My deer rifle is a 30-06 Remmington slide action. I'm a southpaw and a lefthanded bolt was more than I could afford when I got the gun (used): the slide action is ambidextrous. It has a 4 round clip. I've owned it for 31 years now. I don't use it much any more, but at one time it helped stretch the grocery budget.
I learned to shoot from a couple guys who had grown up hunting in the 1930s and who learned to shoot all over again when in the service in World War II. Both saw more action on the Pacific islands than they would ever talk about.
The litany they taught included these steps (done just before the first steps of the hunt)
check the receiver for crud
check the clip for crud and alignment of the top round
check safety is on
insert clip into receiver
LOCK clip into place by slamming it with the heel of your hand
LOAD the first round into the chamber (in my case, work the slide)
check the safety is on (again)
I doubt that either of those guys saw any of the John Wayne war movies (they liked his westerns though). But I'm pretty sure neither one would have thought "Lock and load, son" was wrong or laughable. It is the way it was done.
Sorry about the rant. But this argument among people who have never had to worry about extracting a jammed live round from a rifle because the shooter hadn't locked the clip into place before trying to load the chamber has grown tiresome.
Google is still the first place I go for most of my queries. However, I find myself going to Wikipedia first when I want an overview of a topic and I know I've got a good keyword to get to it. And often when I'm using Google, the first article I look at is the Wikipedia entry.
Where my usage has really changed is when my first choice of keywords for Google leads to too many wrong responses (too much verbiage about Paris Hilton when looking for hotels in Paris). When this happens I now often look for a Wikipedia article to scan for better keywords to feed to Google. This is a very slick way of quickly narrowing the scope of the search.
Google is incredible. Who would have guessed that searching with "30 mi + 10 km = ? leagues" would get an answer?
I've no direct experience with either company. But this much seems obvious: as the Vista and VOffice roll-outs begin, much of Microsoft's resources are going to be turned from these major development projects to other things. There will be a lot of reassignment of duties, especially at the team leader level-- the people who will have the most influence on your daily work environment as a new hire. In other institutions I have personally seen how this leads to an increase in the amount of hidden, personal agenda crap that people bring into their jobs-- and this definitely affects the quality of the work experience. If you see the workplace as a corporate jungle ruled by tooth and claw, then you might enjoy this kind of environment and do well in it. OTOH, be wary of the friendly overtures of others for it can be hard to tell the person who is looking for mutual support from the person who intends to use you as a support as they try to step over to what they really want.
In contrast, Google's near-term future looks pretty stable: continued refinement of GOffice, Google Earth, and similar projects with no major shifts in corporate emphasis in sight. Combined with other things I have heard about Google's management style, it sounds like the Google environment currently promotes cooperation and community values among its staff, and that this is likely to continue for a few years.
Keep in mind that the most important thing you will get out of your first job is the social network you develop with your peers and immediate supervisors. These contacts can have more impact on the first decade of your career than any other thing.
Thanks for clarifying my earlier post. You have saved me from trying to say what you just said (and its doubtful that I could have said it any better)
It should also be noted that the Google bought YouTube without actually paying out any hard cash-- the purchase was done with stocks. This hasn't put any dent in Google's war chest. I believe the gross oversimplification is that anybody who owned stock in YouTube before the purchase is now the lucky owner of enough shares of Google to boost the value of their portfolio by a very nice amount.
I'm looking forward to using both Wikipedia and Citizendium.
I expect to continue to use Wikipedia as a first line resource, because it has excellent performance in providing background for new discoveries and developments. I need it because I refuse to try to remember the differences between a boson and a lepton when I don't have to, even though once every few hundred evenings I find that sort of thing intensely interesting for a few hours. It usually happens when a lot of other people also have the same intense, transient interest, and more often than not, W has anticipated this interest (sometimes by only a few milliseconds-- sometimes its obvious the bits are still damp and smudgeable when they hit my screen). This is great. Everything there in one resource from the very latest in estimates of rocky planets in the Milky Way to the current name of the 129,000 ton Chevron oil tanker that was formerly known as the Condoleezza Rice.
I expect to then sometimes do a compare of the W article with its Citizendium alter ego. Because of Citizendium's more deliberative processes, it should be possible to tell when the elephants in W have increased threefold in the last year. Probably someone will come up with a script to automate comparisons between W and C texts pretty quickly. That will be cool.
So I think we might all win in having two 'cyclopedias that use different forms of quality assurance. W will almost always be the first to publish relevant information; C will enable some fast checking on whether W's presentation had gotten hijacked.
