The article makes the guy sound like a total nightmare. At least, though, he doesn't walk around with a pug under his arm.
I guess the story illustrates what happens: because the internet is so open, it is also open to unlimited quantities of marketers, hype and money. These burn up new ideas at a rate like nothing else. Whatever a new idea might have been, it comes to be seen as just another vehicle for your actual entrepreneur, init, and you can no longer believe a word anyone says. There is always an agenda, and in this case it's your money in their pocket. It's only a matter of time before the whole scene has been gutted to the point of collapse and then the crowd moves on to the next big-bucks bandwagon. So I guess that blogs are, if not dead, then walking wounded because they have no credibility left. I wonder what will come next.
It's hard to think of any other industry that costs society $105 billion a year but which goes unscathed, largely unregulated, the darling of the stock market and haven for some of the finest minds around, etc., etc. No the least of the difficulties with cybersecurity is that it's a world of smoke and mirrors in which nearly all the statistics are bogus and all the players claim it's the next guy's problem, not theirs.
A good example of this is the British guy who recently won a court case against a spammer, thereby setting a legal precedent (as reported on Slashdot yesterday). He managed what platoons of highly paid IT experts and IT lawyers totally failed to do. No one seemed to have asked why the finest minds of our time, blah blah, were unable to find $20 to fund a suit in the UK small claims court.
Even if the true cost is a fraction of that quoted, this is still a serious matter since it is replicated in every country where there is a worthwhile IT presence. Since the IT industry seems unwilling or unable to reform itself, perhaps governments should step in with a special tax on large IT outfits in order to fund the fighting of computer crime and a severe crackdown on ISPs who happily tolerate bot farms or software houses who knock out software full of holes. Bot/zombie farms, in particular, are the oxygen of online criminals since without them their job is a lot harder. It is almost incredible that so little has been done to choke them off.
Maybe it's about time someone did a usability study on Jakob Nielson. If I recall, he predicted the demise of Linux because it's gui was no good. These days, it's better than Windows XP.
I guess any hints and tips are welcome, though for the truly talented such rules are also there to be broken. As for things like "keep it short" and "keep distracting elements out of the frame of your shots" these are old chestnuts that can be found in any how-to book on the subject and even, for all I know, on the back of $10 disposable cameras. I just hope Mr Nielson isn't planning on charging some lucky corporation a couple of thousand bucks for advice like this because it's all there in Borders or wherever for less than twenty.
Like anything else, perhaps, a few folks will make great video blogs, most folks will make truly dull ones and a few unlucky souls will produce really awful ones. Perhaps the most effective ones will learn all their tricks from the masters of the advertising short. Some of those are awesomely clever.
There were no surprises from Microsoft in 2005. They have ended the year as they began it: fighting, bullying and litigating. Unless Microsoft decides to do a deal with the EC and various other parties, chances are they will end 2006 in the same way too.
The "surprises" in the article are at best changes of nuance and pretty darn piffling. So Microsoft gets keen on RSS and the Office team starts to blog? Only in a very boring corporation suffering from serious organizational arthritis would this be considered news. The proceedings of the 23rd convention of the Chinese communist party would hold more interest.
It's hard to think there will be any surprises from Microsoft for as long as Gates, Ballmer and their supporters are in such tight charge. Mabye events or Wall Street will force some change (all those Xbox zillions pouring down the manhole cover), but until then it looks to be strictly yesterday's men and yesterday's business practices.
I entirely agree: Yes, a typical American education must put folks at a terrble disadvantage these days, irony bypass and all. Have you thought of investing in a dictionary?
The "point" is a little overdone. There really isn't much to prevent a distribution from substituting "picture editor" for "gimp", "web browser" for "konqueror" or for that matter "media player" for "xine". Unless they start poking around in the plumbing, users would never have to bother with the "real" name.
But then, hey, where does the process stop? Isn't Red Hat a darn silly and inexpressive name compared to Windows? Doesn't seemed to have stopped Red Hat from becoming the best-known Linux brand and dominating the market.
There are many more pressing reasons why Linux has a relatively low market share on the desktop. Since Windows works perfectly well for most folks and they don't need to switch, desktop Linux needs to come up with some compelling and sexy reasons to induce them to switch. It has yet to do so, imho. But then perhaps "killer app" is a typically obscure Linux name. Call it "Battlefield 2" or "Half-Life" (and get it to work) and Linux would be hoovering up the new users.
