it's like smoking tobacco - on the face of it, your right to fuck your lungs is entirely your business. your right to fuck your internet experience by using crap like IE and Outlook is also entirely your business.
however, when i have to pick up the bill (increased taxes (in countries with universal healthcare) and/or increased insurance premiums (in the US and other third world countries)); when i have to come home from a bar reeking of smoke; or when my aunt dies of lung cancer after a lifetime not smoking but working in the casino industry, i start to see your 'private behavior' as impinging on me, and take an interest in limiting where and how you smoke, as well as how much of the resulting mess you pay for.
likewise, when my network access goes to shit because the latest melissa virus is chewing half the worl's bandwidth; whe i keep having to fend off relatives begging me to come and de-infest their windows boxes; when the 'network and IT support' indirect charge on the grants my (all linux/mac) department receives in effect subsidizes the high-support requirements of the other, windows-running departments at my research institute, i start to give a shit what other people have running on their boxes, and take an interest in sandboxing your shitboxes off frm my network, and in making sure you bear the full financial costs of your stupid IT decisions.
A few weeks ago I had lunch with the now famous "Mark Jen". I never knew Mark while we were at Microsoft, even though we both worked in the same group. Funny how large groups at Microsoft can get...
We had a great Google style lunch at a sunny table in Mountain View. I was too dense to notice that Mark was doing research for his blog. One thing he said got me thinking... Something that many have said over the years, that Microsoft "knows how to ship software".
Being a 16 year Microsoft veteran, a Distinguished Engineer, key architect and code writer for windows, architect of the largest source code control and build system ever attempted, I deeply believed that Microsoft knows how to ship software. We know how to build it, test it, localize it, manufacture it, charge lots of $$$ for it, etc.
Mark and I talked about this briefly at lunch that day, and I have been thinking about it from time to time since...
I am not sure I believe anymore, that Microsoft "knows how to ship software". When a Microsoft engineer fixes a minor defect, makes something faster or better, makes an API more functional and complete, how do they "ship" that software to me? I know the answer and so do you... The software sits in a source code control system for a minimum of two years (significantly longer for some of the early Longhorn code). At some point, the product that the fix is a part of will "ship" meaning that CD's will be pressed and delivered to customers and OEM's. In best case scenarios, the software will reach end users a few months after the Release To Manufacturing (RTM) date. In many cases, particularly for users working in large corporations, they won't see the software for a year or more post RTM...
Consider the.NET framework for a second. Suppose you wrote something innocent like a screen saver, written in C# based on the.NET framework. How would you as an ISV "ship your software"? You can't. Not unless you sign up to ship Microsoft's software as well. You see, the.NET Framework isn't widely deployed. It is present on a small fraction of machines in the world. Microsoft built the software, tested it, released it to manufacturing. They "shipped it", but it will take years for it to be deployed widely enough for you, the ISV to be able to take advantage of it. If you want to use.NET, you need to ship Microsoft's software for them. Isn't this an odd state of affairs? Microsoft is supposed to be the one that "knows how to ship software", but you are the one doing all the heavy lifting. You are the one that has to ship their software the last mile, install it on end user machines, ensure their machines still work after you perform this platform level surgery.
When an Amazon engineer fixes a minor defect, makes something faster or better, makes an API more functional and complete, how do they "ship" that software to me? What is the lag time between the engineer completing the work, and the software reaching its intended customers? A good friend of mine investigated a performance problem one morning, he saw an obvious defect and fixed it. His code was trivial, it was tested during the day, and rolled out that evening. By the next morning millions of users had benefited from his work. Not a single customer had to download a bag of bits, answer any silly questions, prove that they are not software thieves, reboot their computers, etc. The software was shipped to them, and they didn't have to lift a finger. Now that's what I call shipping software.
I would argue that Microsoft used to know how to ship software, but the world has changed... The companies that "know how to ship software" are the ones to watch. They have embraced the network, deeply understand the concept of "software as a service", and know how to deliver incredible value to their customers efficiently and quickly.
So does this mean if I attach GPS devices to all the squad cars at my local police station and have a website which shows their location at all times I won't be prosecuted? I mean, surely the police have '... no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle on a public roadway,' either.
i think he was kind of complimenting you - that you came up with such a fabulously functional hack without having to do irreversable things to every last component you put into it.
great job, and thanks for sharing it with everyone.
let me get this straight.. microsoft are ramming some hastily conceived and rush-designed security format down their partner's throats, and will be locking themselves and said partners to it.
and then they're giving us *how* many years to come up with workarounds or outright cracks?