[BTW, shouldn't that be Citizendia? Seems like the plural is more appropriate for something that will be at best an aggregate of several different compendiums. Or does Sanger think that he will be able to unify all knowledge in such a way that we will be able to seamlessly meander from the theory of relativity to quantum mechanics to the theory of color, and then return by a route that reconciles the Transcendant God(s) with the Immanent Goddess(es)? That would be way cool!]
Actually, monopolizing, attempting to monopolize, or conspiring to monopolize any aspect of interstate commerce is a federal felony
That is true, but this language is intended to prevent a company from deliberately raising artificial barriers to potential competitors. Care was taken in writing both the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act to assure that no businessman who "got the whole business because nobody could do it as well as he could" would be punished.
To find a monopoly, its is not enough that a company is the leading supplier of a product or service, it needs to supply nearly all of that product or service...
And if I recall correctly, just being a monopoly is not an Evil Thing of itself. The legal problems arise only if a company has abused its monopolistic powers. For a long time, 3M had a monopoly in the stickypaper market with Post-It, but no one ever claimed that it was abusing its market dominance to stifle competition, etc.
So evidently a company can be big and also good. If it does no evil...
Re:He's right about the rights
on
Ballmer Sounds Off
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Now that YouTube has money behind it, Google can expect legal action from a whole bunch of people... some of it justified.
That was truly insightful, at least for me.
Google's core business model revolves around "fair use" and similar provisions of copyright law. I think they are most vulnerable in this area-- look at Belgium. So Google needed to buy YouTube for a couple of reasons related to this.
The first is because YouTube's business model also revolves around many of the same "fair use" provisions, and if YouTube loses its upcoming court cases, the fallout could fatally poison Google's business model. It would be very hard for Google to immunize itself from any judgments against YouTube that changed the interpretation of copyright law. Purchasing YouTube allows Google to directly counter such an attack with all its resources. It also decreases the likelihood of such an attack, since all the ambulance chasers who were smacking their lips in anticipation of an easy meal from YouTube's carcass are now slinking away, looking for easier prey that won't be able to fend them off for years with delaying tactics.
The other reason that occurs to me is that the most important part of strategizing any conflict is choosing your battlefield carefully. Google is under constant threat of serious litigation over copyright concerns. Google has just bought a battlefield where these litigations can be played out, that is comfortably distant from the fields of green where Googles' cash cows graze.
I expect that Google is developing the muscles it needs to directly influence copyright legislation, and I expect it is also going to be increasingly influential in copyright litigation as well (intervening with friend of the court briefs, etc). This all seems to be part of Google's mission statement: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
The question is, are we willing to risk total destruction of our economy and pre-industrial revolution living standards over what amounts to little more than a scientific theory?
Tee-hee! Hope you get the +5 for "Funny" for that one!
The questions for policy makers-- which includes the voting public in the effective democracies-- are:
WRT studies of mass extinction dynamics:
Should follow-up studies receive more fiscal support from government?
If so, should the funds come from reducing funding for other research, reducing funding for other government activities, or increasing taxation?
If not, should government identify and implement ways to encourage private funding for such studies? .
WRT modifying the current dependency on fossil fuels:
The economic costs of continuing this pattern of increasing dependency of the last century are pretty obvious at this point: we will hit peak oil production soon if we haven't already; agriculture in advanced nations is seriously skewed where more of the energy for producing food is coming from petrochemicals (especially diesel fuel) than is coming from photosynthesis; the petrochemical world economy is socially destabilizing to many of the producing nations, giving rise to international terrorism, etc, etc. Even without the green arguments, the case for getting cured of the fossil fuel addiction is obvious to any unbiased observer.
So the questions are:
Should government put more funding into developing green power generation technologies like wind mills and wave generators?
Should government put more funding into high stakes power generation technologies like fusion reactors, clean fission reactors, conversion of stockpiles of nuclear weapons to fuel, power generation from space elevators, etc?
To what degree should government encourage conservation measures like increased use of mass transit, bicycle commuting, population migration from suburbias to city centers, and so forth?
Does conversion to a hydrogen based transportation industry trade local improvements in environmental quality for greater degradation of the global environment?
What can we realistically expect from a Secretary of State who once had a 129,000 ton oil tanker of Bahamian registry named after her, and who has the political clout to get the boat renamed from the Condoleezza Rice to the Altair Voyager when it suited her political ambitions? (Just throwing that out to see if you're awake)
There are plenty more questions that could be asked. But whether we should risk the total destruction of our current economy isn't a question worth trying to answer-- it's just plain silly. When the oil laden supertanker you are on is drifting toward the rocks, the crew shouldn't question whether it's a good idea to change course. The questions that need to be asked now are which way should we point this boat, and how the hell do we start the damn engine?
