This is really a matter of target users. If the target users for OO.o were current Linux users and enthusiasts, then they've made a big mistake. However, they're target audience is more likely to be home users or corporate users. In either case, providing a product that is free but is a strong alternative to MS Office has to be their primary concern. If they offer a thin installer that will include a JRE if needed, then this should not cause problems with home users who are willing to subject themselves to a long download time so that they don't have to fork up $$$ for MS Office. For corporate users, including a JRE on the default desktop image used on all the machines, is trivial. The OO.o developers probably stay awake at night dreaming of a Firefox-like revolution and a market-share approaching 10%. Adding features that will appeal to home and corporate users is probably a better way to achieve this than simply trying to appeal to Free Software advocates and Linux users.
"It also seems that CSS support may be more important for client side work, and full or complete CSS support makes a thin client more attractive. This would seem to be counter to Microsoft's push for 'rich' clients."
Microsoft has always feared thin clients because they view them as a way for people to escape Windows. This is why they had to
destroy Netscape at all costs. This is why they will *NEVER* embrace standards that enhance thin clients. Just look at their history. They've always tried to do just the opposite. Look at their proprietary JVM that succesfully took Java applets out of the web client picture. Look at their support for their own DHTML version. Look at their proprietary versions of JavaScript. Look at their proprietary extensions to XSL. And of course there is the mother of all standards-busters: ActiveX. These have all been ways to attack thin client standards, and they have been very succesful. Next up is
XAML.
Even if they wanted to support thin clients and make IE better, they would not want to support standards. Why? Well as soon as they support a standard that allows websites to do more good things, then there will be websites that do these good things. If more websites do more good things based on standards, then suddenly it becomes a lot easier to switch from IE to Firefox or Opera, or for that matter from Windows to Linux or OSX. However, if websites can only get some "cool" functionality by using either ActiveX/DHTML/MSXML or by using CSS 2, then of course they will pick the MS option because there are so many more IE users. And of course that will make it impossible for users of said website to switch from Windows/IE to anything else.
There are a lot of benefits for Comcast on this! Number One is that they are no longer in the business of co-developing and fully supporting DVR software. Instead they have somebody who specializes in doing both of those things. They get a natural way to tie their cable tv/dvr product into their ISP/portal product, since TiVo has already come up with an "acceptable" (to content providers) way to do this (Home Media and ToGo.) Plus they have a compettitive advantage over DirecTV/Dish, since
DirecTV looks like they will drop TiVo.
I used to have a DirecTV/TiVo. I also have Vonage VOIP. TiVo's modem wasn't able to use my Vonage powered phone service, and the DirecTV/TiVo boxes had their USB ports disabled. This turned out to not be a problem at all though, because all it used its modem for was for purchasing Pay-Per-View movies from DirecTV. TiVo was unaffected by not having a phone connection. It downloaded all its programming via its satellite connection. So in effect DirecTV lost potential money from me buying Pay-Per-View movies because of their stupid policy of disabling home networking, which seemed pretty fair to me.
I got rid of my DirecTV/TiVo when I moved earlier this year and I got a Comcast DVR, mostly because I didn't want to spend $1000 on a DirecTV/TiVo that supported HDTV, like my
Comast DVR does. It does not use a phone line at all and TiVo will just be a software update to the DVR, so no phone line should be needed after that either.
As far as threading is concerned, one of the few languages I've dealt with that makes mutexes, semaphores, etc. easy to deal with is Java
Umm, ok. Java has always made synchronization easy to get to use. It's never been particularly straightforward, because of Java's interpretive nature and the all the wonderful JIT liberties allowed for JVMs. Just look at all the confusion around
double check locking. JDK 1.5 is the first version of Java to formally expose semaphores. Now they are "easy" to use just like syncrhonization. Verdict is still out on how easy they are to understand.
Furthermore, we need to get rid of lazy programming.
Oh brother, here we go again. Let me guess, you could probably write a multi-threaded database server that supported fully ATOMIC operations and transactionality, would only need 4K of memory, and would be blazingly fast on a 486SX machine, right? Over-optimization pundits are the worst, even worse than design pattern pundits. This has been
discussed many times before. Fast, buggy code has zero value.
