So if you're the average user petitioning MS to save XP, you basically get told to suck it. But if you're an OEM and threaten to carry low-cost Linux laptops, MS rolls over for them.
Gives you a warm fuzzy feeling as a user, doesn't it? A warm fuzzy feeling in your a--. If there was any residual doubt that MS prizes sales over users, now you know.
This is every bit the win for Microsoft as Vista. It's gone past the point of absurdity. Any developer this side of Alpha Centauri knows they rigged the vote. It's a joke. What on earth could make it worth this public clown posse?
Handled with all the execution savvy we've come to expect from Redmond these days.
the BSA believes 47% of software used in corporations to be illegal
I believe that's referring to companies in France but, in my experience, I've never been in an enterprise that would survive a 100% audit and not find something out of spec in its license.
To me that's one of the best reasons to run F/OSS. Which makes it ironic that MSFT claims using F/OSS is a liability. Well, how does that liability compare to the near guarantee of of a big fine in the event of a BSA audit?
Perhaps someone with more legal background could answer the question of if you're not running any proprietary software, if BSA would be able to claim grounds for an audit? The obvious answer is no....but how would you prove you don't have any BSA covered software on your system? Or do you need to? I'm not at all clear how that process works. Maybe I should call myself into their hotline and see how they handle it.
I'd rather stick knitting needles in my eyes than debug a regular expression.
The only cure for that is getting a good reference and having a go at some tutorials until you get good enough to slay the beast. Then you'll be everyone's buddy at the office, because a lot of people feel the same way.
Or you could just stick knitting needles in your eyes and slash your face with a razor and then everyone will leave you alone.
But I've made some modifications to my install. I replaced the registration and profile pages with a web form that posts to an Email parser. There was a lot of activity the last few days, spam registrations out the yang.
It's funny because to them it looks like the registration page and they keep running scripts against it. I block the IP ranges of the spam registrations at the boundary but they just keep block hopping.
They'll still get a script reg through sometimes, so there's something I'm missing. I could just install the security updates but it's so much more fun to try and tweak it myself.
But what happens when one of these things goes off the reservation and kills innocents? Or a UAV collides with an airliner. Or suppose some clever hacker figures out how to take control of our drones and uses them to bomb us. Is that an act of war even though it was our weapon system?
There's a real danger in relying too much on gadget war fighting devices, even one as simple as a pack mule. It starts out as a luxury and pretty soon no squad can't operate without one. You give them capacity, they'll find something to fill it up. Over time units in the field will become more dependent on their robot pack systems.
It takes longer to get Linux set up and working the way you want, though the discrepancy is smaller in that regard than just a couple years ago. But once you get it working right, you almost never have to dork with it.
I just recently gave up on a contract supporting a Windows shop because it was an endless goat rope. Between desktops and servers, something stopped working every week. Once a month it would be something major. I had to reinstall VisualStudio more than once. It took constant tweaking to keep the application pool running right.
When I come home there's none of that. Once I get an app stable, it generally keeps working. If I need capacity, I just stand it up. No problem. It's a much less stressful environment.
Carries a lot of implications for traveling to even near by planets, with travel time measured in months instead of days. It's tough enough to manage consumables, but traveling to Mars without a change of clothes or some way to launder them is a huge technical challenge all on its own. Maybe clothing becomes another consumable, dispose after using. And you have to pack enough groceries to sustain the entire trip, grow your own or starve if there's a mishap.
And those are our near neighbors, even living on the moon. Extended life in space is going to involve a lot of research. Let's face it, we're adapted for life on this planet. Trying to carry these living conditions across space is not only a technical challenge, it's a financial one as well. Who's going to pay for all this technology? All the lift capacity to get it into space and...then what? If we set up a moon base, we have to supply it. That's not going to be cheap. A Mars trip...even more expensive.
It is definitely a start but when you compare it to the $2 billion the DOE was going to spend in developing new rural coal plants you have to ask where their priorities lie.
Or maybe I should call it chimp change. 14 million when you're talking about a nation dependent on a line of oil tankers that stretches half-way around the world and pumps billions of dollars a day into one of the most oppressive governments on the planet. A country that just happens to supply the bulk of working terrorists in the world. The same country we get some of those dollars back by selling them mountains of advanced weapons systems, sending more guns to a part of the world that really doesn't need them.
