If my memory from the early DOS & Windows days is correct, your suggestion is actually why developers started seeing their names REMOVED from the software they created.
For example, J. Random Hacker writes some slick code that goes into a package, that gathers a lot of attention. Because his name is in the software, his company's competitors chase after him, promising him two, three times his salary, months of vacation every year, any perks he wants to mention, all of that jazz.
Not that I remember it ever happening, but many companies were afraid that it might, & kept their developers' names OFF of the packages. And only the folks who are into geek trivial pursuit could name the actual programmers who worked on Word 1.x, WordPefect 4.x, Lotus 123, dBase III, PC Tools, & other packages of that era.
That was one reason that many of these packages had Easter Eggs in them: pride of accomplishment is a human trait, & these folks wanted some kind of credit for what they had made.
The PTB need to realise that they need to show off their skilled coders & developers, not hide them in a back room & lock the door when people come by to admire their work, all the while muttering, ``Skilled programmers? We don't have any. Never seen any. Go away. Go hire some away from Microsoft."
> Amazon has done some foolish things in the past (wacky patents, charging different prices for each customer, etc) but this is nothing new.
True. Advanced Books Exchange ( http://www.abebooks.com/ ) has been in operation for years, & IMNSHO does a far better job of finding titles than Bezos ever could.
> Anybody know how enforecable such an agreement is, especially
> for people who are no longer with the company? Seems questionable to me.
It's in proportion to just how much money the company has. If the company is Microsoft, & you signed an NDA concerning anything with them (the caterers for billg's wedding had to sign an NDA -- sheesh!), they might hunt you down to the ends of the earth, find you, & send you to the jail of their choice.
If you're the teenage scumbag of this company, who's on the run from the credit card companies, the BBB, & some less-than-motivated state & federal law enforcement officers, you might get a call from his lawyer on your answering machine -- if the scumbag happened to make his monthly payment -- in cash.
> They are a web-hosting company. They are in the media industry. They depend on image, above all. So it is understandable, if a little Draconian,
> that they wish to control their image to the best of their ability.
Or the guy is taking UCITA out for a spin to see if it will let him run over folks in his state.
The last thing any person of little to no morals wants is attention brought to her/his activities. This guy, at best, is pushing the envelope of what he can get away with. At worst, it's a clear sign that he's gonna grow up to be another rip-off artist. No wonder his parents have changed their phone number & claim they don't know where he is.
> frankly, i think the 'article' raises some interesting points, and most/dotters don't understand them.
Frankly, your response is exactly what any Microsoftie would say in response to criticism of MS. Let's analyse your arguments.
> let's see. most of the comments here immediately take the 'force M$ into O/S' position, others keep more in line with the article regarding 'standards'.
>well, how about crediting M$ with making the computer revoltion possible in the first place? how many of us would have our type of job today if it
> wasn't for windows spreading computer use globally? sure, standards and lower hardware prices play an important role as well, but if M$ hadn't
> set a standard all by itself [Windows], then we'd still be battling with interfacing VAX and NIXes and apples [mcintosh platform] would be
> sparesly spread in some well to do households.
The usual argument is that by creating *DOS*, MS created a standard. This poster points to one of the GUI interfaces for DOS as being the standard-setter, which is odd: by that point, the de facto PC hardware standard had already been created, based around an Intel processor, ISA bus, either IDE or SCSI peripheral intefaces, & the limit of 16 IRQs. This was not only MS's choice, but also a certain computer company known as IBM.
Then again, the software APIs did change somewhat between standalone DOS & Win 3.1, then again with Win 95, & again (most noticeably) with Win NT. But it has been documented that every time MS changed the API, another group of independant software vendors writing to the DOS/Windows API went out of business, unable to make the port to a new API & compete with MS at the same time.
Whether this was the intent of MS's upgrade has been hotly debated.
And what's so bad with VMS or UNIX, anyway? Both are reliable, robust OSes that banks & industry have used for years. And people with minimal training use every day.
> give M$ some credit, for chip's sake.
For what? MS does not innovate, it merely sees which way the industry is trending, then runs hard to make it look as if they are leading -- but leading in their own, twisted way. Remember artificial intelligence? Back in the early 1990's, this was supposed to be the Next Big Thing. MS got into this in & produced . . . Microsoft Bob, which was later salvaged as the paperclip in MS Word that everyone hates.
MS Kerberos & the brain-dead implimentation of DNS in Win 2000 is only the latest in a long line of puzzling design choices.
I find your typo ``computer revoltion" in that sense very apropo -- MS has made this indeed a computer revulsion!
> that said, i honestly think that the whole case and associted discussions should be marked 'redundant'. the government was too late, too slow, too
> assuming and the whole affair is [score 0, flamebait] at best.
Another typical MS response. ``This is boring, nothing insightful, nothing to see, it's all past history, let's move along with our lives."
I find it hard to debate an issue with someone who is too arrogant to even acknowledge you have a right to a different opinion on the matter.
> think about it. if the purpose was to shake M$ and scare them into rethinking their strategy, then the mission is partly accomplished. but breaking
> them up now, where new technologies and the internet give them a run for their money anyway, is somewhat childish.
Another typical MS response. ``Okay, we know we shoulda listened to Big Government, & now they have our attention. So let's knock off all this talk of punishing us. We just want to innovate & create good software."
[Yes, I know this poster didn't write that last sentence -- but Bill Gates did say it in response to the Antitrust case.]
