The Republican accuses Democrat of stealing the Washington governor election, but there's far more evidence that someone meddled in the election on behalf of GW Bush.
So why didn't you start out with this line instead? Or better yet, leave off the "GW Bush" and just say "meddled in our presidential elections" and then provide some proof to go along with your accusations. A sure way to get modded a troll is to bring up President Bush. You might not like him, but get over it. The 2008 election is well under way, and you're pissing and moaning about something that happened five years ago? And by the way, if you think that the system is so broken, what have *you* personally done to fix it? Griping on/. doesn't count.
I'll give you this much - at least you're willing to identify yourself. I'm getting tired of all the Anonymous Coward/. posts. There's too much guerilla warfare happening around here, especially when it comes to politics. Everyone should be required to log in, and the number of anonymous posts should be strictly limited.
Re:What ever happened making every vote count?
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WA Governor Race Ends
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Don't ever count on winning Washington again in your lifetime. You have just created a deep red state.
Ok, I'm conservative and live near Seattle, and even I don't believe this bullshit. There are a lot of pissed off people here for sure, but this one case isn't going to change people's perceptions all that much.
I'm just happy to see the Democrats now running amok and raising taxes and pushing an agenda where getting a Botox injection is treated something like a crime. I have at least some measure of faith that while the people of our great state are left-leaning, they have a lot more common sense than to buy into this agenda. There have been huge anti-tax movements in this state, which has impacted nearly every liberal agenda item, both social and economic. The Democrats have more to fear from the initiative to repeal their centerpiece gas tax than they do from the judge's decision yesterday.
Well, actually state law which was passed by the legislature allows for court challenge in cases like this. The state Constitution also provides for checks and balances just like at the Federal level. What they were asking for wasn't a court-appointed governor, but rather an affirmation that the results were indeed legitimate. Nothing wrong with that.
That being said, while I'm a big fan of Rossi, I think that the Republican challenge was pretty weak. When you have to rely on stats to make a decision then the choice is pretty clear - do nothing. The judge did the right thing here. He told our citizens that we'd better clean up this mess ourselves. In King County where I live, that means throwing out Dean Logan, the appointed county elections director. Since his boss doesn't think that this is necessary, it's time to remove Ron Sims as well.
Hmm, are you suggesting that the next big advance is going to come from academia? Or are you suggesting that it's the younger generation that will give us the next big push? You shouldn't necessarily tie the two together. There are a lot of really bright young kids coming out of our colleges these days, but I'm not sure how much the schools themselves are doing to advance their education. Ever look at a current version of a computer science text? Not much that's interesting there, other than the $200+ price tag. I'd like to think that in many situations these students are doing well in spite of the lack of support that they're getting from their educational institutions.
Look, words like "North" and "South" are relative terms... Just because it's called "North Korea" doesn't mean it's to the north of everything on earth.
As soon as the north magnetic pole drifts over N. Korea then it will be. That is, until the Earth's magnetic poles flip, at which time it will south of everything.
Don't say this too loud. I live in the Seattle area and know a guy in the storage locker business. A few years back when it was reported that N. Korea had a missle that *might* reach the U.S., he suddenly got flooded with requests for storage space from people wanting to move out of the area quickly. Many of them reported concern that we might get nuked real soon. While this might not necessarily be a bad thing if they took out Fremont, I seriously doubt that it would happen in my lifetime. It's really kind of funny when you think about it - there's the Cascadia Subduction Zone just off the Washington coast just waiting to deliver a magnitude 9.0 quake to this region and these guys are worried about N. Korea. I don't get why people worry about remote possibilities when there are real threats just around the corner.
So you're the guy who keeps dropping his trash off in the road outside my house out here in the boonies. You wouldn't also happen to be the one dropping off all those stolen cars, would you? And what about that old meth lab we found?
Well, I was talking more about pronunciation. Choose and lose are pronounced the same even though they have different sets of vowels. That's why it's so easy to write loose when you really mean to use lose. If pronounced by the rules of the English language, the "o" in lose should be long, making it sound like the hardware chain Lowes and therefore being more consistent with chose.
