> Anyone who has been using Windows since version 3.1 (the earliest version at which the product was anything more than
> a joke) then they have, by now, paid between $250 and $500 for the product,
Hey, I've been using Windows 3.1 up to February of this year, & I never paid a dime to Billy G since it came installed on my computer.
> if they have been upgrading faithfully.
Er, like I said, I used Win 3.1 until February of this year. (Been using Linux exclusively since then, except for a day or two when I thought I fried my hard drive & had to revert to my old computer.) Except for being confused about which year it was (which was reflected in the date it returned for a given file), it worked just as well as it ever did.
Funny to relate, DOS 6.00 did not show a Y2K problem. Once I reset the date due to a BIOS problem, DOS had NO PROBLEM with this being the year 2000.
I might just wait until next year to exorcise DOS from that hard drive, just to see if DOS 6.00 was truly Y2K compliant.
> It would be more productive to extensively train the managers to be competent in dealing specifically with bright and
> knowledgeable people, rather than ignoring a fundamental problem with IT work, which is that the more complex the work, the
> harder it is for managers to avoid being oafish fools about dealing with people who often are much smarter and more
> knowledgeable than they.
Sheesh, this reminds me of one of the worst jobs I've had since I started making a living from computers. (Warning: the following is a rant. If you don't want to read this, I'm sure a troll will post some Emily Dickinson for you shortly.)
It was a contract job with a bank undergoing a merger with an out-of-state bank, where we had to repoint the LANs from the local server room in Gresham to one in Minneapolis. (And if you live in the Portland, OR area, it was *that* job.)
At first it promised to be kind of interesting, learning about SNA networking with TCPIP, working with several platforms. I even learned how to do some simple configuration of Bay routers.
Unfortunately, the high points were as few & far between as mountains in Indiana: the consulting firm was so eager to put billable warm bodies on the job that there wasn't enough work to go around. For a couple of weeks, several of us sat around most of the day doing NOTHING. Add to that the fact the agency felt it was unprofessional for any of us to be seen sitting around doing nothing, we ended up spending this time cooped up in a forgotten conference room staring at each other.
And the project manager was a treat also. Former SysAdmin & recovering alcoholic with all of the diplomatic skills of a BOFH. He constantly chewed us out for taking the initiative in solving problems we encountered, instead of bucking all of our questions up the line. (I heard that he was upset that I was doing the stuff with the routers -- nothing more than granting them new IP numbers -- because I was the only one who had taken the time to watch how it was done, & understand the steps.)
And I had complained about this to the consulting firm. And they promised to do somethng about it.
The breaking point for me was when I got called in on a day I was promised off. All the way in, I expected that I would be sitting around, doing nothing; sure enough, I found our team sitting around waiting for direction. The only thing that kept me from walking out at that moment was encountering a colleague who needed help inventoring some switch rooms. We finished that task 5 hours later, just in time to be dragged into another butt-chewing session because ``we" hadn't been doing enough.
I seethed about that all weekend, decided that no job was worth being that angry about, & called the agency & gave them a week's notice. This resulted with a PHB from the agency giving me the line ``I never knew you were unhappy. No one told me anything."
I was able to get a job that started the next day & happily left. I later heard that I was the first of several to leave at that point. Something changed at that point, since the project actually got finished, two or three months late.
> Your email address will end up ORBS, RBL and several other blacklists, which means your (brand new!) email address is
> now useless
No, IIRC, RBL applies to the domain, not the account on the domain. (A site gets black holed if it consistently proves itself unwilling to kick spammers & other abuse-types off of it's system.)
In other words, msn.com will get RBLed. AGAIN. After they made the minimum feeble attempts to crawl out of that space.
It's amazing that a company which prides itself for attracting so many ``smart people" has so many marketroids that get it in repeated trouble over so many issues that a couple minutes of applied commonsense would avoid.
>This same guy raced sailboats on the weekend, and treated all of 'his' (regardless of who they reported to) employees as if we
>were crew on a sailing vessel.
::blink::::blink::
Uh, did this guy use ``Hubbard Technology"?
[Note to the puzzled: L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, had a thing for sailing. He gathered his most faithful culties onto a private navy, where he could be a Commodore of all he surveyed. Even though his most significant act while a commissioned officer during WW II was to shell an island belonging to Mexico, & thus cause an international incident.