My employer (University of California, San Francisco) has the legacy problem of a) paper forms not available digitally; and b) digital forms only available in Word/Excel format which work badly if at all in OpenOffice. The forms are all admin-type things for HR and purchasing etc.
Like many workplaces, to deal with legacy paper forms we have a single old typewriter tucked in a corner. Early last year we added a single old Pentium I with Windows 98 and Office 97 to the 'legacy corner' so we could continue to deal painlessly with the last of the legacy closed-format documents.
did the survey ask them if they had broadband access at work?
i do.. i use cheap-as-shit dialup at home for email and some minimal surfing, and broadband at work for grabbing iso's and other bandwidth-intensive stuff.
"Then I started to think about our international readership, and started wondering if global opinion about us has sunk so low that they find humor in our misfortune."
Yes.
Your country delivered death from the air on what, 12, 14, other countries in the 10 years before 9/11? Killing thousands of innocent civilians in the process, and devastating the lives of thousands more. Then someone returned the favour.
And it was appalling. But you can either laugh or cry, and once the shock and the initial genuine empathy for those who had suffered personally wore off, laughing at your country's misfortune is, for much of the rest of the world, the deliciously appropriate response.
I can't help but be reminded of why Hollywood is in Calfornia rather than New York. All the early movie studios were in New Jersey. Edison, who owned patents on the movie camera charged royalties on every foot of film shot, and send thugs out to (in some cases) smash the cameras of those who didn't cough up.
Eventually people got sick of it and moved to the other side of the country & got on with it unmolested.
Current US IP laws are a significant incentive to move any business involved in the creation of IP offshore.
I suspect in a hundred yeasr noone other thana few historians will know why it is that the biotech or IT industry is centered on, say, Australia or India or Marituis and that it once was centered in the US.
"You can fit a small Access database on a floppy. Conversely, you may need a full fledged DBA to run MySQL."
On the other hand, my current fieldwork database (at the point we were switching from access to mysql) was a 50mb Access file, but a 200kb mysql dumpfile.
I could refresh remote copies of the mysql version over a 56k dialup (or by floppy) no problem, but duplicating the access db (don't even talk to me about 'sync' - I lost count of how many rollbacks to backup I had to do after using sync. one of the reasons we migrated) was impossible without boradband or cd burning.
Ahh, the vaguaries of slashdot - write a carefully thought out response to something, it sinks without a trace. Write a flippant, 90% flamebait comment while drunk and someone will click 'insightful'. And it'll be the start of a 20+ message thread arguing about WWII.. {grin}
I've hired about 20 people in the last year. Every single one of them I found by asking friends and contacts in the industry "Oh, hey, I'm looking to hire a [position] - they need to have [experience X / qualification Y] - do you know of anyone?". I don't even ask for a resume until I've pretty much made up my mind to hire someone.
Where does this leave an aspiring job seeker? Let everyone you know that you're looking for work. It doesn't matter if they even work in the industry you want to be employed in - they might know someone who does. And when one of these contacts mentions something, *follow it up* - once you're on my radar as a potential employee, nothing blows your chances like not returning calls or emails promptly.
Finally, go to conferences (or whatever your field's equivalent is) in your field. Talk to people who present. I got one of the best jobs I ever had because I went to a conference and argued with one of the presenters about a technical point (ok, not necessarily the best idea, but it apparently made an impression), then followed up with an email including a reference she'd asked for. In the ensuing exchange I happened to mention I was looking for work, & promptly got offered a job.
Depends on the model. Some reset to Aug 27th, 1956 (birthday of Ray Montagne, who designed the CUDA microcontroller used in some Macs), some reset to Jan 1 1969 (also a birthday, but I forget whose), the vast majority reset to 1904.
see, here's what pisses me off about things like SCO - if you write code for them or do something else vaguely productive, then current events are turning your work into a resume liability. But if you're a lawyer or a CEO, this insane crap isn't going to be a liability at all.
"I worked as lead lawyer on the team that kept an entire industry on tenterhooks for over a year despite having no credible basis on which to do so".
1. a. The action or an act of selling or making over to another for a price; the exchange of a commodity for money or other valuable consideration. Also, with qualification: (Ready, slow, etc.) disposal of goods for money; opportunity of selling.
etmology: late OE. sala, prob. a. ON. sala wk. fem. (ON. had also sal neut.) = OHG. sala, MHG. sale, sal str. fem., f. root sal- of *saljan to SELL.
