"I don't know, did this schoolmaster knowingly "pirate" his software? It's not clear to me from the article. Gorbachev argues the nuance he didn't know he was committing a crime. That to me sounds like splitting semantic hairs."
How is this different than hard time for stealing a loaf a bread? We've finally allowed a belief in corporate BS-wrapped self-interest almost religious in magnitude to push back human rights to Hugo's time. Siberian prison for using software? What have we become? Incidentally, my understnding is the Soviet system for IP was very much different than the West's. All of it was State owned. Implying that a back water school teacher was in some way acting in a 'nefarious' manner and knew the consequences of contravening fast changing WIPO statutes is almost beneath contempt.
I agree completely... hence my comment about changing a really bad law (or system of law) by enforcing it strictly. Unfortunately I'm not sure I see that as any likely result for this case. (And, btw, careful about your historic references... does anyone today even know who Hugo is anymore? To the Victors... (I do, one of my faves actually.)
I don't know, did this schoolmaster knowingly "pirate" his
software? It's not clear to me from the article. Gorbachev
argues the nuance he didn't know he was committing a
crime. That to me sounds like splitting semantic hairs.
That said, I believe if someone knowing commits an infraction,
they should be able to sustain the punishment. But, I don't
always agree with the punishment in light of the crime. The
world of software piracy is especially troubling to me.
It seems too much onus is put on the pirate and little on the
accuser to carry the final outcome. I know if laws were enforced
strictly I would have done some time -- I was once unpleasantly
surprised to fire up Excel at a corporate computer to find
my name and my license info plastered all over
the screen... Someone had pirated my legitimate copy, but how to
prove my innocence?
I've heard if you want to change a bad law, enforce it
strictly. Maybe a few cases like this could bring more light to
the heavy-handed tactics against the little guys (don't know if
this one of those cases, but it certainly has the signature).
Unfortunately, I see the outcome of this as a huge PR win for
Microsoft, and I think Gates may actually take the bait. This
adds to his recent buildup of reputation as world benefactor. If
he has Microsoft withdraw the complaint (or offers up some
benevolent deal), Microsoft gets a PR coup. And, that would be a
shame.
I think an end result (and to some an unexpected result) is TiVo can make life better for everyone with this "service". I've always been a huge fan of TiVo, since they arrived on the scene, so forgive some obvious bias.
How can they make it better? Tivo can supply information to providers of content, and advertisers more valuable than any surveys or polls. Tivo can give real time info (rolled up) of what and how viewers watch their show (and ads). An end result would (potentially) be eventual extinction of really annoying and bad ads... by dint of the fact noone watches them when given an opportunity to skip.
The same goes for content... if noone records a show, or watches it on Tivo buffer, its well earned demise can be accelerated.
Tivo demonstrated just how granular their data are by their disclosure that the Janet Jackson "clip" was the most replayed segment of the Super Bowl... wth? they actually know down to a few seconds of snippets.
Yeah, there may be privacy issues there... but there are privacy issues everywhere, even when there were (are there still?) Nielsen families. My gut tells me there isn't too much interesting in viewers habits other than what they're watching and how much of they're watching. The game is about making money and selling product.
Tivo finally gives the providers feedback that I'd wished for years ago... immediate, and absolute.
Here's where the providers of "stuff" for "us" have gone astray... They're arguing the wrong argument. None of us give a flying f*** whose fault the blinky is... we're freaking customers! And instead of apologies and fixes with humble apologies to the customers, these people don't have enough fingers on their hands to point blame on someone else.
Message to providers of stuff: Provide us with good products, easy to use, and at reasonable cost and price. If something is wrong with the product, fix it.
And then, so Lucy says to Charlie Brown, "Come on Charlie
Brown, I promise not to pull the ball back this
time when you kick it!"
Does anyone imagine in any way or any context this Microsoft
-- Wal-Mart relationship for Linux could be a good
thing? I can thing of many reasons and many ways Microsoft can
undermine and even try to bury Linux with this Novell Suse
bargain (with the Devil?), but I only need think of one.
Suppose as Wal-Mart moves forward doing "stuff" with Linux
things go terrible wrong, or get terribly hard. "No problem",
says Microsoft... you need only switch to our SQL Server which of
course needs to run on a Vista Server, etc. It's win-win for
Microsoft.
Microsoft gets additional customer share from Linux, and has a
diamond-crusted public whipping boy to prove
once and for all Linux can't cut it in the big boys' world
(business). We all know Linux can, but with big publicity coups
I fear Microsoft gains more purchase in the PR war.
Maybe none of this will come to pass, but do you think for one
minute a company that sold out its business partners with "Plays
for Sure" (sorry, I know I keep using this as an example...),
won't think twice about short-shrifting any value Linux brings to
the table? Microsoft has shown itself a predator many times
before, there's no reason to think this isn't just one more
opportunity for them (and a big one at that).
I'm not going to ax for extra credit or anything but,
I wrote mashups in the 80's. FTA:
In decades past, the new ideas in computing
originated in the enterprise world and trickled down to the
consumer world later on (things like databases, computer
networks, file servers, and so on). However in the Web 2.0 era,
for reasons too complex to go into here, new ideas and approaches
are germinating more on the consumer Web than from the enterprise
space.
I would claim this specific notion (mashups) not only
originated from the enterprise and trickled into internet
consciousness, enterprise "mashups" existed many years ago. I
know, I wrote them. It was (or at least we called it)
surround technology.
We took vital pieces of different applications and wrote
wrappers which allowed users with very simple interfaces to
access more data more accurately more quickly. One example was a
service order writing routine for small business that routinely
took over 30 minutes... using our "mashup", we accessed the
necessary enterprise applications and melded into a single app
presentation and shortened the 30 minute process to less than 5.
I could go on, there were at least three other
major applications we wrote (small team of 2,
sometimes 3), that were "mashups". The advent of browser
technology simply gave us another presentation tool, the notion
and mechanics of mashing was still there.
I've played with Google "mashups", and Amazon "mashups",
they're really nothing new.
There was a (don't know if they're still there) a Strategic
Computing Consortium based in Boston, Ma, and they were huge
advocates of surround technology and not only taught techniques
and reasons for approaching solutions this way (I won't go into
it -- it was a six-week class). And they provided and sold tools
and consulting for putting these new applications together... the
CEO (I believe) was John Donovan, author of a few college texts
on OSes, and another major contributor was Stewart Madnick, one
of the original authors of CMS (IBM's Conversational Monitoring
System).
I'm won't claim they were the "founders" of mashups, but what
they espoused and taught was mashup technology, and they were
teaching it in 1986 (that's when I attended the consortium).