> will the o/s-linux community come up with the next big thing? will they spend billions on developping and supporting [especially supporting] a
> standard setting innovation that is available to non-nerds at a low price?
MS has never innovated. Gates was asked point-blank once what innovation MS ever created, & he could only answer feebly that only their business model was an innovation. I guess if your business model is to gut your competition over creating a better product, this might be an innovation. But governments have done this in times of total war since history was first written.
As for supporting a standard, Linux & *BSD both support the next generation of TCPIP & SMP already. MS is just making promises that they will.
And I won't touch on how MS implimented Kerberos or DNS.
> M$ certainly has it's flaws and bullying is never a good thing. But now, the public/states are using M$ strategies to force changes that are not
> necessarily beneficial to consumers. Or how would you call the use of state monopoly on power to inflict changes on a company - and millions of
> users?
Another typical MS argument: ``Private industry makes mistakes, but would you trust the government to make the right decision?"
I find it interesting that frequently, after finding private industry has mismanaged delivering services to the public, the state has had to step in time & again to enforce standards. Or would you like to go back to the days before the FDA was created & use medicines laced with opiates, milk of unknown purity, & other products misrepresented as being good& beneficial for the consumer?
And I find it ironic that all of these apologists for Microsoft are avowed Libertarians when their boss Bill Gates is clearly a Limousine Liberal.
> finally, who is holding car manufacturers responsible for the fact that things start to break down and need replacement just as the warranties run out?
Before the government cracked down on them, car manufacturers offered no warranties at all. It wasn't that long ago when if you bought a new
car, drove it off the lot, & the front wheel fell off, all you got from the dealer or manufacturer was a lot of sympathy.
In case you don't understand, a warrantee means the purchase will last for THAT set amount of time. It will start to degrade after that time. you are arguing over a very stupid point.
> shipping software with bugs and making money on service packs is what pays the high development costs in redmond. nobody forces anyone to run
> with faulty new M$ software.
I haven't heard that argument from any MS apologist before. Probably because it is true: if MS released reliable software, they would make less money. It is to their benefit to write substandard software, & make the public debug it for them. No apologist would unwisely make a statement that could be turned against her or him.
> I convinced management at our company to run Win95 OSR2 on desktops and NT4 IIS4 on servers.
> no blue screens in months.
I guess you avoid that by rebooting & reinstalling frequently. And reinstalling when some cracker roots your webserver.
> given development times, all you gotta do, is wait for M$ to release SP3 or 4 and then upgrade and you got a reasonably stable platform to work
> with. our three linux nerds in the trial department are too busy messing with the o/s to really produce anything else for them company.
This is a non sequitor, at best a troll to get people to respond with how reliable Windows is over Linux. I should ignore it, but I can't help myself.
Yes, there are incompetent Linux admins. Yes, it can be installed wrong, insecurely, & run inefficiently. And there are inappropriate implentations for Linux -- sometimes Solaris or *BSD are clearly better solutions. Given the number of idiots out there, msiuse of Linux somewhere is inevitable.
But in my experience, it is far easier to diagnose & fix problems under Linux or any UNIX variant than under Windows. Vague error messages, incompletely documented interfaces & applications, & millions of lines of spaghetti code that functions thru amazingly weird kludges only lengthen the diagnosis process. And MS's own support people are either $10.-- an hour sweatshop workers who have no idea of what to do beyond ``Reboot, reinstall, blame the hardware" -- or MSCEs who know their books better than their computers.
If you haven't had Windows crashed on you, you haven't pushed it at all. And I speak as someone who spent several hours getting _The_Sims_ to work on my wife's computer yesterday -- about as long than it took me to get sendmail to function, for God's sake. And sendmail hasn't crashed my Linux box once, where this game locked her computer several times.
And if you are happy with MS solutions, then you are in a minority. Studies have shown that Linux & BSD installations are growing in both number & market share. And Apache has 60% of the web server market share to IIS's 20%. All of this without any organized marketing push.
I agree with you, but not for the reason you'd expect. In worst case, Microsoft will be around for about five years due to simple inertia.
That's right -- inertia. It takes years of red ink for a corporation to finally wither away: look at how long it took DEC to finally bite the bullet & sell itself to Compaq. And people predicted the Imminent Demise of Apple for most of the 1990's.
Granted, much of MS's prowess is built on a hill of sand, & once the stock price is south of $30.00 a share most of the employees will start bailing out. However, even at that point there will be some employees who will stick it out -- & Ballmer & Co. will find themselves motivated to recruit some ``turn-around" experts.
In other words, even after it has taken a couple of knock-out blows, & has been reduced to a shadow of itself, MS will take a long time to die. And it will be pitiful: I'd bet even Larry Ellison will get tired of kicking MS.
> Actually, you've put your finger on an important point -- in the case you cited, the spammer wasn't getting a response, and
> wasn't likely to for very long (if at all).
And your response brought out another: there is far more rumor & myth in circulation concerning spam than there is fact. (Sorta like the other other boogie men of modern life -- the drug trade & child pornography -- your cite, including the other links on the Salon web page -- effectively tripled the literature I could quote about the effectiveness of spam advertising.)
I guess I have to revrt to my original assumption about spamming: the only people making money from this are the folks selling the mailing lists or software to other folks who then send their solicitations to millions of email addresses, & lose their Internet access in exchange for a handful of responses -- if they are lucky enough to receive them.