Microsoft needs to map out where its managed solutions effort is going
programming to a raw API
Results in 2005 didn't demonstrate that the unit has the right size, channel, and product lineup
Microsoft needs to show enough progress on DSI to get ISVs
Reengineer Engineering for Clearer Roadmaps
the disconnect between the pricing of the Software Assurance maintenance plan and actual product release cycles
These quotes are taken from the article. They suggest a rather obvious problem that Microsoft might start to fix in 2006. Microsoft have become so bureaucratic and their plans are so contorted and jargon-ridden that few outside the IT industry can any longer understand a word they say. There is no impression here of contact with the end-user, let alone an ordinary Joe. One begins to wonder if Microsoft even now care who they're selling these products to.
Since Microsoft have lost the ability to explain what they are doing other than, perhaps, to a Freudian therapist, it's not surprising that customers see dirty work afoot in almost every new move. The impression is of fantastic constipation, like a grouchy grizzly emerging from long hiberation.
It's a nice idea but it's wishful thinking, surely. The IE stuff sounds too core and too controversional for Microsoft to play around with it.
OTOH, it's possible that Micrisoft might start to become a little more open. They might decide to do so by making the best of what they regard as a bad job, for example opening up their server protocols with a song and dance about open saucery because they are in heavy trouble with the EU over the matter anyway. Or they might decide to make their browser a little more flexible, along the lines of Firefox extensions, etc.
But it is easy to overlook that opening up anything could be fairly traumatic for Microsoft. It's not just the money, it's the whole philosophy of the company that would feel threatened. Microsoft is built on the notion that every single thing, right down to the precise shade of the last pixel, must be absolutely determined and controlled, and then parcelled out dollar by dollar. Only this, the theory must go, guarantees an acceptable "user experience" that can be replicated 100 per cent on any desktop anywhere in the world.
Perhaps there are 500 business-school tomes which back up the idea. If so, they are history now. In many ways, a bold move Bill Gates could make in 2006 would be to accept that the philsosphy which built Microsoft may be becoming incapable of sustaining it, step back and let someone else take a crack. And that could really wrong-foot Google et al, too.
My understanding is that one problem here is that Tamiflu is currently the only drug of any use. If there is more than one treatment available, then combination treatments can be used and so cut down the rate at which resistance arises.
I guess the reality is that we can't really be sure what will work and what will not work until after the virus has mutated enough to spread from human to human. And let's hope that never happens. Or, if it has to happen, that the mutation weakens the virus enough to keep things small scale.
I'm a little dubious about Tamiflu. A problem with piling up supplies of Tamiflu at home, for example, is that if you get a bug, how can you know without a test that it is the killer bug? The risk is that you may have a standard bug and then mistakenly use your one and only heavy artillery round on the wrong target. After that, you are foobarred.
Who is going to buy the book?
on
Firefox Secrets
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's a good review, but the book seems a little misconceived. How many people are really going to spend $25-30 on a book about how to use a web-browser? The market must be very small. I could understand if the book was about how to program a browser and get in real deep but the book doesn't sound as if it might appeal to such readers. Using a web-browser is not that hard, and if it is hard then the chances are good that the browser has been poorly designed (certainly not the case with Firefox). That said, maybe the best Firefox tip is to switch over to Opera, at least until the Firefox team get the memory usage under control. It's a real drag on more modestly specced PCs.
I guess what Gartner is saying wrt boosting the meta-data options is that marketing has won over security on Microsoft's tick list, whereas after Vista is launched the userbase will demand that security wins over marketing. We've been here with MS before, oh my yes...
If I ate a mince pie for every end-of-year IT rumour on the net I'd have exploded by now.
The rather feverish interest in this stuff marks a real change. A year ago, it could have been announced that Microsoft had bought a B-52 and ten atomic bombs and everyone would have turned over and gone back to sleep. Now, the merest whiff of action on the Microsoft-Google-Yahoo front has the pundits running.
