If OpenOffice has waned, why is Microsoft hiring a compete group leader to cozy up to the community and bring back knockdown arguments for their marketing team?
Yeah, I know... it still needs GPS feeds and has a magnetic sensor. It does have accellerometers for pitch and roll and you should be able to rig something up that didn't use magnetism. It's still pretty cool. They're doing some amazing stuff with MEMS these days.
Robert Heinlein was a guest commentator for Apollo 11, beside Walter Cronkite. Boring and like clockwork is how the teams should handle space missions. But to make the coverage by commentators bland and uninteresting is neither necessary nor helpful.
Micosoft identified Unix as a threat early on, and the article in TFA speaks to this. Microsoft did very well at defeating Unix. Unix was a very good operating system, and Microsoft couldn't have competition with those characteristics if they were to succeed.
In the current day Microsoft has defeated Unix by tying up its intellectual property in the wonderfully litigious landscape that is SCO. Microsoft continues to try and fail at defeating Linux because Linux is a much more slippery target. Linus knows that Microsoft is trying to kill his product, as they always have, and he's ignoring them because that's his path to victory. The evil geniuses who could thwart him have long since cashed in their options and gone home.
There was a lot wrong with AT&T back then. Now it's sorted, sort of. Even the name AT&T has changed hands twice, but the last company to buy the name seems determined to validate the negative reminiscences. They don't have to care: they're the phone company.
If that's an hubris you can buy, let me put my bid in at a buck and a half.
The terminal wasn't part of Unix of course you know. It was part of the ecosystem, an xterm to deliver a graphical interface on top of the operating system supported by an operating environment adapted to xterminals of any shape and size. That the environment allowed for such ridiculous resolutions in that early era is a testament to their forethought, or to absurd limit theory if you prefer. The operating system - then as now - provided only an abstraction for applications to program against and served to allocate machine resources, as it proper to its role. The dislocation of this abstraction is one of the great failures of Windows, and the failure is quite deliberate.
I'll award you some points for finding the heart of the matter at hand, but take them away for deliberately misunderstanding them. Please remove the onion from your belt, as you're clearly not worthy to wear it.
In the context of Windows OS's, W2k was "rock solid". That's equivalent to Dave Barry's assesment of the claim that XP is Microsoft's most secure operating system ever: the most articulate vegetable ever.
It's funny. laugh. Usually we laugh because we dare not cry. If you want to laugh at something, laugh at the odd spelling of laugh. Is that not weird? And what of weird, which is itself odd?
In my world the prevention of progress is evil. To profit from the prevention of progress is corporate evil. The prevention of interopability through obfuscation of interfaces is the epitome of evil.
Man will move forward or he will not. Any institutional prevention of progress is an effort to prevent the survival of Man, as a species. We have been distracted by the profit motives of this Redmond, WA corporation long enough.
You had me right up until you said "And whilst I like Ubuntu and De Icaza,". I assume you mean Miguel de Icaza, founder of gnome and proponent of.net and Moonlight.
And then I realized how cleverly you turn the discussion to acceptance of your hero. C#,.net and moonlight are encumbered by patents. Adoption of them is a trap. It's admittedly a sweet trap, but you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar...
Seriously - ready the Comes documents and listen to Bill Gates in his own words describe portability and open formats as anathema to his plans for a Windows world - listen to him instruct his minions on the destruction of interopability. You seriously can't make this stuff up as well as he tells it. The man is a genius. There are ogg video and audio as well. It's beautiful in the way that volcano video is when you live far away from the lava flow.
Let's start with ISO/IEC 29500. This is Microsoft's own bought-and-paid-for International Standards Organization format that includes such rigorous definitions as "whitespace like Office 95 does it". Microsoft managed to destroy the credibility of a 60 year old standards organization devoted to international cooperation in order to get their "standard" accepted but can't be bothered to implement it:
Microsoft, which currently has no products which are compatible with ISO/IEC 29500,[45][46][47][48] has voiced commitment to using the ISO/IEC 29500 standard in their future products.[49]
One might imagine his handwashing will be as enthusiastic as his evangelism was. In order to extract the maximum marketability from his confession it's necessary that he embellish it until it was even more diabolical than it actually was.
