Here is the email address of the AP correspondent Rachel Konrad who wrote the story: rkonrad@ap.org. I urge all slashdotters to write Ms. Konrad and hammer her for this horrible, horrible statement.
The above is of course what Mr. Gates supposedly says whenever he is presented with an idea, concept, or proposal that he doesn't like or agree with. The idea that his product crashes during a KEYNOTE speech he is giving at a major show would certainly be worthy of such a description.
Does anyone know how many MS employees have been fired so far as a result of this incident? At most companies heads would certainly roll. What is particularly mystifying to me is that this would happen to Gates now in light of the fact that this has happened to him before.
This also reminds me of a photo from another show a few years ago where Steve Jobs is shown standing on a stage while behind him is an enormous screen with Gates' big giant head framing Jobs. I laughed and laughed....
Slightly offtopic but speaking of MS crashes, at my company a few years ago I upgraded to Office XP and my machine started crashing regularly. In a rage, I fired off a complaint to billg@microsoft.com to complain. Of course, I never expected a response given that he supposedly has a "bozo" filter and teams of flunkies but I actually got a sincere response email from somone at MS who was at a fairly high level. Go figure...
Thanks for posting this story. I have an IPAQ which I am going to send them. Hopefully these people find palmtops useful...
I have found the entire palmtop concept to be useless for me personally. Having to train the thing to recognize my handwriting or learning to write in the stilted font that some palmtops will recognize has been something I am not willing to do. Plus the dinky screen really is useless, especially at the prices that are being charged for these things.
I prefer to take my laptop computer with me when I am going to need a computer. It is far easier to type whatever and there's enough screen real estate to be useful.
Small time music acts that get promoted by record companies go along with the big firms because they want to be rich and famous. The labels are only giving the artists financial support. If an obscure and innovative act wanted to stay that way there's nothing stopping them.
If a person is a follower they can always switch to a non sell out band or piece of software.
Here is tha actual article; note that MS doesn't plan to have this ready to release until "near the end of the decade."
A Peek Under Microsoft's Secret 'Bigtop' By Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft Watch December 29, 2004
Microsoft officials have said little about the company's intentions in the grid-computing space. But that doesn't mean Microsoft is ignoring the evolving arena of grid/distributed computing.
Microsoft is working on a skunk-works project that is code-named Bigtop, which is designed to allow developers to create a set of loosely coupled, distributed operating-systems components in a relatively rapid way, according to sources close to the company, who requested anonymity.
Rather than attempting to tightly couple a few high-performance systems together, Microsoft is looking at the consequences of loosely coupling a larger number of moderately powerful computers to achieve a similar result.
Bigtop's first commercial manifestation will likely be as some kind of large-scale project, most likely a distributed grid-computing operating system, the sources added.
Bigtop is one of Microsoft's incubation projects. It falls under the domain of Craig Mundie, the Microsoft senior vice president and chief technical officer in charge of advanced strategies and policy, sources said.
Bigtop consists of three components, all written in C#, according to developers who said they were briefed by Microsoft. These are:
Highwire: Highwire is a technology designed to automate the development of highly parallel applications that distribute work over distributed resources, the aforementioned sources said. Highwire is a programming language/model that will aim to make the testing and compiling of such parallel programs much simpler and more reliable.
Bigparts: Bigparts is code designed to turn inexpensive PC devices into special-purpose servers, according to the sources. Bigparts will enable real-time, device-specific software to be moved off a PC, and instead be managed centrally via some Web services-like model.
Bigwin: According to sources close to Microsoft, Bigwin sounds like the ultimate manifestation of Microsoft's "software as a service" mantra. In a Bigwin world, applications are just collections of OS services that adhere to certain "behavioral contracts." These OS services can be provided directly by the core OS or even obtained from libraries outside of the core OS.
Sources said Microsoft will likely make some sort of preview version of the Bigtop code available to the company's software-development partners by 2006. If and when the final version debuts, it won't be much before the end of the decade, sources added.
It's not clear whether the Bigtop components will run on top of Windows when they are completed. But sources say that is what they are expecting at this point. End of Article
I like their use of a circus term as a name for this project. It gives the impression of a bunch of clowns running around into each other and falling down. Kind of like MS systems on the web now.
I, for one, appreciate a webpage that isn't so much of a bandwidth hog. Most photography websites take a while to load for someone with a dialup connection.
Exactly...I have been a long-time Apple hater due to their proprietary business model and higher prices but now I am seriously considering buying an Apple machine. With the PowerPC chip and OS X at approximately the same price as Wintels it is starting to seem like a no-brainer.
