Fouled Up".
I do enjoy knowing that the underlying concept of foobar has now become firmly entrenched in analyst/programmer teachings. There is no question that the subliminal message that too much foo will cause an irreversible state of bar is valuable. Understanding the relationship between foo and bar and FU and BAR is critical to developing good software.
I've sometimes wondered why foobar came down to us through C language teachings while nothing like snafoo has survived. There are some large software houses around that could be described as places of snafoo. But my puzzlement has never been strong enough to motivate me to look into the matter.
I thought foopaw was similar enough to foobar to trigger a different set of reactions than the ones seen in this thread. I have enjoyed the thread quite a bit-- it just didn't go in quite the direction I expected.
Taking the second thing first, QM is all a bunch of quarkery
oh, wait... that's not quite what was written in Parent Post.
Well, on to first things. Parent Post posits that some "really smart person" will someday come up with a "new and better theory of reality".
Assuming that happens tomorrow, how would this RSP communicate his findings to the rest of us in a way that we could understand? Our ability to comprehend is finite and bound by the limitations of our language and maths. If an RSP used a time machine to travel from the distant future to our current time, and tried to explain the Great TOE (Theory Of Everything) to us, he would either be dismissed as a harmless nut or forced to eat mind distorting chemicals since his efforts to communicate would be seen as threatening to himself or to others. Meanwhile, his time machine would be confiscated for study, and after the magic smoke was let out of it while taking it apart, it would be declared a fraud since it wouldn't work when re-assembled.
To make the point perfectly clear, any "new and better theory of reality" that might be presented at this point in time could not be understood within the framework of today's physics, so it could not be recognized as a valid theory of physics.
Basically, we're stuck with QM on one side, and relativity on the other. Which means that when it comes to jobs as theoretical physicists, only dancers need apply. Because physics is a realm of human thought where only persons willing to dance between vastly different frames of thought can do any good work. There are a few persons around who have the mental agility and grace do the dance well: Stephen Hawking comes to mind. He is a Hero in oh so many ways.
Go back to O.P. and read closely. You can't help but see that the progression from discussing Vista as a costly marketing failure has led naturally to discussing Coca Cola's failed introduction of "New Coke" (and the implied discussions about the moral prostitution of Bill Cosby in selling the stuff on prime time tv), which is presented as a very similar marketing failure. The case is made that in both instances the corporations purposefully set out to destroy their existing massive customer base by removing their best selling products and replacing them with products that the market quickly decided were inferior. An interesting extension that I had never heard before is that Coca Cola may have done this deliberately (screwing Bill Cosby both ways) as part of an ulterior campaign to introduce the New Classic Coke, which otherwise would have been rejected outright.
"New Classic Coke" replaced sugar, the traditional nemesis of all Good Moms Throughout The Land, with the new and more horrific nemesis: high fructose corn syrup. Twice the sweet at half the cost, maybe fewer dental caries, but much more asthma and obesity, and all kinds of other health and ecology impacts that we'll discover over the 10 years or so. But the profit margins are so much better with HFCS, and then there's the high margin tag-along markets like asthma inhalers and diet foods.
There were significant asides about the government subsidizing several aspects of HFCS production and managing to do so while projecting the image that it was subsidizing traditional farmers, not multibillion dollar chemical corporations that have bought or leased much of the USA corn belt. These were not directly relevant, it is true: there is no indication that Microsoft has been accepting government subsidies, or even hinting that they would like them. On the contrary, Microsoft would prefer to buy government policies.
So the discerning reader is now prepared to question whether Vista is nothing more nor less than a strawman set up by Microsoft as part of a larger marketing campaign that will involve the announcement of "Classic Windows XP" later this year.
Classic Windows XP will provide all the features that Windows XP provides, but with all the actual processing done on Microsoft's own servers, using its proprietary tunneling protocols, encryptions, and secret handshakes to move data back and forth between client machine and Redmond. Most computer systems built after 2005 will be capable of running Classic Windows XP, although the addition of a second 250 GB hard drive will be necessary in some cases. The footprint of Classic Windows XP on ram and hard disk will be no more than 20% greater than most of today's Windows XP installations, but there will be a major shift in internal resource allocation:
Classic Windows XP will perform significantly more slowly than today's Windows XP since transferring all that data back and forth to Redmond over those tiny innerweb tubes will slow things down. However it will look pretty much like today's Windows XP, and people will have forgotten how fast today's operating system is by the time the "Classic" version becomes available.
So, this summary should demonstrate to everyone that this thread has actually been on target all along.
