care to enlighten us on the correct way [to open a new window from HTML] or do you intend to let us die dumb?
The correct way is - and always has been - to leave that to the user. Useability studies have shown time and again that new windows popping open unannounced are unwelcome, even frightening to many computer users. And the quickest way to piss off power users like me is to presume to know better than I how your site should be displayed.
This behaviour is another legacy of assuming that the entire world browses with certain versions of MSIE. The only reasonable way in that browser to keep track of multiple sites was to open links in new windows. But even then, such presumption was unwelcome to most people, even many IE users.
The only remaining (valid) use of the target attribute is in a frameset, and that monstrousity is not needed any more, what with the moderately decent CSS positioning support that is present in all modern browsers.
If Linux/bsd/osx were at 90% market share, I am sure these &#@%$! will still be selling/buying vulnerabilities at these prices.
But that will never happen, where BSD and Linux are concerned. In fact, it's designed not to happen. The fact of the matter is that people in the FOSS world recognise that monoculture is a dangerous thing, and actually built the entire system to contain as few monolithic elements as possible.
See, the Toolkit Approach doesn't just make the systems integration task easier, it's also more secure by design. By focusing on a wide selection of single-purpose tools, we're able to achieve two things:
Code simplicity. This doesn't make code any less susceptible to exploit, but it makes it easier to spot and properly fix problems. The self-standing aspects of a toolkit approach ensure that maintaining compatibility with other tools through the patching process is simpler as well. There are no hidden, unpublished APIs or other hooks. Everything interacts (in innumerable permutations) through the same known processes.
Heterogeneity. While the way in which tools and libraries are combined and used are limited, the number of combinations are virtually endless. So even if someone does find a zero-day exploit in a particular tool or library, they still don't have a universally effective means of actually gaining access to machines and using that exploit. The variety of flavours of BSD and Linux, as well as the number of different configurations, ensures that the impact of even a very serious problem with a very popular tool will be much more limited than it would be in the Windows world.
There are costs associated with this approach, of course. The burden of systems integration is much heavier on the individual organisation. Some find this too heavy. Others rely on outside sources to cope with it (cf. RedHat, IBM). This in turn leads to the danger of a monoculture, albeit much more limited in scope than Microsoft's, where small armies of technicians apply cookie-cutter solutions throughout a number of enterprises.
Weighed in the balance, though, my personal preference is for a FOSS solution every time. Thought the possibility of exploit remains, at least I'm not starting at such a huge deficit as I would be with Windows.
Okay, I jest. There are number of very good reasons the like Microsoft - their office automation products do make life easier - but it's just not enough for me. The fundamental problems are threefold:
There's no way to guarantee my work. (This is actually a complaint about proprietary software in general, but Microsoft is the worst about this.) On two or three significant occasions, I have been completely burned after commitments that I made to a client based on technical assurances I'd received that proved to be false. I've been forced into unsustainable situations because there was a huge gap between what the product promised to do and what it actually did. Dealing with the last 20% of any task is difficult at the best of times, but the number of times on Windows that I've been forced to accept that things are never going to run as designed because of shortcomings in the technology... they're too many to count.
Ultimately, the only way I could maintain my professional reputation (and my pride) was to walk away from the Microsoft Windows platform completely and to live with Linux and FOSS. It's not that it's better, per se, but at least I can make things work exactly as they're designed, without being completely at the mercy of someone else's market research and development cycle. In the worst case scenario, I can always keep a client happy by paying someone to provide a patch expressly for them. I may lose my shirt on that contract, but I'll never have a pissed-off client, and in my business, that's golden.
They're holding us back. I did a back-of-the-napkin calculation the other day, to see how much time I'd spent that week dealing with Windows' shortcomings instead of actually improving our systems. It was a fairly direct equation, because I was working on developing a really cool network monitoring toolkit that week. Every hour I spent at someone else's desk cleaning up crap delayed the arrival of this very useful tool by an hour. I calculated that I work 30% slower than I could do if I didn't have to deal with spyware, trojans, spambots etc.
That's insane. Seriously. People who don't know anything besides Microsoft will tell you that exploits happen to everyone, that if it wasn't MS, it would be someone else. But it just ain't so. Today's Word exploit is stunning evidence that Microsoft practices... whatever the opposite of security is. No I don't mean 'insecure'; they're apps are that, but their design is more like 'anti-secure'. I mean, who in their right mind stores pointers for memory move operations in a word processing file?
They are trying to break the Internet. The first points disappointed me, as a geek. But this point makes me angry. For Microsoft, dominance is not sufficient. They don't play to win; they play to destroy. And the tactics they use are bad for everyone. They oppose open systems, protocols - anything that makes it easier for people to share. This selfishness of spirit is manifest in every aspect of their business, and it impacts directly on my ability to do my job.
I don't mind having to explain the relative merits of a FOSS solution to an MS-only one. But when I have to respond to lies that are spread about my stock in trade, I get upset. When I spend more time countering FUD than actually talking tech, I get upset.
This is not competition. This is the opposite. It's playing dirty. It's cheating, and I'm tired of it.
Kevin Knobloch is a Washington insider Democrat, who served on the staff of two Democrat Congressmen. He's a "No Nukes" activist and pushes the hybrid car/hug a tree agenda. He's got a degree in Journalism for crying out loud, not science.
I don't care if he's Jack The Ripper. Is he telling the truth or not? That's the only question relevant to this discussion.
