If you were looking for an excuse for an "informative" mod, here it is.
From: James Plamondon
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2000 5:33 PM
To: Darryn Dieken
cc John Colleran
Subject: Re: Windows Evangelism!
Darryn -
Sounds great! But I'm leaving the company In early March, and indeed will be on vacation until then, starting at the end of next week. Upon departure from Microsoft. I'm moving my family to Australia, where I will sit on the beach, drink pina coladas, and laugh at the world.
Here are some documents from the Good Old Days that you might find to be handy in starting this new group. Don't worry about them leaking; they were already entered into the public record by Bristol Technologies as part of their private anti-trust case.
> > Timeline.doc >> > >
Hoping that these will help you keep the flame alive after the old warhorses like me go out to pasture, I remain
Yours
Slashdot didn't evolve into a "Microsoft sux" since you joined. It always was one. You're still here after all these years.
It's self moderated and you're right -- posts that disparage Microsoft and discount Ballmer do fly to the top of the moderation. That's not because some corporate sponsor has a geek lab in Bangalore with 1,000 blogdrones astroturfing the moderation. It's because Slashdot attracts geeks and that's what the geeks really think. That's honest opinion survey for you. I think a lot of that is because the observation that "M$ sux" actually is insightful, and the Ballmer's futile thrashing of a chair in helpless frustration over Google really is funny.
They have to be running scared now. Vista has been out for a year and a half and OEMs are still introducing new machines that not only don't run Vista -- but never will be able to, and people are buying them up like crazy.
Science may cure death for the few. For the many is a more difficult question.
If your estate can sustain your corpse reliably for 200 years then improvements in medical science can be a fair bet. If your estate can endow a foundation to provide for your arousal then it is closer to a sure thing. Nothing is certain though. In 40 years the concept of ownership of property can vary considerably.
In the term TFA is speaking of nothing can save you on this planet. Y(our) only hope is to escape this solar system entirely.
Some macroeconomist can calculate an optimal number (in fact, I think I've seen an article on this on slashdot). I don't see any straight answers to your question yet so I'll propose something:
$10,000 for works of software or more than five minutes of audio or video. $1,000 for less than five minutes. $100 per year for any amount of passive alphanumeric data or a single still image. $10,000 per year per book or magazine, $100 per year per article or short story.
Prices for this year, and indexed to the CPI for following years. First three years free to allow artists to build a market for their output.
Absolute end of copyright protection in seven years. Works automatically fall into the public domain and are provided to the public in open formats on government servers paid for by the taxes on current content.
This is low enough that honest artists can afford to maintain their works for the full duration, aggregators can still turn a profit, people can pay the tax for vanity's sake. It has a definite terminus so wealthy interests cannot escape their duty to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" nor can artistic works escape being incorporated into the culture as they should be.
For patents the same limits. All patents $10,000 per year. No patents in any way involving software, the presentation of information on computers, or anything even remotely related to same. Given the current pace of technological advance, seven years may be far too long.
One more thing: a new photo of a 13th century drawing is not a "new work" entitled to any protection whatsoever. If the original work would be in the public domain, any reproduction of it would be as well. The same for any "Remix" of audio or "Re-edit" of video. No protection whatever for any recording of a live performance, no protection against "tribute" performance by another artist.
Anyway, that's how I would write it. How about you?
Closed source cannot "promote the progress of science and the useful arts". By definition everything that goes into it is proprietary of the maker and does not move the technology bar upward for society. Where it gains improvements at all, they are for the exclusive exploitation of the maker.
On the other hand open source developers innovate in a way that makes component advancements available to all. Alert developers can mix and match ideas to create (ahem) the synergistic fusion of elements (/ahem) that makes new realms of productivity available not just for the developer, but for all computer users. As the commercial developers incorporate their spin on these enhancements their software improves as well.
For example every class of product offered by the dominant player in software is derived from a prior product, almost all of which were previously open. Operating system, word processor, media player, browser, email reader, email server, Presentation software... these things were not invented by Microsoft -- they only implement their own version of other people's creative expressions.
When open platform people create the market sorts the best of their offerings which then are incorporated everywhere for the benefit of all, including you.
For over 200 years, the basic role of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has remained the same: to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their respective discoveries (Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution). - USPTO
That's right - these same laws that are obstructing innovation and progress are intended to have the opposite purpose.
Since Vista is the most secure Windows ever it doesn't need antivirus. Like BSD, Linux and OS-X antivirus is only required as part of mail services to protect vulnerable legacy clients from infested email. Since this is a server issue, this is in keeping with the Microsoft philosophy of disabling features on clients that belong on servers.