[But I fear Nonesuch here may have actually worked for someone employing Scieno teachings. Which would explain why the company is on life support.]
>Before MCSEs existed certifications were quite difficult to obtain, requiring a lot of study, coupled with hands-on practical
>experience to back-up the study.
Sorry, while I'm not a true old-timer in this business, before all of the horror stories about MCSEs, there was constant bitching about ``paper CNAs" -- people who read the NetWare manuals, passed the tests, but could not tell an Ethernet card from a Token ring card to save their lives.
The paper CNAs of yore had something of an excuse, though: in the late 1980's/early 1990, very few people had hands-on experinece creating or maintaining a LAN. Nowadays, any person with a modicum of motivation can build a LAN at home for the cost of a computer upgrade.
With computers available for under US$1000, & the MS software of your choice available for less than another $1000, there is really no excuse for paper MCSEs: if you can't spend that kind of money & time learning the software (but can spend those two on an MSCE bootcamp & test), you have no justification to be paid to fix or upgrade other people's computers.
. . . it's just the usual attempt of the PTB to increase their power by obscuring what they do thru language. George Orwell wrote a very pointed essay on this phenomena (& whose title escapes me -- I assume I'm not the only one who has read it on/.)
For example, throughout US history, bills to improve the infrastucture have had the word ``military" or ``defense" tacked onto them in order to improve their chances to get passed: the various ``Military Road" acts of the mid-19th century, the Interstate highway act was described as a ``Defense" appropriation, & the Internet was originally the _Defense_ ARPA.
All you have to do is say that there are boogeymen out there (e.g., Anarchists, Bolsheviks, Drug Dealers, Child Molesters, even/. Posters) & otherwise reasonable people immediately consent to a ``temporary" abridgement of their natural rights.
Unfortunately the US is not unique in this regard. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the UK had its own extralegal Star Chamber, assigned to combat the threat of Catholicism.
Geez, the subject line of this post says it all, I guess.;-)
Seriously, my attitude has come from the fact that every couple of years I decide I'm being childish & stupid, & I make an attempt to give MS products ``just one more try". And usually within a matter of hours of making this resolution I find I want to drive up to Redmond & adjust the attitude of their design teams with a heavy, blunt object. Or just shoot the lot of them.
My most recent example: IE's incestuous relationship with Windows 2000. Now I'll admit that I rather liked how information was set out in the File Manager that came in Win 3.1: on one side, you had the directories on the drive set out in a tree metaphor, & on the other side, each file was presented on its own line, with the full file name, file size, time & date the file was last written to, & attributes all in a row. Lots of information at a single glance. And if you were scared to see all of this information, well with a few clicks of the mouse you could change it to a window full of icons.
A simple, intuitive setup. And Microsoft proceded to start hosing it up.
First MS started deprecating winfile, in favor of ``Windows Explorer". Since I'm not against change, I grumbled a little, wondered about some of the design implimentations, & ended up learning how to work with this program. I could get my winfile interface, I get the information I wanted how I wanted.
So life went on. Now in Win2k, though, the Windows Explorer has been replaced with IE. Now I'm no longer looking at a list of files & their characteristics, but at an unnecessary HTML page I don't want. Resize one window the wrong way, & instead of seeing all of the columns, I get a help page I don't need & didn't ask for. Every time I go to another directory, I'm back to a window full of meaningless icons -- as far as I can see, there's no way to set & save my preferences globally. And if I'm reading a page on the web when I decide to verify some files on a local drive . . . let's just say I've been warned about my vocabulary at work.
Huh? What's that? Why don't I RTFM?? I have, boyo. But that M is truly F'ed. Click on help, & you get choices like about the World Wide Web, or ``Microsoft and the Internet." (But I'm just trying to manage files on the drives in my employer's computer, not experience this irrelevant paradigm!) Using ``Search" on their help pages to get useful information is about as useful as trying to meet Ms. Right with a poorly-written personal ad. The answer is probably out there somewhere, buried in a hint mentioned in an aside while talking about something totally unrelated.
Microsoft must believe every computer user is a moron, because they work hard writing their user interface down to a moron's level. Everyone else gets confused & either (a) believes she/he is an idiot because she/he can't figure this mess out, or (b) gets just that much more resentful at MS, & resolves to work harder at finding & using a competing -- any competing -- product for their needs.