I've done a few years of telephone support, and I've done quite a bit of calling to help desks as well. A knowledgeable person on a help desk can cut the time to diagnose problems from hours to minutes, and can save much further time by pointing to best practices in correcting the problem. The hours that are saved in this way are hours available for other work. This could make the difference between having to keep a full time IT person with extensive expertise on the payroll, or assigning the IT chores as collateral duties of an additional analyst/programmer. That can easily be the difference between a start-up going belly up and one that manages to stay in the black long enough to become recognized as a going concern.
Of course the same thing applies to established businesses as well. Augmenting the local IT department with outsourced expertise through support contracts can decrease down time with specialized packages and improve the efficiency of what is often the biggest cost center in the company. Why hire or (shudder) train on site someone to troubleshoot specialized software if you can grab a code monkey off the street and use him as a local waldo operating under the control of distant experts?
None of my major points was a complaint. Instead, I tried to demonstrate the absurdity of comparing the purchase price of a license to use MS software with the annual fee for a support contract of OSS. I attempted this by drawing a comparison between the annual fee of a support contract and the payroll cost of in-house IT employees.
It is now very clear to me that in at least one instance I have failed it...
Perhaps others will recognize that the cost to benefit ratio for a $1,000 per seat annual support contract should be compared with the estimated decrease in workload of the IT department. If the support contract makes more than $1,000 of IT hours available for other work over the year's time, then it is clearly worth it. It might still be worth it even if the net cost is higher, since support work farmed out to the contractor would never interfere with some other IT project (like perhaps cleaning up a wiring closet or upgrading the routers).
Disclaimer: It is true that I have a bias against MS that does surface in my posts. I have been forced by uncontrollable circumstance to work with MS products for 18 years. I know very well their level of support, and the kinds of relationships they foster with their partners and with their customers. They have worked very hard to acquire the evil reputation they now have; they have fully earned that reputation; and it would be terribly inappropriate to withhold from them the rewards that they so richly deserve.
So you're saying that a couple of dozen Linux workstations and a bunch of servers won't need ANYONE to service them?
Please re-read my post. I did not write what you seem to believe you heard me say. The remainder of your post appears to be a diatribe against something that I did not write (it appears that your comments were triggered by something you imagined that you heard while you were attempting to read my words?)
Agreed; to be comparable, one would have to add to the price of Windows the prices of a variety of goodies that come bundled with Linux. And if one intended to stay in business, one would also have to add in the prices of antivirus, antispyware, firewall, and other necessities that Windows needs to be operational.
But also the TFA is doing a lot of mixing of apples and oranges. Charges per seat for FOSS imply yearly support contracts, which makes sense, since by definition the license to the software itself is free. What is outsourced under these support contracts, and how does that compare with the cost of self-supporting a Windows shop?
I work for an institution that thinks it has done the right thing by going almost exclusively with Microsoft. And it does get the software licenses for a very low price, and there is no overt charge for accessing MS's extensive knowledge databases. But we have one employee at a cost of at least $50,000 per year whose full time is taken up with administering a handful of servers and a couple of dozen workstations. Part of that $50,000 is a covert cost of using the MS knowledge databases, because he has to wade through that stuff to figure out why the boss's email has taken to reverse spelling every seventh word. Oh, he has an assistant at about $25,000 per year whose time is spent doing all the routine stuff that keeps the software running (configuring, reconfiguring, repairing blown registries, maintaining manifests of authorized software in case the BSA decides to audit, etc).
Comparing the OSS yearly support per seat to the $75,000 per year for on site personnel in a Windows shop is at least as appropriate as the comparisons made in TFA.
I've got 2 abandoned Yahoo accounts of fairly recent vintage (1 to password hassles, 1 was a throwaway I used for learning some stuff about the warez scene). That's in addition to my active Yahoo account.
I've also got at least 2 abandoned GeoCities sites, back from the day before Yahoo's acquisition of same. And possibly 3 or 4 other abandoned sites, because when they attempted to merge GeoCities with Yahoo they kept screwing up my access.
So I can account for at least 5 and possibly 9 of their "users". If my experience is typical, their user base of unique individuals might be a small fraction of what they claim.
You may find that this "OS" which is a stripped version of XP has no IE, has FireFox, and is perfectly stable. It also doesn't phone home for updates etc. Worth a look for "testing" anyway...
Um, thanks but no thanks. From a distance, I find the culture of warez is fascinating. I intend to maintain this distant point of view for at least a few more years...
You make a good point; it was wrong of me to compare the Windows-based computer security industry to leeches. That was an insult to leeches everywhere and I truly am sorry about that.