And while we're at it, why is pronunciation not spelled pronounciation to make it more consistent with pronounce?
What moron modded the parent a troll? It's a brilliant piece of work. If you don't understand a subtle joke then stop reading/., or at least stop wasting mod points.
For the record, I screw this one up all the time. Why are chose and choose different than lose and loose anyway?
All the money in the world doesn't do you any good if you don't know how to use it or you're unwilling to risk it. Microsoft has lost a tremendous amount of its intellectual capital over the years. Many of these people have been replaced by bureaucrats who are unable or unwilling to take a risk because their passion is to retain power. The days of old when Microsoft employees had a passion for technology are nearly gone. Research dollars are spent to keep people employed, not make new discoveries. I'd rather be sitting on a pile of great people than sitting on a pile of cash any day.
Also, I think the point of the article is that Microsoft must come up with a strategy for dealing with F/OSS. They live in a boxed product world, and for all the talk of.Net, there's still no real movement away from the model that's been successful for them for so many years. Markets change - they always do - and Microsoft must respond or die. I don't see an instantaneous death, but rather a slow, painful twisting in the wind as they become more and more irrelevant. When was the last time anyone really cared about a keynote address delivered by Bill Gates?
It goes further than that sometimes. I see a lot of stuff on/. that's moderated as troll or flamebait that really just boils down to a difference of opinion with the parent post. Meta-moderation helps fix some of this, but I think as a community we should rely more on logic than name-calling to solve our differences.
I'm sure this will be labeled flamebait, but I think it should be said. Are today's songs or movies really all that important that we should be worried about DRM? I've seen the latest Star Wars movie and heard Britney Spears sing, and I gotta say that if I didn't have access to either one them any more then I could really care less. How about we fix the problems with the movie industry by demanding quality films? Or maybe we go out of our way to look for bands that play good music rather than listening to the prepackaged crap delivered by those that the RIAA represents. It's like we're fighting over 10 square feet of desert when there's acres and acres of lush, green land just over the next hill.
Contrary to popular opinion, there are lots of ways to keep yourself entertained. Read a book, go for a walk or a drive, play a board game with your family, build a piece of furniture, or maybe even go on a date. I know the last one sounds pretty tough for some of you, but you'd be surprised how easy it is to strike up a conversation with a girl when you're not talking to her about hardware-enabled DRM.
I want to ask a really serious question here - What exactly is the.Net strategy? I ask this question because people ask me what.Net is, and after all this time all I can only tell them is that it's given us a new programming language similar to Java. Forget the FUD, what is.Net really? I'm not looking for a link to MSDN. I'm looking for is a single concise statement about the technology. For example, I could say that managed code is "a replacement for traditional programming techniques that focuses on eliminating mistakes made by novice programmers thereby improving program stability and security". Is there such a one-liner for the.Net strategy?
It's important to note that for any Microsoft idea to flourish it needs support from two arenas - the external public development community and the internal Microsoft development community. While there have always been a lot of folks at Microsoft (including Bill) who will tell you that managed code is the way to go, there is also a huge community of developers at Microsoft who still believe that lightweight code is the best and that managed code sucks at the kernel level. Many of these people still haven't moved into the world of C++, so how is it now that people believe that they will adopt.Net? The notion that any truly important pieces of Longhorn would be built on top of.Net was more marketing FUD than anything else. But then again Microsoft has a long history of stringing the market along to keep their interest, going all the way back to Cairo.
It's interesting to note that in recent years that Microsoft has developed a "one size fits all" mentality. In the early days of Microsoft there were lots of options to pick from (like we currently see in the Linux community), but economy of scale has dictated a streamlining of technology. For example, Microsoft used to support lots of different database technologies (Access, FoxPro, SQL Server) and then there came a big push to center everything around SQL Server. The problem is that SQL Server is great for some applications, but not for others. So the drive to center everything around.Net doesn't suprise me because Microsoft no longer values diversity of technology in its products.
