I was ready to be a critic of this before I RTFA--after all we're talking IBM and Lotus Notes, the worst email client ever--but they really have thought about how integrating this information would make it easier to organize and communicate.
One problem I see is that most email information is very hard to parse reliably if it's just free-format text. Sure you can tell people to send out formal meeting invitations but not all clients support that. It would be great if you received a message that said "how about a meeting next Monday at 1pm my time" and the software would pop up your schedule for next Monday at 4pm because you're eastern time and he's pacific.
A lot of motherboards have a two-pin header where you can attach a thermistor. Here's some how-to on it. Instead of sticking the thermistor to the inside of the PC, run it outside the box. Now you have a PC thermometer. There is plenty of free software like Motherboard Monitor that you can use to grab the temperature from within your own program.
If you go look at their Gator info the word "spyware" is nowhere to be found. However, there is a lot of interesting factual information about Gator's questionable way of doing business. Notice their survey of users who had Gator; more than 70 percent didn't know it was installed. Yet Gator claims they can do what they want on systems because users accepted their license?
Well, they could figure out a way around the problem that made their customers happy but still avoided the wrath of spyware makers. For example, they could point users to a page on the Dell site that had a disclaimer that users should check their licenses and links to programs like Spybot.
If they are trying to read tea leaves, they focused on the wrong part of the story. MS doesn't need the best search engine. Many MSN subscribers will use the search engine they are given. They want a way to make MONEY off search engines. That's what an Overture exec brings, experience with how to do pay-per-click placements in a search engine.
This is particularly important now that Overture is a wholly owned part of Yahoo. It is also important because Overture has partnered with Gator (er, Claria) to pop Overture ads by snooping on users who are using other search engines like Google.
If you want to talk about scary, think what would happen if Microsoft put a Gator-like ad engine in Longhorn and tied it to their own home grown pay-per-click search engine. Come to think of it, every day at the computer would be like watching a Nascar race. All those pretty logos.
Re:Favorite comments from the Article:
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I really thought that the first post was sarcarstic, until I read the hordes of "Me Too" replies that followed. Call me crazy, but the last thing I want is Clippy monitoring my typing in tcsh.
We're not talking MS Word, more like MS VS.NET. There are complex objects being exposed in msh and they want some sort of way to "browse" or autocomplete the object hierarchy at the command line to reduce typing and other errors.
Consumer Reports is a monthly publication, which means their reviews of "shipping products" are in the pipe for two or three months before you see them in print. For a car, toothpaste, or condoms that's fine, you still have plenty of time to buy them because they don't change too quickly.
Now, think about PC products. Some of them only have a two or three month LIFETIME before the next product obsoletes them. Add to that the pressure to be the FIRST to review the great new technology and you almost have to collude with the manufacturer if you don't want to be the last to put in your two cent's worth. Particularly if you are a print publication with long lead times.
So most reviewers are looking at pre-release product provided directly from the vendor. Once you are dependent on the vendor to provide product you are on the hook. Sure you can savage the product but that will hurt your chance of getting early looks later on unless you are such a market mover that the vendor figures they have to give you product.
Since you have pre-release product, the vendor will ASSURE you that any problem you find will certainly be fixed before the public gets it. If you are totally open you will mention these issues in your review along with the vendor's assurance. But perhaps you don't, or maybe it ends up on the cutting room floor. In any case, the final "rating" of the product often overlooks these problems because the vendor promised you they would be fixed, and darn it, the product sure looks cool if it ever does work properly.
Yes you can blame the reviewers. But look in the mirror, because if you didn't demand a "detailed review" the day a product becomes available on NewEgg then the tech sites and magazines wouldn't be pressured into reviewing pre-release stuff.
Social Engineering is all about taking relatively innocuous information and convincing people you are an "insider" by the very fact that you have it. For example, if those boxes are still on the loading dock you might call someone there and say "Hey, this is Joe over in Building 19, we're coming over to pick up those Macs." Then you back up your truck and just take them all.