I fully agree with the concept of wealth creation that Parent Post presents. To state it in its simplest form: when value is added to a product, wealth is created.
I think the example of furniture made from a tree is unfortunate. The timber industry, like mining, is an extractive industry: these generate profits by ripping something out of the natural world. Examples of wealth creation drawn from these industries are always muddled, since there is no common agreement about the value of an uncut forest or the costs associated with mine tailings, etc.
Better to say that the value of a piece of furniture is more than the cost of lumber it was carved from, and that the increase in value is due to the creation of wealth.
I think the parable of the Emperor's new clothes fits this situation better than the parable of the broken window.
The way I read Moody's analysis, it is saying that Vista would provide Europe with few benefits but if everyone pretended to see things otherwise, some $40 billion could redirected from other activities to Vista-related activities (with the implication that this would be a Good Thing, since some fraction of that $40 billion would go to Microsoft).
As near as I can tell (I'm writing after a 66 mile bike ride and not at the top of my mental form), the only benefit Moody identified in moving from WinXP to Vista is improved security. I think the proper parallel to the parable of the broken window is that producers of malware are generating economic activity like a little boy running around the town throwing rocks through [wW]indows. In fact the parallels here are very striking and essentially condemn the entire antivirus - 3rd party firewall industry as nonproductive leeches that might be considered necessary in medieval medical practice. But maybe Europe would do a lot better if it moved to a more modern approach to healthy computing (<voice type="Church Lady">such as, oh I don't know-- LINUX? </voice>).
Gee, at this point I don't know what to say. I guess it's time to bow out of the conversation with an apology.
I'm so sorry that this conversation has gone the way it has; I apologize to anyone who reads this since it is contributing more to the FUD that seems to always surround any perceived criticism of Microsoft than it adds to the universe of rational discourse. There has ended up being more heat and smoke than light here. Sorry about that.
M. Toadlife, I truly regret that reality doesn't match the virtual image of it that you are attempting to project. Your world appears to be a much simpler and safer world, and I'm pretty sure I would enjoy living in it, if it only it existed outside of the mind of the beholder.
This is the kind of thread that could go on and on and on. But that would be a waste of bandwidth. Enough has been laid out here that people with some prior knowledge of the subject and the slashdot milieu can easily predict where it would go and form their own opinions. For anyone else, well, try this:
Consider that a poll of 53,000 slashdot users done more than three years ago showed that more than 67% preferred to use something other than IE as their browser. Since Firefox has gained a lot of market share since then, the number would be unquestionably higher if the poll was repeated today.
Use Google to search the news for stories about MSIE and security issues. There have been just oodles of them, and they provide more factual information than I could hope to present in this forum.
My stated assertion was that MSIE is an integral part of the Windows OS, which means that there is an inherently unsecurable set of portals to the outside world, the browser, that is insufficiently isolated from the OS. So that exploitations of vulnerabilities in the browser can lead to such nasty infections as keyboard loggers, rootkits, and zombie processes (rather than being isolated to just messing up the browser session).
And you are 100% wrong in your assertion. [toadlife]
Good. Now then, M. Toadlife, demonstrate to me that my assertion is wrong by telling me and anyone else who reads your words how to cleanly remove IE from WinXP. Tell me how to do this in the same clean way I can remove MS Office or MS FrontPage. Or Firefox. That is, without destroying any of the other functionality like the help system, or destabilizing the OS.
Take your time. I'll wait around a while, because I'd just love it if you could show me how I'm wrong. If I can reclaim the ram, disk space, and cycles that MSIE is wasting on my machine, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
What kind of "integral part" is it? Is IE part of the kernel or win32?
How would answering these taxonomic questions advance anyone's understanding of the issues being addressed in this thread? You appear to be substituting a semantic quibble for substance.
I don't see why DLLs that ship with the OS should be less secure than DLLs that ship separately.
It isn't a matter of when the modules ship. It is a concern about appropriately partitioning computer resources so that the impact of any exploitable bug would be limited to just the application space. This is done with the Gecko browsers, was done with Netscape before them, and was central to the construction of the first Mosaic browser.
But if you would be able to exchange the OS's default rendering engine
Then you would be repeating MS's mistake and you'd deserve the piece of crap you would end up with.
Thanks for pointing me to WinFLP. I hadn't known of its existence. It might allow some cash registers to continue to function until the hardware fails.
However I don't see your point. WinFLP is not WinXP with some of the DLLs removed; it is an entirely separate OS that is partly based on some of the WinXP source. You can't take WinXP (or any other publically available Win OS) and strip out the MSIE modules and still have a stable OS.
There is no superior technology or anything that would help to make Firefox inherently more secure.
Uh, not quite.