I'd mod you up but they haven't given me any mod points in quite a while. That Charlie Rose comment is dead on and the fact is obviously Linux is the OS that meets his criteria.
Yeah, as a former resident of Oregon I can say that the measures taken were large tax hikes. Not necessarily the best solution to a government budget problem.
FYI: Mormons don't practice polygamy anymore. The practice is forbidden by the church and violators are promptly excommunicated. Anytime you see a news story about polygamists, the people in question are dissidents from the Mormon church and have no connection whatsoever with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints(which happens to be the correct name of the religion).
"New York" magazine is also read by CEO's and decision makers. When New Yorkers want to create a splash for a new venture, they often throw parties at exclusive clubs, hire models, send out invites to a select list of politicians, pundits, authors, and businessmen. If you were a C level executive I think you would want to go to a party where you could meet the next Elle MacPherson and have a bunch of free drinks in exchange for looking at a product for a few minutes.
Le Guin's work is one of the greatest in fantasy writing, comparable to Tolkien in my opinion. That said, expecting a TV/movie adaptation of any book to compare favorably to the written work itself is unrealistic. Peter Jackson's LOTR was a masterpiece and by definition masterpieces are rare. I am not going to watch this Earthsea product; I don't want to mess with my memories of reading the series.
Since most of his work, if not all, is worth a ton of money I would think that the owners would be willing to spend to preserve the paintings. Where did you see that article?
Instead of taking out an ad in the paper, the money should have been spent renting one of the high end NYC clubs, setting up a LAN with a bunch of machines running Firefox, and hiring a bunch of models to escort invitees to the machines and encourage the invitees to try the software. The invitees would be people who show up in the Intelligencer column of New York magazine. This would be more effective than an ad. You need to get influencers to use the product and they'll spread the Firefox gospel by word of mouth. I am completely serious here. The ad was a waste of money. Better to have put together a TV ad with a hot model talking about the product.
Of course, this doesn't come as a surprise to me. Most slashdotters probably hate marketing people almost as much as they hate Microsoft.
I have seen numerous posts on/. where the ability of the NSA or other government agencies to monitor our activities/communication at an extremely detailed level is taken for granted. EG, "I don't need anyone to send this message to the Feds, since they're reading it right now on Echelon."
How is monitoring/filtering volumes of communication/satellite recon easier than tracking large metallic objects speeding through space and hitting same with essentially a large bullet?
The technical knowledge that is being gained from this program is certainly going to filter out to the mainstream tech world eventually and will be useful. Suppose, for example that a small asteroid-like object about the size of an ICBM were approaching the earth from space and the calculated impact point was somewhere in the US. The object detection, identification and destruction technology needed to remove the threat from the asteroid is no different than what is being researched through the US ABM programs.
Anyhow, when it comes to spending US tax dollars to defend us against threats the position of the left wing (and seemingly a majority of slashdot posters) is that if the threat is from space they want to spend freely but if the spending has to be done by the US military the response is negative.
I stand corrected. After re-reading, I would say that of course human activity affects climate change. Is the concept of the "butterfly effect" still considered valid by the scientific community?
I was in fact trying to say that papers addressing pre-human climate change don't include human impacts.
It is certainly a fact that there is a larger amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to human activity and that a greenhouse effect can occur. Given the significant variability of the earth's climate before human activity became significant, wouldn't it be fair to say that we can't make an informed judgment about the good or bad effects of human CO2 generation relative to Earth's climate in the future?
In your opinion is the movement to limit CO2 generation a good thing or a bad thing?
Are you an atmospheric scientist? Your sentence "When reliable evidence that supports the theory that climate change occurs independent of human activity surfaces, it will be published" is rather unfortunate. 99.999% of the data that climatologists are comparing the last humdred years of climate change against records pre-human history.
Yeah, I was wondering how the lefties were going to blame this on President Bush. How about this: Halliburton drilled a well in Wyoming that fouled up the plate tectonics and caused the mountain to start spewing again.
Yep, sounds like something straight out of Howard Dean's moutn....
On the web page this is described as a completely new OS. What would prevent a new open source OS from gaining widespread acceptance now that running multiple OS's on one machine is common? The web page has set forth some ambitious goals for this project. If it lives up to the goals it should take off.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is the email address of the AP correspondent Rachel Konrad who wrote the story: rkonrad@ap.org. I urge all slashdotters to write Ms. Konrad and hammer her for this horrible, horrible statement.