Aside from the potty-mouth nature of the expression, I don't disagree. But the fsking leeches being referred to are employees of Monsanto and other Big Corporations with significant agribusiness divisions. Monsanto is particularly noteworthy since it also produces the ethanol and HFCS, and also does a lot of genetic manipulation of corn.
...corn subsidies encouraging farmers to grow corn syrup.Note that most of those "farmers" are agribusiness divisions of major companies, such as Monsanto. Which also pushes genetically engineered corn, and produces ethanol and HFCS.
Mod parent up.
Sane speed limits are based on the limits of human reaction times, the physics of inertia and friction, and patterns of traffic density, types of vehicles, and frequency of exceptional events (like toddlers chasing after balls that bounce into the street). Since signage cannot be changed on a minute by minute basis, posted speeds are often lower than what would be safe for the moment. That does not make them unreasonable, nor does it suggest that the driver, from his very limited point of view, should be deciding when he can break the speed limit and get away with it.
If and when a slashdot reader gets a license to drive, it binds him to a social contract that requires him to accept these limits. If he violates that contract, he needs to face sanctions. Those around him should also take note that this person does not abide by his agreements and is a risk in other areas, such as employment agreements, production of code that is free of time bombs and backdoors, etc, etc.
Some people do need color. Professionals and serious amateurs in the digital arts need their own color printers.
At the moment I'm a post-professional, serious amateur with about $3,000 invested in digital cameras, equipment, software, and supplies. I have a Canon i9900 that I think is wonderful: I could produce photorealistic prints up to 13 by 19 inches with it. But I usually don't; I like to digitally sculpt the images I get from the camera and usually only a few details remain photorealistic. I might spend a week or more working up an image in PaintShop Pro or the GIMP, and do a dozen or more test prints on cropped areas using different papers and printer settings before I'm ready to do a production run. When I'm in the mood, it is a very satisfying hobby.
The Canon i9900 uses 8 separate print cartridges that are priced at $12 each. Six of these I've been refilling myself for the past year or so using a kit from IMS that cost $18. I have not found a 3rd party supplier for the Red and Green inks, but they last about 5 times as long as the others. I have been very satisfied with the results from the reloaded cartridges, both for quality and resistance to fading or discoloring. I end up with funny colored fingers every now and then, but it is worth it.
I've run a lot of different papers through this printer, including a number of different watercolor papers. Some of these have very rich textures. I ruined the original print head by getting a little too wild with heavy papers, but I've gotten some incredible art done. But now that I'm no longer able to write things off as business expenses, I'm a lot less experimental and I'm getting a lot more life out of the print head.
Back to the point: anyone serious about digital photography or art will want their own color printer sooner or later, because the choice of paper and control of printer settings has a major impact on the final piece of art.
I'd very much like to know more about this technique. Is isopropyl alcohol a specific solvent for toner residue, or is something else going on? What does the gasoline add to the process, and would a quick dip serve as well as manually swabbing all the rollers? Will any gasoline do or should it be non-ethanolized unleaded high octane or something? Would Coleman lantern fuel work as well?
I'm assuming that the second alcohol bath is to remove the gasoline?
Wherever did this technique come from? Is it described on the web somewhere?
...Anything in pearl...Sniggle. Maybe parent post said something that was really insightful and maybe it didn't. I'll never know because I couldn't get beyond that foopaw.
Credibility is a terrible thing to waste.
Heinlein has already demonstrated that the ancients had established the upper limit. It is approximately 1.0314E+28 dimensions. This is
(6 raised to the 6th power) raised to the 6th power
which can be expressed as 6**6**6 or 6^6^6.
Note that the ancient symbol denoting exponentiation was more similar to today's typographer's "enspace" than any other symbol in current usage. This has led to the unfortunate confusion of the large number 6^6^6 with the much smaller quantity 666. All this is thoroughly explained to any careful reader of Heinlein's great work, The Number Of The Beast. Although Heinlein had to couch his findings in an extended allegory to get them published in the less enlightened times of 40 odd years ago, the discerning reader will be able to easily follow his logic. His reconciliation of sentient flying cars with biblical prophesy is masterful; the elegance with which he demonstrates the core relationship between Dorothy's Land of Oz and higher level topology is superb.
Note that in Qwerty Fortran and its derivatives, 6^6^6 is a singlekey bounced notation, which is easily demonstrated on most keyboards. This is a possibly significant clue to a secondary method of proving the ancient theorem.
Anyway, we know that 640k of anything is never enough. Not where there is profit to be made.
This is only their way of saying MSOffice is no longer relevant, that's all.
Yeah, when it rains, it pours...