MSIE was rewritten in the mid 1990s so that core modules became an integral part of the Windows OS. It is generally recognized that maintaining a wall between OS and app is good engineering, partly because it avoids many difficult security issues. This is especially true when the application is an interface to the outside world that by nature cannot be secured, like a browser. MS in its wisdom determined that the immediate courtroom benefits of knocking that wall down outweighed the security and maintenance concerns. This was a central part of their defense strategy against lawsuits brought by Netscape and others.
So yes, Firefox's implementation of the available technology is inherently more secure. Firefox preserves the wall between itself and the OS, and is not a superhighway into the core of the OS, the way today's MSIE is.
Slashdot Mirror
My deer rifle is a 30-06 Remmington slide action. I'm a southpaw and a lefthanded bolt was more than I could afford when I got the gun (used): the slide action is ambidextrous. It has a 4 round clip. I've owned it for 31 years now. I don't use it much any more, but at one time it helped stretch the grocery budget.
I learned to shoot from a couple guys who had grown up hunting in the 1930s and who learned to shoot all over again when in the service in World War II. Both saw more action on the Pacific islands than they would ever talk about.
The litany they taught included these steps (done just before the first steps of the hunt)
I doubt that either of those guys saw any of the John Wayne war movies (they liked his westerns though). But I'm pretty sure neither one would have thought "Lock and load, son" was wrong or laughable. It is the way it was done.
Sorry about the rant. But this argument among people who have never had to worry about extracting a jammed live round from a rifle because the shooter hadn't locked the clip into place before trying to load the chamber has grown tiresome.
Google is still the first place I go for most of my queries. However, I find myself going to Wikipedia first when I want an overview of a topic and I know I've got a good keyword to get to it. And often when I'm using Google, the first article I look at is the Wikipedia entry.
Where my usage has really changed is when my first choice of keywords for Google leads to too many wrong responses (too much verbiage about Paris Hilton when looking for hotels in Paris). When this happens I now often look for a Wikipedia article to scan for better keywords to feed to Google. This is a very slick way of quickly narrowing the scope of the search.
Google is incredible. Who would have guessed that searching with "30 mi + 10 km = ? leagues" would get an answer?
I've no direct experience with either company. But this much seems obvious: as the Vista and VOffice roll-outs begin, much of Microsoft's resources are going to be turned from these major development projects to other things. There will be a lot of reassignment of duties, especially at the team leader level-- the people who will have the most influence on your daily work environment as a new hire. In other institutions I have personally seen how this leads to an increase in the amount of hidden, personal agenda crap that people bring into their jobs-- and this definitely affects the quality of the work experience. If you see the workplace as a corporate jungle ruled by tooth and claw, then you might enjoy this kind of environment and do well in it. OTOH, be wary of the friendly overtures of others for it can be hard to tell the person who is looking for mutual support from the person who intends to use you as a support as they try to step over to what they really want.
In contrast, Google's near-term future looks pretty stable: continued refinement of GOffice, Google Earth, and similar projects with no major shifts in corporate emphasis in sight. Combined with other things I have heard about Google's management style, it sounds like the Google environment currently promotes cooperation and community values among its staff, and that this is likely to continue for a few years.
Keep in mind that the most important thing you will get out of your first job is the social network you develop with your peers and immediate supervisors. These contacts can have more impact on the first decade of your career than any other thing.
Thanks for clarifying my earlier post. You have saved me from trying to say what you just said (and its doubtful that I could have said it any better)
It should also be noted that the Google bought YouTube without actually paying out any hard cash-- the purchase was done with stocks. This hasn't put any dent in Google's war chest. I believe the gross oversimplification is that anybody who owned stock in YouTube before the purchase is now the lucky owner of enough shares of Google to boost the value of their portfolio by a very nice amount.
I'm looking forward to using both Wikipedia and Citizendium.
I expect to continue to use Wikipedia as a first line resource, because it has excellent performance in providing background for new discoveries and developments. I need it because I refuse to try to remember the differences between a boson and a lepton when I don't have to, even though once every few hundred evenings I find that sort of thing intensely interesting for a few hours. It usually happens when a lot of other people also have the same intense, transient interest, and more often than not, W has anticipated this interest (sometimes by only a few milliseconds-- sometimes its obvious the bits are still damp and smudgeable when they hit my screen). This is great. Everything there in one resource from the very latest in estimates of rocky planets in the Milky Way to the current name of the 129,000 ton Chevron oil tanker that was formerly known as the Condoleezza Rice. I expect to then sometimes do a compare of the W article with its Citizendium alter ego. Because of Citizendium's more deliberative processes, it should be possible to tell when the elephants in W have increased threefold in the last year. Probably someone will come up with a script to automate comparisons between W and C texts pretty quickly. That will be cool.
