Although I was totally against the project, I think monorails offer a lot that light rail and heavy rail don't. Their biggest benefit is that, like a subway, it has little or no impact on surface traffic. Unlike subway, however, it's much cheaper to build since you don't have to dig everything up. Monorails are a good idea. Seattle's implementation would have been good too, but after spending billions on sports stadiums and a regional light rail system, the city just couldn't afford it.
I'm really glad that they killed this, even though I don't live in Seattle proper. As a resident of King County (of which Seattle is a part), I could see the handwriting on the wall - the project gets into financial trouble and somehow it's up to the rest of the county/state to bail out the project because it's "vital" to the region. What a load of crap! I'm glad to see politicians finally have the balls to stand up and call this project what it is - a "nice to have" project that the city just can't afford. Too bad this doesn't happen more often.
and do you let them get hold of the data your app creates in thier name or do they have to keep paying you just to preserve that data?
They can export data into an Excel spreadsheet and preserve it for eternity if they want.
and what if something happens to your company or your company simply decide for some reason the service is no longer running? any remaining customers are screwed.
You're absolutely correct. But the same thing can happen when you buy the code. I know people who are still using code on VAXes but they're having a real hard time finding replacement hardware any more. How many DOS games no longer run under Windows? There are plenty of parallels here.
But, in defense of your argument, I can see the concern that we might just shut down with no warning. And I agree. But if you're worried about that then you'd better never hire any employees because they could quit tomorrow with no warning and leave you high-and-dry with whatever project they're working on. You'd also better never work with any other "service" companies for the same reason. Ever have T-shirts printed with your company logo on them? There's usually a setup fee, and if that company goes away then do you have access to the digitized artwork?
Obviously you weren't paying attention. It's clear that there's a conspiracy to cover up the truth here, because in nearly 10 years the [Clinton] White House hasn't commented on this issue. I for one am going to rush out and build a device to stop any more EMF from entering my home. I'll do that as soon as I finish building my equipment that prevents the last great White House coverup - alien anal probes.
Seriously, I've thought about taking myself off Ask Slashdot, but it's like turning away when you're about to witness a train wreck. It's just too hard to ignore.
And they weren't right then...has anything actually changed?
A lot has changed in that time. A couple of years ago, we built an ASP-based service. At the time, we were really worried about high-speed bandwidth adoption. To our surprise, this has not been a problem at all. We seldom ever get calls from people with dial-up service.
The biggest problem that we face is one of perception. People believe that if they buy the software and install it on their PC that somehow they'll have a better experience. They forget that as soon as their PC is full of viruses that the program stops working. They forget that they have to backup their data on a regular basis. They forget that their data is locked in a single place rather than being accessible from any web browser in the world. I think that people are reluctant to build dependencies on others, but that will change over time. After all, when was the last time somebody stapled their own wires to a phone pole because they didn't trust the telephone network?
And this lesson is something that Balmer et al have never understood. They aren't evolved enough to get it. So they buy it, but they can't possibly buy what Google has, and that is what's driving them crazy.
Oh, I don't know about that. All they have to do is look at the NY Yankees to see that spending a whole lot of cash will get you a great team.:-)
I feel your pain because I worked with a guy in a very similar situation to get his domain. In his case, his business partner registered the name and then bailed out of the business. We couldn't get him to send a simple fax transferring ownership.
But when you say "watching over our domains wasn't ever my job", then exactly whose job is it? I hate NSI like everybody else, but it's not their job to babysit your company's brand for you. If you never had clear ownership of the domain name then you should never have spent the time and energy advertising it.
Do you really believe that any software vendor in his/her right mind is going to release a Vista-only application? My 2004 copy of Quickbooks still runs on Windows 98.
That doesn't sound like a whole lot to me. Most reasonable people will pay good money if they're getting something in return. Can you site at least one proposed feature of Vista that you think would be worth paying real money for? (Genuine question)
Food will be very difficult to come by if most of the truly productive agriculture areas become deserts.
There was a time when the Sahara Desert was green and lush and agriculturally productive. That doesn't mean that if one place becomes uninhabitable that another won't take its place.
Can you name at least 100 edible plants that grow within a one mile radius of your home?
