I would like to move my company towards creating s/w that will operate on Linux, both as a client and as embedded (target) s/w. Our clients are the large primes for militaries around the world. Most primes and militaries are moving towards COTS products to reduce costs and improve reliability and support. If we were to port our product s/w to run on Linux, how on earth can we achieve similar value and benefits of COTS-like s/w, s/w like WinRiver's Tornado, that have great robustness, standard (purchasable) support, and carry the perception (remember: perception is reality here) of greater security? For those of you who think support is not important, market data has shown that for larger organizations, the number one "care about" is support. And since Sept 11, security is moving to the top of the list of care abouts for the militaries and primes.
Totally. I'll buy a DVD with hours of good entertainment that I have already previewed/seen and know to be woth the $$ for $20 before I'll buy a CD for that price.
50-80% of "e-waste" is shipped to Asia (China, India, Pakistan)
The US has NOT signed the Basel Convention (1994) on hazardous waste (the convention signatories agree to not ship hazardous waste overseas/out of the country w/o some basic pre-processing of the waste)
The US electronics industry accounts for 2% of world's annual lead consuption. The majority of this is for lead in solder for printed Wire Boards (PWB) manufacturing and assembly. However this does not account for overseas manufacturing which is done for a huge # of US companies (i.e.: assembly offshore makes this 2% look low, but if you tracked the % tied to all US based/HQ'd firms, you'd probably see closer to 50% - this is just a SWAG onmy part here, no data).
The EU passed the Restriction of Use of Hazardous Materials directive (RoHS) which prohibits the use of lead from manufacturing & assembly of PWBs. This comes into effect in 2006. This means any electronics sold into EU on Jan 1 2006 must be 100% lead-solder free.
HP has a publicly stated position on the issue of RoHS and WEEE that puts almost all of the onus on their supply chain partners to meet the directives.
Why am I giving you all this information? Because this is not a simple recycling problem, period. This goes all the way back to the root: electronics manufacturing and assemblt of PWBs. The EU is flexing their muscles by pushing the RoHS and WEEE directives. HP has been planning for these two directives since they were scheduled for a vote in the EU (and RoHS has since been passed). The entire time their plan has been to push it down to the supply chain parnters. This has not changed in over a year, nor will it going forward. Why should it? With HP's purchasing power, they say "jump" and their suppliers say "how high, SIR!"
While games development is a great job for some, it is not for others. I like process, I admit it. I like to follow a methodology that promotes defined repeatable outcomes, that looks for ways to continuously improve the process, and thus the ability of the team to improve the quality of the outputs. When I interviewed at EA, they didn't need no stinkin' process. And I don't blame them: the product they produce is closer to a piece of art than a piece of software at times. Requirements management? Ha! How about ad-hoc requirements change up to the last minute? But that's the nature of doing something so creative... you need to change and tweak up to release. Should they teach this in Uni? No goddamn way. Why? Most software developers already are good at being creative: they take a requirement, a sentence on a piece of paper and translate it into source code that does something. How much more creative do you need? So teaching the finer points of game development, aside from the core stuff that is already taught in most CS degrees (graphics etc.), can be done as part of learning the job. Like an apprencticeship or co-op term. You learn the basic skills for any s/w development in school, then you refine and specify those skills in the real world.
While it's nice to see the "backbone" being shown my the Mass DA, I wonder:
how effective would any settlement including any "enforcement" techniques (read the last para of the article) actually be, considering the stance of the Fed and the other states?
how much money will this cost Mass taxpayers? (glad I don't live there)
when is the DA position up for grabs? (i.e.: how many votes is this person trying to suck out of people?)
This just seems like a colossal waste of time and money. If Mass could get other states on-side, maybe the costs would be less...
But this piece-meal approach to dealing with monopolies like MS (or IBM in a previous generation) is bullcrap. If the federal gov't can't come up with a reasonable punishment/settlement that all states sign off, there will never be any truly effective measures put in place. Another case when distributed power to states gives companies (and criminals) silly-ass easy loopholes to jump through...
