So how do they propose that my two flatmates who do fileshare are cut off, whereas the remaing two flatmates who don't fileshare retain internet access?
Oh wait, no-one's proposing that. They just expect me (internet is in my name) to police my flatmates computers for them. Bottom-up stazi citizenry for your future police state here we come.
Personally, I think the trick is not to chase the so-called "best" option (typically XP or OSX or but to make a desktop that's a) simple and reasonably intuitive off the bat and b) easily configurable to get to where the user wants (if the user doesn't want to "go" anywhere with the UI they don'g get past (a) anyway so it's of little concern).
Personally, I think that the "big four" (Windows, OSX, KDE* and GNOME) both come very close to fulfilling (a) and some way to fulfilling (b), with KDE IMHO being the most uber-configurable whilst squirreling away most of the more frightening UI options away behind multiple tabs of increasingly complex/obscure functionality - simple changes are one or two clicks or a drag'n'drop away, but if you want to change the behaviour of window class XYZ you generally have to drill down three or four menus.
I first delved properly into OSX a few months ago with a Mac mini I was upgrading for a friend. The UI is nice off the bat, but I found it highly functionally limited when I wanted to do "power user" things. It took me about five minutes to find out how to launch an app I had just installed that wasn't shown in the dock, and I'm still at a bit of a loss as to how to switch between apps when I don't know what their dock icon looks like. I find that my way of working doesn't really fit around the Apple way of how it feels I should work, and I don't like swimming upstream.
In windows, it's easy enough to create new panels, menus, re-order this, that and t'other easily enough, but adding things like an applet to control my media player for the taskbar usually means tracking down an obscure plugin of some sort, whereas with KDE and GNOME it's stupidly easy to do IME. Similarly, configuring things like focus-follows-mouse requires installing extra tools (and breaks loads of apps as well, especially you, Outlook!), and a host of other annoyances.
The fact of the matter is that it's only annoying power users like me who want all of this functionality. Your non-power user will just stick with what they're given; some are amenable to learning that the "start menu" is at the top of the screen, some aren't. But there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all UI; remove the power user crap and you piss off the power users. Make every config dialogue a snowstorm of options and you confuse the people who neither know nor care what they do (how many desktops have you seen still displaying the garish "Teletubbies" XP wallpaper?).
As a long-time KDE user I'm obviously biased, because I like the KDE approach the best (the first-run "Do you want your desktop be behave like Windows, OSX or UNIX?" wizard is a lovely touch) - but I do realise they could do a better job of hiding the complex functionality from novice users (I'm a big fan of the "simple/advanced" switch to load up extended config dialogues). But at least the functionality is there reasonably easily if I need it - no installing extra gubbins, no editing registries, no tweaking config files. Alot of what I think they say (said?) about UNIX/Linux currently applies alot to KDE as well - making the easy things hard, making the hard things easy and the impossible things possible.
This post not intended as a pro-KDE, anti-GNOME/OSX/windows/whatever troll. I just think this idea that "there is one desktop paradigm that is unequivocally the best for every possible scenario" needs to stop. Incidentally, my KDE setup bears almost no resemblence to the defaults, and combines the things I like from every desktop UI I've ever used because I've been able to adapt it to my needs rather than have to shape my needs around the limitations of a system.
* That's 3.5.x, not 4.0, which is pure hell to use at the moment, again IMHO.
Unlike a great many technology companies, Opera ASA have a superb sense of humour, and managed to go mad and get even ($12m payout from MS). Shame that the download no longer seems to be available, but pretty sure I have a copy on my hard drive somewhere.
I'm lucky enough to have a circle of friends, both male and female, who are highly attuned to this gender bias in advertising and equally adept at ignoring it. Couple that with the fact that none of us watch much TV and that most of us are aware that large numbers of people are still institutionally sexist and we usually just laugh and decide not to let it offend us. Not sure if the US gets it worse than we do in the UK (there's an inherent sample bias in that people bitching abotu it on/. are largely male and probably more likely to be single than other blocks of males) but there's certainly a large degree of negative male sterotypes in adverts (see below), but that's not to say there isn't an equally large number of negative female stereotypes as well
On the back of that, I'd like to say this: feminists rock, or at least what I consider "proper" feminists (i.e. those women who really do want equal rights and not just an excuse to sneer at "useless" men) and it's pretty much given that if I'm attracted to a woman she's a feminist. They're ballsy, they don't want to be fitted into a "role", they're typically smart and sharp as hell and they're not going to put up with any bullshit. These are qualities that geeks usually admire, and I'm certainly no different in this regard. But I just see the word "feminist" (along with "feminazi", "liberal" and "pro-human rights") bandied about with such insulting regularity that I really wonder if people aren't forgetting what feminism was originally about - namely, not some stupid fucking marketing trick to make women feel superior and buy more sterotyped consumable crap ("I'm a woman in control of my own life... that's why I need to buy some fucking shampoo and lipstick and drool over this neanderthal six-pack on legs whilst I pour diet coke down my throat").
