Who are they aiming at here? Certainly not this group. Definitely not developers. Anyone in IT is going to get a good laugh. It's just surreal.
It's like this ad campaign was designed when the execs were baked. It sounded good in the hot tub but when reality strikes, they discover that planning ad campaigns when you're high is a really bad idea.
If there's some super sekret ad strategy at work here I'd sure like to know what it is, because it's hard to see it as anything but a massive waste of time and money. I don't think most people even care and it reminds the development community how much they hate IE.
Back in my college days I did research on how to skew the sex ratio in horses in favor of females. An ugly mare can still be used as a brood mare but a male that isn't in the top 1-2% of perfection is basically dog food.
So I blundered in with the help of a research scientist at my college and a local vet and achieved a 75% success rate. I thought it was a good thing. Cutting down the number of unwanted animals, raising the profit margin on running a horse park. It was cheap, safe and many times it worked. BZZZZT! The practice (and me) were almost universally despised. Not just dislike, genuine hatred. I routinely got threatening phone calls, even one death threat.
Small breeders said it would just be another way for big breeders to keep them out of the market, a small subset argued it was playing with nature, that was mainly the religious whack jobs. The breed registry threatened to delist any animals born via the procedure and when the found out there was no way to tell the embryo had been screened, threated to ban any park caught using it.
If people go that berserko over horses I can only imagine the reaction applying some of those techniques to human embryos. But it's been going on a lot longer than most of you realize, though wisely not in this country. Whether humans or animals I can guarantee the practice is hugely profitable.
Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with screening embryos to reduce cancer and inherited disease, but you might want to consider getting a bullet proof vest if you're going to publicly support that position.
The move by Brin is unusual, as it is rare these days for the Google founders to have such hands-on involvement in day-to-day operations at the company...
More likely they just needed a good laugh.
Microsoft must laid down some real PR bucks to get that press hit in the Post.
It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom...
Eh? You mean the freedom to work under-paid pilots 14-16 hours a day like Colgan Air? And the FAA let them slide because Colgan had friends in that office? Some of their pilots could make more flipping burgers. Like the pair that were tired, under-paid and not paying attention who turned Continential flight 3407 into a giant lawn dart.
This isn't political. I don't care if it's human, machine or a trained goat. Whatever gets the aircraft down in one piece is what I want managing the control surfaces.
They could certainly use standard word processor documents to keep track of patient information. Or copy off some of the old paper forms. How hard is that?
The only reason I can see for not treating patients is that they couldn't validate insurance coverage. Prescriptions can still be written on paper, treatment notes made on paper charts. For a majority of doctors offices, just ePrescribing is a huge technology step. The medical field is never far from their paper roots, so I'd have to vote that this was a financial decision. Delaying treatment because your computers are down? Come on.
The number of people that want to do only those things is so small its a moot point.
You might be surprised. If you want to look at what's likely to happen in the tech market, look to Japan. The netbook/internet appliance trend started there way before it came to our shores. The trend toward less expensive appliance type devices has continued to expand over there and I can't see a reason to think the same thing won't happen here.
Do you guys in the USA still seriously believe that Cuba is going to invade and conquer you / subvert your citizens and turn them into communists / invite Putin to set up ICBMs pointing at you?
Most Americans, no, they don't believe any of that. There's a minority ruled by the near constant crap flood of fear, racism, xenophobia and negativity offered up by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, along with a handful of media outlets owned by Rupert Murdock and Fred Koch. They don't realize that fear and smear have stopped working but they keep doubling down on the same losing strategy and hoping for a different result.
That 25% minority is now on the verge of tearing themselves apart as the people with two neurons left to make a spark try to wrest control of party away from the wingnuts. A task complicated by the fact that the inmates are running the asylum.
I think ever country has that 15-18% of crackpots, but not every one lets them seize control of the government. Learn the lesson. You can see where it got us.
Now they sell their skills back at 3X the price as contractors and do not get treated like trash.
