I'm going to get violently modded down for this, but I can't help it.
I replaced "Ayers" with "Stallman" and "schools" with "blogs and community websites" and ended up with an exact description of the activism side of FOSS - most aspects of which I dislike intensely, regardless of the obvious technical merits and advantages of the software.
Which also made me chuckle because had I posted this on a discussion about FOSS, I would get promptly crucified.
UAC is a hack to deal with the problem that the Win32 API is typically accessed by third party software written with no security in mind, that would require changing lots third-party software to fix.
I know of this one, if only because it's written in Python and I ran into it looking for some unrelated 3D tools. It does do physics simulations, AFAIK.
Aside from the annoying repetitions, I really liked this part:
Contractors, consultants, and increasingly employees, use their own laptops to connect to the corporate network. Personally, I've not used a corporate supplied computer for the last five to six years.
Hah! This ain't happening any time soon, at least not that I can see. Companies are extremely paranoid (with good reason) and in my experience will very rarely allow a connection to their networks (be it physical or through VPN) on hardware they don't own. Maybe small companies do, trading risk for lowered costs ("Hey, you got a laptop? Great!") but most don't. Not a chance.
If that's one of his premises, along with the we've-heard-it-all-before-thanks babble about how the next version of Windows is DOA, then the whole thing can be safely ignored.
You realize that he added you to his "people who hate me, free software and Slashdot because they don't say enough bad things about M$" list, right?
If you're not careful, he'll do a full write-up on you.
There are several reasons why people might be modding him down regardless of what he's saying - and yes, even I will admit he actually has a point in this case. But you do reap what you sow, eventually.
Considering I've been happily using "closed" products for more than a decade to make a living, you're a little late on the warning front.
For all practical purposes I would be just as screwed if I found a bug in the.NET CLR as I would if it were in the Python VM, because I'm not in the business of developing or fixing languages or runtime libraries, but corporate applications.
That's why I choose tools that are established and have solid backing behind them. I trust the Apache Foundation as much as I trust Microsoft. I trust Guido van Rossum and his troupe of geniuses. I trust Zend and I trust Debian. Not so much the SuperDuperPHPCMSOfTheWeek Team, so I might use their product to run my personal blog about kittens, but I wouldn't trust my livelihood to them.
Understand that money has nothing to do with this.
In short, Slashdot evolves at a positively glacial speed.
That's not the problem. The code and the overall look seem to be moving along lately, so it is evolving. The "borg" icon and many other things appeal to the "hur-hur, M$ LOL" demographic that brings in the page views and ad revenue. That's why it's not going away any time soon.
I like Slashdot, don't get me wrong. But let's not pretend it owes its popularity to anything other than bashing Microsoft.
(and what the hell, now I have to wait four minutes to post again?)
I don't care about cost, and I don't care about "freedom". I care about getting the job done, delivering what I was asked to deliver and getting paid for it.
If I write an application with ASP.NET/Server 2008 that cost $500K to build and maintain over five years, which then ends up generating $50 million in revenue, my costs are effectively zero. Besides, the bulk of the cost is usually people, not software licenses. For all practical purposes the cost ends up being the same if I do it in Python, except that there are things I won't use Python or any other open source software for.
As to freedom, that's a philosophical argument, and you're welcome to it. Just don't assume it's a major factor in real life. I it were, Microsoft and every other commercial software company in the planet would have gone out of business years ago.
There's a lot of software that only runs on Linux or BSD and is useless to me on Windows, but I don't think less of it because of that.
More importantly, I'm more interested on what I can do with my applications and less about the OS they happen to be running on. This is called "the right tool for the job", and for me at least, completely trumps philosophical arguments about degrees of freedom.
I don't know if you said that sarcastically, but if you think about it, focusing on robotic spacecraft that can do more than just take readings might very well contribute to the advancement of robotic sciences. History shows us that progress in scientific fields comes about faster when there is a specific purpose, time pressure and money involved.
I don't have a problem with manned spaceflight, on the contrary. But this might be a good side effect of trying to go all-automata. Not to mention cheaper/easier, since moving carbon-based sentient chimpanzees (also known as humans) through the voids of space requires ungodly amounts of resources.