"RAID 5 you say?", he says, attempting his best Yoda immitation. "Disk space still so expensive that RAID 5 you must still use? Beware of the dark side my young padawan."
Am I wrong in thinking that unless your concerned about the physical disk space or power requirements or few extra $ to go with RAID 1, that there's no longer much benefit to RAID 5? I hear comments like "I can get data off of a striped set faster than a mirror", but as you mention there's a lot of processing that needs to be done to put all the data back together and I think that that tends to offset the gains in reading from multiple drives at once. Given the fact that the RAID 1 is simpler than RAID 5 and therefore by definition more stable, is there any reason any more to use RAID 5, at least for small (<1 TB) installations?
True, but OSes in general are. So are office productivity suites. These two packages combined make up the vast amount of Microsoft's revenues.
The sad thing is that Microsoft has been unable to successfully diversify, probably because they have such a large empire to protect. It kind of reminds me of the Detroit automakers who are trying to figure out how to sell SUVs in a world of $2.50/gallon gas. (For the record, I drive a very large truck that sucks gas like crazy. I would buy another in a heartbeat. It's kinda hard to haul hay in a Prius. The right vehicle for the right application.)
So here's a question for you - Are you looking at replacing any of your applications and servers in the future, or are you going to be content keeping what you have and nursing it along for a while? If you're still actively purchasing new Microsoft software then they are interested in you, but if you're going to want to download patches for your current OS for the next 10 years then they aren't. Your comment holds weight only if you're parting with your hard-earned cash on a regular basis for technology.
I don't necessarily agree with this statement, but let's say that I do. The assumption here is that CIOs actually control technology in their companies. While they make day-to-day strategic decisions, they really don't have much control over the long-term direction that their company's technology takes. This is driven primarily by end users and the technologists who serve them. Hogwash you say? Well how about a little history lesson.
Back when I was a youngster, IBM held dominance in the marketplace. Every CIO (they didn't call themselves that back then) that had a data center ran IBM. They seemed unbeatable. But then the PC came along and beat the pants off the old mainframe systems. This happened because users were demanding more capability than your average mainframe could deliver. It wasn't a matter of computing capacity, but rather the MIS department's ability to deliver applications in a timely manner. I worked on a project where we dumped a $50,000 app that we had written with a much more capable system on a PC built on Excel. Our customer (in this case another group in our organization) was very happy and we saved ourselves a lot of cash in the process. This new way of thinking wasn't driven by the CIO, but rather by the technologists who knew how to put this stuff together. It was collaborative and creative.
Fast forward to today. Corporations don't really drive the marketplace. Sure they have influence, but to think that by taking care of a very limited group of CIOs that somehow you're going to dominate the marketplace is a ridiculous idea. There are literally millions of small businesses that drive the economy and they don't consult their CIO when making a buying decision. They'll usually talk to another small business owner or their geeky nephew or some other "lowly" technologist. The CIO is nowhere to be seen.
Personally I don't know why Microsoft or any other company chases after large corporations like they do, other than that they're a large corporation themselves and know how to service that marketplace. Sure Microsoft has made billions on this market, but the question is whether or not it's sustainable. Once things become commodities (as software is fast becoming), large customers become very price conscious and beat you up for the last $. So unless they're a prestige account or you get some economy of scale, they're pretty much useless from a profit perspective. You're much better off servicing small to medium sized customers who either don't have the leverage or aren't as price sensitive.
If I'm looking to the real future of computing, I'd rather know what a bunch of geeks in high school think about technology than some random group of CIOs. They'll have the greatest degree of influence over it in the long haul.
I agree. We send virtually all email from our web site in HTML with the exception of invoice email. The reason that we send invoices in text is that we want to minimize the possibility of getting trapped by a spam filter. Start adding images and stuff like that and you'll get picked off.
