I did yesterday, twice, on a company workstation. Windows XP Professional version 2002 SP 3.
I also see window artifacts every day or two. Some piece of a window has a horizontal black line drawn through it. Windows freeze and can't be moved for several seconds. Several types of popup windows won't close, or close only to spawn a new window.
Yes, XP is very stable. It consistently behaves like this.
The Linux brand has enormous leverage. We should make the most of it.
The best function that linux.com could serve is as a portal into Linux resources and the entire Linux community. But it has to be organized in such a way as to make Linux adoption as easy and painless as possible. There's no conflict between that and all the other capabilities we might like the site to have.
If we accept the thesis of the book, it offers a refreshing counterpoint to the popular stereotype of "rags to riches" that is too often held up as an achievable ideal.
What's wrong with encouraging people to work hard in order to be successful and famous? Nothing, except that it may be substantially based on a false premise. Sure, hard work is generally (though not always) necessary but it may well prove insufficient. And that's the part that always seems to be overlooked when we celebrate the extraordinary success of a famous individual.
People don't always achieve their dreams, especially if the achievement is statistically improbable. Chance plays a dominant role in the improbable cases. And so, for every single welfare mum who went on to make billions from a book series about a young wizard, there are perhaps hundreds of thousands of welfare mums who have to accept that their most inspired and courageous efforts will probably go unremarked and unrewarded.
Merit is fine, something to be cultivated and rewarded. But success is not proof of merit, and failure should not be cause for censure. That sort of neocon thinking is too simplistic by far.
You're arguing as if this were a zero-sum game, as if we were all fighting for the same cookie. It isn't and we're not. Once we have brought a new capability into play, we don't just all go home. We can use it to create new things. The surface of possibility keeps expanding, and there is, as far as we can determine, no limit to that expansion.
Proprietary solutions try to hoard that potential to themselves, but in doing so all they really achieve is a localized region of starvation in which indeed there is only one cookie and they control it.
If you personally want to settle for that, please go ahead. The rest of us will exercise our freedom to innovate. As the sibling post illustrates, Open Source software makes it possible to build more advanced stacks because there is a base to begin with. We'll be busy working on a new cookie factory while you nibble away at your one cookie.
There's only so much you can do to find work which is relevant to an expert skillset, even if that expertise covers several different areas.
Over the past thirty years of professional life, I've tried just about everything, with mixed success. Consistently, the best results occurred when I aimed directly at or slightly higher than my qualifications, but positions at this level are rare. Within commuting range of a large metropolis, I might see one per week which I view as worth pursuing. If that leads to an interview in one case out of five, and that interview leads to an offer in one case out of three, it takes about four months on average to find senior work.
During the dotcom bust, when senior positions were nonexistent, I tried applying to everything that came up. So what if I was overqualified to be a webmaster or developer? I could easily do the work, and those were the jobs available. That strategy kept me very busy, but it led to exactly ZERO interviews out of several hundred carefully crafted applications submitted over a period of about two years. So you're right, the more desperate you get, the less any employer is likely to hire you. It's also the case that your application is lost among the others. I learned in passing that some of these positions at small sites were receiving close to a thousand applicants a week. How can an employer cope with that much processing workload?
What this all means is that when times are tough, it makes excellent sense to contribute to an open source project, or go back to school, or study the technical literature on your own, or plant a garden, or renovate your kitchen, or just about anything which you judge to be of intrinsic value, while applying for whatever qualified positions may be available. These activities will enhance your career and your life in the long run.
As you say, if survival is an issue then you take what you can get, but it's not certain that aiming lower will do anything to put food on the table. It can be very demoralizing to realize after many months that all of your effort has no intrinsic value.
It takes awhile for society to build momentum in responses of this kind. If nothing else, this trial is significant because it created a huge change of public perception: from being helpless and divided against abuses my Microsoft to being able to act collectively against it.
As you say, a lot was revealed at trial. And that carries forward into other proceedings. It influences the attitude of prosecutors as they develop their own cases, and interested parties who watch these events unfold. It means, as a small example, that the whole ISO OOXML fiasco didn't go unremarked. I know that doesn't sound like a great achievement in terms of protecting the integrity of the standards process, but in a broader context it adds to the perception that Microsoft is chronically untrustworthy and unrepentant.
