Sometimes you just have to take leadership and make a choice. It may not be the perfect choice, but it's a final decision that will get things rolling forward. I already know there will be a billion posts arguing why another distribution is better than another, but the point is moot. Ubuntu is a great distro. There are other distros out there that are great too. Distrowatch ranks it at #1 in popularity. Also, the choice of Ubuntu will make many in the community happy as Ubuntu isn't controversial with its licensing. A high quality, popular, FOSS distro. They could have made other choices, but I think Ubuntu will make the most amount of people happy, is an extremely safe decision, and they only have to support a single distro.
The whole privacy issue is dumb. Google will have just as much info about you before and after the purchase. i.e. They know everything about your life. Trying to block an acquisition will not change this. I wouldn't be surprised to find out later some of these groups are actually funded by other media companies that wanted to purchase doubleclick.
All of these complaints are stupid anyway because none of them have the public's interest in mind. Do you really think Microsoft feels the purchase will be against the public's interest? Fuck no. They are mad Google beat them to the punch and blocked them. Microsoft runs to mommy (the government) every time they feel they don't have an unfair advantage. The privacy groups don't like Google's data mining projects as a whole and want to stifle the company. Blocking this purchase would do just that. Like I said, all these are greedy personal interests and there's no one speaking up for the public interest right now, which may or may not be allowing this to go through. But we'll never know with all this FUD flying around.
I was thinking the other day... in the past 2 years google has bought A LOT of companies, technologies, and created new ones. I thought there's no way they could be a profitable company right now. Well I checked google's Q1 profits and they are actually up 68% to 1 billion a quarter. I know there will be a lot of posts that google is becoming a one hit wonder. Perhaps... but I think if they've got their financials in such good order they've really separated themselves from the dot bomb's of the 2000's. Just a thought...
Yes, the secret is out. High quality Linux distributions aren't that much different from each other. I think Ubuntu has come to the forefront because they've got the right advertising, were in the right place at the right time, have a very dedicated community which wants Ubuntu in the most hands, and because it still is a pretty good distribution. That's not to minimize all the hard work that has gone into Ubuntu, but everyone is working hard. Ubuntu just did a lot of non-technical things right as well combined with a little luck.
Hearing about TLDP is like a trip down memory lane. I got into Linux in the late 90's and it was pretty thriving back then. While the information I got from there was fantastic, I think we have better quality information available today. Though it's not in any single source, Google is so good at finding relevant information I don't think central information sources are needed as much. There's added benefits of duplicate information as sometimes it's not explained clearly from one source. TLDP was good for its day and is where I got a huge bulk of my Linux education, however I just don't think it's needed anymore.
Where does it ever say it will cost more? If it needs real time graphics intensiveness there's always java or flash. If it's real time there's cross platform ajax. If it's a run of the mill site there's always javascript and server side code. If it's a really boring site there's always standard html. I don't see any reason other than incompetence a website would be IE only these days....and that's what it really comes down to. If you can't make a cross platform website with minimal of effort, you probably don't know what you are doing. It's really not hard, you just have to know what you're doing. Obviously it can be done if millions of people are doing it and large organizations like google are doing it with minimal effort. I've met the sort of programmers that make IE only sites. Most of them don't know what they are doing and it never even occurred to them to even try it in another browser. I know a few "web developers" that have never even used Firefox, Safari, or Opera (I've met some that have never heard of Safari or Opera). That's the same type of programmer who it never even occurred to them someone might try to insert javascript into a text field...
From a business prospective there is zero reason to plan any moves to Vista in the near future. What gains will they get? NONE. What problems will they have? They can start with hardware and software incompatibilities and go from there. Vista offers nothing compelling and could be considered a minor upgrade with major problems. Home users could make a case I suppose, but businesses have none right now.
The reason people don't switch is because of misinformation not lack of features. Other products can fill the gaps, but they are so sure other products aren't adequate they will continue to spread misinformation. I pointed this out in another post (that superior alternatives exist) and was modded as flamebait... so I guess there's a crowd of people out there that really don't want people to know there are viable/superior alternatives to exchange.