My question for you is "what is your target audience?" If it's my mom then by all means send HTML email. If it's a bunch of geeks that hate HTML email then send them text. Actually, you can send both at the same time with a multipart MIME email. The problem here is that some email clients are kind of stupid and don't handle them well. For example, if you send text or multipart to Thunderbird and try to reply using an alternate identity then the message body is blank.
For what it's worth, one reason that HTML email is more widely accepted is that many clients turn off image rendering and javascript and other "bad" things by default. This leaves the remaining message pretty benign.
No time to read the thread, so some of this may have already been covered. I did a similar project where we had to keep track of billions of hits on a web site. The volumes got to be too great to handle using SQL Server inserts. The nature of our data (which is common for data sets this size) is that some loss was acceptable but only in situations where the servers experienced a problem (power loss, server lockup, etc) We weren't running a bank. So we'd write stuff to an in-memory queue and have a background thread pick up the data and write it to disk on idle cycles. Every hour we'd start a new disk file, pick up the previous hour's data, and load it into the db. Eventually even this didn't work because our loads were too great, so then our hourly processing process got a makeover and started doing some of the summarization of the data sets that we needed and we just dumped the raw data. There were many people who didn't like that idea because we lost the original values, but once we proved that it didn't affect the final values then it was accepted.
The moral of the story is to determine up-front how much of that data you really need.
I mainly fall into the "no" camp because of a lot of things that I've seen. For example, I was once sent by my company to a "real time computing" conference in Seattle and after 1.5 days I concluded that it was nothing more than a way for a bunch of soon-to-be-graduated people to get noticed. They were talking about stuff that had little relevance to real-world problems. Another experience I had was with a guy who was wrapping up his PhD on processing large volumes of log data in real-time. The difference between him and me was that he spent 4 years paying someone to "allow" him to do the work whereas I spent 3 months getting paid by my employer to do roughly the same thing. I also had the benefit of having my code already processing several billion real-world transactions as opposed to a bunch of crap that was made up in a lab.
That being said, I have read a couple of pieces coming from academia that really impressed me. They were primarily targeted at real problems. For example, I read a great piece on the now defunt LRP and some other stuff on clustering too. So there are some gems out there if you look for them.
I'm personally a fan of LinuxJournal even though it's not really an academic publication. They do some pretty interesting stuff and I usually get one or two good ideas per month. I do like reading what others are doing so that I don't have to repeat the process. The sad fact, however, is that many universities are behind the technology curve when it comes to leading edge research. Just because their school's students were the first to have MP3 players doesn't mean a university knows diddly about the current state of technology. I'd bet that there's more of interest on/. than what's happening in all the computer labs at all the large universities all across the country, trolls notwithstanding.
Deliberate pandering to the young "omg i wanna screw teh hot chick in star trek lolololol" demographic. Jolene Blalock was used as a vulcan sex symbol instead of just a vulcan. Hell, if they were doing that, they could have shown more of Hoshi too... I thought she was way more sexy (as was evident in the mirror universe episodes). But anyway, this was stupid.
That's pretty much when Enterprise jumped the shark for me. It didn't take long to see that this was going to be nothing more than a skin-fest with very little meat. (No pun intended.) What I really love about Amanda Tapping's character on SG-1 is that they really play up all the good things about her beyond the fact that she's physically attractive. I mean she can kill a Jaffa, bake a souffle, pick a lock, and ride a motorcycle all in the same day. There's nothing wrong with having good looking people on the show, but there's got to be more to it than that to keep my interest. But let's face it - a little sex appeal is a good thing. I'm sure all the women on/. (current count = 0) would tell you that RDA is pretty hot and if they're honest then they'll say that that's at least a small part of the reason why they watch the show.
I'm like you, but I gave up Star Trek after TNG. They all pretty much sucked after that, and even TNG had it's aweful moments. I had high hopes for Enterprise, especially with Scott Bakula who was great in Quantum Leap. But it degraded very quickly into the same old story lines as before.