I'm sick of this 'bias' shit. I don't care about bias. I only care about honesty and scientific rigour. I don't care if you're advocating nudism and free love or armageddon defense technology; if you have the data, show it to me. Then we can argue about what conclusions to draw from it.
This organisation, whatever its motivation, has provided a list of abuses of science by politicians. It's verifiable. So, please, for the love of Pete, either refute the list, or argue about the conclusions they reach from the data. But stop with the ad hominem attacks. This is exactly the kind of bad logic this group is complaining about.
"OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market."
Thats exactly the point. It's a bastardization of the TCP/IP standard by M$. They want everything to operate to the M$ standard not the approved W3C/ISO standards.
Exactly. This strategy has been advocated in Microsoft internal documents dating from years back. Eric S. Raymond quotes a Microsoft confidential Linux strategy report as saying:
Linux can win as long as services / protocols are commodities.
I know I've been waiting since then for this particular shoe to drop. As for the rest of you, especially those who don't believe that Microsoft would do such a thing: Please read the documents, study Microsoft's strategy, and then decide where you want to be when their execution [sic] is complete.
I agree that it is creative and ballsy and everything, but has it even been tested? Wouldn't it be even more ballsy to test it on ourseves before peddling it as an educational tool to the poorer part of the world?
Good idea. Why don't you go to laptop.org and download your own copy of the software and, well, test it, then? I did, and I found it has far more strengths than weaknesses. I really feel that they got inside the head of a first-time computer user; not confusing them with details, and creating simple mnemonic cues.
I know I'm being rather critical here, and will probably be flamed for it. Flame away, let's debate it.:)
Well, I might flame you for ignorance (the link to the download was listed on slashdot not so very long ago) but not for intention. Your thoughts are right on target; the only thing is, you're not the first one to think - and do - something about it. So take off that asbestos suit and do some testing of your own. 8^)
"Microsoft Windows, as it is currently constructed, cannot compete in the long run with low- or no-cost software that is platform-neutral."
The fact that it's not doesn't mean it can't.
Uhmmm, I think we're in screaming agreement here. That's the 'as it is currently constructed' part. 8^)
But again, the question isn't 'Can Microsoft do anything?' That's silly. The question is 'What then, will Microsoft do, faced with a business model that is doomed to fail?' This story paints a picture of Internet pie in the sky, which, as the GP pointed out, is not going to be complete any time soon. You're asserting that Microsoft is not without options in the application space. So my question to you then, is 'what can MS do in the application space that will save it from itself?'
All of this "The Net IS the OS" stuff is just ridiculous. This kind of thing doesn't even have a chance until broadband is as ubiquitous and as reliable as electricity.
Agreed. But consider that this is a failed conclusion from an observation which is emphatically true, and whose weight increases with every passing day: Microsoft Windows, as it is currently constructed, cannot compete in the long run with low- or no-cost software that is platform-neutral. The realisation that Microsoft is facing is this: The core of their entire business model will inevitably fail. Not today, not tomorrow, but sometime in the foreseeable future.
Everybody, Microsoft included, knows this is true. But the pundits seem to be extrapolating too far into the future, and they don't realise just how silly a thing this is to do, especially in the eyes of those of us who know a thing or two about computers and the Internet.
So let's just file this story in the same folder with our nuclear-powered flying car promises, and get back to the real question: How is Microsoft going to follow Vista?
perhaps we can rethink our blind devotion to global warming and man's supposed virulent impact. I have never understood why is it accepted completely that we're somehow responsible for supposed "global warming" and that we think we can do anything about it.
[Emphasis mine.]
Nicely trolled, sir. You've begged the question quite nicely, and you'd have effectively sand-bagged any reasoned response, except you forgot something: Your understanding doesn't matter. Your failure to comprehend scientific consensus has no effect on the accuracy of the findings, nor on the continuing refinement of the data models, which, after all, is what this story is reporting about.
The earth has been around 6 billion years, give or take, and it's gone through more violent and extreme changes long before a single human emerged from the primordial sludge.
Absolutely right, and on several of those occasions, the conditions were antithetical to human existence. See, the issue here is not saving the planet. Earth will do just fine, thank you very much. The issue, if I may, is saving the humans, who are not nearly so resilient, and to whom, heaven knows why, many of us seem to have a sentimental attachment. Perhaps it has something to do with being human ourselves.
What kind of opportunities are there in organisations like this for someone with Economics and CS degrees and quite a bit of corporate IT experience?
GeekCorps, VSO and CUSO (if you're Canadian) all have pretty good opportunities for IT volunteers. (VSO Canada accepts applications from permament residents of the US and Canada.)
If you put together a thorough project proposal that includes all of the messy details of WHAT the project will do, HOW the information will be used to improve something, HOW it will do it, HOW it will be implemented, HOW it will be sustained, etc. they you may be able to apply for funding from the many NGOs and bilateral aid agencies that do have money and an interest in ----- (insert your project here).
I wish it worked like that. I honestly do. Experience has taught me otherwise.
The big problem that one faces when designing IT development projects is understanding. There are a million and one organisations out there that will throw PCs, volunteers, building supplies, etc. at an IT project. It's a really 'sexy' thing to do right now. But doing it right it sometimes almost impossible. On more than one occasion, I've had to hold my nose and accept money for a project that I know is doomed to failure, because nobody will listen to me when I explain, in painful detail, why it's not going to work.
