"We want to urge all system builders indeed, all Partners not to supply naked PCs. It is a risk to your customers and a risk to your business with specifically 5 percent fewer opportunities to market software and services," wrote Alexander."
the article mentions
"Microsoft is recruiting two 'feet on the street' personnel whose role will be to provide proactive assistance during customer visits, and help you get the value proposition for pre-installed software and related services. Give us a call and let's get those feet walking," Alexander wrote.
When asked about it they said -
"I can confirm that the... personnel are not participating in customer visits. This is an error in the copy and will be amended in future material on the subject," Alexander claimed.
Alexander also insisted that Microsoft was simply trying to help its reseller partners by explaining how they could grow their businesses by selling its software and services. But she did reiterate that the software giant is concerned that the sale of base systems may be linked to the use of counterfeit software.
But you're right, I'm sure they really mean that people who install Linux are going to will be picked up by BSA/DHS agents, tortured and left to rot in DMCA concentration camps outside the US. You just need to read between the lines.
But why do these corrupt politicians and warlords have so much power to manipulate the people? because the people are not educated, they have no access to news, or any resources which tell them what's really going on.
I think it goes pretty deep unfortunately.
The corrupt politicians are in power partly because of fear, and partly because people think that they need someone ruthless in charge otherwise there would be yet another civil war. These societies are deeply disfunctional, and it will take generations for that to change.
The problem with the $100 laptop project, apart from that I'm skeptical of the technology being ready, is that they want to sell these things to governments, who will then distribute them to the people. Third world countries have governments that basically don't give a toss about poor people, that's the reason that they are third world countries. The UN in particular is a body mostly composed of the representatives of these governments, and for that reason they tend to gloss this over. Negroponte means well, but he's incredibly naive to think this project will end up delivering the laptops to the people that really need them.
There's also something offensive about the whole project. He's decided what people need without doing much in the way of research that I can see. He's also decided that he knows more about laptop design than people who've been doing it for ages. I read a quote from some laptop manufactures along the lines of "if that were possible, we'd already be doing it". And he's decided to solve the problem with government intervention, when the governments doing the intervening are the root cause of the problems they are supposed to be solving.
The other thing I learned is that if you want to be a leader you have to be prepared to squish a Frenchman. Even though he seems to be most likeable member of the expedition.
Which reminds me, are there any French/.'ers who would be like to make new friends? PM me!
- end the war in Iraq to free up the funds for the above initiatives
What would be the effect of leaving Iraq on oil prices?
My guess would be that the civil war between Sunni and Shia would intensify, reducing supplies in the short term. Mind you, Iraqi oil production is limited by insurgent attacks that the US is unable to stop, and it's not like things can get much worse. In the long run, an effective tyranny (or more likely multiple tyrannies controlling different parts of the land) would develop which would be able to terrorise people into not destroying pipelines, Saddam style.
And then the oil prices would drop and thus oil consumption would rise. Which would be bad for the environment.
Hmm, interesting. I read somewhere that Creative's software is horrible, but if I don't have to use it, it's not an issue. They definitely know their stuff hardware wise. Mind you, I've pretty much adapted to using USB 2.5" disks for MP3's, along with everything else. Plus, you can search in Winamp with Alt-Tab Jtrackname, which could never work on a standalone player.
When excited or alarmed, most medium-sized species of antelope bounce up and down on all four legs, keeping them stretched out straight. This behaviour, known as pronking or stotting, acts as an alarming display. Some biologists theorize that stotting also sends a message to predators, showing that individual antelopes are fit and alert, and therefore not worth pursuing.
The idea is that by spending $lots on useless crap, you're saying to potential partners and potential predators "Look how much money I can waste on unimportant things. Just imagine what I could spend on something I take seriously."
I've worked with my share of yuppies, and it seems plausible watching them showing off their new toys.