If Walmart decided to discontinue it because of the lack of demand, that's fair game.
I'd agree, if that's really what's going on. But if Wal-Mart sold out of the units in all their stores, what metrics are they using to justify a lack of demand? Returns? Rain checks? Or Microsoft offering them a deal they can't refuse to discontinue selling them?
It was against the school's rules (Which they accepted when they joined the school) and they broke them, Facebook or no Facebook.
Why is there always some dick ready to step up and blame the victim? In his eyes, and I'd say the eyes of anyone who doesn't have their head crammed up their academic buttocks, he wasn't breaking the rules. He wasn't cheating, he was studying. Even if they were posting the answers that doesn't help them on the test. Either you know the material or you don't.
any deliberate activity to gain academic advantage...
A little broad there, don't you think? Studying is a deliberate activity to gain academic advantage, that would fall under this definition. If you expect people to obey the rules, the rules have to be clear and reasonable. You think he specifically agreed not to post any homework questions to any online forum? Probably not. So the school gets to pull some strange interpretation out of their butt and make that the standard. We can't define the rules for you but we know a violation when we see one.
Now there's a great example for a teaching institution to set.
I don't know if this is because of the platform we are running (which I will leave nameless), or simply because the fates conspiring against us.
Vee have vays of making you talk!
Seriously it depends on what your company does. The platform you select for building...say Slashdot or Digg...would be different than the platform you'd select for spinning out internal sites for a different kind of business. Assuming you're not building a high volume web entertainment site, then speed and time to market are big considerations. You want a platform that's fast to develop and easy to maintain. There are only three platforms I'd use for building integrated systems to support medium to large companies that need sites stood up quickly to support different business units:
LAMP - Specifically PHP. If you need additional capacity, you just stand it up. No licensing hassles, no purchase requisitions, and support is pretty easy to find. All my own sites are built on a LAMP stack.
ColdFusion - Hard to beat for time to market. I have CF sites going on seven, eight years old that are still carrying a load and, once they're stable, hardly ever need updating. ColdFusion runs on Windows or Linux servers and the license costs are still fairly reasonable. It can be hard to find CF developers.
.NET - Though let me say.NET is the least favorite platform that I support. Keeping a.NET site stable is a pain in the ass. Security patches will cause things to stop working unexpectedly and MS keeps you on their upgrade treadmill. I had one customer that paid for upgrading the same application from 1.1 to 2.0, or you have to maintain both environments. I hate their kludgy, GUI-driven development environment, which I consider FrontPage on steroids. But if you run a MS environment and SQL Server,.NET does offer some advantages. It does web services really well, integrates with many portal products and it's generally pretty easy to find support. Hard core NBMers will argue that.NET is faster to develop sites but that's a big, fat lie. It's faster to develop half-functional prototypes, but fully tested systems it's slower and tracking down problems can be really, really time consuming.
They don't have squat until the BK court approves it. Even then they only get 5 million and 95 million in flash cash. If the trustee tells them to put the money in escrow against potential judgments from IBM and Novell, that will flush this deal. This is all show but I haven't figured out who the audience is supposed to be. The BK court isn't going to be impressed.
I'm not sure what they're going to appeal. SCO dug themselves a really deep hole, an appeal is a long shot.
No one with a brain would loan SCO a nickel. It would take a cash cow like Microsoft to convince anyone to get in bed with SCO. Maybe that answers who the audience is supposed to be. Like there are serious players who think SCO's IP claims have merit. Ooooo, scary. If that's the case this is to business strategy what the Zune is to Apple.
Wasn't that list for stopping companies that transit money and support for terrorist organizations? Is Cuba a terrorist country now? I thought they were merely oppressive to their own people and mildly annoying.
This is all getting really out of hand. The no fly list, which doesn't have any actual terrorists on the list because the CIA doesn't want to tip them off they're being watched. Real ID, passports to travel to nearby countries, Iraqistan, Homeland Security...it's all just nuts. We got burned because we were arrogant and weren't paying attention. In response we've stomped all over the liberties that made this country great and squandered billions, put ourselves on the brink of bankruptcy, all to create the world's most expensive false sense of security.