So I accept the equipment and the money, do what I'm told, and then spend the rest of my time preparing the people using the equipment to cope with the shortcomings of the project.
I think the submitter has an exceptionally important point to make, one that you might have missed: Most donors don't know jack shit about what the real requirements for a given project are. Most of them never will, because there's simply no one in the organisation who has a clue about IT. So looking for a clueful donor who's willing to give money and get out of the way is the right thing to do, if a little idealistic.
The reality lies somewhere between your suggestion and his, of course. But I'd always rather aim for the 'give me the money and get out of my way' approach than do the Donor Dance.
The hard drives are the worst problem, we need APCs (for the servers) and power stabilizers to keep the drives from dying. They are all 5-10 years old ide drives, some old scsi drives.
IME, the most cost-effective way to protect your equipment is to install a surge-suppressing switch with good grounding right at the point where the power company connects to the building. Lack of grounding and poor power is a huge problem here in the Pacific, but I've installed a few computer centres using this approach, and my losses due to power fluctuations are nil.
The best part is that every computer on the premises is protected. It's just too expensive to do this with UPS equipment.
Training, equipment that matches peculiar requirements and constraints of the project, well designed deployment infrastructure, and plans for catastrophic failure are what really make a lasting difference.... OLPC really starts looking good when you think about these things.
I couldn't agree more. I actually find it amusing (when I'm not tearing my hair out) that people assail the OLPC project for lack of planning, when in fact this is its major strength. It's clear from the details of the design that the people behind OLPC have thought really carefully about all the details. I guess the part that makes it hard for the rest of the world to swallow is that they're the first to actually get it right. 8^)
But electronic transport assumes a great deal of infrastructure, plus "one laptop per child" to actually make the data accessible to the community.
Nonsense. A self-sufficient VSAT/WiFi station can be plunked down just about anywhere for a few thousand bucks. I do IT in the developing world for a living, so I can tell you authoritatively that the cost-effectiveness of electronic data into the village is vastly greater than shipping books. We've checked. This factors in community-based computer-centres, which are actually much heavier (in terms of capital and maintenance costs) than the OLPC model.
Used college textbooks are generally in reasonable condition, and dating is rarely a problem.
The big liability with regard to books is that they are difficult to protect. Most buildings in the developing world are, surprise surprise, poor quality. In tropical areas, they often don't have doors or windows, so books often barely last through a single school year. Your assumption about books being in fairly good condition might be true when they're loaded into the container, but it generally doesn't take long before they're in tatters. You'd be amazed, actually, how fast things deteriorate.
The biggest liability related to computers and electronic communications is usually power generation. Fuel is bulky and even more difficult to transport than books are. That's why OLPC is enlightened, in my opinion: It's the first such project to take autonomous power generation seriously.
Frankly, I still don't entirely understand why there is such a huge push to distribute laptops to the world. Books are far more durable and require no training or infrastructure (though teachers help).
They are also far more expensive to create, transport and update. There's a reason why we rely on electronic storage and access to data in the developed world. These reasons apply equally to the developing world. More so, in fact, because wireless technology (like the OLPC uses) is cheaper than any other data transmission technology currently available.
(And by the way, if you'd seen just how pitiful the average books-for-schoolkids project is in the developing world, you'd never suggest it except in the absence of all other alternatives. Having helped to unpack containers-full of tattered, outdated and useless crap, I speak from experience.)
Attach a DVD full of literature to the teacher's machine, and every child can access and store more data than an entire library full of books could contain.
Yeah and how much of that wad will go to local business people who figured out they can make a living off it? why is this a bad thing?
On behalf of people here in the developing world, I'd like to thank you for having a brain. 8^)
People in my region are currently negotiating for access to the OLPC project, and you can bet your booties that economic spin-offs are one of the top reasons for the IT community supporting this effort. Just about everyone in the private sector likes the idea expressly because of the fact that these things will require support.
The way costs are expressed in this article are extremely disingenuous. The $30 Billion price tag, for example, is assumed to be a monolithic extra cost that would unquestionably have to be borrowed, because, apparently, heaven forbid that a nation like China actually allocate some of the largest cash reserves in the world to this project. Likewise, I'm not sure how this would cause Brasil, India or even Thailand to break out the begging bowl.
Likewise, why is this investment in infrastructure not compared to the huge investments in basic infrastructure that every single developed nation in the world has made - and continues to make? Perish the thought that a developing nation might see the benefit of following the example of every single successful country in the world. Anyone care to make a similar holistic calculation of how much the US, Canada and Western Europe have invested to introduce computers into the classroom?
Sounds to me like the author slept through economics 101 class. Or like FUD, depending on what you consider the author's motive to be. Whatever this is, it is not science, and it's not logic.
Would you like your email to be read by someone you don't even know? Well that is what could happen if you hire a SysAdmin and do not conduct a background check.
You're not making the argument for background checks; you're making the argument for secure systems that don't allow untrustworthy cowboys to peek at others' mail without supervision.
If someone could prove to me that background checks actually serve any other purpose than to cow potential employees, I'd be willing to consider that there might be some use for them. As things stand, I think they're a silly and - here's the important part - ineffective means of establishing security in business.
Invest some trust in your employees. Verify that the trust is deserved. Punish breaches of trust.
it's amazing that people are jumping on the linux bandwagon. What with the warm, welcoming, and supportive arms of the linux community!