Zimbra alone is enough to completely replace exchange and more. Not only is it OSS but there is a company backing it from which you can purchase enterprise support. I've personally used it for a medium sized business and it easily replaces exchange. It also has many many features exchange could never dream of. Check out their demo site... you will be impressed.
Off the top of my head there's Zimbra, Citadel, the dozens of groupware projects on freshmeat, and Google's offerings (though not OSS, free and very good). And that's just off the top of my head...
This has been the attitude in IT for years, however, what advantage do you have by hosting it in house? Most advantages I hear these days are perceived advantages such as data integrity and security that aren't fully true. Most small and medium sized businesses security and data integrity are on a scale that could never compete with Google. Google probably has a given email stored at dozens of locations around the world and can be accessed at any time with any number of simultaneous disasters occurring. In an SMB environment the server can crash because someone tripped over the cord. It's much more fragile and to get to the level of redundancy Google can provide would cost you more than you could ever afford.
How long will it be before open-source software can provide a complete, accessible office suite for a fraction of the cost that Microsoft current impose?
It already can and has been able to for years. Its mostly been stubborn users and FUD fed to decision makers that has hindered its adoption. What's happening now is all these applications are becoming so vastly superior to MS's offerings you almost look foolish still using it. Firefox 2 is years ahead of IE7. Firefox 3 will be light years ahead. Google's offerings are also light years ahead. OpenOffice as a word processor is about on par with MS Office, however the database functionality and programming language integration is leaps and bounds ahead of anything MS has.
There are just so many products out there vastly superior to MS offerings it's disappointing this FUD still goes on.
I keep seeing comments about doubleclick being blocked. So? You account for such a small portion of the userbase why would google care? They didn't buy doubleclick for the domain or technology anyway, they bought it for the customers. Most likely they'll convert all of their doubleclick accounts to google ads, which far fewer people block. They also bought it to be a cock block against other companies trying to get to the #1 position of internet advertising.
Banks want more complicated authentication. Consumers want simpler. Guess who's winning? The right answer isn't making consumers jump through a bunch of hoops to get into their account. The added complication just makes it easier for the human element to be fooled. If they made simple clean dedicated sites just for the online banking portion, I don't think this would be 1/10th the problem it is. For example, I can have to authenticate myself up to four times to get onto the BOA online banking site. All the while flash ads of their new products barrage my senses when all I want to know is if a check cleared or not. In that process I don't pay attention to site key because it's just one more thing getting in the way. In fact, even as a very educated computer user I pay no attention to their complicated process for the very fact it is overly complicated. If computer professionals don't pay attention what hope does the average user have?
In all reality the online banking world is getting worse than it is better, and their gut reaction to create more hurdles to authentication is just making the problem worse.
I know there are going to be hundreds of posts claiming Microsoft isn't dead and that they are still a very profitable company etc etc, but that's not what the article is about, so you might as well mod those posts down now. The idea is that Microsoft's throne as supreme monopoly that can do whatever they want and everyone will follow is over. I whole heartedly agree.
There was a time 5 years ago that if MS released a technology, now matter how bad, would become the de-facto standard for no other reason than MS released it. MS has yet to do anything new in about 2 years that has become the supreme technology just because they blessed it. Their game of catchup with Google has yielded nothing powerful. Their strategy has been mostly centered around Windows Live, which has yet to garner any real interest. All their Web 2.0 stuff is massively better than what they were releasing 5 years ago (their mapping software isn't half bad), but I've yet to interact with someone who's excited over it. I know a lot of web developers who get a boner over the Google maps API though. Even their desktop software hasn't yielded anything terribly popular. People will keep using Windows and Office, but be extremely slow to adopt any of their new technology.
I guess the real nail in the coffin is that there's no single company for MS to set their sights on. The entire web is surpassing them, not just Google. Google is giving important direction and acting sort of as a leader for the industry, but I see just as many interesting things coming from outside of Google as in. How can MS compete with that? They can keep trying to break IE as much as possible, but even there they are being forced by the market to become more standards compliant.
I don't think MS will just go away and they probably will be relegated to Windows and Office until those are slowly chipped at. The OS market will one day reach the maturity hardware has and there will be standards and most common software will be written in cross platform toolkits. It will happen so slowly that we'll step back and say "Remember Microsoft 15 years ago?" just as we are saying today "Remember Microsoft 5 years ago".