Here's an analogy at a smaller scale. We have a neighbor who has a pattern of behaving badly and then feigning ignorance. The first few offenses caused people to grumble, but they were perceived as isolated incidents. Then the neighbor did something really outrageous involving explosives. That caused a municipal response, which, just like the federal antitrust trial, was more symbolic than effective, since the damage was already done. Now this same neighbor has gone ahead with another egregious offense. This time, we were prepared. The municipality was alerted, issued a cease and desist, and when that had no effect, is now moving to enforcement. Often, it takes that much crap before the community can mount an effective response. But now, you see, this neighbor is persona non grata with everyone. That's a very diminished place to end up, when nobody will talk to you or help you or do business with you, when there is a massive lien on your property to recover for damages.
Most technical jobs have requirements which are far too specialized to be filled through networking and friends. That's a plain fact.
Actually, it's just an anecdotal report plus the application of inductive reasoning. But it's based on thirty years of diverse professional experience rather than on uncritically repeating the same tired old urban myth. Chance acquaintance probably works just fine for generalist positions. But if you need a molecular biologist who has experience building clustered supercomputers, simple word of mouth is unlikely to put you in touch with anyone remotely qualified.
Best if you ask Microsoft about that. Officers of the company testified in court that the browser was so intimately linked to the system that it could not be removed.
This is my thinking as well. The original web browser model with its clear decoupling of responsibility between server and client is what makes the web incredibly attractive as an application platform.
Contrast this with all the clunky alternatives that tried to build elaborate communication and presentation layers in which this decoupling was not clean and not portable. In retrospect, did we really need to implement distributed objects in the vast majority of cases? Apparently not, because suddenly every application of note got ported to the web.
Did we really need to download computation out to web clients? Certainly not at first, though I appreciate that there are distinct benefits to local computation, provided that it doesn't mess up the client-server decoupling. In beneficial cases, local computation should act to improve decoupling.
Recasting the same old entangled crap in web terms is retrogressive and, in my view, parasitic. You want to build some wonderful new distributed system model, be my guest. Show that it can do things that the web can't do, show that it's intrinsically more secure, and people will flock to it. Let it compete on its merits.
Leave the web alone. It doesn't want to be embraced and extended.
So you agree that the courts are still not satisfied that Microsoft is in compliance? That in fact harm is still being done? Indeed, why else would the courts still be seeking remedy? We're talking here about the EU, the US federal court, and various states which were not satisfied with the vigor of enforcement at the federal level.
The court rulings are based on reasoned conclusion that harm is being done. In what sense do you believe that I'm offering an opinion about this and not simply restating public information concerning these judicial processes? It's not hard to compare my account of events with the material on record.
If you'd like to have an intelligent discussion on that, I'm in favor of it. But you've worn out your welcome this time. Fewer snarky putdowns, more consistent logic, and more attention to evidence would make your point of view more convincing on another occasion. Try it.
Not even that. The issue identified in the conference talk isn't with SSL at all. It's with X.509 certificate validation.
And to be precise, there is nothing wrong with certificate validation itself, just with the particular combination of (a) certificate authorities which erroneously issue certs which permit signing, and (b) broken implementations which don't check the X.509v3 constraints while traversing the certificate chain.
Independent thinker, meaning that her thinking is independent of reality?
Factual record: Microsoft was found under law in the United States and the EU to have abused its monopoly to unfairly exclude competition. It is still doing so. Remedies are still being sought. The ongoing downside for the industry and consumers is huge. This is not personal opinion but adjudicated fact.
Interesting speculation: Some day Google might become a problem.
It's not "last century" if Microsoft's abuses, or the effect of those abuses, continues. It's an outstanding problem that still urgently needs to be addressed.
Varney has declared that she would rather look at the bright new shiny thing than attend to cleaning up the existing mess. I think we could use someone with a longer attention span.
And also, by the way, the Internet is not an operating system. The article cites the Conficker virus as justification for redesigning the network, as if the whole thing was some sort of vast amorphous blob that can only be explained by muddled analogy.