The above is of course what Mr. Gates supposedly says whenever he is presented with an idea, concept, or proposal that he doesn't like or agree with. The idea that his product crashes during a KEYNOTE speech he is giving at a major show would certainly be worthy of such a description.
Does anyone know how many MS employees have been fired so far as a result of this incident? At most companies heads would certainly roll. What is particularly mystifying to me is that this would happen to Gates now in light of the fact that this has happened to him before.
This also reminds me of a photo from another show a few years ago where Steve Jobs is shown standing on a stage while behind him is an enormous screen with Gates' big giant head framing Jobs. I laughed and laughed....
Slightly offtopic but speaking of MS crashes, at my company a few years ago I upgraded to Office XP and my machine started crashing regularly. In a rage, I fired off a complaint to billg@microsoft.com to complain. Of course, I never expected a response given that he supposedly has a "bozo" filter and teams of flunkies but I actually got a sincere response email from somone at MS who was at a fairly high level. Go figure...
According to the article, the receiving operator was using a 1,000 foot antenna. I'd be more impressed if the antenna were smaller.
Thanks for posting this story. I have an IPAQ which I am going to send them. Hopefully these people find palmtops useful...
I have found the entire palmtop concept to be useless for me personally. Having to train the thing to recognize my handwriting or learning to write in the stilted font that some palmtops will recognize has been something I am not willing to do. Plus the dinky screen really is useless, especially at the prices that are being charged for these things.
I prefer to take my laptop computer with me when I am going to need a computer. It is far easier to type whatever and there's enough screen real estate to be useful.
Small time music acts that get promoted by record companies go along with the big firms because they want to be rich and famous. The labels are only giving the artists financial support. If an obscure and innovative act wanted to stay that way there's nothing stopping them.
If a person is a follower they can always switch to a non sell out band or piece of software.
I believe this was Microsoft's mantra with regard to IBM at one time. Ironic that MS is now the company with the masses....
Here is tha actual article; note that MS doesn't plan to have this ready to release until "near the end of the decade."
A Peek Under Microsoft's Secret 'Bigtop'
By Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft Watch
December 29, 2004
Microsoft officials have said little about the company's intentions in the grid-computing space. But that doesn't mean Microsoft is ignoring the evolving arena of grid/distributed computing.
Microsoft is working on a skunk-works project that is code-named Bigtop, which is designed to allow developers to create a set of loosely coupled, distributed operating-systems components in a relatively rapid way, according to sources close to the company, who requested anonymity.
Rather than attempting to tightly couple a few high-performance systems together, Microsoft is looking at the consequences of loosely coupling a larger number of moderately powerful computers to achieve a similar result.
Bigtop's first commercial manifestation will likely be as some kind of large-scale project, most likely a distributed grid-computing operating system, the sources added.
Bigtop is one of Microsoft's incubation projects. It falls under the domain of Craig Mundie, the Microsoft senior vice president and chief technical officer in charge of advanced strategies and policy, sources said.
Bigtop consists of three components, all written in C#, according to developers who said they were briefed by Microsoft. These are:
Highwire: Highwire is a technology designed to automate the development of highly parallel applications that distribute work over distributed resources, the aforementioned sources said. Highwire is a programming language/model that will aim to make the testing and compiling of such parallel programs much simpler and more reliable.
Bigparts: Bigparts is code designed to turn inexpensive PC devices into special-purpose servers, according to the sources. Bigparts will enable real-time, device-specific software to be moved off a PC, and instead be managed centrally via some Web services-like model.
Bigwin: According to sources close to Microsoft, Bigwin sounds like the ultimate manifestation of Microsoft's "software as a service" mantra. In a Bigwin world, applications are just collections of OS services that adhere to certain "behavioral contracts." These OS services can be provided directly by the core OS or even obtained from libraries outside of the core OS.
Sources said Microsoft will likely make some sort of preview version of the Bigtop code available to the company's software-development partners by 2006. If and when the final version debuts, it won't be much before the end of the decade, sources added.
It's not clear whether the Bigtop components will run on top of Windows when they are completed. But sources say that is what they are expecting at this point. End of Article
I like their use of a circus term as a name for this project. It gives the impression of a bunch of clowns running around into each other and falling down. Kind of like MS systems on the web now.
I, for one, appreciate a webpage that isn't so much of a bandwidth hog. Most photography websites take a while to load for someone with a dialup connection.
It appears that Colonel Mustard did it in the library with a knife...
Exactly...I have been a long-time Apple hater due to their proprietary business model and higher prices but now I am seriously considering buying an Apple machine. With the PowerPC chip and OS X at approximately the same price as Wintels it is starting to seem like a no-brainer.