A couple of my friends work retail doing geeksquid/firedog type work and I would say customers were mislead. There are a certain number of machines that were sold as vista compatible that don't have vista drivers yet. They are fast enough to run vista, but in their current state won't fully function. I would say that is misleading. A significant number of machines they have to flat out turn away for the time being until they are confident they won't hose the customers machines. Also, it wasn't made clear that Vista would have a new feature model as previous versions only had Home and Professional. I think if you are going to change your model that drastically it should be made clear that is the case. Saying it is "Vista compatible" is misleading and should have been advertised "Vista Version X compatible". Even if the customer had no clue the new feature model at least they were told upfront what they were or weren't getting. Illegal? Maybe. Underhanded and misleading to the point it could win a civil suit? Most definitely.
That's what is scary. People making life changing decisions for you believe things with little/no scientific backing. That's why the country is the way it is. That's why we lost the edge we once had. There's a rebirth of celebrating ignorance and we are in the middle of it. Hell, we are basically as a culture in a dark age right now. Once knowledge is acquired it's like our culture as a whole has to check the bible to see if it's credible. Would you want people with the ability to kill you at any moment completely impermeable to reason?
Well, I think the idea was that the world has its priorities skewed. Statistically your child would have an insignificant risk if millions of children were playing with this toy. You should be more worried about your children getting common childhood disease that could kill them. Likewise, getting your personal information stolen can make your life hell. Would you be more worried about your child having a.00001% chance of choking on a toy, or a 5% chance of having your ATM card stolen? If you said the former, then you need a reality check.
10 people can die due to a serial killer over the period of two years while at the same time millions of people die due to heart disease. Which one will the media cover? It's human nature to be scared of dying due to an external force you have no control over (such as a serial killer). However, humans have completely irrational emotions and will try to justify to themselves why a completely irrational fear is rational.
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Sometimes you just have to take leadership and make a choice. It may not be the perfect choice, but it's a final decision that will get things rolling forward. I already know there will be a billion posts arguing why another distribution is better than another, but the point is moot. Ubuntu is a great distro. There are other distros out there that are great too. Distrowatch ranks it at #1 in popularity. Also, the choice of Ubuntu will make many in the community happy as Ubuntu isn't controversial with its licensing. A high quality, popular, FOSS distro. They could have made other choices, but I think Ubuntu will make the most amount of people happy, is an extremely safe decision, and they only have to support a single distro.
The whole privacy issue is dumb. Google will have just as much info about you before and after the purchase. i.e. They know everything about your life. Trying to block an acquisition will not change this. I wouldn't be surprised to find out later some of these groups are actually funded by other media companies that wanted to purchase doubleclick.
All of these complaints are stupid anyway because none of them have the public's interest in mind. Do you really think Microsoft feels the purchase will be against the public's interest? Fuck no. They are mad Google beat them to the punch and blocked them. Microsoft runs to mommy (the government) every time they feel they don't have an unfair advantage. The privacy groups don't like Google's data mining projects as a whole and want to stifle the company. Blocking this purchase would do just that. Like I said, all these are greedy personal interests and there's no one speaking up for the public interest right now, which may or may not be allowing this to go through. But we'll never know with all this FUD flying around.
When your other choices are Viacom, Clear Channel, and Microsoft, I think Google is still one of the good guys.
I was thinking the other day... in the past 2 years google has bought A LOT of companies, technologies, and created new ones. I thought there's no way they could be a profitable company right now. Well I checked google's Q1 profits and they are actually up 68% to 1 billion a quarter. I know there will be a lot of posts that google is becoming a one hit wonder. Perhaps... but I think if they've got their financials in such good order they've really separated themselves from the dot bomb's of the 2000's. Just a thought...
Yes, the secret is out. High quality Linux distributions aren't that much different from each other. I think Ubuntu has come to the forefront because they've got the right advertising, were in the right place at the right time, have a very dedicated community which wants Ubuntu in the most hands, and because it still is a pretty good distribution. That's not to minimize all the hard work that has gone into Ubuntu, but everyone is working hard. Ubuntu just did a lot of non-technical things right as well combined with a little luck.