So it's from old english or old norse root words meaning 'to sell'. Your story is more fun though : )
'twas an imac. bought retail in australia as a closeout item, so in honesty while it was indeed brand new, it was almost certainly a model originally released pre-2001.
the (borrowed) osx installer disk barfed on something or other.. i've since replaced that machine with a g4 powerbook, which needless to say runs osx just fine, but i no longer have the old machine to go back to to give it another go and work out what went wrong.
lies, damn lies and statistics. still, my original point that whining that this week's release of fedora runs poorly on a three year old machine is a bit silly is valid, i think.
"Not trolling: Go install Fedora and see how it runs on a three year old machine. There's quite a lot of work to do."
Tried running OSX or WinXP on a three year old machine lately? My three year old Mac (brand new 2001) won't even let me install OSX let alone *run* it..
The point of crossover is the same as the point of cygwin.
I use linux because the core tools to do my job are only available (or work best) under linux. I use crossover so I can use some essentially peripheral tools so far only available under windows without having to screw around with dual boot or keeping a spare box around. And I'm certainly not going to bend over backwards to migrate to windows and work out how to kludge/emulate/port my work tools just so I can run windows.
For someone whose core toolset is only available (or works best) under windows, I'd also suspect they aren't going to migrate just because more of their core toolset can now be kludged into working under linux.
The great work crossover does will not cause anyone to migrate; it'll only reduce the need to dual boot or keep a spare windows box for non-core functions among those of us who have long sicne migrated. Which is a worthy and useful end in itself.
Slashdot Mirror
it's like smoking tobacco - on the face of it, your right to fuck your lungs is entirely your business. your right to fuck your internet experience by using crap like IE and Outlook is also entirely your business.
however, when i have to pick up the bill (increased taxes (in countries with universal healthcare) and/or increased insurance premiums (in the US and other third world countries)); when i have to come home from a bar reeking of smoke; or when my aunt dies of lung cancer after a lifetime not smoking but working in the casino industry, i start to see your 'private behavior' as impinging on me, and take an interest in limiting where and how you smoke, as well as how much of the resulting mess you pay for.
likewise, when my network access goes to shit because the latest melissa virus is chewing half the worl's bandwidth; whe i keep having to fend off relatives begging me to come and de-infest their windows boxes; when the 'network and IT support' indirect charge on the grants my (all linux/mac) department receives in effect subsidizes the high-support requirements of the other, windows-running departments at my research institute, i start to give a shit what other people have running on their boxes, and take an interest in sandboxing your shitboxes off frm my network, and in making sure you bear the full financial costs of your stupid IT decisions.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
.NET framework for a second. Suppose you wrote something innocent like a screen saver, written in C# based on the .NET framework. How would you as an ISV "ship your software"? You can't. Not unless you sign up to ship Microsoft's software as well. You see, the .NET Framework isn't widely deployed. It is present on a small fraction of machines in the world. Microsoft built the software, tested it, released it to manufacturing. They "shipped it", but it will take years for it to be deployed widely enough for you, the ISV to be able to take advantage of it. If you want to use .NET, you need to ship Microsoft's software for them. Isn't this an odd state of affairs? Microsoft is supposed to be the one that "knows how to ship software", but you are the one doing all the heavy lifting. You are the one that has to ship their software the last mile, install it on end user machines, ensure their machines still work after you perform this platform level surgery.
Shipping Software
A few weeks ago I had lunch with the now famous "Mark Jen". I never knew Mark while we were at Microsoft, even though we both worked in the same group. Funny how large groups at Microsoft can get...
We had a great Google style lunch at a sunny table in Mountain View. I was too dense to notice that Mark was doing research for his blog. One thing he said got me thinking... Something that many have said over the years, that Microsoft "knows how to ship software".
Being a 16 year Microsoft veteran, a Distinguished Engineer, key architect and code writer for windows, architect of the largest source code control and build system ever attempted, I deeply believed that Microsoft knows how to ship software. We know how to build it, test it, localize it, manufacture it, charge lots of $$$ for it, etc.
Mark and I talked about this briefly at lunch that day, and I have been thinking about it from time to time since...