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
(Also, as an aside, the article implies this new magic allows
for "easy" creation of new applications. This is hardly so. All
the care and due diligence of putting an application are still
required. The effort can still be significant... There is
certainly time saved if a team leverages existing critical
applications but to toss this out as magical and easy for any end
user community to leverage is probably glib and misleading.)
With a rollout in EU, and an anticipated 1M units sold by June here, what is the impact with the latest development whereby songs purchased for the Zune are not "squirtable" courtesy SONY's proscription? Is it really true about 50% of SONY songs purchased in the Microsoft way are not shareable with other Zune owners (if you can find them)?
If so, what is the Zune but yet another mp3 player (yamp?)? A music and video player offered by a corporation that betrayed not only those sucked into the siren song of "Plays for Sure", but betrayed the manufacturers of those devices.
I hope the buying public gets a whiff of this laughing gas before they open their digital wallets. The Zune needs to die, not on the vine, but in the ground.
I've long hated and resented Microsoft for what they've
done to the competitive tech market and how they've done it.
That said, the arguments about which OS is better seem
specious. I've used XP for years now, and find it to be overall
quite excellent. I suspect (and based on what I've read so far)
Vista will be very good too. That doesn't change how I feel
about Microsoft... they're basically an asswipe company with an
"I don't have to care, I'm Microsoft" attitude.
I recently purchased my first OS X machine. I find it
excellent too, but never having had used it before I did have to
make adjustments. I still find many things about it quirky.
I sometimes wish the argument would be more open... the debate
about which is the finer OS mostly splits semantic hairs. The
underlying "allegiance" and loyalties about which is the better
company seems to be more what this is all about.
Microsoft trampled the marketplace, so much so it eventually
had a DOJ judgement against it and subsequent consent decree.
The damage done to innovation (in my opinion) and continuing to
be done is irreparable. (Why in the world would technology
continue to have to fight the idiocy and unmanageability of
logical drives these days -- I know, there's a way not to, but
Microsoft in a competitive market would have had to fix this long
ago.)
Apple misstepped early and seemingly never cared. They
focused on the education market, and never offered price
competitive products. If you were a Mac loyalist, you paid the
premium. But I believe that pride by Apple cut them off from an
even larger audience and potentially a competitive slice of the
PC market. Today they seem to be looking more closely at that --
you still pay a premium for Apple, but it isn't as harsh as
before.
Bottom line, both companies have faults. But comparing OS X
and Vista is almost a silly game. Both OSes are very good. I
can argue one and I can argue the other. The more interesting
discussion is what Microsoft's and Apple's roles are in
contributing to the overall landscape of computing. I know where
I stand on that one.
(For the record, when it comes time to get some real work
done, I go running for the nearest Unix terminal, be it Solaris,
HP-UX, Linux... doesn't matter, that's the OS and environment I
find put together in the smartest way.)
This particular example is interesting considering the "performer". KF was pretty much s***listed early on for taking advantage of his marriage and Spears fame, and his pretty obvious lack of talent (at the House of Blues in Chicago, they finally had to send runners out before his concert started -- they started giving tickets away free just to ensure KF had some semblence of a crowd (even that didn't work )).
So, I'd agree there can and will be artists who would not want their art used without permission (or would even not give permission when asked), and that works for me. I'd prefer to see that dialogue on a case-by-case basis since appearances suggest in today's world it's mostly an accepted practice... no harm, no foul.
What I find a thorn is that the self-anointed RIAA steps in on these things ostensibly supporting the music industry and the artists when nothing could be further from the truth.
Ultimately the RIAA is encumbering both the artists and the consumers so much as to effectively call into question any and all of their actions and motives. I'm hopeful they eventually are rendered irrelevant (not holding my breath, there's a lot of money and power there).
You're absolutely right... And, I already knew about this, but didn't want to bog down more than I'd already done in my post..
Here's what's interesting about the CD-Text, and why it really goes to my original point: It showed up in 1996, about 13 years after my first CD player! I'm pretty sure those doing the inventing could've cobbled together a text for CD a little earlier.
I, too bought some CDs excited about the new text format. But the players that could display were few and far between, and I finally opted out of getting the machines (the CDs were ones I'd have bought anyway). I guess if I thought they were serious about this, they'd have put a little more energy into it (earlier delivery, more advertising, more players). But, they didn't -- this was a huge potential for a nice leap in functionality. Heck, I'd even have considered paying a nickel or two more per disk for the extra info.
I think the record industry was lazy with this -- it wasn't interesting to them, their money was just rolling in from their cast of mega-stars and mega-bands. There was no incentive.
Some would point to the "role" of a business isn't to make everything and anything but instead to maximize profit, and rolling out the CD info as part of the product didn't fit that model. In my opinion the huge fascination with mega-dollar dealings obscured that customer satisfaction, even delight, provides, if more subtle, comparable returns for the investment. As it is now, I buy far fewer CDs than before, mostly because I resent their actions. I return any CD with copy protection built in (it's darned near impossible to figure out and know before you walk out the door with it).
Yeah, there was CD text, 13 years late, and long after we the people were already filling up the database with our own typing pools. Sony's effort may have even been an attempt to thwart the CDDB effort (I really don't know on that one).
Wow, only 3 articles later, and more media industry
trampling. Now the trampling is on artists (the mixers).
On a personal level, I've always had mixed feelings
about hiphop and mixing from other artists, especially when used
without permission. But at a gut level I tend to agree it's a
different kind of creativity and creation, and the end result is
exposure of old (and new) music in ways never heard before. The
final net result is positive for all parties involved.
The research I was able to do showed pretty clearly using
other artists' work in mixes is tacitly allowed with a wink. The
artists getting additional exposure are getting free advertising.
(I'd be happy to know if there are artists out there who really
don't want their art in others' mixes.
This clearly underscores the RIAA's hypocrisy in that their
thesis includes the tenet they are out to protect the
artists, but if more exposure, and ultimately more happy
consumers and sellers all around doesn't fit the definition of
"protection", I'm at a loss.
In the meantime unknown
artists who may have never seen the light of day get world-wide
exposure. Sales across the genre, and from the borrowed genre (I
just had to go out and get the Steppenwolf, after hearing the mix
with "Magic Carpet Ride") go up. Everybody could be happy.
But I keep forgetting it doesn't seem to be about being happy
(on all levels: aesthetic, profit), it's about power and control.
The RIAA wants to control something they feel slipping out of
their hands and they seem more desparate every day.
I keep thinking it'd be interesting to organize some loosely
structured boycott or activity against the RIAA, but as I
mentioned in my very
recent post the irritation factor alone may be enough to push
consumers away.
