Well of course, it may be that you can't get a good answer to that question until your employees use it enough to formulate complaints.
One of the key factors in the idea of "eating your own dog food" is to be responsive to feedback from those eating the dog food. The idea is that, if you're using your own product then you have both a better understanding of what needs to be changed and a greater motivation to change it. The problem with some "eat your own dog food situations" is sometimes the directive down from the boss is not "eat our own dog food and tell us how to improve it," but instead "eat our own dog food and you had better like it!"
Some of this would hinge on what you consider to be "mental illness". Does the job cause people with perfect mental health (as though there are any of those) to suddenly develop schizophrenia? You're not going to find evidence of that. If someone did suddenly develop schizophrenia, you'd also be able to find other precursors and contributing factors in that person's past. However, stress and emotional trauma can be contributory factors to all kinds of things that may be considered "mental illness".
So the trick is not finding evidence of a particular individual who has suffered due to a job. That's easy. Most jobs cause stress and emotional trauma. The trick is in determining whether the stress and emotional trauma of Amazon jobs somehow cross a line, and reach a level of *unacceptable* stress and emotional trauma. Where do you draw that line?
TV news and the 24 hour news cycle seemed to have seriously sidelined written journalism, and when nobody reads you can't have an idea that doesn't take 30 seconds to deliver, especially if there's not a picture.
Let's not forget the Internet. The Internet opened the door for amateur activist journalism in a way that was not previously possible, but it has also almost killed print journalism, which had been where a lot of our "serious news" was coming from.
The answer is: there isn't really investigative journalism anymore. Journalists mostly deliver the news as presented to them in press releases.
Lots of people would like to attribute this to malice and corruption, or else stupidity and laziness. Unfortunately, a big component of the problem is much harder to address: there isn't any money in providing news. Traditional news outlets are struggling to maintain revenue channels. Newspapers are going under, and TV news is mostly focused on tabloid news, because that's what people watch.
More than anything else, the poor quality of journalism is our own fault. We're getting the news that we choose to watch and choose to pay for.
If not USING your PC is your idea of IT, I'm glad I dont' work w/ you!
Using it and doing silly hacks and customizations are not the same thing. It's fun to compile all your Linux binaries with non-standard tweaks, reskin everything, and customize the hell out of your computer when you're 12 years old and just learning. When you really want computers to work reliably, you have to consider that every non-standard tweak is another chance for something stupid to go wrong. To a certain extent, it's a trade-off: hacks and customizations vs. stability and reliability. Sometimes it's worth the trade-off. For most people most of the time, it isn't.
And keep in mind, I'm not talking about normal/supported customization. You want to change the background wallpaper or cursor? Great. If you want to install some freeware thingy that gives you whacky animated wallpaper and cursors? There's a decent chance it's malware. If not, it's probably going to break at some point, if you're lucky enough that it's not going to break something else.
Somethings make work easier, like AutoHotKey. The later, I only use every now (not even quarterly?) and then to create rapid text macros needed for doing manual manipulation of >20 records at a time. A rarity, but it saves hours!
Great. So that's a useful tool that improves your productivity. You use it. I said, "Don't have more software installed on your system than you use." So that counts as "software you use".
Like many I've used photoXXXX, (including bump mapping, texturizing, Masking, Merging multiple layers, color replacements, etc... not making Memes) but I don't use PhotoXXXX on a regular basis, maybe 2x a year. Should I uninstall / re-install that every time?
No, I'm saying don't install or uninstall software any more than you need to. If you use it, install it once, and keep it patched and up to date. Don't install it unless you have a reason to do so. Don't uninstall it unless you have a reason to do so. It may be almost a superstition with me, but for most of the computers I've seen over my career that have been well and truly fucked, to the point of needing to be reformatted and reinstalled from scratch, it's because someone has been installing, uninstalling, and reinstalling a bunch of crapware, screwing around with settings, and trying to "optimize" it in some way.
And this isn't an "IT vs. users" thing. I'm talking to IT people too. Don't customize things more than you need to. Don't install crap that people won't use. Keep it simple.
You are asking what makes me uninstall apps, but I think the bigger question is, what makes me not uninstall apps. I don't install a lot of apps, and with most apps that I try out, I immediately remove them.