Dense meshes just don't work very well, they implode upon themselves.
I heard the same argument in the early days of the internet. If we let just anyone on the network, requests will slow to a crawl.
Mesh is a fairly new technology, I'm confident the density issues can be mitigated. So, yeah, a dense mesh doesn't work well today. But to me that's not a hugely difficult problem to solve. Latency may be more of a challenge, as you also pointed out. Still, it's Gen I, give them a chance. Reminds me of people harping on Linux two or three years ago.
Telcos and other providers should tremble at the thought of mesh networks. Network technology that doesn't need them to spring up and function, almost anywhere. Self-discovering local phone networks...that'll keep AT&T up nights.
If we have deviations, we'll be transparent about the deviations
And if we're threatening IP litigation through surrogates, we'll be transparent about setting up pipe funding to finance IP litigation through surrogates.
The influx of cheaper cars (from Japan, I may add!) didn't kill off the top models...
Not yet but American auto manufacturers are on life support. GM used to be huge. Remember the old saying that what's good for GM is good for the country? Probably before your time. As big as GM was in the day and as small as those upstart Japanese car makers were in comparison, there's been quite a turn around. That in an industry that evolves at a glacial pace.
The technology market evolves much faster. The technologies that should scare the bejabbers out of the status quo include:
Appliance PC's. Sony has good reason to be scared. So does Dell, HP and Lenovo.
Mesh networking. Self-discovering p2p networks that don't need a telecomm or service provider to spring to life. This could potentially be as disruptive to the current internet as the internet was to traditional telecomm in the late 80's.
Open Source. When you take an overview of MSFT's approach to OSS, it's hard to mask the unmistakable signs of fear. And MS should be afraid of OSS, the same way Dell should be afraid of EEE PC's.
Legitimate businesses are dying for venture capital. And here it is, being wasted.
And anyone with two neurons left to rub together to make a spark would know that. You'd think anyone investing 100 million dollars would be a little more careful about where their money's going, wouldn't you? But they're not really investing a 100 million, they're investing 5 million.
So someone is willing to put up five mil to SCO in exchange for nothing. That same someone thinks that five million is not being wasted. Since they're getting nothing from SCO, what are they getting? Not that this bizarro world plan has any chance getting past the trustee, but where do they keep finding collaborators to go along with this fraud?
Another line of questioning might ask who could get someone do go along with flushing 100 million, or even five million down the toilet? That's a shorter list. Because if SCO goes begging for dollars, they'd get laughed out of the room. So it's not SCO. That would leave Microsoft. They have lots of money. People with money usually have friends with money. But what's Microsoft getting at this point? Nothing. This case exhausted its value to them years ago. Vista is a giant, steaming turd and everyone knows it. Linux and Apple are feasting on their entrails and the EU is hitting them with billions in fines.
Interns are a cheap way to test the water. When you find someone you like, hire them on full time at a good rate.
That's a good way to find junior people but not anyone with experience. I used to work with a local community college for student labor. I remember getting a call from the coordinator one day explaining that she really valued our participation in the program but it would be really nice if I would stop referring to the candidates as "galley slaves."
Not too bright but they rowed really well. Oh, well.
The problem with senior people is they go out and start their own companies. Or they partner with other small groups of equally talented people on a project basis. Employer? We don't need no stinking employer! No matter how great you think your company is, a bad day working for yourself is better than the best day working for someone else.
Has Microsoft totally switched gears in how it is approaching the Unix and FOSS sector for direct competition?
In the absence of a massive turn over in management, this is MS changing gears and competing with FOSS the same way they competed with Netscape. The same way they competed in the SCO fiasco, file formats, DRM, and all the other ways MS "competes" in the IT world. The kind of competition that just earned them a $1.3 billion dollar fine from the EU.
A leopard can't change its spots and MSFT can't change their character with the same people calling the shots. If they really want to change direction a re-establish trust then that change has start and spring from the top.