I wish someone would make an mp3-dvd player. You could get 4.7GB of MP3s onto a DVD-R blank which costs almost nothing these days. Most recent PC's have a DVD burner, so writing is no problem. Laptops already have slimline DVD drives, and I'm sure DiscMan style drives are available to OEMs. Power consumption is probably not too bad, and you could run the drive slower if you just need to read ~200Kbaud files off it to reduce it even more.
They're trying to make the point the Microsoft makes bloatware. They think that by posting these grossly exaggerated horror stories on slashdot, people will realise that Microsoft is a bad, bad company and switch the Linux. And they get moderated up. It's comical really.
/Running XP SP2 on a 4 year old 1Ghz P3 laptop, 384MB Ram, XP SP2. Never noticed anything happen so slowly it annoyed me.
This is all a film, not reality. They're probably made of aluminium or something so the actors feel the right weight for their coreographed sword fight scene. In post production, ILM effects wizards sample the image into a computer and add the light effects. Light sabers won't cut anything, it's all done by trick photgraphy and CGI. The whole light saber thing is just done as a way to have sword fights in a sci fi movie, because George Lucas thought it would be cool. It doesn't stand up to any adult scrutiny.
People that argue about how the technology works in science fiction films are on the way to serious mental illness at worst, an unhappy and lonely adulthood at best. If you ever spoke to George, he'd tell you to get a life and then apply for a restraining order on you. He wants cute kids to see his films, creepy single thirty something guys are too small a market to worry about.
Ha ha, not really. April Fool. This post is just a reference to Emperor Palpatine's "where are your friends now" speech in Episode VI. Just testing your Jedi faith, padawan.
When I was in Munich, I knew a musician that used Apples, and it was amazing how much of a pain they were.
E.g. the battery on the motherboard dies after a few years. They charge a huge amount of money to swap it, presumably in a service centre. The battery itself is easy to change and costs very little, but if you scratch the screws or case changing it, the machine is out of warranty. Oh, and it's not a standard PC battery, it's non standard enough that people imported them. He was pretty happy that he found a place in Munich that sold them
He got a second hand Mac with a German version of the OS. Since lots of software doesn't work on the German version, he wanted to wipe it and reinstall. But the English version he had was one point version higher, e.g. xx.y.z+1 rather than xx.y.z. Problem is, that version wouldn't run. He didn't want the latest version, since some of the software he wanted wouldn't work. Cue a grey import of an English xx.y.z+1 from ebay.
Whereas with PC's, you can put together a PC from junk, and install pretty much anything on it. It's all modular too, and you can buy the bits from anywhere.
Once you move away from an open architecture, there's an enormous temptation for the company that controls things to charge absurd prices for everything. Hell, it's put me off buying a PC notebook for ages, even though desktops are a pain to cart around the world.
I can't believe what I'm reading! Sending many threatening emails is harassment. The user is _many many_ times more rude. This fact seems to have totally gone over your head. You even say they are requesting "technical information" when they just want to know the most basic of questions. How does information like the website name constitute "technical information" ??
They asked him for the name of his ISP, and I don't think he knows what an ISP is.
And it's not a question of how rude you are, if you want to deal with people like him quickly, you need to make sure that you aren't rude at all.
The guy sends them rude email after rude email. How about he starts off by, well, not being rude!
He's a customer. He thinks that they've screwed up his computer. He's wrong of course, but that's the reason he's rude.
And you say they should have just asked to help him... wtf. Almost every email they plead to help him.
These guys were waaaay more polite than I ever would have been.
Don't ever get a job that requires that you deal with non programmers then, you'll get fired very quickly.
You can probably get away with it in some open source project, but even there I think the project will fade into insignificance if you deal with people like this.
Btw, I think the reason they published the emails on the internet was because of the last email. That really was the straw the broke the camels back. He blames _them_ for not helping _him_ quicker!
This guy deserves all the mocking he can get.
He ignorant of the technology and arrogant to be sure. Quite frankly he comes across as a jerk. But if you want to sell something to a lot of people, there are a suprising number of people like him. My point is that there are ways to deal with them in an efficient way.