There's a simple pattern to what makes me keep an app: It does something distinctly useful in a way that doesn't annoy me at all. If it crashes on me repeatedly, it's gone. If it doesn't integrate well into my OS or it conflicts with other apps, it's gone. If it's slow or hard to use, or confusing, then I probably won't keep it. If it doesn't do anything that makes my life significantly easier, I won't keep it for very long.
I've been doing IT for a long time, and there are three big recommendations I would make for keeping your system in good shape:
Don't run open attachments or run programs from websites that you don't know what they are.
Don't use silly hacks. In fact, don't change the default settings unless you have a real reason to do it.
Don't have more software installed on your system than you use. Try not to install any software than you need to.
Yours is not a "more obvious and powerful truth". In fact, it already assumes the first of my viewpoints, that people who do better things are going to be more successful. If you are powerless to effect your own future, then your motive to act is irrelevant.
I'm not saying that the first viewpoint is wrong, but I'm not saying it's right either. I would like to point out that:
(a) it is a viewpoint that you're being sold, force fed all the time, by various people
(b) It is a viewpoint that will be stronger among the wealthy and powerful
(c) It's a viewpoint that benefits the wealthy and powerful to convince us all of, because it tells us that they're wealthy and powerful because they deserve it
(d) The "power of positive thinking" is likely to be a successful meme, since people are more likely to spread that idea than the alternative. That is, if you think you can change things with thinking, then you're likely to keep thinking it and spread the thought to other people. If you don't believe that, then there's no motivation to spread your ideas to others.
(e) The success of a meme is not necessarily an indicator of its truth
If you want to know what I think, it's that the "truth" is significantly more complicated than either of these viewpoints would indicate. The degree of control we have over our own futures is very unclear, and probably extremely variable. Some of us probably have much more control than others, but it depends on what you consider to be "control".
Agreed. Doing this well would not necessarily require a 20% layoff in every group. It should, for example, take into account the individual team's relevance to overall business plans-- i.e. the team working on the flagship product should probably have fewer layoffs than people working on a floundering product that may be discontinued in the near future.
I'm not saying it's the worst problem. Going back to my metaphor:
It's like a man coming into your house, pissing all over your rug, and then saying he's struggling to figure out how he can improve your property value. Maybe start by not pissing on my rug anymore?
Now maybe this man is a carpenter, and he can fix your roof and refinishing your basement and do all kinds of things to fix up your house. And ultimately, pissing on your rug is probably not the biggest issue in your house. It can be cleaned up. The rug can be tossed and replaced. It's not the biggest deal. But still, if you're trying to fix up the house, stopping your habit of pissing on the rug is probably a good place to start.
I think the previous poster is correct to talk about the "just world fallacy". Without getting into too much of an argument as to who is "right", we all create a world view that helps to prop up our own ego.
It's common for rich people to believe (or want to believe) that we are all in control of our own lives, and the reason they have so much is because they deserve it. They think that they're either inherently superior people, or at least that they've done better things and made better choices. To believe otherwise would induce a lot of angst.
Meanwhile, if you're poor, it's much more ego-soothing to believe that we are powerless in our own lives, and the reason you have so little is either because of luck, or because someone has screwed you over. To believe otherwise would imply that you are somehow inferior to everyone who makes more money than you.
If all that is true, then it would help to explain why poor people would give more, proportionately. You have one set of people who believe that poor people are unfortunate, and another set which believes that poor people deserve their problems. Which would you expect to donate more to charity?
I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems. You could make a good case for poverty, disease, hunger, war, poor education, bad governance, political instability, weak trade, or mistreatment of women.
All of those things are good causes, but since Gates is struggling to find a place to begin, I'd like to suggest that he starts by fixing the blight-on-humanity that he created. Microsoft screws many of us over on a regular basis. It hurts the economy. It hurts technological progress. How about pushing his company to be more cooperative? How about pushing for open standards? How about pushing back against terrible patent and copyright abuses, insane EULAs, and absurd licensing fees? How about open sourcing old versions of their software so that software from a few decades ago can be preserved for historical/artistic purposes, if for no other reason?
It's like a man coming into your house, pissing all over your rug, and then saying he's struggling to figure out how he can improve your property value. Maybe start by not pissing on my rug anymore?