The warm, welcoming and supportive arms of the Linux community [sic] are generally full, and looking for a way to share the load. So when someone comes along and refuses to join unless someone else carries their burden for a while, some tend to be a bit incredulous. People who reduce the burden of others tend to be very warmly welcomed.
This isn't a defense of the one, nor is it an accusation against the other. But it's a fact that FOSS rewards the self-motivated and community-oriented far more than others. Therefore, there will likely always be a DIY element to the community that looks somewhat perplexedly at people who aren't willing to learn to build things for themselves.
FWIW, I worked and supported a bunch of teachers from nearby Illinois who customised the distro I was working on at the time, and supported it across a number of school districts. It was a spontaneous bit of self-organisation to meet an immediate need, and it's since grown into something really remarkable. I was proud to be able to assist them at the time and learned a great deal from their example. So I hope you'll forgive us if some of us challenge the assertion that it's impossible to start using Linux until someone pays for training. It's just that we happen to know from experience that it's not true.
If an enterprise already has a Windows environment, why would they be interested in upsetting everything and installing new Linux workstations? I'm not saying Linux can't perform, but keep in mind that if things are running smooth already, the least of their costs are going to be Windows client licenses.
If we grant your assumption that things are indeed running smoothly, then there's no reason to change. But in my experience with Windows, I've yet to see a place where things run smoothly without a remarkable loss in terms of the capabilities of the individual client. Sometimes (indeed, often) this is exactly what management wants, so more power to them.
By far the more common scene, though, is one where nobody stops to calculate the opportunity cost of running Windows. Time and money spent keeping workstations malware-free could be spent improving and automating processes, making the entire organisation more effective. Just a couple of weeks ago I encountered a textbook example of this, where I was pulled away from writing a remote monitoring and administration interface for some web-based services because some user received a wonderful surprise in the form of a trojan-infested Powerpoint file with a 'Jesus loves you' message. (Aside: I've had a really hard time explaining to people that yes, Jesus may love you, but in this particular case, he's more interested in pwning your computer.)
Installing a low/no-cost alternative to Windows that integrates well with existing infrastructure but is vastly easier to manage and is inherently more secure is, well, to my mind it's a gimme. I think Linux is beginning to offer some really compelling alternatives that meet or exceed all of Windows' capabilities. I've played with Xandros before (it's based in my home town, so I've met a few of the devs as well), and though it's not to my taste, it is a well-built distro that attempts to leverage security and robustness without forgetting real-world needs of business users.
More power to them, I say.
IT managers would be wise to evaluate this kind of software. If nothing else, it gives them a better context in which to make their decisions. The more you know about what the different platforms can do, the better positioned you are to do what your business wants to do.
I won't address the groupthink claim, but I can address the more general claim that M2 is decent at catching unfair mods.
Careful there. The argument is not that meta-moderation catches all bad moderation, but that it does offer a statistically significant view of the degree to which moderation abuse occurs. Some people claim abusive moderation is systematic and supportive primarily of 'slashdot groupthink', whatever that is. Their argument seems to be that consensus around certain issues is enforced through the punishment of unpopular ideas with negative moderation.
I challenged them to provide evidence to back that assertion, and countered that regular and frequent meta-moderation over time should give one a pretty clear picture of moderation trends, and abuses like that should be immediately evident. The fact that they aren't led me to conclude that the accusations were nothing but make-believe.
But there's nothing in there that says that moderator abuse doesn't occur. Nor is there any claim that meta-moderation is an appropriate - or maybe sufficient - tool to counter all abuse. The kind of abuse that you're describing, one person targeting another for arbitrary, personal reasons, is almost impossible to stop without direct human intervention. It also fits well within the approx. 1% poor moderation I observed.
I'm sorry to hear about your experience, and having been around slashdot since the early days (never judge a user by their uid!), I've seen a fair amount of sillyness. It's a shame that sometimes we have to take the good with the bad, but there it is.
If you say it will cost twice as much and take twice as long to support another 15-20% of the market thats a losing argument.
Look, I failed math three years running in high school, but it still only took me about 1.7 seconds to spot the logical flaws in your equation:
If you believe that using CSS and web standards take twice as long and cost twice as much, then you've never seriously tried to use them. And you've certainly never had to manage style changes over tens or hundreds of thousands of documents, or even a few dozen dynamic pages. CSS is one of the greatest gifts to web design I've seen since I started developing websites back in 1995.
Just because results don't scale with effort doesn't mean that it doesn't make fantastically good sense to invest more in a development project in order to get it right. The first question you have to ask is, 'How big is that 15%?' Believe me, if that notional 15% earns you hundreds of thousands for an investment of another 10-20K, there's not a manager in the world wouldn't go for it. But you'd have to be able to do math to explain it.
If you think that using web standards affects only the (significant) minority of users who don't run MSIE, then you don't understand the issue. Web standards ensure consistency, simplicity and predictability. Any good project designer knows the importance of these, and will fight hard to ensure that they're adhered to. One of reasons behind Google's great engineering triumphs in scalability is their ability to focus on simplicity. They don't have a blind adherence to standards (no one should), but you can see a clear preference to keep things simple, consistent and platform-neutral. Standards help achieve this.
