I am in a situation that is a bit comparable. I didn't die, but I left, and people decided to continue what I started. It is hard to describe how much it hurts every day to watch them. I built this group up and introduced most of what made them successful. Some gets continued, most gets twisted, some outright abused.
No, I'd much rather feel good if they had shut it down, or at least replaced it with something entirely their making. In this particular case, they didn't really have that option, though.
No, just continuing something for the sake of continuing it is not always what would please the original founder(s).
But this is not an organization that was intended to survive. It was intended to start a discussion and spread a message. It had a limited mission from the start.
I applaud them for realizing they had come as far as they would, and close down. It shows that they really cherish their ideals, and don't cling on to something that has been completed, just because they think it still needs a tiny bit of finish.
They could enforce it but that would break backwards compatibility. What would u propose?
Breaking backwards compatibility. Sometimes, it is the right thing to do. If we never, ever did that, we would still build cars with, say, a box for the horse fodder. And that's what windos is, in many places. Do they still keep compatibility with the A20 gate?
Or make it optional with a big warning sign. Again, OS X is an example: Rosetta is not a default install anymore since Snow Leopard. But you can still install it.
All of the things the article mentions have almost nothing to do with Bill being or not being at MS.
What the guy did, however, was to have good timing. He stepped out at the top. He will always be remembered as the one who made MS great, and Ballmer will always be remembered as the guy who brought it down. I wonder if he knew and if he made them pay extra for that.
you can't expect the OS to make up for badly written software.
I can, if it's the same OS that caused these particular problems in the first place.
Why is it that OS X could run old Mac OS applications with no trouble, even PPC ones on an Intel machine, and W7 croaks on some XP apps? Is it really only the apps at fault? Sure, most of the windos software I've seen is of a quality that people would fail their courses with if they had submitted them as their (programming language) 101 project.
But I'm tired of the cheap apologies. It is never windos, is it? It's always bad drivers, bad applications, bad anything 3rd party. It does kinda make you wonder. If no matter what stereo you put in your car, it just sounds like shit, maybe, just maybe, the speakers in the car are a part of the problem?
And really you can run into a similar problem on unices with symlinks pointing to the wrong versions, ofcourse the advantage there is that you just have to point the link back to the older version for the applications the upgrade broke.
That and the fact that it is a lot more difficult to break things. Why is it we have had working package management for Linux for what, 10 years now? And windos install and uninstall is still a gamble? Half of the time you uninstall something, it leaves crap behind. Even when they are apparently using MSI, i.e. the "official" installer of the OS manufacturer.
The environment does a lot to affect application quality. It's the same effect as with graffiti - there's a correlation between graffiti and crime, because when things look like nobody cares, people behave as if nobody cared. The small indy software that's available for the Mac regularily looks and performs better than even expensive software for windos. Either there is a religious cult of UI designers that makes it a sin to work on windos software, or people who work in an environment that looks like these things matter put more effort into it then people who work in an environment that is largely hobbled-together crap.
And yes, that is in a large part a self-sustaining problem and 3rd parties have a big part. But it is MS who controls the environment, and the fact that they don't give a shit how crappy all the apps are is a big part of the problem.
the perfect 802.11n router? You know, the one with dual band, great range, USB print server and storage?
It's called the Time Capsule. I own one, and it offers all that. What, exactly, was the question?
(oh yeah, maybe you don't like Apple for whatever reason. That's not the point. The point is that such a device does indeed exist, contrary to the claims of the author that it doesn't.)
Weird, XP still suffers from it, and a similar problem does exist on W7. Which while it has some library management still can get its stuff overwritten by any sucky installer.
junk mail filtering, message rules, and message flagging."
Because, you know, no corporate environment whatsoever has any of these new "mail server" things, which do crap like that for you, with the added advantage that your rules are the same no matter if you read your mails on the phone or on the desktop. No, sir, we can not possibly do server-side filtering. We must do it on our phone.