Yeah, if you know you want to lay off 20% of a large workforce, it makes sense to take some metrics-- including some subjective evaluation-- and develop a ranking of employees from "extremely valuable" to "a drain on company resources", and then cut the bottom 20%. Do that as a one-time thing, or even do a couple rounds in relatively short succession. That could work.
But if you make it part of the company culture, you're going to end up with a company of paranoid back-stabbers.
Why release a simple system, when you can bloat it with a zillion tweaks of dubious value and then charge money to keep the whole mess working?
I don't think it's really as malicious as that. The larger problem is that everyone has a slightly different definition of what makes a simple, stripped down system. You only want the features you want, I only want the features that I want. You want a rock-solid server; I want a responsive and feature-rich desktop system; my brother just wants to play video games. You can't do it all without a little bit of complexity.
And look at what happens when they try. Someone proposes a new window compositing system that will make development easier and performance more responsive, and people get all bent out of shape because it breaks the X11 spec.
Microsoft is a whole other ball of wax. Chronic mismanagement, perverse incentives to sabotage any product which might cannibalize the Windows/Office products, and an attempt to maintain backwards compatibility as much as possible, going back to DOS systems from a quarter century ago.
This is a misunderstanding on your part, thinking that our healthcare "insurance" is about paying for only the things you need. In fact, it is, and has always been, about paying for things that you don't need in order to fund things that you do need.
It's just that when you unfuck a system for a bunch of people, some other set of people are going to lose something. Like if you abolish slavery, slave owners are going to lose their "property". If you pay the slave owners for the loss, then that money will come from the people who never owned slaves. It's not a zero-sum game, but it's not completely elastic either.
The system got a lot less fucked for a lot of people, so you, as a previously lucky-SOB, have to pay a little extra.
I don't know. I feel like it's an interesting project that deserves some attention. It'd be great if the project got some support and reached a usable state, but it seems like they're learning interesting things-- both about Windows itself, and about the process of trying to reverse-engineer a complex system. Personally, I'm willing to have an occasional/. story that isn't very relevant so long as it's interesting.
Also, the potential value that WINE can't provide is if they can reach a level of running with good driver compatibility, i.e. if you have some old unsupported hardware with a Windows-only driver, there's the potential that you could use that driver and thereby still use the hardware. Sure, it's a very niche use, but I think it was part of the intention of the project.
I'd suggest that the choice to retain backwards compatibility for so long is stupidity. And it hasn't even worked very well. These days Linux is more compatible with old Windows apps than Windows is.
I'd suggest that it has also encouraged businesses to think very stupidly about in-house application development, which is where a lot of the problem is.
Essentially, lots of businesses created some in-house apps 10-15 years ago, which make use of quirks, design flaws, and bugs in Windows XP (or earlier) and IE6. Microsoft sat down to fix the quirks, bugs, and design flaws, only to find that they had to choose between dropping support and pissing off a huge portion of their customer base, failing to fix the flaws, or continuing to emulate the bugs for a decade in some kind of "compatibility mode". They've pretty much chosen a middle road that does a little of all three.
The problem is, this has only encouraged a mentality within businesses to think of application development as a one-off project. Management thinks, "Oh, well we'll just pay some programmers to develop a business-critical application, and then we'll be done with it. We'll get rid of the programmers, and the application will just keep working forever, because Microsoft will keep supporting all these whacky design choices." This is a very dangerous way of treating software development. Sooner or later, you're going to have to update your app. If you treated it as a one-off project, then you end up with a decade-long backlog of bugs that were never fixed, and a lack of any expertise because you've gotten rid of all the original programmers.
Yeah, sometimes things like "disaster recovery" and "security" get a bit out of hand and/or miss the point. You get people really into the idea "If a nuclear bomb hit my office, I could get my operations back up and running from another location immediately, because all my data is immediately synced to a location on the other side of the country." Well yeah, that's great, until you realize the person has confused a "sync" with a "backup", and besides if a nuclear bomb hit your office, you'd have bigger problems.
What few people will admit is that most of us can afford to be out-of-commission for a few days. You might not like it, and you might lose some money, but the world would keep turning and life would go on. It can be tremendously expensive to protect yourself against every possible disaster scenario, and you may end up spending a bunch of money to save yourself only a little, for a scenario that almost never happens. And then, of course, there's also the possibility of some weird nightmare scenario that gets past all of your safeguards, which you couldn't have predicted.