Like P.T.Barnum once said, ``There's a fool born every minute, & two to take him."
I've only had a ``gut-feeling" answer to your question until I stumbled across the following about six months ago. It is the only fact I have seen about this anywhere. (Yes, the writer is from AOL. But I am still amazed at a response rate far above the typical 3-5% for junk mail.)
Until I read it, I always thought the way people made money from spam in this manner: spammers found marks, promised them alot of money if they let them advertise for them on the Interent, sent out the spam, & made off with the money while the mark took the fall. If this email is any indication, a spammer may actually get useful leads & make somem sales from engaging in this obnoxious activity!
I am a small business and use the computer on an individual level. We are not
network but we have the same problems. I also use the internet for personal
things, such as just enjoying it. I get quite a few commercial spams and LOADS
of the porn crap, which I am not interested in. I am with AOL and they have an
email address that I just forward the junk to. I have never gone so far as to
CLICK on one of their hyperlinks and don't intend to. The biggest bother is just
spending the time forwarding and deleting it. Someone did get into my computer
once with a Trojan Horse program and somehow got my password and sent a lot
of this trash out in my name. I was temporarily kicked off of AOL and had to
spend a lot of time just getting rid of the stuff. Overnite, I had 450 messages from
people responding to whatever it said (I never did see the original letter) about
80% were very angry and called me every name imaginable. The other 20%
were responding positively and wanted more information. What a mess that was.
I am aware that it is going to be a difficult thing to stop. We just all need to not let
it bother us and keep on living. I have gotten over being frustrated by it and just
know that some of my time each day will be spent getting these jerks off of my
machine.
Well, as I wrote above, I haven't worked there in over 4 years, but from what I hear over the grapevine is that it's a lot like the workplace described in the article -- although you get two 10 minute personal breaks, instead of two 5 minute ones.
And I managed to earn major BOFH points once by admitting I encouraged the guy who stole my ex-girlfriend to apply for a job there. (A BOFH **never** settles for just getting even . ..)
Then again, YMMV. I've heard from a couple of people who felt Stream was a good way to start one's tech career.
> I know that helpdesks are pretty stringent about trying to get the fastest times they can. [snip]
> [snip] However, I would
> think that they are not quite this strict with helpdesk people.
I worked at Stream on the Netscape team from around May of 1995 to April of 1996. Conditions at the beginning were tolerable, & when I left were this bad -- although the training was slightly better than described in this article. And I was perpetually in trouble for long call times -- partly because I never got decent training on Windows 95, partly because I actually tried to solve caller's problems.
Calling us ``soldiers" was too kind.
Geoff
* Glorification of military service, esp. from an officer's point of view. Nothing about the terror of warfare, like being in a military barrage so heavy that you swear the buttons on your shirt are making you the highest poiont of land around. Or watching poison gas roll towards you, & cursing in fright because your gas mask is not where you swore it was a second ago.
(Sorry. I was channeling Wilfred Owens there.)
* The enemy was uniformly one-dimensional. The section concerning the raid on the ``Skinnies" read harrowingly like an act of ethnic cleansing.
* The ``We are all brothers in arms" portrait of military srvice. Yeah, right. Life in the military is a daily routine of keeping one's head down, mouth shut, & watching your back & those of a few, chosen others. And when an outsider slips, you take the opportunity to slip in a little payback.
About the same time I read _Starship Troopers_, I read Haldeman's _Forever_War_. A picture of space warfare from a slightly different perspective -- & written by someone who wanted to point out the flaws in Heinlein's book. The tale of a band of intelligent people of both sexes (with the obligatory Heinleinian orgy) drafted into frontline combat where they have the honor of dying under alien skies following the orders of PHBs.
Read Haldeman's book, then decide if ST is worth defending. While not all leaders are as manipulative & venal as those in FW, very few are perceptive as those mentioned in ST.
There's a class system very much alive at Intel: blue badge means you get all of the benies & stock options that Intel trumpets to one & all that they are a forward-thinking, next-millenium company. Green badges are the temps, contractors, janitors & cafeteria operators. Oh, & the other techs who put in 8 or more hours a day, every day, Intel.
I worked as a green badge at Intel. All that badge meant was they'd let me in the building each morning, & someone would sign my time sheet. Everything else -- a desk, a computer, a login on the network, the usual common courtesy for my fellow employees -- was considered a luxury I had to earn. Like being an enlisted man in the military -- probably why so many vets work at Chipzilla.
And probably why I'd exhaust every other option of work before I went there again.
You could run a sed script against this, & it would end up describing what has happened in Oregon over the last 2 decades. Probably Washington & Arizona too.
This shock of drastic change seems to be common to too many Western USers. One farm I picked strawberries on is now a subdivision covered with tract mansions & I expect is full of newcomers who wonder (1) what happened to all of the native wildlife, & (2) why they can't find a decent plate of angelhair pasta at 2:00am.
This typo may explain why some people responded to my post as if I had called them Godless heretics doomed to rot in Hell. Using MS software won't do that to you.
Once upon a time, I thought that only my native country had venial & corrupt politicinas whose actions favored the rich. Then I started reading the Internet, & the horror stories started to change my mind.
Since then, I've come to determine the only countries that are actually & proveably better run than mine are those (1) I've never been to, (2) I've never heard a complaint from a local about, & (3) have never made the news for some stupid act of its politicians. Right now the list of places with wonderful governments is down to Iceland, Latvia & Andorra.