But I can't help wondering whether a little game of chicken is going on, with folks being bounced into buying something for fear the next guy will get it. Ebay and Skype, Google and AOL - these and others are not really matches made in heaven. It will be interesting to see how the dice have fallen on this craze in, say, a year's time. But I hope MS don't buy Opera, for a simple, selfish reason. I like using Opera, and I like it just the way it is.
Any flaw like this is going to catch some people eventually, because they won't have updated their software for whatever reason. So that's bad news. The good news is that at least Symantec have acknowledged the problem and are taking steps to deal with it, rather than trying to hide things.
None of this is going to make me like Symantec and its dog-slow products, but it hardly seems that big a deal. If say an open-source outfit like clamav had announced a bug it would hardly merit headlines. Going with Windows means closed source all the way down the line and that's a case of like it, lump it or jump ship. It would be fairly surprising if there weren't quite a few bugs in all the Windows "security" products - that amounts to a lot of code by now. Still, they are being tackled
Ho-ho-ho, this wouldn't be the festive season without a good laugh from the world's wackiest columnist.
Probably the best idea would be for Microsoft to buy John C. Dvorak and hastily patent that little portrait picture atop column. Dvorak would cost Microsoft chump change and he can be guaranteed to work across all three major platforms and a host of minor ones with almost no reconfiguration at all. A laugh is a laugh in any language and, heck, you only need a browser to read it.
Well, I am happy for them. Somehow, I doubt they eked out the evening on K rations and a quart of cider wiped down with a rag. However, in between congratulating themselves these gentlemen could perhaps have spared a moment for the many millions of folks out there for whom email means not megabucks in the bank and a cushy job but fraud, phishing and asphixiation by spam. The net needs new and improved email protocols, not (yet more) talk-talk from the Porsche-driving classes.
Also, this journalist sounds a little too close to his natural prey. Perhaps he laced the after-dinner mints with a power emetic as a gesture, at least, of professional independence. We can only hope.
Thanks for proving my point about the the 1970s hairy-beardy geek era. I think you'll find that the world has moved on a little since the era of "the manuals are the documentation". Boy, was that a crap era. But as I said, this is 2005 and folks look for a little more these days. You may not like it or even understand it, but folks are folks that's just what they do.
yes, ssh is a tool used daily by huge numbers of people and hats off to the development team for that gift to us.
However, a serious black mark for the standards of documentation. In reality, no documentation at all that is easy to find apart from the man pages and an FAQ that assumes fairly high-level knowledge, if you check the website. There are plenty of third-party how-tos, but how do I know I can trust what a third-party says? It's 2005. I just find it incredible that this of all program suites is still in the 1970s hairy-beardy geek era with regard to providing clear and comprehensible information to the end-user.
If it was eighteen times a day there'd be cause for concern, obviously. But over a number of years? Probably completely normal for a celebrity of his age and sex
The roots of Linux lie a long while ago now. Isn't it about time we all moved on?
The Hairy Ranter aspects of Linux, these days, aren't a net positive. They keep Linux in the image of a previous generation. They foster the image of a cult and they politicize all discussion. This is not helpful. Folks want computer software, not an invitation to man the barricades in Paris 1968.
If these old war horses took up painting or playing the violin for a few hours a day instead of re-running yesterday's battles in black and white the world might be a happier place. And a lot more folks might be drawn into an open-minded comparison of pay-for and no-pay software. Yes, technically, it is GNU/Linux. But the world knows it as Linux. There is no turning back now.
Ah, 'tis Christmas, the season in which all disbelief and rational mind is suspended, or pickled in alcohol.
Bill Gates and his wife Melinda fully deserve recognition for their many charitable works. The fact is, though, that they've already had a fair share of that in years gone by. In a year of ghastly natural calamities it is really lame of Time Magazine to play oh-so-safe and choose the world's richest couple and a clapped-out rock star.
In addition, Time Magazine's write-up is pretty nauseating: "For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow...." Fine-sounding phrases but, really, they mean zilch. Time's reporters badly need to get out and about a bit more. They might find that seemingly "ordinary" folks are capable of the most extraordinary things and that "re-engineering justice" might begin with closing down the massive agricultural subsidies beloved of the rich world and an end to running torture networks. We have to deal with those through the ballot box and not through Bill Gates.