If you are only talking about an economic decision, then clearly putting your money in something that will (usually) appreciate while getting a tax deduction for the interest is a better decision than a non-investment. However, there are other considerations, like the quality of the housing you get from the two options. Many would argue that this quality is much more important than the long term financial consequences, especially if the difference in quality is significant. For example, I have a house that I rent out. I could sell the house for $700,000 (this is Silicon Valley.) If somebody had no down payment and did a fixed 30 year mortgage at 5.5% that would come to a monthly payment of $3974 (and that doesn't include maintenance.) I rent the house out for $2300 per month. Even when you consider tax breaks, there is a very big difference in how much it costs to get a certain level of quality. Now that's assuming you do a 30 year fixed mortgage. Of course you can do an ARM or an IO loan and get lower payments, but then you are taking on a lot of risk on a very large loan.
FIDE - Almost destroyed FIDE and to this day FIDE is a much weaker organization. When Garry said I am world champion and the title is mine no matter what FIDE says and does, he cracked the "legitimacy" of FIDE. In This case Gary had help from Nigel Short.
I just did a search for the name of an API library (called YlqLib) written by a co-worker that I needed to use recently. GDS instantly returned these results:
An email (and reply) I sent to the author asking about the API.
A Java source file that I wrote that uses YlqLib.
An email about an MS Exchange public folder created to discuss YlqLib
A Word doc written as a requirements doc for YlqLib.
A PDF of the YlqLib Programmer's Guide (intended for our customers.)
The HTML javadoc page for YlqLib
There's lots more actually, but I thought this was pretty impressive. Desktop Search is very useful for me, especially at work. There are still several improvements I would like to see in it, such as being able to specify exactly what folders are indexed, and better chat support (plugins will probably handle this.)
So this guy complains about how Microsoft's inability to "ship".NET to everybody when compared to how a service like Amazon ships software, and you really think he wants to write an OS for Google? To this guy, there's already an OS out there: TCP/IP, HTML, and Ecma/JavaScript.
Funny, I would say Quality = Knowledgeable_Staff_On_Good_Salary + Deadlines
I know what you're saying, but it's just not true. The age-old equation of engineering is:
Quality ~ Money * Time
If you decrease time, you will decrease quality unless you increase money. The othe classic rule of software engineering is that there are diminishing returns when trying to spend more on more people.
Of course you could re-write the above equation as:
Quality = k*Money*Time
Where is k is some constant. Most would agree that this constant increases over time (tools, training, etc. all improve.) Some would argue that globalization has provided a shortcut for greatly increasing k, allowing for companies to produce the same quality in the same amount of time, but for much less money.
There's already a million posts about premature optimization. But it really can't be stressed enough. I was really surprised that somebody who claimed to have been programming for ten years would even ask this question. Obsession with optimization is usually the easiest way to spot a junior programmer. Just last year I had a very talent, but inexperienced programmer that I had to sit down and lecture to them on this very subject. Here's what I told him
Before you write any code, think about potential bottlenecks. Document this! This shoudl affect design, i.e. cause you to change an algorithm or invalidate an assumption. Otherwise don't do anything with this information for now.
Make your code work before doing any optimization. If you break this rule, then you will waste tremendous amounts of time during debugging. Remember, there will be bugs in your code. Always! So optimizing before the bugs will just make things much harder.
Once your code works, profile your system to identify the actual bottlenecks. Check your notes when doing this! And when I say profile, that means there is a running system to examine. (For the author of the post, this will also let you see if the compiler did enough optimization. )
Determine if any of the bottlenecks are significant or not. What's the performance penalty being incurred? Is it statistically significant? Is it on the critical path of the application?
If there are significant bottlenecks, now is the time to solve the problem. Is the bottleneck a design flaw? If so don't try to optimize around, but consider starting over. Swallow your pride on this one!
If it's not a design flaw and there is an optimization that will solve the problem, then first document the optimization in the code, implement it, then test it to see if it actually solves the problem. If it doesn't solve the problem, you must rollback!
Seriously, it's obvious where this is headed. This report was done by a Congressional committee using reports from each agency's inspector general. That's a lot of ineffective bueracracy to start with, but it's only going to get worse. Next we'll have an agency devoted just to making sure these other agencies have proper security. And of course each of those agencies will need to hire specialized people and consultants to figure out how to fix their security problems, and then to diligently maintain the new security fixes on an ongoing basis.
So what do we have at the end of the day? The government reports on itself and determines that more government is needed. Never saw that coming. At least there was one good thing to come of thus, from TFA:
The poor grades effectively dampen efforts by U.S. policy makers to impose new laws or regulations to compel private companies and organizations to enhance their own security
If only their sense of freedom was enough to "dampen" these efforts...