Sometimes you're better off accepting that bad things happen, instead of trying to protect yourself from every possible bad scenario.
Normally if you want a website, you buy a domain, and you'll want e-mail on that domain too so it all fits. Few people want XMPP and VOIP with that.
As someone who has done a lot of IT for a lot of different business-- different types of businesses of different sizes in different industries-- I'll say that real businesses run by competent people rarely have web hosting and email run on the same place. I'd estimate that in the majority of cases, it's web hosting with one company, email with another, DNS with a third. Often the web hosting also offers DNS and email for free as part of the package, but we don't use that because they often don't do a very good job of it.
I'd wager it is the way it is because my experience is typical of the market - the money is in people looking for web hosting and a hostname and e-mail address to go with that so ISPs have optimised for offering that.
On the contrary, I'd quess that the market includes these things not because it's what people want, but because it's what's easy to provide. If you're setting up a web server, it's not very hard to throw on support for IMAP/POP/SMTP. The people working at these places are familiar with how to do that, the software is free, bandwidth/storage use is relatively small and predictable, and the security risks and minimal. Services like chat, calendaring, and VoIP are a bit more complicated and less well understood to your average IT worker. If you're selling a hosting plan for $5/month, you aren't going to want to do anything weird or difficult, but adding IMAP/SMTP hosting, and even webmail hosting, is pretty trivial.
As far as "paying for services that you don't use", they could get around that by charging a certain amount for al la carte, and then a different amount for a package deal, so it's not really a sensible objection.
When people think of hosting, they think of web, mail, and dns. They generally don't think of VoIP, VPN, or XMPP
See, I'd agree that his grouping is arbitrary, but thinking about it leaves me wondering why we group web, mail, and DNS together. It seems more sensible to group email, VoIP, and XMPP together. Web space and email really have no functional overlap, whereas you can benefit from integrating chat, voice, and email.
So ultimately, what he's asking my not be nonsense. We have many various hosted services, so why do we arbitrarily group some of them together, and not others? I think the answer is that we don't include VoIP because ISPs tend to lock that up for home users, whereas businesses want dedicated business solutions. VPN is more of a niche service, and most people don't bother setting up chat services because they're used to using AOL. I'm not sure why we don't find a better solution than having dedicated certificate authorities that charge ridiculous prices, but we haven't done that.
Our economy is actually in a good place to reshape things. You want to invest in rebuilding things and creating infrastructure when the economy isn't doing very well. It creates jobs, and you're buying labor while labor is cheap.
I agree with you, and that's part of the reason we need to make cycling a viable form of transportation. That may sound silly, but the reason we make it so easy to get a license and to keep a license is that we've made it necessary to drive. For a lot of people in a lot of places, their lives would be unsustainable without being able to drive at will. They wouldn't be able to get to work. They wouldn't be able to buy groceries. As a result, taking someone's license is an extremely severe penalty.
However, if we lived in a society where a person could live comfortably using bicycles and public transportation, then we could take away someone's license without much consideration.
A) You're talking about a single anecdote.
B) I don't know that it's certain you would have died.
C) He was talking about going 10 MPH, whereas your story is about going 30 MPH.
This is starting to change as the millenials come into the workforce and seem decidedly uninterested in owning their own car. I'm not entirely sure why this is happening, because unlike Europe, the population density of America is such that owning a car is pretty much a necessity...
It depends a bit on where you live, and I think there are more people who want to live in the kind of places where it's not a necessity. I don't think it's that hard to understand why people are uninterested. How many tens of thousands of dollars do you want to spend on a big dangerous mechanical status symbol? How many tens of thousands of dollars do you want to spend over the next decade for fuel, maintenance, and a place to store your enormous mechanical status symbol?
You're right. The problem is our urban sprawl. It damages our health, destroys our communities, makes infrastructure impractical, and makes cars necessary. So maybe let's do something about it...? How about we make incremental moves toward better urban planning and higher-density living. How about we encourage cycling as a valid method of transportation. I think that if millennials are uninterested in owning a car, it may be because they're thinking about these things, and rather than talking about how impossible it is to live without a car, they're finding ways to do it.