I'd mod you up but they haven't given me any mod points in quite a while. That Charlie Rose comment is dead on and the fact is obviously Linux is the OS that meets his criteria.
Yeah, as a former resident of Oregon I can say that the measures taken were large tax hikes. Not necessarily the best solution to a government budget problem.
FYI: Mormons don't practice polygamy anymore. The practice is forbidden by the church and violators are promptly excommunicated. Anytime you see a news
story about polygamists, the people in question are dissidents from the Mormon church and have no connection whatsoever with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints(which happens to be the correct name of the religion).
"New York" magazine is also read by CEO's and decision makers. When New Yorkers want to create a splash for a new venture, they often throw parties at exclusive clubs, hire models, send out invites to a select list of politicians, pundits, authors, and businessmen. If you were a C level executive I think you would want to go to a party where you could meet the next Elle MacPherson and have a bunch of free drinks in exchange for looking at a product for a few minutes.
Le Guin's work is one of the greatest in fantasy writing, comparable to Tolkien in my opinion. That said, expecting a TV/movie adaptation of any book to compare favorably to the written work itself is unrealistic. Peter Jackson's LOTR was a masterpiece and by definition masterpieces are rare. I am not going to watch this Earthsea product; I don't want to mess with my memories of reading the series.
Since most of his work, if not all, is worth a ton of money I would think that the owners would be willing to spend to preserve the paintings. Where did you see that article?
Instead of taking out an ad in the paper, the money should have been spent renting one of the high end NYC clubs, setting up a LAN with a bunch of machines running Firefox, and hiring a bunch of models to escort invitees to the machines and encourage the invitees to try the software. The invitees would be people who show up in the Intelligencer column of New York magazine. This would be more effective than an ad. You need to get influencers to use the product and they'll spread the Firefox gospel by word of mouth.
I am completely serious here. The ad was a waste of money. Better to have put together a TV ad with a hot model talking about the product.
Of course, this doesn't come as a surprise to me. Most slashdotters probably hate marketing people almost as much as they hate Microsoft.
If I were a corporate purchaser, why would I pay now when I could wait a while and download it for free?
I have seen numerous posts on /. where the ability of the NSA or other government agencies to monitor our activities/communication at an extremely detailed level is taken for granted. EG,
"I don't need anyone to send this message to the Feds, since they're reading it right now on Echelon."
How is monitoring/filtering volumes of communication/satellite recon easier than tracking large metallic objects speeding through space and hitting same with essentially a large bullet?
The technical knowledge that is being gained from this program is certainly going to filter out to the mainstream tech world eventually and will be useful. Suppose, for example that a small asteroid-like object about the size of an ICBM were approaching the earth from space and the calculated impact point was somewhere in the US.
The object detection, identification and destruction technology needed to remove the threat from the asteroid is no different than what is being researched through the US ABM programs.
Anyhow, when it comes to spending US tax dollars to defend us against threats the position of the left wing (and seemingly a majority of slashdot posters) is that if the threat is from space they want to spend freely but if the spending has to be done by the US military the response is negative.
I stand corrected. After re-reading, I would say that of course human activity affects climate change. Is the concept of the "butterfly effect" still considered valid by the scientific community?
I was in fact trying to say that papers addressing pre-human climate change don't include human impacts.
It is certainly a fact that there is a larger amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to human activity and that a greenhouse effect can occur. Given the significant variability of the earth's climate before human activity became significant, wouldn't it be fair to say that we can't make an informed judgment about the good or bad effects of human CO2 generation relative to Earth's climate in the future?
In your opinion is the movement to limit CO2 generation a good thing or a bad thing?
Thanks for responding to my post.
Based on the number of comments posted so far related to this story, I would say the editors shouldn't bother posting any more stories about Mandrake.
Are you an atmospheric scientist? Your sentence "When reliable evidence that supports the theory that climate change occurs independent of human activity surfaces, it will be published" is rather unfortunate. 99.999% of the data that climatologists are comparing the last humdred years of climate change against records pre-human history.
Yeah, I was wondering how the lefties were going to blame this on President Bush. How about this: Halliburton drilled a well in Wyoming that fouled up the plate tectonics and caused the mountain to start spewing again.
Yep, sounds like something straight out of Howard Dean's moutn....
On the web page this is described as a completely new OS. What would prevent a new open source OS from gaining widespread acceptance now that running multiple OS's on one machine is common? The web page has set forth some ambitious goals for this project. If it lives up to the goals it should take off.
What exactly does "whopping" mean anyway?