If the devs were in charge, or if they had scrupulous and competent businessmen, it would be a much different company. The fish rots from the head.
I disagree. Any non-idiot in charge of Microsoft would have to try really hard to slaughter the cash cow. They can take over the market in a specific application just by creating an adequate product with Microsoft stamped on it. So do you tell those devs to intentionally create crap?
Where I really started getting disgusted with their business was after I saw company after company run out of business due to business practices that bordered on illegal and in some cases blatantly crossed the legal line.
As an MS intern in the summer of 2001 I had the chance to attend the Windows XP RTM celebration, and the company meeting at SafeCo field.
The company meeting was especially interesting. My memories of it are fading, but IIRC, before all the individual product groups made their presentations Ballmer had to get up and say a few words about the ongoing monopoly trial, and how they were getting unduly harassed by the feds. That was followed up by a demo of the brand-new XBox, which was going to crush Sony and Nintendo. And a presentation about CE, and how that was going to crush Palm. And discussion about how Outlook had just surpassed Notes. Etc etc. You just got the impression that every business they delved into they intended to crush the competition. Which is really the rational thing for a business to do-- and individually can you really fault each team for trying to outdo the competition? But on the other hand, you saw them throwing more money than innovation at getting a foothold in the console market, and using the Windows brand to purchase credibility the Palm market.
So do I hate Microsoft? No, because I try not to be a hypocrite. I believe they can dominate markets without even trying, and certainly by being only adequate. In that position, what do you do? Intentionally fuck up? Vista will show that the fuckup threshold is effectively impossible to surmount. But I dislike Microsoft. Microsoft is too powerful. The prevailing attitude these days amongst IT buyers must be "You don't get fired for buying Microsoft" ala IBM. I believe that nothing will break Microsoft's stranglehold on non-distributed computing. The only solution to that is to make that stranglehold irrelevant.
But man do I HATE it when they kill progress like with MSIE. Thank god for Firefox. Maybe they will kill progress with overboard DRM in Vista. That doesn't mean Vista will fail any more than MSIE failed to maintain 80% of the browser market...
Between cost of living increases, inflation, and the incredible loss in the value of the dollar in the world market, that second decimal place has pretty much lost all meaning anyway.
... But Titan's crust is made out of water ice. If you were to take it out of the deep-freeze and bring it to a comfortable, Earth-like temperature - it would melt.
Seriously. One wonders if the only requirements for being defined as "most earthlike" were liquid precipitation and active alluvial erosion.
It's a good thing you didn't make NUMMAMMALS a global constant, but perhaps to optimize for the speed of extinction you'd should maintain only nummammals and deadmammals variables...
If price wasn't a case Computers wouldn't have much RAM but all Cache, or huge amount of registers. But in real life price is the final decision
Actually in systems where price is no object, performance is usually paramount. If you have astounding amounts of registers or cache, your performance per instruction or memory operation may be slower. Given the fact that we can manufacture dual-core dies with ease, I imagine we could easily fit a bazillion more registers or double the L1 cache of a single core, but there is a performance trade-off there.
It was clearly within their linguistic capabilities to write "Congress shall make no law respecting the the right to bear arms."
The original poster argued that it was obviously an individual right by the grammar. It is not. You argue that it is clearly an individual right based on its context within the Bill of Rights. That doesn't fly either. An equally contextual argument is that it is mixed with some language about a well-regulated militia, so to argue that the federal and state governments have no powers to regulate individual weapon ownership seems facile. Clearly there was some intention here to invest the right to bear arms to a power other than the federal government, but it is not clearly every individual man and woman.
My point is that it is not obvious either way from the document. Precedent, however, is strongly on the individual's side. I don't really think that rifle owners have too much to worry about, but to argue that the uninfringed ownership of handguns was the intent of the framers? That isn't what they wrote at all.
Remember this: if the Soldiers come home without winning, this time, the war will follow them. This is a lesson which perhaps ONLY Americans could reasonably have failed to learn by this point in history--so why doesn't Europe see this?
[colbert] Ha Ha Ha! Those silly europeans with no historical viewpoint! Clearly they know nothing that we Americans haven't taught them. 61 years later, they still have to kowtow for our rescuing their asses from the Nazis. If only the European colonial powers had listened to our sage counsel throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, think how many civil wars they could be embroiled in in Africa, Asia and South America! Those Fools! [/colbert]
It's pretty obvious from the statement that it is an individual right.
