This essay describes the surprising results of a brief trial
'Brief' sums it up. Optimism is good, but I think experience shows that a lot depends on your demographic, for there are clearly two distinct groups here: those that have an appreciation for the abstract in computers, and those that do not.
Those that have an appreciation for the abstract will always be fascinated by a command line, for they are interested in - fascinated by - how things work. They also like to learn things.
That's the good group. Of the other group, there is not much to be said. They won't learn, they won't learn, they won't learn.
And they won't learn.
I am happy the author of this article has spent time working with adults in this context. But please - there are a lot more people who have amassed tens of years of experience like this together, and sorry to say, their collective experiences are more accurate.
It's interesting to see a breakdown that can attribute US$45 to every PC manufactured, but otherwise this is just yet another talking head article. It's subservient, and begins its wind-up with the classic:
The world expects a lot from great monopolies.
Need one say any more?
And if all this fantastic research is going on - research such as in Cambridge where they basically waste money - why can't MS take care of the essentials first? Such as producing a system that's stable, reliable, not a sitting duck on the net, doesn't leak memory all over the place, is coded with at least a fraction of the care Linus puts into his work, etc? Research? Windows users are paying for research?
Windows users, the poor lot, want the bugs out first!
IMHO it is more than that, and I have been watching these clowns for a long time.
A. Coding quality at Microsoft is abysmal. 'When it gets too slow, we just throw more hardware at it.' That's a direct quote from a Microsoft employee. That's the way things are done there. No one ever allocates time to clean code, but if you want to add a new wiz-bang feature, no matter how dumb it is, you get an immediate go-ahead.
B. Things do not improve over time. I don't care if it's a debug build or not. Things are never that bad if it's coded well in the first place. In fact, the entire production model is screwed. It goes against everything Fred Brooks tried to teach people. If Fred Brooks had been asked to lead the Longhorn project, he would have gone fishing instead, or asked Dave Cutler to help in the pit stop with the latter's Microsoft-sponsored race cars.
C. Microsoft will insist to the very end that their latest Belgian Blue will run faster on less hardware than people are using today. They have to: this is marketing. When Windows 95 was getting ready to stumble out the door, Ballmer insisted, time and again, that it would run FAST on 4 MB RAM. When they finally unveiled it, all the OEMs set up their machines with precisely 4 MB RAM, and it could take ten seconds real time to minimise a window.
D. Now OEMs will beef up their models. When people have been hyped for so long, they're hooked. Now you got 'em.
E. The pathetic programming quality in Redmond is a bonus to Microsoft and everyone. It's known to be bad, and things work best if it is bad. Yes, everyone profits. It's a scam. What's interesting is that people never catch on.
I don't know good ol' Bob Vila. For all I know, he's just another Nathan Arizona. But it's his business; he's ultimately responsible, as are Blue Stream. I say 'good' if it helps reduce spam.
Bob Vila might not have known, true, but that's highly unlikely. Blue Stream are in it up to their skinny necks. In either case, they're all responsible under the law, and be glad for that. Otherwise the classic defence will be 'we didn't know, and the employee who did that terrible thing for us is long gone, and we don't have a forwarding address'.
Something too many seem to find too easy to forget: there's a big world out there outside that Microsoft window...
A. Most Unix systems won't get infected and cannot be infected. Not only is it more difficult, the spyware perps write this stuff specifically for Windows.
B. There would seem to be an assumption here that 'all computers (in the world) run Microsoft Windows'.
C. Ad-aware does as well as an automated tool can do (hopefully), but it cannot kill the latest spyware variant, the automatic cloning program. These programs are scheduled to make multiple copies of themselves with different names and be deposited in different directories and then look out for each other. Should any one of them disappear, the others will quickly clone and replace the missing file and launch it again. Further, they incessantly monitor Windows Registry activity, and as soon as their 'autostart' (in one of the 'Run' keys) is removed, they will immediately replace it. As Ad-aware cannot deal with spyware that fights back like this, Ad-aware cannot defeat them.
D. A better estimate is not that one in ten Microsoft Windows computers is infected, but that a greater number are infected perhaps tens of times with thirty - forty spyware programs all competing for CPU. We recently had a customer completely oblivious to the issue until his XP idled at 100% CPU - that's how bad it becomes, through Windows being so easily exploitable, and through the average Windows Joe being so clueless.
SCO are totally dishonest and they will repeat the "Linux is ours" routine until someone stops them.
A. How much real research is going into Belgian Blue (Longhorn)? They're more behind schedule every day, with specs tossed out of previous versions of NT for a very good reason.
B. Chris Gulker and others say MS will come out with their own Linux, not with Longhorn.
Who's to say the delays are not because MS are monitoring the SCO situation - that they stand poised to buy SCO (who could stop them) at which point they basically own Linus?
He and everyone else in that Utah ghost town have been suckered by Gates.