I'm always reminded of a favorite
Peanuts cartoon (kudos to slashdotter
Patrick Furlong for finding that old cartoon for me)
where the RIAA behaves much
like Lucy... they want "us" to have fun, but give us minimal
leash to do so... and even then when they see we've figured a way
to have fun with so little leash, they want to take that away
too. Stupid gits!
It's a pity -- the articles roll in every day about yet
another speedbump in the DRM saga and how DRM and "protection" in
general makes consumers' lives miserable. Of course it's no
surprise (to me), just a disappointment. Imagine if the energy
spent trying to hogtie the general (and 99%+ totally honest and
willing to purchase) consumer were instead applied to making the
technology even better?
Making the technology even better rather than harder would
only improve the landscape for everyone. TV would look better,
content would be easier to deliver and use. Bang for the buck
would be better. Access to everyone for things like "high-def"
(pick your favorite pseudo-standard) would not be limited to just
those with $5-10,000 to toss (with no guarantee your picture will
be better, or even viewable).
Instead it's just one more betrayal.
Consider the very first CD player I purchased in 1983. I
paid, well, I won't say how much I played for player that could
only play one CD at at time. But it was heady stuff even back
then. The player had a "pitch" slider to change the pitch of the
music (though it also correspondingly sped up and slowed down the
track to accommodate). It had the ability to program the songs
in any order, and even program the starting time offset into a
track, and stopping offset into a track.
And!, on the back, a 9-pin DIN out (I think that was the
configuration), with the only mention in the user's manual for
that output as "reserved for future use"! I couldn't have been
more excited. I brought friends over and showed them the
exciting new technology... they just drooled at
the sight.
And I always saved the "for future use" output as the hook...
I described digital output where liner notes, lyrics, all kinds
cool things (of course including the de rigeur track information)
would be output in some form that could be put up on a display,
TV or otherwise. I 'splained how the digital format worked and
how much storage there was available for all kinds of "future
use" enhancements.
And, it never happened. The promise of
excellent technology, never delivered. And (I've posted on this
before), the notion of track info associated with CD technology
didn't emerge until we, the people, did it
ourselves! with CDDB!
Instead, newer generations of technology included increasingly
large percentages of "slice" dedicated to controlling our use of
the media, not improving the quality of our experience.
I say fork 'em.
Maybe one good thing will come of all of this -- people may
get so fed up and annoyed with trying to get their newfangled
entertainment setups to work right (or at all), they give up, buy
a bicycle, or some hiking shoes, and get outdoors and see a
different world... maybe even one with more return on investment.
I think complaining there aren't emough women in tech is
disingenuous and a little condescending towards women. There has
been a wide open door for women for years,
self-taught, or otherwise. To claim otherwise ignores so many
other attempts and programs.
The reason there aren't more women in tech, self starters or
otherwise is because they don't want to be and aren't
interested! No program, encouragement, coersion or
other methods will change that.
Consider a telcom I worked for... In the mid-80s a memo was
circulated admonishing IT for the "underutilized" women. An IT
policy was thus implemented picking women from myriad other jobs
(call centers, anywhere!). These women were given free
training, often at universities and were given 6 weeks and more
to be trained. Most of these women were looking at more than a
doubling in salary, all they had to do was "participate"...
Even with that policy, we could not even approach fifty
percent of women in the IT work force.
(As an aside, an unexpected (to management) side effect of
this monumental effort was a flood of women (those that signed
up), only a small fraction of whom had any interest at all in
tech, and only a fraction of those hitting stride in any
reasonable time join It without even close to the skills
necessary to contribute. We burned a lot of money to skew a population
and saw productivity tank.)
It is no reflection of women's abilities. I know it's really
cliche, but some of the very best IT people I worked with were
women. But, as in the male population, many women were
incompetent as were men. The difference isn't in ability, it's
in the proportion choosing a field... For some reason men choose
computers, women don't.
Ultimately, if you build it (the program), they will come, but
not in droves. Like it or not, there seems to be a difference in
wiring between the sexes. And, as in any large population, there
will always be exceptions. IT welcomes (at least in my
experience) women as much as men.
In the meantime, these old harangues only condescend to women
who have chose not to enter IT as a career choice. They do have
the options today... they're still not choosing it. Nudging them
with these initiatives somehow implies their non-IT choices weren't valid, or
good.
This hand-wringing is as silly as wondering why more police
officers don't enter the tech fields (and some do as a recent/.
article pointed out -- a state trooper wrote a traffic ticket
application). They didn't/don't because they like being police
officers better.
My point is/was that to the casual observer (and contestant), signing a waiver and being "warned" (I didn't see anything in the article to suggest they warned how dangerous this was) would seem a mere "standard" formality and for the purposes of participating in a water-drinking contest, absurd. But, the radio station, as I pointed out, with minimal research should have known going in this was dangerous and not even hosted this contest.
The only difference I see between this and a contest where contestants drink as much alcohol as possible to win a Wii is that to the common man, dangers and risks associated with alcohol are much more widely known and understood. And, no radio station in the world would get away with having contestants drink alcohol in a similar fashion, waivers and warnings or not.
I'd had this argument many times with a friend about my water
intake. I've always known my intake was fine (hint: coffee
counts...), but in the course of that discussion I found many
articles on the problems one could encounter by drinking
too much water.
I won't claim any person on the street should know the dangers
of drinking too much water, but the people putting on this
contest (sorry, stunt) could have recognized they were in deep
waters with a modicum of research.
I'm not much for lawsuits, but I hope the radio station that
put on this stunt makes significant remedy to the lady's family.
Insulting the "client" isn't constrained to the IT market,
it may be more visible to/.ers, but seemingly many
"professionals" think an attributes of being a professional
include being an unmitigated asswipe to those less knowledgeable.
My personal experience with over 25 years now in IT is that
many times the asswipe-ness of an IT professional is inversely
proportional to what they know and how well they know it. While
I've known some brilliant IT staff who were grumpy, most of the
anointed geniuses-with-attitude were self anointed, and less than
geniuses (doesn't mean they didn't know anything, just that the
attitude was a convenient and easy facade to hide behind).
The insulting IT staff were the ones I avoided -- mostly their
expertise, as it were, was a diminished return in being held
hostage by "their schedule", and their attitude. I'd much rather
find assistance with a less competent person who is self aware
and interested in helping find a solution if they don't know it
themselves.
Admittedly there is a consumer demographic cowed by the angry
IT support, and they probably accept and suffer more insult than
they deserve. But, in the long run, I think any IT staff member
who glories in his or her rancor and animus with the client
grossly underestimates the long
term impact on their reputation and career. If you think
customers don't talk... and consider alternatives when they
present, think again. (I long since have avoided Circuit City
for not only rude treatment and condescension, but that kind of
treatment coupled with virtual incompetence on that for which
they condescended..., literally thousands of my dollars have gone
elsewhere solely on "rude behavior" by "professionals".)