P.S. I hope this is the right one (YouTube blocked at work) but Charlie Brooker did a pretty nice take on it on his screenwipe TV show http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiwmYjk9ARA - the reason that men are often portrayed as idiots in adverts is that a worryingly large percetntage of them are. Just don't call him cynical:) Unfortunately I share much of his opinion in that I would love for there to be a "B Ark" made at some point in the near future.
The WOW first started when Stallman stuck two fingers up at a printer driver as said "fuck this, I can do better". From the first "fuck you" it's a downhill struggle.
Heck, Opera didn't even let me get as far as clicking on the javascript link. Shame, Photosynth looked cool in the demo. Guess that's another MS-only tech I'll fail to give a shit about.
As an aside, MS:if you can't get a grip on Google, at least get a grip on standards. It's a start, at least. Opera, you rule. Firefox, you almost rule. Microsoft? EPOCH FAIL
Two main search engines? Isn't that a highly competitive market by US DoJ standards? I thought antitrust only kicked in when a company ended up competing with itself and the DoJ acted as a referee?
This is getting ridiculous - you haven't even made it Zune-only or Xbox360 only, and I didn't even see you de-anti-incentivise something once. I think the person who says he's from MS offering you a job might be an impersonator - you clearly have too much interest in delivering a usable product.
Hehe, yes, was aware of the multitasking article, just found it oddly coincidental that I had my first hit-reply-in-the-wrong-tab accident so soon after the article was published. I blame Friday afternoon, as anything that immediately follows thursdays can't be good;)
I hate getting dangerously close to two Godwin's in a week, but the whole MS/Ballmer/Google thing is increasingly making me think of a certain German's obsession with a Soviet city on the Volga (but that's what you get from erading too many history books). With $45bn being almost all of MS's cash reserve, it stinks of a desperate and obsessive tactical error for the sole purpose of buying mindshare*.
The fact of the matter is, Google started out with the cards stacked against them - miniscule funding, hard drive arrays built from lego, the inability to modify their own consumer operating system monopoly to point their bundled internet browser at their own search engines/portals - and yet within a few short years google was a household name, and is now the de facto synonym for "looking something up on the internet". It's the kind of success that Ballmer can only dream of - a vastly better product than anything else that was out at the time (fast and lean, IIRC an alien concept in search engines at the time), in the right place at the right moment to catch the new "internet boom" that MS had famously underestimated. If I was the CEO of (supposedly) the worlds' leading technology firm, such upstart behaviour would piss me off too.
As it is, I suspect the deal will be approved (the shareholders will love it and I can't see the ineffectual monpoly police battin gan eyelid over this "because MS isn't a monopoly on the internet") but I don't think it's going to do MS much good in the long run. Yet another brand run into the ground.
* Yes, I'm aware that the Y! purchase would net many other gains (such as the oft-mentioned decrease in FOSS contributions from Y!), but mindshare and search hits seem to be the biggest factor here.
My advice to said user? Buck up and get business-level service, or find yourself a real hosting service for your mail server.
Define "real hosting". Not everything requires a data centre; I define hosting as "fit for purpose", if my home mail server sends out 20MB of email a month I can hardly see why I need to pay for an entirely different server and internet connection that I upload the same 20MB to, which then uploads the 20MB elsewhere. Here was me thinking the internet was all about multiple different nodes being able to send and receive data to one another, automatically routing around damaged nodes. I didn't think you needed a special sort of internet connection in order to send stuff to other people. I don't subscribe to the "walled garden" idea of the ISP, where everything is sanitised for you by a third party, it sets a bad precedent.
If they're worried about people using up gobs of upload bandwidth, doesn't their ToS cover a "fair usage" policy as well? They don't seem to mind people using their home internet connections to host online games or accept VoIP calls, both of which require "server" functionality.
Readig the mailing list postings, it's blatant that they're just scanning for their own IP blocks but telling people that they were detecting was spam (in any case, anyone who routinely blackholes "possible" spam should be shot; modify the subject or the X-Spam: headers). This is lying in order to make the customer think they're in the wrong.
Yup, I remember spending DAYS on getting my much beloved dual-monitor setup working in Gentoo several years ago, and was dreading my shift to Kubuntu for having to go through the process all over again. Thankfully, the nVidia drivers have been rock solid for me and most others for some years now, and the new developments with X.org and xrandr (X.org has positively shot along since the fork from XF86) rendered the whole process quick and painless (easier than windows in fact, IMHO). Fire up nVidia config utility. Click "turn on second monitor". Turn on TwinView. Test. Write settings to xorg.conf. Restart X if you want to use it Right Now.