It's classic British war tactics - something Gates would not have missed. It doesn't say Gates will ever define the rewards these losers get for doing all this dirty stuff for him; it totally precludes them having any direct contact with him at all; and no matter how it goes, Gates will deny, both to authorities and to SCO - they've been suckered big.
But Gates might still end up killing open source. Don't underestimate him. Never do that.
It is interesting, and spine-tingling even, and definitely relevant, but you have to go farther back in history to see the relation.
In the early 80's, Gates was still intent on getting out from under the skirts of IBM. He'd succeeded in getting the MS out of DOS to sell it himself. And in one fell swoop, he bought a source code license to Unix and the Lattice C compiler.
The C compiler was not Unix compatible. That's what his own engineers changed for the first release.
At the same time, he handed over the Unix source to SCO. Their contract was to produce XENIX for Bill. At that time, people were still entertaining getting Unix onto PCs of the day. AT&T even tried.
In 1989, David Cutler had been under a Microsoft roof about one year. He had come cross town with his entire Prism team, including the hardware engineers he forced Bill to salary, even though they couldn't be used. And Microsoft were still 'helping' IBM write OS/2. And the only viable memory extension on the PC was the first LIM (Lotus Intel Microsoft) standard, which was not much to have.
When LIM came out with their new improved standard, the waters broke through the dam and MS concentrated on Windows 3.0, released in 1990 - a year after their supposed investment in SCO, and a couple of years before Linus got his idea.
Slashdot Mirror
StarBrite became StarDimm - 'Service Unavailable'.
Agreed. Forbes is forbing up here.
This essay describes the surprising results of a brief trial
'Brief' sums it up. Optimism is good, but I think experience shows that a lot depends on your demographic, for there are clearly two distinct groups here: those that have an appreciation for the abstract in computers, and those that do not.
Those that have an appreciation for the abstract will always be fascinated by a command line, for they are interested in - fascinated by - how things work. They also like to learn things.
That's the good group. Of the other group, there is not much to be said. They won't learn, they won't learn, they won't learn.
And they won't learn.
I am happy the author of this article has spent time working with adults in this context. But please - there are a lot more people who have amassed tens of years of experience like this together, and sorry to say, their collective experiences are more accurate.
It's interesting to see a breakdown that can attribute US$45 to every PC manufactured, but otherwise this is just yet another talking head article. It's subservient, and begins its wind-up with the classic:
The world expects a lot from great monopolies.
Need one say any more?
And if all this fantastic research is going on - research such as in Cambridge where they basically waste money - why can't MS take care of the essentials first? Such as producing a system that's stable, reliable, not a sitting duck on the net, doesn't leak memory all over the place, is coded with at least a fraction of the care Linus puts into his work, etc? Research? Windows users are paying for research?
Windows users, the poor lot, want the bugs out first!
At time of writing two of the three links do not work and the third has broken links to all the images.
Better luck next time.
... takes 0.018 grams of brains.
A. Apple have a pretty interesting programming community, considering how many came in from NeXT.
B. Not everything is improving. Although Panther can be faster on much older machines, it can be a lot slower on more recent hardware.
IMHO it is more than that, and I have been watching these clowns for a long time.
A. Coding quality at Microsoft is abysmal. 'When it gets too slow, we just throw more hardware at it.' That's a direct quote from a Microsoft employee. That's the way things are done there. No one ever allocates time to clean code, but if you want to add a new wiz-bang feature, no matter how dumb it is, you get an immediate go-ahead.
B. Things do not improve over time. I don't care if it's a debug build or not. Things are never that bad if it's coded well in the first place. In fact, the entire production model is screwed. It goes against everything Fred Brooks tried to teach people. If Fred Brooks had been asked to lead the Longhorn project, he would have gone fishing instead, or asked Dave Cutler to help in the pit stop with the latter's Microsoft-sponsored race cars.
C. Microsoft will insist to the very end that their latest Belgian Blue will run faster on less hardware than people are using today. They have to: this is marketing. When Windows 95 was getting ready to stumble out the door, Ballmer insisted, time and again, that it would run FAST on 4 MB RAM. When they finally unveiled it, all the OEMs set up their machines with precisely 4 MB RAM, and it could take ten seconds real time to minimise a window.
D. Now OEMs will beef up their models. When people have been hyped for so long, they're hooked. Now you got 'em.
E. The pathetic programming quality in Redmond is a bonus to Microsoft and everyone. It's known to be bad, and things work best if it is bad. Yes, everyone profits. It's a scam. What's interesting is that people never catch on.
s
:)
s
Here ya go.
From that article:
Vila, whose wife, Diana Barrett, is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School...
Uh, where was she when hubby decided to get involved in spamming? This is very interesting...
Good point, but it's 'spam' with a 'p', not a 'c'. Scamming is bad enough; this law - and the general objection - is about spam.