I am not sure I believe anymore, that Microsoft "knows how to ship software". When a Microsoft engineer fixes a minor defect, makes something faster or better, makes an API more functional and complete, how do they "ship" that software to me? I know the answer and so do you... The software sits in a source code control system for a minimum of two years (significantly longer for some of the early Longhorn code). At some point, the product that the fix is a part of will "ship" meaning that CD's will be pressed and delivered to customers and OEM's. In best case scenarios, the software will reach end users a few months after the Release To Manufacturing (RTM) date. In many cases, particularly for users working in large corporations, they won't see the software for a year or more post RTM...
Consider the
When an Amazon engineer fixes a minor defect, makes something faster or better, makes an API more functional and complete, how do they "ship" that software to me? What is the lag time between the engineer completing the work, and the software reaching its intended customers? A good friend of mine investigated a performance problem one morning, he saw an obvious defect and fixed it. His code was trivial, it was tested during the day, and rolled out that evening. By the next morning millions of users had benefited from his work. Not a single customer had to download a bag of bits, answer any silly questions, prove that they are not software thieves, reboot their computers, etc. The software was shipped to them, and they didn't have to lift a finger. Now that's what I call shipping software.
I would argue that Microsoft used to know how to ship software, but the world has changed... The companies that "know how to ship software" are the ones to watch. They have embraced the network, deeply understand the concept of "software as a service", and know how to deliver incredible value to their customers efficiently and quickly.
posted by Mark Lucovsky at 9:38 PM
there's something decidedly poigniant about that lone broken spring sitting in front of the heatsheild..
So does this mean if I attach GPS devices to all the squad cars at my local police station and have a website which shows their location at all times I won't be prosecuted? I mean, surely the police have '... no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle on a public roadway,' either.
i think he was kind of complimenting you - that you came up with such a fabulously functional hack without having to do irreversable things to every last component you put into it.
great job, and thanks for sharing it with everyone.
pete
kliper? i can't find that under my kde menu.. can someone give me an ftp address?
that's nothing:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=824973
(installing redhat 6 on microsoft virtual pc for mac)
let me get this straight.. microsoft are ramming some hastily conceived and rush-designed security format down their partner's throats, and will be locking themselves and said partners to it.
and then they're giving us *how* many years to come up with workarounds or outright cracks?
heh. hehehehehehe.
My employer (University of California, San Francisco) has the legacy problem of a) paper forms not available digitally; and b) digital forms only available in Word/Excel format which work badly if at all in OpenOffice. The forms are all admin-type things for HR and purchasing etc.
Like many workplaces, to deal with legacy paper forms we have a single old typewriter tucked in a corner. Early last year we added a single old Pentium I with Windows 98 and Office 97 to the 'legacy corner' so we could continue to deal painlessly with the last of the legacy closed-format documents.
Works for us.
did the survey ask them if they had broadband access at work?
i do.. i use cheap-as-shit dialup at home for email and some minimal surfing, and broadband at work for grabbing iso's and other bandwidth-intensive stuff.
"Then I started to think about our international readership, and started wondering if global opinion about us has sunk so low that they find humor in our misfortune."
Yes.
Your country delivered death from the air on what, 12, 14, other countries in the 10 years before 9/11? Killing thousands of innocent civilians in the process, and devastating the lives of thousands more. Then someone returned the favour.
And it was appalling. But you can either laugh or cry, and once the shock and the initial genuine empathy for those who had suffered personally wore off, laughing at your country's misfortune is, for much of the rest of the world, the deliciously appropriate response.
I can't help but be reminded of why Hollywood is in Calfornia rather than New York. All the early movie studios were in New Jersey. Edison, who owned patents on the movie camera charged royalties on every foot of film shot, and send thugs out to (in some cases) smash the cameras of those who didn't cough up.
Eventually people got sick of it and moved to the other side of the country & got on with it unmolested.
Current US IP laws are a significant incentive to move any business involved in the creation of IP offshore.
I suspect in a hundred yeasr noone other thana few historians will know why it is that the biotech or IT industry is centered on, say, Australia or India or Marituis and that it once was centered in the US.
"You can fit a small Access database on a floppy. Conversely, you may need a full fledged DBA to run MySQL."
On the other hand, my current fieldwork database (at the point we were switching from access to mysql) was a 50mb Access file, but a 200kb mysql dumpfile.
I could refresh remote copies of the mysql version over a 56k dialup (or by floppy) no problem, but duplicating the access db (don't even talk to me about 'sync' - I lost count of how many rollbacks to backup I had to do after using sync. one of the reasons we migrated) was impossible without boradband or cd burning.