Anyone want to post a horror story about one of these & prove me wrong? I figure it's only a matter of time.
> Open source advocates are always talking about the virtue of choice, but when MS offers choice, they cry foul. How convenient.
So, either you can pay MS once, or you can pay them every year. Gosh golly Captain Wizzbang, what will they think of next??? Maybe they'll add a paperclip on crack as their next feature . . .
Being told ``you can pay us so much now, or you can pay us the same amount each year" is not a choice. Unless you are braindead & need more than 5 seconds to decide between the two options.
> And don't come out with the crazy conspiracy theory that "Office 11 will be subscription only". First of all, it attributes to MS a
> level of stupidity they simply lack. And there is simply not basis for that statement.
Interesting. Leaked memos have been available for a couple of years showing that Billg & Ballmer have seriously entertained this concept. After all, their End User Agreements state that you have NOT bought the software, just leased the right to use the binary. And if UCITA passes in your jurisdiction, be sure that they will change the terms of the contract.
And have you ignored the fact that MS requires companies with site licenses to pay for their software *twice*? Once for the concenience of having it pre-installed, & once for blowing it away so that the tested, & corporate-approved version can be installed. A quick search on Gogle turned up this URL: http://www.canada.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-2427307 .html
As for the charge of ``stupidity", I think the better word describe any company that stands squarely behind UCITA is ``venial".
MS is seeing the numbers of sales begin to slide; migration from NT to Win 2000 is far less than what Gartner & others predicted. So MS has to get the revenue from somewhere. Which means this braindead licensing choice. And if they DON'T force theri customer base to migrate to a subscription basis, then they ARE stupid.
Geoff
Re:Nobel laureates reviewing business proposals?
on
Super Computing 2000
·
· Score: 2
> These guys may mean business, but I'm glad that they aren't doing business with my money. Just because someone is a top notch
> physicist, for instance, doesn't mean that they know anything about good software or hardware design.
I'm glad to see someone else reflected on this passage in Steven Adler's otherwise very cool review of this geekfest. (& I wish I had made the effort to have gone to last year's conference here in Portland.)
Adler describes the situation very well: take one guy who wants to play with big toys, works long hours for less-than-market-scale pay in exchange for the priviledge, & knows he is close to burn-out, hold before him the temptation to sell it all for a chance to grab the brass ring . . . & watch him catch the start-up bug. This is what all of those VC suits are hoping for.
This -- & whether all of the stars in the geek's eyes will blind him to the fact he's signing away most of his idea for a few million dollars. That will melt away during the start-up phase.
> The Business Software Alliance can almost certainly scrounge up one unhappy ex-employee in every large company on the planet.
If they found one at Microsoft, do you think they'd listen to him? Then again . . .
``Uh, Steve, it came to our attention that since you don't have a site license for your software, & we found three hundred copies of Windows 2000 without a license in your Redmond offices. You're gonna get sued for software piracy."
``What??? We own the &%$!! software!!! Are you stupid???"
``Steve, if we could have passed the IQ tests, we would have jobs as real police officers."
> I'm sure that programmers here will claim that their huge intelligences are responsible for their constant need to change the task they're doing and their
> complete lack of focus, but it means that out of every hour they're present, only half (if you're lucky!) of it will be spent working. The rest will be spent
> browsing the net, checking emails, getting drinks, going to the toilet, scratching their armpits and any other activities that can help them avoid doing what
> they're begin paid for for another minute.
Programmers are creative types, a fact which makes the following words (paraphrased from memory) of Frederic Pohl (a Science Fiction writer of the old school) relevant.
It's hard to tell when a writer is actually writing. Sometimes even he is not sure, & can't say whether reading the Sunday classifieds is actually work towards the book, or just screwing off.
> Call it embarrassment, call it publicity, but please don't call it unadulterated altruism.
Err, I don't think that my words implied that Billg was an example of ``unadulterated altruism". If being a limousine liberal was identical to pure unadulterated altruism, then we'd be giving Sally Struthers, spokeswoman for the ``Save the Children" foundation the Nobel Peace Prize, rather than Mother Teresa.
Then again, even if ``a lot of the donating that he does comes with the proviso that his name is loudly involved, I'll admit for sake of fairness that it's more than some of his peers are doing. Will we ever see the ``Larry Ellison Home for Battered Women"? Or even an ``Andrew Grove Foundation for Judaic Studies"?
So far, all I've seen created is Paul Allen's temple to Jimi Hendrix, & I'm still not convinced that even that is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I did read it.
You said -- in essense -- give the guys some credit, like a recommendation.
I said -- in essense -- the corporations won't do this because they don't want anyone to know who their most valuable programmers are.
Who's not reading whom?
Geoff
If my memory from the early DOS & Windows days is correct, your suggestion is actually why developers started seeing their names REMOVED from the software they created.
For example, J. Random Hacker writes some slick code that goes into a package, that gathers a lot of attention. Because his name is in the software, his company's competitors chase after him, promising him two, three times his salary, months of vacation every year, any perks he wants to mention, all of that jazz.
Not that I remember it ever happening, but many companies were afraid that it might, & kept their developers' names OFF of the packages. And only the folks who are into geek trivial pursuit could name the actual programmers who worked on Word 1.x, WordPefect 4.x, Lotus 123, dBase III, PC Tools, & other packages of that era.