It pays to be nice.
(And, regardless of the sans-clue clientèle's, there are rarely
circumstances that warrant abuse of the customer.... )
assumption of intent: while the proprietors of DRM insist this is about protecting intellectual property, that's simply a canard to hide behind for what they really want, control. Meanwhile, it's clear their "DRM" is an assumption I am trying to rip them off (I'm not).
portability: their notion of control proscribes what should be normal fair use. Imagine the old days not being able to take your vinyl records to a friends house to listen because they wouldn't play on other people's machines. That really is insane. The only reason they are trying to restrict to that level today (and they are) is because they can.
convenience: there are so many reasons things can go wrong. In today's and the future's DRM world if it goes as far as it seems it may, you risk all kinds of outages, from the momentary inconvenience of grabbing the wrong player (unauthorized), the the catastrophic (an entire collection wiped out because of a lost key).
quality: I'm not convinced they can layer DRM into digital art ad nauseum without degradation and corruption, no matter how long and hard they try to convince me they can.
trust: similar to "assumption of intent"... after I have my purchased (ummm, sorry, "licensed") digital art in my digits I resent the implication I won't and can't handle the notion of fair use appropriately. Further, I resent their blanket inference we as citizens are somehow that sleazy. The average user doesn't care about cheating and stealing, but DRM finally gives them at least a reason to consider it.
...
No, I can't say as I find DRM something acceptable at any implementation or level. In its most innocent and benign form it's just irritating noise, in it's most insidious manifestation (and they're going there if they can), it's rage-inducing.
[Offshoring] was used almost
entirely as a form of expansion, not as a replacement," Thomas
said.
So, how is hiring someone out of the United States be it
expansion or replacement anything but fewer jobs
for the United States?!?
Above was going to be my original post, but it's pretty clear many others beat me to the punch, and it's (in my opinion) also seemingly clear there is a lot of opinion and sentiment the article is talking out its private parts.
It's interesting to me the ones making decisions to do the outsourcing are the ones funding the studies to somehow assuage their collective guilt. There's lots of empirical evidence jobs have been and continue to be lost through outsourcing.
A more accurate summary should have indicated the money is
frozen by policy for 180 days. So, paypal is not saying they
won't release the money, they won't release it
until April 13.
It probably sucks for the people who raised this money, but it
also sucks for paypal that too many people set up these kinds of
things with intent to defraud.
Hopefully with the noise raised and ruckus caused by sites
such as slashdot, the resolution will become before April 13.
FTA:
Anyway, so, unless Paypal can see reason, we
won't be able to send the legitimately raised money for a
legitimate cause to Adam's family and the goods to Adam's platoon
until April 13. We find this unacceptable.
Hopefully Adam's family and platoon isn't so depleted to not
be able to function until April 13. Hopefully if this
is so, paypal will figure out a way to disburse earlier.
Meantime, deepest regrets and best wishes to Adam's family for
their loss.
I've seen drop dead performance on flat file databases. I've seen molasses slow performance on mainframe relational databases. And I've seen about everything in between.
What I see as a HUGE factor is less the database chosen (though that is obviously important) and more how interactions with the database (updates, queries, etc) are constructed and managed.
For example, we one time had a relational database cycle application that was running for over eight hours every night, longer than the alloted time for all night time runs. One of our senior techs took a look at the program, changed the order of a couple of parentheses, and the program ran in less than fifteen minutes, with correct results.
I've also written flat file "database" applications, specialized with known characteristics that operated on extremely large databases (for the time, greater than 10G), and transactions were measured in milliseconds, typically.001 -.005 seconds) under heavy load. This application would never have held up under any kind of moderate requirement for updates, but I knew that.
I've many times seen overkill with hugely expensive databases hammering lightweight applications into some mangle relational solution.
I've never seen the world as a one-size-fits-all database solution. Vendors of course would tell us all different.
Gaming and computing are two different animals. This is
even more true for mult-user computing, a la Unix, OS X, XP, and now
Vista. And, some of today's security problems in Microsoft's security
model are directly related to and introduced by gaming
requirements early on (circa 1992, 1993).
Gaming demands high-end, near-to-the-hardware, unencumbered
access. Multi-user computing demands flexibility, equitable
distribution of resources, and if properly done, capability of
extremely high and granular security.
This puts the two activities at odds in deciding how to
implement a "computer" -- probably one of the main reasons
hardcore gaming usually is the domain of dedicated consoles and
hardware.
In NT's early days (which eventually became Windows 2000 and
Windows XP) Microsoft caved to requests for compromised access to
"rings" of kernel security to give better (and acceptable)
performance for game developers -- most notably there were some
passthroughs for video hardware access. I don't know if there
were other compromises but I suspect there were. These
compromises contributed to security problems (but were not the
cause of all of Microsoft's security headaches).
From what I've read, Microsoft has made some tough but I think
"correct" choices for security in Vista... it should be very hard
for limited users to do much more that use the machine.
Unfortunately, gaming typically requires access to the machine
that, under the covers, is much more than typical and casual
access to the innards. This is probably why Microsoft has gotten
into the game console market... they finally have
hardware/software dedicated to and around gaming.
It's probably a tough pill to swallow for gamers and
developers used to being able to pull it off in XP (and previous
generation Windows), but it's probably a better security world on whole for
general computing and Vista users.
Wouldn't it be nice to be a company so large and dominant
in it's industry yet so inept in delivering a code-complete
product it gets help (I'm assuming for free) from government
agencies to try and get it right? So, my tax dollars at work for
Microsoft... (the article does mention Microsoft gets this help
for free, I can only assume then "we" foot the bill).
I'm not saying Microsoft shouldn't collaborate with external
organizations, but why am I paying for it? Even
more reason to be upset about their usurious rates for their new
OS. Consider that the drive I bought at Costco 10 years ago
(500MB) costs on the order of 500 to 1000 times more (that's
almost two magnitudes) than storage
today, and that Microsoft continues to charge at the same rate --
they even seem to adjust for inflation.
As some have pointed out, this appears to be an incomprehensible rant. The "article" referenced says little and backs up that little with less.
I also notice the "submitter" seems to be the same person as the blogger for the article. Not saying this shouldn't happen, but this usually shouldn't happen... If it's good enough to get "published", it's good enough to be published by someone other than the author.
I think you may be onto something here, and maybe touching a little on a between-the-lines point... so many people have been sold the bill of goods computers will "do everything" for them, they run out and buy a computer, a couple hundred blank CDs or DVDs, etc., and then call their favorite support relative (in my family, "me"), and say "It won't ${your_favorite_chore_here}". I'm not sure I blame them, even I after 22+ years of computer expertise sometimes end up with software I curse because it's just too darned hard to use or not worth figuring out.
