I'm more concerned for the employees. I work for a company that was recently assimilated by a very big three letter company. I have never seen so much incompetence and selfishness in all my life. They come in promising roses, but really they want to screw every last employee of the company.
I know. My favourite is this one, from an English exam paper:
"Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph. "
I think you are criticising the wrong component. Don't blame Outlook, blame MAPI! It's one of the most stupid, bonedead APIs I've ever seen. The underlying protocol apparently consists of a lot of proprietary binary blobs that the OpenExchange guys have had to capture over the wire and disassemble. Hardly a stable or neat mail protocol if you ask me.
Also, people think that MAPI is inherently secure, which it isn't. I can't tell you the number of clients I've seen who've shut down POP3 or IMAP services on their Exchange server and have instead required MAPI because it is a "secure protocol", or it meets "security standards". And before anyone pings me on POP3 being insecure - yes, it's insecure by default but you can use some form secure authentication and run it over SSL or TLS as the transport mechanism.
He knows about Devils because the latest Linux.conf is being held in Tasmania.
And Koalas can be vicious. If you believe in evolutionary biology (I hope there are no Texans in the room...) then you should note that they were once carnivorous. I'm not too aware of any marsupials that devolved from meat eating to eating leaves, but there you are.
Well, I found it amusing to repeat Ballmer's quote, but change it slightly.
Original quote:
"Apple gained about one point, but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction. The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be."
Changed slightly:
"Microsoft gained about one point, but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction. The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for an operating system in this environment -- same piece of software -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be."
CEOs of technology companies should be careful not to throw stones in glasshouses.
What does the word *whoosh* mean? The way it's pronounced seems remarkably like the sound I heard when I read your comment just now... please tell me what this marvellous word means!
Actually, I rather think that you are placing the blame on the wrong set of individuals here.
I work for a closed-source software company, which has some extremely large customers using our product. We were implementing minor/major releases and we incorporated functionality changes to minor releases. This was a problem almost every time, because at least one of our customers was using that feature and relying on it to work the way it worked in the previous patch.
Consequently we stopped adding new functionality into the minor releases.
You'll notice, however, that it's not the developers that caused this issue. No. It was the project and product managers for either a. allowing the functionality change, or b. allowing the functionality change but not realising the sheer impact it would have on the client-base and thus not planning accordingly.
The last comment was the most infuriating to a lot of people I think. The best response I read in relation to Andre Klepper's "*shrug*" comment was:
This is a little bit alarming. These *shrug*s and the like are not giving me the feeling of urgency that I normally associate with finding a really big regression in a stable point release.
I'm sympathetic to a degree, because I work on other projects often criticised for their bugginess. But even I can't quite imagine letting such a big regression go unnoticed, to the extent that it not only isn't mentioned in the release notes, but isn't awarded an OH MY GOD DID WE REALLY RELEASE THAT when the first reports file in.
I would like to think that this happened because an enthusiastic young developer built up a brilliant new design, got half-way through implementing it, then saw it released while unready at an unexpected point -- and the consequent worry is that the more we hound developers on this, the more we put them off developing at all. That would be a terrible pity, and I think there is an appreciation here all around that a modern replacement for the XSMP could be a great thing. The error seems to be a management one, rather than a development one.
Maybe it's just a question of expectation and taste. Like a previous poster here, I used to enjoy the fact that session management was one of the few things Linux did unambiguously better than other operating systems. Now it doesn't, at least for Gnome users -- and it was a shock to me to find that other developers never actually saw it as important in the way that I did. My world is not exactly torn apart, but it may have been slightly tweaked in a small corner somewhere. Gosh, maybe my view of that corner of the world was wrong all along.
In the mean time, I'm running gnome-session 2.22 and gnome-panel 2.22 quite happily with the rest of Gnome 2.24 on several machines.
Chris
As a fan of open-source for a LONG time, I'm beginning to wonder if it will ever cut it in the business world. I suspect with attitudes like the ones highlighted above that the answer is "no". And that makes me feel very, very sad.
Slashdot Mirror
Heck you could substitute a slug and you'd get the same result. Only you would also get a cool slug trail also, so that would be cooler.
Doesn't explain OpenOffice.org or MySQL :-)
But I agree with the first 2 paragraphs.
I'm more concerned for the employees. I work for a company that was recently assimilated by a very big three letter company. I have never seen so much incompetence and selfishness in all my life. They come in promising roses, but really they want to screw every last employee of the company.