I'm not giving him a pass here - the man promoted the evil prevention of progress in a most effective way. I'm just pointing out that much like his efforts then were, his efforts to promote his book will be equally self-serving.
If you had enjoyed the benefit of playing with SVR2 through a 30" high def graphical terminal in 1984 as I did, Microsoft's "innovations" in Windows 2000 some 15 years later might seem a bit less amazing. In 1984 we had aerial photos on LaserDisc overlaid with terrain data that we could draw on, and real-time position data in a distributed database with mesh networking for geotracking important operational assets. You could take a bomb to all but one node in the system, and that last node would stay up and have the latest propagated data. Yes, it took three or four seconds to redraw when you shifted scale or moved the map, but it was 1984. We had csh, ksh, X-Windows with widgets that looked better than W2k's. Networking was assumed. It was a multiuser system with an evolved system of managing user security that persists to this day. This was about nine months after Microsoft had invented the remarkable "subdirectory" concept with DOS 2.0, and 14 years before they included an IP stack by default. </sarcasm>.
Back then it took about 12 minutes to draft a professional one page letter using a CPT dedicated word processing station with full-page WYSYWIG and a SCSI daisy wheel printer. Today you can do a Google maps mashup of your own Cell GPS geolocation data in real time, and it takes about 25 minutes to craft a one-page letter. So the advantage of 25 years of progress is that technolgies are cheaper and more common and individuals are less effective.
A default install of SVR2 included development tools - grep, lex, yacc, awk, sed, an assembler, compiler, and cross-compiler for new hardware architectures, the source for the OS and all the tools, an ip stack including email. It was a multiuser environment. The processor performance graph, to give an example, included an animated graph of the pen writing the data on the scrolling log - an unnecessary but artful use of screen space that I miss to this day.
Rock solid? Windows 2000? Give me a break! If you think W2k was rock solid you have low standards.
Microsoft marketed Windows 2000 as the most secure Windows version ever,[15] but it became the target of a number of high-profile virus attacks such as Code Red and Nimda.[16] Over nine years after its release, it continues to receive patches for security vulnerabilities nearly every month.
Windows 2000 was a remarkable advance in the scope of "Microsoft operating systems". People who know better found nothing special in it. It wasn't as good as eight year old Jolix then, and it still isn't.
This behaviour is in Microsoft's DNA from the first dealings with Gary Kildall to the current i4i debacle. It didn't mysteriously originate at the moment that Microsoft turned the corner from logarithmic growth to slow decline in January of 2000. For that radical course correction we need look no further than the appointment of Steve Ballmer to the helm on that day.
Obviously Ballmer isn't responsible for the culture that established these behaviours - he inherited that. We should just be thankful he's not as good at executing it.
If Google wins then there will be available numerous facilities available in the Google cloud that are attractive alternatives to doing things the hard way, for every case where excellent cloud apps make sense.
Google's not trying to take your personal workstation away. If you want to host your own data and crunch your own numbers your way that's up to you. But if you don't, they want to be the easiest and best way to assemble and reference information online. I don't see that as a bad thing.
It's fun. It's for kids. Let's not get uptight about NORAD tracking Santa - it has a long history with cultural value.
Not everything has to be sanitized to be the least offensive. Let's not get so compulsive about the first amendment we forget to enjoy life or allow others a little elbow room to enjoy theirs.
And.. Ten minutes after midnight. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Eid al-Adha, Enjoy Rohatsu, or Good Night - whichever is your preference.
Slashdot Mirror
If OpenOffice has waned, why is Microsoft hiring a compete group leader to cozy up to the community and bring back knockdown arguments for their marketing team?
Perhaps this google cache link will be a little more persistent. We still need a long term archive and I'm not doing it.
But I also learned at Groklaw today that Microsoft is looking for somebody to reach out to the open source community...
The whole thing is quite amusing. Somebody should probably cache that - I'm sure it will be gone by morning.