I mean, you really gotta be a bottom of the barrel dipshit to not understand how to move a mouse cursor and click things. No degree required.
Well, I'm sure my Dad, a doctor, and my Mother, a Concert Violinist (also with a doctorate) will be pleased to know you think highly of their abilities to use a computer. Again, our universe that is computers and UIs therein are not their universe. Interestingly, I don't seem to remember either parent looking down his or her nose at others not in their field for not "getting" what seems obvious to them.
That's not to say things couldn't be better (and improvements are made all the time) but I don't share the doomsday view of people in general,; with some odd disposition to not be able to use computers as computer users. The only way I can see some giant leap in computer usability will be when you can talk plainly to them, and get responses from an AI-type system. Think Star Trek.
Plus, let's be realistic: If computers were THAT hard to figure out, why in god's name have so many of them been sold? Wouldn't the word be out by now, that you need a degree to use them?
My prediction: computers will never have that (Star Trek) kind of interface, partly because pundits vastly underrate how hard a truly transcendental AI interface is to create, and partly because by the time we'd even get close to being able to something like that, computing will (my prediction) have become passe, and computers will be embedded and transparent for the task(s) at hand.
As for being "realistic", mostly Microsoft (but there are others) have sold the collective naive world the bill(irony)-of-goods computers are (would be) "THAT" easy (i.e., not THAT hard to figure out). Of course each new generation of computers have failed to deliver on that promise with the promise the NEXT generation would solve the shortcomings of today's computers. But then, Lucy has been promising Charlie Brown not to pull the football back when he tries to kick it for fifty years.
Those in the know know you almost do need a degree to really use a computer, but the marketing machine that is Microsoft, and others, continues to convince the masses otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this different than hard time for stealing a loaf a bread? We've finally allowed a belief in corporate BS-wrapped self-interest almost religious in magnitude to push back human rights to Hugo's time. Siberian prison for using software? What have we become? Incidentally, my understnding is the Soviet system for IP was very much different than the West's. All of it was State owned. Implying that a back water school teacher was in some way acting in a 'nefarious' manner and knew the consequences of contravening fast changing WIPO statutes is almost beneath contempt.
I agree completely... hence my comment about changing a really bad law (or system of law) by enforcing it strictly. Unfortunately I'm not sure I see that as any likely result for this case. (And, btw, careful about your historic references... does anyone today even know who Hugo is anymore? To the Victors... (I do, one of my faves actually.)
I don't know, did this schoolmaster knowingly "pirate" his software? It's not clear to me from the article. Gorbachev argues the nuance he didn't know he was committing a crime. That to me sounds like splitting semantic hairs.
That said, I believe if someone knowing commits an infraction, they should be able to sustain the punishment. But, I don't always agree with the punishment in light of the crime. The world of software piracy is especially troubling to me.
It seems too much onus is put on the pirate and little on the accuser to carry the final outcome. I know if laws were enforced strictly I would have done some time -- I was once unpleasantly surprised to fire up Excel at a corporate computer to find my name and my license info plastered all over the screen... Someone had pirated my legitimate copy, but how to prove my innocence?
I've heard if you want to change a bad law, enforce it strictly. Maybe a few cases like this could bring more light to the heavy-handed tactics against the little guys (don't know if this one of those cases, but it certainly has the signature).
Unfortunately, I see the outcome of this as a huge PR win for Microsoft, and I think Gates may actually take the bait. This adds to his recent buildup of reputation as world benefactor. If he has Microsoft withdraw the complaint (or offers up some benevolent deal), Microsoft gets a PR coup. And, that would be a shame.
I think an end result (and to some an unexpected result) is TiVo can make life better for everyone with this "service". I've always been a huge fan of TiVo, since they arrived on the scene, so forgive some obvious bias.
How can they make it better? Tivo can supply information to providers of content, and advertisers more valuable than any surveys or polls. Tivo can give real time info (rolled up) of what and how viewers watch their show (and ads). An end result would (potentially) be eventual extinction of really annoying and bad ads... by dint of the fact noone watches them when given an opportunity to skip.
The same goes for content... if noone records a show, or watches it on Tivo buffer, its well earned demise can be accelerated.
Tivo demonstrated just how granular their data are by their disclosure that the Janet Jackson "clip" was the most replayed segment of the Super Bowl... wth? they actually know down to a few seconds of snippets.
Yeah, there may be privacy issues there... but there are privacy issues everywhere, even when there were (are there still?) Nielsen families. My gut tells me there isn't too much interesting in viewers habits other than what they're watching and how much of they're watching. The game is about making money and selling product.
Tivo finally gives the providers feedback that I'd wished for years ago... immediate, and absolute.
Here's where the providers of "stuff" for "us" have gone astray... They're arguing the wrong argument. None of us give a flying f*** whose fault the blinky is... we're freaking customers! And instead of apologies and fixes with humble apologies to the customers, these people don't have enough fingers on their hands to point blame on someone else.
Message to providers of stuff: Provide us with good products, easy to use, and at reasonable cost and price. If something is wrong with the product, fix it.
And then, so Lucy says to Charlie Brown, "Come on Charlie Brown, I promise not to pull the ball back this time when you kick it!"
Does anyone imagine in any way or any context this Microsoft -- Wal-Mart relationship for Linux could be a good thing? I can thing of many reasons and many ways Microsoft can undermine and even try to bury Linux with this Novell Suse bargain (with the Devil?), but I only need think of one.
Suppose as Wal-Mart moves forward doing "stuff" with Linux things go terrible wrong, or get terribly hard. "No problem", says Microsoft... you need only switch to our SQL Server which of course needs to run on a Vista Server, etc. It's win-win for Microsoft.
Microsoft gets additional customer share from Linux, and has a diamond-crusted public whipping boy to prove once and for all Linux can't cut it in the big boys' world (business). We all know Linux can, but with big publicity coups I fear Microsoft gains more purchase in the PR war.
Maybe none of this will come to pass, but do you think for one minute a company that sold out its business partners with "Plays for Sure" (sorry, I know I keep using this as an example...), won't think twice about short-shrifting any value Linux brings to the table? Microsoft has shown itself a predator many times before, there's no reason to think this isn't just one more opportunity for them (and a big one at that).
I'm not going to ax for extra credit or anything but, I wrote mashups in the 80's. FTA:
I would claim this specific notion (mashups) not only originated from the enterprise and trickled into internet consciousness, enterprise "mashups" existed many years ago. I know, I wrote them. It was (or at least we called it) surround technology.