It's only obvious if you can prove that the authors of the second amendment were ignorant of conjunctions. Otherwise it is just as plainly obvious that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" was being specifically described as a synonym for "a well regulated militia." Given that the authors thought it pertinent to describe the right to bear arms as "a well regulated militia," it seems to be a stretch to argue that the right to bear arms entitles one to be unburdened with any regulation whatsoever.
The article reads like an advertisement for Microsoft products.
Perhaps ComputerWorld is partial to Microsoft. The more I become familiar with tech industry news, the more apparent it becomes that various news outlets have a tendency to be very credulous with the companies they are most familiar with. Other companies tend to have their PR very much sliced and diced and taken with a grain of salt.
Though I may be confusing the "news" with the blogs since the bloggers seem to be absolved of all attempts at impartiality, though. But the blogs are definitely interesting when they point to the biases of the staff.
Then it brings up the other question: What else can this processor be used for? If it needs to be produced in the millions to make it financially viable, where else will it be sold?
Nope, IBM offers a SiGe foundry process. If you pay for the wafers, IBM will make them, whether you want 10 or 10,000. Yes, you may be designing a chip for a limited design run, but you're also designing a telescope that you'll only build once...
I'm way too familiar with patents, and my experience is that the vast, vast majority -- I'm talking two to three sigmas here -- are issued not because someone thought up a novel solution to a problem, but because someone thought up a stunningly obvious solution to a newly emerging problem.
In my reply immediately preceding yours I was thinking along the same lines. If the patent application for a solution to a new problem is comprised of claims that disclose no newly invented method or concept, but simply rehash pre-existing concepts tailored to a new problem, it's probably obvious. But if the patent for the solution sticks to a simple list of specific claims, it may or may not be obvious. But new claims or not, how do you determine whether you are just the first to an obvious solution?
Even if you're the first, what if only *some* teams come up with it? Is that obvious? A solution that 99% of qualified engineers would create is likely obvious, but what about a solution that only 1% of qualified engineers would create? Where is the threshold in between?
Strikes me as true, and as always when claiming something is obvious, it begs the question "how come you didn't think of it then?"
I loved the discussion of how you claim that something is NOT obvious... new sig, as of yesterday.
Certainly you can argue in circles about hindsightful obviousness. i.e. "Prove it is obvious! No, you prove that it's not! If no one has invented it already, then how can it be obvious? Yes, but it's the problem that is new, not the solution!" etc etc.
I wonder if there is a non-competition clause in the recent agreement.
Right. In other news, Novell is getting out of the operating system, virtualization, and identity management businesses. In a press release, Novell states, "We got tired of selling actual software that does stuff."
Doesn't "the approximately 24 people who worked on the shutdown menu" already tell you everything you need to know?
No, it's worse than that:
In small programming projects, there's a central repository of code. Builds are produced, generally daily, from this central repository. Programmers add their changes to this central repository as they go, so the daily build is a pretty good snapshot of the current state of the product.
In Windows, this model breaks down simply because there are far too many developers to access one central repository -- among other problems, the infrastructure just won't support it. So Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes. It should be noted too that the only common ancestor that my team, the shell team, and the kernel team shared was the root.
Sounds like an even better way--better than adding even more people--to ensure that nothing good is ever invented outside of isolated development silos, and that bugs in code won't pop out until months after it was checked in.
News flash: he's not talking about 'techies' (necessarily). He's talking about every John and Jane out there who buys trendy shit for the cost of a car payment or two, uses it for 3 months, and then discards it to a box or closet until deciding to sell it at a rumage sale for $5 (or simply throw it out). Or, they'll simply keep it: people in my generation have more emotional attachments (both in strength and number) to innanimate objects than to people.
Are you kidding?? That's what he'd be talking about if he were rational. The man is a crotchety lunatic, and he was just hating on all gamers and all young people because of a few nutjobs that think it's worth waiting in line to get a friggin game console. As usual it's a man in the unmarginalized right-wing lunatic fringe trying to describe society as being taken over by the completely marginalized left-wing lunatic fringe. Except gamers aren't really left-wing lunatic fringers, so mostly he is just hating on people out of willful ignorance.