Web host calls me this afternoon, while I'm at my day job. I need to do a mandatory upgrade that will cost me 150% of what I was paying for their services, but he is going to throw in a lot of extras. (If I wanted extras, I would have shopped for a different host package.) He claims they notified me about this by email on Jan 4. I look, and find that the only communications I've had with them in all of Jan were support tickets because they couldn't keep my site online. He says that since I've got 35 support tickets, I need the improved service. I point out that those 35 support tickets are over the 8 years I've been with them, and more than 90% are reports of their services breaking down one way or another. (They had a pattern of things going off-line on Friday and Saturday nights and not getting fixed until Monday afternoons.) He starts up with something else, and I say "Forget it. I'm no longer interested in doing business with you. Goodbye."
He calls back and says that he is in administration, not sales, and he'll forgive me for being rude to him and hanging up on him. I tell him I don't have time for this, I'm quitting your service, goodbye.
A few minutes later I get a call from someone else who says he is the guy's boss and what's the problem and I'm the last account on that server, you see... I interrupt and say I've cancelled; shut it down. He asks whether there is some other problem, which actually totally flummoxes me... I tell him being pushed into a mandatory upgrade without being notified of it isn't enough? He says I was sent an email; I said I never received the email, but I did receive the notification of billing for continuing my existing contract only a few weeks ago. Oh, he says, that's automated... I say goodbye.
That acount is now defunct.
I'll have to get back in touch with them since I've paid ahead for services that they now say they won't provide. I have used 3 weeks of the current yearly contract; I expect them to refund me 94% of what they billed to my credit card on March 22.
And I'm very disappointed that I can't take my domain name with me. When I set that up so many years ago, I was a little green and I never realized that they were actually registering the domain for me, apparently as a courtesy, so it has never actually been mine. Even though I've been paying a premium price every year for its renewal (it seemed like it was worth an extra $8 per year to avoid more paperwork.)
All in all, I think it is a Good Thing to move on to another web host. As the saying goes, you can't choose your relatives, but you can choose your business associates.
This company might be just the thing for somebody else, so here's their contact data:
Global Internet Solutions (gee, it's been several years since I looked at their front page... it seems, idunno, less somehow than what I remember)
GISol's contact page (all sorts of ways to ask about the sweet deals on the front page, like the "Six Months Free!" and "$5.95 Per Month!" Actually I've been paying a multiple of that and not getting everything they are offering in these new deals. Maybe I should start a new account with them.)
Thanks for the info. This is one of my own websites— I use them mostly to explore different aspects of website development. I recently deleted a redirector that led to the "mysticgoat" web page. I neglected to update the link from slashdot when I did that.
I've just corrected the bad link.
Most of those "corn farmers" who are benefitting from government subsidies are actually the agribusiness divisions of big corporations, like Monsanto. Who often have other divisions involved in processing corn into high fructose corn syrup. And sometimes, like Monsanto, have divisions involved in genetically engineering corn, such as making it produce its own pesticides.
There might not be anything wrong with HFCS itself. It might be a case of a little too much dioxin getting in the mix, or maybe a failure to recognize that the bacillus thurengis genes that were introduced to harden the plants against root worm might be putting traces of nasties into the supersweet nectar that is poured into the railroad tank cars to be put in our morning Chocolate Sugar Bomb cereal. Pardon, I guess that's now called "Special K" or something like that.
Getting back to topic (more or less): there is also the possibility that our very own Department of Homeland Security has slipped up again, and Al Qada operatives have been quietly setting out poison bait traps for the bees. Choose a poison that would allow a scout bee to survive for a while and mix it with an attractant like HFCS and you could end up with a low tech method of destroying lots of hives with a single bait station.
Nope. All the client company needs to be able to do is control access to the encryption keys that convert the data to useful information. Google can store the (encrypted) data and maintain the encryption process, and leave the company in full control of the keys. It can also offer much better data protection and preservation than most companies can do for themselves without taking on crippling overheads.
For the reasons already outlined, the best place for company proprietary data is where security, access, and cost curves intersect most favorably wrt the corporate mission. Nearly always, that will be found in buying these kinds of specialized services from a firm like Google. Not in taking on all the costs and risks of trying to do it in house.
As for Google being better at accessibility, security and cost, that is too broad of an assumption. Most companies that have proprietary data worth protecting make the point of hiring competent information security personnel, and the principle of "the less people who have access to the data the more secure it is" generally applies.The incorrect assumption made above is that companies can evaluate and hire competent IT personnel for less than the cost of buying these services from Google, which specializes in hiring competent IT personnel, and also provides them with everything they need to keep on top of the rapidly changing IT landscape.
Another incorrect assumption is that good security can be had through obscurity.