We took vital pieces of different applications and wrote wrappers which allowed users with very simple interfaces to access more data more accurately more quickly. One example was a service order writing routine for small business that routinely took over 30 minutes... using our "mashup", we accessed the necessary enterprise applications and melded into a single app presentation and shortened the 30 minute process to less than 5.
I could go on, there were at least three other major applications we wrote (small team of 2, sometimes 3), that were "mashups". The advent of browser technology simply gave us another presentation tool, the notion and mechanics of mashing was still there.
I've played with Google "mashups", and Amazon "mashups", they're really nothing new.
There was a (don't know if they're still there) a Strategic Computing Consortium based in Boston, Ma, and they were huge advocates of surround technology and not only taught techniques and reasons for approaching solutions this way (I won't go into it -- it was a six-week class). And they provided and sold tools and consulting for putting these new applications together... the CEO (I believe) was John Donovan, author of a few college texts on OSes, and another major contributor was Stewart Madnick, one of the original authors of CMS (IBM's Conversational Monitoring System).
I'm won't claim they were the "founders" of mashups, but what they espoused and taught was mashup technology, and they were teaching it in 1986 (that's when I attended the consortium). The more things change, the more they stay the same.
(Also, as an aside, the article implies this new magic allows for "easy" creation of new applications. This is hardly so. All the care and due diligence of putting an application are still required. The effort can still be significant... There is certainly time saved if a team leverages existing critical applications but to toss this out as magical and easy for any end user community to leverage is probably glib and misleading.)
With a rollout in EU, and an anticipated 1M units sold by June here, what is the impact with the latest development whereby songs purchased for the Zune are not "squirtable" courtesy SONY's proscription? Is it really true about 50% of SONY songs purchased in the Microsoft way are not shareable with other Zune owners (if you can find them)?
If so, what is the Zune but yet another mp3 player (yamp?)? A music and video player offered by a corporation that betrayed not only those sucked into the siren song of "Plays for Sure", but betrayed the manufacturers of those devices.
I hope the buying public gets a whiff of this laughing gas before they open their digital wallets. The Zune needs to die, not on the vine, but in the ground.
I've long hated and resented Microsoft for what they've done to the competitive tech market and how they've done it.
That said, the arguments about which OS is better seem specious. I've used XP for years now, and find it to be overall quite excellent. I suspect (and based on what I've read so far) Vista will be very good too. That doesn't change how I feel about Microsoft... they're basically an asswipe company with an "I don't have to care, I'm Microsoft" attitude.
I recently purchased my first OS X machine. I find it excellent too, but never having had used it before I did have to make adjustments. I still find many things about it quirky.
I sometimes wish the argument would be more open... the debate about which is the finer OS mostly splits semantic hairs. The underlying "allegiance" and loyalties about which is the better company seems to be more what this is all about.
Microsoft trampled the marketplace, so much so it eventually had a DOJ judgement against it and subsequent consent decree. The damage done to innovation (in my opinion) and continuing to be done is irreparable. (Why in the world would technology continue to have to fight the idiocy and unmanageability of logical drives these days -- I know, there's a way not to, but Microsoft in a competitive market would have had to fix this long ago.)
Apple misstepped early and seemingly never cared. They focused on the education market, and never offered price competitive products. If you were a Mac loyalist, you paid the premium. But I believe that pride by Apple cut them off from an even larger audience and potentially a competitive slice of the PC market. Today they seem to be looking more closely at that -- you still pay a premium for Apple, but it isn't as harsh as before.
Bottom line, both companies have faults. But comparing OS X and Vista is almost a silly game. Both OSes are very good. I can argue one and I can argue the other. The more interesting discussion is what Microsoft's and Apple's roles are in contributing to the overall landscape of computing. I know where I stand on that one.
(For the record, when it comes time to get some real work done, I go running for the nearest Unix terminal, be it Solaris, HP-UX, Linux... doesn't matter, that's the OS and environment I find put together in the smartest way.)
Thanks for the example... I'd wondered.
This particular example is interesting considering the "performer". KF was pretty much s***listed early on for taking advantage of his marriage and Spears fame, and his pretty obvious lack of talent (at the House of Blues in Chicago, they finally had to send runners out before his concert started -- they started giving tickets away free just to ensure KF had some semblence of a crowd (even that didn't work )).
So, I'd agree there can and will be artists who would not want their art used without permission (or would even not give permission when asked), and that works for me. I'd prefer to see that dialogue on a case-by-case basis since appearances suggest in today's world it's mostly an accepted practice... no harm, no foul.
What I find a thorn is that the self-anointed RIAA steps in on these things ostensibly supporting the music industry and the artists when nothing could be further from the truth.
Ultimately the RIAA is encumbering both the artists and the consumers so much as to effectively call into question any and all of their actions and motives. I'm hopeful they eventually are rendered irrelevant (not holding my breath, there's a lot of money and power there).
You're absolutely right... And, I already knew about this, but didn't want to bog down more than I'd already done in my post..
Here's what's interesting about the CD-Text, and why it really goes to my original point: It showed up in 1996, about 13 years after my first CD player! I'm pretty sure those doing the inventing could've cobbled together a text for CD a little earlier.
I, too bought some CDs excited about the new text format. But the players that could display were few and far between, and I finally opted out of getting the machines (the CDs were ones I'd have bought anyway). I guess if I thought they were serious about this, they'd have put a little more energy into it (earlier delivery, more advertising, more players). But, they didn't -- this was a huge potential for a nice leap in functionality. Heck, I'd even have considered paying a nickel or two more per disk for the extra info.
I think the record industry was lazy with this -- it wasn't interesting to them, their money was just rolling in from their cast of mega-stars and mega-bands. There was no incentive.
Some would point to the "role" of a business isn't to make everything and anything but instead to maximize profit, and rolling out the CD info as part of the product didn't fit that model. In my opinion the huge fascination with mega-dollar dealings obscured that customer satisfaction, even delight, provides, if more subtle, comparable returns for the investment. As it is now, I buy far fewer CDs than before, mostly because I resent their actions. I return any CD with copy protection built in (it's darned near impossible to figure out and know before you walk out the door with it).
Yeah, there was CD text, 13 years late, and long after we the people were already filling up the database with our own typing pools. Sony's effort may have even been an attempt to thwart the CDDB effort (I really don't know on that one).
Wow, only 3 articles later, and more media industry trampling. Now the trampling is on artists (the mixers).
On a personal level, I've always had mixed feelings about hiphop and mixing from other artists, especially when used without permission. But at a gut level I tend to agree it's a different kind of creativity and creation, and the end result is exposure of old (and new) music in ways never heard before. The final net result is positive for all parties involved.