That, my friend, is one thing virtual machines are for. On a decent modern machine you can run a base OS and have virtual machines with all the operating systems and applications you need. No need to dual boot -- run them all at once. Try out Virtualbox for free to see what I mean. Once you've got your VMs set up you can do neat stuff with them. For serious work, consider VMWare.
It's time to retire this "App" does not work in "OS" meme. It is a relic of an age when you could only run one OS at a time.
I mean, yay for Open Source and all that, but so what? At least from a customer perspective, you may not be paying for licenses anymore, but you are still paying for support -- and that is usually where the bulk of the expenses lie.
The perspective that organic resources are inferior to external resources for solving problems can be resolved in HR by hiring capable people. You can start by hiring capable HR people or letting the prospective coworkers interview the applicants. If the attitude of the HR team is that any certified fool will do it should no surprise that certified fools are doing the work and the result will be as expected. If you can't solve this problem your competitors can and I'm not worried about how it works out for you.
You're not just paying for support and stability. If stability were a critical factor you wouldn't be looking at Microsoft solutions at all. Their history on this issue is bad. Integration is a factor too and here Microsoft has the edge because their integration from bottom to top is superb. It's easy to integrate when you have no standard to adhere to. Open source answers are great for servers where one server does one job and you can strip out every other part. Where standards are present there's no reason not to go with open solutions. TCP/IP won, didn't it? On the desktop open source doesn't gain the end-to-end integration advantage until you're dealing with high levels of customization or large numbers of apps that don't work well together. Virtualization and application servers can be very helpful here. If what you need is an end-to-end answer today with the resources you have, the Microsoft answer can be an appealing choice.
Two major problems with the Microsoft solutions are stability and flexibility. On flexibility, when you come to the point where the Microsoft solution just doesn't have the feature you want you'll find you're in a corner where the solution is beyond any answer. On stability they're improving but we're still a long way from "good". Another problem with flexibility is that if you move to a standards based approach you will find that the standards lag the practice and to compete you'll need people who can assess the merits of available technology despite lack of dominant standards. Such people are seldom cheap and often hard to find. It is my belief they are worth both the effort and the money.
If by some chance you find yourself in an organization where a movement to adopt open source or standards is successfully met with "We can't do that, we're a Microsoft shop" my best guidance is to flee to the competitor that is not so impaired, or if it's a government shop, to lay low and solve the problems you have with the best available technology and let the conflict settle itself out.
For reference, see The Onion reference, "... We're doing five blades". (Rough language. If you're at a school maybe NSFW). From February, 2004. For the record, the Gillette Fusion with five blades and two lubricating strips was introduced in early 2006.
Hilarious though:
Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my a?? with it. They don't tell me what to invent--I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick two more blades in there. I don't care how. Make the blades so thin they're invisible. Put some on the handle. I don't care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!
You're taking the "safety" part of "safety razor" too literally, grandma. Cut the strings and soar. Let's hit it. Let's roll. This is our chance to make razor history. Let's dream big. All you have to do is say that five blades can happen, and it will happen. If you aren't on board, then.... you. And if you're on the board, then.... you and your father. Hey, if I'm the only one who'll take risks, I'm sure as hell happy to hog all the glory when the five-blade razor becomes the shaving tool for the U.S. of "this is how we shave now" A.
People said we couldn't go to three. It'll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Five's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at Norelco, working on #### electrics. Rotary blades, my white #!
I'm a big AMD fan but three cores are barely better than two. Buy it anyway - AMD needs to live if the computer market is to be bearable at all in ten years. Via makes some interesting stuff too - and they're not afraid to cut the watts and make them small. You can do some very neat stuff with a low watt CPU on a small board.
It doesn't take a great deal of insight to see we're going to 8 cores per processor on the desktop sometime in the next few years. Dual 16 core processors will happen within ten if competition keeps the pressure up. Personally I don't care if every core is on a separate slab of silicon as long as they integrate in the package well. Yields are better that way I imagine. Somebody tell them to get the watts down. Electricity is mostly made from CO2 emissions:
PCs worldwide consume about 80 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year.
Be sure to check out the Treasury of deathless quotes. It's like a Microsoft Vista press release except because it's happening to somone else it's funny instead of sad.
Is a Saudi prince saying casually to his nephew "you could learn strategic thinking from a man such as Gates. Various and subtle are his means." And then the third level assistant getting confused and funding SCO.
* The company's market cap was less than two million dollars, so the size of the investment is more than fifty times the value of the company on the open market.
Slashdot Mirror
link
If you were looking for an excuse for an "informative" mod, here it is.