For real action, my choice of Sci-Fi is Stargate SG-1. With the exception of Season 7, it doesn't suffer from that "let's sit in a room and push buttons" syndrome that Star Trek has had problems with since the original movies. If I want to watch people explore then I really want to see them leave the room, and SG-1 is always shooting outdoors. (It's really funny how all the planets that they visit seem to look a lot like the Vancouver, B.C. area though.)
But maybe not for the reason that you think. I hear a lot of comments about how bad Microsoft software is, or how expensive it is, or how many security flaws it has. But if you read the article carefully, it's the concept of "convergence" that's really at the heart of Microsoft's problems.
Convergence isn't new to Microsoft at all. It's how they've conducted business all along. The reason that Microsoft has succeeded all these years is that they brought something to that marketplace that it really wanted - ease of use. Everything was integrated together in one clean way. Windows was "great", but what really made Microsoft great was OLE and COM and XML. Hook stuff together and make it work and people will pay big bucks. You may not agree, but the marketplace doesn't want to have to think about which UI they want to install or whether it will work with every application. Most people just want stuff to work. (Yeah, I know, this is/. and that we love to build things, but let's face it, we're not "the norm".)
So what's the future of integration? Well, I'd say that unlike Microsoft's vision of throwing everything into one box, we're going to see a pattern of "divergence" away from all-in-one devices. The pattern of convergence has been seen before, like the all-in-one VCR/TV or all-in-one entertainment centers, that have had limited success. If my Windows Media Center PC dies, do I really want to lose my ability to surf the web, play games, pay my bills, and do my homework all at the same time?
What Microsoft is missing is that the integration point isn't in a single box, but in a single network. Bill has already admitted to missing the Internet in 1995, and that's because in his world we bring everything to one place and control it there. But the reality of the situation is that different devices serve different functions for a reason. Sure I can build a PC that does everything, but is that what I really want? Or do I just want to have my different devices talk to each other (and my friend's devices) and share information? Not that I necessarily want to live in the Java world where my toaster tells my fridge that it's toasting the last slice of bread and to order more, but it sure would be nice if I could do something as simple as have my phone exchange contact information with my PC on my desk without having to dock it. That's a far cry from the Microsoft world where I hold my PC to my head to make a phone call because I have to store all my data in one place. At least then I can get more than 30 minutes of talk time on my phone because the CPU isn't sucking up power yet adding no value to the call in progress.
Especially when you've only got *one* machine to both work with the program and read the documentation.
Instead of incurring the cost of printing something, why not just buy another machine? Seriously. You can pick up a PC for so cheap these days and compared to what it costs to print a few manuals, you're probably about break even. Get yourself a KVM switch if you're worried about desk space.
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So why didn't you start out with this line instead? Or better yet, leave off the "GW Bush" and just say "meddled in our presidential elections" and then provide some proof to go along with your accusations. A sure way to get modded a troll is to bring up President Bush. You might not like him, but get over it. The 2008 election is well under way, and you're pissing and moaning about something that happened five years ago? And by the way, if you think that the system is so broken, what have *you* personally done to fix it? Griping on /. doesn't count.
I'll give you this much - at least you're willing to identify yourself. I'm getting tired of all the Anonymous Coward /. posts. There's too much guerilla warfare happening around here, especially when it comes to politics. Everyone should be required to log in, and the number of anonymous posts should be strictly limited.
Ok, I'm conservative and live near Seattle, and even I don't believe this bullshit. There are a lot of pissed off people here for sure, but this one case isn't going to change people's perceptions all that much.
I'm just happy to see the Democrats now running amok and raising taxes and pushing an agenda where getting a Botox injection is treated something like a crime. I have at least some measure of faith that while the people of our great state are left-leaning, they have a lot more common sense than to buy into this agenda. There have been huge anti-tax movements in this state, which has impacted nearly every liberal agenda item, both social and economic. The Democrats have more to fear from the initiative to repeal their centerpiece gas tax than they do from the judge's decision yesterday.