The research I was able to do showed pretty clearly using other artists' work in mixes is tacitly allowed with a wink. The artists getting additional exposure are getting free advertising. (I'd be happy to know if there are artists out there who really don't want their art in others' mixes.
This clearly underscores the RIAA's hypocrisy in that their thesis includes the tenet they are out to protect the artists, but if more exposure, and ultimately more happy consumers and sellers all around doesn't fit the definition of "protection", I'm at a loss.
In the meantime unknown artists who may have never seen the light of day get world-wide exposure. Sales across the genre, and from the borrowed genre (I just had to go out and get the Steppenwolf, after hearing the mix with "Magic Carpet Ride") go up. Everybody could be happy.
But I keep forgetting it doesn't seem to be about being happy (on all levels: aesthetic, profit), it's about power and control. The RIAA wants to control something they feel slipping out of their hands and they seem more desparate every day.
I keep thinking it'd be interesting to organize some loosely structured boycott or activity against the RIAA, but as I mentioned in my very recent post the irritation factor alone may be enough to push consumers away.
I'm always reminded of a favorite Peanuts cartoon (kudos to slashdotter Patrick Furlong for finding that old cartoon for me) where the RIAA behaves much like Lucy... they want "us" to have fun, but give us minimal leash to do so... and even then when they see we've figured a way to have fun with so little leash, they want to take that away too. Stupid gits!
It's a pity -- the articles roll in every day about yet another speedbump in the DRM saga and how DRM and "protection" in general makes consumers' lives miserable. Of course it's no surprise (to me), just a disappointment. Imagine if the energy spent trying to hogtie the general (and 99%+ totally honest and willing to purchase) consumer were instead applied to making the technology even better?
Making the technology even better rather than harder would only improve the landscape for everyone. TV would look better, content would be easier to deliver and use. Bang for the buck would be better. Access to everyone for things like "high-def" (pick your favorite pseudo-standard) would not be limited to just those with $5-10,000 to toss (with no guarantee your picture will be better, or even viewable).
Instead it's just one more betrayal.
Consider the very first CD player I purchased in 1983. I paid, well, I won't say how much I played for player that could only play one CD at at time. But it was heady stuff even back then. The player had a "pitch" slider to change the pitch of the music (though it also correspondingly sped up and slowed down the track to accommodate). It had the ability to program the songs in any order, and even program the starting time offset into a track, and stopping offset into a track.
And!, on the back, a 9-pin DIN out (I think that was the configuration), with the only mention in the user's manual for that output as "reserved for future use"! I couldn't have been more excited. I brought friends over and showed them the exciting new technology... they just drooled at the sight.
And I always saved the "for future use" output as the hook... I described digital output where liner notes, lyrics, all kinds cool things (of course including the de rigeur track information) would be output in some form that could be put up on a display, TV or otherwise. I 'splained how the digital format worked and how much storage there was available for all kinds of "future use" enhancements.
And, it never happened. The promise of excellent technology, never delivered. And (I've posted on this before), the notion of track info associated with CD technology didn't emerge until we, the people, did it ourselves! with CDDB!
Instead, newer generations of technology included increasingly large percentages of "slice" dedicated to controlling our use of the media, not improving the quality of our experience.
I say fork 'em.
Maybe one good thing will come of all of this -- people may get so fed up and annoyed with trying to get their newfangled entertainment setups to work right (or at all), they give up, buy a bicycle, or some hiking shoes, and get outdoors and see a different world... maybe even one with more return on investment.
I think complaining there aren't emough women in tech is disingenuous and a little condescending towards women. There has been a wide open door for women for years, self-taught, or otherwise. To claim otherwise ignores so many other attempts and programs.
The reason there aren't more women in tech, self starters or otherwise is because they don't want to be and aren't interested! No program, encouragement, coersion or other methods will change that.
Consider a telcom I worked for... In the mid-80s a memo was circulated admonishing IT for the "underutilized" women. An IT policy was thus implemented picking women from myriad other jobs (call centers, anywhere!). These women were given free training, often at universities and were given 6 weeks and more to be trained. Most of these women were looking at more than a doubling in salary, all they had to do was "participate"...
Even with that policy, we could not even approach fifty percent of women in the IT work force.
(As an aside, an unexpected (to management) side effect of this monumental effort was a flood of women (those that signed up), only a small fraction of whom had any interest at all in tech, and only a fraction of those hitting stride in any reasonable time join It without even close to the skills necessary to contribute. We burned a lot of money to skew a population and saw productivity tank.)
It is no reflection of women's abilities. I know it's really cliche, but some of the very best IT people I worked with were women. But, as in the male population, many women were incompetent as were men. The difference isn't in ability, it's in the proportion choosing a field... For some reason men choose computers, women don't.
Ultimately, if you build it (the program), they will come, but not in droves. Like it or not, there seems to be a difference in wiring between the sexes. And, as in any large population, there will always be exceptions. IT welcomes (at least in my experience) women as much as men.
In the meantime, these old harangues only condescend to women who have chose not to enter IT as a career choice. They do have the options today... they're still not choosing it. Nudging them with these initiatives somehow implies their non-IT choices weren't valid, or good.
This hand-wringing is as silly as wondering why more police officers don't enter the tech fields (and some do as a recent /.
article pointed out -- a state trooper wrote a traffic ticket
application). They didn't/don't because they like being police
officers better.
My point is/was that to the casual observer (and contestant), signing a waiver and being "warned" (I didn't see anything in the article to suggest they warned how dangerous this was) would seem a mere "standard" formality and for the purposes of participating in a water-drinking contest, absurd. But, the radio station, as I pointed out, with minimal research should have known going in this was dangerous and not even hosted this contest.
The only difference I see between this and a contest where contestants drink as much alcohol as possible to win a Wii is that to the common man, dangers and risks associated with alcohol are much more widely known and understood. And, no radio station in the world would get away with having contestants drink alcohol in a similar fashion, waivers and warnings or not.
This is not some mysterious malady. The radio station is off the scale negligent for putting contestants in the position of potential serious harm:
I'd had this argument many times with a friend about my water intake. I've always known my intake was fine (hint: coffee counts...), but in the course of that discussion I found many articles on the problems one could encounter by drinking too much water.
I won't claim any person on the street should know the dangers of drinking too much water, but the people putting on this contest (sorry, stunt) could have recognized they were in deep waters with a modicum of research.
I'm not much for lawsuits, but I hope the radio station that put on this stunt makes significant remedy to the lady's family.
Insulting the "client" isn't constrained to the IT market, it may be more visible to /.ers, but seemingly many
"professionals" think an attributes of being a professional
include being an unmitigated asswipe to those less knowledgeable.