Non-nvidia cards (like the Intel chipset in my laptop) have the inbuilt ubuntu graphics manager which follows a similar purpose and allows a similar degree of configurability. It detects what screens are connected, their resolution (either native or user-configured), and gives a degree of positional control.
All of the ubuntu xorg detection routines use bus ID's as far as I can tell, so using two different GFX cards that require two different drivers shouldn't be a problem, at least, I hope I'm right. Good luck with it if you decide to give it another shot.
Achilles' weakness was his heel, but it wasn't his fault.
Similarly, Linux's supposed lack of support for hardware (in reality, it's hardware's lack of support for Linux) is frequently what makes the tasks of which you speak difficult. I'm not saying that Linux couldn't do with alot of polish in regard to making some of the things that are supported easier, but the point of TFA is that there are still some hardware hurdles to overcome with certain manufacturers.
Incidentally, the latest ubuntu made switching between multi-monitor setups a million miles easier (depending on your hardware;)). It's not perfect but it's light years ahead of what was commonly available less than a year ago. Dock my laptop - I get an extra screen automatically. Undock it - all the windows that were on the secondary monitor shift back to my laptop screen. Plug it into a different monitor and it's automatically detected (assuming correct EDID). One thing I've not done is try and use two different graphics cards at once though, but two screens at different resolutions from the same card is easy IME.
You mean all those other devs I meet in IRC with handles like "billgroolz!" and "ballmerrocksmyballs" "jobsisawiener" weren't being sarcastic?!
I did wonder why I saw this chunk of code creep into ubuntu CVS as well; if [ parttype.sda1 = "NTFS" && parttype.sda2 = "EvilLinuxFilesystem" ]
sda1.wipedrive
print "pwned by teh Ballmer!"
exit
Fortunatele for me, it wasn't written in any exploitable programming language as gcc doesn't understand bad pseudocode. Although I'm sure are writing a patch for it as we speak.
Not to mention all of the other trackers, public and private, that have the exact same torrent file posted to them as well. Heck, if you have a popular TPB torrent running, I imagine you'll see several other trackers listed. Only submitting your upload to one tracker when there are hundreds available is limiting your potential swarm base.
Not sure how selective proecution plays out under European rules though, and even if it were treated the same as in the states it's still not grounds for dismissal.
I remember the cries "OH no! Windows sux because of running as an administrator. That's why we have virii!". Now we're stuck with annoying popups. If I want to perform a "ipconfig/release", I have to create a shortcut to cmd, right-click and "run as Administrator" to be able to do that task.
This was basically the nail in the coffin of our company rolling out Vista any time soon. The inability to quickly use one of the many useful CLI programs to accomplish something infuriated many, many people.
Honestly, I can't see how MS fucked up UAC so badly. They took al the lessons learned from various incvarnations of [g|k]sudo... and threw them out of the window, implementing a "security" function that isn't extended to all programs...? Who on earth OK'd that idea? Couldn't they just have given `runas` a bit of an overhaul and left it at that? Mostly every config dialogue in windows I'm aware of is implemented as an executable program, an MSC dialogue or an MMC object and all of them can be run as superuser using the runas tool already (even though there's still plenty of apps that still don't work properly with runas, such as outlook). For every cool idea I've seen in Vista, there's been a stupid one to cancel it out.
First off, there are people like you and me - computer with Vista (new HP nx7300 laptop in my case), working perfectly. Stable, no crashes, no bluescreens, ages between reboots, easily fast enough for my needs. Brilliant. Vista lasted about 2hrs on my laptop before I got rid of it and set up a dual boot XP/Kubuntu install. Why? I just didn't like it, and found it too hard to get the system to behave like I like my computers to behave. Not everything is about performance.
Then you have the people who do have significant problems, typically with drivers, most of them third party. Whether or not this is MS's fault (lots of changed driver API's were only there to pacify Big Content IMHO) is neither here nor there because the users themselves can't do anything about it. Ergo, they don't like Vista.
Then you have the people with software that won't run properly, typically because it's shoddily written and hasn't been updated since the 9x days. Again, what options do they have? Use an OS they can't run their crufty-but-essential software on? Another valid reason why people don't use Vista, and the one my company finds itself in (shitty webapps designed to only work with IE6's hideously broken rendering and activex).
Sure, we can argue about backwards compatability until we're all blue in the face - yup, it'd be great if stupid people didn't purchase stupid software from other stupid people so that everything Just Worked [TM] but this isn't the world we live in. MS made a conscious choice to change alot of how things worked in Vista, and alot of people aren't seeing the benefit of it for the reaons outlined above (and more besides). XP didn't have half so many problems at it's release as it'd had 2k preceding it to iron out some of the most fundamental issues, and even then XP was a bag o' crap until SP1. From a tech perspective, 9x > NT5 was a colossal leap, far bigger than the leap from, say, NT5.1 to NT6. Similarly, the leap user experienced going from 98/ME to XP was stultifyingly huge - all of a sudden users had an OS where uptimes could be measured in *days*, where things didn't stop working or crash after XYZ. Vista offers, comparatively, the same benefits to your average user who's already generally happy with XP, with the only end-user change appearing to be a glossy 3D UI. Most people don't care enough to justify the cash.