Hey, there are a heck of a lot of "technical geeks" out there who could use some work on their problem solving skills and basic usage of math, numbers, data etc. I've worked with a lot of engineers (EE, ME, SE, etc.) and man oh man, the lack of critical thinking by many of these folks just baffles me. As a physics major, I was forced to take math theory courses in Uni, like Proofs & Analysis, on top of the regulary Physics approaches to problem solving.
Bottom line: you may be kick-ass at this kind of thinking, these kinds of approaches to problems, but there are plenty of geeks out there who suck at it. You know, for a geek, your bozo filter seems to be malfunctioning - you should be able to filter this stuff out and dump it from the cache more easily than this!
My company does quite a bit of work for the big defense contractors, we're involved in many big programs. These contractors are constantly asking us for Linux based software (SDKs APIs etc.) and especially for their embedded devices. These guys want to stop laying huge license fees to WindRiver for their vxWorks software... and want to spend the $$ elsewhere. Good on them I say. However I will insert the obligatory M$ comment: I'm shocked (not!) that MS would push their own agenda blah blah blah...;-)
Dood, momentum is a function of MASS, and quarks sure as hell have a pretty SMALL mass... if I recall, p=m*v, so momentum on this thing would likely be pretty small... even an electron which is what, 10^-(a bajillion) kilos at light speed (10^6 m/s) would still be neglibile in terms of momentum...
BTW: "bajillion" is a valid technical term;-)
Most immediate space challenge? Riiight....
on
Beaming into Space
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
From the article on Space.com:
"Preventing collisions with the Earth by hypervelocity asteroids, meteoroids, and comets is the most important immediate space challenge facing human civilization. This is the Impact Imperative," Campbell and several research associates suggest.
Wow. I always thought that the likelihood of an asteroid hitting Earth was low, at least low enough that ther are probably better things to spend one's time addressing... say, hunger, AIDS, yadda yadda yadda.
A larger problem is how to lower the cost of missions to allow for an increase their frequency. If this kind of technology c(w)ould be used to allow humans or unmanned craft more time in space to collect data, I think that would be far more useful.
The quote smacks of FUDing. Oooh, look out! A big bad asteroid could it us! You all saw "Deep Impact", right? Well, better fund us so we can make sure that never happens...
In the pool? Sheesh, you can't hear anything in the pool anyways, so what's the point? I have a HR monitor that I wear in the pool, so it's possible, but the idea of people swimming or jetskiing with headphones on is so ludicrous, how much more dangerous do you think you could make it? Sorry, as much as I love new gadgets to make my training in the pool, on the bike or on the run more enjoyable, safety still has to be a primary concern. Know how many runners get hit by cars or jumped by persons with evil intentions becuase they were wearing headphones and couldn't hear what was happening around them? I used to run with music (discman). Man, that stopped in a hurry when some a**hole snuck up on me and tried to haul me into the bushes. </rant>
I particularly like the *FREE* ARM (Automated Requirements Measurement) tool from the SATC (first link). Granted it only runs on Windoze, but you can get it to parse a 300+ page req doc and count all the requirements, weak phrases, etc. for you. Handy tool.
Forgot to add that test design is driven almost entirely by requirements, that is, the requirements are the primary artifact consumed by test planners designers...
I'm certain someone has already said this, but over 80% of defects come from crappy requirements. Forget about your design & analysis, your coding practices, inpsection techniques, debugging and testing abilities - if your requirements are not CLEAR, CORRECT, ATOMIC, UNAMBIGUOUS, and CONSISTENT, you might as well start burning money.
NASA correlated a $1 cost to correct a "defect" in the requirements stage (here a defect can be any requirement that does not meet all 5 attributes I listed above) to several hundred to thousands of times over when addressing the same defect at the testing stage. Crappy requirements and crappy specifications are a big part of what makes your code buggy and expensive.
LA Times posted a study last year that showed that the average US programmer only coded for 51 days a year. 51 days!! One fifth of your working year spent writing new code. The rest of the time? DOING REWORK.
Biggest cause of rework?
UNCLEAR AND AMBIGUOUS REQUIREMENTS.
Spend the time and effort to beef up your requirements gathering and management processes. You'll get your ROI in ONE project cycle.