That was one reason that many of these packages had Easter Eggs in them: pride of accomplishment is a human trait, & these folks wanted some kind of credit for what they had made.
The PTB need to realise that they need to show off their skilled coders & developers, not hide them in a back room & lock the door when people come by to admire their work, all the while muttering, ``Skilled programmers? We don't have any. Never seen any. Go away. Go hire some away from Microsoft."
Geoff
> Amazon has done some foolish things in the past (wacky patents, charging different prices for each customer, etc) but this is nothing new.
True. Advanced Books Exchange ( http://www.abebooks.com/ ) has been in operation for years, & IMNSHO does a far better job of finding titles than Bezos ever could.
Geoff
> Anybody know how enforecable such an agreement is, especially
> for people who are no longer with the company? Seems questionable to me.
It's in proportion to just how much money the company has. If the company is Microsoft, & you signed an NDA concerning anything with them (the caterers for billg's wedding had to sign an NDA -- sheesh!), they might hunt you down to the ends of the earth, find you, & send you to the jail of their choice.
If you're the teenage scumbag of this company, who's on the run from the credit card companies, the BBB, & some less-than-motivated state & federal law enforcement officers, you might get a call from his lawyer on your answering machine -- if the scumbag happened to make his monthly payment -- in cash.
Geoff
> They are a web-hosting company. They are in the media industry. They depend on image, above all. So it is understandable, if a little Draconian,
> that they wish to control their image to the best of their ability.
Or the guy is taking UCITA out for a spin to see if it will let him run over folks in his state.
The last thing any person of little to no morals wants is attention brought to her/his activities. This guy, at best, is pushing the envelope of what he can get away with. At worst, it's a clear sign that he's gonna grow up to be another rip-off artist. No wonder his parents have changed their phone number & claim they don't know where he is.
Geoff
> frankly, i think the 'article' raises some interesting points, and most /dotters don't understand them.
Frankly, your response is exactly what any Microsoftie would say in response to criticism of MS. Let's analyse your arguments.
> let's see. most of the comments here immediately take the 'force M$ into O/S' position, others keep more in line with the article regarding 'standards'.
>well, how about crediting M$ with making the computer revoltion possible in the first place? how many of us would have our type of job today if it
> wasn't for windows spreading computer use globally? sure, standards and lower hardware prices play an important role as well, but if M$ hadn't
> set a standard all by itself [Windows], then we'd still be battling with interfacing VAX and NIXes and apples [mcintosh platform] would be
> sparesly spread in some well to do households.
The usual argument is that by creating *DOS*, MS created a standard. This poster points to one of the GUI interfaces for DOS as being the standard-setter, which is odd: by that point, the de facto PC hardware standard had already been created, based around an Intel processor, ISA bus, either IDE or SCSI peripheral intefaces, & the limit of 16 IRQs. This was not only MS's choice, but also a certain computer company known as IBM.
Then again, the software APIs did change somewhat between standalone DOS & Win 3.1, then again with Win 95, & again (most noticeably) with Win NT. But it has been documented that every time MS changed the API, another group of independant software vendors writing to the DOS/Windows API went out of business, unable to make the port to a new API & compete with MS at the same time.
Whether this was the intent of MS's upgrade has been hotly debated.
And what's so bad with VMS or UNIX, anyway? Both are reliable, robust OSes that banks & industry have used for years. And people with minimal training use every day.
> give M$ some credit, for chip's sake.
For what? MS does not innovate, it merely sees which way the industry is trending, then runs hard to make it look as if they are leading -- but leading in their own, twisted way. Remember artificial intelligence? Back in the early 1990's, this was supposed to be the Next Big Thing. MS got into this in & produced . . . Microsoft Bob, which was later salvaged as the paperclip in MS Word that everyone hates.
MS Kerberos & the brain-dead implimentation of DNS in Win 2000 is only the latest in a long line of puzzling design choices.
I find your typo ``computer revoltion" in that sense very apropo -- MS has made this indeed a computer revulsion!
> that said, i honestly think that the whole case and associted discussions should be marked 'redundant'. the government was too late, too slow, too
> assuming and the whole affair is [score 0, flamebait] at best.
Another typical MS response. ``This is boring, nothing insightful, nothing to see, it's all past history, let's move along with our lives."
I find it hard to debate an issue with someone who is too arrogant to even acknowledge you have a right to a different opinion on the matter.
> think about it. if the purpose was to shake M$ and scare them into rethinking their strategy, then the mission is partly accomplished. but breaking
> them up now, where new technologies and the internet give them a run for their money anyway, is somewhat childish.
Another typical MS response. ``Okay, we know we shoulda listened to Big Government, & now they have our attention. So let's knock off all this talk of punishing us. We just want to innovate & create good software."
[Yes, I know this poster didn't write that last sentence -- but Bill Gates did say it in response to the Antitrust case.]
> will the o/s-linux community come up with the next big thing? will they spend billions on developping and supporting [especially supporting] a
> standard setting innovation that is available to non-nerds at a low price?
MS has never innovated. Gates was asked point-blank once what innovation MS ever created, & he could only answer feebly that only their business model was an innovation. I guess if your business model is to gut your competition over creating a better product, this might be an innovation. But governments have done this in times of total war since history was first written.
As for supporting a standard, Linux & *BSD both support the next generation of TCPIP & SMP already. MS is just making promises that they will.
And I won't touch on how MS implimented Kerberos or DNS.