Go on... and are you seeing the problem now? You forgot RealPlayer in the list of media apps. You think the RealNetworks folks are going to be happy about that? And how about all the other companies that make email clients? Are they going to complain? How big or small do you make the list? Under what criteria do you include or exclude applications from them?
And what about text editors? Image editors? Games? Hell, why not force Microsoft to include a Ubuntu LiveCD image and an evaluation copy of OS X with Windows, just in case?
makes it harder for someone to be aware of the fact that choice exists
Microsoft's job is to sell software, not make you aware of choices. It's your responsibility as a consumer to inform yourself of choices and make decisions based on that.
This is all mildly interesting twitter, but assuming you're not just karma whoring, maybe you'd like to explain how the people who produce the content you so eloquently demand must be shared are going to make a living?
The system is clearly broken at the moment, and shady legal actions and stacking from large groups that rarely have the artists' best interests in mind hardly help. Their passe distribution and promotion mechanisms also have to go.
But all these poetic "information wants to be free" essays I see here (yours is honestly just slightly north of corny) inevitably fail to explain how artists are supposed to avoid starvation and homelessness when freedom-loving folk like you are hard at work "sharing" their work.
The other day I read an article on game piracy. It centered mostly on DRM, but it also identified the lack of availability of titles in most of the world as a driving cause for piracy. In other words, there are millions of potential customers who would gladly pay for a game, yet simply can't because they have no legal way to do so. So they simply pirate it. That got me thinking that maybe if we had an open, secure and global mechanism for micropayment (< $100 on average) transactions, that could be used as an effective way to allow independent artists to profit from their hard work. Sure, there would be some piracy, that's a given. But depending on your overhead, even if only 10% of a hundred million people who have access to your work could pay, you'd probably break even and then some.
But just offering up empty prose on how everyone must "share" (and where is your shared content, BTW?) is and how eeeevil the **AA people are is, as usual, nothing but empty prose.
No, there is no excuse. But in light of this I've come to the realization that the government of the most powerful nation on earth is really no different than most large corporations I've worked with - a disorganized bureaucratic mess. I've seen people take one or two weeks to receive a working email account and a functional laptop or desktop with which to use it from. The users have to fill $FORM_A, $FORM_B, take the "Communications Policy Training", do a somersault and bring their crayons with them. Johnny from Desktop Support is nowhere to be found. The laptop was ordered but hasn't arrived yet. It's in another building. The dog chewed on it. The email account was deleted and then re-created because of some error, and now the server won't accept messages from it. The laptop arrived without Application_X, which is necessary for the employee to do his/her job. The AD permissions are screwed up so employee has no access to some network share where his team's documents are kept. Etc, etc.
Contrast this to smaller companies who are not saddled with suffocating SOX-related "regulations" and bureaucracies and new employees usually hit the ground running.
I commend your company on the way it does business. If my experience is any indication of the median, I'd say they're a rare exception.
But government has to continue to function, so much as I find the idea of using Google mail (seriously, WTF), it's still better than nothing. And it shows that at least they can be flexible if they need to.
Contrast the news of Microsoft and IBM with yesterday's report that Apple beat the market's Q1 estimates
There's no need to contrast anything, IBM also reported better than expected numbers yesterday, and they still announced layoffs today.
I don't know if Apple will also trim its workforce, but in these weird times, good numbers != no layoffs. Still, I'd be surprised if they did. I don't know much about Apple but Microsoft, Intel and IBM have become bloated bureaucracies in the past ten years of growth or so.
Even Google recently announced belt-tightening measures, nuked free products and announced cutbacks - this from the company that supposedly is "safest" from an economic downturn. Obviously not.
Publicly traded companies often succumb to the irrational expectations of their shareholders, as in "everyone's laying people off to cut costs, why aren't the companies in my portfolio doing that as well".
Technically, yes. Even though you signed the document under duress, you could have refused to sign it knowing you would be killed for not doing so. Ultimately, it is the person with the gun who is responsible.