IME, staying away from the perils of complexity is much easier when one focuses on sticking close to the standards, and to avoiding most of the pointy-clicky 'web development' toolkits around. There's simply no substitute for a clean, hand-crafted implementation automated carefully and sanely. It keeps maintenance costs down and makes it possible to scale with far fewer of the headaches associated with proprietary - and constantly, arbitrarily changing - pseudo-standards.
[S]ince posts lower than zero do not get displayed automatically, views that are unappealing to the Slashdot community are relegated to obscurity regardless of their validity and correctness.
Here's a thought: Rather than indulging in self-satisfied name-calling, why not perform some analysis on the moderation system and actually try to provide some evidence for your facile assertion? It's pretty easy to do, precisely because the kind of abuse you claim is rampant here would also be completely transparent, if it were happening.
For my part, I have no inclination to agree with your assertion, because in the 2 years I've been meta-moderating daily, I haven't seen more about 1% of posts[*] that show such symptoms. On the contrary, if my experience is any guide, there's a far more common tendency to content-free comments like yours upward than to mod unpopular, but well-argued, comments downward. The consistency of the data, and the fact that it's semi-randomly selected for me, leads me to believe that it's statistically significant, and that my experience doesn't differ significantly from anyone else's.
YMMV, but the burden of proof does lie with the accuser, so please back your assertion with evidence.
[*] I base that on viewing slightly less than 1 abusive down-mod a week, or 1 in 80-90 moderations.
Parliement, [sic] not any kind of technical branch of the government. The people affected by this move will only surf the web, write reports and emails.
I really doubt that. I don't have any experience with the French Parliament, but I did a lot of contracting with the Canadian Parliament for a few years, and I can tell you that they have a huge data management task. They were responsible for the timely publication of every single formal statement, document, report etc. from our politicians. And we all know that politicians do love to talk.
One of the services we offered the was daily Hansard (a record of everything spoken in Parliament during a session), which was fielded by and indexed, cross-linked in both official languages and searchable by language, Party affiliation, region, riding and protocol (e.g. Question Period, Votes, etc.). Every morning by 07:00, we had everything spoken the day before prepped and readied for our customers. This data was merged into the existing infobase, creating a tremendously powerful research tool. And that was only one aspect of the kind of data management services they offered.
I'm inclined to say that the French Parliament probably did a needs analysis and decided on FOSS for precisely the opposite reason you're suggesting. If my experience in Canada is any indication, their typical workstation needs would be quite advanced, and the ability to create special purpose data management tools in open, interchangeable formats for a reasonable cost would likely be the most compelling reasons to move to Linux.
I say that from experience. It was the work I did with these guys (and other clients at the time) that convinced me to move away from Windows entirely. I haven't ever regretted that decision.
Slashdot Mirror
The correct way is - and always has been - to leave that to the user. Useability studies have shown time and again that new windows popping open unannounced are unwelcome, even frightening to many computer users. And the quickest way to piss off power users like me is to presume to know better than I how your site should be displayed.
This behaviour is another legacy of assuming that the entire world browses with certain versions of MSIE. The only reasonable way in that browser to keep track of multiple sites was to open links in new windows. But even then, such presumption was unwelcome to most people, even many IE users.
The only remaining (valid) use of the target attribute is in a frameset, and that monstrousity is not needed any more, what with the moderately decent CSS positioning support that is present in all modern browsers.
But that will never happen, where BSD and Linux are concerned. In fact, it's designed not to happen. The fact of the matter is that people in the FOSS world recognise that monoculture is a dangerous thing, and actually built the entire system to contain as few monolithic elements as possible.
See, the Toolkit Approach doesn't just make the systems integration task easier, it's also more secure by design. By focusing on a wide selection of single-purpose tools, we're able to achieve two things:
There are costs associated with this approach, of course. The burden of systems integration is much heavier on the individual organisation. Some find this too heavy. Others rely on outside sources to cope with it (cf. RedHat, IBM). This in turn leads to the danger of a monoculture, albeit much more limited in scope than Microsoft's, where small armies of technicians apply cookie-cutter solutions throughout a number of enterprises.
Weighed in the balance, though, my personal preference is for a FOSS solution every time. Thought the possibility of exploit remains, at least I'm not starting at such a huge deficit as I would be with Windows.
...It's contempt. 8^)
Okay, I jest. There are number of very good reasons the like Microsoft - their office automation products do make life easier - but it's just not enough for me. The fundamental problems are threefold:
There's no way to guarantee my work. (This is actually a complaint about proprietary software in general, but Microsoft is the worst about this.) On two or three significant occasions, I have been completely burned after commitments that I made to a client based on technical assurances I'd received that proved to be false. I've been forced into unsustainable situations because there was a huge gap between what the product promised to do and what it actually did. Dealing with the last 20% of any task is difficult at the best of times, but the number of times on Windows that I've been forced to accept that things are never going to run as designed because of shortcomings in the technology... they're too many to count.
Ultimately, the only way I could maintain my professional reputation (and my pride) was to walk away from the Microsoft Windows platform completely and to live with Linux and FOSS. It's not that it's better, per se, but at least I can make things work exactly as they're designed, without being completely at the mercy of someone else's market research and development cycle. In the worst case scenario, I can always keep a client happy by paying someone to provide a patch expressly for them. I may lose my shirt on that contract, but I'll never have a pissed-off client, and in my business, that's golden.