Too bad MS is a monopoly. That makes it hard to find competing products in many catagories.
Okay, okay, I'm done ranting. I've got all of that off my chest, & can go back to work now.
Hmm. Supposedly if J. Random Hacker writes software that causes (say) a $1000-- loss to a given corporation, this corporation can sue J. R. to recover this amount of money.
But if J. R. writes software that causes our hypothetical corporation to have an increase of (again, say) $1000--, does this mean that the corporation has to sue J. R. to pay her or him some or all of this negative damage?
Maybe these suits are afraid of & the cost of tracking down random hackers to reimberse them for their contributions.
In a nutshell, this is what this whole stupid act on the basis of these legal sharks come down to: someone writes software that increases the market for their hardware, & they get told to stop it.
And if I'm being a smart-*ss about this, it's Friday & these same legal sharks don't deserve any more of my attention than that.
>Here's the thing I don't really understand (well, I understand it, but I don't accept it): Most programs and games don't need that fast a
>processor, so why are people buying it? The need for speed?
'Cause they're told they need it.
A recent issue of _Consumer_Reports_ stated that a new buyer should expect a minimum speed of 1 GHz in her/his new computer (unless it's used for non-CPU intensive tasks like word processing & Email).
Sheesh, I've been using computers with an average speed in the 400-600 MHz range (well, my home computer has two 400 MHz), & I have seen no problems with any of those being ``too slow". (For once, Andy is ahead of either Bill or Linus.)
The only reason I can think that _Consumer_Reports_ would state that is because the OEMs' PR flacks talked them into it.
In every discussion of this infamous event, it seems that one important detail gets overlooked:
The failure of a single computer disabled an entire warship.
Let's be honest: if you can disable a warship by disabling a single computer, it doesn't matter what OS the machine is running. DOS, NT, Macintoshes, Linux, *BSD, Solaris & OS/390 are all equally vulnerable to a lucky shot that causes physical damage to the hardware.
The solution? Either multiple computers, or a distributed OS that can continue to run processes even while individual units are failing.
I agreee -- the clarifications will be coming soon & fast. But not that the comments are ``technically ill-informed". It's because he's about to open a Pandora's box of hurt for the corporate music industry.
There is an old rule about not starting a war one cannot win (variously expressed as ``never invade Russia late in summer" or ``avoid a major land war in Asia"). This PHB has just declared war on all of the warez kiddies out there.
And what are these warez kiddies gonna do? Hmm, hey look Corporate Music depends on all of these sales of pop stars like Britney Spears, In Sync, & so forth. All of their names & sales are printed in the newspaper every week. What if they start burning copies of every CD & give them away? Boy, are those sales figures gonna dip & crash!
And there are probably even simpler & cheaper ways to circulate copies at NO COST to the end recipient. But since I'm not a criminal, nor do I advocate this response, I can't think of what they are.
And if you think the government can stop this kind of theft of intellectual property, then why haven't they stopped the drug trade?
My advice to the suits out there reading this is simple: get the artists behind you. People are making mp3 copies of songs & sharing them because they like the music & respect the artist. If the artists ask people using Napster or Gnutella to buy after they try, they will get the revenue. And you get the artists behind you by offering them decent recording contracts -- not by ripping them off.
Sorry, I beat you to that. Check the IBM Patent Server.
So all of you ``First Post Lamerz" better knock it off. This is fair warning. Next time one of you lusers do this, I will sell the patent to a true scumbag of a company (No, I don't mean Microsoft -- Computer Associates would do nicely. Or maybe even Network ``Reviewing our software violates our NDA" Associates) that will track you down like a common criminal, & not only sue you but take your computer away & do even more evil stuff to you.
Now if I could only get the patent to pouring hot grits on my pants (pat. pend.) & turning women to stone (pat. pend.)
>The reason that copyright holders are given this "right" is to give them temporary monopoly. However, if they are no longer
>using it, and they use copyright to stop further distribution, they are perverting and in fact working against the entire reason
>that copyright exists.
Good point.
One of the most hated things about copyright goes back to when it applied only to books. And that item was the fact that if a publisher bought the rights to your book, botched the selling of it, & let the work fall out of print, there was nothing that you, the author, could do to bring the book back into publication unless you could get the suits at the publishing house to return the rights to you.