Which is why many Canadian cities are doing OK in attracting hi-tech co's: that's where the geeks are. Canada is built on multi-culturalism and tolerance. Vancouver (where I live) has a huge gay&lesbian community, amazing arts and sub-culture (just have to look for it), and has very high education standards which are accessible to much of the population (plus a BSc/BASc will only put you back $25K CAD for the whole thing, not some retarded amount like $25K USD a year). Add AMAZING quality of life, outdoor activities, scenery, oh yeah and WHISTLER. 'Nuff Said.;-)
Sure I hate paying as much tax as I do. But I do it for social welfare reasons: if I'm well off, I should support those who are less fortunate (like the fellow who loses teh ability to work due to MS); if I fund the education system, so more people can get degrees and high(er) paying jobs, they too will pay more taxes, which will help with my retirement. It's like karma, baby: what goes around comes around.
Besides the gap between what Americans and 'Nucks pay in taxes is not as big as most Americans (and Canadians) think it is...
The fact that these viruses got into these "private & secure" networks has more to do with uneducated users than with the network itself (hardware/software/config/etc.). Maybe Dubya should spend the money on making the goverment employees more tech-savvy. I'll take that contract, thanks.
How on earth can it become criminal if the actions by the mentor/PhD are not in the best interests of the student researcher (or "failing to perform" as you put it)? As far as I can tell, only when the mentor actually breaks a section in the criminal code, say theft, fraud or maybe he slaps her around in the lab... aside from these kinds of actions, most of these so-called patent-stealing PhDers would be subject to civil litigation... not criminal.
But I agree that the University (as probably all others in the US) would be well advised to take action to avoid this happening again in the future (and thus a potentially large lawsuit):
he should not be allowed to be solely in charge of student researchers;
his prior patents should be re-examined; and
new student researchers and mentoring PhDs should all be educated about what is acceptable conduct in this area, what kinds of rights to patents students have, etc.
Not true in this case (possibly others). The Airbus A300 has all of its hydraulics centered in the wing-engine region. An engine falls off and there's a better than 90% chance that you've lost all your hydraulics. Even with double redundancy for the hydraulics there's almost no way that you will NOT lose the hydraulic system, and thus any ability to control the plane. In the event of a general hydraulic system failure, you *could* control the plane via differential power (applying different amounts of power to each engine to perform basic navigation) - however with one engine dropped several kms behind you, you've got no hope in hell for controlling that plane.
I'd be curious how any performance hit will affect developers and powerusers, especially since the.NET dev environment is a pig (need at least 256MB RAM on a 700+ MHz processor just to not be constantly tearing your hair out waiting for it to clunk along...). If you're a.NET developer, paying M$ $1000 per year to develop.NET services, I'd think you'd want to maximize your dev time available... but then again, most developers spend only 47 some odd days programming each year anyways;-)...
It's true. I'm using IE6 (6.00.2462, a "Beta") and I get the stupid MSN search instead of a 404. It looks like you can turn this off under Tools/Internet Options/Advanced/Browsing and deselect "Show friendly HTTP errors." However, I have deselected that option and I still get the MSN search page... sigh...
ugh. I though patents were for processes and techniques, in general, and that software, in particular, could not be patented (at least that was the "spirit" of patents). Copyright and Trademarks are supposed to apply to products like software (IP), not patents. I could be mistaken, as the bloody USPTO is being slashdotted... sigh. Oh wait, got it.
You can patent:
Inventions: (a) The term "invention" means invention or
discovery.
Processes: (b) The term "process" means process, art, or
method, and includes a new use of a known process,
machine, manufacture, composition of matter, or
material.
So if they patented the process of the Auto-generation of HTML, then they'd be patenting a process, not the tool to complete the process.
Punks. This whole patenting of software is ridiculous. I have a friend who works for a med-tech company, and they're always looking for things to patent... he's filled out so many of those damn forms he could do it in his sleep. Is the company doing well? Is the company valuable? Nah... that'd make sense;-).
OK, while it sounds (reads) like a plausible argument, "the Net is interactive, fast, provides multiple viewpoints", yadda yadda yadda, there's one piece of info I'd like you all to keep in mind:
The majority of the world's population doesn't even know what the Internet is, let alone how to use it for news and information gathering purposes.