Yes, the screen can display 16 colors in VGA mode. However, the 16 colors can be chosen from a palette of 262,144 colors (6 bits each of red, green, blue). I think you are referring to the standard VGA palette.
And taking down a service isn't disruptive? It's not too bad for usually-stateless and quick services like http, but restarting a database can take a while and really hose performance since it flushes the db's internal caches.
I at the time those numbers were calculated, the software development process was very different from today. It was harder to distribute software, harder to deploy updates, harder for developers to get information about errors in the field. Testing the next release was a lot more critical because if a bug did exist it might not be possible to fix for several months until the next release could be sent out via floppy or mag tape to each customer.
Today most people download their software throught the Internet, and can get patches just as fast, even automatically as they are posted. Tools like Windows Error Reporting, Quality Feedback Agent, and BugToaster make it easier for detect and prioritize bugs based on their frequency of occurrence in the field.
So with all those changes, it's still 15 times more expensive to fix a bug after release? Does that take into account the time value of money, the value of early user feedback, or lost opportunity costs?
In most cases you have to use the phones that are supplied through the carrier. The carrier will determine what features go into the phones and what the price points will be. They will use their buying power as a lever against equipment mfgs and suppliers of the imbedded software. What the carrier asks for is not necessarily what the user wants, but to the equipment mfg the carrier IS the customer.
Today's PDA market is driven by users, or at least driven by IT departments. You can choose whatever you want with no strings attached (like multi-year phone contracts with termination fees).
I am going through the process of getting a new phone and it is horrible. The carrier I want doesn't have the equipment I like--you know, phones with PDA and camera functionality. The carriers that do don't have the right plans or coverage for my area.
>> America got to the wooden model stage at a cost of $400million
Yep, too bad they couldn't find a "software engineering" manager back then. I can just see him saying, "ditch the planning and design, start riveting some sheet metal! Prove to me that it won't work and THEN we'll fix it!"
What makes them think that they would somehow be responsible if they were to do something simple and straightforward like a discussion forum? The high court has already ruled on several of these kind of cases and free speech won. For example, they struck down the CDA and they also said that Yahoo didn't have to rat out an anonymous Yahoo Groups poster.
Why use an obscure technology? That will have more of a chilling effect on active participation than any other factor.
When the infection rate of SoBig-style spamming worms is into the millions, having a limit of 1000 emails isn't much of an impediment to a spammer. There is a limitless supply of clueless users who can be fooled into running them.
If you try to force Grandma into paying the $10, she will just get the AARP to lobby for a law that protects people from paying in cases of "fraud". (For a template, see the rules on credit card purchases.) The ISPs will raise the rates from 1 cent to 2 or 3 or 4 cents to cover the money lost through fraud.
In other words, only clueful people will end up paying for email, and they will pay a lot to cover the mistakes of the clueless.
Why IS everybody laughing at him? Doesn't it make sense that Microsoft would want to build up a big patent portfolio that they could use to play ball with companies that try to sue them? IBM has cross licensed their patents for years.
Microsoft holds a lot of patents that it hasn't yet tried to enforce, for example their patent on using Bayesian statistics to filter email.
The big deal is that it's at the wrong conceptual level. The domain lookup for a non-existent domain should return "domain not found" and not refer the user to an IP that does not represent that domain. (I believe that could be called "misrepresentation".)
A similar mistake is made by sites that do not return 404 errors when a page is not found on the site, but instead return 200 and some sort of "was this what you were looking for?" page. Instead I would prefer a 404 page with that content.
Unfortunately, IE is broken and will display that worthless and uninformative "page cannot be displayed" message on a 404 unless the content returned is larger than 1024 bytes. To add insult to injury, IE refers to this as "friendly error messages"!
Does anyone have information about exactly what behavior the patent covers? If it really somehow covers plugin behavior it seems like there will be a lot of collateral damage including all the browsers, Macromedia, Java,...
Actually, there are many companies that let you do something as crazy as Valenti's lawnmower story. You can generally return products to companies like Target, Land's End, or Nordstrom without argument. In the case of Nordstrom I once returned a sportcoat my son wore only once because he outgrew it within three months. I once had a Land's End phone rep encourage me to exchange a briefcase after a year because it was fraying in some areas and "it should have worn better than that."