No, no. Contractors still get treated like trash. Every so often you'll get military people who try to give you a break, but two years later they'll get rotated out and you'll have to start all over with new brass. Civilian management ranges from bad to horrendous and most of them have been where they are for decades. And a large number of them are ex-military, so you have an intellectually incestuous personnel environment where dogma triumphs over inventiveness.
Being a military contractor was the most stifling, oppressive, sterile, unimaginative environment I've ever worked in. For 3x what I used to make, I'd go back for a while, but not long. Even higher pay would only temporarily blunt the crappy working environment. It's not the money.
The government gets a bad deal because it's crap work. Coming out of that environment was almost liberating. I can't even drive by the base without getting a shiver.
The Pentagon is considering ways to share its threat data with other industries including telecommunications and Internet service providers, led by the DoD's Cyber Crime Center...
Certainly the military should be protecting their own infrastructure, but civilian infrastructure should be handled by DHS. There's no justification for mission creep when there are agencies with the charter and authority to address those issues.
We have the CIA, FBI, NSA and Homeland Security. Isn't that enough? Why isn't DoD working through one of them?
The problem with your reasoning is that when a free-market entity produces an inferior product, service, or solution, it will eventually fail.
Ironic you pick Microsoft as an example. The most non-competitive products in the IT world.
The problem with that argument is that what we have is not a free market. It's series of cartels. That's why we spend more than twice as much on health care as other industrialized countries and get treatment closer to the bottom of the scale. Because there are so many entrenched cartels in the health care industry. It's why we have the worst cellular service outside of Nigeria and why banks and credit card companies still run Washington.
New industries might start out competitive but once they get to a certain size, they start bending the rules in their own favor. Using unfair practices to freeze out competition, getting sweetheart legislation pushed through Congress, buying influence.
You free market preachers are just naive. The only free markets are also fair markets. And if you think what we have today is a fair market, you need to pass the bong. Government is the only entity that has the ability to groom a competitive marketplace. What we have today is what happens when government stops doing that job for 10 years. The rich get richer and there's no accountability for cheating. Economic collapse follows right after.
Inefficient government programs are the truism, not necessarily the reality. With some notable and widely publicized exceptions. But the fact you ignore is that without government, without a referee to control the game, our economic system has a very short lifespan. And yet you keep on with 30 year old economic theory in the face of economic meltdown while your 401K loses 65%. I don't think I want advice on government or managing markets from you.
A magnitude 4.7 earthquake was recorded by the USGS in North Korea.
If memory serves their last couple tests didn't generate much of a yield. But that big of tremor likely indicates they have overcome that problem. They got it working now.
today it requires that plus an understanding of computers and advanced electronics / electrical theory.
My first thought reading your post was about BMW mechanics. They are well educated and well paid. The job requires a surprising depth of knowledge.
If I was going to start over, I'd probably pick a trade fixing specialized industrial machines. It's knowledge that can easily be retrained in a number of fields and as more industries move to more automation, job security is not a problem. You don't see the copier repairman out of work very often.
Mining machinery, oil platform systems, medical devices, robotics repair...any of those would offer opportunities to travel to exotic places and make a lot of money.
They all integrate the security training into their work, and form new habits:
HAHAHAA! Wow, things must really work different on your side of the pond. Because over here, 90% of people would forget all their security training 20 minutes after leaving the meeting. Most of them will suffer through massive regulations and rules, struggling to do their job and then some contractor will walk out with millions of records on a laptop.
Information security in most government offices involves straining out gnats while swallowing camels. Lock down workstations to the point people can barely work, but let contractors bypass all those safeguards servicing the applications. Wrap themselves around the axle stopping people from installing weather bug, and leave massive holes in other areas. The IRS has mountains of data security processes but that didn't stop them from mailing my wife someone else's tax audits. All those docs had a big banner right across the top THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS SENSITIVE TAXPAYER INFORMATION. Name, address, date of birth, social security number, employer and income going back five years. All the computer security, all the data security processes, thwarted by some twit with an envelope and the post office.