Sure, you know that. But did you also stop to consider how many people in the First and Second World cultures around the globe actually use their computers for exhaustive internet seraches, information gathering, posting and responding to posts, etc. That is, the high degree of interactivity is from a very small portion of the population of that group. This is analagous to the "10% of the population controls 90% of the weath" idea: there is a very small segment of the computer-enabled society that are "sophisticated users", those folks who know how to use the Net for gathering news and interacting with other similar folks around the globe. Literacy levels are over 70% in North America, so there is a large portion of the populatiuon who can pick up and read a newspaper. A much higher percentage of people can see &/or hear (or use Closed Captioning, etc.) to listen to/watch a newscast on the radio or TV.
Because Radio, print media and television are all "push" mediums, that is they push specific content to (all) users, when a major news story happens, they will push anything and everything they have to their users. The Net is a pull medium: I go and ask for what I want to read/see/hear. The user chooses, by surfing and clicking, what they want to read, what information they want to learn. Sophisticated users know how to use the Net effectively to get the information they want. Ma and Pa Kettle don't. Why should they struggle with their slow AOL dial-up, navigate thru Yahoo! and maybe find a single piece of largely-irrelevant information, when they can turn on the radio or the TV and be bombarded with information?
Another thought: when bad things happen, people want to interact with other people, don't want to be alone, and want to hear the voice of another human. Radio and TV does that. Look at how people reacted to Dan Rather crying on TV?
I don't work for MS, but have seen their testing and QA processes and people.
They do test. They have one experienced tester for every developer.
They also do fairly good test planning and automation. Lots of visibility into how they test. They are far better than most other test departments out there.
They fix a huge amount of defects in all of their products.
They do not fix all defects found.
Now, they may not make the most defect-free software (that phrase is so not even grammatically correct, but phuk it), but they make "Good Enough" software (most times they do, there have been exceptions, like PowerPoint 98 for the Mac, don't even get me started!) - software that is good enough for the majority of users/majority of the market.
It's a case of limited returns. They could spend a lot more effort to try and track down (nearly) all the bugs, and fix (nearly) all of them, but the software would be another year late, and have cost them another year of n number of full-time people working on the product, with little to no real improvement for the end user.
Since most users wouldn't notice the difference, why on eath should they spend the extra time and money? If users will buy Office XP and live with it, defects and all, why should they spend the extra time and effort for nearly neglible results?
Now in the case of IIS, there's a lot of rhetoric about "ooh, the sysadmins should be doing their jobs", "MS should be sued", "MS should rewrite/opensource IIS", "Switch to Apache"... yadda yadda yadda. Some people use this software for company critical operations. That's their choice. Simple case is: if you use the tool, you should understand how to use it correctly.
Remember teaching your Mom how to use Word? or Outlook? Remember when she really screwed something up and couldn't find that recipe she sent Martha Stewart? After you rolled your eyes and sat down at the keyboard, you fixed the problem. Why? How? Are you a genius? No. You are a sophisticated, experienced user. Mom isn't. IMHO the same logic applies. If you are going to use the tool, understand how to use it correctly. Otherwise stop bitching and moaning about it.
Hey, the government DID take care of IBM, not the market. IBM had 40+ years of very strict guidelines and regulations (these restrictions ended in April 97). Granted the gov't took their sweet-assed time getting around to it, but they did act and their actions drastically changed the landscape.
Dammit, can't find the link now... but if I do, I'll post it...
Not to say that the market might not take care of MSFT, but we are talking about a whole lot of sheep here...
Now, let's not be naive here, (y)our government has more than enough information on you to whip up a little card with your photo, DOB, SSN(SIN), blood type, yadda yadda yadda, and mail it to you without you having to do anything...(I'm Canadian and the same applies to me as well). I agree that we shouldn't jump to conclusions and hastily implement ill-thought-out plans, but on the idea of national ID cards, you're already there: simply apply duct tape to the edges of your existing cards to make one big one.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to move my company towards creating s/w that will operate on Linux, both as a client and as embedded (target) s/w. Our clients are the large primes for militaries around the world.
Most primes and militaries are moving towards COTS products to reduce costs and improve reliability and support. If we were to port our product s/w to run on Linux, how on earth can we achieve similar value and benefits of COTS-like s/w, s/w like WinRiver's Tornado, that have great robustness, standard (purchasable) support, and carry the perception (remember: perception is reality here) of greater security?