Slashdot Mirror
So if you're the average user petitioning MS to save XP, you basically get told to suck it. But if you're an OEM and threaten to carry low-cost Linux laptops, MS rolls over for them.
Gives you a warm fuzzy feeling as a user, doesn't it? A warm fuzzy feeling in your a--. If there was any residual doubt that MS prizes sales over users, now you know.
It's not the size of your black hole that matters, it's how you manage your singularity.
This is every bit the win for Microsoft as Vista. It's gone past the point of absurdity. Any developer this side of Alpha Centauri knows they rigged the vote. It's a joke. What on earth could make it worth this public clown posse?
Handled with all the execution savvy we've come to expect from Redmond these days.
Please fix the headline by dropping "Puts the" and "To" from the sentence.
Thank you.
the BSA believes 47% of software used in corporations to be illegal
I believe that's referring to companies in France but, in my experience, I've never been in an enterprise that would survive a 100% audit and not find something out of spec in its license.
To me that's one of the best reasons to run F/OSS. Which makes it ironic that MSFT claims using F/OSS is a liability. Well, how does that liability compare to the near guarantee of of a big fine in the event of a BSA audit?
Perhaps someone with more legal background could answer the question of if you're not running any proprietary software, if BSA would be able to claim grounds for an audit? The obvious answer is no....but how would you prove you don't have any BSA covered software on your system? Or do you need to? I'm not at all clear how that process works. Maybe I should call myself into their hotline and see how they handle it.
and is currently fitted with a plough...
Vital for those sudden lunar snow storms.
I'd rather stick knitting needles in my eyes than debug a regular expression.
The only cure for that is getting a good reference and having a go at some tutorials until you get good enough to slay the beast. Then you'll be everyone's buddy at the office, because a lot of people feel the same way.
Or you could just stick knitting needles in your eyes and slash your face with a razor and then everyone will leave you alone.
But I've made some modifications to my install. I replaced the registration and profile pages with a web form that posts to an Email parser. There was a lot of activity the last few days, spam registrations out the yang.
It's funny because to them it looks like the registration page and they keep running scripts against it. I block the IP ranges of the spam registrations at the boundary but they just keep block hopping.
They'll still get a script reg through sometimes, so there's something I'm missing. I could just install the security updates but it's so much more fun to try and tweak it myself.
But what happens when one of these things goes off the reservation and kills innocents? Or a UAV collides with an airliner. Or suppose some clever hacker figures out how to take control of our drones and uses them to bomb us. Is that an act of war even though it was our weapon system?
There's a real danger in relying too much on gadget war fighting devices, even one as simple as a pack mule. It starts out as a luxury and pretty soon no squad can't operate without one. You give them capacity, they'll find something to fill it up. Over time units in the field will become more dependent on their robot pack systems.
It takes longer to get Linux set up and working the way you want, though the discrepancy is smaller in that regard than just a couple years ago. But once you get it working right, you almost never have to dork with it.
I just recently gave up on a contract supporting a Windows shop because it was an endless goat rope. Between desktops and servers, something stopped working every week. Once a month it would be something major. I had to reinstall VisualStudio more than once. It took constant tweaking to keep the application pool running right.
When I come home there's none of that. Once I get an app stable, it generally keeps working. If I need capacity, I just stand it up. No problem. It's a much less stressful environment.
Carries a lot of implications for traveling to even near by planets, with travel time measured in months instead of days. It's tough enough to manage consumables, but traveling to Mars without a change of clothes or some way to launder them is a huge technical challenge all on its own. Maybe clothing becomes another consumable, dispose after using. And you have to pack enough groceries to sustain the entire trip, grow your own or starve if there's a mishap.
And those are our near neighbors, even living on the moon. Extended life in space is going to involve a lot of research. Let's face it, we're adapted for life on this planet. Trying to carry these living conditions across space is not only a technical challenge, it's a financial one as well. Who's going to pay for all this technology? All the lift capacity to get it into space and...then what? If we set up a moon base, we have to supply it. That's not going to be cheap. A Mars trip...even more expensive.
It is definitely a start but when you compare it to the $2 billion the DOE was going to spend in developing new rural coal plants you have to ask where their priorities lie.