Do you mean in addition to the corn, sunflowers, radishes, carrots, tomatoes, and cucumbers that I have growing in my garden?;-)
Don't get me wrong - I think that reducing greenhouse gasses is a good idea. I just think that the way that we've approached this whole argument is really very unproductive. "The sky is falling" is not the way to make the argument. The way to make the argument is to provide alternatives that have less of an environmental impact and then promote those. Show me a car that runs on a fuel cell and is powered by a nuke plant. Then sell it to me for no more than 25% above the sticker of a regular car. As part of the sales process, make sure that I understand that not only will I be helping the environment, but I won't be dependent on foreign oil any more. Certainly this is all very doable over a reasonable period of time, and you're likely to get a lot of support from many different sectors along the way because you've included everyone in the process.
As a species we've never faced quite so dire a threat... combined with such a fragile infrastructure
Our planet is constantly under change, sometimes for good, and sometimes for bad. To think that ours is a fragile infrastructure, however, is probably a little shortsighted. Anytime I hear the term "runaway", I find myself asking this simple question: "If the ecosystem is so fragile and we're teetering on the brink, why has this not happened before?" I think if you really want to make the case for global warming then you have to show evidence of it in the past. Dinosaurs don't count because the prevailing theory is that it was a massive meteorite impact that wiped them out. (Either that, or Homer Simpson going back in time with a cold and sneezing on them.) Ice core samples from Greenland for the last several thousand years show a predominately cooler planet, but one with temperature fluctuations that far exceed anything that we've seen in our records over the last few hundred years. So I'll buy into your theory as soon as you can demonstrate that the planet is not able to correct for climate change.
Wake me when they can attach executable code to any section of a program.
That's kind of been our theory on this. Just because you can come up with something that matches doesn't necessarily mean that it even will look like the object that it's meant to replace. For example, I want to replace an RPM in a Linux distro with a rogue component yet still match the MD5 hash. Since I'm going to have to replace the rest of the RPMs with something that create the same hash, am I still going to have a functioning Linux distro when I'm done? Or perhaps I'll attempt to pad the data, but then will the new file size not make it obvious that the data has been tampered with?
Actually, I had the reverse problem. I had one chair, one small desk that I put rollers on, a desktop PC on the floor, a small roller cabinet in the corner, and a chair. I docked my laptop on my desk for a second machine. I could push everything to the wall in about 30 seconds. But this created a real problem for me. When I'd step out for a break, people would move into my office for meetings because it was the only free space in the building.:-)
As are storage lockers and safe deposit boxes. Personally, I recommend evaluating stuff to see if you really need it. When I had an office, I had a 30 day rule. If I didn't touch it in 30 days, it was gone. It worked really well, and I had virtually nothing in my office.
rather than simply aping the rest of the industry.
Well, let's hope that they can actually pull it off. Just breaking the system into modules isn't enough. What they're really missing is cool functionality like mod_rewrite.
Maybe Microsoft has come to the realization that the rest of the world has - that every new version of Windows isn't as "revolutionary" as Windows 95 was. Ever since the end of the.com era when computers really just became commodity items, Microsoft has been trying to convince us that their next new OS will also be the next greatest thing in computing. Much of what I've read about Vista isn't all that interesting, and it's good to see the computer industry give Vista the coverage that it deserves. If Microsoft hopes to avoid going down in flames altogether, it has to adopt the incremental strategy that everyone else uses. What will be interesting to see is if Microsoft can manage this well. With 7 new flavors of Vista alone, throwing more versions of the OS into the mix at a rapid rate is just going to confuse the market even further. To be at all successful, the first thing that they'll have to do it switch back to a numbering system like Mac or their old year-based system (95/98/2000) so that people can keep tabs on their OS. This is good not only from a marketing standpoint where people feel like they've got an old copy of the OS that they want to upgrade, but it's also good from a patch standpoint. How are people to know whether ending the life cycle of a named OS is going to impact their version?
Personally, I think that Microsoft will continue to implode under the weight of Windows. The testing alone on all the various current and future versions of Windows will suck up a significant amount of their resources. I'd be willing to bet that just a few years after Vista is released that Microsoft starts talking about end-of-life for XP because they can't sustain all those different releases. Of course so few people will have paid to upgrade their machines from the last release that there will still be a huge number of people running old code. Then they'll need to have a discounted upgrade program, which further erodes earnings, leading to even less support, and the cycle goes on...