So I think we might all win in having two 'cyclopedias that use different forms of quality assurance. W will almost always be the first to publish relevant information; C will enable some fast checking on whether W's presentation had gotten hijacked.
[BTW, shouldn't that be Citizendia? Seems like the plural is more appropriate for something that will be at best an aggregate of several different compendiums. Or does Sanger think that he will be able to unify all knowledge in such a way that we will be able to seamlessly meander from the theory of relativity to quantum mechanics to the theory of color, and then return by a route that reconciles the Transcendant God(s) with the Immanent Goddess(es)? That would be way cool!]
Actually, monopolizing, attempting to monopolize, or conspiring to monopolize any aspect of interstate commerce is a federal felony
That is true, but this language is intended to prevent a company from deliberately raising artificial barriers to potential competitors. Care was taken in writing both the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act to assure that no businessman who "got the whole business because nobody could do it as well as he could" would be punished.
Wikipedia seems to have pretty good summaries of these: see Sherman Antitrust Act and Clayton Antitrust Act.
To find a monopoly, its is not enough that a company is the leading supplier of a product or service, it needs to supply nearly all of that product or service...
And if I recall correctly, just being a monopoly is not an Evil Thing of itself. The legal problems arise only if a company has abused its monopolistic powers. For a long time, 3M had a monopoly in the stickypaper market with Post-It, but no one ever claimed that it was abusing its market dominance to stifle competition, etc.
So evidently a company can be big and also good. If it does no evil...
Now that YouTube has money behind it, Google can expect legal action from a whole bunch of people... some of it justified.
That was truly insightful, at least for me.
Google's core business model revolves around "fair use" and similar provisions of copyright law. I think they are most vulnerable in this area-- look at Belgium. So Google needed to buy YouTube for a couple of reasons related to this.
The first is because YouTube's business model also revolves around many of the same "fair use" provisions, and if YouTube loses its upcoming court cases, the fallout could fatally poison Google's business model. It would be very hard for Google to immunize itself from any judgments against YouTube that changed the interpretation of copyright law. Purchasing YouTube allows Google to directly counter such an attack with all its resources. It also decreases the likelihood of such an attack, since all the ambulance chasers who were smacking their lips in anticipation of an easy meal from YouTube's carcass are now slinking away, looking for easier prey that won't be able to fend them off for years with delaying tactics.
The other reason that occurs to me is that the most important part of strategizing any conflict is choosing your battlefield carefully. Google is under constant threat of serious litigation over copyright concerns. Google has just bought a battlefield where these litigations can be played out, that is comfortably distant from the fields of green where Googles' cash cows graze.
I expect that Google is developing the muscles it needs to directly influence copyright legislation, and I expect it is also going to be increasingly influential in copyright litigation as well (intervening with friend of the court briefs, etc). This all seems to be part of Google's mission statement: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
The question is, are we willing to risk total destruction of our economy and pre-industrial revolution living standards over what amounts to little more than a scientific theory?
Tee-hee! Hope you get the +5 for "Funny" for that one!
The questions for policy makers-- which includes the voting public in the effective democracies-- are:
.
The economic costs of continuing this pattern of increasing dependency of the last century are pretty obvious at this point: we will hit peak oil production soon if we haven't already; agriculture in advanced nations is seriously skewed where more of the energy for producing food is coming from petrochemicals (especially diesel fuel) than is coming from photosynthesis; the petrochemical world economy is socially destabilizing to many of the producing nations, giving rise to international terrorism, etc, etc. Even without the green arguments, the case for getting cured of the fossil fuel addiction is obvious to any unbiased observer.
So the questions are:
There are plenty more questions that could be asked. But whether we should risk the total destruction of our current economy isn't a question worth trying to answer-- it's just plain silly. When the oil laden supertanker you are on is drifting toward the rocks, the crew shouldn't question whether it's a good idea to change course. The questions that need to be asked now are which way should we point this boat, and how the hell do we start the damn engine?
I've done a few years of telephone support, and I've done quite a bit of calling to help desks as well. A knowledgeable person on a help desk can cut the time to diagnose problems from hours to minutes, and can save much further time by pointing to best practices in correcting the problem. The hours that are saved in this way are hours available for other work. This could make the difference between having to keep a full time IT person with extensive expertise on the payroll, or assigning the IT chores as collateral duties of an additional analyst/programmer. That can easily be the difference between a start-up going belly up and one that manages to stay in the black long enough to become recognized as a going concern.