Microsoft is in business to make as much money as possible. They do this by breaking the law and abusing the monopolistic hold they have on the OS market.
It most certainly IS some nefarious move by Microsoft orchestrated to increase their profits. To think otherwise is naive.
Sounds like they need the money. Microsoft borrowing money...who woulda thought?
The version for netbooks only runs three programs at a time. So the price point difference will be even higher if you account for a version of Windows 7 that actually works right. Early reports are that Windows 7 isn't that much faster than Vista on low end hardware. The only win I see here is in Steve Ballmer's mind.
And, isn't oddly ironic, that just when MSFT is losing market share and needs a win, suddenly there are articles future tripping on Windows 7. What a coincidence! Trying to make Windows 7 look inevitable just weeks before Android netbooks roll out on to the market. Wow, is that bizarre, or what? Almost like it was...planned.
Not sure how much of an advantage touch is on 9 in screen. A 17 in screen on a netbook makes it a laptop and wipes out all the advantages of a netbook. What's it say about MSFT when they're in such a desperate race to the bottom?
Teachers could carve each frame into a clay tablet and let it dry in the sun. Then mount the clay tablets on big wooden wheel and spin it real fast.
Time to put an end to chucklehead organizations like the MPAA, BSA and RIAA. Companies are trying to be heavy-handed with their customers while letting some vaporous organization take the heat for their dickish behavior. Implement joint and several liability on the member companies for the actions of their enforcement organizations and this silly business will end overnight.
Funny that service is one of the things that got Dell to the size they are, then was one of the first things that got shipped off to offshore call centers after they got big. Apparently Dell decided service was the first thing to go at Alienware as well.
That kind of silliness is what got me into building my own hardware. Too bad you can't do that with laptops...or can you?
Ubuntu cannot simply be a better platform to run Windows apps.
Exactly right. Morphing Linux into a Windows software platform would be a major mistake. You'd still be locking users into one way of doing things. I'm sitting here looking at our developers, all working on Linux. One uses pico, one a text editor another uses Eclipse. We all work differently, even different distros, and all manage to get our work done.
In a Windows shop we were all using the same OS, the same development environment and the same tools. Everything was regimented into MSFT's way of doing things and limited by the latitude they decide you get. Their tools, their rules, their training, their way. And it seemed we were always dancing on their string over something. Licensing, product activation, version compatibility issues, so we'd get paid to rewrite working applications for new frameworks, security patches that break things, the upgrade treadmill. Hours of undocumented time pouring through knowledge base articles. It was a constant waterfall of nit-picky little things that we would have to bend our schedule, manage our time to accommodate. The bonus was you always looked stressed out and busy and it was job security. Without regular maintenance, apps would stop working. You have no idea how much time you spend digging sand in a MSFT environment until you move off it.
I think it's nice that Wine exists for those odd times you need to run a Windows app. But that should never be the OS focus. And in the bigger picture of proprietary v free, as long as MSFT dictates your application environment, you're still dancing on their string.
...the school system is essentially a liberal enclave.
So making eduction a right wing enclave would make it all better. Funny, but I didn't hear any ideas about actually improving education. Seems like if you had such a vaulted ideal of what education should look like, you'd have some suggestion for improvement. But all you do is dismiss the entire system with a massive generalization.
But then again, throwing rocks is the only thing you're good at, so I guess it would be futile to expect anything better.
IE6 is a plague on the internet development world. If it gets rid of that, wonderful. Making it the default browser, that's classic Microsoft. Actually, that's the new, desperate to hang on to market share in the face of shrinking revenue Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Who are they aiming at here? Certainly not this group. Definitely not developers. Anyone in IT is going to get a good laugh. It's just surreal.
It's like this ad campaign was designed when the execs were baked. It sounded good in the hot tub but when reality strikes, they discover that planning ad campaigns when you're high is a really bad idea.