How about this: the network itself is working just fine, but that doesn't prevent people from attaching vulnerable hosts to it. A large population of flawed components would be an issue for any mechanism. The answer is not to redesign the mechanism but to eliminate the source of flawed components.
But it's reasonable, indeed fairly elegant, to write a web server in Tcl. And Tcl was specifically conceived as a glue language. It doesn't hurt that Tcl commands look a lot like interactive shell commands, but expressed in a more regular syntax.
I'm mentioning this just to point out that these distinctions of granularity are a bit artificial. Yes, glue languages give you composability at the coarse end of the scale. But they're often quite acceptable as programming languages as well.
It's a gorgeous part of the planet. I live in coastal British Columbia - certainly favored as a tourist destination for its natural beauty - and I've made several long and delightful road trips down to Utah and vicinity because it offers a completely different sort of magic.
My understanding is that you can camp pretty much anywhere you like off road in Utah, except in the fire season. Yet much of the landscape seems quite pristine, and I hope we'll keep it that way.
It's a very cool place. Now the people, well, there are all kinds of people, just like anywhere. All of the United States seems insanely religious to me, so Utah doesn't really rise much against the background signal. The only really weird thing I found was when I would go into town to buy beer or wine. The liquor store staff seem to have wandered out of some time tunnel from the 1050s. They give out the same weird attitude, as if I was buying lice shampoo or something. But to me, it's the variety of cultural experience that I look forward to as a traveller. It would be dull if everyone in the world had the same mannerisms.
It would be entirely reasonable, even admirable, for you to chart a middle course. I'll assume that the offer is being made in good faith because you're regarded as a key individual. Fantastic. Trying to see this from management's point of view, there is high value in the continuity of keeping you on board.
But nobody expects such a situation to prevail forever. So there would be equal, possibly even greater, value in having your help in making a smooth transfer of knowledge to another resource. Competent management knows that it has to embrace this sort of change, because such changes are a normal part of business over the long term. Every transition is an opportunity to get better at it, and thus become more agile.
So I'm thinking, why not propose some sort of middle ground where you participate for a year (or whatever seems appropriate) in finding and training a replacement? Everybody wins. And because you took the initiative in suggesting it, you gain some advantage in negotiating the terms. I'd take 5% in shares in addition to salary for the period. And I'd really excel at making it work too. After all, I now have a stake in the company's success long term.
And then there's the whole light temperature issue, which is very difficult for a consumer to determine.
Especially as color temperature doesn't really tell the story where LEDs and fluorescents are concerned. While incandescent lights are thermal emitters with smooth color spectra, the others are composed of several sharp peaks at different wavelengths, a conditition which doesn't reduce to a single color temperature. It's also much of the reason why the light seems somewhat harsh and unnatural.
I can attest to the truth of your observation. One of my neighbors insists that she has two windows in her apartment (this all forms the basis of a recurring argument that she should not have to pay so much as others for various services.)
The actual number of windows is just the same as all the other apartments: seven.
Yes, her vote counts. Yes, she's probably typical of ten percent of the population. But she's a selfish old bat, and there is no pleasing her. So it goes. I try not to lose a lot of sleep about it.
(By the way, I just overheard someone in the next cube say "irregardless." Not ironically. I rest my case.)
I don't know how contract law works in Germany. In many jurisdictions, a contract requires three things in order to be considered binding on the parties: (1) an offer (2) an acceptance (3) an exchange of consideration.
So if I offer you a download and you accept it by clicking on it, that does not constitute a contract, since no consideration (eg payment) has been exchanged.
Others have pointed out how dumb it is to allow something to be downloaded before collecting payment. I agree. The request to pay in advance is what alerts a reasonable person to the expectation of payment. Supplying personal information does not, because it's used in many other contexts where payment is not at issue.
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I did yesterday, twice, on a company workstation. Windows XP Professional version 2002 SP 3.
I also see window artifacts every day or two. Some piece of a window has a horizontal black line drawn through it. Windows freeze and can't be moved for several seconds. Several types of popup windows won't close, or close only to spawn a new window.