They're holding us back. I did a back-of-the-napkin calculation the other day, to see how much time I'd spent that week dealing with Windows' shortcomings instead of actually improving our systems. It was a fairly direct equation, because I was working on developing a really cool network monitoring toolkit that week. Every hour I spent at someone else's desk cleaning up crap delayed the arrival of this very useful tool by an hour. I calculated that I work 30% slower than I could do if I didn't have to deal with spyware, trojans, spambots etc.
That's insane. Seriously. People who don't know anything besides Microsoft will tell you that exploits happen to everyone, that if it wasn't MS, it would be someone else. But it just ain't so. Today's Word exploit is stunning evidence that Microsoft practices... whatever the opposite of security is. No I don't mean 'insecure'; they're apps are that, but their design is more like 'anti-secure'. I mean, who in their right mind stores pointers for memory move operations in a word processing file?
They are trying to break the Internet. The first points disappointed me, as a geek. But this point makes me angry. For Microsoft, dominance is not sufficient. They don't play to win; they play to destroy. And the tactics they use are bad for everyone. They oppose open systems, protocols - anything that makes it easier for people to share. This selfishness of spirit is manifest in every aspect of their business, and it impacts directly on my ability to do my job.
I don't mind having to explain the relative merits of a FOSS solution to an MS-only one. But when I have to respond to lies that are spread about my stock in trade, I get upset. When I spend more time countering FUD than actually talking tech, I get upset.
This is not competition. This is the opposite. It's playing dirty. It's cheating, and I'm tired of it.
I don't care if he's Jack The Ripper. Is he telling the truth or not? That's the only question relevant to this discussion.
I'm sick of this 'bias' shit. I don't care about bias. I only care about honesty and scientific rigour. I don't care if you're advocating nudism and free love or armageddon defense technology; if you have the data, show it to me. Then we can argue about what conclusions to draw from it.
This organisation, whatever its motivation, has provided a list of abuses of science by politicians. It's verifiable. So, please, for the love of Pete, either refute the list, or argue about the conclusions they reach from the data. But stop with the ad hominem attacks. This is exactly the kind of bad logic this group is complaining about.
Quoth parent:
No problem. Here you go.
http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.html:
That was too easy....
Exactly. This strategy has been advocated in Microsoft internal documents dating from years back. Eric S. Raymond quotes a Microsoft confidential Linux strategy report as saying:
I know I've been waiting since then for this particular shoe to drop. As for the rest of you, especially those who don't believe that Microsoft would do such a thing: Please read the documents, study Microsoft's strategy, and then decide where you want to be when their execution [sic] is complete.
Good idea. Why don't you go to laptop.org and download your own copy of the software and, well, test it, then? I did, and I found it has far more strengths than weaknesses. I really feel that they got inside the head of a first-time computer user; not confusing them with details, and creating simple mnemonic cues.
Well, I might flame you for ignorance (the link to the download was listed on slashdot not so very long ago) but not for intention. Your thoughts are right on target; the only thing is, you're not the first one to think - and do - something about it. So take off that asbestos suit and do some testing of your own. 8^)
Uhmmm, I think we're in screaming agreement here. That's the 'as it is currently constructed' part. 8^)
But again, the question isn't 'Can Microsoft do anything?' That's silly. The question is 'What then, will Microsoft do, faced with a business model that is doomed to fail?' This story paints a picture of Internet pie in the sky, which, as the GP pointed out, is not going to be complete any time soon. You're asserting that Microsoft is not without options in the application space. So my question to you then, is 'what can MS do in the application space that will save it from itself?'
Agreed. But consider that this is a failed conclusion from an observation which is emphatically true, and whose weight increases with every passing day: Microsoft Windows, as it is currently constructed, cannot compete in the long run with low- or no-cost software that is platform-neutral. The realisation that Microsoft is facing is this: The core of their entire business model will inevitably fail. Not today, not tomorrow, but sometime in the foreseeable future.
Everybody, Microsoft included, knows this is true. But the pundits seem to be extrapolating too far into the future, and they don't realise just how silly a thing this is to do, especially in the eyes of those of us who know a thing or two about computers and the Internet.
So let's just file this story in the same folder with our nuclear-powered flying car promises, and get back to the real question: How is Microsoft going to follow Vista?
[Emphasis mine.]
Nicely trolled, sir. You've begged the question quite nicely, and you'd have effectively sand-bagged any reasoned response, except you forgot something: Your understanding doesn't matter. Your failure to comprehend scientific consensus has no effect on the accuracy of the findings, nor on the continuing refinement of the data models, which, after all, is what this story is reporting about.
Absolutely right, and on several of those occasions, the conditions were antithetical to human existence. See, the issue here is not saving the planet. Earth will do just fine, thank you very much. The issue, if I may, is saving the humans, who are not nearly so resilient, and to whom, heaven knows why, many of us seem to have a sentimental attachment. Perhaps it has something to do with being human ourselves.
HTH, HAND.
GeekCorps, VSO and CUSO (if you're Canadian) all have pretty good opportunities for IT volunteers. (VSO Canada accepts applications from permament residents of the US and Canada.)
I wish it worked like that. I honestly do. Experience has taught me otherwise.
The big problem that one faces when designing IT development projects is understanding. There are a million and one organisations out there that will throw PCs, volunteers, building supplies, etc. at an IT project. It's a really 'sexy' thing to do right now. But doing it right it sometimes almost impossible. On more than one occasion, I've had to hold my nose and accept money for a project that I know is doomed to failure, because nobody will listen to me when I explain, in painful detail, why it's not going to work.