I wonder if she might better user her time doing something else. There is so much catcalling and pointless arguing in the nix community, and especially between the Gnome and KDE factions, or at least their fans. Nothing seems to be looked at objectively or is taken seriously except as grist for yet another propaganda offensive. Open source developers always have the ultimate get-out if something is subpar, namely that they aren't writing for a market or to a set of standards but for pleasure or their peers. The professional ones never use this excuse and turn in a top-class job, but scores of less talented or committed ones use it all the time.
Perhaps there are other areas - Ajax, even particular websites or other operating systems - that would repay her efforts more fully and bring her into contact with some outstanding and seriously experienced people.
If you are Microsoft, what you have at stake are billions of dollars and your monopoly. Therefore Microsoft will do absolutely anything to protect both. They are a monopoly and this is what monopolies do.
I guess all the rest of us can do is plot our course - in this case OpenDocument - and stick to it through thick and thin.
Microsoft will contine to wriggle and bluster around this for months and months. It's part of the game. There's no point wasting any more energy on the subject. Microsoft would like nothing more than to exhaust people they will always regard as competition.
Coming from BMW, this sounds suspiciously like "how to be green when you are super rich". New forms of ultra-frugal but still capable engines are more likely to be perfected by the Japanese even if someone else comes up with the initial idea.
The core problem is the notion that you need an SUV the size of a tank to take a couple of kids three miles to school, or that you'll be considered a loser unless you drive an executive-class limo with a huge engine and all the trimmings. It's not very likely the car companies will start back-pedalling on either of those.
Why is this news? Burglars don't leave a card with their name and address printed on it after cleaning out your house. Why expect online criminals to do the same by registering their throwaway web addresses with details that can be traced back to anywhere near them? We should be asking why registrar companies appear not to make even the most basic checks on the details of an application. It couldn't be that hard to check in real time for names like Mickey Mouse and phone numbers that are all 9s.
I'd like to comment but I am too busy reading tech blogs. Only another 96,546 to go, each one so very very interesting and important.
Why are some people so obsessed with other people's opinions? Opinions are gone like the wind. Would you prefer to invest in a company run by someone who worked hard and knew his own mind or who spent all day reading blogs, fearful that he didn't?
Blogs are a great argument for internet-enabled lavatories since they are the modern equivalent of loo books. No one need feel any great urgency to join that particular A List.
Slashdot Mirror
The article makes the guy sound like a total nightmare. At least, though, he doesn't walk around with a pug under his arm.
I guess the story illustrates what happens: because the internet is so open, it is also open to unlimited quantities of marketers, hype and money. These burn up new ideas at a rate like nothing else. Whatever a new idea might have been, it comes to be seen as just another vehicle for your actual entrepreneur, init, and you can no longer believe a word anyone says. There is always an agenda, and in this case it's your money in their pocket. It's only a matter of time before the whole scene has been gutted to the point of collapse and then the crowd moves on to the next big-bucks bandwagon. So I guess that blogs are, if not dead, then walking wounded because they have no credibility left. I wonder what will come next.
It's hard to think of any other industry that costs society $105 billion a year but which goes unscathed, largely unregulated, the darling of the stock market and haven for some of the finest minds around, etc., etc. No the least of the difficulties with cybersecurity is that it's a world of smoke and mirrors in which nearly all the statistics are bogus and all the players claim it's the next guy's problem, not theirs.
A good example of this is the British guy who recently won a court case against a spammer, thereby setting a legal precedent (as reported on Slashdot yesterday). He managed what platoons of highly paid IT experts and IT lawyers totally failed to do. No one seemed to have asked why the finest minds of our time, blah blah, were unable to find $20 to fund a suit in the UK small claims court.
Even if the true cost is a fraction of that quoted, this is still a serious matter since it is replicated in every country where there is a worthwhile IT presence. Since the IT industry seems unwilling or unable to reform itself, perhaps governments should step in with a special tax on large IT outfits in order to fund the fighting of computer crime and a severe crackdown on ISPs who happily tolerate bot farms or software houses who knock out software full of holes. Bot/zombie farms, in particular, are the oxygen of online criminals since without them their job is a lot harder. It is almost incredible that so little has been done to choke them off.
