You're right, he didn't give an answer, but the reason for that should be obvious: Microsoft wasn't thinking about the Internet when they shipped Outlook, and so they fucked up and shipped it anyway because they had to get something out the door.
But answering the question you really asked would have made for a piss-poor answer. "Um, yeah, we screwed up on that one. Sorry 'bout that." I'm glad he took your dead-end question and used it as a chance to talk about the company's new focus.
First of all, it's sad that Slashdot couldn't hold notable members of the Perl community. Makes me a bit wistful to look over the nearly content-free posts on this topic and remember Abigail's scathing and 100% accurate flames, and Tom Christensen's odd and brilliant posts. Assholes, maybe, but their minds are unparalleled and their writing incisive. They're sorely missed in a discussion like this.
In any case, Perl is in good hands. Require strict and warnings for modules makes sense. Leaving room for Perl to grow is a good thing. Making everything an object that is free to return in scalar context adds flexibility while giving functions the freedom to behave as they see fit.
Most of all, these principles are in place before the major work of adding full Unicode support and meta-languaging begins. There's a firm hand on the tiller, and Larry seems as up for the work as he ever has been.
You're cynical. O'Reilly doesn't do what they do just for the money. If that was their only motivation, they'd publish porno and run virtual blackjack tables. Publishing tech books is sometimes profitable, but it's extremely labor-intensive.
I haven't bought a CD that I could find in MP3 since I first discovered MP3s in 1997, and most of my friends are the same way. We don't have thousands of dollars worth of audio equipment to detect the loss of quality, and we all spend a ton of time at our computers, anyway.
For every story of someone who's bought more music because of MP3 sharing, there's ten stories of someone who's tired of paying too much money for too much fluff, and opts to pick up the single or the album in the traditional, downloadable, five-fingered way. The recording industry is right to be paranoid about this.
yeah, there's been much better trolls here. Shoeboy, for example. He could create a post guaranteed to win or lose a specific number of points, and make you laugh unbelievably while doing it.
It could similarly be argued that pushing buttons on a digital clock is a perfect metaphor for what is actually going on, the toggling of tiny electrical switches on and off, on and off...
Points one and two attempt to refute the remote possibility that 'benevolent involuntary root patching' (Or BIRP, as I like to call it - excuse me) could gain credence as a legitimate tactic for updating daemons. You're right, but consider this scenario:
A 'good worm', nearly identical to this one, is periodically distributed from an unknown location, armed with the latest and most popular exploit and the correct scripting to retrieve the binaries to fix the vulnerability. It compromises the system using the exploit, silently fixes the problem, propogates itself for a fixed amount of time, and rm's itself from the box.
And, in the grand tradition of survival of the fittest: the real sysadmins will have already patched, or will be rooted and do a clean rebuild once they notice. The clueless users will be protected from raining DDOS and IRC bot madness onto their fellow Internet denizens for another day.
There's nothing like being owned to make you a better sysadmin, and this method ensures that no one else will hijack your system through the same exploit while you're waiting to notice that something fishy has gone on. Morally, this argument doesn't hold water, but practically, it could eliminate a whole class of script kiddie problems before they start, by harnessing the power of the exploit for something beneficial.
Huh? Google moderates the Internet, of course. Or, put another way, we ourselves moderate it with every page we link. Even if Google changes their ranking scheme, some other search engine will run with the idea.
Common wisdom trickles to the top, as do the polarized opinions of every hot-button issue. We don't need no stinking government regulation - we have a democracy of information as has never existed before in the history of the world, and all the required pieces in place to comb through it effectively.
This is probably the single most insightful thing said on this thread so far. It's almost an exact description of what happens inside the software house I work for. Developers who, given adequate time and resources, would come up with the most elegant, high-quality designs possible are forced between the Scylla and Charybdis of marketing and management, AKA the aggressive ship schedule, and crapware is the result.
It would take the marketplace demanding quality from for-hire vendors for this to change, not management foisting it off as one more checkbox.
The funniest thing about this comment is that it's been moderated insightful. "Funny", maybe, but insightful? With 12 billion dollars in the bank, it doesn't take more than 100 million or so to convince any small business owner that they're better off cashing out. Especially because (as another poster mentioned above) Microsoft keeps its gaming acquisitions as autonomous entities, and just takes over QA testing, win32 compliance, and marketing. It's a great deal for all involved.