It's not like Vista is terrible, from an end user perspective. It's just astonishingly medicore compared to the PC revolution that preceded it.
N.B. please don't try and dilute my argument with techie details about all the cool shit going on in the kernel, or this that and t'other doohickey - your avergae user doesn't know or care. I'm aware of alot of the cool stuff going on in Vista, especially under the hood - heck, I've maintained for years that MS employs some of the smartest coders on the planet - but as a whole, the OS and the company just isn't coherent any more and Vista positively reeks of a platform becoming too top-heavy.
The thing we loved about Plone was that we could restrict what was posted and by whom on a very fine-grained basis which made it much easier to enforce where the documentation should live and (roughly) what format it was in (we made a custom object that created a docs template, as well as a bunch of other custom objects fo various other collaborative business tasks).
Your situation does sound sucky (I'd say that such a project needs a strong, determined leader/manager) but it does sound like the systems inception was rushed. As you point out, if the implementation people become fractious, all hell can break loose. But you're completely right about information management skills/practices being essential from the word go.
The world and his wife has already said it, but wiki's are an absolute godsend. My previous company took me and my partner on due to having a terrible IT outsourcer who charged them a fortune and provided shit service (whooda thunk it, eh?) and one of the first things we added was a wiki. When you're rebuilding an architecture from the ground up, you don't have the time or inclination to write huge tomes of docs, but you do have time to scribble notes in a wiki whilst package XYZ is installing or you're waiting for seven gigs of data to copy over a shoffy broadband link.
We eventually settled on Zope/Plone, and it made future IT maintenance an absolute breeze. Universal search of the object database meant finding a particular scribble was a piece of piss. Fine grained permissions mean we can safely add all of our backend IT stuff (architecture docs, ISP details, support contacts, machine names, the works) so that no-one else can see it. Web based means it's available throughout the company and usable over minimum bandwidth, inclduing GPRS on my blackberry. The ability to add a "comments" box to the end of every type of page object was an utterly superb idea, as was the inbuilt version control for file attachments.
Compare and contrast to my current company (who bought out the one with Plone); documentation is an absolute fucking nightmare. We're forced to type it in a very particular format in Word in such an arcane template that one wrong move re-numbering the mis-numbered bullet points can make whole sections just vanish (I've exponded more expletives over word than any other program in history - fine for quick letters, anything more complicated and it always seems to crumble to pieces); screenshots in word look absofuckinglutely terrible, and some docs are little more than a catalogue of screenshots from installing and configuring each stage of the app (useless IMHO because they're practically impossible to edit - no-one goes through it when reconfiguring, removing the obsolete screenshots and putting in new ones), unless you happen to live in one of our sub-domains, whose normal.dot is such that screenshots that take up the whole width of one of my domains' pages do no appear to exist on their computer (that's right, a completely 60 page blank document weighing in at over 15MB, as far as they can tell).
On top of the dogged insistence that Word be the holy grail of all document formats, each project team has their own documentation area and since there's alot of "architects hand this to ops who hand this to apps testing who hand this to helpdesk who hand this back to ops who then forward changes back to architects who then hand it down to..." going on, there's a veritable starburst of word documents all over the SAN, all pertaining to different sections of the app with about 80% overlap, much of it mutually contradictory, and since all depts use different (and manual, hence arbitrary) version numbering schemes you essentially just have to talk to practically everyone who's worked on that project to figure out WTF is going on. Since the documentation is in such a state, no-one bothers updating it, to the extent that when it's time to reinstall $app on a different server, you find the name of the database has changed and have the task of tracking down the one DBA who knows which box to look at. The few projects that do have "universal" documentation (typically because they're either small or under the helm of someone who laid down strict rules of where the docs should go to begin with) do so at the expense of permissions - they're typically available to normal users if you know the right path to put in to your run: dialogue.
Have pleaded and pleaded for a saner document management system, Plone was thrown out for the time being for being UNIX (!), at the moment they're trying to integrate the current docs in sharepoint. The words "fuster" and "cluck" spring to mind, although not necessarily spoonerised.
With a wiki and a remarkably small amount of self-discipline you can avoid the doc
Slashdot Mirror
So how do they propose that my two flatmates who do fileshare are cut off, whereas the remaing two flatmates who don't fileshare retain internet access?
Oh wait, no-one's proposing that. They just expect me (internet is in my name) to police my flatmates computers for them. Bottom-up stazi citizenry for your future police state here we come.