Maybe it's about time someone did a usability study on Jakob Nielson. If I recall, he predicted the demise of Linux because it's gui was no good. These days, it's better than Windows XP.
I guess any hints and tips are welcome, though for the truly talented such rules are also there to be broken. As for things like "keep it short" and "keep distracting elements out of the frame of your shots" these are old chestnuts that can be found in any how-to book on the subject and even, for all I know, on the back of $10 disposable cameras. I just hope Mr Nielson isn't planning on charging some lucky corporation a couple of thousand bucks for advice like this because it's all there in Borders or wherever for less than twenty.
Like anything else, perhaps, a few folks will make great video blogs, most folks will make truly dull ones and a few unlucky souls will produce really awful ones. Perhaps the most effective ones will learn all their tricks from the masters of the advertising short. Some of those are awesomely clever.
There were no surprises from Microsoft in 2005. They have ended the year as they began it: fighting, bullying and litigating. Unless Microsoft decides to do a deal with the EC and various other parties, chances are they will end 2006 in the same way too.
The "surprises" in the article are at best changes of nuance and pretty darn piffling. So Microsoft gets keen on RSS and the Office team starts to blog? Only in a very boring corporation suffering from serious organizational arthritis would this be considered news. The proceedings of the 23rd convention of the Chinese communist party would hold more interest.
It's hard to think there will be any surprises from Microsoft for as long as Gates, Ballmer and their supporters are in such tight charge. Mabye events or Wall Street will force some change (all those Xbox zillions pouring down the manhole cover), but until then it looks to be strictly yesterday's men and yesterday's business practices.
I entirely agree: Yes, a typical American education must put folks at a terrble disadvantage these days, irony bypass and all. Have you thought of investing in a dictionary?
The "point" is a little overdone. There really isn't much to prevent a distribution from substituting "picture editor" for "gimp", "web browser" for "konqueror" or for that matter "media player" for "xine". Unless they start poking around in the plumbing, users would never have to bother with the "real" name.
But then, hey, where does the process stop? Isn't Red Hat a darn silly and inexpressive name compared to Windows? Doesn't seemed to have stopped Red Hat from becoming the best-known Linux brand and dominating the market.
There are many more pressing reasons why Linux has a relatively low market share on the desktop. Since Windows works perfectly well for most folks and they don't need to switch, desktop Linux needs to come up with some compelling and sexy reasons to induce them to switch. It has yet to do so, imho. But then perhaps "killer app" is a typically obscure Linux name. Call it "Battlefield 2" or "Half-Life" (and get it to work) and Linux would be hoovering up the new users.
These quotes are taken from the article. They suggest a rather obvious problem that Microsoft might start to fix in 2006. Microsoft have become so bureaucratic and their plans are so contorted and jargon-ridden that few outside the IT industry can any longer understand a word they say. There is no impression here of contact with the end-user, let alone an ordinary Joe. One begins to wonder if Microsoft even now care who they're selling these products to.
Since Microsoft have lost the ability to explain what they are doing other than, perhaps, to a Freudian therapist, it's not surprising that customers see dirty work afoot in almost every new move. The impression is of fantastic constipation, like a grouchy grizzly emerging from long hiberation.
It's a nice idea but it's wishful thinking, surely. The IE stuff sounds too core and too controversional for Microsoft to play around with it.
OTOH, it's possible that Micrisoft might start to become a little more open. They might decide to do so by making the best of what they regard as a bad job, for example opening up their server protocols with a song and dance about open saucery because they are in heavy trouble with the EU over the matter anyway. Or they might decide to make their browser a little more flexible, along the lines of Firefox extensions, etc.
But it is easy to overlook that opening up anything could be fairly traumatic for Microsoft. It's not just the money, it's the whole philosophy of the company that would feel threatened. Microsoft is built on the notion that every single thing, right down to the precise shade of the last pixel, must be absolutely determined and controlled, and then parcelled out dollar by dollar. Only this, the theory must go, guarantees an acceptable "user experience" that can be replicated 100 per cent on any desktop anywhere in the world.
Perhaps there are 500 business-school tomes which back up the idea. If so, they are history now. In many ways, a bold move Bill Gates could make in 2006 would be to accept that the philsosphy which built Microsoft may be becoming incapable of sustaining it, step back and let someone else take a crack. And that could really wrong-foot Google et al, too.