And putting your contact information in something which you aren't responsible for supporting pretty much guarantees you spend your life dealing with this sort of thing.
CentOS is an operating system. It is probably installed on the computer that runs your website.
We hope you are happy with it, since we produced it for free and you are able to use it without paying us... and are even threatening to have us arrested for providing to you free of charge.
Please contact someone who does IT for you and show them the page so that they can configure your apache webserver correctly.
Yeah, nice attitude. Don't explain anything, lots of digs (we hope you are happy with it, I feel sorry for your city), and a unworkable suggestion to contact "someone who does IT for you". It's clear from Jerry's first email that he has no idea about this stuff, otherwise he wouldn't be firing off threats to CentOS.
It would have been better to look up the dudes ISP like he did in the final email. But even that has a smarter than thou tone about it
Mr. Taylor,
Even though I have repeatedly asked you to contact your service provider or your network administrator, you have persisted to instead harass me. I have repeatedly offered to help you fix your issue, if you would just provide me with information. You have chosen neither provide me with information or contact your hosting provider... so I decided to see if I could find some of the information myself.
harass me? WTF. And as I said, it's clear from very early on that Jerry has no clue what he's doing. Complaining he hasn't provided technical information is pointless if he can't understand the questions.
I found the website that you are having problems with by looking at http://www.tuttle-ok.gov/ and I saw an e-mail address of cityoftuttle.org... so I went to www.cityoftuttle.org and I see the problem.
As I tried to explain to you before, that page is displayed when the webserver in question is not properly configured.
The IP address that is returned from a name lookup of www.cityoftuttle.org is 65.77.67.7. That is the IP address of your server.
Doing more research, I have found that the site in question is hosted by Vidia Communications. If you look at this page
you will plainly see that Vidia Communications uses CentOS as the operating system for their server.
Well I know how to find out who hosts a website too, but someone like Jerry doesn't. Nice use of plainly though.
So, though I have told you again and again that you need to contact your service provider and tell them of your problem, you obviously would rather threaten me and my group.
Welcome to the world of work. Customers, particularly clueless ones, do tend to threaten you when stuff doesn't work if you reply sarcastically when they send you angry emails.
Now, for the last time... contact your web server provider, Vidia Communications, and tell them that they have a misconfiguration on the server that they are hosting your website on.
While you are at it, why don't you ask Vidia Communications why it is that they choose CentOS to host your webserver on.
Sigh.
So you see Mr. Taylor, you ARE using my free operating system to run your website, you are doing so by choice, it is a configuration error by the person who choose to install the software and if you would have done what I asked you to your website would have been up by now.
Let me conclude by saying that it is very hard for me NOT to send this e-mail and all the other correspondence between you and I to
Mostly because USB stacks are pretty rock solid on most devices, whereas Bluetooth stacks are awful on everything.
If you had a W-USB keyboard and system, even the Bios would have a driver for it, and it would work the way USB HID devices now, which is always flawless.
It's because IT contractors get all misty eyed when the hear the phrase rich client.
We will need to do a lot of work enhancing our current standards only website? Wow, we'll need a task force, with a big budget. Also, we'll need to do a study of current best practices in Webpage design first.
I'll get right on that. It's a very big job though, we'll need unlimited overtime and consultation on deadlines. Still, if you want to be a Fortune 100 company, you need to take a longterm view of costs.
Hmm, I can already hear the 90's techno and taste the imported beer. Maybe we should have a team building snowboarding trip first.
Ask yourself this. Do you have aged computer illiterate relatives who could get in this situation? I do, especially if they felt they were being given the run around. Which he did.
Poor bastard. And to all the people mocking him, I hope in the future when you're his age and some high tech piece of equipment that your job requires you use but you don't really understand goes wrong and you fire off stupid threats to Company A when you should have done it to Company B, that they don't post them on the internet for everyone to mock.
But yeah, LOL he doesn't know an OS vendor from a hosting company. Mind you, I bet Microsoft would have handled this in a more tactful way - like getting someone with people skills to drip feed him the contact information he needed and keep the whole thing confidential rather than letting some type A programmer humiliate him pubicly.