That being said, while I'm a big fan of Rossi, I think that the Republican challenge was pretty weak. When you have to rely on stats to make a decision then the choice is pretty clear - do nothing. The judge did the right thing here. He told our citizens that we'd better clean up this mess ourselves. In King County where I live, that means throwing out Dean Logan, the appointed county elections director. Since his boss doesn't think that this is necessary, it's time to remove Ron Sims as well.
Hmm, are you suggesting that the next big advance is going to come from academia? Or are you suggesting that it's the younger generation that will give us the next big push? You shouldn't necessarily tie the two together. There are a lot of really bright young kids coming out of our colleges these days, but I'm not sure how much the schools themselves are doing to advance their education. Ever look at a current version of a computer science text? Not much that's interesting there, other than the $200+ price tag. I'd like to think that in many situations these students are doing well in spite of the lack of support that they're getting from their educational institutions.
As soon as the north magnetic pole drifts over N. Korea then it will be. That is, until the Earth's magnetic poles flip, at which time it will south of everything.
Don't say this too loud. I live in the Seattle area and know a guy in the storage locker business. A few years back when it was reported that N. Korea had a missle that *might* reach the U.S., he suddenly got flooded with requests for storage space from people wanting to move out of the area quickly. Many of them reported concern that we might get nuked real soon. While this might not necessarily be a bad thing if they took out Fremont, I seriously doubt that it would happen in my lifetime. It's really kind of funny when you think about it - there's the Cascadia Subduction Zone just off the Washington coast just waiting to deliver a magnitude 9.0 quake to this region and these guys are worried about N. Korea. I don't get why people worry about remote possibilities when there are real threats just around the corner.
So you're the guy who keeps dropping his trash off in the road outside my house out here in the boonies. You wouldn't also happen to be the one dropping off all those stolen cars, would you? And what about that old meth lab we found?
And while we're at it, why is pronunciation not spelled pronounciation to make it more consistent with pronounce?
For the record, I screw this one up all the time. Why are chose and choose different than lose and loose anyway?
Also, I think the point of the article is that Microsoft must come up with a strategy for dealing with F/OSS. They live in a boxed product world, and for all the talk of .Net, there's still no real movement away from the model that's been successful for them for so many years. Markets change - they always do - and Microsoft must respond or die. I don't see an instantaneous death, but rather a slow, painful twisting in the wind as they become more and more irrelevant. When was the last time anyone really cared about a keynote address delivered by Bill Gates?
It goes further than that sometimes. I see a lot of stuff on /. that's moderated as troll or flamebait that really just boils down to a difference of opinion with the parent post. Meta-moderation helps fix some of this, but I think as a community we should rely more on logic than name-calling to solve our differences.
Contrary to popular opinion, there are lots of ways to keep yourself entertained. Read a book, go for a walk or a drive, play a board game with your family, build a piece of furniture, or maybe even go on a date. I know the last one sounds pretty tough for some of you, but you'd be surprised how easy it is to strike up a conversation with a girl when you're not talking to her about hardware-enabled DRM.
I want to ask a really serious question here - What exactly is the .Net strategy? I ask this question because people ask me what .Net is, and after all this time all I can only tell them is that it's given us a new programming language similar to Java. Forget the FUD, what is .Net really? I'm not looking for a link to MSDN. I'm looking for is a single concise statement about the technology. For example, I could say that managed code is "a replacement for traditional programming techniques that focuses on eliminating mistakes made by novice programmers thereby improving program stability and security". Is there such a one-liner for the .Net strategy?
It's important to note that for any Microsoft idea to flourish it needs support from two arenas - the external public development community and the internal Microsoft development community. While there have always been a lot of folks at Microsoft (including Bill) who will tell you that managed code is the way to go, there is also a huge community of developers at Microsoft who still believe that lightweight code is the best and that managed code sucks at the kernel level. Many of these people still haven't moved into the world of C++, so how is it now that people believe that they will adopt .Net? The notion that any truly important pieces of Longhorn would be built on top of .Net was more marketing FUD than anything else. But then again Microsoft has a long history of stringing the market along to keep their interest, going all the way back to Cairo.