So I accept the equipment and the money, do what I'm told, and then spend the rest of my time preparing the people using the equipment to cope with the shortcomings of the project.
I think the submitter has an exceptionally important point to make, one that you might have missed: Most donors don't know jack shit about what the real requirements for a given project are. Most of them never will, because there's simply no one in the organisation who has a clue about IT. So looking for a clueful donor who's willing to give money and get out of the way is the right thing to do, if a little idealistic.
The reality lies somewhere between your suggestion and his, of course. But I'd always rather aim for the 'give me the money and get out of my way' approach than do the Donor Dance.
IME, the most cost-effective way to protect your equipment is to install a surge-suppressing switch with good grounding right at the point where the power company connects to the building. Lack of grounding and poor power is a huge problem here in the Pacific, but I've installed a few computer centres using this approach, and my losses due to power fluctuations are nil.
The best part is that every computer on the premises is protected. It's just too expensive to do this with UPS equipment.
I couldn't agree more. I actually find it amusing (when I'm not tearing my hair out) that people assail the OLPC project for lack of planning, when in fact this is its major strength. It's clear from the details of the design that the people behind OLPC have thought really carefully about all the details. I guess the part that makes it hard for the rest of the world to swallow is that they're the first to actually get it right. 8^)
Nonsense. A self-sufficient VSAT/WiFi station can be plunked down just about anywhere for a few thousand bucks. I do IT in the developing world for a living, so I can tell you authoritatively that the cost-effectiveness of electronic data into the village is vastly greater than shipping books. We've checked. This factors in community-based computer-centres, which are actually much heavier (in terms of capital and maintenance costs) than the OLPC model.
The big liability with regard to books is that they are difficult to protect. Most buildings in the developing world are, surprise surprise, poor quality. In tropical areas, they often don't have doors or windows, so books often barely last through a single school year. Your assumption about books being in fairly good condition might be true when they're loaded into the container, but it generally doesn't take long before they're in tatters. You'd be amazed, actually, how fast things deteriorate.
The biggest liability related to computers and electronic communications is usually power generation. Fuel is bulky and even more difficult to transport than books are. That's why OLPC is enlightened, in my opinion: It's the first such project to take autonomous power generation seriously.
They are also far more expensive to create, transport and update. There's a reason why we rely on electronic storage and access to data in the developed world. These reasons apply equally to the developing world. More so, in fact, because wireless technology (like the OLPC uses) is cheaper than any other data transmission technology currently available.
(And by the way, if you'd seen just how pitiful the average books-for-schoolkids project is in the developing world, you'd never suggest it except in the absence of all other alternatives. Having helped to unpack containers-full of tattered, outdated and useless crap, I speak from experience.)
Attach a DVD full of literature to the teacher's machine, and every child can access and store more data than an entire library full of books could contain.
On behalf of people here in the developing world, I'd like to thank you for having a brain. 8^)
People in my region are currently negotiating for access to the OLPC project, and you can bet your booties that economic spin-offs are one of the top reasons for the IT community supporting this effort. Just about everyone in the private sector likes the idea expressly because of the fact that these things will require support.
The way costs are expressed in this article are extremely disingenuous. The $30 Billion price tag, for example, is assumed to be a monolithic extra cost that would unquestionably have to be borrowed, because, apparently, heaven forbid that a nation like China actually allocate some of the largest cash reserves in the world to this project. Likewise, I'm not sure how this would cause Brasil, India or even Thailand to break out the begging bowl.
Likewise, why is this investment in infrastructure not compared to the huge investments in basic infrastructure that every single developed nation in the world has made - and continues to make? Perish the thought that a developing nation might see the benefit of following the example of every single successful country in the world. Anyone care to make a similar holistic calculation of how much the US, Canada and Western Europe have invested to introduce computers into the classroom?
Sounds to me like the author slept through economics 101 class. Or like FUD, depending on what you consider the author's motive to be. Whatever this is, it is not science, and it's not logic.
You're not making the argument for background checks; you're making the argument for secure systems that don't allow untrustworthy cowboys to peek at others' mail without supervision.
If someone could prove to me that background checks actually serve any other purpose than to cow potential employees, I'd be willing to consider that there might be some use for them. As things stand, I think they're a silly and - here's the important part - ineffective means of establishing security in business.
Invest some trust in your employees. Verify that the trust is deserved. Punish breaches of trust.
Well, that's a show-stopper. In the country where I live, that removes 80% of the population from the market for this device.
The warm, welcoming and supportive arms of the Linux community [sic] are generally full, and looking for a way to share the load. So when someone comes along and refuses to join unless someone else carries their burden for a while, some tend to be a bit incredulous. People who reduce the burden of others tend to be very warmly welcomed.
This isn't a defense of the one, nor is it an accusation against the other. But it's a fact that FOSS rewards the self-motivated and community-oriented far more than others. Therefore, there will likely always be a DIY element to the community that looks somewhat perplexedly at people who aren't willing to learn to build things for themselves.
FWIW, I worked and supported a bunch of teachers from nearby Illinois who customised the distro I was working on at the time, and supported it across a number of school districts. It was a spontaneous bit of self-organisation to meet an immediate need, and it's since grown into something really remarkable. I was proud to be able to assist them at the time and learned a great deal from their example. So I hope you'll forgive us if some of us challenge the assertion that it's impossible to start using Linux until someone pays for training. It's just that we happen to know from experience that it's not true.