There's no guarantee the next version of Microsoft Office will support them either if history is our guide.
So if you're throwing away your productivity building your business intelligence into office applications, how 'bout just not doing that?
If you come across a straight one, capture it for me please.
They're getting smaller.
Yeah, I know... it still needs GPS feeds and has a magnetic sensor. It does have accellerometers for pitch and roll and you should be able to rig something up that didn't use magnetism. It's still pretty cool. They're doing some amazing stuff with MEMS these days.
Robert Heinlein was a guest commentator for Apollo 11, beside Walter Cronkite. Boring and like clockwork is how the teams should handle space missions. But to make the coverage by commentators bland and uninteresting is neither necessary nor helpful.
This page has an MPEG of the aftermath of this event.
You're right. He makes some good points. I have no recall of where I was going with that.
Actually, you're accidentally on topic.
Micosoft identified Unix as a threat early on, and the article in TFA speaks to this. Microsoft did very well at defeating Unix. Unix was a very good operating system, and Microsoft couldn't have competition with those characteristics if they were to succeed.
In the current day Microsoft has defeated Unix by tying up its intellectual property in the wonderfully litigious landscape that is SCO. Microsoft continues to try and fail at defeating Linux because Linux is a much more slippery target. Linus knows that Microsoft is trying to kill his product, as they always have, and he's ignoring them because that's his path to victory. The evil geniuses who could thwart him have long since cashed in their options and gone home.
There was a lot wrong with AT&T back then. Now it's sorted, sort of. Even the name AT&T has changed hands twice, but the last company to buy the name seems determined to validate the negative reminiscences. They don't have to care: they're the phone company.
If that's an hubris you can buy, let me put my bid in at a buck and a half.
The terminal wasn't part of Unix of course you know. It was part of the ecosystem, an xterm to deliver a graphical interface on top of the operating system supported by an operating environment adapted to xterminals of any shape and size. That the environment allowed for such ridiculous resolutions in that early era is a testament to their forethought, or to absurd limit theory if you prefer. The operating system - then as now - provided only an abstraction for applications to program against and served to allocate machine resources, as it proper to its role. The dislocation of this abstraction is one of the great failures of Windows, and the failure is quite deliberate.
I'll award you some points for finding the heart of the matter at hand, but take them away for deliberately misunderstanding them. Please remove the onion from your belt, as you're clearly not worthy to wear it.
And you will pay his fee.
In the context of Windows OS's, W2k was "rock solid". That's equivalent to Dave Barry's assesment of the claim that XP is Microsoft's most secure operating system ever: the most articulate vegetable ever.
It's funny. laugh. Usually we laugh because we dare not cry. If you want to laugh at something, laugh at the odd spelling of laugh. Is that not weird? And what of weird, which is itself odd?
That's not how the record reads to me. About this we disagree.
In my world the prevention of progress is evil. To profit from the prevention of progress is corporate evil. The prevention of interopability through obfuscation of interfaces is the epitome of evil.
Man will move forward or he will not. Any institutional prevention of progress is an effort to prevent the survival of Man, as a species. We have been distracted by the profit motives of this Redmond, WA corporation long enough.
You had me right up until you said "And whilst I like Ubuntu and De Icaza,". I assume you mean Miguel de Icaza, founder of gnome and proponent of .net and Moonlight.
And then I realized how cleverly you turn the discussion to acceptance of your hero. C#, .net and moonlight are encumbered by patents. Adoption of them is a trap. It's admittedly a sweet trap, but you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar...
Seriously - ready the Comes documents and listen to Bill Gates in his own words describe portability and open formats as anathema to his plans for a Windows world - listen to him instruct his minions on the destruction of interopability. You seriously can't make this stuff up as well as he tells it. The man is a genius. There are ogg video and audio as well. It's beautiful in the way that volcano video is when you live far away from the lava flow.