Yeah, right. And Random House got to be the biggest publisher in the game by being such a nice guy.
There are a lot of books out there that remain out of print because the publisher can't figure out how to make a profit from it, but they don't want someone else doing it.
Well, at least if you can find the book in the library, you can read it. If a software manufacturer wants to sit on a product, there's no way for someone to use the program -- other than to download it from an abandonware site.
Buddy, I'm a Boomer, & I know the details about Napster very well thankyouverymuch. (And I figure if the foks at RIAA had a clue, they'd stop racheting up the prices on every CD, & make it worth people's whiles to buy high-quality CDs over free, but lower-quality mp3s.)
In a nutshell -- yes, there are a lot of clueless people over 30. But the majority of people under are also clueless. Remember this when you decide to change the world. It just might help you to suceed.
>But, even worse, worshipping technology in and of itself is stupid.
No argument about that. But the history of UNIX is far more interesting than other OS platforms for several reasons: it's the history of a definable sub-group of people, who are not bound by ties of employment or purchasing to one specific company, but are bound together because of the tools they created, shared, & refined.
This includes people who were interested in computer research, who were interested in developing technology or useful arts, & those who were interested in spreading the word about a technology either out of religious-like enthusiasm or to make a buck. There's a richness here that you just don't find with the history of, say, Windows 95 or the Amiga. (I know, I'm setting myself up to be flamed.)
>Aside from the whole "Us and Them" treatment of contractors (Blue badges are Gods, all else are worthless scum), it extends to their view of the world in general.
It's exactly the same at Intel, except the contractors have Green badges. And contractors are limited to 18 months on any one contract.
This is the reason a growing number of people won't work at Intel, except at a premium over market rate.
>So I would wait for a few more weeks, and see if the situation improves.
About a year ago, they moved all of the older posts to an inobvious location; in other words, first you had to do a search in the current archive, then you could do a search in the older archive.
Then a few months ago came the announced re-organization. So far, all they have told us is the same promise that the older archives should be back online.
Deja has been stupid about this. Right now, they are -- or were -- the only people who offered this service. They could have offered the older posts as a premium service -- maybe charged to the user by charging ISPs. Instead they apparently decided this unique service was not worth offering, & have discontinued it.
That would be typical yuppie dot-com thinking. I'd like to think that Deja didn't subscribe to that kind of thinking.
For those of you who flunked Oregon geography, Washington Co. is to the West of Portland. 25 years ago it was part-rural, part-suburban. Then Intel came in, built a half-dozen campuses, invited their suppliers to also build there, & now it looks like SV North.
Lots of suburban sprawl, Hwy 26 is a parking lot of the day, & unless you have a blue badge & are vested in lots of stock, you have to put up with dweebs who happened to be lucky & have too much attitude. And every few years Intel (or Nike) complains that they need more tax subsidies, or else they're gonna take their new construction elsewhere.
Meanwhile, they bulldoze more & more of the native oak & pine -- & I mean real pine, not Douglas Fir -- so that they can build another office sprawl, plant it plane trees, & water the hell out of the grass so that you won't want to sit on it. It looks more like California every day.
Okay, this is probably nothing more than an articulate rant, but I feel better for having said it. And I look forward to seeing the movie.
Geoff
Sorry for the rant. But people like that make me sick that I like computers.
>That's like the pot calling the dinner plate black. Ziff-Davis has a long history of getting lots of actual money from MS for >advertising, and a long history of generating glowing reviews of every new MS product...
Naw, it's like the most notorious whore on the street screaming abuse at a couple of teenagers for doing it with a stranger 'cause they thought the guy had a cute moustache & bought 'em a six-pack.
I can't believe anyone read this article & didn't fall over laughing uncontrollably. Especially in the Ziff-Davis editorial offices. EVERYBODY knows that ZD picks their Editor's Choice based on number of advertising bought. It's been that way for at least a decade.
Frank Sinatra once compared female journalists to prostitutes, the apologized the next day to the prostitutes. Maybe I ought to follow ol' Blue-eye's example & apologize to the two-bit whores for comparing them to ZD.