Yes, XP is very stable. It consistently behaves like this.
The Linux brand has enormous leverage. We should make the most of it.
The best function that linux.com could serve is as a portal into Linux resources and the entire Linux community. But it has to be organized in such a way as to make Linux adoption as easy and painless as possible. There's no conflict between that and all the other capabilities we might like the site to have.
If we accept the thesis of the book, it offers a refreshing counterpoint to the popular stereotype of "rags to riches" that is too often held up as an achievable ideal.
What's wrong with encouraging people to work hard in order to be successful and famous? Nothing, except that it may be substantially based on a false premise. Sure, hard work is generally (though not always) necessary but it may well prove insufficient. And that's the part that always seems to be overlooked when we celebrate the extraordinary success of a famous individual.
People don't always achieve their dreams, especially if the achievement is statistically improbable. Chance plays a dominant role in the improbable cases. And so, for every single welfare mum who went on to make billions from a book series about a young wizard, there are perhaps hundreds of thousands of welfare mums who have to accept that their most inspired and courageous efforts will probably go unremarked and unrewarded.
Merit is fine, something to be cultivated and rewarded. But success is not proof of merit, and failure should not be cause for censure. That sort of neocon thinking is too simplistic by far.
You're arguing as if this were a zero-sum game, as if we were all fighting for the same cookie. It isn't and we're not. Once we have brought a new capability into play, we don't just all go home. We can use it to create new things. The surface of possibility keeps expanding, and there is, as far as we can determine, no limit to that expansion.
Proprietary solutions try to hoard that potential to themselves, but in doing so all they really achieve is a localized region of starvation in which indeed there is only one cookie and they control it.
If you personally want to settle for that, please go ahead. The rest of us will exercise our freedom to innovate. As the sibling post illustrates, Open Source software makes it possible to build more advanced stacks because there is a base to begin with. We'll be busy working on a new cookie factory while you nibble away at your one cookie.
Thanks for making these points.
There's only so much you can do to find work which is relevant to an expert skillset, even if that expertise covers several different areas.
Over the past thirty years of professional life, I've tried just about everything, with mixed success. Consistently, the best results occurred when I aimed directly at or slightly higher than my qualifications, but positions at this level are rare. Within commuting range of a large metropolis, I might see one per week which I view as worth pursuing. If that leads to an interview in one case out of five, and that interview leads to an offer in one case out of three, it takes about four months on average to find senior work.
During the dotcom bust, when senior positions were nonexistent, I tried applying to everything that came up. So what if I was overqualified to be a webmaster or developer? I could easily do the work, and those were the jobs available. That strategy kept me very busy, but it led to exactly ZERO interviews out of several hundred carefully crafted applications submitted over a period of about two years. So you're right, the more desperate you get, the less any employer is likely to hire you. It's also the case that your application is lost among the others. I learned in passing that some of these positions at small sites were receiving close to a thousand applicants a week. How can an employer cope with that much processing workload?
What this all means is that when times are tough, it makes excellent sense to contribute to an open source project, or go back to school, or study the technical literature on your own, or plant a garden, or renovate your kitchen, or just about anything which you judge to be of intrinsic value, while applying for whatever qualified positions may be available. These activities will enhance your career and your life in the long run.
As you say, if survival is an issue then you take what you can get, but it's not certain that aiming lower will do anything to put food on the table. It can be very demoralizing to realize after many months that all of your effort has no intrinsic value.
It takes awhile for society to build momentum in responses of this kind. If nothing else, this trial is significant because it created a huge change of public perception: from being helpless and divided against abuses my Microsoft to being able to act collectively against it.
As you say, a lot was revealed at trial. And that carries forward into other proceedings. It influences the attitude of prosecutors as they develop their own cases, and interested parties who watch these events unfold. It means, as a small example, that the whole ISO OOXML fiasco didn't go unremarked. I know that doesn't sound like a great achievement in terms of protecting the integrity of the standards process, but in a broader context it adds to the perception that Microsoft is chronically untrustworthy and unrepentant.