You are right in some assumptions, but not in the projection. All these social things are "open" by default. You have to explicitly lock down your profile. It's not a garden party, it's a street party. And it's not even a party, because people do all kinds of stuff. It's a busy main street - some people are shopping, some are playing music, some are enjoying an ice cream, and so on. And Twitter users are the crazy street preachers.:-)
There is a difference to forums. This is where we go for specific topics that we want to discuss with likeminded people. Especially on/. - I mean, nobody here RTFA, we're all here for the comments, are we not?
That is more like the local chess club - people of similar interests meeting to pursue their similar interests.
You can, but the court won't care. It heard that argument from the opposing side, and refused it.
Again though, why not?
Because a civil society lives by the standard of mutual respect, not by the standard of "whoever finds the most loopholes in the laws, wins". Yes, even though Wall Street and politics look a lot like it. And upper management. You may have noticed these are all areas that very few people think highly of.
They work fine if you install them inside of the XP Mode virtual machine, like you're supposed to.
So what exactly is my reason for actually runing windos then, instead of running it all in a VM from the start? Would certainly be less hassle, and if it crashes I just kill the VM process instead of having to reboot.
Yeah, wanting to play PC games is a big fail these days. Microsoft is almost certainly trying to sabotage PC gaming to push gamers onto consoles now,
Which, given their respective shares of the PC and of the console markets, strikes me as the dumbest thing ever (aside from Microsoft Bob). Who would willingly push people out of a market they own into a market where they're the smallest player?
By now, we should be familiar with the issue at hand.
It happened when people started making "personal webpages". Then came blogs. Then Facebook et al. Now Twitter.
Basically, most of the world lives in the misguided assumption that at least a tiny fraction of the rest of the world is interested in them. Statistically speaking, that's not true. But we have this old tribal desire to "express ourselves", to communicate with the rest of the tribe.
There's a few billion people on the Internet today. How many of them may even theoretically care about your dog, your house, your opinion of last nights local television program, or, in fact, you? A high mark of a thousand, for most of us. 10,000 at most for everyone who's not at least a minor celebrity. Even those 10k are less than 0.0005% of the Internet population. ppm is a better measure than percent here. It's a single-digit ppm. For the majority of us, not even 1 ppm.
Or, in short, nobody(*) fucking cares. Not what the name of your dog is and not what you think about soccer.
Twitter is Geocities, only shorter, and with even less content.
(*) where "nobody" is equal, but not identical, to zero, for all practical purposes.
Have you seen it? The video quality is way beyond even the best "HD" on youtube. The download is well over a gig. This is a real pilot, not a youtube demo video, and yes there is something new in the distribution model. The P2P is not just a technological difference, it also means they give up control of the distribution channel.
Yes, if only now someone who understands something about good interfaces came out with a Wave client, I'd be happy.
I love the concept behind Wave. But Google Wave is a close-to-unusable mess. And yes, I've tried pretty hard to use it, with several different groups of people.
...until Windows 7, where we have XP mode to handle backwards compatibility.
Oh yeah, which works... uh... I don't know, I never had a case where it actually solved anything. It definitely doesn't cause any of the many installers that don't like W7 64bit to run, even though the actual game that it installs runs just fine.
Maybe I'm just pissed because if I sent a bill to Redmond about the many hours wasted on stupid crap like that, it would be in the five digits. And I don't have any illusions of them paying, so I eat it up as my expense for being so stupid to still want to play PC games.
You know, this funny approach that doesn't allow you to install different versions of the same library, because all versions share the same filename. And that will happily install any older version over any newer version, breaking all your applications that rely on the newer version. Oh, and that contains no management whatsoever. Good luck ever trying to clean up your libraries.
Yes, discussion about the laws should always be an ongoing process. After all, the world changes, so should our laws.
And indeed they do. A recent court ruling here in Germany already said that if you don't encrypt your WiFi, you are responsible for what people who can access it freely do. The reverse argument - if you encrypt it, you can consider it private - is not far off.
Nevertheless, since we do not, at this time, have such standards, I still maintain it was not ok for Google to simply copy it all down. Someone at Google didn't think enough. I don't say they had evil intend, as some paranoid people here do. But there is such a thing as neglect.
With a commercial vehicle, we are talking 20 billion.
Not really. We're talking chapter 7 of the one company that is legally responsible, structured to be as small as legally allowed, and a couple lawsuits against the holding, etc. to try and recover at least some money from them.