Personally, I think the trick is not to chase the so-called "best" option (typically XP or OSX or but to make a desktop that's a) simple and reasonably intuitive off the bat and b) easily configurable to get to where the user wants (if the user doesn't want to "go" anywhere with the UI they don'g get past (a) anyway so it's of little concern).
Personally, I think that the "big four" (Windows, OSX, KDE* and GNOME) both come very close to fulfilling (a) and some way to fulfilling (b), with KDE IMHO being the most uber-configurable whilst squirreling away most of the more frightening UI options away behind multiple tabs of increasingly complex/obscure functionality - simple changes are one or two clicks or a drag'n'drop away, but if you want to change the behaviour of window class XYZ you generally have to drill down three or four menus.
I first delved properly into OSX a few months ago with a Mac mini I was upgrading for a friend. The UI is nice off the bat, but I found it highly functionally limited when I wanted to do "power user" things. It took me about five minutes to find out how to launch an app I had just installed that wasn't shown in the dock, and I'm still at a bit of a loss as to how to switch between apps when I don't know what their dock icon looks like. I find that my way of working doesn't really fit around the Apple way of how it feels I should work, and I don't like swimming upstream.
In windows, it's easy enough to create new panels, menus, re-order this, that and t'other easily enough, but adding things like an applet to control my media player for the taskbar usually means tracking down an obscure plugin of some sort, whereas with KDE and GNOME it's stupidly easy to do IME. Similarly, configuring things like focus-follows-mouse requires installing extra tools (and breaks loads of apps as well, especially you, Outlook!), and a host of other annoyances.
The fact of the matter is that it's only annoying power users like me who want all of this functionality. Your non-power user will just stick with what they're given; some are amenable to learning that the "start menu" is at the top of the screen, some aren't. But there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all UI; remove the power user crap and you piss off the power users. Make every config dialogue a snowstorm of options and you confuse the people who neither know nor care what they do (how many desktops have you seen still displaying the garish "Teletubbies" XP wallpaper?).
As a long-time KDE user I'm obviously biased, because I like the KDE approach the best (the first-run "Do you want your desktop be behave like Windows, OSX or UNIX?" wizard is a lovely touch) - but I do realise they could do a better job of hiding the complex functionality from novice users (I'm a big fan of the "simple/advanced" switch to load up extended config dialogues). But at least the functionality is there reasonably easily if I need it - no installing extra gubbins, no editing registries, no tweaking config files. Alot of what I think they say (said?) about UNIX/Linux currently applies alot to KDE as well - making the easy things hard, making the hard things easy and the impossible things possible.
This post not intended as a pro-KDE, anti-GNOME/OSX/windows/whatever troll. I just think this idea that "there is one desktop paradigm that is unequivocally the best for every possible scenario" needs to stop. Incidentally, my KDE setup bears almost no resemblence to the defaults, and combines the things I like from every desktop UI I've ever used because I've been able to adapt it to my needs rather than have to shape my needs around the limitations of a system.
* That's 3.5.x, not 4.0, which is pure hell to use at the moment, again IMHO.
Certainly did!
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/02/14/1256231.shtml?tid=133
http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2003/02/14/
Unlike a great many technology companies, Opera ASA have a superb sense of humour, and managed to go mad and get even ($12m payout from MS). Shame that the download no longer seems to be available, but pretty sure I have a copy on my hard drive somewhere.
I'm lucky enough to have a circle of friends, both male and female, who are highly attuned to this gender bias in advertising and equally adept at ignoring it. Couple that with the fact that none of us watch much TV and that most of us are aware that large numbers of people are still institutionally sexist and we usually just laugh and decide not to let it offend us. Not sure if the US gets it worse than we do in the UK (there's an inherent sample bias in that people bitching abotu it on /. are largely male and probably more likely to be single than other blocks of males) but there's certainly a large degree of negative male sterotypes in adverts (see below), but that's not to say there isn't an equally large number of negative female stereotypes as well
:) Unfortunately I share much of his opinion in that I would love for there to be a "B Ark" made at some point in the near future.
On the back of that, I'd like to say this: feminists rock, or at least what I consider "proper" feminists (i.e. those women who really do want equal rights and not just an excuse to sneer at "useless" men) and it's pretty much given that if I'm attracted to a woman she's a feminist. They're ballsy, they don't want to be fitted into a "role", they're typically smart and sharp as hell and they're not going to put up with any bullshit. These are qualities that geeks usually admire, and I'm certainly no different in this regard. But I just see the word "feminist" (along with "feminazi", "liberal" and "pro-human rights") bandied about with such insulting regularity that I really wonder if people aren't forgetting what feminism was originally about - namely, not some stupid fucking marketing trick to make women feel superior and buy more sterotyped consumable crap ("I'm a woman in control of my own life... that's why I need to buy some fucking shampoo and lipstick and drool over this neanderthal six-pack on legs whilst I pour diet coke down my throat").