Nope. IE is free because it's a picture frame, and if it displays content tailored to its featureset better than any other browser, then it will be the platform of choice on which to build other things that make money. E-commerce sites, streaming media applications that charge by the view, etc. In the future, it is likely to be the mounting point for all of Microsoft's software rental ideas, with ActiveX controls tightly integrated into the browser architecture, all running based on a subscription model.
Even if IE/Internet is broken off into its own company, that will not stop this strategy from unfolding, and IE will continue to be free.
The arbitrary code was not embedded in the message (any more than any other MIME-encoded attachment is embedded), and it was not executed by the email client. It required the user to double-click on it to execute it, exactly like any other executable attachment. The security hole is in the scripting model (Windows Scripting Host) that provides an automated interface to the global address book.
LOL...I asked this exact question to a developer, who replied that since the API calls are nearly completely overlapping, it's possible to compile one of the Pocket apps to run on x86 with nearly no modification to the source. Should Microsoft ever decide that it's any kind of a good idea, it could be shipped in a few weeks.
Justice doesn't have to be lucky, and, in fact, has little motivation to settle. Despite the posturing from the preening Joel Klein and the repulsive Janet Reno, winning is not necessarily what this case is about at all.
Why? Because, whatever the rhetoric from both sides of the fence, the inquiry has forced Microsoft to play softer ball than it would otherwise. It pirouettes where it would otherwise tackle, cajoles where it would otherwise threaten. Whatever the official line, and the frequent pronouncements of progress and acquisition, Microsoft is actually behaving like a company that the DOJ would approve of, even today.
Tying Microsoft up in litigation for the next two or three years, at the cost of paltry tens or hundreds of millions, without any sure chance of victory for the Justice Department, is still a sure victory for the consumer, or so the thought must go through some of the lawyer's heads.
There is no clear-cut method of punishment for Microsoft - observe/., where some of the brighter minds on the Internet completely fail to reach a consensus on what could possibly be done to rein in the 800 lb. gorilla. Any method selected will have both positive and negative consequences for the software industry in the future, and all will be applied with the clumsy hand of government, making such options imminently unsuitable to nimble and fast-changing technology.
So what better way to regulate the industry than to spend a few more years in court, giving young technologies the chance to succeed in a market where Microsoft is under the microscope, forced to play nice, even if the end result is losing the case?
Not that this is anyone's master plan, but it certainly must be a factor.
Kind of an interesting point, even as a lame troll. But you missed the boat completely, anyway. The only reason you have the 90% margin to shoot for, the only reason you have any idea whatsoever as to what constitutes ACTUAL use is because someone gave you a standard in the first place with which to measure your deviation.
Without the standards nazis, the RMSs, the detail sticklers, and all the other inflexible bastards in this world, there would be no room for your mostly-compliant pages that work only because browser makers have coded their rendering engines forgivingly enough that you can get away with it.
Without standards, there is no Internet. Without the W3C, there is a power void filled by any self-serving corporation in whose interest it is to see the "standards" bent their own way. Without a detailed specification of the way a markup language should and should not behave, you have no common ground off of which to build.
Interestingly enough, the reason you have to design for what looks best, works best for the majority of browsers, and gets the job done, with compromises in each of those areas, is because the standards were not implemented as spec'ed, forcing you into work-arounds to the Nth degree. As content as you may be with this bizarre stretch of HTML, it is by no means a utopia, nor is it the fault of the W3C.
Standards are your friend. Learn it, repeat it, live it. Not that your post was anything but a crude attempt to start a flamewar, but it was too stupid to pass up.
Oh goodness, there was never any question that 3Com is just another one of the corporates, looking then and now to make a (reasonably) honest, if not ultimately moral, buck. OTOH, there is a project at linmodems.org to get open-source drivers for these devices and make them useful under Linux, if not as modems, then as telephony interfaces for a variety of useful tasks. Hopefully, the pressure on the vendors to release drivers for these devices will build as Linux grows in popularity.
Among those who work on desktop apps here, there is, in fact, very little discussion of Linux, which is perceived as a treat to Microsoft's server marketshare, and not much more. The discussions hinge around the competitors, and when there is no viable competition on the horizon (as is the case for Office), the focus is on improving the apps and leveraging them into other spaces, to make them more and more irreplacable.
Whatever the future of Linux as a desktop OS, it has yet to make a dent in the collective Microsoft consciousness as a serious worry. Given the company's track record for noticing things late, however, this could certainly change in the next few years...
Yes, that corollary was the intended extrapolation; I do not believe that any religion has a lock on what is objectively true. There are millions of people who do, however, and I have a very difficult time relating to them.