If there's some super sekret ad strategy at work here I'd sure like to know what it is, because it's hard to see it as anything but a massive waste of time and money. I don't think most people even care and it reminds the development community how much they hate IE.
Windows 7 Licensing a Disaster
That's all it would take. How many versions? Six? It was a disaster before XP was figured in. Only Microsoft would think that was a good idea.
NASA should recruit them. They'd be the experts on triggering massive explosions.
Back in my college days I did research on how to skew the sex ratio in horses in favor of females. An ugly mare can still be used as a brood mare but a male that isn't in the top 1-2% of perfection is basically dog food.
So I blundered in with the help of a research scientist at my college and a local vet and achieved a 75% success rate. I thought it was a good thing. Cutting down the number of unwanted animals, raising the profit margin on running a horse park. It was cheap, safe and many times it worked. BZZZZT! The practice (and me) were almost universally despised. Not just dislike, genuine hatred. I routinely got threatening phone calls, even one death threat.
Small breeders said it would just be another way for big breeders to keep them out of the market, a small subset argued it was playing with nature, that was mainly the religious whack jobs. The breed registry threatened to delist any animals born via the procedure and when the found out there was no way to tell the embryo had been screened, threated to ban any park caught using it.
If people go that berserko over horses I can only imagine the reaction applying some of those techniques to human embryos. But it's been going on a lot longer than most of you realize, though wisely not in this country. Whether humans or animals I can guarantee the practice is hugely profitable.
Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with screening embryos to reduce cancer and inherited disease, but you might want to consider getting a bullet proof vest if you're going to publicly support that position.
The move by Brin is unusual, as it is rare these days for the Google founders to have such hands-on involvement in day-to-day operations at the company...
More likely they just needed a good laugh.
Microsoft must laid down some real PR bucks to get that press hit in the Post.
The security community will continue to fight them, but as long as the worm remains embedded in any Windows computer there can be no quick fixes.
Fixed that for ya.
It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom...
Eh? You mean the freedom to work under-paid pilots 14-16 hours a day like Colgan Air? And the FAA let them slide because Colgan had friends in that office? Some of their pilots could make more flipping burgers. Like the pair that were tired, under-paid and not paying attention who turned Continential flight 3407 into a giant lawn dart.
This isn't political. I don't care if it's human, machine or a trained goat. Whatever gets the aircraft down in one piece is what I want managing the control surfaces.
They could certainly use standard word processor documents to keep track of patient information. Or copy off some of the old paper forms. How hard is that?
The only reason I can see for not treating patients is that they couldn't validate insurance coverage. Prescriptions can still be written on paper, treatment notes made on paper charts. For a majority of doctors offices, just ePrescribing is a huge technology step. The medical field is never far from their paper roots, so I'd have to vote that this was a financial decision. Delaying treatment because your computers are down? Come on.
The number of people that want to do only those things is so small its a moot point.
You might be surprised. If you want to look at what's likely to happen in the tech market, look to Japan. The netbook/internet appliance trend started there way before it came to our shores. The trend toward less expensive appliance type devices has continued to expand over there and I can't see a reason to think the same thing won't happen here.
Do you guys in the USA still seriously believe that Cuba is going to invade and conquer you / subvert your citizens and turn them into communists / invite Putin to set up ICBMs pointing at you?
Most Americans, no, they don't believe any of that. There's a minority ruled by the near constant crap flood of fear, racism, xenophobia and negativity offered up by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, along with a handful of media outlets owned by Rupert Murdock and Fred Koch. They don't realize that fear and smear have stopped working but they keep doubling down on the same losing strategy and hoping for a different result.
That 25% minority is now on the verge of tearing themselves apart as the people with two neurons left to make a spark try to wrest control of party away from the wingnuts. A task complicated by the fact that the inmates are running the asylum.
I think ever country has that 15-18% of crackpots, but not every one lets them seize control of the government. Learn the lesson. You can see where it got us.