]knowing my karma is going to Hell in a handbasket[ Geoff
Re:Was Linux the competitor?
on
Endgame For SCO
·
· Score: 2
>I hate to be the one to point it out, because I like having karma, but you neglected to mention that some folks may have moved from >SCO to say.... Windows NT? Good point. I interviewed at a company who had a SCO Unix app. It was a turn-key product for doctor offices. The interviewer mentioned they were planning on migrating this to NT. And no, they hadn't considered either Linux or *BSD. One of the reasons I decided I didn't want the job well before the interview was over. While I had been unemployed for a couple of months, I wasn't *that* desperate for work. Geoff
>Why is everyone always bashing on drug smugglers?
I dunno. They seem to be universally disliked by governments everywhere, & was the first example that came to my mind.
Whyn't we just Godwinize this line of argument, & say that anyone seeking secrecy is obviously in the business of trafficing in kiddie pr0n? that's right, all of those folks who just want to be left alone are trading pics about how they made Junior do it with Fido!
(Except that there aren't enough child molestors out there on the 'Net trading pics to make it worth the law enforcement agencies' while to ask for an international agreement to watch the 'Net for dirtbags abusing the fiber in this way. They'd rather argue that drug dealers are encrypting all of their dealings with PGP, rot-13, & other computer generated cyphers, & that's why they need to be able to decrypt every communication out there.)
Slashdot Mirror
> Anyone who has been using Windows since version 3.1 (the earliest version at which the product was anything more than
> a joke) then they have, by now, paid between $250 and $500 for the product,
Hey, I've been using Windows 3.1 up to February of this year, & I never paid a dime to Billy G since it came installed on my computer.
> if they have been upgrading faithfully.
Er, like I said, I used Win 3.1 until February of this year. (Been using Linux exclusively since then, except for a day or two when I thought I fried my hard drive & had to revert to my old computer.) Except for being confused about which year it was (which was reflected in the date it returned for a given file), it worked just as well as it ever did.
Funny to relate, DOS 6.00 did not show a Y2K problem. Once I reset the date due to a BIOS problem, DOS had NO PROBLEM with this being the year 2000.
I might just wait until next year to exorcise DOS from that hard drive, just to see if DOS 6.00 was truly Y2K compliant.
]revealing a possibly fatal weakness[
Geoff
> It would be more productive to extensively train the managers to be competent in dealing specifically with bright and
> knowledgeable people, rather than ignoring a fundamental problem with IT work, which is that the more complex the work, the
> harder it is for managers to avoid being oafish fools about dealing with people who often are much smarter and more
> knowledgeable than they.
Sheesh, this reminds me of one of the worst jobs I've had since I started making a living from computers. (Warning: the following is a rant. If you don't want to read this, I'm sure a troll will post some Emily Dickinson for you shortly.)
It was a contract job with a bank undergoing a merger with an out-of-state bank, where we had to repoint the LANs from the local server room in Gresham to one in Minneapolis. (And if you live in the Portland, OR area, it was *that* job.)
At first it promised to be kind of interesting, learning about SNA networking with TCPIP, working with several platforms. I even learned how to do some simple configuration of Bay routers.
Unfortunately, the high points were as few & far between as mountains in Indiana: the consulting firm was so eager to put billable warm bodies on the job that there wasn't enough work to go around. For a couple of weeks, several of us sat around most of the day doing NOTHING. Add to that the fact the agency felt it was unprofessional for any of us to be seen sitting around doing nothing, we ended up spending this time cooped up in a forgotten conference room staring at each other.
And the project manager was a treat also. Former SysAdmin & recovering alcoholic with all of the diplomatic skills of a BOFH. He constantly chewed us out for taking the initiative in solving problems we encountered, instead of bucking all of our questions up the line. (I heard that he was upset that I was doing the stuff with the routers -- nothing more than granting them new IP numbers -- because I was the only one who had taken the time to watch how it was done, & understand the steps.)
And I had complained about this to the consulting firm. And they promised to do somethng about it.
The breaking point for me was when I got called in on a day I was promised off. All the way in, I expected that I would be sitting around, doing nothing; sure enough, I found our team sitting around waiting for direction. The only thing that kept me from walking out at that moment was encountering a colleague who needed help inventoring some switch rooms. We finished that task 5 hours later, just in time to be dragged into another butt-chewing session because ``we" hadn't been doing enough.