I guess that it's just a matter of how you're looking at it then. Bill's comment translates to "computers weren't designed to be hooked together therefore no software is secure". You should be reading my initial post as "*nix was designed to be secure in all aspects from the ground up, therefore all software (including networking) is secure". If you let Bill get away with his comment, then he could easily say "because no OS today was designed for a 64 bit processor, Windows is not secure when running on a 64 bit machine" and get away with it because it's technically true.
Bill's statement kind of reminded me of President Bush's statement on the levees in New Orleans. Although I generally have a favorable view of our current President, I was horrified to hear him say that no one could forsee the levy system failing in NO when a strong hurricane came through. While that may be true for him and his people, it sure wasn't true for most of the rest of the country. Heck, I live in Seattle and I knew that that system could fail. So for Bill to claim that Windows isn't secure because Microsoft failed to take it seriously doesn't mean that you can extend that same argument to all of computing, which he did by starting his sentence with the phrase "Software in general, whether it was from Microsoft or somebody else..."
So you wouldn't agree then that having a security mindset from the initial design stages of an operating system yields a significantly more robust solution than one that's bolted on after the fact. Would that be a fair assessment of your comments?
If they don't get their shit together, they are going to go on the steady slope down to the bottom of the lake.
So true, but "get[ting] their shit together" can mean different things. I'd like to think it means that they'll actually start looking at what their customers want and produce it. But take a look at Bill's comment on security:
Q: Some people hold Microsoft most accountable for security problems, even though software flaws are exploited by "bad guys," as you said. Is that a fair criticism?
Gates: Software in general, whether it was from Microsoft or somebody else, was not set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together. So it's not like there was some software that had this security capability and our software did not...
Now I don't know about you, but this sounds like the same old familiar FUD that we've heard before. The problem is that the interviewer didn't stop Bill in his tracks and call him a liar. I could see him making this statement if it were just a matter of opinion, but the truth of the matter is that *nix is inherently a multi-user, "we don't trust the student hacking on system from the terminals in the basement at 2am and eating pizza" kind of OS. Bill knows better and it just flat out lying to shift the responsibility away from where it truly lies, which is on *his* shoulders as Microsoft's "Chief Software Architect".
Work your ass off on that, and put it proudly on your resume when you're done.
I went to school at PodunkU, but it had a very good theoretical CS program. When I found myself in around the MIT and Stanford grads, I didn't have any real problem keeping up with them on the theoretical side of computing. Throw in a healthy Midwest work ethic, and I had a real advantage.
The guys who suffered the most were those who were self-taught. They didn't understand simple concepts like bit manipulation or queue theory. Now while I'll admit that I don't often think about Dijkstra's algorithm, I have had a practical application of it recently. So I don't want to pick on anyone who doesn't have a CS degree because I've seen some really good work, but I do tend to see a difference in those with a CS background and those without.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I was totally against the project, I think monorails offer a lot that light rail and heavy rail don't. Their biggest benefit is that, like a subway, it has little or no impact on surface traffic. Unlike subway, however, it's much cheaper to build since you don't have to dig everything up. Monorails are a good idea. Seattle's implementation would have been good too, but after spending billions on sports stadiums and a regional light rail system, the city just couldn't afford it.
I'm really glad that they killed this, even though I don't live in Seattle proper. As a resident of King County (of which Seattle is a part), I could see the handwriting on the wall - the project gets into financial trouble and somehow it's up to the rest of the county/state to bail out the project because it's "vital" to the region. What a load of crap! I'm glad to see politicians finally have the balls to stand up and call this project what it is - a "nice to have" project that the city just can't afford. Too bad this doesn't happen more often.
I said, "any software vendor in his/her right mind". That wouldn't include Microsoft. ;-)
They can export data into an Excel spreadsheet and preserve it for eternity if they want.
and what if something happens to your company or your company simply decide for some reason the service is no longer running? any remaining customers are screwed.
You're absolutely correct. But the same thing can happen when you buy the code. I know people who are still using code on VAXes but they're having a real hard time finding replacement hardware any more. How many DOS games no longer run under Windows? There are plenty of parallels here.
But, in defense of your argument, I can see the concern that we might just shut down with no warning. And I agree. But if you're worried about that then you'd better never hire any employees because they could quit tomorrow with no warning and leave you high-and-dry with whatever project they're working on. You'd also better never work with any other "service" companies for the same reason. Ever have T-shirts printed with your company logo on them? There's usually a setup fee, and if that company goes away then do you have access to the digitized artwork?