I know. My favourite is this one, from an English exam paper:
"Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph. "
I think you are criticising the wrong component. Don't blame Outlook, blame MAPI! It's one of the most stupid, bonedead APIs I've ever seen. The underlying protocol apparently consists of a lot of proprietary binary blobs that the OpenExchange guys have had to capture over the wire and disassemble. Hardly a stable or neat mail protocol if you ask me.
Also, people think that MAPI is inherently secure, which it isn't. I can't tell you the number of clients I've seen who've shut down POP3 or IMAP services on their Exchange server and have instead required MAPI because it is a "secure protocol", or it meets "security standards". And before anyone pings me on POP3 being insecure - yes, it's insecure by default but you can use some form secure authentication and run it over SSL or TLS as the transport mechanism.
OK, rant over.
He knows about Devils because the latest Linux.conf is being held in Tasmania.
And Koalas can be vicious. If you believe in evolutionary biology (I hope there are no Texans in the room...) then you should note that they were once carnivorous. I'm not too aware of any marsupials that devolved from meat eating to eating leaves, but there you are.
So get someone else to buy it for them.
Well, I found it amusing to repeat Ballmer's quote, but change it slightly.
Original quote:
Changed slightly:
CEOs of technology companies should be careful not to throw stones in glasshouses.
It would have been worse if you were imagining the bat was Bill O'Reiley. And worse still if you imagined him as the shuttle. *shudder*
Given there are so many of them on Wikipedia, I'd have to say the answer is "yes".
You anonymous cowards certainly love to make a lot of unfounded stereotypes.
But who would that someone be? If only someone who was bitten by a spider and gained amazing abilities was around.
Your profession must make dictionary publishers very happy.
Hey. You're the one with the sig "some people just don't know when to give up (+1 irony)". Oh but how I do love meta-irony.
A small hint: when someone rights "oh noes", they normally aren't being serious.
What does the word *whoosh* mean? The way it's pronounced seems remarkably like the sound I heard when I read your comment just now... please tell me what this marvellous word means!
What does a Lexical Engineer do? I'm having problems parsing your job title.
But what will document the perl-documentation script? Oh noes!
A "Linux" thing huh? Could you be more vague?
The GNOME project works on a number of platforms, not just Linux, and to be honest they are pretty much the worst offenders.
I never got that notice. And it still sucks, even had I had a chance to see it, would I have been able to prevent the changes? I think not.
Maybe. But it's not reasonable to do this without notice. Kind of like Facebook with their third interface "upgrade" (I say this loosely).
After a while, people stop using the service. I know I've stopped using Facebook.
Actually, I rather think that you are placing the blame on the wrong set of individuals here.
I work for a closed-source software company, which has some extremely large customers using our product. We were implementing minor/major releases and we incorporated functionality changes to minor releases. This was a problem almost every time, because at least one of our customers was using that feature and relying on it to work the way it worked in the previous patch.
Consequently we stopped adding new functionality into the minor releases.
You'll notice, however, that it's not the developers that caused this issue. No. It was the project and product managers for either a. allowing the functionality change, or b. allowing the functionality change but not realising the sheer impact it would have on the client-base and thus not planning accordingly.
That said, the difference between the company I work for and the Gnome project (after reviewing the ) was that when a regression occured for us we scrambled for a fix within a week, while the Gnome guys say things like "The bug is fixed when it's closed as FIXED.", "Paolo, Manu: Whining does not really help in getting things fixed.
"What's the hold up?" Write the code for it and attach it here." and "Yeah. And the codebase for 2.24 has changed a lot, so the 2.22 code has to be
adapted/changed a bit. Just do it, the code is available. *shrug*"
The last comment was the most infuriating to a lot of people I think. The best response I read in relation to Andre Klepper's "*shrug*" comment was:
As a fan of open-source for a LONG time, I'm beginning to wonder if it will ever cut it in the business world. I suspect with attitudes like the ones highlighted above that the answer is "no". And that makes me feel very, very sad.
Oh, but if only you could show me what you mean through more visual, non-textual media. Unfortunately it looks like Slashdot is well behind the times.
If Gopher had won we would have had more a focus on content than presentation. I hardly think this is a bad thing.
I'll believe it.
I can't agree. The startup time of IE on my work Windows PC is atrocious. Firefox beats it every time. And I use IE extensively every day.