Really, responsibility in the corporate sector is a case of your lawyers being too stupid to set up your company so it doesn't affect you. Or you being too big or too political to think it's worth the effort (BP, I'm looking at you).
The big machine that NASA has become certainly plays a role. However, policies also do. NASA has the guide to never lose a life. It still happens, but they work as if the loss of life is inacceptable. We all know about diminishing returns, so pushing the risk from 1% down to 0.5% is massively expensive, even if you only plan 20 flights, so even at 1% it would statistically never happen.
I'm pretty sure the private companies are a tiny bit less risk-averse. Entrepeneurs are usually risk takers.
I do not understand this argument. How is your data private if its sitting out in open air?
We're talking about electro-magnetic waves here, right?
Light is electro-magnetic waves. So what you're saying is that anyone looking into my private house can not possibly ever violate my privacy, because I was "broadcasting" it into open air, right? I could close the curtains, after all.
While that is true (closing the curtains), the reverse is not. Just because I did not close the curtains does not automatically mean you can point a camera at my bedroom and that's ok.
I don't know if geeks just don't get it at times, but many of the laws we have on our books are there exactly because it is easier to make it illegal than to force everyone to adopt security protocols. According to the arguments posted here, we wouldn't need laws against breaking and entering - after all, everyone could just install strong enough locks and doors and windows if they didn't want their homes to be broken into.
That is not the thinking that makes a society work. A society works by agreeing on what kinds of activities we want or don't want, and then writing that down. If we don't want people listening in on open WiFi traffic, we can write that down. It is an alternative approach to forcing everyone to run encryption. It's called "laws".
You can argue all you want about encryption and broadcast and bla bla, but the fact remains that this simple, straighforward approach of writing something down we don't want people to do even when it's easy has been fairly successfull for a couple thousand years now.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, no. At least not that I could remember.
I am in a situation that is a bit comparable. I didn't die, but I left, and people decided to continue what I started. It is hard to describe how much it hurts every day to watch them. I built this group up and introduced most of what made them successful. Some gets continued, most gets twisted, some outright abused.
No, I'd much rather feel good if they had shut it down, or at least replaced it with something entirely their making. In this particular case, they didn't really have that option, though.
No, just continuing something for the sake of continuing it is not always what would please the original founder(s).
But this is not an organization that was intended to survive. It was intended to start a discussion and spread a message. It had a limited mission from the start.
I applaud them for realizing they had come as far as they would, and close down. It shows that they really cherish their ideals, and don't cling on to something that has been completed, just because they think it still needs a tiny bit of finish.
They could enforce it but that would break backwards compatibility. What would u propose?
Breaking backwards compatibility. Sometimes, it is the right thing to do. If we never, ever did that, we would still build cars with, say, a box for the horse fodder. And that's what windos is, in many places. Do they still keep compatibility with the A20 gate?
Or make it optional with a big warning sign. Again, OS X is an example: Rosetta is not a default install anymore since Snow Leopard. But you can still install it.
All of the things the article mentions have almost nothing to do with Bill being or not being at MS.
What the guy did, however, was to have good timing. He stepped out at the top. He will always be remembered as the one who made MS great, and Ballmer will always be remembered as the guy who brought it down. I wonder if he knew and if he made them pay extra for that.
Hm, yes. Re-reading it that's what it looks like. Never thought of that, since I've always gotten an ADSL modem from my ISP.
you can't expect the OS to make up for badly written software.
I can, if it's the same OS that caused these particular problems in the first place.
Why is it that OS X could run old Mac OS applications with no trouble, even PPC ones on an Intel machine, and W7 croaks on some XP apps? Is it really only the apps at fault? Sure, most of the windos software I've seen is of a quality that people would fail their courses with if they had submitted them as their (programming language) 101 project.
But I'm tired of the cheap apologies. It is never windos, is it? It's always bad drivers, bad applications, bad anything 3rd party. It does kinda make you wonder. If no matter what stereo you put in your car, it just sounds like shit, maybe, just maybe, the speakers in the car are a part of the problem?
And really you can run into a similar problem on unices with symlinks pointing to the wrong versions, ofcourse the advantage there is that you just have to point the link back to the older version for the applications the upgrade broke.