My understanding is that one problem here is that Tamiflu is currently the only drug of any use. If there is more than one treatment available, then combination treatments can be used and so cut down the rate at which resistance arises.
I guess the reality is that we can't really be sure what will work and what will not work until after the virus has mutated enough to spread from human to human. And let's hope that never happens. Or, if it has to happen, that the mutation weakens the virus enough to keep things small scale.
I'm a little dubious about Tamiflu. A problem with piling up supplies of Tamiflu at home, for example, is that if you get a bug, how can you know without a test that it is the killer bug? The risk is that you may have a standard bug and then mistakenly use your one and only heavy artillery round on the wrong target. After that, you are foobarred.
It's a good review, but the book seems a little misconceived. How many people are really going to spend $25-30 on a book about how to use a web-browser? The market must be very small. I could understand if the book was about how to program a browser and get in real deep but the book doesn't sound as if it might appeal to such readers. Using a web-browser is not that hard, and if it is hard then the chances are good that the browser has been poorly designed (certainly not the case with Firefox). That said, maybe the best Firefox tip is to switch over to Opera, at least until the Firefox team get the memory usage under control. It's a real drag on more modestly specced PCs.
I guess what Gartner is saying wrt boosting the meta-data options is that marketing has won over security on Microsoft's tick list, whereas after Vista is launched the userbase will demand that security wins over marketing. We've been here with MS before, oh my yes ...
If I ate a mince pie for every end-of-year IT rumour on the net I'd have exploded by now.
The rather feverish interest in this stuff marks a real change. A year ago, it could have been announced that Microsoft had bought a B-52 and ten atomic bombs and everyone would have turned over and gone back to sleep. Now, the merest whiff of action on the Microsoft-Google-Yahoo front has the pundits running.
But I can't help wondering whether a little game of chicken is going on, with folks being bounced into buying something for fear the next guy will get it. Ebay and Skype, Google and AOL - these and others are not really matches made in heaven. It will be interesting to see how the dice have fallen on this craze in, say, a year's time. But I hope MS don't buy Opera, for a simple, selfish reason. I like using Opera, and I like it just the way it is.
Any flaw like this is going to catch some people eventually, because they won't have updated their software for whatever reason. So that's bad news. The good news is that at least Symantec have acknowledged the problem and are taking steps to deal with it, rather than trying to hide things.
None of this is going to make me like Symantec and its dog-slow products, but it hardly seems that big a deal. If say an open-source outfit like clamav had announced a bug it would hardly merit headlines. Going with Windows means closed source all the way down the line and that's a case of like it, lump it or jump ship. It would be fairly surprising if there weren't quite a few bugs in all the Windows "security" products - that amounts to a lot of code by now. Still, they are being tackled
Ho-ho-ho, this wouldn't be the festive season without a good laugh from the world's wackiest columnist. Probably the best idea would be for Microsoft to buy John C. Dvorak and hastily patent that little portrait picture atop column. Dvorak would cost Microsoft chump change and he can be guaranteed to work across all three major platforms and a host of minor ones with almost no reconfiguration at all. A laugh is a laugh in any language and, heck, you only need a browser to read it.
Well, I am happy for them. Somehow, I doubt they eked out the evening on K rations and a quart of cider wiped down with a rag. However, in between congratulating themselves these gentlemen could perhaps have spared a moment for the many millions of folks out there for whom email means not megabucks in the bank and a cushy job but fraud, phishing and asphixiation by spam. The net needs new and improved email protocols, not (yet more) talk-talk from the Porsche-driving classes. Also, this journalist sounds a little too close to his natural prey. Perhaps he laced the after-dinner mints with a power emetic as a gesture, at least, of professional independence. We can only hope.
Thanks for proving my point about the the 1970s hairy-beardy geek era. I think you'll find that the world has moved on a little since the era of "the manuals are the documentation". Boy, was that a crap era. But as I said, this is 2005 and folks look for a little more these days. You may not like it or even understand it, but folks are folks that's just what they do.
yes, ssh is a tool used daily by huge numbers of people and hats off to the development team for that gift to us. However, a serious black mark for the standards of documentation. In reality, no documentation at all that is easy to find apart from the man pages and an FAQ that assumes fairly high-level knowledge, if you check the website. There are plenty of third-party how-tos, but how do I know I can trust what a third-party says? It's 2005. I just find it incredible that this of all program suites is still in the 1970s hairy-beardy geek era with regard to providing clear and comprehensible information to the end-user.