Or maybe I should call it chimp change. 14 million when you're talking about a nation dependent on a line of oil tankers that stretches half-way around the world and pumps billions of dollars a day into one of the most oppressive governments on the planet. A country that just happens to supply the bulk of working terrorists in the world. The same country we get some of those dollars back by selling them mountains of advanced weapons systems, sending more guns to a part of the world that really doesn't need them.
So how's that 14 million looking now?
If Walmart decided to discontinue it because of the lack of demand, that's fair game.
I'd agree, if that's really what's going on. But if Wal-Mart sold out of the units in all their stores, what metrics are they using to justify a lack of demand? Returns? Rain checks? Or Microsoft offering them a deal they can't refuse to discontinue selling them?
MacBook Air Confuses Airport Security
Which points out nothing other than airport security is easily confused. Although it would make a great Apple ad. MacBook Air: Laptop of Doom!
It was against the school's rules (Which they accepted when they joined the school) and they broke them, Facebook or no Facebook.
Why is there always some dick ready to step up and blame the victim? In his eyes, and I'd say the eyes of anyone who doesn't have their head crammed up their academic buttocks, he wasn't breaking the rules. He wasn't cheating, he was studying. Even if they were posting the answers that doesn't help them on the test. Either you know the material or you don't.
any deliberate activity to gain academic advantage...
A little broad there, don't you think? Studying is a deliberate activity to gain academic advantage, that would fall under this definition. If you expect people to obey the rules, the rules have to be clear and reasonable. You think he specifically agreed not to post any homework questions to any online forum? Probably not. So the school gets to pull some strange interpretation out of their butt and make that the standard. We can't define the rules for you but we know a violation when we see one.
Now there's a great example for a teaching institution to set.
Whole new layers of self-important morons sticking their nose in your business in the name of national security.
I don't know if this is because of the platform we are running (which I will leave nameless), or simply because the fates conspiring against us.
Vee have vays of making you talk!
Seriously it depends on what your company does. The platform you select for building...say Slashdot or Digg...would be different than the platform you'd select for spinning out internal sites for a different kind of business. Assuming you're not building a high volume web entertainment site, then speed and time to market are big considerations. You want a platform that's fast to develop and easy to maintain. There are only three platforms I'd use for building integrated systems to support medium to large companies that need sites stood up quickly to support different business units:
LAMP - Specifically PHP. If you need additional capacity, you just stand it up. No licensing hassles, no purchase requisitions, and support is pretty easy to find. All my own sites are built on a LAMP stack.
ColdFusion - Hard to beat for time to market. I have CF sites going on seven, eight years old that are still carrying a load and, once they're stable, hardly ever need updating. ColdFusion runs on Windows or Linux servers and the license costs are still fairly reasonable. It can be hard to find CF developers.
.NET - Though let me say .NET is the least favorite platform that I support. Keeping a .NET site stable is a pain in the ass. Security patches will cause things to stop working unexpectedly and MS keeps you on their upgrade treadmill. I had one customer that paid for upgrading the same application from 1.1 to 2.0, or you have to maintain both environments. I hate their kludgy, GUI-driven development environment, which I consider FrontPage on steroids. But if you run a MS environment and SQL Server, .NET does offer some advantages. It does web services really well, integrates with many portal products and it's generally pretty easy to find support. Hard core NBMers will argue that .NET is faster to develop sites but that's a big, fat lie. It's faster to develop half-functional prototypes, but fully tested systems it's slower and tracking down problems can be really, really time consuming.
They don't have squat until the BK court approves it. Even then they only get 5 million and 95 million in flash cash. If the trustee tells them to put the money in escrow against potential judgments from IBM and Novell, that will flush this deal. This is all show but I haven't figured out who the audience is supposed to be. The BK court isn't going to be impressed.
I'm not sure what they're going to appeal. SCO dug themselves a really deep hole, an appeal is a long shot.
No one with a brain would loan SCO a nickel. It would take a cash cow like Microsoft to convince anyone to get in bed with SCO. Maybe that answers who the audience is supposed to be. Like there are serious players who think SCO's IP claims have merit. Ooooo, scary. If that's the case this is to business strategy what the Zune is to Apple.