That and the fact that it is a lot more difficult to break things. Why is it we have had working package management for Linux for what, 10 years now? And windos install and uninstall is still a gamble? Half of the time you uninstall something, it leaves crap behind. Even when they are apparently using MSI, i.e. the "official" installer of the OS manufacturer.
The environment does a lot to affect application quality. It's the same effect as with graffiti - there's a correlation between graffiti and crime, because when things look like nobody cares, people behave as if nobody cared. The small indy software that's available for the Mac regularily looks and performs better than even expensive software for windos. Either there is a religious cult of UI designers that makes it a sin to work on windos software, or people who work in an environment that looks like these things matter put more effort into it then people who work in an environment that is largely hobbled-together crap.
And yes, that is in a large part a self-sustaining problem and 3rd parties have a big part. But it is MS who controls the environment, and the fact that they don't give a shit how crappy all the apps are is a big part of the problem.
the perfect 802.11n router? You know, the one with dual band, great range, USB print server and storage?
It's called the Time Capsule. I own one, and it offers all that. What, exactly, was the question?
(oh yeah, maybe you don't like Apple for whatever reason. That's not the point. The point is that such a device does indeed exist, contrary to the claims of the author that it doesn't.)
really?
Weird, XP still suffers from it, and a similar problem does exist on W7. Which while it has some library management still can get its stuff overwritten by any sucky installer.
junk mail filtering, message rules, and message flagging."
Because, you know, no corporate environment whatsoever has any of these new "mail server" things, which do crap like that for you, with the added advantage that your rules are the same no matter if you read your mails on the phone or on the desktop. No, sir, we can not possibly do server-side filtering. We must do it on our phone.
True and false.
You are right in some assumptions, but not in the projection. All these social things are "open" by default. You have to explicitly lock down your profile. It's not a garden party, it's a street party. And it's not even a party, because people do all kinds of stuff. It's a busy main street - some people are shopping, some are playing music, some are enjoying an ice cream, and so on. And Twitter users are the crazy street preachers. :-)
There is a difference to forums. This is where we go for specific topics that we want to discuss with likeminded people. Especially on /. - I mean, nobody here RTFA, we're all here for the comments, are we not?
That is more like the local chess club - people of similar interests meeting to pursue their similar interests.
This I disagree with;
You can, but the court won't care. It heard that argument from the opposing side, and refused it.
Again though, why not?
Because a civil society lives by the standard of mutual respect, not by the standard of "whoever finds the most loopholes in the laws, wins". Yes, even though Wall Street and politics look a lot like it. And upper management. You may have noticed these are all areas that very few people think highly of.
They work fine if you install them inside of the XP Mode virtual machine, like you're supposed to.
So what exactly is my reason for actually runing windos then, instead of running it all in a VM from the start? Would certainly be less hassle, and if it crashes I just kill the VM process instead of having to reboot.
Yeah, wanting to play PC games is a big fail these days. Microsoft is almost certainly trying to sabotage PC gaming to push gamers onto consoles now,
Which, given their respective shares of the PC and of the console markets, strikes me as the dumbest thing ever (aside from Microsoft Bob). Who would willingly push people out of a market they own into a market where they're the smallest player?
By now, we should be familiar with the issue at hand.
It happened when people started making "personal webpages". Then came blogs. Then Facebook et al. Now Twitter.
Basically, most of the world lives in the misguided assumption that at least a tiny fraction of the rest of the world is interested in them. Statistically speaking, that's not true. But we have this old tribal desire to "express ourselves", to communicate with the rest of the tribe.
There's a few billion people on the Internet today. How many of them may even theoretically care about your dog, your house, your opinion of last nights local television program, or, in fact, you? A high mark of a thousand, for most of us. 10,000 at most for everyone who's not at least a minor celebrity. Even those 10k are less than 0.0005% of the Internet population. ppm is a better measure than percent here. It's a single-digit ppm. For the majority of us, not even 1 ppm.
Or, in short, nobody(*) fucking cares. Not what the name of your dog is and not what you think about soccer.
Twitter is Geocities, only shorter, and with even less content.