It's interesting to note that in recent years that Microsoft has developed a "one size fits all" mentality. In the early days of Microsoft there were lots of options to pick from (like we currently see in the Linux community), but economy of scale has dictated a streamlining of technology. For example, Microsoft used to support lots of different database technologies (Access, FoxPro, SQL Server) and then there came a big push to center everything around SQL Server. The problem is that SQL Server is great for some applications, but not for others. So the drive to center everything around .Net doesn't suprise me because Microsoft no longer values diversity of technology in its products.
Am I wrong in thinking that unless your concerned about the physical disk space or power requirements or few extra $ to go with RAID 1, that there's no longer much benefit to RAID 5? I hear comments like "I can get data off of a striped set faster than a mirror", but as you mention there's a lot of processing that needs to be done to put all the data back together and I think that that tends to offset the gains in reading from multiple drives at once. Given the fact that the RAID 1 is simpler than RAID 5 and therefore by definition more stable, is there any reason any more to use RAID 5, at least for small (<1 TB) installations?
True, but OSes in general are. So are office productivity suites. These two packages combined make up the vast amount of Microsoft's revenues.
The sad thing is that Microsoft has been unable to successfully diversify, probably because they have such a large empire to protect. It kind of reminds me of the Detroit automakers who are trying to figure out how to sell SUVs in a world of $2.50/gallon gas. (For the record, I drive a very large truck that sucks gas like crazy. I would buy another in a heartbeat. It's kinda hard to haul hay in a Prius. The right vehicle for the right application.)
So here's a question for you - Are you looking at replacing any of your applications and servers in the future, or are you going to be content keeping what you have and nursing it along for a while? If you're still actively purchasing new Microsoft software then they are interested in you, but if you're going to want to download patches for your current OS for the next 10 years then they aren't. Your comment holds weight only if you're parting with your hard-earned cash on a regular basis for technology.
Back when I was a youngster, IBM held dominance in the marketplace. Every CIO (they didn't call themselves that back then) that had a data center ran IBM. They seemed unbeatable. But then the PC came along and beat the pants off the old mainframe systems. This happened because users were demanding more capability than your average mainframe could deliver. It wasn't a matter of computing capacity, but rather the MIS department's ability to deliver applications in a timely manner. I worked on a project where we dumped a $50,000 app that we had written with a much more capable system on a PC built on Excel. Our customer (in this case another group in our organization) was very happy and we saved ourselves a lot of cash in the process. This new way of thinking wasn't driven by the CIO, but rather by the technologists who knew how to put this stuff together. It was collaborative and creative.
Fast forward to today. Corporations don't really drive the marketplace. Sure they have influence, but to think that by taking care of a very limited group of CIOs that somehow you're going to dominate the marketplace is a ridiculous idea. There are literally millions of small businesses that drive the economy and they don't consult their CIO when making a buying decision. They'll usually talk to another small business owner or their geeky nephew or some other "lowly" technologist. The CIO is nowhere to be seen.
Personally I don't know why Microsoft or any other company chases after large corporations like they do, other than that they're a large corporation themselves and know how to service that marketplace. Sure Microsoft has made billions on this market, but the question is whether or not it's sustainable. Once things become commodities (as software is fast becoming), large customers become very price conscious and beat you up for the last $. So unless they're a prestige account or you get some economy of scale, they're pretty much useless from a profit perspective. You're much better off servicing small to medium sized customers who either don't have the leverage or aren't as price sensitive.
If I'm looking to the real future of computing, I'd rather know what a bunch of geeks in high school think about technology than some random group of CIOs. They'll have the greatest degree of influence over it in the long haul.
My question for you is "what is your target audience?" If it's my mom then by all means send HTML email. If it's a bunch of geeks that hate HTML email then send them text. Actually, you can send both at the same time with a multipart MIME email. The problem here is that some email clients are kind of stupid and don't handle them well. For example, if you send text or multipart to Thunderbird and try to reply using an alternate identity then the message body is blank.