For those of you who think support is not important, market data has shown that for larger organizations, the number one "care about" is support. And since Sept 11, security is moving to the top of the list of care abouts for the militaries and primes.
Totally. I'll buy a DVD with hours of good entertainment that I have already previewed/seen and know to be woth the $$ for $20 before I'll buy a CD for that price.
Why am I giving you all this information? Because this is not a simple recycling problem, period. This goes all the way back to the root: electronics manufacturing and assemblt of PWBs. The EU is flexing their muscles by pushing the RoHS and WEEE directives. HP has been planning for these two directives since they were scheduled for a vote in the EU (and RoHS has since been passed). The entire time their plan has been to push it down to the supply chain parnters. This has not changed in over a year, nor will it going forward. Why should it? With HP's purchasing power, they say "jump" and their suppliers say "how high, SIR!"
While games development is a great job for some, it is not for others. I like process, I admit it. I like to follow a methodology that promotes defined repeatable outcomes, that looks for ways to continuously improve the process, and thus the ability of the team to improve the quality of the outputs. When I interviewed at EA, they didn't need no stinkin' process. And I don't blame them: the product they produce is closer to a piece of art than a piece of software at times. Requirements management? Ha! How about ad-hoc requirements change up to the last minute? But that's the nature of doing something so creative... you need to change and tweak up to release. Should they teach this in Uni? No goddamn way. Why? Most software developers already are good at being creative: they take a requirement, a sentence on a piece of paper and translate it into source code that does something. How much more creative do you need? So teaching the finer points of game development, aside from the core stuff that is already taught in most CS degrees (graphics etc.), can be done as part of learning the job. Like an apprencticeship or co-op term. You learn the basic skills for any s/w development in school, then you refine and specify those skills in the real world.
This just seems like a colossal waste of time and money. If Mass could get other states on-side, maybe the costs would be less...
But this piece-meal approach to dealing with monopolies like MS (or IBM in a previous generation) is bullcrap. If the federal gov't can't come up with a reasonable punishment/settlement that all states sign off, there will never be any truly effective measures put in place. Another case when distributed power to states gives companies (and criminals) silly-ass easy loopholes to jump through...
Bottom line: you may be kick-ass at this kind of thinking, these kinds of approaches to problems, but there are plenty of geeks out there who suck at it. You know, for a geek, your bozo filter seems to be malfunctioning - you should be able to filter this stuff out and dump it from the cache more easily than this!
My company does quite a bit of work for the big defense contractors, we're involved in many big programs. These contractors are constantly asking us for Linux based software (SDKs APIs etc.) and especially for their embedded devices. These guys want to stop laying huge license fees to WindRiver for their vxWorks software... and want to spend the $$ elsewhere. Good on them I say. However I will insert the obligatory M$ comment: I'm shocked (not!) that MS would push their own agenda blah blah blah... ;-)
BTW: "bajillion" is a valid technical term ;-)
Wow. I always thought that the likelihood of an asteroid hitting Earth was low, at least low enough that ther are probably better things to spend one's time addressing... say, hunger, AIDS, yadda yadda yadda.
A larger problem is how to lower the cost of missions to allow for an increase their frequency. If this kind of technology c(w)ould be used to allow humans or unmanned craft more time in space to collect data, I think that would be far more useful.
The quote smacks of FUDing. Oooh, look out! A big bad asteroid could it us! You all saw "Deep Impact", right? Well, better fund us so we can make sure that never happens...
In the pool? Sheesh, you can't hear anything in the pool anyways, so what's the point? I have a HR monitor that I wear in the pool, so it's possible, but the idea of people swimming or jetskiing with headphones on is so ludicrous, how much more dangerous do you think you could make it? Sorry, as much as I love new gadgets to make my training in the pool, on the bike or on the run more enjoyable, safety still has to be a primary concern. Know how many runners get hit by cars or jumped by persons with evil intentions becuase they were wearing headphones and couldn't hear what was happening around them? I used to run with music (discman). Man, that stopped in a hurry when some a**hole snuck up on me and tried to haul me into the bushes.