Or maybe it's just that they can't afford it because the economy is in the toilet. I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Well of course, it may be that you can't get a good answer to that question until your employees use it enough to formulate complaints.
One of the key factors in the idea of "eating your own dog food" is to be responsive to feedback from those eating the dog food. The idea is that, if you're using your own product then you have both a better understanding of what needs to be changed and a greater motivation to change it. The problem with some "eat your own dog food situations" is sometimes the directive down from the boss is not "eat our own dog food and tell us how to improve it," but instead "eat our own dog food and you had better like it!"
Some of this would hinge on what you consider to be "mental illness". Does the job cause people with perfect mental health (as though there are any of those) to suddenly develop schizophrenia? You're not going to find evidence of that. If someone did suddenly develop schizophrenia, you'd also be able to find other precursors and contributing factors in that person's past. However, stress and emotional trauma can be contributory factors to all kinds of things that may be considered "mental illness".
So the trick is not finding evidence of a particular individual who has suffered due to a job. That's easy. Most jobs cause stress and emotional trauma. The trick is in determining whether the stress and emotional trauma of Amazon jobs somehow cross a line, and reach a level of *unacceptable* stress and emotional trauma. Where do you draw that line?
TV news and the 24 hour news cycle seemed to have seriously sidelined written journalism, and when nobody reads you can't have an idea that doesn't take 30 seconds to deliver, especially if there's not a picture.
Let's not forget the Internet. The Internet opened the door for amateur activist journalism in a way that was not previously possible, but it has also almost killed print journalism, which had been where a lot of our "serious news" was coming from.
The answer is: there isn't really investigative journalism anymore. Journalists mostly deliver the news as presented to them in press releases.
Lots of people would like to attribute this to malice and corruption, or else stupidity and laziness. Unfortunately, a big component of the problem is much harder to address: there isn't any money in providing news. Traditional news outlets are struggling to maintain revenue channels. Newspapers are going under, and TV news is mostly focused on tabloid news, because that's what people watch.
More than anything else, the poor quality of journalism is our own fault. We're getting the news that we choose to watch and choose to pay for.
If not USING your PC is your idea of IT, I'm glad I dont' work w/ you!
Using it and doing silly hacks and customizations are not the same thing. It's fun to compile all your Linux binaries with non-standard tweaks, reskin everything, and customize the hell out of your computer when you're 12 years old and just learning. When you really want computers to work reliably, you have to consider that every non-standard tweak is another chance for something stupid to go wrong. To a certain extent, it's a trade-off: hacks and customizations vs. stability and reliability. Sometimes it's worth the trade-off. For most people most of the time, it isn't.
And keep in mind, I'm not talking about normal/supported customization. You want to change the background wallpaper or cursor? Great. If you want to install some freeware thingy that gives you whacky animated wallpaper and cursors? There's a decent chance it's malware. If not, it's probably going to break at some point, if you're lucky enough that it's not going to break something else.
Somethings make work easier, like AutoHotKey. The later, I only use every now (not even quarterly?) and then to create rapid text macros needed for doing manual manipulation of >20 records at a time. A rarity, but it saves hours!
Great. So that's a useful tool that improves your productivity. You use it. I said, "Don't have more software installed on your system than you use." So that counts as "software you use".
Like many I've used photoXXXX, (including bump mapping, texturizing, Masking, Merging multiple layers, color replacements, etc... not making Memes) but I don't use PhotoXXXX on a regular basis, maybe 2x a year. Should I uninstall / re-install that every time?
No, I'm saying don't install or uninstall software any more than you need to. If you use it, install it once, and keep it patched and up to date. Don't install it unless you have a reason to do so. Don't uninstall it unless you have a reason to do so. It may be almost a superstition with me, but for most of the computers I've seen over my career that have been well and truly fucked, to the point of needing to be reformatted and reinstalled from scratch, it's because someone has been installing, uninstalling, and reinstalling a bunch of crapware, screwing around with settings, and trying to "optimize" it in some way.
And this isn't an "IT vs. users" thing. I'm talking to IT people too. Don't customize things more than you need to. Don't install crap that people won't use. Keep it simple.
You are asking what makes me uninstall apps, but I think the bigger question is, what makes me not uninstall apps. I don't install a lot of apps, and with most apps that I try out, I immediately remove them.