"What do you make of this hacked PC?"
"Oh, you could make a boat anchor, a fish tank, or a flower pot!"
Now they sell their skills back at 3X the price as contractors and do not get treated like trash.
No, no. Contractors still get treated like trash. Every so often you'll get military people who try to give you a break, but two years later they'll get rotated out and you'll have to start all over with new brass. Civilian management ranges from bad to horrendous and most of them have been where they are for decades. And a large number of them are ex-military, so you have an intellectually incestuous personnel environment where dogma triumphs over inventiveness.
Being a military contractor was the most stifling, oppressive, sterile, unimaginative environment I've ever worked in. For 3x what I used to make, I'd go back for a while, but not long. Even higher pay would only temporarily blunt the crappy working environment. It's not the money.
The government gets a bad deal because it's crap work. Coming out of that environment was almost liberating. I can't even drive by the base without getting a shiver.
Maybe 3x isn't enough now that I think about it.
The Pentagon is considering ways to share its threat data with other industries including telecommunications and Internet service providers, led by the DoD's Cyber Crime Center...
Certainly the military should be protecting their own infrastructure, but civilian infrastructure should be handled by DHS. There's no justification for mission creep when there are agencies with the charter and authority to address those issues.
We have the CIA, FBI, NSA and Homeland Security. Isn't that enough? Why isn't DoD working through one of them?
The problem with your reasoning is that when a free-market entity produces an inferior product, service, or solution, it will eventually fail.
Ironic you pick Microsoft as an example. The most non-competitive products in the IT world.
The problem with that argument is that what we have is not a free market. It's series of cartels. That's why we spend more than twice as much on health care as other industrialized countries and get treatment closer to the bottom of the scale. Because there are so many entrenched cartels in the health care industry. It's why we have the worst cellular service outside of Nigeria and why banks and credit card companies still run Washington.
New industries might start out competitive but once they get to a certain size, they start bending the rules in their own favor. Using unfair practices to freeze out competition, getting sweetheart legislation pushed through Congress, buying influence.
You free market preachers are just naive. The only free markets are also fair markets. And if you think what we have today is a fair market, you need to pass the bong. Government is the only entity that has the ability to groom a competitive marketplace. What we have today is what happens when government stops doing that job for 10 years. The rich get richer and there's no accountability for cheating. Economic collapse follows right after.
Inefficient government programs are the truism, not necessarily the reality. With some notable and widely publicized exceptions. But the fact you ignore is that without government, without a referee to control the game, our economic system has a very short lifespan. And yet you keep on with 30 year old economic theory in the face of economic meltdown while your 401K loses 65%. I don't think I want advice on government or managing markets from you.
A magnitude 4.7 earthquake was recorded by the USGS in North Korea.
If memory serves their last couple tests didn't generate much of a yield. But that big of tremor likely indicates they have overcome that problem. They got it working now.
Lovely.
today it requires that plus an understanding of computers and advanced electronics / electrical theory.
My first thought reading your post was about BMW mechanics. They are well educated and well paid. The job requires a surprising depth of knowledge.
If I was going to start over, I'd probably pick a trade fixing specialized industrial machines. It's knowledge that can easily be retrained in a number of fields and as more industries move to more automation, job security is not a problem. You don't see the copier repairman out of work very often.
Mining machinery, oil platform systems, medical devices, robotics repair...any of those would offer opportunities to travel to exotic places and make a lot of money.
They all integrate the security training into their work, and form new habits:
HAHAHAA! Wow, things must really work different on your side of the pond. Because over here, 90% of people would forget all their security training 20 minutes after leaving the meeting. Most of them will suffer through massive regulations and rules, struggling to do their job and then some contractor will walk out with millions of records on a laptop.