</rant>
I particularly like the *FREE* ARM (Automated Requirements Measurement) tool from the SATC (first link). Granted it only runs on Windoze, but you can get it to parse a 300+ page req doc and count all the requirements, weak phrases, etc. for you. Handy tool.
Forgot to add that test design is driven almost entirely by requirements, that is, the requirements are the primary artifact consumed by test planners designers...
I'm certain someone has already said this, but over 80% of defects come from crappy requirements. Forget about your design & analysis, your coding practices, inpsection techniques, debugging and testing abilities - if your requirements are not CLEAR, CORRECT, ATOMIC, UNAMBIGUOUS, and CONSISTENT, you might as well start burning money.
NASA correlated a $1 cost to correct a "defect" in the requirements stage (here a defect can be any requirement that does not meet all 5 attributes I listed above) to several hundred to thousands of times over when addressing the same defect at the testing stage. Crappy requirements and crappy specifications are a big part of what makes your code buggy and expensive.
LA Times posted a study last year that showed that the average US programmer only coded for 51 days a year. 51 days!! One fifth of your working year spent writing new code. The rest of the time? DOING REWORK.
Biggest cause of rework?
UNCLEAR AND AMBIGUOUS REQUIREMENTS.
Spend the time and effort to beef up your requirements gathering and management processes. You'll get your ROI in ONE project cycle.
Which is why many Canadian cities are doing OK in attracting hi-tech co's: that's where the geeks are. Canada is built on multi-culturalism and tolerance. Vancouver (where I live) has a huge gay&lesbian community, amazing arts and sub-culture (just have to look for it), and has very high education standards which are accessible to much of the population (plus a BSc/BASc will only put you back $25K CAD for the whole thing, not some retarded amount like $25K USD a year). Add AMAZING quality of life, outdoor activities, scenery, oh yeah and WHISTLER. 'Nuff Said. ;-)
Sure I hate paying as much tax as I do. But I do it for social welfare reasons: if I'm well off, I should support those who are less fortunate (like the fellow who loses teh ability to work due to MS); if I fund the education system, so more people can get degrees and high(er) paying jobs, they too will pay more taxes, which will help with my retirement. It's like karma, baby: what goes around comes around.
Besides the gap between what Americans and 'Nucks pay in taxes is not as big as most Americans (and Canadians) think it is...
Sorry for the rant.
The 0th law was added later, being that: A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. Anyways, I believe that his laws of robotics have been widely adapted and followed by robotics and AI folk around the globe... Could start here: http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/SOS/Asi
As well, Asimov is widely credited with being the first to coin the term "robotics".
The fact that these viruses got into these "private & secure" networks has more to do with uneducated users than with the network itself (hardware/software/config/etc.). Maybe Dubya should spend the money on making the goverment employees more tech-savvy. I'll take that contract, thanks.
;-).
And he can start with himself
But I agree that the University (as probably all others in the US) would be well advised to take action to avoid this happening again in the future (and thus a potentially large lawsuit):
Not true in this case (possibly others). The Airbus A300 has all of its hydraulics centered in the wing-engine region. An engine falls off and there's a better than 90% chance that you've lost all your hydraulics. Even with double redundancy for the hydraulics there's almost no way that you will NOT lose the hydraulic system, and thus any ability to control the plane. In the event of a general hydraulic system failure, you *could* control the plane via differential power (applying different amounts of power to each engine to perform basic navigation) - however with one engine dropped several kms behind you, you've got no hope in hell for controlling that plane.
I'd be curious how any performance hit will affect developers and powerusers, especially since the .NET dev environment is a pig (need at least 256MB RAM on a 700+ MHz processor just to not be constantly tearing your hair out waiting for it to clunk along...). If you're a .NET developer, paying M$ $1000 per year to develop .NET services, I'd think you'd want to maximize your dev time available... but then again, most developers spend only 47 some odd days programming each year anyways ;-)...
It's true. I'm using IE6 (6.00.2462, a "Beta") and I get the stupid MSN search instead of a 404. It looks like you can turn this off under Tools/Internet Options/Advanced/Browsing and deselect "Show friendly HTTP errors." However, I have deselected that option and I still get the MSN search page... sigh...
You can patent:
discovery.
method, and includes a new use of a known process,
machine, manufacture, composition of matter, or
material.