For what it's worth, one reason that HTML email is more widely accepted is that many clients turn off image rendering and javascript and other "bad" things by default. This leaves the remaining message pretty benign.
The moral of the story is to determine up-front how much of that data you really need.
That being said, I have read a couple of pieces coming from academia that really impressed me. They were primarily targeted at real problems. For example, I read a great piece on the now defunt LRP and some other stuff on clustering too. So there are some gems out there if you look for them.
I'm personally a fan of LinuxJournal even though it's not really an academic publication. They do some pretty interesting stuff and I usually get one or two good ideas per month. I do like reading what others are doing so that I don't have to repeat the process. The sad fact, however, is that many universities are behind the technology curve when it comes to leading edge research. Just because their school's students were the first to have MP3 players doesn't mean a university knows diddly about the current state of technology. I'd bet that there's more of interest on /. than what's happening in all the computer labs at all the large universities all across the country, trolls notwithstanding.
That's pretty much when Enterprise jumped the shark for me. It didn't take long to see that this was going to be nothing more than a skin-fest with very little meat. (No pun intended.) What I really love about Amanda Tapping's character on SG-1 is that they really play up all the good things about her beyond the fact that she's physically attractive. I mean she can kill a Jaffa, bake a souffle, pick a lock, and ride a motorcycle all in the same day. There's nothing wrong with having good looking people on the show, but there's got to be more to it than that to keep my interest. But let's face it - a little sex appeal is a good thing. I'm sure all the women on /. (current count = 0) would tell you that RDA is pretty hot and if they're honest then they'll say that that's at least a small part of the reason why they watch the show.
For real action, my choice of Sci-Fi is Stargate SG-1. With the exception of Season 7, it doesn't suffer from that "let's sit in a room and push buttons" syndrome that Star Trek has had problems with since the original movies. If I want to watch people explore then I really want to see them leave the room, and SG-1 is always shooting outdoors. (It's really funny how all the planets that they visit seem to look a lot like the Vancouver, B.C. area though.)
Convergence isn't new to Microsoft at all. It's how they've conducted business all along. The reason that Microsoft has succeeded all these years is that they brought something to that marketplace that it really wanted - ease of use. Everything was integrated together in one clean way. Windows was "great", but what really made Microsoft great was OLE and COM and XML. Hook stuff together and make it work and people will pay big bucks. You may not agree, but the marketplace doesn't want to have to think about which UI they want to install or whether it will work with every application. Most people just want stuff to work. (Yeah, I know, this is /. and that we love to build things, but let's face it, we're not "the norm".)
So what's the future of integration? Well, I'd say that unlike Microsoft's vision of throwing everything into one box, we're going to see a pattern of "divergence" away from all-in-one devices. The pattern of convergence has been seen before, like the all-in-one VCR/TV or all-in-one entertainment centers, that have had limited success. If my Windows Media Center PC dies, do I really want to lose my ability to surf the web, play games, pay my bills, and do my homework all at the same time?
What Microsoft is missing is that the integration point isn't in a single box, but in a single network. Bill has already admitted to missing the Internet in 1995, and that's because in his world we bring everything to one place and control it there. But the reality of the situation is that different devices serve different functions for a reason. Sure I can build a PC that does everything, but is that what I really want? Or do I just want to have my different devices talk to each other (and my friend's devices) and share information? Not that I necessarily want to live in the Java world where my toaster tells my fridge that it's toasting the last slice of bread and to order more, but it sure would be nice if I could do something as simple as have my phone exchange contact information with my PC on my desk without having to dock it. That's a far cry from the Microsoft world where I hold my PC to my head to make a phone call because I have to store all my data in one place. At least then I can get more than 30 minutes of talk time on my phone because the CPU isn't sucking up power yet adding no value to the call in progress.
Instead of incurring the cost of printing something, why not just buy another machine? Seriously. You can pick up a PC for so cheap these days and compared to what it costs to print a few manuals, you're probably about break even. Get yourself a KVM switch if you're worried about desk space.