Google Enterprise marks the beginning of a big change in the world of IT. A lot of the glamour and power that has been part of running the company's IT Department is going to rapidly become a thing of the past. And good riddance— neither IT nor the company has ever benefited from that kind of ego food.
That is undoubtedly true for some people. Others will recognize that I was talking about illegal online gambling and putting in context with other illegal business activities. All for the sake of talking about illegal business activities as a category, wrt the use of Google Enterprise and crooks' concerns about keeping their illegalities secret.
Yes, I agree that if you are a crook, it would be best to keep all information about your illegal activities completely to yourself. Crooks shouldn't use any of Google's services. Honest people and businesses are not constrained in this, though.
Basically, Google discriminates against crooks. That is not a bad thing.
True enough. It also depends on assuring clients that no one within Google can inappropriately access client data. So Google Enterprise is basically an encryption service. With a business model akin to safety deposit boxes in a bank vault.
Corporate network admins, on the other hand, typically give first priority to doing something that Google fundamentally can't without interfering with their business model - prevent outsiders from obtaing ANY access whatsoever to the internal network.Again this is true, and thank you for so eloquently stating a core part of my argument.
Some old school sys admins see their primary duty as protecting the corporate jewels at any expense. Meanwhile the suits who run the corporation think, as they have always done, that the primary duty of every corporate officer should be maximizing profits by increasing revenues or minimizing expenses. Anything less in a high performance individual might be tolerated so long as he is doing a good enough job, but it is not the ideal.
Do you see the conflict here? A historical context might make this more clear:
Between about 1925 and 1955, the majority of US corporations switched from cash payrolls and payments to creditors to the use of paychecks and various accounts payable methods that also reduced actual contact with cash. As a result, hardware expenses for shotguns, handguns, armored vehicles, strongboxes, and vaults dropped dramatically. And the role of the Chief Security Officer changed.
The announcement of Google Enterprise might mark the beginning of another period of rapid evolution in corporate structures. Just as we no longer need a Chief Security Officer who is proficient in designing the corporate vault and training men to use shotguns, soon perhaps we will not need sysadmins with skills in the physical handling and preservation of backup tapes, etc.
This doens't mean the sys admin jobs will disappear. But the skill set will change somewhat. And the ones who successfully manage the transition are likely to be the ones who are flexible enough to re-evaluate their values and find a new alignment that is more congruent with the general corporate mission.
This is very true. It is written into the contract anyone signing up for a personal no-cost Google account agrees to.
A business that agreed to a contract with such a clause doesn't deserve to survive. Google knows this, which is why the Google Enterprise contracts are written differently. Google wants to keep those customers around, and keep them healthy and happy, so they'll re-subscribe. That's where the real money is: repeat business without all the start-up costs of a new contract.
If you don't like the terms of Google's personal no-cost account, then perhaps you should consider paying money for services. You will get better terms.
If the bee die-off was directly linked to cell phone technology, I would have expected it to show up over a longer period with a demographic that clearly followed the pattern of cell phone adoption.
But if the bee die-off is related to BlueTooth or other wireless headset technology, then we might get the kind of intercontinental surge in die-offs that are being reported.
Personally, I think its more likely due to high fructose corn syrup being fed to the bees deliberately, or possibly through discarded junk food wrappers and spills of soft drinks and sports drinks. But I'm biased. I have recently found that I have an intolerance to HFCS: the stuff makes me feel shitty with symptoms like exercise induced asthma. And it so heavily used in prepared foods in the USA that it is hard to avoid it.
I think an underlying tacit assumption of this thread was that the discussion would be limited to legal business activities. Companies that deal in illegal gambling, drugs, slavery, or other outlaw activities are a wholly different matter.
Well, that's stupid.
Proprietary information should be stored in whatever place is the best place for it. Criteria that need to be measured include security, accessability, and cost. Most corporations cannot do as well with any of these as a specialist company like Google. Most corporations should not be able to do as well with any of these as Google, since their IT departments are cost centers, not profit centers.
There is one option that would perhaps be better than some companies than Google, if it was available to them. But IBM doesn't offer this kind of service.
So is it time that Congress directed the FBI to confiscate all servers, backup devices, and media of the gwb43.com and georgewbush.com domains, since these were used in violation of the Patriot Act and White House operational manuals, and may contain evidence relevant to a congressional investigation? Somewhere on those hard drives or tapes would be copies of the missing emails.
There shouldn't really be any problem with obtaining this stuff since the owners are patriotic supporters of the US Government.
Actually, we affect ecology simply by existing.
Too true. At 6 billion, the global population is roughly around 3 times the carrying capacity of the ecosphere.