Hearing about TLDP is like a trip down memory lane. I got into Linux in the late 90's and it was pretty thriving back then. While the information I got from there was fantastic, I think we have better quality information available today. Though it's not in any single source, Google is so good at finding relevant information I don't think central information sources are needed as much. There's added benefits of duplicate information as sometimes it's not explained clearly from one source. TLDP was good for its day and is where I got a huge bulk of my Linux education, however I just don't think it's needed anymore.
Where does it ever say it will cost more? If it needs real time graphics intensiveness there's always java or flash. If it's real time there's cross platform ajax. If it's a run of the mill site there's always javascript and server side code. If it's a really boring site there's always standard html. I don't see any reason other than incompetence a website would be IE only these days. ...and that's what it really comes down to. If you can't make a cross platform website with minimal of effort, you probably don't know what you are doing. It's really not hard, you just have to know what you're doing. Obviously it can be done if millions of people are doing it and large organizations like google are doing it with minimal effort. I've met the sort of programmers that make IE only sites. Most of them don't know what they are doing and it never even occurred to them to even try it in another browser. I know a few "web developers" that have never even used Firefox, Safari, or Opera (I've met some that have never heard of Safari or Opera). That's the same type of programmer who it never even occurred to them someone might try to insert javascript into a text field...
I give Google a week before they buy another technology to snuff silver surfer (or whatever it's called) out.
From a business prospective there is zero reason to plan any moves to Vista in the near future. What gains will they get? NONE. What problems will they have? They can start with hardware and software incompatibilities and go from there. Vista offers nothing compelling and could be considered a minor upgrade with major problems. Home users could make a case I suppose, but businesses have none right now.
The reason people don't switch is because of misinformation not lack of features. Other products can fill the gaps, but they are so sure other products aren't adequate they will continue to spread misinformation. I pointed this out in another post (that superior alternatives exist) and was modded as flamebait... so I guess there's a crowd of people out there that really don't want people to know there are viable/superior alternatives to exchange.
Zimbra alone is enough to completely replace exchange and more. Not only is it OSS but there is a company backing it from which you can purchase enterprise support. I've personally used it for a medium sized business and it easily replaces exchange. It also has many many features exchange could never dream of. Check out their demo site... you will be impressed.
Off the top of my head there's Zimbra, Citadel, the dozens of groupware projects on freshmeat, and Google's offerings (though not OSS, free and very good). And that's just off the top of my head...
This has been the attitude in IT for years, however, what advantage do you have by hosting it in house? Most advantages I hear these days are perceived advantages such as data integrity and security that aren't fully true. Most small and medium sized businesses security and data integrity are on a scale that could never compete with Google. Google probably has a given email stored at dozens of locations around the world and can be accessed at any time with any number of simultaneous disasters occurring. In an SMB environment the server can crash because someone tripped over the cord. It's much more fragile and to get to the level of redundancy Google can provide would cost you more than you could ever afford.
How long will it be before open-source software can provide a complete, accessible office suite for a fraction of the cost that Microsoft current impose?
It already can and has been able to for years. Its mostly been stubborn users and FUD fed to decision makers that has hindered its adoption. What's happening now is all these applications are becoming so vastly superior to MS's offerings you almost look foolish still using it. Firefox 2 is years ahead of IE7. Firefox 3 will be light years ahead. Google's offerings are also light years ahead. OpenOffice as a word processor is about on par with MS Office, however the database functionality and programming language integration is leaps and bounds ahead of anything MS has.
There are just so many products out there vastly superior to MS offerings it's disappointing this FUD still goes on.
I keep seeing comments about doubleclick being blocked. So? You account for such a small portion of the userbase why would google care? They didn't buy doubleclick for the domain or technology anyway, they bought it for the customers. Most likely they'll convert all of their doubleclick accounts to google ads, which far fewer people block. They also bought it to be a cock block against other companies trying to get to the #1 position of internet advertising.
Banks want more complicated authentication. Consumers want simpler. Guess who's winning? The right answer isn't making consumers jump through a bunch of hoops to get into their account. The added complication just makes it easier for the human element to be fooled. If they made simple clean dedicated sites just for the online banking portion, I don't think this would be 1/10th the problem it is. For example, I can have to authenticate myself up to four times to get onto the BOA online banking site. All the while flash ads of their new products barrage my senses when all I want to know is if a check cleared or not. In that process I don't pay attention to site key because it's just one more thing getting in the way. In fact, even as a very educated computer user I pay no attention to their complicated process for the very fact it is overly complicated. If computer professionals don't pay attention what hope does the average user have?