If you think about it, the cost of good customer service to the recording industry would be almost nothing. Why don't they make an ironclad guarantee that anyone who presented at least 51% of a damaged CD or DVD--no matter how old--would be given a new copy? Wouldn't that help to reduce the need for backup copies?
I felt the same way about vi when I first used it in the late-1970s, but after using it I realized that its user interface was masterful in the way it took advantage of touch typing in the editing process. Yes, the "modal" interface can be a bit confusing but once you know it your fingers never forget, and they never have to leave the home keys.
The internals of Bill Joy's vi code, however, were butt-ugly at the time. The input loop was a giant switch statement with all kinds of flags and special cases. More than half the commands were implemented by pushing keystrokes back into the buffer, the D command pushed back d$ for example. This turned any command enhancements into a nightmare and there was always some nasty dependency you hadn't anticipated.
My guess is that as long as they offer similar capabilities (secure key storage, unique ID for the computer, etc.) then Windows will probably have an OS API to provide some sort of uniform access. Windows applications that want to take advantage of these features (Windows Media Player, software license enforcement schemes) will write to those APIs.
Linux will be unaffected unless someone wants to write similar APIs.
It's not like this is the end of PCs as we know them, unless they can get the world governments to mandate DRM for all computers.
I have a Windows 2000 SP3 Server with MS SQL Server that automatically downloads and installs the patches via Windows Update, and reboots automatically between 3am and 4am on Monday if a patch requires a reboot. This system has been running continuously since SP3 was released last August and I've never had a problem with any bad patches.
Even though SP4 is now out, the automatic updates process doesn't do SP upgrades automatically. Device drivers aren't installed either. Only the critical security fixes are applied this way, which is probably the exact behavior most people want.
Apple controls both the hardware and software platform. If they claimed that the software was fully functional on some particular Apple hardware and it isn't, then they are guilty of false advertising. They can either fix the hardware, fix the software, or offer some other compensation to consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
I was ready to be a critic of this before I RTFA--after all we're talking IBM and Lotus Notes, the worst email client ever--but they really have thought about how integrating this information would make it easier to organize and communicate.
One problem I see is that most email information is very hard to parse reliably if it's just free-format text. Sure you can tell people to send out formal meeting invitations but not all clients support that. It would be great if you received a message that said "how about a meeting next Monday at 1pm my time" and the software would pop up your schedule for next Monday at 4pm because you're eastern time and he's pacific.
A lot of motherboards have a two-pin header where you can attach a thermistor. Here's some how-to on it. Instead of sticking the thermistor to the inside of the PC, run it outside the box. Now you have a PC thermometer. There is plenty of free software like Motherboard Monitor that you can use to grab the temperature from within your own program.
If you go look at their Gator info the word "spyware" is nowhere to be found. However, there is a lot of interesting factual information about Gator's questionable way of doing business. Notice their survey of users who had Gator; more than 70 percent didn't know it was installed. Yet Gator claims they can do what they want on systems because users accepted their license?
Well, they could figure out a way around the problem that made their customers happy but still avoided the wrath of spyware makers. For example, they could point users to a page on the Dell site that had a disclaimer that users should check their licenses and links to programs like Spybot.
For example, PC Pitstop was sued by Gator but still has a lot of Gator information.
If they are trying to read tea leaves, they focused on the wrong part of the story. MS doesn't need the best search engine. Many MSN subscribers will use the search engine they are given. They want a way to make MONEY off search engines. That's what an Overture exec brings, experience with how to do pay-per-click placements in a search engine.
This is particularly important now that Overture is a wholly owned part of Yahoo. It is also important because Overture has partnered with Gator (er, Claria) to pop Overture ads by snooping on users who are using other search engines like Google.
If you want to talk about scary, think what would happen if Microsoft put a Gator-like ad engine in Longhorn and tied it to their own home grown pay-per-click search engine. Come to think of it, every day at the computer would be like watching a Nascar race. All those pretty logos.
Consumer Reports is a monthly publication, which means their reviews of "shipping products" are in the pipe for two or three months before you see them in print. For a car, toothpaste, or condoms that's fine, you still have plenty of time to buy them because they don't change too quickly.
Now, think about PC products. Some of them only have a two or three month LIFETIME before the next product obsoletes them. Add to that the pressure to be the FIRST to review the great new technology and you almost have to collude with the manufacturer if you don't want to be the last to put in your two cent's worth. Particularly if you are a print publication with long lead times.
So most reviewers are looking at pre-release product provided directly from the vendor. Once you are dependent on the vendor to provide product you are on the hook. Sure you can savage the product but that will hurt your chance of getting early looks later on unless you are such a market mover that the vendor figures they have to give you product.
Since you have pre-release product, the vendor will ASSURE you that any problem you find will certainly be fixed before the public gets it. If you are totally open you will mention these issues in your review along with the vendor's assurance. But perhaps you don't, or maybe it ends up on the cutting room floor. In any case, the final "rating" of the product often overlooks these problems because the vendor promised you they would be fixed, and darn it, the product sure looks cool if it ever does work properly.
Yes you can blame the reviewers. But look in the mirror, because if you didn't demand a "detailed review" the day a product becomes available on NewEgg then the tech sites and magazines wouldn't be pressured into reviewing pre-release stuff.
Social Engineering is all about taking relatively innocuous information and convincing people you are an "insider" by the very fact that you have it. For example, if those boxes are still on the loading dock you might call someone there and say "Hey, this is Joe over in Building 19, we're coming over to pick up those Macs." Then you back up your truck and just take them all.
Yes, the screen can display 16 colors in VGA mode. However, the 16 colors can be chosen from a palette of 262,144 colors (6 bits each of red, green, blue). I think you are referring to the standard VGA palette.
And taking down a service isn't disruptive? It's not too bad for usually-stateless and quick services like http, but restarting a database can take a while and really hose performance since it flushes the db's internal caches.
I at the time those numbers were calculated, the software development process was very different from today. It was harder to distribute software, harder to deploy updates, harder for developers to get information about errors in the field. Testing the next release was a lot more critical because if a bug did exist it might not be possible to fix for several months until the next release could be sent out via floppy or mag tape to each customer.
Today most people download their software throught the Internet, and can get patches just as fast, even automatically as they are posted. Tools like Windows Error Reporting, Quality Feedback Agent, and BugToaster make it easier for detect and prioritize bugs based on their frequency of occurrence in the field.
So with all those changes, it's still 15 times more expensive to fix a bug after release? Does that take into account the time value of money, the value of early user feedback, or lost opportunity costs?
There is a big difference, at least in the USA.
In most cases you have to use the phones that are supplied through the carrier. The carrier will determine what features go into the phones and what the price points will be. They will use their buying power as a lever against equipment mfgs and suppliers of the imbedded software. What the carrier asks for is not necessarily what the user wants, but to the equipment mfg the carrier IS the customer.
Today's PDA market is driven by users, or at least driven by IT departments. You can choose whatever you want with no strings attached (like multi-year phone contracts with termination fees).
I am going through the process of getting a new phone and it is horrible. The carrier I want doesn't have the equipment I like--you know, phones with PDA and camera functionality. The carriers that do don't have the right plans or coverage for my area.
>> America got to the wooden model stage at a cost of $400million
Yep, too bad they couldn't find a "software engineering" manager back then. I can just see him saying, "ditch the planning and design, start riveting some sheet metal! Prove to me that it won't work and THEN we'll fix it!"
What makes them think that they would somehow be responsible if they were to do something simple and straightforward like a discussion forum? The high court has already ruled on several of these kind of cases and free speech won. For example, they struck down the CDA and they also said that Yahoo didn't have to rat out an anonymous Yahoo Groups poster.
Why use an obscure technology? That will have more of a chilling effect on active participation than any other factor.
When the infection rate of SoBig-style spamming worms is into the millions, having a limit of 1000 emails isn't much of an impediment to a spammer. There is a limitless supply of clueless users who can be fooled into running them.