The only problem with your argument is that these ISPs have binding contracts with their customers to provide a certain amount of bandwidth. So if their customers use Vonage, then Vonage traffic should be able to absorb every bit of that bandwidth, all the time. It's hard to imagine that the amount of bandwidth they've promised customers is less than the 160 Kb/sec you claim that Vonage consumes. So if they can't handle all their customers simultaneously using 160 Kb/sec then they are guilty of fraud because they have sold something (bandwidth) that they are unable to provide.
Go down to your local mall and its food court. Take a look at the teenagers down there and what they are doing. There has become a huge culture built around cell phones -- talking (of course), text messaging, picture mail, wallpaper, and especially ring tones. I've seen primetime TV ads lately for companies selling animated cell phone wallpaper. It's big business. The iPod, as amazingly popular as it is, is just starting to become a fixture of youth culture. So there just might be some serious money to be made in the convergence.
the 15 vulnerabilities for windows are to the core and system services
That's not totally accurate. Two of the patches that came out this week are not core/system patches.
KB886903 is an ASP.NET bug, kinda like a patch to PHP.
KB887472 is a bug in Windows/MSN Messenger and Windows Media Player.
Actually most of the bugs have to do with DHTML, ActiveX, hyperlinks, and the "core" parts of IE. These are core/system vulnerabilities because of IE's integration. And that's where the real weakness of Windows lies. There could be Mozilla vulnerabilities that are just as bad as these IE and IE-related ones, but patching them only requires patching Mozilla, not patching the Linux kernel or even Gnome/KDE.
When they talk about "truly interesting", I think they mean truly interesting to Larry and Sergey. I could see how making their search moneymakers (Ad*) more global/profitable/etc. would not be very interesting to people who think of themselves as being innovators. It is definitely the right answer to Wall Street to say that they spend 70% of their resources on the search stuff, since that makes all their money. It's their management's challenge to find talented people who are interested in doing the 70% that Larry and Sergey find too boring. All that being said, if you think about their recruiting process, it doesn't seem like the kind of process that would get the kind of people they would need for that 70% stuff.
Ok, but what about stuff like Desktop Search and Picasa? You can run both of these without an internet connection, though they both have some web integration parts (that are very similar to how Microsoft integrates its legacy apps with the web.)
I think Google's strategy is to NOT have a clear strategy. They seem much more interested in developing technology just because it is interesting to somebody. There is definitely a bit of the dot-com arrogance with them, i.e. the notion that they can come up with a cool technology and then later find a business model for it. Look at how many of things are still in "Beta" for Google! A lot of these beta things are guilty of not having a business model behind them.
Personally I think it's great: GMail is all I use for email (except for having to use Outlook at work) and Picasa is one of the best Windows apps out there IMO. I think their Desktop Search could use a lot of work, but that's another topic... I can't help but think it would be funny to see some of their hubris backfire on them though.
You are totally right. I changed jobs last year because I was tired of traveling a lot. I posted my resume and got tons of responses. I picked out seven places to do phone screens with and got interviews at all seven. I got offers from five of the seven and was able to pick out the best. I probably could've gotten two of the places in a bidding war, but the place I liked the best also made me the best offer, so I was pretty happy with the outcome.
Fascism has to do with totalitarianism and suppression of rights, not with property. The canonical fascist country (Nazi Germany) was capitalist.
This is a common, but incorrect, belief, especially among progressive/socialists. It started because Hitler went after communists in his country and had close alliances with some corporations. But it was hardly capitalism. The full name of the Nazi party was the National Socialist Party. The Nazi's were definitely socialists. The State planned the economy, even if it didn't own all the "Commanding Heights", i.e. all the big industries. The Nazi's were actually big fans of a lot of the New Deal reforms.
$499 and it doesn't even come with a mouse! I could build a $499 Linux and it would have a wiresless optical mouse with four buttons, scroll wheel, and a GNU-blender!
Re:Comprehensive interviews are very important.
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
A company filled with 'A' players will win every time.
Or falls on its face spectacularly. Read
this for an example.
Re:Engineering within limits brings great results
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 1
Let's not forget the other aspects of those olden times. Baffling bugs. Indecipherable code that was impossible to maintain. The constant joy of re-inventing the wheel on every project.
Maybe we can go back to other good ol' times. Like when it took great skill to tell time by observing the sun, instead of lazy buffoons using clocks. Hey next time I see somebody going to IKEA maybe I'll stop them and suggest they go chop down a tree and build themselves a table just to show off their "magic."