This seems to be my reply-don't-mod day....
If we grant your assumption that things are indeed running smoothly, then there's no reason to change. But in my experience with Windows, I've yet to see a place where things run smoothly without a remarkable loss in terms of the capabilities of the individual client. Sometimes (indeed, often) this is exactly what management wants, so more power to them.
By far the more common scene, though, is one where nobody stops to calculate the opportunity cost of running Windows. Time and money spent keeping workstations malware-free could be spent improving and automating processes, making the entire organisation more effective. Just a couple of weeks ago I encountered a textbook example of this, where I was pulled away from writing a remote monitoring and administration interface for some web-based services because some user received a wonderful surprise in the form of a trojan-infested Powerpoint file with a 'Jesus loves you' message. (Aside: I've had a really hard time explaining to people that yes, Jesus may love you, but in this particular case, he's more interested in pwning your computer.)
Installing a low/no-cost alternative to Windows that integrates well with existing infrastructure but is vastly easier to manage and is inherently more secure is, well, to my mind it's a gimme. I think Linux is beginning to offer some really compelling alternatives that meet or exceed all of Windows' capabilities. I've played with Xandros before (it's based in my home town, so I've met a few of the devs as well), and though it's not to my taste, it is a well-built distro that attempts to leverage security and robustness without forgetting real-world needs of business users.
More power to them, I say.
IT managers would be wise to evaluate this kind of software. If nothing else, it gives them a better context in which to make their decisions. The more you know about what the different platforms can do, the better positioned you are to do what your business wants to do.
Careful there. The argument is not that meta-moderation catches all bad moderation, but that it does offer a statistically significant view of the degree to which moderation abuse occurs. Some people claim abusive moderation is systematic and supportive primarily of 'slashdot groupthink', whatever that is. Their argument seems to be that consensus around certain issues is enforced through the punishment of unpopular ideas with negative moderation.
I challenged them to provide evidence to back that assertion, and countered that regular and frequent meta-moderation over time should give one a pretty clear picture of moderation trends, and abuses like that should be immediately evident. The fact that they aren't led me to conclude that the accusations were nothing but make-believe.
But there's nothing in there that says that moderator abuse doesn't occur. Nor is there any claim that meta-moderation is an appropriate - or maybe sufficient - tool to counter all abuse. The kind of abuse that you're describing, one person targeting another for arbitrary, personal reasons, is almost impossible to stop without direct human intervention. It also fits well within the approx. 1% poor moderation I observed.
I'm sorry to hear about your experience, and having been around slashdot since the early days (never judge a user by their uid!), I've seen a fair amount of sillyness. It's a shame that sometimes we have to take the good with the bad, but there it is.
Look, I failed math three years running in high school, but it still only took me about 1.7 seconds to spot the logical flaws in your equation:
IME, staying away from the perils of complexity is much easier when one focuses on sticking close to the standards, and to avoiding most of the pointy-clicky 'web development' toolkits around. There's simply no substitute for a clean, hand-crafted implementation automated carefully and sanely. It keeps maintenance costs down and makes it possible to scale with far fewer of the headaches associated with proprietary - and constantly, arbitrarily changing - pseudo-standards.
Here's a thought: Rather than indulging in self-satisfied name-calling, why not perform some analysis on the moderation system and actually try to provide some evidence for your facile assertion? It's pretty easy to do, precisely because the kind of abuse you claim is rampant here would also be completely transparent, if it were happening.
For my part, I have no inclination to agree with your assertion, because in the 2 years I've been meta-moderating daily, I haven't seen more about 1% of posts[*] that show such symptoms. On the contrary, if my experience is any guide, there's a far more common tendency to content-free comments like yours upward than to mod unpopular, but well-argued, comments downward. The consistency of the data, and the fact that it's semi-randomly selected for me, leads me to believe that it's statistically significant, and that my experience doesn't differ significantly from anyone else's.
YMMV, but the burden of proof does lie with the accuser, so please back your assertion with evidence.
[*] I base that on viewing slightly less than 1 abusive down-mod a week, or 1 in 80-90 moderations.
I doubt it. I suspect that it just needs an XML parser to read data from an HTTP Request.
I really doubt that. I don't have any experience with the French Parliament, but I did a lot of contracting with the Canadian Parliament for a few years, and I can tell you that they have a huge data management task. They were responsible for the timely publication of every single formal statement, document, report etc. from our politicians. And we all know that politicians do love to talk.
One of the services we offered the was daily Hansard (a record of everything spoken in Parliament during a session), which was fielded by and indexed, cross-linked in both official languages and searchable by language, Party affiliation, region, riding and protocol (e.g. Question Period, Votes, etc.). Every morning by 07:00, we had everything spoken the day before prepped and readied for our customers. This data was merged into the existing infobase, creating a tremendously powerful research tool. And that was only one aspect of the kind of data management services they offered.
I'm inclined to say that the French Parliament probably did a needs analysis and decided on FOSS for precisely the opposite reason you're suggesting. If my experience in Canada is any indication, their typical workstation needs would be quite advanced, and the ability to create special purpose data management tools in open, interchangeable formats for a reasonable cost would likely be the most compelling reasons to move to Linux.
I say that from experience. It was the work I did with these guys (and other clients at the time) that convinced me to move away from Windows entirely. I haven't ever regretted that decision.