Let's start with ISO/IEC 29500. This is Microsoft's own bought-and-paid-for International Standards Organization format that includes such rigorous definitions as "whitespace like Office 95 does it". Microsoft managed to destroy the credibility of a 60 year old standards organization devoted to international cooperation in order to get their "standard" accepted but can't be bothered to implement it:
Microsoft, which currently has no products which are compatible with ISO/IEC 29500,[45][46][47][48] has voiced commitment to using the ISO/IEC 29500 standard in their future products.[49]
One might imagine his handwashing will be as enthusiastic as his evangelism was. In order to extract the maximum marketability from his confession it's necessary that he embellish it until it was even more diabolical than it actually was.
I'm not giving him a pass here - the man promoted the evil prevention of progress in a most effective way. I'm just pointing out that much like his efforts then were, his efforts to promote his book will be equally self-serving.
If you had enjoyed the benefit of playing with SVR2 through a 30" high def graphical terminal in 1984 as I did, Microsoft's "innovations" in Windows 2000 some 15 years later might seem a bit less amazing. In 1984 we had aerial photos on LaserDisc overlaid with terrain data that we could draw on, and real-time position data in a distributed database with mesh networking for geotracking important operational assets. You could take a bomb to all but one node in the system, and that last node would stay up and have the latest propagated data. Yes, it took three or four seconds to redraw when you shifted scale or moved the map, but it was 1984. We had csh, ksh, X-Windows with widgets that looked better than W2k's. Networking was assumed. It was a multiuser system with an evolved system of managing user security that persists to this day. This was about nine months after Microsoft had invented the remarkable "subdirectory" concept with DOS 2.0, and 14 years before they included an IP stack by default. </sarcasm>.
Back then it took about 12 minutes to draft a professional one page letter using a CPT dedicated word processing station with full-page WYSYWIG and a SCSI daisy wheel printer. Today you can do a Google maps mashup of your own Cell GPS geolocation data in real time, and it takes about 25 minutes to craft a one-page letter. So the advantage of 25 years of progress is that technolgies are cheaper and more common and individuals are less effective.
A default install of SVR2 included development tools - grep, lex, yacc, awk, sed, an assembler, compiler, and cross-compiler for new hardware architectures, the source for the OS and all the tools, an ip stack including email. It was a multiuser environment. The processor performance graph, to give an example, included an animated graph of the pen writing the data on the scrolling log - an unnecessary but artful use of screen space that I miss to this day.
Rock solid? Windows 2000? Give me a break! If you think W2k was rock solid you have low standards.
Microsoft marketed Windows 2000 as the most secure Windows version ever,[15] but it became the target of a number of high-profile virus attacks such as Code Red and Nimda.[16] Over nine years after its release, it continues to receive patches for security vulnerabilities nearly every month.
Windows 2000 was a remarkable advance in the scope of "Microsoft operating systems". People who know better found nothing special in it. It wasn't as good as eight year old Jolix then, and it still isn't.
This behaviour is in Microsoft's DNA from the first dealings with Gary Kildall to the current i4i debacle. It didn't mysteriously originate at the moment that Microsoft turned the corner from logarithmic growth to slow decline in January of 2000. For that radical course correction we need look no further than the appointment of Steve Ballmer to the helm on that day.
Obviously Ballmer isn't responsible for the culture that established these behaviours - he inherited that. We should just be thankful he's not as good at executing it.
If Google wins then there will be available numerous facilities available in the Google cloud that are attractive alternatives to doing things the hard way, for every case where excellent cloud apps make sense.
Google's not trying to take your personal workstation away. If you want to host your own data and crunch your own numbers your way that's up to you. But if you don't, they want to be the easiest and best way to assemble and reference information online. I don't see that as a bad thing.
We swam in the Hudson..." (video)
R.I.P. funnyman.
It's fun. It's for kids. Let's not get uptight about NORAD tracking Santa - it has a long history with cultural value.
Not everything has to be sanitized to be the least offensive. Let's not get so compulsive about the first amendment we forget to enjoy life or allow others a little elbow room to enjoy theirs.
And.. Ten minutes after midnight. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Eid al-Adha, Enjoy Rohatsu, or Good Night - whichever is your preference.