P.S. I hope this is the right one (YouTube blocked at work) but Charlie Brooker did a pretty nice take on it on his screenwipe TV show http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiwmYjk9ARA - the reason that men are often portrayed as idiots in adverts is that a worryingly large percetntage of them are. Just don't call him cynical
Wow, you must work for Microsoft :D
The WOW first started when Stallman stuck two fingers up at a printer driver as said "fuck this, I can do better". From the first "fuck you" it's a downhill struggle.
Heck, Opera didn't even let me get as far as clicking on the javascript link. Shame, Photosynth looked cool in the demo. Guess that's another MS-only tech I'll fail to give a shit about.
As an aside, MS:if you can't get a grip on Google, at least get a grip on standards. It's a start, at least. Opera, you rule. Firefox, you almost rule. Microsoft? EPOCH FAIL
Two main search engines? Isn't that a highly competitive market by US DoJ standards? I thought antitrust only kicked in when a company ended up competing with itself and the DoJ acted as a referee?
This is getting ridiculous - you haven't even made it Zune-only or Xbox360 only, and I didn't even see you de-anti-incentivise something once. I think the person who says he's from MS offering you a job might be an impersonator - you clearly have too much interest in delivering a usable product.
...but why male models?
;)
Hehe, yes, was aware of the multitasking article, just found it oddly coincidental that I had my first hit-reply-in-the-wrong-tab accident so soon after the article was published. I blame Friday afternoon, as anything that immediately follows thursdays can't be good
I hate getting dangerously close to two Godwin's in a week, but the whole MS/Ballmer/Google thing is increasingly making me think of a certain German's obsession with a Soviet city on the Volga (but that's what you get from erading too many history books). With $45bn being almost all of MS's cash reserve, it stinks of a desperate and obsessive tactical error for the sole purpose of buying mindshare*.
The fact of the matter is, Google started out with the cards stacked against them - miniscule funding, hard drive arrays built from lego, the inability to modify their own consumer operating system monopoly to point their bundled internet browser at their own search engines/portals - and yet within a few short years google was a household name, and is now the de facto synonym for "looking something up on the internet". It's the kind of success that Ballmer can only dream of - a vastly better product than anything else that was out at the time (fast and lean, IIRC an alien concept in search engines at the time), in the right place at the right moment to catch the new "internet boom" that MS had famously underestimated. If I was the CEO of (supposedly) the worlds' leading technology firm, such upstart behaviour would piss me off too.
As it is, I suspect the deal will be approved (the shareholders will love it and I can't see the ineffectual monpoly police battin gan eyelid over this "because MS isn't a monopoly on the internet") but I don't think it's going to do MS much good in the long run. Yet another brand run into the ground.
* Yes, I'm aware that the Y! purchase would net many other gains (such as the oft-mentioned decrease in FOSS contributions from Y!), but mindshare and search hits seem to be the biggest factor here.
M$ fails in the add market
You've used Excel too?
D'oh! Reading the wrong damned thread! We need an article about multitasking making you stupid.
Are you kidding? A Silverlight-only, ActiveX-only-upload Flickr would absolutely *rock*! I can't think of a better way to gain marketshare.
Tech Report seems to think it was the WSJ that said it:
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14047
whereas Ars doesn't name a source;
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080201-microsoft-adds-yahoo-to-shopping-cart.html
My advice to said user? Buck up and get business-level service, or find yourself a real hosting service for your mail server.
Define "real hosting". Not everything requires a data centre; I define hosting as "fit for purpose", if my home mail server sends out 20MB of email a month I can hardly see why I need to pay for an entirely different server and internet connection that I upload the same 20MB to, which then uploads the 20MB elsewhere. Here was me thinking the internet was all about multiple different nodes being able to send and receive data to one another, automatically routing around damaged nodes. I didn't think you needed a special sort of internet connection in order to send stuff to other people. I don't subscribe to the "walled garden" idea of the ISP, where everything is sanitised for you by a third party, it sets a bad precedent.
If they're worried about people using up gobs of upload bandwidth, doesn't their ToS cover a "fair usage" policy as well? They don't seem to mind people using their home internet connections to host online games or accept VoIP calls, both of which require "server" functionality.
Readig the mailing list postings, it's blatant that they're just scanning for their own IP blocks but telling people that they were detecting was spam (in any case, anyone who routinely blackholes "possible" spam should be shot; modify the subject or the X-Spam: headers). This is lying in order to make the customer think they're in the wrong.
Yup, I remember spending DAYS on getting my much beloved dual-monitor setup working in Gentoo several years ago, and was dreading my shift to Kubuntu for having to go through the process all over again. Thankfully, the nVidia drivers have been rock solid for me and most others for some years now, and the new developments with X.org and xrandr (X.org has positively shot along since the fork from XF86) rendered the whole process quick and painless (easier than windows in fact, IMHO). Fire up nVidia config utility. Click "turn on second monitor". Turn on TwinView. Test. Write settings to xorg.conf. Restart X if you want to use it Right Now.