Of course the same thing applies to established businesses as well. Augmenting the local IT department with outsourced expertise through support contracts can decrease down time with specialized packages and improve the efficiency of what is often the biggest cost center in the company. Why hire or (shudder) train on site someone to troubleshoot specialized software if you can grab a code monkey off the street and use him as a local waldo operating under the control of distant experts?
None of my major points was a complaint. Instead, I tried to demonstrate the absurdity of comparing the purchase price of a license to use MS software with the annual fee for a support contract of OSS. I attempted this by drawing a comparison between the annual fee of a support contract and the payroll cost of in-house IT employees.
It is now very clear to me that in at least one instance I have failed it...
Perhaps others will recognize that the cost to benefit ratio for a $1,000 per seat annual support contract should be compared with the estimated decrease in workload of the IT department. If the support contract makes more than $1,000 of IT hours available for other work over the year's time, then it is clearly worth it. It might still be worth it even if the net cost is higher, since support work farmed out to the contractor would never interfere with some other IT project (like perhaps cleaning up a wiring closet or upgrading the routers).
Disclaimer: It is true that I have a bias against MS that does surface in my posts. I have been forced by uncontrollable circumstance to work with MS products for 18 years. I know very well their level of support, and the kinds of relationships they foster with their partners and with their customers. They have worked very hard to acquire the evil reputation they now have; they have fully earned that reputation; and it would be terribly inappropriate to withhold from them the rewards that they so richly deserve.
So you're saying that a couple of dozen Linux workstations and a bunch of servers won't need ANYONE to service them?
Please re-read my post. I did not write what you seem to believe you heard me say. The remainder of your post appears to be a diatribe against something that I did not write (it appears that your comments were triggered by something you imagined that you heard while you were attempting to read my words?)
Agreed; to be comparable, one would have to add to the price of Windows the prices of a variety of goodies that come bundled with Linux. And if one intended to stay in business, one would also have to add in the prices of antivirus, antispyware, firewall, and other necessities that Windows needs to be operational.
But also the TFA is doing a lot of mixing of apples and oranges. Charges per seat for FOSS imply yearly support contracts, which makes sense, since by definition the license to the software itself is free. What is outsourced under these support contracts, and how does that compare with the cost of self-supporting a Windows shop?
I work for an institution that thinks it has done the right thing by going almost exclusively with Microsoft. And it does get the software licenses for a very low price, and there is no overt charge for accessing MS's extensive knowledge databases. But we have one employee at a cost of at least $50,000 per year whose full time is taken up with administering a handful of servers and a couple of dozen workstations. Part of that $50,000 is a covert cost of using the MS knowledge databases, because he has to wade through that stuff to figure out why the boss's email has taken to reverse spelling every seventh word. Oh, he has an assistant at about $25,000 per year whose time is spent doing all the routine stuff that keeps the software running (configuring, reconfiguring, repairing blown registries, maintaining manifests of authorized software in case the BSA decides to audit, etc).
Comparing the OSS yearly support per seat to the $75,000 per year for on site personnel in a Windows shop is at least as appropriate as the comparisons made in TFA.
I've got 2 abandoned Yahoo accounts of fairly recent vintage (1 to password hassles, 1 was a throwaway I used for learning some stuff about the warez scene). That's in addition to my active Yahoo account.
I've also got at least 2 abandoned GeoCities sites, back from the day before Yahoo's acquisition of same. And possibly 3 or 4 other abandoned sites, because when they attempted to merge GeoCities with Yahoo they kept screwing up my access.
So I can account for at least 5 and possibly 9 of their "users". If my experience is typical, their user base of unique individuals might be a small fraction of what they claim.
You may find that this "OS" which is a stripped version of XP has no IE, has FireFox, and is perfectly stable. It also doesn't phone home for updates etc. Worth a look for "testing" anyway...
Um, thanks but no thanks. From a distance, I find the culture of warez is fascinating. I intend to maintain this distant point of view for at least a few more years...
You make a good point; it was wrong of me to compare the Windows-based computer security industry to leeches. That was an insult to leeches everywhere and I truly am sorry about that.
Ah yes, good questions. Pondering on them has caused me to update my sig:
I fully agree with the concept of wealth creation that Parent Post presents. To state it in its simplest form: when value is added to a product, wealth is created.
I think the example of furniture made from a tree is unfortunate. The timber industry, like mining, is an extractive industry: these generate profits by ripping something out of the natural world. Examples of wealth creation drawn from these industries are always muddled, since there is no common agreement about the value of an uncut forest or the costs associated with mine tailings, etc.
Better to say that the value of a piece of furniture is more than the cost of lumber it was carved from, and that the increase in value is due to the creation of wealth.