Sounds kind of personal-- straightforwardly asking the board to fire these guys:
More explicitly, the decisions made by George Halvorson and J. Clifford Dodd since their joining this
organization have fundamentally undermined our financial and market positions. Within two years, we will face
the risk of a financial meltdown that would change the face of Kaiser Permanente as we know it. Instead of
irresponsible cuts to our staffing, benefits, and care, we must take immediate action to bring efficiency and
responsibility to our information technology operations. Many of the technology vendors and platforms which
have been chosen and approved by Mr. Halvorson and Mr. Dodd are unreliable and costly. Unfortunately, these
questions of financial responsibility and business integrity are not new:
Mr. Halvorson left the health plan he previously led, HealthPartners, in the midst of what, we would
later learn, was an audit by the Minnesota Attorney General. The Attorney General uncovered years of
financial irresponsibility and waste, and ultimately concluded that the HealthPartners Board of
Directors provided inadequate oversight of Mr. Halvorson and other HealthPartners executives.
Mr. Dodd "invited" and oversaw the selection of Tanning Technology to "help ensure that the technical
performance of Kaiser Permanente's Automated Medical Record (AMR) initiative meets the goals of
the organization." Mr. Dodd later resigned as a director of that company "to avoid even the appearance
of conflict."
Slashdot Mirror
The company meeting was especially interesting. My memories of it are fading, but IIRC, before all the individual product groups made their presentations Ballmer had to get up and say a few words about the ongoing monopoly trial, and how they were getting unduly harassed by the feds. That was followed up by a demo of the brand-new XBox, which was going to crush Sony and Nintendo. And a presentation about CE, and how that was going to crush Palm. And discussion about how Outlook had just surpassed Notes. Etc etc. You just got the impression that every business they delved into they intended to crush the competition. Which is really the rational thing for a business to do-- and individually can you really fault each team for trying to outdo the competition? But on the other hand, you saw them throwing more money than innovation at getting a foothold in the console market, and using the Windows brand to purchase credibility the Palm market.
So do I hate Microsoft? No, because I try not to be a hypocrite. I believe they can dominate markets without even trying, and certainly by being only adequate. In that position, what do you do? Intentionally fuck up? Vista will show that the fuckup threshold is effectively impossible to surmount. But I dislike Microsoft. Microsoft is too powerful. The prevailing attitude these days amongst IT buyers must be "You don't get fired for buying Microsoft" ala IBM. I believe that nothing will break Microsoft's stranglehold on non-distributed computing. The only solution to that is to make that stranglehold irrelevant.
But man do I HATE it when they kill progress like with MSIE. Thank god for Firefox. Maybe they will kill progress with overboard DRM in Vista. That doesn't mean Vista will fail any more than MSIE failed to maintain 80% of the browser market...
In other news, they're troubleshooting a flaky solar panel up on the space station: Live status
It's a good thing you didn't make NUMMAMMALS a global constant, but perhaps to optimize for the speed of extinction you'd should maintain only nummammals and deadmammals variables...
Exactly. He didn't say much at all, or predict anything.
It was clearly within their linguistic capabilities to write "Congress shall make no law respecting the the right to bear arms."
The original poster argued that it was obviously an individual right by the grammar. It is not. You argue that it is clearly an individual right based on its context within the Bill of Rights. That doesn't fly either. An equally contextual argument is that it is mixed with some language about a well-regulated militia, so to argue that the federal and state governments have no powers to regulate individual weapon ownership seems facile. Clearly there was some intention here to invest the right to bear arms to a power other than the federal government, but it is not clearly every individual man and woman.
My point is that it is not obvious either way from the document. Precedent, however, is strongly on the individual's side. I don't really think that rifle owners have too much to worry about, but to argue that the uninfringed ownership of handguns was the intent of the framers? That isn't what they wrote at all.
Though I may be confusing the "news" with the blogs since the bloggers seem to be absolved of all attempts at impartiality, though. But the blogs are definitely interesting when they point to the biases of the staff.
Even if you're the first, what if only *some* teams come up with it? Is that obvious? A solution that 99% of qualified engineers would create is likely obvious, but what about a solution that only 1% of qualified engineers would create? Where is the threshold in between?
Wikipedia...It's more part of Goddard lore than anything else.