If it was eighteen times a day there'd be cause for concern, obviously. But over a number of years? Probably completely normal for a celebrity of his age and sex
The roots of Linux lie a long while ago now. Isn't it about time we all moved on?
The Hairy Ranter aspects of Linux, these days, aren't a net positive. They keep Linux in the image of a previous generation. They foster the image of a cult and they politicize all discussion. This is not helpful. Folks want computer software, not an invitation to man the barricades in Paris 1968.
If these old war horses took up painting or playing the violin for a few hours a day instead of re-running yesterday's battles in black and white the world might be a happier place. And a lot more folks might be drawn into an open-minded comparison of pay-for and no-pay software. Yes, technically, it is GNU/Linux. But the world knows it as Linux. There is no turning back now.
Ah, 'tis Christmas, the season in which all disbelief and rational mind is suspended, or pickled in alcohol.
... ." Fine-sounding phrases but, really, they mean zilch. Time's reporters badly need to get out and about a bit more. They might find that seemingly "ordinary" folks are capable of the most extraordinary things and that "re-engineering justice" might begin with closing down the massive agricultural subsidies beloved of the rich world and an end to running torture networks. We have to deal with those through the ballot box and not through Bill Gates.
Bill Gates and his wife Melinda fully deserve recognition for their many charitable works. The fact is, though, that they've already had a fair share of that in years gone by. In a year of ghastly natural calamities it is really lame of Time Magazine to play oh-so-safe and choose the world's richest couple and a clapped-out rock star.
In addition, Time Magazine's write-up is pretty nauseating: "For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow
I wonder if she might better user her time doing something else. There is so much catcalling and pointless arguing in the nix community, and especially between the Gnome and KDE factions, or at least their fans. Nothing seems to be looked at objectively or is taken seriously except as grist for yet another propaganda offensive. Open source developers always have the ultimate get-out if something is subpar, namely that they aren't writing for a market or to a set of standards but for pleasure or their peers. The professional ones never use this excuse and turn in a top-class job, but scores of less talented or committed ones use it all the time.
Perhaps there are other areas - Ajax, even particular websites or other operating systems - that would repay her efforts more fully and bring her into contact with some outstanding and seriously experienced people.
If you are Microsoft, what you have at stake are billions of dollars and your monopoly. Therefore Microsoft will do absolutely anything to protect both. They are a monopoly and this is what monopolies do.
I guess all the rest of us can do is plot our course - in this case OpenDocument - and stick to it through thick and thin.
Microsoft will contine to wriggle and bluster around this for months and months. It's part of the game. There's no point wasting any more energy on the subject. Microsoft would like nothing more than to exhaust people they will always regard as competition.
Coming from BMW, this sounds suspiciously like "how to be green when you are super rich". New forms of ultra-frugal but still capable engines are more likely to be perfected by the Japanese even if someone else comes up with the initial idea. The core problem is the notion that you need an SUV the size of a tank to take a couple of kids three miles to school, or that you'll be considered a loser unless you drive an executive-class limo with a huge engine and all the trimmings. It's not very likely the car companies will start back-pedalling on either of those.
Why is this news? Burglars don't leave a card with their name and address printed on it after cleaning out your house. Why expect online criminals to do the same by registering their throwaway web addresses with details that can be traced back to anywhere near them? We should be asking why registrar companies appear not to make even the most basic checks on the details of an application. It couldn't be that hard to check in real time for names like Mickey Mouse and phone numbers that are all 9s.
I'd like to comment but I am too busy reading tech blogs. Only another 96,546 to go, each one so very very interesting and important.
Why are some people so obsessed with other people's opinions? Opinions are gone like the wind. Would you prefer to invest in a company run by someone who worked hard and knew his own mind or who spent all day reading blogs, fearful that he didn't?
Blogs are a great argument for internet-enabled lavatories since they are the modern equivalent of loo books. No one need feel any great urgency to join that particular A List.