In all honesty, the angle I perceive Knuth to be taking is rare and uncommon. About the only practical application is has is providing the scientifically-minded a morally neutral way to use organized religion as an outlet without needing to feel coerced into the (potentially) bizarre doctrines that go along with the faith. It is this angle alone that makes no claim on accuracy.
The vast majority of the world will continue, as you mentioned, to use religion in destructive, unproductive ways that violate the rights of those around them, claiming truth at the point of a gun. I'm not upset or angry that thinking people choose, on the whole, to shun these institutions. Whenever faith stops being personal (which happens the majority of the time), it starts being destructive.
In these talks, Knuth makes the extremely important point that is missing from so much of what we perceive about Christianity in the Western world today - religion is a private thing, as personal as a lover and just as sacred. In the first talk, he speaks of teaching at Stanford, and refusing to answer students' questions about God and politics. Could this possibly be because he's weak and unable to discuss the subject, or is it more likely that he recognizes what the Religious Right refuses to, namely that God's (however you define him/her) place is not in politics or education or courtrooms, but in the hearts of those who find him/her real?
Is it real? Will it save your life? Is it even Christianity if you don't smear it in your friend's faces? The overwhelming feeling from a scientist who cannot help but feel a reverence for the tradition and the mystery that is human existence is: who cares? What matters is not whether or not you dip or sprinkle, but whether or not you need it to feed your soul.
Many scientists are knee-jerk atheists, being unable to reconcile Genesis with the overwhelming evidence for something different. However, maintaining a spiritual life is not about adhering to the tenants of a specific doctrine. Having not done the research, it nevertheless seems safe to say that Knuth, as a man of scientific mind, cannot reconcile some of the tenants of his faith to what he knows to be true, and has yet found a way to embrace it as a valued and necessary part of his life.
There's a lesson here. Whatever brought us here, whatever keeps us cranking along in life, be it evolution, creation, or something else, there is a piece in 99% of us that is mystical, that asks for some outlet. Accepting Christianity as an outlet does not mean succumbing to the stupidities that are fraught within it, just as they are fraught within every other religion, in varying ways. It does mean acknowledging one's own need for the unknown, and a way to interact with it.
From the "everything-is-a-conspiracy" school of thought, but not very well reasoned. Not that stupidity doesn't become the status quo occasionally, or even often, but it's amazing how many times a complex issue refuses to become simple, just because you want it to. As previously noted, certain things are respectable: numbers, statistics applied to a larger picture that doesn't distort them, etc. FUD like this, from either a leftist or rightist slant, helps no one.
Slashdot Mirror
But answering the question you really asked would have made for a piss-poor answer. "Um, yeah, we screwed up on that one. Sorry 'bout that." I'm glad he took your dead-end question and used it as a chance to talk about the company's new focus.
First of all, it's sad that Slashdot couldn't hold notable members of the Perl community. Makes me a bit wistful to look over the nearly content-free posts on this topic and remember Abigail's scathing and 100% accurate flames, and Tom Christensen's odd and brilliant posts. Assholes, maybe, but their minds are unparalleled and their writing incisive. They're sorely missed in a discussion like this.
In any case, Perl is in good hands. Require strict and warnings for modules makes sense. Leaving room for Perl to grow is a good thing. Making everything an object that is free to return in scalar context adds flexibility while giving functions the freedom to behave as they see fit.
Most of all, these principles are in place before the major work of adding full Unicode support and meta-languaging begins. There's a firm hand on the tiller, and Larry seems as up for the work as he ever has been.
You're cynical. O'Reilly doesn't do what they do just for the money. If that was their only motivation, they'd publish porno and run virtual blackjack tables. Publishing tech books is sometimes profitable, but it's extremely labor-intensive.
For every story of someone who's bought more music because of MP3 sharing, there's ten stories of someone who's tired of paying too much money for too much fluff, and opts to pick up the single or the album in the traditional, downloadable, five-fingered way. The recording industry is right to be paranoid about this.
yeah, there's been much better trolls here. Shoeboy, for example. He could create a post guaranteed to win or lose a specific number of points, and make you laugh unbelievably while doing it.
It could similarly be argued that pushing buttons on a digital clock is a perfect metaphor for what is actually going on, the toggling of tiny electrical switches on and off, on and off...