Obviously you weren't paying attention. It's clear that there's a conspiracy to cover up the truth here, because in nearly 10 years the [Clinton] White House hasn't commented on this issue. I for one am going to rush out and build a device to stop any more EMF from entering my home. I'll do that as soon as I finish building my equipment that prevents the last great White House coverup - alien anal probes.
Seriously, I've thought about taking myself off Ask Slashdot, but it's like turning away when you're about to witness a train wreck. It's just too hard to ignore.
A lot has changed in that time. A couple of years ago, we built an ASP-based service. At the time, we were really worried about high-speed bandwidth adoption. To our surprise, this has not been a problem at all. We seldom ever get calls from people with dial-up service.
The biggest problem that we face is one of perception. People believe that if they buy the software and install it on their PC that somehow they'll have a better experience. They forget that as soon as their PC is full of viruses that the program stops working. They forget that they have to backup their data on a regular basis. They forget that their data is locked in a single place rather than being accessible from any web browser in the world. I think that people are reluctant to build dependencies on others, but that will change over time. After all, when was the last time somebody stapled their own wires to a phone pole because they didn't trust the telephone network?
Oh, I don't know about that. All they have to do is look at the NY Yankees to see that spending a whole lot of cash will get you a great team. :-)
But when you say "watching over our domains wasn't ever my job", then exactly whose job is it? I hate NSI like everybody else, but it's not their job to babysit your company's brand for you. If you never had clear ownership of the domain name then you should never have spent the time and energy advertising it.
Do you really believe that any software vendor in his/her right mind is going to release a Vista-only application? My 2004 copy of Quickbooks still runs on Windows 98.
That doesn't sound like a whole lot to me. Most reasonable people will pay good money if they're getting something in return. Can you site at least one proposed feature of Vista that you think would be worth paying real money for? (Genuine question)
There was a time when the Sahara Desert was green and lush and agriculturally productive. That doesn't mean that if one place becomes uninhabitable that another won't take its place.
Can you name at least 100 edible plants that grow within a one mile radius of your home?
Do you mean in addition to the corn, sunflowers, radishes, carrots, tomatoes, and cucumbers that I have growing in my garden? ;-)
Don't get me wrong - I think that reducing greenhouse gasses is a good idea. I just think that the way that we've approached this whole argument is really very unproductive. "The sky is falling" is not the way to make the argument. The way to make the argument is to provide alternatives that have less of an environmental impact and then promote those. Show me a car that runs on a fuel cell and is powered by a nuke plant. Then sell it to me for no more than 25% above the sticker of a regular car. As part of the sales process, make sure that I understand that not only will I be helping the environment, but I won't be dependent on foreign oil any more. Certainly this is all very doable over a reasonable period of time, and you're likely to get a lot of support from many different sectors along the way because you've included everyone in the process.
Our planet is constantly under change, sometimes for good, and sometimes for bad. To think that ours is a fragile infrastructure, however, is probably a little shortsighted. Anytime I hear the term "runaway", I find myself asking this simple question: "If the ecosystem is so fragile and we're teetering on the brink, why has this not happened before?" I think if you really want to make the case for global warming then you have to show evidence of it in the past. Dinosaurs don't count because the prevailing theory is that it was a massive meteorite impact that wiped them out. (Either that, or Homer Simpson going back in time with a cold and sneezing on them.) Ice core samples from Greenland for the last several thousand years show a predominately cooler planet, but one with temperature fluctuations that far exceed anything that we've seen in our records over the last few hundred years. So I'll buy into your theory as soon as you can demonstrate that the planet is not able to correct for climate change.
That's kind of been our theory on this. Just because you can come up with something that matches doesn't necessarily mean that it even will look like the object that it's meant to replace. For example, I want to replace an RPM in a Linux distro with a rogue component yet still match the MD5 hash. Since I'm going to have to replace the rest of the RPMs with something that create the same hash, am I still going to have a functioning Linux distro when I'm done? Or perhaps I'll attempt to pad the data, but then will the new file size not make it obvious that the data has been tampered with?