Here's an analogy at a smaller scale. We have a neighbor who has a pattern of behaving badly and then feigning ignorance. The first few offenses caused people to grumble, but they were perceived as isolated incidents. Then the neighbor did something really outrageous involving explosives. That caused a municipal response, which, just like the federal antitrust trial, was more symbolic than effective, since the damage was already done. Now this same neighbor has gone ahead with another egregious offense. This time, we were prepared. The municipality was alerted, issued a cease and desist, and when that had no effect, is now moving to enforcement. Often, it takes that much crap before the community can mount an effective response. But now, you see, this neighbor is persona non grata with everyone. That's a very diminished place to end up, when nobody will talk to you or help you or do business with you, when there is a massive lien on your property to recover for damages.
Sorta like Microsoft but not as systematic.
Anyway, I think if you're looking for work there's little sense in reducing your profile>/i>
I agree with you there.
Most technical jobs have requirements which are far too specialized to be filled through networking and friends. That's a plain fact.
Actually, it's just an anecdotal report plus the application of inductive reasoning. But it's based on thirty years of diverse professional experience rather than on uncritically repeating the same tired old urban myth. Chance acquaintance probably works just fine for generalist positions. But if you need a molecular biologist who has experience building clustered supercomputers, simple word of mouth is unlikely to put you in touch with anyone remotely qualified.
Best if you ask Microsoft about that. Officers of the company testified in court that the browser was so intimately linked to the system that it could not be removed.
This is my thinking as well. The original web browser model with its clear decoupling of responsibility between server and client is what makes the web incredibly attractive as an application platform.
Contrast this with all the clunky alternatives that tried to build elaborate communication and presentation layers in which this decoupling was not clean and not portable. In retrospect, did we really need to implement distributed objects in the vast majority of cases? Apparently not, because suddenly every application of note got ported to the web.
Did we really need to download computation out to web clients? Certainly not at first, though I appreciate that there are distinct benefits to local computation, provided that it doesn't mess up the client-server decoupling. In beneficial cases, local computation should act to improve decoupling.
Recasting the same old entangled crap in web terms is retrogressive and, in my view, parasitic. You want to build some wonderful new distributed system model, be my guest. Show that it can do things that the web can't do, show that it's intrinsically more secure, and people will flock to it. Let it compete on its merits.
Leave the web alone. It doesn't want to be embraced and extended.
Remedies are still being sought.
Correct.
So you agree that the courts are still not satisfied that Microsoft is in compliance? That in fact harm is still being done? Indeed, why else would the courts still be seeking remedy? We're talking here about the EU, the US federal court, and various states which were not satisfied with the vigor of enforcement at the federal level.
The court rulings are based on reasoned conclusion that harm is being done. In what sense do you believe that I'm offering an opinion about this and not simply restating public information concerning these judicial processes? It's not hard to compare my account of events with the material on record.
If you'd like to have an intelligent discussion on that, I'm in favor of it. But you've worn out your welcome this time. Fewer snarky putdowns, more consistent logic, and more attention to evidence would make your point of view more convincing on another occasion. Try it.
Not even that. The issue identified in the conference talk isn't with SSL at all. It's with X.509 certificate validation.
And to be precise, there is nothing wrong with certificate validation itself, just with the particular combination of (a) certificate authorities which erroneously issue certs which permit signing, and (b) broken implementations which don't check the X.509v3 constraints while traversing the certificate chain.
Independent thinker, meaning that her thinking is independent of reality?
Factual record: Microsoft was found under law in the United States and the EU to have abused its monopoly to unfairly exclude competition. It is still doing so. Remedies are still being sought. The ongoing downside for the industry and consumers is huge. This is not personal opinion but adjudicated fact.
Interesting speculation: Some day Google might become a problem.
It's not "last century" if Microsoft's abuses, or the effect of those abuses, continues. It's an outstanding problem that still urgently needs to be addressed.
Varney has declared that she would rather look at the bright new shiny thing than attend to cleaning up the existing mess. I think we could use someone with a longer attention span.
Cue the resurrection of the fabled "skill testing question" to determine competence to understand a legal agreement.