(*) where "nobody" is equal, but not identical, to zero, for all practical purposes.
Have you seen it? The video quality is way beyond even the best "HD" on youtube. The download is well over a gig. This is a real pilot, not a youtube demo video, and yes there is something new in the distribution model. The P2P is not just a technological difference, it also means they give up control of the distribution channel.
Sometimes, things are simply ahead of their times. See the Newton.
Let's wait and see. Not every new concept succeeds on the first try.
Yes, if only now someone who understands something about good interfaces came out with a Wave client, I'd be happy.
I love the concept behind Wave. But Google Wave is a close-to-unusable mess. And yes, I've tried pretty hard to use it, with several different groups of people.
...until Windows 7, where we have XP mode to handle backwards compatibility.
Oh yeah, which works... uh... I don't know, I never had a case where it actually solved anything. It definitely doesn't cause any of the many installers that don't like W7 64bit to run, even though the actual game that it installs runs just fine.
Maybe I'm just pissed because if I sent a bill to Redmond about the many hours wasted on stupid crap like that, it would be in the five digits. And I don't have any illusions of them paying, so I eat it up as my expense for being so stupid to still want to play PC games.
I think it's commonly known as "DLL hell".
You know, this funny approach that doesn't allow you to install different versions of the same library, because all versions share the same filename. And that will happily install any older version over any newer version, breaking all your applications that rely on the newer version. Oh, and that contains no management whatsoever. Good luck ever trying to clean up your libraries.
Now that's a much better spirit.
Yes, discussion about the laws should always be an ongoing process. After all, the world changes, so should our laws.
And indeed they do. A recent court ruling here in Germany already said that if you don't encrypt your WiFi, you are responsible for what people who can access it freely do. The reverse argument - if you encrypt it, you can consider it private - is not far off.
Nevertheless, since we do not, at this time, have such standards, I still maintain it was not ok for Google to simply copy it all down. Someone at Google didn't think enough. I don't say they had evil intend, as some paranoid people here do. But there is such a thing as neglect.
With a commercial vehicle, we are talking 20 billion.
Not really. We're talking chapter 7 of the one company that is legally responsible, structured to be as small as legally allowed, and a couple lawsuits against the holding, etc. to try and recover at least some money from them.
Really, responsibility in the corporate sector is a case of your lawyers being too stupid to set up your company so it doesn't affect you. Or you being too big or too political to think it's worth the effort (BP, I'm looking at you).
Which don't contain e-mail addresses, passwords and HTTP traffic, which this was all about, so your argument is what, exactly?
Correct.
The big machine that NASA has become certainly plays a role. However, policies also do. NASA has the guide to never lose a life. It still happens, but they work as if the loss of life is inacceptable. We all know about diminishing returns, so pushing the risk from 1% down to 0.5% is massively expensive, even if you only plan 20 flights, so even at 1% it would statistically never happen.
I'm pretty sure the private companies are a tiny bit less risk-averse. Entrepeneurs are usually risk takers.
touche
I do not understand this argument. How is your data private if its sitting out in open air?
We're talking about electro-magnetic waves here, right?
Light is electro-magnetic waves. So what you're saying is that anyone looking into my private house can not possibly ever violate my privacy, because I was "broadcasting" it into open air, right? I could close the curtains, after all.
While that is true (closing the curtains), the reverse is not. Just because I did not close the curtains does not automatically mean you can point a camera at my bedroom and that's ok.
I don't know if geeks just don't get it at times, but many of the laws we have on our books are there exactly because it is easier to make it illegal than to force everyone to adopt security protocols. According to the arguments posted here, we wouldn't need laws against breaking and entering - after all, everyone could just install strong enough locks and doors and windows if they didn't want their homes to be broken into.
That is not the thinking that makes a society work. A society works by agreeing on what kinds of activities we want or don't want, and then writing that down. If we don't want people listening in on open WiFi traffic, we can write that down. It is an alternative approach to forcing everyone to run encryption. It's called "laws".
You can argue all you want about encryption and broadcast and bla bla, but the fact remains that this simple, straighforward approach of writing something down we don't want people to do even when it's easy has been fairly successfull for a couple thousand years now.