There's a simple pattern to what makes me keep an app: It does something distinctly useful in a way that doesn't annoy me at all. If it crashes on me repeatedly, it's gone. If it doesn't integrate well into my OS or it conflicts with other apps, it's gone. If it's slow or hard to use, or confusing, then I probably won't keep it. If it doesn't do anything that makes my life significantly easier, I won't keep it for very long.
I've been doing IT for a long time, and there are three big recommendations I would make for keeping your system in good shape:
Yours is not a "more obvious and powerful truth". In fact, it already assumes the first of my viewpoints, that people who do better things are going to be more successful. If you are powerless to effect your own future, then your motive to act is irrelevant.
I'm not saying that the first viewpoint is wrong, but I'm not saying it's right either. I would like to point out that:
(a) it is a viewpoint that you're being sold, force fed all the time, by various people
(b) It is a viewpoint that will be stronger among the wealthy and powerful
(c) It's a viewpoint that benefits the wealthy and powerful to convince us all of, because it tells us that they're wealthy and powerful because they deserve it
(d) The "power of positive thinking" is likely to be a successful meme, since people are more likely to spread that idea than the alternative. That is, if you think you can change things with thinking, then you're likely to keep thinking it and spread the thought to other people. If you don't believe that, then there's no motivation to spread your ideas to others.
(e) The success of a meme is not necessarily an indicator of its truth
If you want to know what I think, it's that the "truth" is significantly more complicated than either of these viewpoints would indicate. The degree of control we have over our own futures is very unclear, and probably extremely variable. Some of us probably have much more control than others, but it depends on what you consider to be "control".
Agreed. Doing this well would not necessarily require a 20% layoff in every group. It should, for example, take into account the individual team's relevance to overall business plans-- i.e. the team working on the flagship product should probably have fewer layoffs than people working on a floundering product that may be discontinued in the near future.
I'm not saying it's the worst problem. Going back to my metaphor:
It's like a man coming into your house, pissing all over your rug, and then saying he's struggling to figure out how he can improve your property value. Maybe start by not pissing on my rug anymore?
Now maybe this man is a carpenter, and he can fix your roof and refinishing your basement and do all kinds of things to fix up your house. And ultimately, pissing on your rug is probably not the biggest issue in your house. It can be cleaned up. The rug can be tossed and replaced. It's not the biggest deal. But still, if you're trying to fix up the house, stopping your habit of pissing on the rug is probably a good place to start.
I think the previous poster is correct to talk about the "just world fallacy". Without getting into too much of an argument as to who is "right", we all create a world view that helps to prop up our own ego.
It's common for rich people to believe (or want to believe) that we are all in control of our own lives, and the reason they have so much is because they deserve it. They think that they're either inherently superior people, or at least that they've done better things and made better choices. To believe otherwise would induce a lot of angst.
Meanwhile, if you're poor, it's much more ego-soothing to believe that we are powerless in our own lives, and the reason you have so little is either because of luck, or because someone has screwed you over. To believe otherwise would imply that you are somehow inferior to everyone who makes more money than you.
If all that is true, then it would help to explain why poor people would give more, proportionately. You have one set of people who believe that poor people are unfortunate, and another set which believes that poor people deserve their problems. Which would you expect to donate more to charity?
I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems. You could make a good case for poverty, disease, hunger, war, poor education, bad governance, political instability, weak trade, or mistreatment of women.
All of those things are good causes, but since Gates is struggling to find a place to begin, I'd like to suggest that he starts by fixing the blight-on-humanity that he created. Microsoft screws many of us over on a regular basis. It hurts the economy. It hurts technological progress. How about pushing his company to be more cooperative? How about pushing for open standards? How about pushing back against terrible patent and copyright abuses, insane EULAs, and absurd licensing fees? How about open sourcing old versions of their software so that software from a few decades ago can be preserved for historical/artistic purposes, if for no other reason?
It's like a man coming into your house, pissing all over your rug, and then saying he's struggling to figure out how he can improve your property value. Maybe start by not pissing on my rug anymore?
Yeah, if you know you want to lay off 20% of a large workforce, it makes sense to take some metrics-- including some subjective evaluation-- and develop a ranking of employees from "extremely valuable" to "a drain on company resources", and then cut the bottom 20%. Do that as a one-time thing, or even do a couple rounds in relatively short succession. That could work.