In all reality the online banking world is getting worse than it is better, and their gut reaction to create more hurdles to authentication is just making the problem worse.
I think he needs to talk to the janitor from the breakfast club to give him some insight on life.
I know there are going to be hundreds of posts claiming Microsoft isn't dead and that they are still a very profitable company etc etc, but that's not what the article is about, so you might as well mod those posts down now. The idea is that Microsoft's throne as supreme monopoly that can do whatever they want and everyone will follow is over. I whole heartedly agree.
There was a time 5 years ago that if MS released a technology, now matter how bad, would become the de-facto standard for no other reason than MS released it. MS has yet to do anything new in about 2 years that has become the supreme technology just because they blessed it. Their game of catchup with Google has yielded nothing powerful. Their strategy has been mostly centered around Windows Live, which has yet to garner any real interest. All their Web 2.0 stuff is massively better than what they were releasing 5 years ago (their mapping software isn't half bad), but I've yet to interact with someone who's excited over it. I know a lot of web developers who get a boner over the Google maps API though. Even their desktop software hasn't yielded anything terribly popular. People will keep using Windows and Office, but be extremely slow to adopt any of their new technology.
I guess the real nail in the coffin is that there's no single company for MS to set their sights on. The entire web is surpassing them, not just Google. Google is giving important direction and acting sort of as a leader for the industry, but I see just as many interesting things coming from outside of Google as in. How can MS compete with that? They can keep trying to break IE as much as possible, but even there they are being forced by the market to become more standards compliant.
I don't think MS will just go away and they probably will be relegated to Windows and Office until those are slowly chipped at. The OS market will one day reach the maturity hardware has and there will be standards and most common software will be written in cross platform toolkits. It will happen so slowly that we'll step back and say "Remember Microsoft 15 years ago?" just as we are saying today "Remember Microsoft 5 years ago".
I think I just got the biggest geek boner ever.
If chicks are boning you then I think a PSP is the last thing you are worried about.
A couple of my friends work retail doing geeksquid/firedog type work and I would say customers were mislead. There are a certain number of machines that were sold as vista compatible that don't have vista drivers yet. They are fast enough to run vista, but in their current state won't fully function. I would say that is misleading. A significant number of machines they have to flat out turn away for the time being until they are confident they won't hose the customers machines. Also, it wasn't made clear that Vista would have a new feature model as previous versions only had Home and Professional. I think if you are going to change your model that drastically it should be made clear that is the case. Saying it is "Vista compatible" is misleading and should have been advertised "Vista Version X compatible". Even if the customer had no clue the new feature model at least they were told upfront what they were or weren't getting. Illegal? Maybe. Underhanded and misleading to the point it could win a civil suit? Most definitely.
That was the most witty blog title ever. And to you sir!
That's what is scary. People making life changing decisions for you believe things with little/no scientific backing. That's why the country is the way it is. That's why we lost the edge we once had. There's a rebirth of celebrating ignorance and we are in the middle of it. Hell, we are basically as a culture in a dark age right now. Once knowledge is acquired it's like our culture as a whole has to check the bible to see if it's credible. Would you want people with the ability to kill you at any moment completely impermeable to reason?
Well, I think the idea was that the world has its priorities skewed. Statistically your child would have an insignificant risk if millions of children were playing with this toy. You should be more worried about your children getting common childhood disease that could kill them. Likewise, getting your personal information stolen can make your life hell. Would you be more worried about your child having a .00001% chance of choking on a toy, or a 5% chance of having your ATM card stolen? If you said the former, then you need a reality check.
10 people can die due to a serial killer over the period of two years while at the same time millions of people die due to heart disease. Which one will the media cover? It's human nature to be scared of dying due to an external force you have no control over (such as a serial killer). However, humans have completely irrational emotions and will try to justify to themselves why a completely irrational fear is rational.
We all know the real reason youtube is here is for candy mountain.