> M$ certainly has it's flaws and bullying is never a good thing. But now, the public/states are using M$ strategies to force changes that are not
> necessarily beneficial to consumers. Or how would you call the use of state monopoly on power to inflict changes on a company - and millions of
> users?
Another typical MS argument: ``Private industry makes mistakes, but would you trust the government to make the right decision?"
I find it interesting that frequently, after finding private industry has mismanaged delivering services to the public, the state has had to step in time & again to enforce standards. Or would you like to go back to the days before the FDA was created & use medicines laced with opiates, milk of unknown purity, & other products misrepresented as being good& beneficial for the consumer?
And I find it ironic that all of these apologists for Microsoft are avowed Libertarians when their boss Bill Gates is clearly a Limousine Liberal.
> finally, who is holding car manufacturers responsible for the fact that things start to break down and need replacement just as the warranties run out?
Before the government cracked down on them, car manufacturers offered no warranties at all. It wasn't that long ago when if you bought a new
car, drove it off the lot, & the front wheel fell off, all you got from the dealer or manufacturer was a lot of sympathy.
In case you don't understand, a warrantee means the purchase will last for THAT set amount of time. It will start to degrade after that time. you are arguing over a very stupid point.
> shipping software with bugs and making money on service packs is what pays the high development costs in redmond. nobody forces anyone to run
> with faulty new M$ software.
I haven't heard that argument from any MS apologist before. Probably because it is true: if MS released reliable software, they would make less money. It is to their benefit to write substandard software, & make the public debug it for them. No apologist would unwisely make a statement that could be turned against her or him.
> I convinced management at our company to run Win95 OSR2 on desktops and NT4 IIS4 on servers.
> no blue screens in months.
I guess you avoid that by rebooting & reinstalling frequently. And reinstalling when some cracker roots your webserver.
> given development times, all you gotta do, is wait for M$ to release SP3 or 4 and then upgrade and you got a reasonably stable platform to work
> with. our three linux nerds in the trial department are too busy messing with the o/s to really produce anything else for them company.
This is a non sequitor, at best a troll to get people to respond with how reliable Windows is over Linux. I should ignore it, but I can't help myself.
Yes, there are incompetent Linux admins. Yes, it can be installed wrong, insecurely, & run inefficiently. And there are inappropriate implentations for Linux -- sometimes Solaris or *BSD are clearly better solutions. Given the number of idiots out there, msiuse of Linux somewhere is inevitable.
But in my experience, it is far easier to diagnose & fix problems under Linux or any UNIX variant than under Windows. Vague error messages, incompletely documented interfaces & applications, & millions of lines of spaghetti code that functions thru amazingly weird kludges only lengthen the diagnosis process. And MS's own support people are either $10.-- an hour sweatshop workers who have no idea of what to do beyond ``Reboot, reinstall, blame the hardware" -- or MSCEs who know their books better than their computers.
If you haven't had Windows crashed on you, you haven't pushed it at all. And I speak as someone who spent several hours getting _The_Sims_ to work on my wife's computer yesterday -- about as long than it took me to get sendmail to function, for God's sake. And sendmail hasn't crashed my Linux box once, where this game locked her computer several times.
And if you are happy with MS solutions, then you are in a minority. Studies have shown that Linux & BSD installations are growing in both number & market share. And Apache has 60% of the web server market share to IIS's 20%. All of this without any organized marketing push.
Geoff
I agree with you, but not for the reason you'd expect. In worst case, Microsoft will be around for about five years due to simple inertia.
That's right -- inertia. It takes years of red ink for a corporation to finally wither away: look at how long it took DEC to finally bite the bullet & sell itself to Compaq. And people predicted the Imminent Demise of Apple for most of the 1990's.
Granted, much of MS's prowess is built on a hill of sand, & once the stock price is south of $30.00 a share most of the employees will start bailing out. However, even at that point there will be some employees who will stick it out -- & Ballmer & Co. will find themselves motivated to recruit some ``turn-around" experts.
In other words, even after it has taken a couple of knock-out blows, & has been reduced to a shadow of itself, MS will take a long time to die. And it will be pitiful: I'd bet even Larry Ellison will get tired of kicking MS.
Geoff
> Actually, you've put your finger on an important point -- in the case you cited, the spammer wasn't getting a response, and
> wasn't likely to for very long (if at all).
And your response brought out another: there is far more rumor & myth in circulation concerning spam than there is fact. (Sorta like the other other boogie men of modern life -- the drug trade & child pornography -- your cite, including the other links on the Salon web page -- effectively tripled the literature I could quote about the effectiveness of spam advertising.)
I guess I have to revrt to my original assumption about spamming: the only people making money from this are the folks selling the mailing lists or software to other folks who then send their solicitations to millions of email addresses, & lose their Internet access in exchange for a handful of responses -- if they are lucky enough to receive them.
Like P.T.Barnum once said, ``There's a fool born every minute, & two to take him."
Geoff
> Is SPAMing even getting through anymore?
8 1-318280,00.html]
I've only had a ``gut-feeling" answer to your question until I stumbled across the following about six months ago. It is the only fact I have seen about this anywhere. (Yes, the writer is from AOL. But I am still amazed at a response rate far above the typical 3-5% for junk mail.)
Until I read it, I always thought the way people made money from spam in this manner: spammers found marks, promised them alot of money if they let them advertise for them on the Interent, sent out the spam, & made off with the money while the mark took the fall. If this email is any indication, a spammer may actually get useful leads & make somem sales from engaging in this obnoxious activity!