But if you make it part of the company culture, you're going to end up with a company of paranoid back-stabbers.
Why release a simple system, when you can bloat it with a zillion tweaks of dubious value and then charge money to keep the whole mess working?
I don't think it's really as malicious as that. The larger problem is that everyone has a slightly different definition of what makes a simple, stripped down system. You only want the features you want, I only want the features that I want. You want a rock-solid server; I want a responsive and feature-rich desktop system; my brother just wants to play video games. You can't do it all without a little bit of complexity.
And look at what happens when they try. Someone proposes a new window compositing system that will make development easier and performance more responsive, and people get all bent out of shape because it breaks the X11 spec.
Microsoft is a whole other ball of wax. Chronic mismanagement, perverse incentives to sabotage any product which might cannibalize the Windows/Office products, and an attempt to maintain backwards compatibility as much as possible, going back to DOS systems from a quarter century ago.
This is a misunderstanding on your part, thinking that our healthcare "insurance" is about paying for only the things you need. In fact, it is, and has always been, about paying for things that you don't need in order to fund things that you do need.
It's just that when you unfuck a system for a bunch of people, some other set of people are going to lose something. Like if you abolish slavery, slave owners are going to lose their "property". If you pay the slave owners for the loss, then that money will come from the people who never owned slaves. It's not a zero-sum game, but it's not completely elastic either.
The system got a lot less fucked for a lot of people, so you, as a previously lucky-SOB, have to pay a little extra.
I don't know. I feel like it's an interesting project that deserves some attention. It'd be great if the project got some support and reached a usable state, but it seems like they're learning interesting things-- both about Windows itself, and about the process of trying to reverse-engineer a complex system. Personally, I'm willing to have an occasional /. story that isn't very relevant so long as it's interesting.
Also, the potential value that WINE can't provide is if they can reach a level of running with good driver compatibility, i.e. if you have some old unsupported hardware with a Windows-only driver, there's the potential that you could use that driver and thereby still use the hardware. Sure, it's a very niche use, but I think it was part of the intention of the project.
I'd suggest that the choice to retain backwards compatibility for so long is stupidity. And it hasn't even worked very well. These days Linux is more compatible with old Windows apps than Windows is.
I'd suggest that it has also encouraged businesses to think very stupidly about in-house application development, which is where a lot of the problem is.
Essentially, lots of businesses created some in-house apps 10-15 years ago, which make use of quirks, design flaws, and bugs in Windows XP (or earlier) and IE6. Microsoft sat down to fix the quirks, bugs, and design flaws, only to find that they had to choose between dropping support and pissing off a huge portion of their customer base, failing to fix the flaws, or continuing to emulate the bugs for a decade in some kind of "compatibility mode". They've pretty much chosen a middle road that does a little of all three.
The problem is, this has only encouraged a mentality within businesses to think of application development as a one-off project. Management thinks, "Oh, well we'll just pay some programmers to develop a business-critical application, and then we'll be done with it. We'll get rid of the programmers, and the application will just keep working forever, because Microsoft will keep supporting all these whacky design choices." This is a very dangerous way of treating software development. Sooner or later, you're going to have to update your app. If you treated it as a one-off project, then you end up with a decade-long backlog of bugs that were never fixed, and a lack of any expertise because you've gotten rid of all the original programmers.
Some people don't know the difference between "automatic" and "semiautomatic". It was probably written by one of those people.
Have we gotten a full accounting of what kind of breach it was or how it happened? They may have compromised an internal system.
Yeah, sometimes things like "disaster recovery" and "security" get a bit out of hand and/or miss the point. You get people really into the idea "If a nuclear bomb hit my office, I could get my operations back up and running from another location immediately, because all my data is immediately synced to a location on the other side of the country." Well yeah, that's great, until you realize the person has confused a "sync" with a "backup", and besides if a nuclear bomb hit your office, you'd have bigger problems.
What few people will admit is that most of us can afford to be out-of-commission for a few days. You might not like it, and you might lose some money, but the world would keep turning and life would go on. It can be tremendously expensive to protect yourself against every possible disaster scenario, and you may end up spending a bunch of money to save yourself only a little, for a scenario that almost never happens. And then, of course, there's also the possibility of some weird nightmare scenario that gets past all of your safeguards, which you couldn't have predicted.