Exactly, and supporing old software is easy with this kind of architecture. All the 16bit compatibility stuff is in a separate subsystem, and one that will get killed off when Win64 debuts.
And they have an architecture where Windows checks for compatibility flags in the registry for each application. If they find an application breaks with a new version of Windows, they usually need to just set the right flags to fix it.
and App Verifier does a test (HighVersionLie IIRC) to detect it.
And they test new Windows versions with a vast amount of software and make Windows lie to it without user interaction. Even if they missed it you can get Windows to lie to programs thay the testing missed -
Slashdot Mirror
In the free magazine, scanned here Microsoft said
"We want to urge all system builders indeed, all Partners not to supply naked PCs. It is a risk to your customers and a risk to your business with specifically 5 percent fewer opportunities to market software and services," wrote Alexander."
the article mentions
"Microsoft is recruiting two 'feet on the street' personnel whose role will be to provide proactive assistance during customer visits, and help you get the value proposition for pre-installed software and related services. Give us a call and let's get those feet walking," Alexander wrote.
When asked about it they said -
"I can confirm that the... personnel are not participating in customer visits. This is an error in the copy and will be amended in future material on the subject," Alexander claimed.
Alexander also insisted that Microsoft was simply trying to help its reseller partners by explaining how they could grow their businesses by selling its software and services. But she did reiterate that the software giant is concerned that the sale of base systems may be linked to the use of counterfeit software.
But you're right, I'm sure they really mean that people who install Linux are going to will be picked up by BSA/DHS agents, tortured and left to rot in DMCA concentration camps outside the US. You just need to read between the lines.
But why do these corrupt politicians and warlords have so much power to manipulate the people? because the people are not educated, they have no access to news, or any resources which tell them what's really going on.
I think it goes pretty deep unfortunately.
The corrupt politicians are in power partly because of fear, and partly because people think that they need someone ruthless in charge otherwise there would be yet another civil war. These societies are deeply disfunctional, and it will take generations for that to change.
The problem with the $100 laptop project, apart from that I'm skeptical of the technology being ready, is that they want to sell these things to governments, who will then distribute them to the people. Third world countries have governments that basically don't give a toss about poor people, that's the reason that they are third world countries. The UN in particular is a body mostly composed of the representatives of these governments, and for that reason they tend to gloss this over. Negroponte means well, but he's incredibly naive to think this project will end up delivering the laptops to the people that really need them.
There's also something offensive about the whole project. He's decided what people need without doing much in the way of research that I can see. He's also decided that he knows more about laptop design than people who've been doing it for ages. I read a quote from some laptop manufactures along the lines of "if that were possible, we'd already be doing it". And he's decided to solve the problem with government intervention, when the governments doing the intervening are the root cause of the problems they are supposed to be solving.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to keep chasing the carrot on the string.
WHERE? Where's the carrot?
You mispelled Americaun.
I learnt about this from that movie The Core
/.'ers who would be like to make new friends? PM me!
The other thing I learned is that if you want to be a leader you have to be prepared to squish a Frenchman. Even though he seems to be most likeable member of the expedition.
Which reminds me, are there any French
kthbye
- end the war in Iraq to free up the funds for the above initiatives
What would be the effect of leaving Iraq on oil prices?
My guess would be that the civil war between Sunni and Shia would intensify, reducing supplies in the short term. Mind you, Iraqi oil production is limited by insurgent attacks that the US is unable to stop, and it's not like things can get much worse. In the long run, an effective tyranny (or more likely multiple tyrannies controlling different parts of the land) would develop which would be able to terrorise people into not destroying pipelines, Saddam style.
And then the oil prices would drop and thus oil consumption would rise. Which would be bad for the environment.
Hmm, interesting. I read somewhere that Creative's software is horrible, but if I don't have to use it, it's not an issue. They definitely know their stuff hardware wise. Mind you, I've pretty much adapted to using USB 2.5" disks for MP3's, along with everything else. Plus, you can search in Winamp with Alt-Tab Jtrackname, which could never work on a standalone player.