My personal experience with over 25 years now in IT is that many times the asswipe-ness of an IT professional is inversely proportional to what they know and how well they know it. While I've known some brilliant IT staff who were grumpy, most of the anointed geniuses-with-attitude were self anointed, and less than geniuses (doesn't mean they didn't know anything, just that the attitude was a convenient and easy facade to hide behind).
The insulting IT staff were the ones I avoided -- mostly their expertise, as it were, was a diminished return in being held hostage by "their schedule", and their attitude. I'd much rather find assistance with a less competent person who is self aware and interested in helping find a solution if they don't know it themselves.
Admittedly there is a consumer demographic cowed by the angry IT support, and they probably accept and suffer more insult than they deserve. But, in the long run, I think any IT staff member who glories in his or her rancor and animus with the client grossly underestimates the long term impact on their reputation and career. If you think customers don't talk... and consider alternatives when they present, think again. (I long since have avoided Circuit City for not only rude treatment and condescension, but that kind of treatment coupled with virtual incompetence on that for which they condescended..., literally thousands of my dollars have gone elsewhere solely on "rude behavior" by "professionals".)
It pays to be nice.
(And, regardless of the sans-clue clientèle's, there are rarely circumstances that warrant abuse of the customer.... )
There is nothing I find acceptable about DRM:
No, I can't say as I find DRM something acceptable at any implementation or level. In its most innocent and benign form it's just irritating noise, in it's most insidious manifestation (and they're going there if they can), it's rage-inducing.
Above was going to be my original post, but it's pretty clear many others beat me to the punch, and it's (in my opinion) also seemingly clear there is a lot of opinion and sentiment the article is talking out its private parts.
It's interesting to me the ones making decisions to do the outsourcing are the ones funding the studies to somehow assuage their collective guilt. There's lots of empirical evidence jobs have been and continue to be lost through outsourcing.
A more accurate summary should have indicated the money is frozen by policy for 180 days. So, paypal is not saying they won't release the money, they won't release it until April 13.
It probably sucks for the people who raised this money, but it also sucks for paypal that too many people set up these kinds of things with intent to defraud.
Hopefully with the noise raised and ruckus caused by sites such as slashdot, the resolution will become before April 13.
FTA:
Hopefully Adam's family and platoon isn't so depleted to not be able to function until April 13. Hopefully if this is so, paypal will figure out a way to disburse earlier.
Meantime, deepest regrets and best wishes to Adam's family for their loss.
I've seen drop dead performance on flat file databases. I've seen molasses slow performance on mainframe relational databases. And I've seen about everything in between.
What I see as a HUGE factor is less the database chosen (though that is obviously important) and more how interactions with the database (updates, queries, etc) are constructed and managed.
For example, we one time had a relational database cycle application that was running for over eight hours every night, longer than the alloted time for all night time runs. One of our senior techs took a look at the program, changed the order of a couple of parentheses, and the program ran in less than fifteen minutes, with correct results.
I've also written flat file "database" applications, specialized with known characteristics that operated on extremely large databases (for the time, greater than 10G), and transactions were measured in milliseconds, typically .001 - .005 seconds) under heavy load. This application would never have held up under any kind of moderate requirement for updates, but I knew that.
I've many times seen overkill with hugely expensive databases hammering lightweight applications into some mangle relational solution.
I've never seen the world as a one-size-fits-all database solution. Vendors of course would tell us all different.
Thanks... point well made, and taken. (I did read the article. I guess I could have grokked it a little better.)
-Regards
Gaming and computing are two different animals. This is even more true for mult-user computing, a la Unix, OS X, XP, and now Vista. And, some of today's security problems in Microsoft's security model are directly related to and introduced by gaming requirements early on (circa 1992, 1993).
Gaming demands high-end, near-to-the-hardware, unencumbered access. Multi-user computing demands flexibility, equitable distribution of resources, and if properly done, capability of extremely high and granular security.
This puts the two activities at odds in deciding how to implement a "computer" -- probably one of the main reasons hardcore gaming usually is the domain of dedicated consoles and hardware.
In NT's early days (which eventually became Windows 2000 and Windows XP) Microsoft caved to requests for compromised access to "rings" of kernel security to give better (and acceptable) performance for game developers -- most notably there were some passthroughs for video hardware access. I don't know if there were other compromises but I suspect there were. These compromises contributed to security problems (but were not the cause of all of Microsoft's security headaches).
From what I've read, Microsoft has made some tough but I think "correct" choices for security in Vista... it should be very hard for limited users to do much more that use the machine. Unfortunately, gaming typically requires access to the machine that, under the covers, is much more than typical and casual access to the innards. This is probably why Microsoft has gotten into the game console market... they finally have hardware/software dedicated to and around gaming.
It's probably a tough pill to swallow for gamers and developers used to being able to pull it off in XP (and previous generation Windows), but it's probably a better security world on whole for general computing and Vista users.
Wouldn't it be nice to be a company so large and dominant in it's industry yet so inept in delivering a code-complete product it gets help (I'm assuming for free) from government agencies to try and get it right? So, my tax dollars at work for Microsoft... (the article does mention Microsoft gets this help for free, I can only assume then "we" foot the bill).
I'm not saying Microsoft shouldn't collaborate with external organizations, but why am I paying for it? Even more reason to be upset about their usurious rates for their new OS. Consider that the drive I bought at Costco 10 years ago (500MB) costs on the order of 500 to 1000 times more (that's almost two magnitudes) than storage today, and that Microsoft continues to charge at the same rate -- they even seem to adjust for inflation.
</rant>
As some have pointed out, this appears to be an incomprehensible rant. The "article" referenced says little and backs up that little with less.
I also notice the "submitter" seems to be the same person as the blogger for the article. Not saying this shouldn't happen, but this usually shouldn't happen... If it's good enough to get "published", it's good enough to be published by someone other than the author.
My prediction: computers will never have that (Star Trek) kind of interface, partly because pundits vastly underrate how hard a truly transcendental AI interface is to create, and partly because by the time we'd even get close to being able to something like that, computing will (my prediction) have become passe, and computers will be embedded and transparent for the task(s) at hand.
As for being "realistic", mostly Microsoft (but there are others) have sold the collective naive world the bill(irony)-of-goods computers are (would be) "THAT" easy (i.e., not THAT hard to figure out). Of course each new generation of computers have failed to deliver on that promise with the promise the NEXT generation would solve the shortcomings of today's computers. But then, Lucy has been promising Charlie Brown not to pull the football back when he tries to kick it for fifty years.
Those in the know know you almost do need a degree to really use a computer, but the marketing machine that is Microsoft, and others, continues to convince the masses otherwise.