Wasn't that list for stopping companies that transit money and support for terrorist organizations? Is Cuba a terrorist country now? I thought they were merely oppressive to their own people and mildly annoying.
This is all getting really out of hand. The no fly list, which doesn't have any actual terrorists on the list because the CIA doesn't want to tip them off they're being watched. Real ID, passports to travel to nearby countries, Iraqistan, Homeland Security...it's all just nuts. We got burned because we were arrogant and weren't paying attention. In response we've stomped all over the liberties that made this country great and squandered billions, put ourselves on the brink of bankruptcy, all to create the world's most expensive false sense of security.
Dense meshes just don't work very well, they implode upon themselves.
I heard the same argument in the early days of the internet. If we let just anyone on the network, requests will slow to a crawl.
Mesh is a fairly new technology, I'm confident the density issues can be mitigated. So, yeah, a dense mesh doesn't work well today. But to me that's not a hugely difficult problem to solve. Latency may be more of a challenge, as you also pointed out. Still, it's Gen I, give them a chance. Reminds me of people harping on Linux two or three years ago.
Telcos and other providers should tremble at the thought of mesh networks. Network technology that doesn't need them to spring up and function, almost anywhere. Self-discovering local phone networks...that'll keep AT&T up nights.
If we have deviations, we'll be transparent about the deviations
And if we're threatening IP litigation through surrogates, we'll be transparent about setting up pipe funding to finance IP litigation through surrogates.
The influx of cheaper cars (from Japan, I may add!) didn't kill off the top models...
Not yet but American auto manufacturers are on life support. GM used to be huge. Remember the old saying that what's good for GM is good for the country? Probably before your time. As big as GM was in the day and as small as those upstart Japanese car makers were in comparison, there's been quite a turn around. That in an industry that evolves at a glacial pace.
The technology market evolves much faster. The technologies that should scare the bejabbers out of the status quo include:
Legitimate businesses are dying for venture capital. And here it is, being wasted.
And anyone with two neurons left to rub together to make a spark would know that. You'd think anyone investing 100 million dollars would be a little more careful about where their money's going, wouldn't you? But they're not really investing a 100 million, they're investing 5 million.
So someone is willing to put up five mil to SCO in exchange for nothing. That same someone thinks that five million is not being wasted. Since they're getting nothing from SCO, what are they getting? Not that this bizarro world plan has any chance getting past the trustee, but where do they keep finding collaborators to go along with this fraud?
Another line of questioning might ask who could get someone do go along with flushing 100 million, or even five million down the toilet? That's a shorter list. Because if SCO goes begging for dollars, they'd get laughed out of the room. So it's not SCO. That would leave Microsoft. They have lots of money. People with money usually have friends with money. But what's Microsoft getting at this point? Nothing. This case exhausted its value to them years ago. Vista is a giant, steaming turd and everyone knows it. Linux and Apple are feasting on their entrails and the EU is hitting them with billions in fines.
So, what's the five million for?
Interns are a cheap way to test the water. When you find someone you like, hire them on full time at a good rate.
That's a good way to find junior people but not anyone with experience. I used to work with a local community college for student labor. I remember getting a call from the coordinator one day explaining that she really valued our participation in the program but it would be really nice if I would stop referring to the candidates as "galley slaves."
Not too bright but they rowed really well. Oh, well.
The problem with senior people is they go out and start their own companies. Or they partner with other small groups of equally talented people on a project basis. Employer? We don't need no stinking employer! No matter how great you think your company is, a bad day working for yourself is better than the best day working for someone else.
Has Microsoft totally switched gears in how it is approaching the Unix and FOSS sector for direct competition?
In the absence of a massive turn over in management, this is MS changing gears and competing with FOSS the same way they competed with Netscape. The same way they competed in the SCO fiasco, file formats, DRM, and all the other ways MS "competes" in the IT world. The kind of competition that just earned them a $1.3 billion dollar fine from the EU.
A leopard can't change its spots and MSFT can't change their character with the same people calling the shots. If they really want to change direction a re-establish trust then that change has start and spring from the top.