Boars you to death? Go watch Hannibal and say that. :P
Points one and two attempt to refute the remote possibility that 'benevolent involuntary root patching' (Or BIRP, as I like to call it - excuse me) could gain credence as a legitimate tactic for updating daemons. You're right, but consider this scenario:
A 'good worm', nearly identical to this one, is periodically distributed from an unknown location, armed with the latest and most popular exploit and the correct scripting to retrieve the binaries to fix the vulnerability. It compromises the system using the exploit, silently fixes the problem, propogates itself for a fixed amount of time, and rm's itself from the box.
And, in the grand tradition of survival of the fittest: the real sysadmins will have already patched, or will be rooted and do a clean rebuild once they notice. The clueless users will be protected from raining DDOS and IRC bot madness onto their fellow Internet denizens for another day.
There's nothing like being owned to make you a better sysadmin, and this method ensures that no one else will hijack your system through the same exploit while you're waiting to notice that something fishy has gone on. Morally, this argument doesn't hold water, but practically, it could eliminate a whole class of script kiddie problems before they start, by harnessing the power of the exploit for something beneficial.
Common wisdom trickles to the top, as do the polarized opinions of every hot-button issue. We don't need no stinking government regulation - we have a democracy of information as has never existed before in the history of the world, and all the required pieces in place to comb through it effectively.
This is probably the single most insightful thing said on this thread so far. It's almost an exact description of what happens inside the software house I work for. Developers who, given adequate time and resources, would come up with the most elegant, high-quality designs possible are forced between the Scylla and Charybdis of marketing and management, AKA the aggressive ship schedule, and crapware is the result. It would take the marketplace demanding quality from for-hire vendors for this to change, not management foisting it off as one more checkbox.
The funniest thing about this comment is that it's been moderated insightful. "Funny", maybe, but insightful? With 12 billion dollars in the bank, it doesn't take more than 100 million or so to convince any small business owner that they're better off cashing out. Especially because (as another poster mentioned above) Microsoft keeps its gaming acquisitions as autonomous entities, and just takes over QA testing, win32 compliance, and marketing. It's a great deal for all involved.
Nope. IE is free because it's a picture frame, and if it displays content tailored to its featureset better than any other browser, then it will be the platform of choice on which to build other things that make money. E-commerce sites, streaming media applications that charge by the view, etc. In the future, it is likely to be the mounting point for all of Microsoft's software rental ideas, with ActiveX controls tightly integrated into the browser architecture, all running based on a subscription model.
Even if IE/Internet is broken off into its own company, that will not stop this strategy from unfolding, and IE will continue to be free.
Just to clear up a prevalent rumor:
The arbitrary code was not embedded in the message (any more than any other MIME-encoded attachment is embedded), and it was not executed by the email client. It required the user to double-click on it to execute it, exactly like any other executable attachment. The security hole is in the scripting model (Windows Scripting Host) that provides an automated interface to the global address book.
LOL...I asked this exact question to a developer, who replied that since the API calls are nearly completely overlapping, it's possible to compile one of the Pocket apps to run on x86 with nearly no modification to the source. Should Microsoft ever decide that it's any kind of a good idea, it could be shipped in a few weeks.
Tools | Internet Options | Advanced | Play Animations |
Justice doesn't have to be lucky, and, in fact, has little motivation to settle. Despite the posturing from the preening Joel Klein and the repulsive Janet Reno, winning is not necessarily what this case is about at all.
Why? Because, whatever the rhetoric from both sides of the fence, the inquiry has forced Microsoft to play softer ball than it would otherwise. It pirouettes where it would otherwise tackle, cajoles where it would otherwise threaten. Whatever the official line, and the frequent pronouncements of progress and acquisition, Microsoft is actually behaving like a company that the DOJ would approve of, even today.
Tying Microsoft up in litigation for the next two or three years, at the cost of paltry tens or hundreds of millions, without any sure chance of victory for the Justice Department, is still a sure victory for the consumer, or so the thought must go through some of the lawyer's heads.
There is no clear-cut method of punishment for Microsoft - observe /., where some of the brighter minds on the Internet completely fail to reach a consensus on what could possibly be done to rein in the 800 lb. gorilla. Any method selected will have both positive and negative consequences for the software industry in the future, and all will be applied with the clumsy hand of government, making such options imminently unsuitable to nimble and fast-changing technology.
So what better way to regulate the industry than to spend a few more years in court, giving young technologies the chance to succeed in a market where Microsoft is under the microscope, forced to play nice, even if the end result is losing the case?
Not that this is anyone's master plan, but it certainly must be a factor.