Not to invoke the ghost of Godwin here, but many Nazi leaders were prosecuted using this premise in Nuremberg, even though they argued that they had to do the things they did or face retribution. There's even a special word for this in German that I forget at the moment (Führer's defense or something like that).
To play devil's advocate here, considering how evil the Nazi regime was perceived to be, shouldn't that defense have worked wonders for them, especially since they had so many corpses of higher-ups to lay blame on that could not argue back? Yet it didn't.
In reality, defendant's arguments in cases like these are, historically, as valid as the victorious parties in the preceding conflict allow them to be. That, and how useful the defendant happens to be to the victors. Just ask von Braun and friends.
it'll give you a good balance to offset the propaganda you're being spoon fed daily here.
Being spoon-fed more propaganda is not exactly an advantageous counter balance.
Al-Jazeera is the Fox News of the Middle East, specifically where the US or Israel are concerned. A good 1/2 of all Americans consider Fox to be "reputable", but that doesn't make it particularly so.
Just because some news network in a different part of the world reports on things differently from yours doesn't mean it's "better" or "right". It's just different.
If Microsoft was concerned about Linux in 1998 (especially on the desktop) then they must be a lot more intelligent and clairvoyant than people give them credit for.
If you let the last eight years hold you back from being a real human being
I'm sorry, I must have missed that part of my own post. Could you point it out?
And, seriously, since what is essentially the same congress is in session under Obama as was under Bush do you really think there is going to be a heavy swing in policy?
If it's going to be the same old game in Washington, fine. The country has endured that since it was first founded and still managed to move forward.
But most Americans (I'll assume that includes you) don't have the slightest idea how hated their country has become abroad. Obama brings an enormous change in perception, and perception is 3/4ths of reality. If nothing else, doing positive things like closing down Gitmo will crate a huge jump in public opinion abroad. And whether you like it or not, this is a big planet with a lot of people in it - most of whom are not Americans. The resentment created by 8 years of bad foreign policies and interventions will eventually come back and bite you, very possibly economically where it will hurt the most.
In the next few decades you'll see foreign policy tied more and more to economic policy. It's already begun. It's the result of a heavily interconnected and inter-dependent planet. In that world, PR is going to be vital. Obama is good PR for the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to get violently modded down for this, but I can't help it.
I replaced "Ayers" with "Stallman" and "schools" with "blogs and community websites" and ended up with an exact description of the activism side of FOSS - most aspects of which I dislike intensely, regardless of the obvious technical merits and advantages of the software.
Which also made me chuckle because had I posted this on a discussion about FOSS, I would get promptly crucified.
That, and reading. Regardless of country/region/etc, developing a reading habit in children is extremely important.
Here, I fixed this for you:
A little redundant, but actually true now.
I know of this one, if only because it's written in Python and I ran into it looking for some unrelated 3D tools. It does do physics simulations, AFAIK.
Aside from the annoying repetitions, I really liked this part:
Hah! This ain't happening any time soon, at least not that I can see. Companies are extremely paranoid (with good reason) and in my experience will very rarely allow a connection to their networks (be it physical or through VPN) on hardware they don't own. Maybe small companies do, trading risk for lowered costs ("Hey, you got a laptop? Great!") but most don't. Not a chance.
If that's one of his premises, along with the we've-heard-it-all-before-thanks babble about how the next version of Windows is DOA, then the whole thing can be safely ignored.
Yes, thank you. That's the idea I was trying to convey without much success, obviously :)
You realize that he added you to his "people who hate me, free software and Slashdot because they don't say enough bad things about M$" list, right?
If you're not careful, he'll do a full write-up on you.
There are several reasons why people might be modding him down regardless of what he's saying - and yes, even I will admit he actually has a point in this case. But you do reap what you sow, eventually.
Considering I've been happily using "closed" products for more than a decade to make a living, you're a little late on the warning front.
For all practical purposes I would be just as screwed if I found a bug in the .NET CLR as I would if it were in the Python VM, because I'm not in the business of developing or fixing languages or runtime libraries, but corporate applications.