I don't know good ol' Bob Vila. For all I know, he's just another Nathan Arizona. But it's his business; he's ultimately responsible, as are Blue Stream. I say 'good' if it helps reduce spam.
Bob Vila might not have known, true, but that's highly unlikely. Blue Stream are in it up to their skinny necks. In either case, they're all responsible under the law, and be glad for that. Otherwise the classic defence will be 'we didn't know, and the employee who did that terrible thing for us is long gone, and we don't have a forwarding address'.
Something too many seem to find too easy to forget: there's a big world out there outside that Microsoft window...
A. Most Unix systems won't get infected and cannot be infected. Not only is it more difficult, the spyware perps write this stuff specifically for Windows.
B. There would seem to be an assumption here that 'all computers (in the world) run Microsoft Windows'.
C. Ad-aware does as well as an automated tool can do (hopefully), but it cannot kill the latest spyware variant, the automatic cloning program. These programs are scheduled to make multiple copies of themselves with different names and be deposited in different directories and then look out for each other. Should any one of them disappear, the others will quickly clone and replace the missing file and launch it again. Further, they incessantly monitor Windows Registry activity, and as soon as their 'autostart' (in one of the 'Run' keys) is removed, they will immediately replace it. As Ad-aware cannot deal with spyware that fights back like this, Ad-aware cannot defeat them.
D. A better estimate is not that one in ten Microsoft Windows computers is infected, but that a greater number are infected perhaps tens of times with thirty - forty spyware programs all competing for CPU. We recently had a customer completely oblivious to the issue until his XP idled at 100% CPU - that's how bad it becomes, through Windows being so easily exploitable, and through the average Windows Joe being so clueless.
file a writ of mandamus, and a court will tell the prosecutor
Great idea! Now who tells the court they have to tell the prosecutor to file? What kind of writ is that?
In the end we would end up with essentially a monopoly in computer operating systems.
What the hell you think we got now, boy?
LOL
SCO are totally dishonest and they will repeat the "Linux is ours" routine until someone stops them.
A. How much real research is going into Belgian Blue (Longhorn)? They're more behind schedule every day, with specs tossed out of previous versions of NT for a very good reason.
B. Chris Gulker and others say MS will come out with their own Linux, not with Longhorn.
Who's to say the delays are not because MS are monitoring the SCO situation - that they stand poised to buy SCO (who could stop them) at which point they basically own Linus?
Isn't this right out of the MS playbook?
Of course it is!
Why is everybody else on drugs?
But I for one never quite realized that Microsoft was in a panic.
Wow. Little Rip van Winkle! Been asleep five whole years, have we?
To be a pawn, manipulated by another for sinister purposes. They used him to SCO those other guys.
This one's right on. Is 'SCO-punk' a word? For their all Bill's 'punks'.
He and everyone else in that Utah ghost town have been suckered by Gates.
It's classic British war tactics - something Gates would not have missed. It doesn't say Gates will ever define the rewards these losers get for doing all this dirty stuff for him; it totally precludes them having any direct contact with him at all; and no matter how it goes, Gates will deny, both to authorities and to SCO - they've been suckered big.
But Gates might still end up killing open source. Don't underestimate him. Never do that.
They've lost any grip on reality now.
Ridiculous. They've stirred the open source pot dextrously. Bill Gates couldn't have done it better. In fact, he's the one who did it.
apparently nonsensical actions
There's nothing nonsensical about it. It's all brilliantly planned, and up to now, going 100% according to plan.
It's bloody brilliant. Evil, but brilliant. And the longer people do not get it, the better their chances are.
don't let it spoil the original SCO company or products
One of which was XENIX, which they did on contract for you-know-who.
'Follow the money!'
- Deep Throat
It is interesting, and spine-tingling even, and definitely relevant, but you have to go farther back in history to see the relation.
In the early 80's, Gates was still intent on getting out from under the skirts of IBM. He'd succeeded in getting the MS out of DOS to sell it himself. And in one fell swoop, he bought a source code license to Unix and the Lattice C compiler.
The C compiler was not Unix compatible. That's what his own engineers changed for the first release.
At the same time, he handed over the Unix source to SCO. Their contract was to produce XENIX for Bill. At that time, people were still entertaining getting Unix onto PCs of the day. AT&T even tried.
In 1989, David Cutler had been under a Microsoft roof about one year. He had come cross town with his entire Prism team, including the hardware engineers he forced Bill to salary, even though they couldn't be used. And Microsoft were still 'helping' IBM write OS/2. And the only viable memory extension on the PC was the first LIM (Lotus Intel Microsoft) standard, which was not much to have.
When LIM came out with their new improved standard, the waters broke through the dam and MS concentrated on Windows 3.0, released in 1990 - a year after their supposed investment in SCO, and a couple of years before Linus got his idea.
I am just glad the "Linux is unix" and "GPL" stuff will be settled in court soon.
Soon? Says who?
There comes a time when idealism means blindness.