Information security in most government offices involves straining out gnats while swallowing camels. Lock down workstations to the point people can barely work, but let contractors bypass all those safeguards servicing the applications. Wrap themselves around the axle stopping people from installing weather bug, and leave massive holes in other areas. The IRS has mountains of data security processes but that didn't stop them from mailing my wife someone else's tax audits. All those docs had a big banner right across the top THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS SENSITIVE TAXPAYER INFORMATION. Name, address, date of birth, social security number, employer and income going back five years. All the computer security, all the data security processes, thwarted by some twit with an envelope and the post office.
Where you go when your wookie wants to have a good time!
Microsoft is in business to make as much money as possible. They do this by breaking the law and abusing the monopolistic hold they have on the OS market. It most certainly IS some nefarious move by Microsoft orchestrated to increase their profits. To think otherwise is naive.
Sounds like they need the money. Microsoft borrowing money...who woulda thought?
The version for netbooks only runs three programs at a time. So the price point difference will be even higher if you account for a version of Windows 7 that actually works right. Early reports are that Windows 7 isn't that much faster than Vista on low end hardware. The only win I see here is in Steve Ballmer's mind.
And, isn't oddly ironic, that just when MSFT is losing market share and needs a win, suddenly there are articles future tripping on Windows 7. What a coincidence! Trying to make Windows 7 look inevitable just weeks before Android netbooks roll out on to the market. Wow, is that bizarre, or what? Almost like it was...planned.
Not sure how much of an advantage touch is on 9 in screen. A 17 in screen on a netbook makes it a laptop and wipes out all the advantages of a netbook. What's it say about MSFT when they're in such a desperate race to the bottom?
Teachers could carve each frame into a clay tablet and let it dry in the sun. Then mount the clay tablets on big wooden wheel and spin it real fast.
Time to put an end to chucklehead organizations like the MPAA, BSA and RIAA. Companies are trying to be heavy-handed with their customers while letting some vaporous organization take the heat for their dickish behavior. Implement joint and several liability on the member companies for the actions of their enforcement organizations and this silly business will end overnight.
Funny that service is one of the things that got Dell to the size they are, then was one of the first things that got shipped off to offshore call centers after they got big. Apparently Dell decided service was the first thing to go at Alienware as well.
That kind of silliness is what got me into building my own hardware. Too bad you can't do that with laptops...or can you?
Ubuntu cannot simply be a better platform to run Windows apps.
Exactly right. Morphing Linux into a Windows software platform would be a major mistake. You'd still be locking users into one way of doing things. I'm sitting here looking at our developers, all working on Linux. One uses pico, one a text editor another uses Eclipse. We all work differently, even different distros, and all manage to get our work done.
In a Windows shop we were all using the same OS, the same development environment and the same tools. Everything was regimented into MSFT's way of doing things and limited by the latitude they decide you get. Their tools, their rules, their training, their way. And it seemed we were always dancing on their string over something. Licensing, product activation, version compatibility issues, so we'd get paid to rewrite working applications for new frameworks, security patches that break things, the upgrade treadmill. Hours of undocumented time pouring through knowledge base articles. It was a constant waterfall of nit-picky little things that we would have to bend our schedule, manage our time to accommodate. The bonus was you always looked stressed out and busy and it was job security. Without regular maintenance, apps would stop working. You have no idea how much time you spend digging sand in a MSFT environment until you move off it.
I think it's nice that Wine exists for those odd times you need to run a Windows app. But that should never be the OS focus. And in the bigger picture of proprietary v free, as long as MSFT dictates your application environment, you're still dancing on their string.
So making eduction a right wing enclave would make it all better. Funny, but I didn't hear any ideas about actually improving education. Seems like if you had such a vaulted ideal of what education should look like, you'd have some suggestion for improvement. But all you do is dismiss the entire system with a massive generalization.
But then again, throwing rocks is the only thing you're good at, so I guess it would be futile to expect anything better.
IE6 is a plague on the internet development world. If it gets rid of that, wonderful. Making it the default browser, that's classic Microsoft. Actually, that's the new, desperate to hang on to market share in the face of shrinking revenue Microsoft.