Seriously, it reminds me of something called stotting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antelope
The idea is that by spending $lots on useless crap, you're saying to potential partners and potential predators "Look how much money I can waste on unimportant things. Just imagine what I could spend on something I take seriously."
I've worked with my share of yuppies, and it seems plausible watching them showing off their new toys.
My God, you're right. It's all a scam, Steve Jobs is ...
... Ooh, what nice shiny silver and white boxes. Where do I sign up?
Duke Nukem Forever : estimated $
Program received signal SIGFPE, Arithmetic exception.
I wish someone would make an mp3-dvd player. You could get 4.7GB of MP3s onto a DVD-R blank which costs almost nothing these days. Most recent PC's have a DVD burner, so writing is no problem. Laptops already have slimline DVD drives, and I'm sure DiscMan style drives are available to OEMs. Power consumption is probably not too bad, and you could run the drive slower if you just need to read ~200Kbaud files off it to reduce it even more.
Actually, if I found an mp3 player that displayed an album called "System Volume Information" I'd buy it immediately.
/s your MP3 collection onto it. Or whatever the command is in Linux, BeOs, vxWorks, etc. Which is the point.
Because that means you can just xcopy
What brand is your brother's mp3 player?
They're trying to make the point the Microsoft makes bloatware. They think that by posting these grossly exaggerated horror stories on slashdot, people will realise that Microsoft is a bad, bad company and switch the Linux. And they get moderated up. It's comical really.
/Running XP SP2 on a 4 year old 1Ghz P3 laptop, 384MB Ram, XP SP2. Never noticed anything happen so slowly it annoyed me.
You can read about his experiences here
http://tinyurl.com/lc43c
I'd hit it, and then spend the rest of my life singin' soprano!
The light sabers aren't really made of light.
This is all a film, not reality. They're probably made of aluminium or something so the actors feel the right weight for their coreographed sword fight scene. In post production, ILM effects wizards sample the image into a computer and add the light effects. Light sabers won't cut anything, it's all done by trick photgraphy and CGI. The whole light saber thing is just done as a way to have sword fights in a sci fi movie, because George Lucas thought it would be cool. It doesn't stand up to any adult scrutiny.
People that argue about how the technology works in science fiction films are on the way to serious mental illness at worst, an unhappy and lonely adulthood at best. If you ever spoke to George, he'd tell you to get a life and then apply for a restraining order on you. He wants cute kids to see his films, creepy single thirty something guys are too small a market to worry about.
Ha ha, not really. April Fool. This post is just a reference to Emperor Palpatine's "where are your friends now" speech in Episode VI. Just testing your Jedi faith, padawan.
Yeah, there's a dark side to Apple.
When I was in Munich, I knew a musician that used Apples, and it was amazing how much of a pain they were.
E.g. the battery on the motherboard dies after a few years. They charge a huge amount of money to swap it, presumably in a service centre. The battery itself is easy to change and costs very little, but if you scratch the screws or case changing it, the machine is out of warranty. Oh, and it's not a standard PC battery, it's non standard enough that people imported them. He was pretty happy that he found a place in Munich that sold them
He got a second hand Mac with a German version of the OS. Since lots of software doesn't work on the German version, he wanted to wipe it and reinstall. But the English version he had was one point version higher, e.g. xx.y.z+1 rather than xx.y.z. Problem is, that version wouldn't run. He didn't want the latest version, since some of the software he wanted wouldn't work. Cue a grey import of an English xx.y.z+1 from ebay.
Whereas with PC's, you can put together a PC from junk, and install pretty much anything on it. It's all modular too, and you can buy the bits from anywhere.
Once you move away from an open architecture, there's an enormous temptation for the company that controls things to charge absurd prices for everything. Hell, it's put me off buying a PC notebook for ages, even though desktops are a pain to cart around the world.
They asked him for the name of his ISP, and I don't think he knows what an ISP is.