And also, by the way, the Internet is not an operating system. The article cites the Conficker virus as justification for redesigning the network, as if the whole thing was some sort of vast amorphous blob that can only be explained by muddled analogy.
How about this: the network itself is working just fine, but that doesn't prevent people from attaching vulnerable hosts to it. A large population of flawed components would be an issue for any mechanism. The answer is not to redesign the mechanism but to eliminate the source of flawed components.
At least they didn't order the lighthouse to give way.
But it's reasonable, indeed fairly elegant, to write a web server in Tcl. And Tcl was specifically conceived as a glue language. It doesn't hurt that Tcl commands look a lot like interactive shell commands, but expressed in a more regular syntax.
I'm mentioning this just to point out that these distinctions of granularity are a bit artificial. Yes, glue languages give you composability at the coarse end of the scale. But they're often quite acceptable as programming languages as well.
It's a gorgeous part of the planet. I live in coastal British Columbia - certainly favored as a tourist destination for its natural beauty - and I've made several long and delightful road trips down to Utah and vicinity because it offers a completely different sort of magic.
My understanding is that you can camp pretty much anywhere you like off road in Utah, except in the fire season. Yet much of the landscape seems quite pristine, and I hope we'll keep it that way.
It's a very cool place. Now the people, well, there are all kinds of people, just like anywhere. All of the United States seems insanely religious to me, so Utah doesn't really rise much against the background signal. The only really weird thing I found was when I would go into town to buy beer or wine. The liquor store staff seem to have wandered out of some time tunnel from the 1050s. They give out the same weird attitude, as if I was buying lice shampoo or something. But to me, it's the variety of cultural experience that I look forward to as a traveller. It would be dull if everyone in the world had the same mannerisms.
It would be entirely reasonable, even admirable, for you to chart a middle course. I'll assume that the offer is being made in good faith because you're regarded as a key individual. Fantastic. Trying to see this from management's point of view, there is high value in the continuity of keeping you on board.
But nobody expects such a situation to prevail forever. So there would be equal, possibly even greater, value in having your help in making a smooth transfer of knowledge to another resource. Competent management knows that it has to embrace this sort of change, because such changes are a normal part of business over the long term. Every transition is an opportunity to get better at it, and thus become more agile.
So I'm thinking, why not propose some sort of middle ground where you participate for a year (or whatever seems appropriate) in finding and training a replacement? Everybody wins. And because you took the initiative in suggesting it, you gain some advantage in negotiating the terms. I'd take 5% in shares in addition to salary for the period. And I'd really excel at making it work too. After all, I now have a stake in the company's success long term.
And then there's the whole light temperature issue, which is very difficult for a consumer to determine.
Especially as color temperature doesn't really tell the story where LEDs and fluorescents are concerned. While incandescent lights are thermal emitters with smooth color spectra, the others are composed of several sharp peaks at different wavelengths, a conditition which doesn't reduce to a single color temperature. It's also much of the reason why the light seems somewhat harsh and unnatural.
I can attest to the truth of your observation. One of my neighbors insists that she has two windows in her apartment (this all forms the basis of a recurring argument that she should not have to pay so much as others for various services.)
The actual number of windows is just the same as all the other apartments: seven.
Yes, her vote counts. Yes, she's probably typical of ten percent of the population. But she's a selfish old bat, and there is no pleasing her. So it goes. I try not to lose a lot of sleep about it.
(By the way, I just overheard someone in the next cube say "irregardless." Not ironically. I rest my case.)
That's because it treats every MS Office file as if it were damaged. There are lots of extra sanity checks that Microsoft doesn't bother doing.
I don't know how contract law works in Germany. In many jurisdictions, a contract requires three things in order to be considered binding on the parties: (1) an offer (2) an acceptance (3) an exchange of consideration.
So if I offer you a download and you accept it by clicking on it, that does not constitute a contract, since no consideration (eg payment) has been exchanged.
Others have pointed out how dumb it is to allow something to be downloaded before collecting payment. I agree. The request to pay in advance is what alerts a reasonable person to the expectation of payment. Supplying personal information does not, because it's used in many other contexts where payment is not at issue.