The extraordinary population growth of the last 100 years, from less than 2 billion to more than 6 billion, has been fueled by the reintroduction of carbon and other bioactive substances that had been removed from the ecosphere millions of years before the living world had evolved to its present state. We are putting this stuff back into the ecosphere at a rate of several hundred trillion tons per year. Our most successful farm programs on the richest land we cultivate— the North American Great Plains— now uses several times more Calories derived from fossil carbon than its harvests provide from sunlight. The primary source of our species' nutrition has been changing from sunlight to petrochemicals in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, and the diesel and coal used manufacture, distribute, and apply the other petrochemicals.
Thirty-odd years ago a retiring Willamette Valley farmer told me as we watched a 500 horsepower tractor slowly tow 12 tons of fertilizer into a muddy field that "Now, all we use the ground for is to hold the stalks up". That was back in the good old days when the population was well under 3 billion, and the context of his comment concerned the way diesel powered farming techniques had destroyed much of the inherent richness of the soil he had been working since the 1930s. Today, if he was still around, he would be likely say "Now all we use the plants for is to convert barrels of crude into something more tasty."
There is no long term stability in this situation. I am not saying that a catastrophe is inevitable, but a major change of some sort is definitely going to happen. Perhaps it can be a managed change.
However, most environmentalists grandly over-estimate our ability to cause global-scale disasters.
This bald assertion is made without providing any foundation or subsequent argument. It is also a serious misrepresentation of the work of environmental science and catastrophic modeling.
I live in an area that has not experienced a significant earthquake in recorded history. But over the last 30 years, geologists and other scientists have become aware that major quakes have indeed shaken this region, and have convinced governments that it would be prudent to prepare for a bad shaking. Bridges and buildings have been retrofitted with devices that will make them less likely to fail. Building codes have been changed to make new construction more safe. This is Good Stuff, and the kind of thing that government is supposed to do for its citizens.
None of this could have occurred without scientists and engineers from a multitude of backgrounds talking about what would happen to the Marquam Bridge in a bad quake: would the torque of the rolling earth cause the major beams to slide off their supports; could safety cables be used to keep them (and the surface of the interstate highway) from falling 200 feet into the Willamette River? These are necessarily alarmist discussions, but they are also absolutely necessary if we want a reasonable and prudent approach to limiting the risks we all face. (BTW, the cables are now in place.)
Any citizenry that is concerned about avoiding the dangers of a rapidly shifting climate needs to be willing to listen to talk about possible environmental catastrophes. These talks cannot and should not be conducted in the back rooms by some mysterious intelligentsia; they need to be conducted in the open forums where public policy is shaped. If it takes burning 15 Calories of crude oil to produce 1 Calorie of clean biofuel from corn, then the environmental implications of that need to be factored into decisions about subsidizing the nascent corn-based ethanol fuel industry. If there is a possibility that ocean levels will rise a few feet in the next couple of dozen years, then citizens of coastal c
I do not disagree.
However the Microsoft that emerges after the current management is thrown out and the outmoded corporate vision is revised will be a very different company. So different that it will probably change its name. Sort of like the way the Exxon Valdez has become the Sea River Mediterranean . Whatever floats your boat.
Certainly the products will change. Microsoft has most of what is needed to be very successful at developing and servicing large custom packages, such as integrated hospital management, or fly by wire systems, or government agencies. True, it does lack the concept of quality assurance that these kinds of applications require, but new management working under a new vision could recruit the needed skills and experience.
Microsoft desperately needs some products that can be marketed on their intrinsic merits. With the withdrawal of MS Office 2003 and Vista, it has zip nada none in the marketplace.
With a few exceptions like MS Project and MS Flight Simulator, I think it unlikely that any of Microsoft's current products would be continued. Their engineering has been too heavily influenced by an outmoded marketing strategy; it is highly doubtful that a team could tease out what is good in Excel (for example) from what was done to gain a marketing advantage, and then rebuild the result into something that could 1) compete on its merits with existing products; 2) come in at a low enough cost to be profitable. Plus there is a growing stigma attached to MS Office, Windows, Exchange Server, and Outlook— the company that emerges from Microsoft's self-built funeral pyre would be better off selling that code and distancing itself from it.
There are good people at Microsoft who can do good work, provided they have the vision and leadership to take them in the right direction. I think the absurd pile of liquid assets Microsoft "manages" is big enough that the corporation could rebuild itself.
Gee, this is second post I've done about Microsoft management in the last month where I've made no references to threats of lethal force against competitors by monkey-dancing, chair-throwing, potty-mouthed CEOs. I must be mellowing.