I know you didn't mean to be funny, but James Plamondon flipping them the bird on the way out was precious.
(paraphrase)Won't you help us promote W2K?
Cya suckas! I be on the beach drinking pina coladas and laughing at you! Got mine. Peace, out.
(end paraphrase)
Slashdot didn't evolve into a "Microsoft sux" since you joined. It always was one. You're still here after all these years.
It's self moderated and you're right -- posts that disparage Microsoft and discount Ballmer do fly to the top of the moderation. That's not because some corporate sponsor has a geek lab in Bangalore with 1,000 blogdrones astroturfing the moderation. It's because Slashdot attracts geeks and that's what the geeks really think. That's honest opinion survey for you. I think a lot of that is because the observation that "M$ sux" actually is insightful, and the Ballmer's futile thrashing of a chair in helpless frustration over Google really is funny.
When you add that slashdot is still one of the popular sites on the intertubes you have to ask: does Microsoft have a problem?
And remember, an answer to every Microsoft problem is available all over the web.
They have to be running scared now. Vista has been out for a year and a half and OEMs are still introducing new machines that not only don't run Vista -- but never will be able to, and people are buying them up like crazy.
if the product works.
Did they fix that? I thought not. Nothing to see here.
Science may cure death for the few. For the many is a more difficult question.
If your estate can sustain your corpse reliably for 200 years then improvements in medical science can be a fair bet. If your estate can endow a foundation to provide for your arousal then it is closer to a sure thing. Nothing is certain though. In 40 years the concept of ownership of property can vary considerably.
In the term TFA is speaking of nothing can save you on this planet. Y(our) only hope is to escape this solar system entirely.
This is the most informed and educated post I have seen on slashdot for some time.
Mod parent up! Long before solar expansion is an issue the earth will have been struck by extinction level asteroids multiple times.
This is a test: Escape your planet of origin or die out. End test.
By this time if humans have not established self sufficient colonies around many different stars they deserve to die out.
This is a test. This is the only test.
I want to subscribe. It looks like you know stuff. Thanks for burning what had to be a lot of time on a very informative post.
Some macroeconomist can calculate an optimal number (in fact, I think I've seen an article on this on slashdot). I don't see any straight answers to your question yet so I'll propose something:
$10,000 for works of software or more than five minutes of audio or video. $1,000 for less than five minutes. $100 per year for any amount of passive alphanumeric data or a single still image. $10,000 per year per book or magazine, $100 per year per article or short story.
Prices for this year, and indexed to the CPI for following years. First three years free to allow artists to build a market for their output.
Absolute end of copyright protection in seven years. Works automatically fall into the public domain and are provided to the public in open formats on government servers paid for by the taxes on current content.
This is low enough that honest artists can afford to maintain their works for the full duration, aggregators can still turn a profit, people can pay the tax for vanity's sake. It has a definite terminus so wealthy interests cannot escape their duty to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" nor can artistic works escape being incorporated into the culture as they should be.
For patents the same limits. All patents $10,000 per year. No patents in any way involving software, the presentation of information on computers, or anything even remotely related to same. Given the current pace of technological advance, seven years may be far too long.
One more thing: a new photo of a 13th century drawing is not a "new work" entitled to any protection whatsoever. If the original work would be in the public domain, any reproduction of it would be as well. The same for any "Remix" of audio or "Re-edit" of video. No protection whatever for any recording of a live performance, no protection against "tribute" performance by another artist.
Anyway, that's how I would write it. How about you?
Closed source cannot "promote the progress of science and the useful arts". By definition everything that goes into it is proprietary of the maker and does not move the technology bar upward for society. Where it gains improvements at all, they are for the exclusive exploitation of the maker.
On the other hand open source developers innovate in a way that makes component advancements available to all. Alert developers can mix and match ideas to create (ahem) the synergistic fusion of elements (/ahem) that makes new realms of productivity available not just for the developer, but for all computer users. As the commercial developers incorporate their spin on these enhancements their software improves as well.
For example every class of product offered by the dominant player in software is derived from a prior product, almost all of which were previously open. Operating system, word processor, media player, browser, email reader, email server, Presentation software... these things were not invented by Microsoft -- they only implement their own version of other people's creative expressions.
When open platform people create the market sorts the best of their offerings which then are incorporated everywhere for the benefit of all, including you.
That's right - these same laws that are obstructing innovation and progress are intended to have the opposite purpose.
Since Vista is the most secure Windows ever it doesn't need antivirus. Like BSD, Linux and OS-X antivirus is only required as part of mail services to protect vulnerable legacy clients from infested email. Since this is a server issue, this is in keeping with the Microsoft philosophy of disabling features on clients that belong on servers.