Actually, I had the reverse problem. I had one chair, one small desk that I put rollers on, a desktop PC on the floor, a small roller cabinet in the corner, and a chair. I docked my laptop on my desk for a second machine. I could push everything to the wall in about 30 seconds. But this created a real problem for me. When I'd step out for a break, people would move into my office for meetings because it was the only free space in the building. :-)
As are storage lockers and safe deposit boxes. Personally, I recommend evaluating stuff to see if you really need it. When I had an office, I had a 30 day rule. If I didn't touch it in 30 days, it was gone. It worked really well, and I had virtually nothing in my office.
corrupteed?
watching TV, drinking coffee and pop. It's a great setup.
You got it wrong. It's "beetches".
Well, let's hope that they can actually pull it off. Just breaking the system into modules isn't enough. What they're really missing is cool functionality like mod_rewrite.
Somebody has been a bad boy and not been reading Slashdot lately. See here and here.
Maybe Microsoft has come to the realization that the rest of the world has - that every new version of Windows isn't as "revolutionary" as Windows 95 was. Ever since the end of the .com era when computers really just became commodity items, Microsoft has been trying to convince us that their next new OS will also be the next greatest thing in computing. Much of what I've read about Vista isn't all that interesting, and it's good to see the computer industry give Vista the coverage that it deserves. If Microsoft hopes to avoid going down in flames altogether, it has to adopt the incremental strategy that everyone else uses. What will be interesting to see is if Microsoft can manage this well. With 7 new flavors of Vista alone, throwing more versions of the OS into the mix at a rapid rate is just going to confuse the market even further. To be at all successful, the first thing that they'll have to do it switch back to a numbering system like Mac or their old year-based system (95/98/2000) so that people can keep tabs on their OS. This is good not only from a marketing standpoint where people feel like they've got an old copy of the OS that they want to upgrade, but it's also good from a patch standpoint. How are people to know whether ending the life cycle of a named OS is going to impact their version?
Personally, I think that Microsoft will continue to implode under the weight of Windows. The testing alone on all the various current and future versions of Windows will suck up a significant amount of their resources. I'd be willing to bet that just a few years after Vista is released that Microsoft starts talking about end-of-life for XP because they can't sustain all those different releases. Of course so few people will have paid to upgrade their machines from the last release that there will still be a huge number of people running old code. Then they'll need to have a discounted upgrade program, which further erodes earnings, leading to even less support, and the cycle goes on...
Bill's statement kind of reminded me of President Bush's statement on the levees in New Orleans. Although I generally have a favorable view of our current President, I was horrified to hear him say that no one could forsee the levy system failing in NO when a strong hurricane came through. While that may be true for him and his people, it sure wasn't true for most of the rest of the country. Heck, I live in Seattle and I knew that that system could fail. So for Bill to claim that Windows isn't secure because Microsoft failed to take it seriously doesn't mean that you can extend that same argument to all of computing, which he did by starting his sentence with the phrase "Software in general, whether it was from Microsoft or somebody else..."
So you wouldn't agree then that having a security mindset from the initial design stages of an operating system yields a significantly more robust solution than one that's bolted on after the fact. Would that be a fair assessment of your comments?
So true, but "get[ting] their shit together" can mean different things. I'd like to think it means that they'll actually start looking at what their customers want and produce it. But take a look at Bill's comment on security:
Now I don't know about you, but this sounds like the same old familiar FUD that we've heard before. The problem is that the interviewer didn't stop Bill in his tracks and call him a liar. I could see him making this statement if it were just a matter of opinion, but the truth of the matter is that *nix is inherently a multi-user, "we don't trust the student hacking on system from the terminals in the basement at 2am and eating pizza" kind of OS. Bill knows better and it just flat out lying to shift the responsibility away from where it truly lies, which is on *his* shoulders as Microsoft's "Chief Software Architect".
I went to school at PodunkU, but it had a very good theoretical CS program. When I found myself in around the MIT and Stanford grads, I didn't have any real problem keeping up with them on the theoretical side of computing. Throw in a healthy Midwest work ethic, and I had a real advantage.
The guys who suffered the most were those who were self-taught. They didn't understand simple concepts like bit manipulation or queue theory. Now while I'll admit that I don't often think about Dijkstra's algorithm, I have had a practical application of it recently. So I don't want to pick on anyone who doesn't have a CS degree because I've seen some really good work, but I do tend to see a difference in those with a CS background and those without.