Geoff
[from http://www.zdnet.com/tlkbck/comment/82/0,9586,821
Name: Patti Illingworth
Email: plifrog@aol.com
Location: Reno, NV
Occupation: Secretary
I am a small business and use the computer on an individual level. We are not
network but we have the same problems. I also use the internet for personal
things, such as just enjoying it. I get quite a few commercial spams and LOADS
of the porn crap, which I am not interested in. I am with AOL and they have an
email address that I just forward the junk to. I have never gone so far as to
CLICK on one of their hyperlinks and don't intend to. The biggest bother is just
spending the time forwarding and deleting it. Someone did get into my computer
once with a Trojan Horse program and somehow got my password and sent a lot
of this trash out in my name. I was temporarily kicked off of AOL and had to
spend a lot of time just getting rid of the stuff. Overnite, I had 450 messages from
people responding to whatever it said (I never did see the original letter) about
80% were very angry and called me every name imaginable. The other 20%
were responding positively and wanted more information. What a mess that was.
I am aware that it is going to be a difficult thing to stop. We just all need to not let
it bother us and keep on living. I have gotten over being frustrated by it and just
know that some of my time each day will be spent getting these jerks off of my
machine.
Thanks for letting me vent.
> How is work at Stream?
.)
Well, as I wrote above, I haven't worked there in over 4 years, but from what I hear over the grapevine is that it's a lot like the workplace described in the article -- although you get two 10 minute personal breaks, instead of two 5 minute ones.
And I managed to earn major BOFH points once by admitting I encouraged the guy who stole my ex-girlfriend to apply for a job there. (A BOFH **never** settles for just getting even . .
Then again, YMMV. I've heard from a couple of people who felt Stream was a good way to start one's tech career.
Geoff
> I know that helpdesks are pretty stringent about trying to get the fastest times they can. [snip] > [snip] However, I would > think that they are not quite this strict with helpdesk people. I worked at Stream on the Netscape team from around May of 1995 to April of 1996. Conditions at the beginning were tolerable, & when I left were this bad -- although the training was slightly better than described in this article. And I was perpetually in trouble for long call times -- partly because I never got decent training on Windows 95, partly because I actually tried to solve caller's problems. Calling us ``soldiers" was too kind. Geoff
I saw this article mentioned in the ``YRO" box, but not in the general list of articles. Even then, it only took me a minute or two to track it down.
And there's already two off-topic or stupid posts here.
Interesting article, though.
]not sure if I'm logged in here at the Twilight Zone or not[
Geoff
If I remember correctly:
* Glorification of military service, esp. from an officer's point of view. Nothing about the terror of warfare, like being in a military barrage so heavy that you swear the buttons on your shirt are making you the highest poiont of land around. Or watching poison gas roll towards you, & cursing in fright because your gas mask is not where you swore it was a second ago.
(Sorry. I was channeling Wilfred Owens there.)
* The enemy was uniformly one-dimensional. The section concerning the raid on the ``Skinnies" read harrowingly like an act of ethnic cleansing.
* The ``We are all brothers in arms" portrait of military srvice. Yeah, right. Life in the military is a daily routine of keeping one's head down, mouth shut, & watching your back & those of a few, chosen others. And when an outsider slips, you take the opportunity to slip in a little payback.
About the same time I read _Starship Troopers_, I read Haldeman's _Forever_War_. A picture of space warfare from a slightly different perspective -- & written by someone who wanted to point out the flaws in Heinlein's book. The tale of a band of intelligent people of both sexes (with the obligatory Heinleinian orgy) drafted into frontline combat where they have the honor of dying under alien skies following the orders of PHBs.
Read Haldeman's book, then decide if ST is worth defending. While not all leaders are as manipulative & venal as those in FW, very few are perceptive as those mentioned in ST.
Geoff
> badges?
There's a class system very much alive at Intel: blue badge means you get all of the benies & stock options that Intel trumpets to one & all that they are a forward-thinking, next-millenium company. Green badges are the temps, contractors, janitors & cafeteria operators. Oh, & the other techs who put in 8 or more hours a day, every day, Intel.
I worked as a green badge at Intel. All that badge meant was they'd let me in the building each morning, & someone would sign my time sheet. Everything else -- a desk, a computer, a login on the network, the usual common courtesy for my fellow employees -- was considered a luxury I had to earn. Like being an enlisted man in the military -- probably why so many vets work at Chipzilla.
And probably why I'd exhaust every other option of work before I went there again.
Geoff
> Intel has a long-standing record of obnoxious behaviour . . . . And those blue guys, too.
Which ``blue guys" do you mean? The ones in the bunny suits on tv, or the ones with the blue badge? I can see how your comments fit both.
Geoff
> Wow, this is the first time I've seen a "Mod this up" comments scored higher than the comment it was referring to
I'm surprised too. Probably won't survive metamoderation, though.
If wonder if this will incite karma whores to include references to sed & other UNIX commands in their posts.
Geoff
You could run a sed script against this, & it would end up describing what has happened in Oregon over the last 2 decades. Probably Washington & Arizona too.
This shock of drastic change seems to be common to too many Western USers. One farm I picked strawberries on is now a subdivision covered with tract mansions & I expect is full of newcomers who wonder (1) what happened to all of the native wildlife, & (2) why they can't find a decent plate of angelhair pasta at 2:00am.