That, my friend, is one thing virtual machines are for. On a decent modern machine you can run a base OS and have virtual machines with all the operating systems and applications you need. No need to dual boot -- run them all at once. Try out Virtualbox for free to see what I mean. Once you've got your VMs set up you can do neat stuff with them. For serious work, consider VMWare.
It's time to retire this "App" does not work in "OS" meme. It is a relic of an age when you could only run one OS at a time.
The perspective that organic resources are inferior to external resources for solving problems can be resolved in HR by hiring capable people. You can start by hiring capable HR people or letting the prospective coworkers interview the applicants. If the attitude of the HR team is that any certified fool will do it should no surprise that certified fools are doing the work and the result will be as expected. If you can't solve this problem your competitors can and I'm not worried about how it works out for you.
You're not just paying for support and stability. If stability were a critical factor you wouldn't be looking at Microsoft solutions at all. Their history on this issue is bad. Integration is a factor too and here Microsoft has the edge because their integration from bottom to top is superb. It's easy to integrate when you have no standard to adhere to. Open source answers are great for servers where one server does one job and you can strip out every other part. Where standards are present there's no reason not to go with open solutions. TCP/IP won, didn't it? On the desktop open source doesn't gain the end-to-end integration advantage until you're dealing with high levels of customization or large numbers of apps that don't work well together. Virtualization and application servers can be very helpful here. If what you need is an end-to-end answer today with the resources you have, the Microsoft answer can be an appealing choice.
Two major problems with the Microsoft solutions are stability and flexibility. On flexibility, when you come to the point where the Microsoft solution just doesn't have the feature you want you'll find you're in a corner where the solution is beyond any answer. On stability they're improving but we're still a long way from "good". Another problem with flexibility is that if you move to a standards based approach you will find that the standards lag the practice and to compete you'll need people who can assess the merits of available technology despite lack of dominant standards. Such people are seldom cheap and often hard to find. It is my belief they are worth both the effort and the money.
If by some chance you find yourself in an organization where a movement to adopt open source or standards is successfully met with "We can't do that, we're a Microsoft shop" my best guidance is to flee to the competitor that is not so impaired, or if it's a government shop, to lay low and solve the problems you have with the best available technology and let the conflict settle itself out.
For reference, see The Onion reference, "... We're doing five blades". (Rough language. If you're at a school maybe NSFW). From February, 2004. For the record, the Gillette Fusion with five blades and two lubricating strips was introduced in early 2006.
Hilarious though:
I'm a big AMD fan but three cores are barely better than two. Buy it anyway - AMD needs to live if the computer market is to be bearable at all in ten years. Via makes some interesting stuff too - and they're not afraid to cut the watts and make them small. You can do some very neat stuff with a low watt CPU on a small board.
It doesn't take a great deal of insight to see we're going to 8 cores per processor on the desktop sometime in the next few years. Dual 16 core processors will happen within ten if competition keeps the pressure up. Personally I don't care if every core is on a separate slab of silicon as long as they integrate in the package well. Yields are better that way I imagine. Somebody tell them to get the watts down. Electricity is mostly made from CO2 emissions:
What's a newspaper?
The Iraqi Information Minister
Be sure to check out the Treasury of deathless quotes. It's like a Microsoft Vista press release except because it's happening to somone else it's funny instead of sad.
The macbook air looks really sweet with its ultrathin form factor. Speaking as a guy that struggles with a 30 pound carryon, that's a winner.
And Apple doesn't ship it with one OS to use and make you license a different OS for it you never intend to use, like the OEMs pushing "Blista" do.
OS-X has some sweet deployment options for the enterprise, too, like image broadcasting built right in.
To be fair, I'm sure they've sold a ton of copies of the license sticker.
All of them stuck to PCs running XP.
They can call that a win if they want to but it's not a win for Vista.
Is a Saudi prince saying casually to his nephew "you could learn strategic thinking from a man such as Gates. Various and subtle are his means." And then the third level assistant getting confused and funding SCO.
* The company's market cap was less than two million dollars, so the size of the investment is more than fifty times the value of the company on the open market.
Rotating slowly out where the sun is just a brighter than average star there is a ball of methane snow some 200km in diameter.
On the door of the shack there the sign reads "Last Chance for Gas. Next services 10.5 ly."
It's a gas station!
Music companies just found another tech company to take a bajillion dollars to promise them that sweet, sweet DRM.
How many times does that make now? I can think of no better evidence that cocaine makes you dumb.
Boats launch each unique,
Rivers flow through the valleys
leading to one sea.