I think the parable of the Emperor's new clothes fits this situation better than the parable of the broken window.
The way I read Moody's analysis, it is saying that Vista would provide Europe with few benefits but if everyone pretended to see things otherwise, some $40 billion could redirected from other activities to Vista-related activities (with the implication that this would be a Good Thing, since some fraction of that $40 billion would go to Microsoft).
As near as I can tell (I'm writing after a 66 mile bike ride and not at the top of my mental form), the only benefit Moody identified in moving from WinXP to Vista is improved security. I think the proper parallel to the parable of the broken window is that producers of malware are generating economic activity like a little boy running around the town throwing rocks through [wW]indows. In fact the parallels here are very striking and essentially condemn the entire antivirus - 3rd party firewall industry as nonproductive leeches that might be considered necessary in medieval medical practice. But maybe Europe would do a lot better if it moved to a more modern approach to healthy computing (<voice type="Church Lady">such as, oh I don't know-- LINUX? </voice>).
Perhaps that is what Parent Post was inferring?
Gee, at this point I don't know what to say. I guess it's time to bow out of the conversation with an apology.
I'm so sorry that this conversation has gone the way it has; I apologize to anyone who reads this since it is contributing more to the FUD that seems to always surround any perceived criticism of Microsoft than it adds to the universe of rational discourse. There has ended up being more heat and smoke than light here. Sorry about that.
M. Toadlife, I truly regret that reality doesn't match the virtual image of it that you are attempting to project. Your world appears to be a much simpler and safer world, and I'm pretty sure I would enjoy living in it, if it only it existed outside of the mind of the beholder.
This is the kind of thread that could go on and on and on. But that would be a waste of bandwidth. Enough has been laid out here that people with some prior knowledge of the subject and the slashdot milieu can easily predict where it would go and form their own opinions. For anyone else, well, try this:
My stated assertion was that MSIE is an integral part of the Windows OS, which means that there is an inherently unsecurable set of portals to the outside world, the browser, that is insufficiently isolated from the OS. So that exploitations of vulnerabilities in the browser can lead to such nasty infections as keyboard loggers, rootkits, and zombie processes (rather than being isolated to just messing up the browser session).
And you are 100% wrong in your assertion. [toadlife]
Good. Now then, M. Toadlife, demonstrate to me that my assertion is wrong by telling me and anyone else who reads your words how to cleanly remove IE from WinXP. Tell me how to do this in the same clean way I can remove MS Office or MS FrontPage. Or Firefox. That is, without destroying any of the other functionality like the help system, or destabilizing the OS.
Take your time. I'll wait around a while, because I'd just love it if you could show me how I'm wrong. If I can reclaim the ram, disk space, and cycles that MSIE is wasting on my machine, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
You speak in very abstract terms, and you imply that IE runs differently than a regular user-space library would.
I have implied nothing like that. I have emphatically asserted that this is so.
What kind of "integral part" is it? Is IE part of the kernel or win32?
How would answering these taxonomic questions advance anyone's understanding of the issues being addressed in this thread? You appear to be substituting a semantic quibble for substance.
I don't see why DLLs that ship with the OS should be less secure than DLLs that ship separately.
It isn't a matter of when the modules ship. It is a concern about appropriately partitioning computer resources so that the impact of any exploitable bug would be limited to just the application space. This is done with the Gecko browsers, was done with Netscape before them, and was central to the construction of the first Mosaic browser.
But if you would be able to exchange the OS's default rendering engine
Then you would be repeating MS's mistake and you'd deserve the piece of crap you would end up with.
Check out "cross coupling" and the evils thereof.
Thanks for pointing me to WinFLP. I hadn't known of its existence. It might allow some cash registers to continue to function until the hardware fails.
However I don't see your point. WinFLP is not WinXP with some of the DLLs removed; it is an entirely separate OS that is partly based on some of the WinXP source. You can't take WinXP (or any other publically available Win OS) and strip out the MSIE modules and still have a stable OS.
There is no superior technology or anything that would help to make Firefox inherently more secure.
Uh, not quite.
MSIE was rewritten in the mid 1990s so that core modules became an integral part of the Windows OS. It is generally recognized that maintaining a wall between OS and app is good engineering, partly because it avoids many difficult security issues. This is especially true when the application is an interface to the outside world that by nature cannot be secured, like a browser. MS in its wisdom determined that the immediate courtroom benefits of knocking that wall down outweighed the security and maintenance concerns. This was a central part of their defense strategy against lawsuits brought by Netscape and others.
So yes, Firefox's implementation of the available technology is inherently more secure. Firefox preserves the wall between itself and the OS, and is not a superhighway into the core of the OS, the way today's MSIE is.