And it's not a question of how rude you are, if you want to deal with people like him quickly, you need to make sure that you aren't rude at all.
He's a customer. He thinks that they've screwed up his computer. He's wrong of course, but that's the reason he's rude.
Don't ever get a job that requires that you deal with non programmers then, you'll get fired very quickly.
You can probably get away with it in some open source project, but even there I think the project will fade into insignificance if you deal with people like this.
He ignorant of the technology and arrogant to be sure. Quite frankly he comes across as a jerk. But if you want to sell something to a lot of people, there are a suprising number of people like him. My point is that there are ways to deal with them in an efficient way.
And putting your contact information in something which you aren't responsible for supporting pretty much guarantees you spend your life dealing with this sort of thing.
Yeah, nice attitude. Don't explain anything, lots of digs (we hope you are happy with it, I feel sorry for your city), and a unworkable suggestion to contact "someone who does IT for you". It's clear from Jerry's first email that he has no idea about this stuff, otherwise he wouldn't be firing off threats to CentOS. It would have been better to look up the dudes ISP like he did in the final email. But even that has a smarter than thou tone about it
harass me? WTF. And as I said, it's clear from very early on that Jerry has no clue what he's doing. Complaining he hasn't provided technical information is pointless if he can't understand the questions.
Well I know how to find out who hosts a website too, but someone like Jerry doesn't. Nice use of plainly though.
Welcome to the world of work. Customers, particularly clueless ones, do tend to threaten you when stuff doesn't work if you reply sarcastically when they send you angry emails.
Sigh.
I reckon the USB over WiMedia has a better chance of winning.
http://www.intel.com/technology/comms/uwb/
Mostly because USB stacks are pretty rock solid on most devices, whereas Bluetooth stacks are awful on everything.
If you had a W-USB keyboard and system, even the Bios would have a driver for it, and it would work the way USB HID devices now, which is always flawless.
It's because IT contractors get all misty eyed when the hear the phrase rich client.
We will need to do a lot of work enhancing our current standards only website? Wow, we'll need a task force, with a big budget. Also, we'll need to do a study of current best practices in Webpage design first.
I'll get right on that. It's a very big job though, we'll need unlimited overtime and consultation on deadlines. Still, if you want to be a Fortune 100 company, you need to take a longterm view of costs.
Hmm, I can already hear the 90's techno and taste the imported beer. Maybe we should have a team building snowboarding trip first.
Mod parent down!
The topic is flaming Theo, not talking about the wonderful OS that is OpenBSD.
Now can someone tell me what he did to piss off those nice guys from the military/industrial complex?
Ask yourself this. Do you have aged computer illiterate relatives who could get in this situation? I do, especially if they felt they were being given the run around. Which he did.
Poor bastard. And to all the people mocking him, I hope in the future when you're his age and some high tech piece of equipment that your job requires you use but you don't really understand goes wrong and you fire off stupid threats to Company A when you should have done it to Company B, that they don't post them on the internet for everyone to mock.
But yeah, LOL he doesn't know an OS vendor from a hosting company. Mind you, I bet Microsoft would have handled this in a more tactful way - like getting someone with people skills to drip feed him the contact information he needed and keep the whole thing confidential rather than letting some type A programmer humiliate him pubicly.
Jesus sometimes I really despise my fellow geeks.
Exactly, and supporing old software is easy with this kind of architecture. All the 16bit compatibility stuff is in a separate subsystem, and one that will get killed off when Win64 debuts.
And they have an architecture where Windows checks for compatibility flags in the registry for each application. If they find an application breaks with a new version of Windows, they usually need to just set the right flags to fix it.
Microsoft have told people about this
/ 13/72476.aspx
u pport/learnmore/appcompat.mspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02
and App Verifier does a test (HighVersionLie IIRC) to detect it.
And they test new Windows versions with a vast amount of software and make Windows lie to it without user interaction. Even if they missed it you can get Windows to lie to programs thay the testing missed -
(found via a 1 minute Google search)
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpands