The spam problems of email are causing people to migrate to trusted systems.
As I stood at a kiosk at a trade show this week, and waded through my spam-filled email on a few services (work email, hotmail, and gmail), the young woman at the kiosk next to me accessed her myspace and facebook accounts and responded to friends only.
If you think myspace users don't get spam through myspace, you
apparently haven't ever used myspace. And if you think myspace
handles the spam that does exist well, you really have not used myspace much. For
one thing, when an account is marked as a spammer and then deleted,
messages in the recipient's inbox from that account get marked as
messages from spammers but don't disappear from the inbox. Because
the people who implemented myspace are absolute geniuses.
He wrote a simple problem on the board and told the students he wanted them to work on it for the next class. The question he got right away was, "Is this graded".
One of the best teachers I ever had was a calculus teacher. Someone in the
class asked him if an upcoming test would be just over the material since
the last test or it if would cover stuff before that as well. So the
teacher picks up the book and says basically, "See this section? This is
the section we just covered. You should know that stuff if you want to do
well on the test. Also, the stuff we covered recently builds on everything
else before that, so if you want to do well on the test, you should also
know
the stuff in chapters 1 through 10 as well. And most of you in the room took trigonometry
before calculus, at least I hope you did, and you should know that for the
test as well, if you want to get a good grade. Also, being strong in algebra
would be a very good idea, as would being strong in basic arithmetic. In
fact, pretty much any math class you took before this you should remember.
And it would help if you can read and understand the questions and write
your name at the top of the piece of paper."
Basically, the student was being an asshole and trying to get the teacher
to tell him in excruciating detail what material he did not need to
worry about, so that he could be maximally lazy, and the teacher refused
to place that stupid game. He gave
the student an answer that was slightly embarrassing for the student,
although he didn't say it in a harsh way, more of "here's the truth, and
if you don't like it, it's not my fault, because it's the truth" sort of
way.
He did this because he was an awesome teacher. The problem is, most
teachers are not like this. Most of them, let's
be honest, don't have the guts to give an answer like that. And in
doing so, they are letting down their students.
This figures.... doesn't the brain use about 30% of the blood oxygen.
Obviously, the Creator must've been an environmentalist, because he
thought to include into the design of the brain a power-saving state
called "sleep mode". I put my brain into sleep mode all the time.
In fact, I'm just about to do it here shortly.
Unfortunately, I sometimes get complaints from others that (just as
with a computer) it takes my brain an annoyingly long time
to come out of sleep mode. But hey, what can you do? I'm
conserving energy here, and don't think it's fair to get criticized
for that!
Thou shall not forbid interoperability between any two software configurations using the same code base.
That's hilarious! I was going to make the exact same comment. There is
only so far you can go in forcing people to be cooperative and to be good
citizens.
Also, the article mentions that most phone lines into and out of the country have been cut, the mobile network has been shut down, and so had the national ISP.
I hate the fact that the government over there has tried to cut
Internet access, but I love the fact that it was a powerful enough
tool for the people that they felt threatened by it.
Yes, and has for at least a decade. As has SGI's IRIX and probably a
lot of other operating systems. (Linux would be included in that list
based on the comments here.)
One day sun sneers at all things x86, the next day sun is releasing x86 solaris
Hrm? Sun has had quite a number of x86 products for quite a long time.
Solaris x86 was originally released in 1993 with Solaris 2.1, and it's
still available 14 years later. Granted, there have been a few release
of Solaris that haven't had x86 versions available, but that has mainly
been because, when forced to prioritize, Sun made it clear its primary
priority was SPARC.
Sun's willingness to use x86 processors, incidentally, goes back
before 1993. In fact, it goes all the way back to 1988 when Sun
released the Sun386i, a Sun system that ran SunOS 4.0.x and used
an Intel 80386 processor rather than a Motorola 680x0 processor.
(The SPARC had not been released yet, and the Sun 3 systems
available at the time were using Motorola 68k processors.)
Basically, while Sun is pretty committed to SPARC (and it would
be stupid of them not to support SPARC), they have never really
had a problem with x86 chips.
t seems like they'll pick option #2 here, and then either charge legacy users a fee to get a box, or just jack up everyones' rate by $5.
Don't a lot of cable subscribers already have a box that lets their
analog TV set gets digital cable signals? I know I do, and I only got it
because it was part of a package deal that was actually cheaper than not
getting it (considering that I also have internet service through the
cable company).
And then there's the fact that the cable industry's main association is happy about this. What's up with that!?
They're happy about it because a ton of people in the world view things
in terms of what it costs per month. A lot of people would much rather
pay $30 or $40 for cable every month for 5 years than spend $600 and get
a decent HDTV set. And as far as I'm concerned, this is a perfectly
fair deal. The FCC wants to clean up and consolidate the spectrum (and
they should, because UHF is way under-utilized), cable companies want
more customers, and a few people out there prefer to get cable rather
than (gasp) buying a whole new TV set.
Everyone is always old enough in his own mind. When I was 15, I was definitly old enough and had enough experience. Or so I thought. I turned 21 and saw what a moron I was at 15.
There's an old quote attributed to Mark Twain that says this:
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
A RAID array of Flash drives? You mean like this? You'll probably want to skip about 2 minutes and 10 seconds into the video to see the interesting part.
I wrote apps for Palm OS for a little over 3 years, and
that Engadget article was right on the money.
That Palm responded at all was a positive thing, but
that may be the only positive thing they do about it.
Their response has a hint of phoniness to it, as if they had
never thought of any of the ideas listed but answered
with "uh yeah, of course we're working on that". If their
behavior over the last few years is any indication, they'll
probably end up releasing a new device that addresses
exactly none of the points. I only say this because
of the long string of broken promises and lame excuses from
them over the last few years. But I dunno, maybe
they have hit rock bottom and they are ready to start
climbing up again and will actually do something.
I'd love to see it, because honestly there isn't a really
great mobile device out there, and given how much hardware
has advanced, there totally could be.
At any rate, as a former developer for Palm OS, it'll take
a lot to get me interested again. Even if they were to
release a product that is absolutely smashing and kick-ass
from both a technical and user experience point of view, many of the
small shops that were doing apps for Palm OS have seen a
BIG drop in revenues, and I don't think it's a very good
financial gamble to develop for some new device. I'd have to take a
big pay cut and in return for it I'd get a huge amount of
risk that I'd be spending a bunch of effort on a platform
that will go nowhere. Not very enticing.
The (perfect) octave, fourth and fifth are natural harmonics. So natural, infact, that if you silently hold down a G and then strike the C an octave and a half below the G will start to audibly resonate (even though on the piano the G is slightly out of tune compared to the C)
Or to put it in terms that are more mathematical, we have a twelve-tone
system because of the value of the number 2^(7/12).
Put that expression into your
calculator and evaluate it, and you'll get 1.498307. Notice that this is very
close to being equal to 1.5? That's important.
Now, because of physics, objects that oscillate at some frequency N will
also be stable and oscillate at 2*N, 3*N, 4*N, and so on. These additional
frequencies are called "harmonics".
So if I pluck a string tuned to X Hz and another string tuned to Y Hz,
I will get frequencies at X, 2*X, 3*X, and so on, and I will also get
frequencies at Y, 2*Y, 3*Y, and so on. And if
Y = X * 2^(7/12), something interesting happens: because 2^(7/12)
is approximately equal to
1.5, 2*Y is approximately equal to 3*X. That
means the first harmonic of the higher note and the second harmonic of the
lower note will line up. Other harmonics will line up as well. This makes
a sound that is pleasing to the ear when both are played together. (Notice
the similarity of the terms "harmonic" and "harmony"?)
Musical terminology gives a name to the interval between any two notes
whose frequencies differ by a factor of 2^(7/12). It calls that a "perfect
fifth". Musicians will notice that a perfect fifth equates to a change of
7 half steps. Moving up 1 half step equates to multiplying the frequency
by 2^(1/12). A perfect fifth is 7 half steps and thus a ratio of 2^(7/12).
On a side note, I believe the reason people consider the equal temperament
tuning non-ideal is that 2^(7/12) does not exactly equal 1.5. This means
the harmonics line up pretty well (almost within 0.1%), but not exactly.
2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access.
This is a nice idea, but a researcher is unlikely to make this choice
even if they want to promote open access. The reason is, a
big factor in determining a researcher's career opportunities is the level
of prestige of the journals that they can get
their papers published in. A researcher's output is research, and
the tangible and visible sign of that is publications, so it is the
only reflection of their work that many people see.
Prestige is so important that there is a
formal system to denote the prestige of a journal: they are each
assigned an Impact
Factor. So, 99% of the time, a researcher will submit their paper to
the most prestigious journal they think will accept it, and any other
concern is secondary.
There do exist open-access journals, but at present these tend to be
towards the lower end of the prestige scale. Basically, journals
that have a high impact factor do not have any need to offer open access
and can easily get away with charging for access. Journals with a lower
impact factor are interested in providing open access as a way to create
interest in their journal. So although some journals have a motivation
to provide open access, most researchers are motivated to publish in
journals with high prestige, and as a consequence, they tend to prefer
journals which as a side effect happen to not be open access.
This is not to say that the technique wouldn't be useful for hunting down GPL violations. But a positive is not difinitive by itself.
Indeed. The title of this slashdot article would be pretty much dead
on if the words "and Prove" were taken out of "New Method to Detect and
Prove GPL Violations".
You aren't building automobiles or painting teapots. You are a support function and not a line function.
That is the best answer I've seen so far in this discussion. It mostly
clearly illustrates that the question is framed wrong.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to monitor and even quantify the
value that an employee brings to the organization, but contrasting
support function vs. line function perfectly illustrates the key point
here: production is not the only kind of value that an employee
can add to an organization.
I wonder if a way of communicating this might be to make an analogy to
something a financial person can relate to. You can use money to make
several different types of purchases: you can buy durable goods, you
can buy consumables, and you can buy more abstract things like insurance
or legal advice. Don't take the analogy too literally, but system
administration is like insurance or legal advice in that the value you
provide is stuff like protection, security, planning, design, and order.
I think if this were me, I would start by providing an outline of the
responsibilities of the system administrator and the value that a
system admin provides to the organization. This does include certain
deliverables (like physical installation of hardware in machine rooms,
installation of software, working and configured systems, documentation,
answers to technical questions, training presentations, and code for
scripts written to automate tasks), but it also includes a lot of
work that doesn't have a deliverable (like diagnosing a problem and
tracking down a patch from a vendor, or even convincing a vendor to
supply a patch). It might be helpful to break
the job down into types and subtypes of work being done and very rough
estimates of the proportion of time being spent at each.
So maybe the best plan is to educate the higher-ups about what the
job really entails. It's quite possible they don't understand much
about it, and some increased visibility into what is really going
on could help with their understanding and thus their comfort level
with paying the salaries of the people who do it.
Also, there are deliverables that can be quantified. Creating user
accounts, for example, has to be done repeatedly, and it takes about
the same amount of time every time it happens. Auto mechanics deal
with a similar situation and the industry has developed a list of
tasks (such as replacing a fuel pump or brake pads) and standard
times required to accomplish them. The computer world changes so
quickly it might be hard to accomplish that, especially without
industry support, but it seems possible to quantify some of what
a system administrator does, because some of it is standard stuff.
There are two kinds of respect at play here: respect for their abilities, and respect for the intentions.
I would argue that they are deserving of some of the first kind of
respect. Not necessarily respect for their technical abilities in
most areas (although they've done a few worthwhile technical things),
but their overall ability to sell stuff and make a product successful.
Whether their methods are good or not, there have been lots of other
companies with big monopolies who sat on their ass and lost it.
Microsoft is tenacious and doesn't seem to be doing that. And
they strategize fairly well (except when they don't).
Then the second kind of respect, I think most of us agree, is
not something Microsoft deserves. They aren't trying to be good
citizens, and they aren't even trying to make a particularly
product from a technical (or even ergonomic) point of view.
When it comes to designing things that work, Microsoft is very
much about doing the minimum. This is especially annoying given
their position as one of a few industry leaders (in the sense
that people follow them, not that they lead well).
So anyway, the disagreement about whether Microsoft deserves
respect might be a problem with terminology. I think most
people agree that Microsoft deserves one kind of respect but
not so much with the other kind.
we need clean, non-polluting power that doesn't ultimately come from politically volatile parts of the world.
I don't know if that will ever happen. With most sources of energy,
the fuel is unevenly spread around the globe. And being some small
country that has a huge reserve of some kind of fuel will tend to
mess your country up in the same way that people who inherit a lot
of money (and never have to work a day in their lives) get messed up.
Trade doesn't always have to create political instability, but it
certainly doesn't help when you have a country that controls some
resource that society must have in order to keep functioning.
If someone must have something, they're willing to take it.
And conversely if you have something that someone else needs, you
tend to behave however you damn well please.
Further, one big source of resistance to adoption of their chips is the concern for what happens if Sun abandons the line, stops developing it, goes belly-up, or closes up again.
Closes up again? The SPARC architecture is and pretty much always has been an open
standard. Anyone can implement it, and several other companies have, including TI,
Cypress Semiconductor, and Fujitsu. The architecture is controlled by a separate
organization, which is a non-profit: SPARC
International.
Now this only applies to the architecture, not the design of the chips that
implement the architecture. Nevertheless, if your concern is to be able to
run SPARC code, you don't need to rely on Sun to do that.
Sun is, always has been, and always will be an also-ran.
You can make a reasonable argument that Sun is washed up now. But always has been?
Do I need to remind you that when the SPARC architecture came out in about 1990, it beat
the snot out of everything else available? Do I need to remind you what type of machines
people used to route TCP/IP traffic before Cisco entered the game? What about the
huge market share that Sun held with Unix when SunOS 4.1.3 was the current version?
Sure, there have
usually been some alternatives (like IBM, and at various points HP, DEC, and SGI, and
now regular old x86), but at various points, Sun hardware and software have been the
clear market leaders because they were clearly better.
However, there is no command similar to Ctrl+Alt+F1 that will give you a text terminal should your graphical environment become inaccessible.
While I am not a fan of Windows, and while that statement is technically true, it's not really the whole story. There is a reason that you have to hit ctrl-alt-del to login
on current versions of Windows: it is the only key combination that generates a special
hardware interrupt. A regular application cannot intercept this interrupt. This makes
it much harder to install a program that mimics the login screen and collects passwords.
For the same reason that it is good for a login screen, ctrl-alt-del is useful for bringing
up the Windows Security window (the one where you can launch the task manager, etc.) after
you've logged in. Namely, there is no way that an application can stop it, unless the
application modifies the Windows kernel.
So no, Windows does not have a way to fall back to a text console. But it does have a
way to fall back to a graphical console with a few limited abilities to control the
system from there. And those abilities should be sufficient for killing this popup
thing.
That's pretty much what the Java signing process does for you already although it's not very easy to use. The code requests a number of restricted features and you get to choose whether to allow or deny the code.
This is a good feature, but this sort of behavior should not be restricted to signed
applets. Instead, this privilege should be denied by default for all applets,
regardless of whether they are signed or unsigned.
I suspect that this is a moot point anyway, though, since what's apparently
happened here is that the design is correct but there is simply a bug in the
implementation that allows this behavior. And the bug would be that signed
applets get privileges in addition to the set that unsigned ones get, but there
is a privilege included in the base set of privileges that shouldn't be included.
Hopefully, any civilization advanced enough to not blow itself to pieces before developing interstellar transport capability would be reasonably benign -- but can we afford the risk?
Now I'm imagining this future where the human race develops
faster-than-life transport, then a decade or two later, there's a "great radio
wave cleanup" project, where zillions of ships travel out a bit past the edge of the ever-expanding sphere of radio waves emanating from Earth
and start transmitting a complex signal that cancels them out, so that
they don't actually get anywhere where some nasties would see them.
We could have ex post facto radio silence.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think myspace users don't get spam through myspace, you apparently haven't ever used myspace. And if you think myspace handles the spam that does exist well, you really have not used myspace much. For one thing, when an account is marked as a spammer and then deleted, messages in the recipient's inbox from that account get marked as messages from spammers but don't disappear from the inbox. Because the people who implemented myspace are absolute geniuses.
One of the best teachers I ever had was a calculus teacher. Someone in the class asked him if an upcoming test would be just over the material since the last test or it if would cover stuff before that as well. So the teacher picks up the book and says basically, "See this section? This is the section we just covered. You should know that stuff if you want to do well on the test. Also, the stuff we covered recently builds on everything else before that, so if you want to do well on the test, you should also know the stuff in chapters 1 through 10 as well. And most of you in the room took trigonometry before calculus, at least I hope you did, and you should know that for the test as well, if you want to get a good grade. Also, being strong in algebra would be a very good idea, as would being strong in basic arithmetic. In fact, pretty much any math class you took before this you should remember. And it would help if you can read and understand the questions and write your name at the top of the piece of paper."
Basically, the student was being an asshole and trying to get the teacher to tell him in excruciating detail what material he did not need to worry about, so that he could be maximally lazy, and the teacher refused to place that stupid game. He gave the student an answer that was slightly embarrassing for the student, although he didn't say it in a harsh way, more of "here's the truth, and if you don't like it, it's not my fault, because it's the truth" sort of way.
He did this because he was an awesome teacher. The problem is, most teachers are not like this. Most of them, let's be honest, don't have the guts to give an answer like that. And in doing so, they are letting down their students.
Obviously, the Creator must've been an environmentalist, because he thought to include into the design of the brain a power-saving state called "sleep mode". I put my brain into sleep mode all the time. In fact, I'm just about to do it here shortly.
Unfortunately, I sometimes get complaints from others that (just as with a computer) it takes my brain an annoyingly long time to come out of sleep mode. But hey, what can you do? I'm conserving energy here, and don't think it's fair to get criticized for that!
That's hilarious! I was going to make the exact same comment. There is only so far you can go in forcing people to be cooperative and to be good citizens.
Ah. Remember that old phrase that goes, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."? I guess now we get to see if that's really true. Hopefully it is.
I hate the fact that the government over there has tried to cut Internet access, but I love the fact that it was a powerful enough tool for the people that they felt threatened by it.
Yes, and has for at least a decade. As has SGI's IRIX and probably a lot of other operating systems. (Linux would be included in that list based on the comments here.)
I think the proper term might be "wishful thinking".
I didn't even know Apple had a Directory Access Protocol implementation that they were selling. That's... so... uh... X.500 of them.
Hrm? Sun has had quite a number of x86 products for quite a long time. Solaris x86 was originally released in 1993 with Solaris 2.1, and it's still available 14 years later. Granted, there have been a few release of Solaris that haven't had x86 versions available, but that has mainly been because, when forced to prioritize, Sun made it clear its primary priority was SPARC.
Sun's willingness to use x86 processors, incidentally, goes back before 1993. In fact, it goes all the way back to 1988 when Sun released the Sun386i, a Sun system that ran SunOS 4.0.x and used an Intel 80386 processor rather than a Motorola 680x0 processor. (The SPARC had not been released yet, and the Sun 3 systems available at the time were using Motorola 68k processors.)
Basically, while Sun is pretty committed to SPARC (and it would be stupid of them not to support SPARC), they have never really had a problem with x86 chips.
Don't a lot of cable subscribers already have a box that lets their analog TV set gets digital cable signals? I know I do, and I only got it because it was part of a package deal that was actually cheaper than not getting it (considering that I also have internet service through the cable company).
They're happy about it because a ton of people in the world view things in terms of what it costs per month. A lot of people would much rather pay $30 or $40 for cable every month for 5 years than spend $600 and get a decent HDTV set. And as far as I'm concerned, this is a perfectly fair deal. The FCC wants to clean up and consolidate the spectrum (and they should, because UHF is way under-utilized), cable companies want more customers, and a few people out there prefer to get cable rather than (gasp) buying a whole new TV set.
There's an old quote attributed to Mark Twain that says this:
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
A RAID array of Flash drives? You mean like this? You'll probably want to skip about 2 minutes and 10 seconds into the video to see the interesting part.
I wrote apps for Palm OS for a little over 3 years, and that Engadget article was right on the money. That Palm responded at all was a positive thing, but that may be the only positive thing they do about it. Their response has a hint of phoniness to it, as if they had never thought of any of the ideas listed but answered with "uh yeah, of course we're working on that". If their behavior over the last few years is any indication, they'll probably end up releasing a new device that addresses exactly none of the points. I only say this because of the long string of broken promises and lame excuses from them over the last few years. But I dunno, maybe they have hit rock bottom and they are ready to start climbing up again and will actually do something. I'd love to see it, because honestly there isn't a really great mobile device out there, and given how much hardware has advanced, there totally could be.
At any rate, as a former developer for Palm OS, it'll take a lot to get me interested again. Even if they were to release a product that is absolutely smashing and kick-ass from both a technical and user experience point of view, many of the small shops that were doing apps for Palm OS have seen a BIG drop in revenues, and I don't think it's a very good financial gamble to develop for some new device. I'd have to take a big pay cut and in return for it I'd get a huge amount of risk that I'd be spending a bunch of effort on a platform that will go nowhere. Not very enticing.
Or to put it in terms that are more mathematical, we have a twelve-tone system because of the value of the number 2^(7/12).
Put that expression into your calculator and evaluate it, and you'll get 1.498307. Notice that this is very close to being equal to 1.5? That's important.
Now, because of physics, objects that oscillate at some frequency N will also be stable and oscillate at 2*N, 3*N, 4*N, and so on. These additional frequencies are called "harmonics". So if I pluck a string tuned to X Hz and another string tuned to Y Hz, I will get frequencies at X, 2*X, 3*X, and so on, and I will also get frequencies at Y, 2*Y, 3*Y, and so on. And if Y = X * 2^(7/12), something interesting happens: because 2^(7/12) is approximately equal to 1.5, 2*Y is approximately equal to 3*X. That means the first harmonic of the higher note and the second harmonic of the lower note will line up. Other harmonics will line up as well. This makes a sound that is pleasing to the ear when both are played together. (Notice the similarity of the terms "harmonic" and "harmony"?)
Musical terminology gives a name to the interval between any two notes whose frequencies differ by a factor of 2^(7/12). It calls that a "perfect fifth". Musicians will notice that a perfect fifth equates to a change of 7 half steps. Moving up 1 half step equates to multiplying the frequency by 2^(1/12). A perfect fifth is 7 half steps and thus a ratio of 2^(7/12).
On a side note, I believe the reason people consider the equal temperament tuning non-ideal is that 2^(7/12) does not exactly equal 1.5. This means the harmonics line up pretty well (almost within 0.1%), but not exactly.
This is a nice idea, but a researcher is unlikely to make this choice even if they want to promote open access. The reason is, a big factor in determining a researcher's career opportunities is the level of prestige of the journals that they can get their papers published in. A researcher's output is research, and the tangible and visible sign of that is publications, so it is the only reflection of their work that many people see. Prestige is so important that there is a formal system to denote the prestige of a journal: they are each assigned an Impact Factor. So, 99% of the time, a researcher will submit their paper to the most prestigious journal they think will accept it, and any other concern is secondary.
There do exist open-access journals, but at present these tend to be towards the lower end of the prestige scale. Basically, journals that have a high impact factor do not have any need to offer open access and can easily get away with charging for access. Journals with a lower impact factor are interested in providing open access as a way to create interest in their journal. So although some journals have a motivation to provide open access, most researchers are motivated to publish in journals with high prestige, and as a consequence, they tend to prefer journals which as a side effect happen to not be open access.
Indeed. The title of this slashdot article would be pretty much dead on if the words "and Prove" were taken out of "New Method to Detect and Prove GPL Violations".
That is the best answer I've seen so far in this discussion. It mostly clearly illustrates that the question is framed wrong.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to monitor and even quantify the value that an employee brings to the organization, but contrasting support function vs. line function perfectly illustrates the key point here: production is not the only kind of value that an employee can add to an organization.
I wonder if a way of communicating this might be to make an analogy to something a financial person can relate to. You can use money to make several different types of purchases: you can buy durable goods, you can buy consumables, and you can buy more abstract things like insurance or legal advice. Don't take the analogy too literally, but system administration is like insurance or legal advice in that the value you provide is stuff like protection, security, planning, design, and order.
I think if this were me, I would start by providing an outline of the responsibilities of the system administrator and the value that a system admin provides to the organization. This does include certain deliverables (like physical installation of hardware in machine rooms, installation of software, working and configured systems, documentation, answers to technical questions, training presentations, and code for scripts written to automate tasks), but it also includes a lot of work that doesn't have a deliverable (like diagnosing a problem and tracking down a patch from a vendor, or even convincing a vendor to supply a patch). It might be helpful to break the job down into types and subtypes of work being done and very rough estimates of the proportion of time being spent at each.
So maybe the best plan is to educate the higher-ups about what the job really entails. It's quite possible they don't understand much about it, and some increased visibility into what is really going on could help with their understanding and thus their comfort level with paying the salaries of the people who do it.
Also, there are deliverables that can be quantified. Creating user accounts, for example, has to be done repeatedly, and it takes about the same amount of time every time it happens. Auto mechanics deal with a similar situation and the industry has developed a list of tasks (such as replacing a fuel pump or brake pads) and standard times required to accomplish them. The computer world changes so quickly it might be hard to accomplish that, especially without industry support, but it seems possible to quantify some of what a system administrator does, because some of it is standard stuff.
There are two kinds of respect at play here: respect for their abilities, and respect for the intentions.
I would argue that they are deserving of some of the first kind of respect. Not necessarily respect for their technical abilities in most areas (although they've done a few worthwhile technical things), but their overall ability to sell stuff and make a product successful. Whether their methods are good or not, there have been lots of other companies with big monopolies who sat on their ass and lost it. Microsoft is tenacious and doesn't seem to be doing that. And they strategize fairly well (except when they don't).
Then the second kind of respect, I think most of us agree, is not something Microsoft deserves. They aren't trying to be good citizens, and they aren't even trying to make a particularly product from a technical (or even ergonomic) point of view. When it comes to designing things that work, Microsoft is very much about doing the minimum. This is especially annoying given their position as one of a few industry leaders (in the sense that people follow them, not that they lead well).
So anyway, the disagreement about whether Microsoft deserves respect might be a problem with terminology. I think most people agree that Microsoft deserves one kind of respect but not so much with the other kind.
I don't know if that will ever happen. With most sources of energy, the fuel is unevenly spread around the globe. And being some small country that has a huge reserve of some kind of fuel will tend to mess your country up in the same way that people who inherit a lot of money (and never have to work a day in their lives) get messed up.
Trade doesn't always have to create political instability, but it certainly doesn't help when you have a country that controls some resource that society must have in order to keep functioning. If someone must have something, they're willing to take it. And conversely if you have something that someone else needs, you tend to behave however you damn well please.
Closes up again? The SPARC architecture is and pretty much always has been an open standard. Anyone can implement it, and several other companies have, including TI, Cypress Semiconductor, and Fujitsu. The architecture is controlled by a separate organization, which is a non-profit: SPARC International.
Now this only applies to the architecture, not the design of the chips that implement the architecture. Nevertheless, if your concern is to be able to run SPARC code, you don't need to rely on Sun to do that.
You can make a reasonable argument that Sun is washed up now. But always has been? Do I need to remind you that when the SPARC architecture came out in about 1990, it beat the snot out of everything else available? Do I need to remind you what type of machines people used to route TCP/IP traffic before Cisco entered the game? What about the huge market share that Sun held with Unix when SunOS 4.1.3 was the current version? Sure, there have usually been some alternatives (like IBM, and at various points HP, DEC, and SGI, and now regular old x86), but at various points, Sun hardware and software have been the clear market leaders because they were clearly better.
While I am not a fan of Windows, and while that statement is technically true, it's not really the whole story. There is a reason that you have to hit ctrl-alt-del to login on current versions of Windows: it is the only key combination that generates a special hardware interrupt. A regular application cannot intercept this interrupt. This makes it much harder to install a program that mimics the login screen and collects passwords.
For the same reason that it is good for a login screen, ctrl-alt-del is useful for bringing up the Windows Security window (the one where you can launch the task manager, etc.) after you've logged in. Namely, there is no way that an application can stop it, unless the application modifies the Windows kernel.
So no, Windows does not have a way to fall back to a text console. But it does have a way to fall back to a graphical console with a few limited abilities to control the system from there. And those abilities should be sufficient for killing this popup thing.
This is a good feature, but this sort of behavior should not be restricted to signed applets. Instead, this privilege should be denied by default for all applets, regardless of whether they are signed or unsigned.
I suspect that this is a moot point anyway, though, since what's apparently happened here is that the design is correct but there is simply a bug in the implementation that allows this behavior. And the bug would be that signed applets get privileges in addition to the set that unsigned ones get, but there is a privilege included in the base set of privileges that shouldn't be included.
Argh. Or faster-than-light transport...
Now I'm imagining this future where the human race develops faster-than-life transport, then a decade or two later, there's a "great radio wave cleanup" project, where zillions of ships travel out a bit past the edge of the ever-expanding sphere of radio waves emanating from Earth and start transmitting a complex signal that cancels them out, so that they don't actually get anywhere where some nasties would see them. We could have ex post facto radio silence.