Non-nvidia cards (like the Intel chipset in my laptop) have the inbuilt ubuntu graphics manager which follows a similar purpose and allows a similar degree of configurability. It detects what screens are connected, their resolution (either native or user-configured), and gives a degree of positional control.
All of the ubuntu xorg detection routines use bus ID's as far as I can tell, so using two different GFX cards that require two different drivers shouldn't be a problem, at least, I hope I'm right. Good luck with it if you decide to give it another shot.
Achilles' weakness was his heel, but it wasn't his fault.
;)). It's not perfect but it's light years ahead of what was commonly available less than a year ago. Dock my laptop - I get an extra screen automatically. Undock it - all the windows that were on the secondary monitor shift back to my laptop screen. Plug it into a different monitor and it's automatically detected (assuming correct EDID). One thing I've not done is try and use two different graphics cards at once though, but two screens at different resolutions from the same card is easy IME.
Similarly, Linux's supposed lack of support for hardware (in reality, it's hardware's lack of support for Linux) is frequently what makes the tasks of which you speak difficult. I'm not saying that Linux couldn't do with alot of polish in regard to making some of the things that are supported easier, but the point of TFA is that there are still some hardware hurdles to overcome with certain manufacturers.
Incidentally, the latest ubuntu made switching between multi-monitor setups a million miles easier (depending on your hardware
You mean all those other devs I meet in IRC with handles like "billgroolz!" and "ballmerrocksmyballs" "jobsisawiener" weren't being sarcastic?!
I did wonder why I saw this chunk of code creep into ubuntu CVS as well;
if [ parttype.sda1 = "NTFS" && parttype.sda2 = "EvilLinuxFilesystem" ]
sda1.wipedrive
print "pwned by teh Ballmer!"
exit
Fortunatele for me, it wasn't written in any exploitable programming language as gcc doesn't understand bad pseudocode. Although I'm sure are writing a patch for it as we speak.
Not to mention all of the other trackers, public and private, that have the exact same torrent file posted to them as well. Heck, if you have a popular TPB torrent running, I imagine you'll see several other trackers listed. Only submitting your upload to one tracker when there are hundreds available is limiting your potential swarm base.
Not sure how selective proecution plays out under European rules though, and even if it were treated the same as in the states it's still not grounds for dismissal.
I can see the 1969 headlines now... "Entirity of United States of America emigrates to the moon, comes back" ;)
I remember the cries "OH no! Windows sux because of running as an administrator. That's why we have virii!". Now we're stuck with annoying popups. If I want to perform a "ipconfig /release", I have to create a shortcut to cmd, right-click and "run as Administrator" to be able to do that task.
This was basically the nail in the coffin of our company rolling out Vista any time soon. The inability to quickly use one of the many useful CLI programs to accomplish something infuriated many, many people.
Honestly, I can't see how MS fucked up UAC so badly. They took al the lessons learned from various incvarnations of [g|k]sudo... and threw them out of the window, implementing a "security" function that isn't extended to all programs...? Who on earth OK'd that idea? Couldn't they just have given `runas` a bit of an overhaul and left it at that? Mostly every config dialogue in windows I'm aware of is implemented as an executable program, an MSC dialogue or an MMC object and all of them can be run as superuser using the runas tool already (even though there's still plenty of apps that still don't work properly with runas, such as outlook). For every cool idea I've seen in Vista, there's been a stupid one to cancel it out.
The problem is manifold.
First off, there are people like you and me - computer with Vista (new HP nx7300 laptop in my case), working perfectly. Stable, no crashes, no bluescreens, ages between reboots, easily fast enough for my needs. Brilliant. Vista lasted about 2hrs on my laptop before I got rid of it and set up a dual boot XP/Kubuntu install. Why? I just didn't like it, and found it too hard to get the system to behave like I like my computers to behave. Not everything is about performance.
Then you have the people who do have significant problems, typically with drivers, most of them third party. Whether or not this is MS's fault (lots of changed driver API's were only there to pacify Big Content IMHO) is neither here nor there because the users themselves can't do anything about it. Ergo, they don't like Vista.
Then you have the people with software that won't run properly, typically because it's shoddily written and hasn't been updated since the 9x days. Again, what options do they have? Use an OS they can't run their crufty-but-essential software on? Another valid reason why people don't use Vista, and the one my company finds itself in (shitty webapps designed to only work with IE6's hideously broken rendering and activex).