That's why I choose tools that are established and have solid backing behind them. I trust the Apache Foundation as much as I trust Microsoft. I trust Guido van Rossum and his troupe of geniuses. I trust Zend and I trust Debian. Not so much the SuperDuperPHPCMSOfTheWeek Team, so I might use their product to run my personal blog about kittens, but I wouldn't trust my livelihood to them.
Understand that money has nothing to do with this.
That's not the problem. The code and the overall look seem to be moving along lately, so it is evolving. The "borg" icon and many other things appeal to the "hur-hur, M$ LOL" demographic that brings in the page views and ad revenue. That's why it's not going away any time soon.
I like Slashdot, don't get me wrong. But let's not pretend it owes its popularity to anything other than bashing Microsoft.
(and what the hell, now I have to wait four minutes to post again?)
I don't care about cost, and I don't care about "freedom". I care about getting the job done, delivering what I was asked to deliver and getting paid for it.
If I write an application with ASP.NET/Server 2008 that cost $500K to build and maintain over five years, which then ends up generating $50 million in revenue, my costs are effectively zero. Besides, the bulk of the cost is usually people, not software licenses. For all practical purposes the cost ends up being the same if I do it in Python, except that there are things I won't use Python or any other open source software for.
As to freedom, that's a philosophical argument, and you're welcome to it. Just don't assume it's a major factor in real life. I it were, Microsoft and every other commercial software company in the planet would have gone out of business years ago.
There's a lot of software that only runs on Linux or BSD and is useless to me on Windows, but I don't think less of it because of that.
More importantly, I'm more interested on what I can do with my applications and less about the OS they happen to be running on. This is called "the right tool for the job", and for me at least, completely trumps philosophical arguments about degrees of freedom.
That has the insidious side effect of causing the patient to start speaking lolcat though.
I don't know if you said that sarcastically, but if you think about it, focusing on robotic spacecraft that can do more than just take readings might very well contribute to the advancement of robotic sciences. History shows us that progress in scientific fields comes about faster when there is a specific purpose, time pressure and money involved.
I don't have a problem with manned spaceflight, on the contrary. But this might be a good side effect of trying to go all-automata. Not to mention cheaper/easier, since moving carbon-based sentient chimpanzees (also known as humans) through the voids of space requires ungodly amounts of resources.
As opposed to what, Firefox?
My guess is that's why it was mentioned.
The video was recently removed from YouTube due to a DMCA takedown request, IIRC. I'm sure there are copies out there.
Go on...
Go on...
Go on... and are you seeing the problem now? You forgot RealPlayer in the list of media apps. You think the RealNetworks folks are going to be happy about that? And how about all the other companies that make email clients? Are they going to complain? How big or small do you make the list? Under what criteria do you include or exclude applications from them?
And what about text editors? Image editors? Games? Hell, why not force Microsoft to include a Ubuntu LiveCD image and an evaluation copy of OS X with Windows, just in case?
Microsoft's job is to sell software, not make you aware of choices. It's your responsibility as a consumer to inform yourself of choices and make decisions based on that.
Or just people in the US?
Is there a distinction at all?
This is all mildly interesting twitter, but assuming you're not just karma whoring, maybe you'd like to explain how the people who produce the content you so eloquently demand must be shared are going to make a living?
The system is clearly broken at the moment, and shady legal actions and stacking from large groups that rarely have the artists' best interests in mind hardly help. Their passe distribution and promotion mechanisms also have to go.
But all these poetic "information wants to be free" essays I see here (yours is honestly just slightly north of corny) inevitably fail to explain how artists are supposed to avoid starvation and homelessness when freedom-loving folk like you are hard at work "sharing" their work.
The other day I read an article on game piracy. It centered mostly on DRM, but it also identified the lack of availability of titles in most of the world as a driving cause for piracy. In other words, there are millions of potential customers who would gladly pay for a game, yet simply can't because they have no legal way to do so. So they simply pirate it. That got me thinking that maybe if we had an open, secure and global mechanism for micropayment (< $100 on average) transactions, that could be used as an effective way to allow independent artists to profit from their hard work. Sure, there would be some piracy, that's a given. But depending on your overhead, even if only 10% of a hundred million people who have access to your work could pay, you'd probably break even and then some.