Ahh, the vaguaries of slashdot - write a carefully thought out response to something, it sinks without a trace. Write a flippant, 90% flamebait comment while drunk and someone will click 'insightful'. And it'll be the start of a 20+ message thread arguing about WWII.. {grin}
" The other part that makes it exciting is they might get nuked by the Pakistanis at any time."
As opposed to the US, hated by 2/3 of the world's population, & obvious target # 1 for more minor excitements like, um, 9/11..
I've hired about 20 people in the last year. Every single one of them I found by asking friends and contacts in the industry "Oh, hey, I'm looking to hire a [position] - they need to have [experience X / qualification Y] - do you know of anyone?". I don't even ask for a resume until I've pretty much made up my mind to hire someone.
Where does this leave an aspiring job seeker? Let everyone you know that you're looking for work. It doesn't matter if they even work in the industry you want to be employed in - they might know someone who does. And when one of these contacts mentions something, *follow it up* - once you're on my radar as a potential employee, nothing blows your chances like not returning calls or emails promptly.
Finally, go to conferences (or whatever your field's equivalent is) in your field. Talk to people who present. I got one of the best jobs I ever had because I went to a conference and argued with one of the presenters about a technical point (ok, not necessarily the best idea, but it apparently made an impression), then followed up with an email including a reference she'd asked for. In the ensuing exchange I happened to mention I was looking for work, & promptly got offered a job.
Anyway, hope these tidbits help someone.
San Francisco police cars all have laptops mounted on a bracket in the front seat accessible to the driver for running licenses & *writing reports*.
does this mean they'll have to pull them all? {grin}
Depends on the model. Some reset to Aug 27th, 1956 (birthday of Ray Montagne, who designed the CUDA microcontroller used in some Macs), some reset to Jan 1 1969 (also a birthday, but I forget whose), the vast majority reset to 1904.
"it would for example reduce the travel time from Sydney, Australia to New York to less than 3 hrs"
Yep, I'm real sure the Indian govt is pumping cash into this so a high-speed service from Sydney to NY can be set up..
Mumbai to NY perhaps, Delhi to London perhaps..
see, here's what pisses me off about things like SCO - if you write code for them or do something else vaguely productive, then current events are turning your work into a resume liability. But if you're a lawyer or a CEO, this insane crap isn't going to be a liability at all.
"I worked as lead lawyer on the team that kept an entire industry on tenterhooks for over a year despite having no credible basis on which to do so".
Fuckers. Drown them all.
no joy. from the OED:
1. a. The action or an act of selling or making over to another for a price; the exchange of a commodity for money or other valuable consideration. Also, with qualification: (Ready, slow, etc.) disposal of goods for money; opportunity of selling.
etmology: late OE. sala, prob. a. ON. sala wk. fem. (ON. had also sal neut.) = OHG. sala, MHG. sale, sal str. fem., f. root sal- of *saljan to SELL.
So it's from old english or old norse root words meaning 'to sell'. Your story is more fun though : )
'twas an imac. bought retail in australia as a closeout item, so in honesty while it was indeed brand new, it was almost certainly a model originally released pre-2001.
the (borrowed) osx installer disk barfed on something or other.. i've since replaced that machine with a g4 powerbook, which needless to say runs osx just fine, but i no longer have the old machine to go back to to give it another go and work out what went wrong.
lies, damn lies and statistics. still, my original point that whining that this week's release of fedora runs poorly on a three year old machine is a bit silly is valid, i think.
"Not trolling: Go install Fedora and see how it runs on a three year old machine. There's quite a lot of work to do."
Tried running OSX or WinXP on a three year old machine lately? My three year old Mac (brand new 2001) won't even let me install OSX let alone *run* it..
"Am I the only one just waiting for FOX news to start a radio station?"
Yes.
The point of crossover is the same as the point of cygwin.
I use linux because the core tools to do my job are only available (or work best) under linux. I use crossover so I can use some essentially peripheral tools so far only available under windows without having to screw around with dual boot or keeping a spare box around. And I'm certainly not going to bend over backwards to migrate to windows and work out how to kludge/emulate/port my work tools just so I can run windows.
For someone whose core toolset is only available (or works best) under windows, I'd also suspect they aren't going to migrate just because more of their core toolset can now be kludged into working under linux.
The great work crossover does will not cause anyone to migrate; it'll only reduce the need to dual boot or keep a spare windows box for non-core functions among those of us who have long sicne migrated. Which is a worthy and useful end in itself.