Sure, we can argue about backwards compatability until we're all blue in the face - yup, it'd be great if stupid people didn't purchase stupid software from other stupid people so that everything Just Worked [TM] but this isn't the world we live in. MS made a conscious choice to change alot of how things worked in Vista, and alot of people aren't seeing the benefit of it for the reaons outlined above (and more besides). XP didn't have half so many problems at it's release as it'd had 2k preceding it to iron out some of the most fundamental issues, and even then XP was a bag o' crap until SP1. From a tech perspective, 9x > NT5 was a colossal leap, far bigger than the leap from, say, NT5.1 to NT6. Similarly, the leap user experienced going from 98/ME to XP was stultifyingly huge - all of a sudden users had an OS where uptimes could be measured in *days*, where things didn't stop working or crash after XYZ. Vista offers, comparatively, the same benefits to your average user who's already generally happy with XP, with the only end-user change appearing to be a glossy 3D UI. Most people don't care enough to justify the cash.
It's not like Vista is terrible, from an end user perspective. It's just astonishingly medicore compared to the PC revolution that preceded it.
N.B. please don't try and dilute my argument with techie details about all the cool shit going on in the kernel, or this that and t'other doohickey - your avergae user doesn't know or care. I'm aware of alot of the cool stuff going on in Vista, especially under the hood - heck, I've maintained for years that MS employs some of the smartest coders on the planet - but as a whole, the OS and the company just isn't coherent any more and Vista positively reeks of a platform becoming too top-heavy.
The thing we loved about Plone was that we could restrict what was posted and by whom on a very fine-grained basis which made it much easier to enforce where the documentation should live and (roughly) what format it was in (we made a custom object that created a docs template, as well as a bunch of other custom objects fo various other collaborative business tasks).
Your situation does sound sucky (I'd say that such a project needs a strong, determined leader/manager) but it does sound like the systems inception was rushed. As you point out, if the implementation people become fractious, all hell can break loose. But you're completely right about information management skills/practices being essential from the word go.
The world and his wife has already said it, but wiki's are an absolute godsend. My previous company took me and my partner on due to having a terrible IT outsourcer who charged them a fortune and provided shit service (whooda thunk it, eh?) and one of the first things we added was a wiki. When you're rebuilding an architecture from the ground up, you don't have the time or inclination to write huge tomes of docs, but you do have time to scribble notes in a wiki whilst package XYZ is installing or you're waiting for seven gigs of data to copy over a shoffy broadband link.
We eventually settled on Zope/Plone, and it made future IT maintenance an absolute breeze. Universal search of the object database meant finding a particular scribble was a piece of piss. Fine grained permissions mean we can safely add all of our backend IT stuff (architecture docs, ISP details, support contacts, machine names, the works) so that no-one else can see it. Web based means it's available throughout the company and usable over minimum bandwidth, inclduing GPRS on my blackberry. The ability to add a "comments" box to the end of every type of page object was an utterly superb idea, as was the inbuilt version control for file attachments.
Compare and contrast to my current company (who bought out the one with Plone); documentation is an absolute fucking nightmare. We're forced to type it in a very particular format in Word in such an arcane template that one wrong move re-numbering the mis-numbered bullet points can make whole sections just vanish (I've exponded more expletives over word than any other program in history - fine for quick letters, anything more complicated and it always seems to crumble to pieces); screenshots in word look absofuckinglutely terrible, and some docs are little more than a catalogue of screenshots from installing and configuring each stage of the app (useless IMHO because they're practically impossible to edit - no-one goes through it when reconfiguring, removing the obsolete screenshots and putting in new ones), unless you happen to live in one of our sub-domains, whose normal.dot is such that screenshots that take up the whole width of one of my domains' pages do no appear to exist on their computer (that's right, a completely 60 page blank document weighing in at over 15MB, as far as they can tell).
On top of the dogged insistence that Word be the holy grail of all document formats, each project team has their own documentation area and since there's alot of "architects hand this to ops who hand this to apps testing who hand this to helpdesk who hand this back to ops who then forward changes back to architects who then hand it down to..." going on, there's a veritable starburst of word documents all over the SAN, all pertaining to different sections of the app with about 80% overlap, much of it mutually contradictory, and since all depts use different (and manual, hence arbitrary) version numbering schemes you essentially just have to talk to practically everyone who's worked on that project to figure out WTF is going on. Since the documentation is in such a state, no-one bothers updating it, to the extent that when it's time to reinstall $app on a different server, you find the name of the database has changed and have the task of tracking down the one DBA who knows which box to look at. The few projects that do have "universal" documentation (typically because they're either small or under the helm of someone who laid down strict rules of where the docs should go to begin with) do so at the expense of permissions - they're typically available to normal users if you know the right path to put in to your run: dialogue.
Have pleaded and pleaded for a saner document management system, Plone was thrown out for the time being for being UNIX (!), at the moment they're trying to integrate the current docs in sharepoint. The words "fuster" and "cluck" spring to mind, although not necessarily spoonerised.
With a wiki and a remarkably small amount of self-discipline you can avoid the doc