Slashdot Mirror
This is really a matter of target users. If the target users for OO.o were current Linux users and enthusiasts, then they've made a big mistake. However, they're target audience is more likely to be home users or corporate users. In either case, providing a product that is free but is a strong alternative to MS Office has to be their primary concern. If they offer a thin installer that will include a JRE if needed, then this should not cause problems with home users who are willing to subject themselves to a long download time so that they don't have to fork up $$$ for MS Office. For corporate users, including a JRE on the default desktop image used on all the machines, is trivial. The OO.o developers probably stay awake at night dreaming of a Firefox-like revolution and a market-share approaching 10%. Adding features that will appeal to home and corporate users is probably a better way to achieve this than simply trying to appeal to Free Software advocates and Linux users.
You better check your facts
So like Internet Explorer for example?
Even if they wanted to support thin clients and make IE better, they would not want to support standards. Why? Well as soon as they support a standard that allows websites to do more good things, then there will be websites that do these good things. If more websites do more good things based on standards, then suddenly it becomes a lot easier to switch from IE to Firefox or Opera, or for that matter from Windows to Linux or OSX. However, if websites can only get some "cool" functionality by using either ActiveX/DHTML/MSXML or by using CSS 2, then of course they will pick the MS option because there are so many more IE users. And of course that will make it impossible for users of said website to switch from Windows/IE to anything else.
There are a lot of benefits for Comcast on this! Number One is that they are no longer in the business of co-developing and fully supporting DVR software. Instead they have somebody who specializes in doing both of those things. They get a natural way to tie their cable tv/dvr product into their ISP/portal product, since TiVo has already come up with an "acceptable" (to content providers) way to do this (Home Media and ToGo.) Plus they have a compettitive advantage over DirecTV/Dish, since DirecTV looks like they will drop TiVo.
I used to have a DirecTV/TiVo. I also have Vonage VOIP. TiVo's modem wasn't able to use my Vonage powered phone service, and the DirecTV/TiVo boxes had their USB ports disabled. This turned out to not be a problem at all though, because all it used its modem for was for purchasing Pay-Per-View movies from DirecTV. TiVo was unaffected by not having a phone connection. It downloaded all its programming via its satellite connection. So in effect DirecTV lost potential money from me buying Pay-Per-View movies because of their stupid policy of disabling home networking, which seemed pretty fair to me.
I got rid of my DirecTV/TiVo when I moved earlier this year and I got a Comcast DVR, mostly because I didn't want to spend $1000 on a DirecTV/TiVo that supported HDTV, like my Comast DVR does. It does not use a phone line at all and TiVo will just be a software update to the DVR, so no phone line should be needed after that either.
If you are only talking about an economic decision, then clearly putting your money in something that will (usually) appreciate while getting a tax deduction for the interest is a better decision than a non-investment. However, there are other considerations, like the quality of the housing you get from the two options. Many would argue that this quality is much more important than the long term financial consequences, especially if the difference in quality is significant. For example, I have a house that I rent out. I could sell the house for $700,000 (this is Silicon Valley.) If somebody had no down payment and did a fixed 30 year mortgage at 5.5% that would come to a monthly payment of $3974 (and that doesn't include maintenance.) I rent the house out for $2300 per month. Even when you consider tax breaks, there is a very big difference in how much it costs to get a certain level of quality. Now that's assuming you do a 30 year fixed mortgage. Of course you can do an ARM or an IO loan and get lower payments, but then you are taking on a lot of risk on a very large loan.
- An email (and reply) I sent to the author asking about the API.
- A Java source file that I wrote that uses YlqLib.
- An email about an MS Exchange public folder created to discuss YlqLib
- A Word doc written as a requirements doc for YlqLib.
- A PDF of the YlqLib Programmer's Guide (intended for our customers.)
- The HTML javadoc page for YlqLib
There's lots more actually, but I thought this was pretty impressive. Desktop Search is very useful for me, especially at work. There are still several improvements I would like to see in it, such as being able to specify exactly what folders are indexed, and better chat support (plugins will probably handle this.)So this guy complains about how Microsoft's inability to "ship" .NET to everybody when compared to how a service like Amazon ships software, and you really think he wants to write an OS for Google? To this guy, there's already an OS out there: TCP/IP, HTML, and Ecma/JavaScript.
Quality ~ Money * Time
If you decrease time, you will decrease quality unless you increase money. The othe classic rule of software engineering is that there are diminishing returns when trying to spend more on more people.