(Taken liberally from United States Code Title 35 - Patents, Part 2, Chapter 101.
So if they patented the process of the Auto-generation of HTML, then they'd be patenting a process, not the tool to complete the process.
Punks. This whole patenting of software is ridiculous. I have a friend who works for a med-tech company, and they're always looking for things to patent... he's filled out so many of those damn forms he could do it in his sleep. Is the company doing well? Is the company valuable? Nah... that'd make sense ;-).
The majority of the world's population doesn't even know what the Internet is, let alone how to use it for news and information gathering purposes.
Sure, you know that. But did you also stop to consider how many people in the First and Second World cultures around the globe actually use their computers for exhaustive internet seraches, information gathering, posting and responding to posts, etc. That is, the high degree of interactivity is from a very small portion of the population of that group. This is analagous to the "10% of the population controls 90% of the weath" idea: there is a very small segment of the computer-enabled society that are "sophisticated users", those folks who know how to use the Net for gathering news and interacting with other similar folks around the globe. Literacy levels are over 70% in North America, so there is a large portion of the populatiuon who can pick up and read a newspaper. A much higher percentage of people can see &/or hear (or use Closed Captioning, etc.) to listen to/watch a newscast on the radio or TV.
Because Radio, print media and television are all "push" mediums, that is they push specific content to (all) users, when a major news story happens, they will push anything and everything they have to their users. The Net is a pull medium: I go and ask for what I want to read/see/hear. The user chooses, by surfing and clicking, what they want to read, what information they want to learn. Sophisticated users know how to use the Net effectively to get the information they want. Ma and Pa Kettle don't. Why should they struggle with their slow AOL dial-up, navigate thru Yahoo! and maybe find a single piece of largely-irrelevant information, when they can turn on the radio or the TV and be bombarded with information?
Another thought: when bad things happen, people want to interact with other people, don't want to be alone, and want to hear the voice of another human. Radio and TV does that. Look at how people reacted to Dan Rather crying on TV?
Now, they may not make the most defect-free software (that phrase is so not even grammatically correct, but phuk it), but they make "Good Enough" software (most times they do, there have been exceptions, like PowerPoint 98 for the Mac, don't even get me started!) - software that is good enough for the majority of users/majority of the market.
It's a case of limited returns. They could spend a lot more effort to try and track down (nearly) all the bugs, and fix (nearly) all of them, but the software would be another year late, and have cost them another year of n number of full-time people working on the product, with little to no real improvement for the end user.
Since most users wouldn't notice the difference, why on eath should they spend the extra time and money? If users will buy Office XP and live with it, defects and all, why should they spend the extra time and effort for nearly neglible results?
Now in the case of IIS, there's a lot of rhetoric about "ooh, the sysadmins should be doing their jobs", "MS should be sued", "MS should rewrite/opensource IIS", "Switch to Apache"... yadda yadda yadda. Some people use this software for company critical operations. That's their choice. Simple case is: if you use the tool, you should understand how to use it correctly.
Remember teaching your Mom how to use Word? or Outlook? Remember when she really screwed something up and couldn't find that recipe she sent Martha Stewart? After you rolled your eyes and sat down at the keyboard, you fixed the problem. Why? How? Are you a genius? No. You are a sophisticated, experienced user. Mom isn't. IMHO the same logic applies. If you are going to use the tool, understand how to use it correctly. Otherwise stop bitching and moaning about it.
I feel better now.
Hey, the government DID take care of IBM, not the market. IBM had 40+ years of very strict guidelines and regulations (these restrictions ended in April 97). Granted the gov't took their sweet-assed time getting around to it, but they did act and their actions drastically changed the landscape.
Dammit, can't find the link now... but if I do, I'll post it...
Not to say that the market might not take care of MSFT, but we are talking about a whole lot of sheep here...
Now, let's not be naive here, (y)our government has more than enough information on you to whip up a little card with your photo, DOB, SSN(SIN), blood type, yadda yadda yadda, and mail it to you without you having to do anything...(I'm Canadian and the same applies to me as well). I agree that we shouldn't jump to conclusions and hastily implement ill-thought-out plans, but on the idea of national ID cards, you're already there: simply apply duct tape to the edges of your existing cards to make one big one.