Without the standards nazis, the RMSs, the detail sticklers, and all the other inflexible bastards in this world, there would be no room for your mostly-compliant pages that work only because browser makers have coded their rendering engines forgivingly enough that you can get away with it.
Without standards, there is no Internet. Without the W3C, there is a power void filled by any self-serving corporation in whose interest it is to see the "standards" bent their own way. Without a detailed specification of the way a markup language should and should not behave, you have no common ground off of which to build.
Interestingly enough, the reason you have to design for what looks best, works best for the majority of browsers, and gets the job done, with compromises in each of those areas, is because the standards were not implemented as spec'ed, forcing you into work-arounds to the Nth degree. As content as you may be with this bizarre stretch of HTML, it is by no means a utopia, nor is it the fault of the W3C.
Standards are your friend. Learn it, repeat it, live it. Not that your post was anything but a crude attempt to start a flamewar, but it was too stupid to pass up.
Oh goodness, there was never any question that 3Com is just another one of the corporates, looking then and now to make a (reasonably) honest, if not ultimately moral, buck. OTOH, there is a project at linmodems.org to get open-source drivers for these devices and make them useful under Linux, if not as modems, then as telephony interfaces for a variety of useful tasks. Hopefully, the pressure on the vendors to release drivers for these devices will build as Linux grows in popularity.
For a split second, I thought your nick was PB, which really made me think...
Whatever the future of Linux as a desktop OS, it has yet to make a dent in the collective Microsoft consciousness as a serious worry. Given the company's track record for noticing things late, however, this could certainly change in the next few years...
This is as funny as it gets, on or offtopic. No moderator points today, or I'd be sending this up instead of commenting on it. But, excellent, anyway.
Anybody want a peanut?
Yes, that corollary was the intended extrapolation; I do not believe that any religion has a lock on what is objectively true. There are millions of people who do, however, and I have a very difficult time relating to them.
In all honesty, the angle I perceive Knuth to be taking is rare and uncommon. About the only practical application is has is providing the scientifically-minded a morally neutral way to use organized religion as an outlet without needing to feel coerced into the (potentially) bizarre doctrines that go along with the faith. It is this angle alone that makes no claim on accuracy.
The vast majority of the world will continue, as you mentioned, to use religion in destructive, unproductive ways that violate the rights of those around them, claiming truth at the point of a gun. I'm not upset or angry that thinking people choose, on the whole, to shun these institutions. Whenever faith stops being personal (which happens the majority of the time), it starts being destructive.
In these talks, Knuth makes the extremely important point that is missing from so much of what we perceive about Christianity in the Western world today - religion is a private thing, as personal as a lover and just as sacred. In the first talk, he speaks of teaching at Stanford, and refusing to answer students' questions about God and politics. Could this possibly be because he's weak and unable to discuss the subject, or is it more likely that he recognizes what the Religious Right refuses to, namely that God's (however you define him/her) place is not in politics or education or courtrooms, but in the hearts of those who find him/her real?
Is it real? Will it save your life? Is it even Christianity if you don't smear it in your friend's faces? The overwhelming feeling from a scientist who cannot help but feel a reverence for the tradition and the mystery that is human existence is: who cares? What matters is not whether or not you dip or sprinkle, but whether or not you need it to feed your soul.
Many scientists are knee-jerk atheists, being unable to reconcile Genesis with the overwhelming evidence for something different. However, maintaining a spiritual life is not about adhering to the tenants of a specific doctrine. Having not done the research, it nevertheless seems safe to say that Knuth, as a man of scientific mind, cannot reconcile some of the tenants of his faith to what he knows to be true, and has yet found a way to embrace it as a valued and necessary part of his life.
There's a lesson here. Whatever brought us here, whatever keeps us cranking along in life, be it evolution, creation, or something else, there is a piece in 99% of us that is mystical, that asks for some outlet. Accepting Christianity as an outlet does not mean succumbing to the stupidities that are fraught within it, just as they are fraught within every other religion, in varying ways. It does mean acknowledging one's own need for the unknown, and a way to interact with it.
From the "everything-is-a-conspiracy" school of thought, but not very well reasoned. Not that stupidity doesn't become the status quo occasionally, or even often, but it's amazing how many times a complex issue refuses to become simple, just because you want it to. As previously noted, certain things are respectable: numbers, statistics applied to a larger picture that doesn't distort them, etc. FUD like this, from either a leftist or rightist slant, helps no one.