Sometimes you're better off accepting that bad things happen, instead of trying to protect yourself from every possible bad scenario.
Normally if you want a website, you buy a domain, and you'll want e-mail on that domain too so it all fits. Few people want XMPP and VOIP with that.
As someone who has done a lot of IT for a lot of different business-- different types of businesses of different sizes in different industries-- I'll say that real businesses run by competent people rarely have web hosting and email run on the same place. I'd estimate that in the majority of cases, it's web hosting with one company, email with another, DNS with a third. Often the web hosting also offers DNS and email for free as part of the package, but we don't use that because they often don't do a very good job of it.
I'd wager it is the way it is because my experience is typical of the market - the money is in people looking for web hosting and a hostname and e-mail address to go with that so ISPs have optimised for offering that.
On the contrary, I'd quess that the market includes these things not because it's what people want, but because it's what's easy to provide. If you're setting up a web server, it's not very hard to throw on support for IMAP/POP/SMTP. The people working at these places are familiar with how to do that, the software is free, bandwidth/storage use is relatively small and predictable, and the security risks and minimal. Services like chat, calendaring, and VoIP are a bit more complicated and less well understood to your average IT worker. If you're selling a hosting plan for $5/month, you aren't going to want to do anything weird or difficult, but adding IMAP/SMTP hosting, and even webmail hosting, is pretty trivial.
As far as "paying for services that you don't use", they could get around that by charging a certain amount for al la carte, and then a different amount for a package deal, so it's not really a sensible objection.
When people think of hosting, they think of web, mail, and dns. They generally don't think of VoIP, VPN, or XMPP
See, I'd agree that his grouping is arbitrary, but thinking about it leaves me wondering why we group web, mail, and DNS together. It seems more sensible to group email, VoIP, and XMPP together. Web space and email really have no functional overlap, whereas you can benefit from integrating chat, voice, and email.
So ultimately, what he's asking my not be nonsense. We have many various hosted services, so why do we arbitrarily group some of them together, and not others? I think the answer is that we don't include VoIP because ISPs tend to lock that up for home users, whereas businesses want dedicated business solutions. VPN is more of a niche service, and most people don't bother setting up chat services because they're used to using AOL. I'm not sure why we don't find a better solution than having dedicated certificate authorities that charge ridiculous prices, but we haven't done that.
Our economy is actually in a good place to reshape things. You want to invest in rebuilding things and creating infrastructure when the economy isn't doing very well. It creates jobs, and you're buying labor while labor is cheap.
I agree with you, and that's part of the reason we need to make cycling a viable form of transportation. That may sound silly, but the reason we make it so easy to get a license and to keep a license is that we've made it necessary to drive. For a lot of people in a lot of places, their lives would be unsustainable without being able to drive at will. They wouldn't be able to get to work. They wouldn't be able to buy groceries. As a result, taking someone's license is an extremely severe penalty.
However, if we lived in a society where a person could live comfortably using bicycles and public transportation, then we could take away someone's license without much consideration.
A) You're talking about a single anecdote.
B) I don't know that it's certain you would have died.
C) He was talking about going 10 MPH, whereas your story is about going 30 MPH.
This is starting to change as the millenials come into the workforce and seem decidedly uninterested in owning their own car. I'm not entirely sure why this is happening, because unlike Europe, the population density of America is such that owning a car is pretty much a necessity...
It depends a bit on where you live, and I think there are more people who want to live in the kind of places where it's not a necessity. I don't think it's that hard to understand why people are uninterested. How many tens of thousands of dollars do you want to spend on a big dangerous mechanical status symbol? How many tens of thousands of dollars do you want to spend over the next decade for fuel, maintenance, and a place to store your enormous mechanical status symbol?
You're right. The problem is our urban sprawl. It damages our health, destroys our communities, makes infrastructure impractical, and makes cars necessary. So maybe let's do something about it...? How about we make incremental moves toward better urban planning and higher-density living. How about we encourage cycling as a valid method of transportation. I think that if millennials are uninterested in owning a car, it may be because they're thinking about these things, and rather than talking about how impossible it is to live without a car, they're finding ways to do it.
Or maybe it's just that they can't afford it because the economy is in the toilet. I don't know.