If you try to force Grandma into paying the $10, she will just get the AARP to lobby for a law that protects people from paying in cases of "fraud". (For a template, see the rules on credit card purchases.) The ISPs will raise the rates from 1 cent to 2 or 3 or 4 cents to cover the money lost through fraud.
In other words, only clueful people will end up paying for email, and they will pay a lot to cover the mistakes of the clueless.
Why IS everybody laughing at him? Doesn't it make sense that Microsoft would want to build up a big patent portfolio that they could use to play ball with companies that try to sue them? IBM has cross licensed their patents for years.
Microsoft holds a lot of patents that it hasn't yet tried to enforce, for example their patent on using Bayesian statistics to filter email.
The big deal is that it's at the wrong conceptual level. The domain lookup for a non-existent domain should return "domain not found" and not refer the user to an IP that does not represent that domain. (I believe that could be called "misrepresentation".)
A similar mistake is made by sites that do not return 404 errors when a page is not found on the site, but instead return 200 and some sort of "was this what you were looking for?" page. Instead I would prefer a 404 page with that content.
Unfortunately, IE is broken and will display that worthless and uninformative "page cannot be displayed" message on a 404 unless the content returned is larger than 1024 bytes. To add insult to injury, IE refers to this as "friendly error messages"!
i can never find a good selection of Carol King or Arthra Franklin songs
That's because Kazaa doesn't have a filter that will find misspelled words. Carole King, Aretha Franklin. Go forth and plunder.
Does anyone have information about exactly what behavior the patent covers? If it really somehow covers plugin behavior it seems like there will be a lot of collateral damage including all the browsers, Macromedia, Java, ...
Actually, there are many companies that let you do something as crazy as Valenti's lawnmower story. You can generally return products to companies like Target, Land's End, or Nordstrom without argument. In the case of Nordstrom I once returned a sportcoat my son wore only once because he outgrew it within three months. I once had a Land's End phone rep encourage me to exchange a briefcase after a year because it was fraying in some areas and "it should have worn better than that."
If you think about it, the cost of good customer service to the recording industry would be almost nothing. Why don't they make an ironclad guarantee that anyone who presented at least 51% of a damaged CD or DVD--no matter how old--would be given a new copy? Wouldn't that help to reduce the need for backup copies?
I felt the same way about vi when I first used it in the late-1970s, but after using it I realized that its user interface was masterful in the way it took advantage of touch typing in the editing process. Yes, the "modal" interface can be a bit confusing but once you know it your fingers never forget, and they never have to leave the home keys.
The internals of Bill Joy's vi code, however, were butt-ugly at the time. The input loop was a giant switch statement with all kinds of flags and special cases. More than half the commands were implemented by pushing keystrokes back into the buffer, the D command pushed back d$ for example. This turned any command enhancements into a nightmare and there was always some nasty dependency you hadn't anticipated.
My guess is that as long as they offer similar capabilities (secure key storage, unique ID for the computer, etc.) then Windows will probably have an OS API to provide some sort of uniform access. Windows applications that want to take advantage of these features (Windows Media Player, software license enforcement schemes) will write to those APIs.
Linux will be unaffected unless someone wants to write similar APIs.
It's not like this is the end of PCs as we know them, unless they can get the world governments to mandate DRM for all computers.
I have a Windows 2000 SP3 Server with MS SQL Server that automatically downloads and installs the patches via Windows Update, and reboots automatically between 3am and 4am on Monday if a patch requires a reboot. This system has been running continuously since SP3 was released last August and I've never had a problem with any bad patches.
Even though SP4 is now out, the automatic updates process doesn't do SP upgrades automatically. Device drivers aren't installed either. Only the critical security fixes are applied this way, which is probably the exact behavior most people want.
Apple controls both the hardware and software platform. If they claimed that the software was fully functional on some particular Apple hardware and it isn't, then they are guilty of false advertising. They can either fix the hardware, fix the software, or offer some other compensation to consumers.
I wonder what percentage of Linux crashes are due to Linux code?