Geoff
Touche.
;-)
This typo may explain why some people responded to my post as if I had called them Godless heretics doomed to rot in Hell. Using MS software won't do that to you.
Yet, anyway.
Geoff
Once upon a time, I thought that only my native country had venial & corrupt politicinas whose actions favored the rich. Then I started reading the Internet, & the horror stories started to change my mind.
Since then, I've come to determine the only countries that are actually & proveably better run than mine are those (1) I've never been to, (2) I've never heard a complaint from a local about, & (3) have never made the news for some stupid act of its politicians. Right now the list of places with wonderful governments is down to Iceland, Latvia & Andorra.
Anyone want to post a horror story about one of these & prove me wrong? I figure it's only a matter of time.
Geoff
> Open source advocates are always talking about the virtue of choice, but when MS offers choice, they cry foul. How convenient.
7 .html
So, either you can pay MS once, or you can pay them every year. Gosh golly Captain Wizzbang, what will they think of next??? Maybe they'll add a paperclip on crack as their next feature . . .
Being told ``you can pay us so much now, or you can pay us the same amount each year" is not a choice. Unless you are braindead & need more than 5 seconds to decide between the two options.
> And don't come out with the crazy conspiracy theory that "Office 11 will be subscription only". First of all, it attributes to MS a
> level of stupidity they simply lack. And there is simply not basis for that statement.
Interesting. Leaked memos have been available for a couple of years showing that Billg & Ballmer have seriously entertained this concept. After all, their End User Agreements state that you have NOT bought the software, just leased the right to use the binary. And if UCITA passes in your jurisdiction, be sure that they will change the terms of the contract.
And have you ignored the fact that MS requires companies with site licenses to pay for their software *twice*? Once for the concenience of having it pre-installed, & once for blowing it away so that the tested, & corporate-approved version can be installed. A quick search on Gogle turned up this URL: http://www.canada.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-242730
As for the charge of ``stupidity", I think the better word describe any company that stands squarely behind UCITA is ``venial".
MS is seeing the numbers of sales begin to slide; migration from NT to Win 2000 is far less than what Gartner & others predicted. So MS has to get the revenue from somewhere. Which means this braindead licensing choice. And if they DON'T force theri customer base to migrate to a subscription basis, then they ARE stupid.
Geoff
> These guys may mean business, but I'm glad that they aren't doing business with my money. Just because someone is a top notch
> physicist, for instance, doesn't mean that they know anything about good software or hardware design.
I'm glad to see someone else reflected on this passage in Steven Adler's otherwise very cool review of this geekfest. (& I wish I had made the effort to have gone to last year's conference here in Portland.)
Adler describes the situation very well: take one guy who wants to play with big toys, works long hours for less-than-market-scale pay in exchange for the priviledge, & knows he is close to burn-out, hold before him the temptation to sell it all for a chance to grab the brass ring . . . & watch him catch the start-up bug. This is what all of those VC suits are hoping for.
This -- & whether all of the stars in the geek's eyes will blind him to the fact he's signing away most of his idea for a few million dollars. That will melt away during the start-up phase.
Geoff
> The Business Software Alliance can almost certainly scrounge up one unhappy ex-employee in every large company on the planet.
If they found one at Microsoft, do you think they'd listen to him? Then again . . .
``Uh, Steve, it came to our attention that since you don't have a site license for your software, & we found three hundred copies of Windows 2000 without a license in your Redmond offices. You're gonna get sued for software piracy."
``What??? We own the &%$!! software!!! Are you stupid???"
``Steve, if we could have passed the IQ tests, we would have jobs as real police officers."
Geoff
> I'm sure that programmers here will claim that their huge intelligences are responsible for their constant need to change the task they're doing and their
> complete lack of focus, but it means that out of every hour they're present, only half (if you're lucky!) of it will be spent working. The rest will be spent
> browsing the net, checking emails, getting drinks, going to the toilet, scratching their armpits and any other activities that can help them avoid doing what
> they're begin paid for for another minute.
Programmers are creative types, a fact which makes the following words (paraphrased from memory) of Frederic Pohl (a Science Fiction writer of the old school) relevant.
It's hard to tell when a writer is actually writing. Sometimes even he is not sure, & can't say whether reading the Sunday classifieds is actually work towards the book, or just screwing off.
Geoff
Pick one of the following:
1) A new standard in software!!! More features, more stable, & runs faster!!!
2) Apple is still dead.
3) Linux doesn't have a modern interface. And it's too hard to use.
4) Jesse Berst: ``Hey, the hits on my column are down, so what brain dead thing can I say today?"
5) There's another operating system out there?
Geoff
> Call it embarrassment, call it publicity, but please don't call it unadulterated altruism.
Err, I don't think that my words implied that Billg was an example of ``unadulterated altruism". If being a limousine liberal was identical to pure unadulterated altruism, then we'd be giving Sally Struthers, spokeswoman for the ``Save the Children" foundation the Nobel Peace Prize, rather than Mother Teresa.
Then again, even if ``a lot of the donating that he does comes with the proviso that his name is loudly involved, I'll admit for sake of fairness that it's more than some of his peers are doing. Will we ever see the ``Larry Ellison Home for Battered Women"? Or even an ``Andrew Grove Foundation for Judaic Studies"?
So far, all I've seen created is Paul Allen's temple to Jimi Hendrix, & I'm still not convinced that even that is a good thing.
Geoff