But just offering up empty prose on how everyone must "share" (and where is your shared content, BTW?) is and how eeeevil the **AA people are is, as usual, nothing but empty prose.
No, there is no excuse. But in light of this I've come to the realization that the government of the most powerful nation on earth is really no different than most large corporations I've worked with - a disorganized bureaucratic mess. I've seen people take one or two weeks to receive a working email account and a functional laptop or desktop with which to use it from. The users have to fill $FORM_A, $FORM_B, take the "Communications Policy Training", do a somersault and bring their crayons with them. Johnny from Desktop Support is nowhere to be found. The laptop was ordered but hasn't arrived yet. It's in another building. The dog chewed on it. The email account was deleted and then re-created because of some error, and now the server won't accept messages from it. The laptop arrived without Application_X, which is necessary for the employee to do his/her job. The AD permissions are screwed up so employee has no access to some network share where his team's documents are kept. Etc, etc.
Contrast this to smaller companies who are not saddled with suffocating SOX-related "regulations" and bureaucracies and new employees usually hit the ground running.
I commend your company on the way it does business. If my experience is any indication of the median, I'd say they're a rare exception.
But government has to continue to function, so much as I find the idea of using Google mail (seriously, WTF), it's still better than nothing. And it shows that at least they can be flexible if they need to.
There's no need to contrast anything, IBM also reported better than expected numbers yesterday, and they still announced layoffs today.
I don't know if Apple will also trim its workforce, but in these weird times, good numbers != no layoffs. Still, I'd be surprised if they did. I don't know much about Apple but Microsoft, Intel and IBM have become bloated bureaucracies in the past ten years of growth or so.
Even Google recently announced belt-tightening measures, nuked free products and announced cutbacks - this from the company that supposedly is "safest" from an economic downturn. Obviously not.
Publicly traded companies often succumb to the irrational expectations of their shareholders, as in "everyone's laying people off to cut costs, why aren't the companies in my portfolio doing that as well".
And I read their crap all the time. Maybe you should as well.
Not to invoke the ghost of Godwin here, but many Nazi leaders were prosecuted using this premise in Nuremberg, even though they argued that they had to do the things they did or face retribution. There's even a special word for this in German that I forget at the moment (Führer's defense or something like that).
To play devil's advocate here, considering how evil the Nazi regime was perceived to be, shouldn't that defense have worked wonders for them, especially since they had so many corpses of higher-ups to lay blame on that could not argue back? Yet it didn't.
In reality, defendant's arguments in cases like these are, historically, as valid as the victorious parties in the preceding conflict allow them to be. That, and how useful the defendant happens to be to the victors. Just ask von Braun and friends.
Being spoon-fed more propaganda is not exactly an advantageous counter balance.
Al-Jazeera is the Fox News of the Middle East, specifically where the US or Israel are concerned. A good 1/2 of all Americans consider Fox to be "reputable", but that doesn't make it particularly so.
Just because some news network in a different part of the world reports on things differently from yours doesn't mean it's "better" or "right". It's just different.
If Microsoft was concerned about Linux in 1998 (especially on the desktop) then they must be a lot more intelligent and clairvoyant than people give them credit for.
I'm sorry, I must have missed that part of my own post. Could you point it out?
If it's going to be the same old game in Washington, fine. The country has endured that since it was first founded and still managed to move forward.
But most Americans (I'll assume that includes you) don't have the slightest idea how hated their country has become abroad. Obama brings an enormous change in perception, and perception is 3/4ths of reality. If nothing else, doing positive things like closing down Gitmo will crate a huge jump in public opinion abroad. And whether you like it or not, this is a big planet with a lot of people in it - most of whom are not Americans. The resentment created by 8 years of bad foreign policies and interventions will eventually come back and bite you, very possibly economically where it will hurt the most.
In the next few decades you'll see foreign policy tied more and more to economic policy. It's already begun. It's the result of a heavily interconnected and inter-dependent planet. In that world, PR is going to be vital. Obama is good PR for the United States.