Of course you could re-write the above equation as:
Quality = k*Money*Time
Where is k is some constant. Most would agree that this constant increases over time (tools, training, etc. all improve.) Some would argue that globalization has provided a shortcut for greatly increasing k, allowing for companies to produce the same quality in the same amount of time, but for much less money.
Seriously, it's obvious where this is headed. This report was done by a Congressional committee using reports from each agency's inspector general. That's a lot of ineffective bueracracy to start with, but it's only going to get worse. Next we'll have an agency devoted just to making sure these other agencies have proper security. And of course each of those agencies will need to hire specialized people and consultants to figure out how to fix their security problems, and then to diligently maintain the new security fixes on an ongoing basis.
So what do we have at the end of the day? The government reports on itself and determines that more government is needed. Never saw that coming. At least there was one good thing to come of thus, from TFA: If only their sense of freedom was enough to "dampen" these efforts...
The only problem with your argument is that these ISPs have binding contracts with their customers to provide a certain amount of bandwidth. So if their customers use Vonage, then Vonage traffic should be able to absorb every bit of that bandwidth, all the time. It's hard to imagine that the amount of bandwidth they've promised customers is less than the 160 Kb/sec you claim that Vonage consumes. So if they can't handle all their customers simultaneously using 160 Kb/sec then they are guilty of fraud because they have sold something (bandwidth) that they are unable to provide.
Go down to your local mall and its food court. Take a look at the teenagers down there and what they are doing. There has become a huge culture built around cell phones -- talking (of course), text messaging, picture mail, wallpaper, and especially ring tones. I've seen primetime TV ads lately for companies selling animated cell phone wallpaper. It's big business. The iPod, as amazingly popular as it is, is just starting to become a fixture of youth culture. So there just might be some serious money to be made in the convergence.
Actually most of the bugs have to do with DHTML, ActiveX, hyperlinks, and the "core" parts of IE. These are core/system vulnerabilities because of IE's integration. And that's where the real weakness of Windows lies. There could be Mozilla vulnerabilities that are just as bad as these IE and IE-related ones, but patching them only requires patching Mozilla, not patching the Linux kernel or even Gnome/KDE.
When they talk about "truly interesting", I think they mean truly interesting to Larry and Sergey. I could see how making their search moneymakers (Ad*) more global/profitable/etc. would not be very interesting to people who think of themselves as being innovators. It is definitely the right answer to Wall Street to say that they spend 70% of their resources on the search stuff, since that makes all their money. It's their management's challenge to find talented people who are interested in doing the 70% that Larry and Sergey find too boring. All that being said, if you think about their recruiting process, it doesn't seem like the kind of process that would get the kind of people they would need for that 70% stuff.
Ok, but what about stuff like Desktop Search and Picasa? You can run both of these without an internet connection, though they both have some web integration parts (that are very similar to how Microsoft integrates its legacy apps with the web.)
I think Google's strategy is to NOT have a clear strategy. They seem much more interested in developing technology just because it is interesting to somebody. There is definitely a bit of the dot-com arrogance with them, i.e. the notion that they can come up with a cool technology and then later find a business model for it. Look at how many of things are still in "Beta" for Google! A lot of these beta things are guilty of not having a business model behind them.
Personally I think it's great: GMail is all I use for email (except for having to use Outlook at work) and Picasa is one of the best Windows apps out there IMO. I think their Desktop Search could use a lot of work, but that's another topic... I can't help but think it would be funny to see some of their hubris backfire on them though.
You are totally right. I changed jobs last year because I was tired of traveling a lot. I posted my resume and got tons of responses. I picked out seven places to do phone screens with and got interviews at all seven. I got offers from five of the seven and was able to pick out the best. I probably could've gotten two of the places in a bidding war, but the place I liked the best also made me the best offer, so I was pretty happy with the outcome.
$499 and it doesn't even come with a mouse! I could build a $499 Linux and it would have a wiresless optical mouse with four buttons, scroll wheel, and a GNU-blender!
Let's not forget the other aspects of those olden times. Baffling bugs. Indecipherable code that was impossible to maintain. The constant joy of re-inventing the wheel on every project.
Maybe we can go back to other good ol' times. Like when it took great skill to tell time by observing the sun, instead of lazy buffoons using clocks. Hey next time I see somebody going to IKEA maybe I'll stop them and suggest they go chop down a tree and build themselves a table just to show off their "magic."