Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
on
Critics Pan Nemesis
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· Score: 1
First off: Do you have any concept of how unnecessarily patronizing you sound?
And as to poorly-done Shakespeare: The Tempest and As You Like It come immediately to mind...
Sure, those two are beautifully written, but the book itself is simply drek, once you take away the glorious prose.
It certainly doesn't take away from the 15 or so wonderful plays that he wrote, which is far more than just about any playwright can claim to have done.
I'm not one to write letters that would be seen by most companies to be basic editorials, but I couldn't help, this time.
The content of my letter:
Hi there.
I realize that the person who will be reading this will not be a person in any capacity to do anything with this. However, I feel that Amazon is about to lose a customer it has had almost since it began.
Why?
Because your company is taking advantage of an overworked, underpaid patent office using a poorly designed, poorly regulated patent system. Your tactics are unethical -- I don't care if they're legal or not.
You are not "protecting your business from competitors" by disallowing such common practices as affiliates programs or the "one-click" shopping idea. I thought a boycott would be silly because it accomplishes nothing, but your company has proven that they just don't care one way or another about fair competition or even the future of the Internet. What your company has shown by these actions is that they are primarily interested in the bottom line, no matter how dirty they have to become to do it.
I'm highly disappointed in your company at the moment and will cease to support you with my hard-earned money until the point at which you both rescind your rights to the patents you currently have and also announce the intention to never file a spurious business practices legal patent again. I will also do my very best to ensure that other friends of mine do not use your service as well.
I cannot stress to you how angry this makes me. You are taking advantage of American taxpayers' money and you are taking advantage of _me_.
> [Linus Torvalds] didn't start Linux to create a free OS for others, or with any intent to further open source (a term which didn't even exist at the time), but simply to fill his own needs.
Intriguing. Isn't that the whole point of Open Source, though? That you find a need for an application (in this case, a Unix Variant), you start coding it yourself, and at the very least you have a piece of software that does what you want it to do?
The step after that is: can others use this same tool? If the answer is yes, others will start using it, and will find needs in it themselves. They will then start contributing to the original software.
It's the most interesting part of OSS development to me anyway. Software arises from a need. I think that Linus, in his creation of Linux, was doing exactly what OSS was originally intended to do. If it doesn't make him a crusador, it does at least make him a role model.
Even on systems without heavy user interfaces, such as the ones I code each and every day, the QA of our code often turns up duplicate errors over and over, or contain error reports that actually are stemmed from one particular error -- in other words, fixing one error will likely fix several or dozens of other errors.
I cannot imagine that Microsoft's QA process would be any different. However, on a product that has been in development this long, with this much fanfare, and this much complexity, shipping it at this point and then saying "Bugs Happen" is a dangerous philosophy for Microsoft to be following. They seem to be staking, at this point, a huge amount of their future profitability on this one product, and if it doesn't meet client expectations, or causes undue hardship on the client base, Microsoft is going to watch themselves die to a competitor without the DoJ having ever needed to step in.
The clients have been waiting for so long for this product that I doubt they would have minded waiting a couple more months.
Here's hoping that out of the 20,000 "real" bugs or so out there, that none of them are show-stoppers.
I will almost have to feel sorry for Ballmer if there are.
Slashdot Mirror
First off: Do you have any concept of how unnecessarily patronizing you sound?
And as to poorly-done Shakespeare: The Tempest and As You Like It come immediately to mind...
Sure, those two are beautifully written, but the book itself is simply drek, once you take away the glorious prose. It certainly doesn't take away from the 15 or so wonderful plays that he wrote, which is far more than just about any playwright can claim to have done.
Now that's some half-assed science.
The content of my letter:
Hi there.
I realize that the person who will be reading this will not be a person in any capacity to do anything with this. However, I feel that Amazon is about to lose a customer it has had almost since it began.
Why?
Because your company is taking advantage of an overworked, underpaid patent office using a poorly designed, poorly regulated patent system. Your tactics are unethical -- I don't care if they're legal or not.
You are not "protecting your business from competitors" by disallowing such common practices as affiliates programs or the "one-click" shopping idea. I thought a boycott would be silly because it accomplishes nothing, but your company has proven that they just don't care one way or another about fair competition or even the future of the Internet. What your company has shown by these actions is that they are primarily interested in the bottom line, no matter how dirty they have to become to do it.
I'm highly disappointed in your company at the moment and will cease to support you with my hard-earned money until the point at which you both rescind your rights to the patents you currently have and also announce the intention to never file a spurious business practices legal patent again. I will also do my very best to ensure that other friends of mine do not use your service as well.
I cannot stress to you how angry this makes me. You are taking advantage of American taxpayers' money and you are taking advantage of _me_.
Regards,
--
Kenneth G. Cavness
Not that it makes a difference. *sigh*
Intriguing. Isn't that the whole point of Open Source, though? That you find a need for an application (in this case, a Unix Variant), you start coding it yourself, and at the very least you have a piece of software that does what you want it to do?
The step after that is: can others use this same tool? If the answer is yes, others will start using it, and will find needs in it themselves. They will then start contributing to the original software.
It's the most interesting part of OSS development to me anyway. Software arises from a need. I think that Linus, in his creation of Linux, was doing exactly what OSS was originally intended to do. If it doesn't make him a crusador, it does at least make him a role model.
Even on systems without heavy user interfaces, such as the ones I code each and every day, the QA of our code often turns up duplicate errors over and over, or contain error reports that actually are stemmed from one particular error -- in other words, fixing one error will likely fix several or dozens of other errors.
I cannot imagine that Microsoft's QA process would be any different. However, on a product that has been in development this long, with this much fanfare, and this much complexity, shipping it at this point and then saying "Bugs Happen" is a dangerous philosophy for Microsoft to be following. They seem to be staking, at this point, a huge amount of their future profitability on this one product, and if it doesn't meet client expectations, or causes undue hardship on the client base, Microsoft is going to watch themselves die to a competitor without the DoJ having ever needed to step in.
The clients have been waiting for so long for this product that I doubt they would have minded waiting a couple more months.
Here's hoping that out of the 20,000 "real" bugs or so out there, that none of them are show-stoppers.
I will almost have to feel sorry for Ballmer if there are.