I seethed about that all weekend, decided that no job was worth being that angry about, & called the agency & gave them a week's notice. This resulted with a PHB from the agency giving me the line ``I never knew you were unhappy. No one told me anything."
I was able to get a job that started the next day & happily left. I later heard that I was the first of several to leave at that point. Something changed at that point, since the project actually got finished, two or three months late.
Sometimes it is as bad as you hear it is.
Geoff
> Your email address will end up ORBS, RBL and several other blacklists, which means your (brand new!) email address is
> now useless
No, IIRC, RBL applies to the domain, not the account on the domain. (A site gets black holed if it consistently proves itself unwilling to kick spammers & other abuse-types off of it's system.)
In other words, msn.com will get RBLed. AGAIN. After they made the minimum feeble attempts to crawl out of that space.
It's amazing that a company which prides itself for attracting so many ``smart people" has so many marketroids that get it in repeated trouble over so many issues that a couple minutes of applied commonsense would avoid.
Geoff
>Footnote: Actually, "OooOOOOOHhonnnngggh! is the cry of the spammer. After I pound its balls flat with a mallet.
To pick a nit here: if a spammer is an ``it", by definition a spammer is neither male nor female, & thus does not have testes (aka balls).
So how painful *is* the cry of a spammer when you crush its spores?
Geoff
>This same guy raced sailboats on the weekend, and treated all of 'his' (regardless of who they reported to) employees as if we
::blink::
>were crew on a sailing vessel.
::blink::
Uh, did this guy use ``Hubbard Technology"?
[Note to the puzzled: L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, had a thing for sailing. He gathered his most faithful culties onto a private navy, where he could be a Commodore of all he surveyed. Even though his most significant act while a commissioned officer during WW II was to shell an island belonging to Mexico, & thus cause an international incident.
[But I fear Nonesuch here may have actually worked for someone employing Scieno teachings. Which would explain why the company is on life support.]
Geoff
>Before MCSEs existed certifications were quite difficult to obtain, requiring a lot of study, coupled with hands-on practical
>experience to back-up the study.
Sorry, while I'm not a true old-timer in this business, before all of the horror stories about MCSEs, there was constant bitching about ``paper CNAs" -- people who read the NetWare manuals, passed the tests, but could not tell an Ethernet card from a Token ring card to save their lives.
The paper CNAs of yore had something of an excuse, though: in the late 1980's/early 1990, very few people had hands-on experinece creating or maintaining a LAN. Nowadays, any person with a modicum of motivation can build a LAN at home for the cost of a computer upgrade.
With computers available for under US$1000, & the MS software of your choice available for less than another $1000, there is really no excuse for paper MCSEs: if you can't spend that kind of money & time learning the software (but can spend those two on an MSCE bootcamp & test), you have no justification to be paid to fix or upgrade other people's computers.
Geoff
No, not that one -- although it is probably relevant. the essay I had in mind was ``Politics And The English Language"
Geoff
>One thing that nobody seems to have noticed/mentioned is that most airlines also do package shipping as part of their regular service.
.)
But make sure the airline's not Aeroflot. (At least based on the reputaiton I've heard . .
Geoff
. . . it's just the usual attempt of the PTB to increase their power by obscuring what they do thru language. George Orwell wrote a very pointed essay on this phenomena (& whose title escapes me -- I assume I'm not the only one who has read it on /.)
/. Posters) & otherwise reasonable people immediately consent to a ``temporary" abridgement of their natural rights.
For example, throughout US history, bills to improve the infrastucture have had the word ``military" or ``defense" tacked onto them in order to improve their chances to get passed: the various ``Military Road" acts of the mid-19th century, the Interstate highway act was described as a ``Defense" appropriation, & the Internet was originally the _Defense_ ARPA.
All you have to do is say that there are boogeymen out there (e.g., Anarchists, Bolsheviks, Drug Dealers, Child Molesters, even
Unfortunately the US is not unique in this regard. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the UK had its own extralegal Star Chamber, assigned to combat the threat of Catholicism.
Geoff
Geez, the subject line of this post says it all, I guess. ;-)
Seriously, my attitude has come from the fact that every couple of years I decide I'm being childish & stupid, & I make an attempt to give MS products ``just one more try". And usually within a matter of hours of making this resolution I find I want to drive up to Redmond & adjust the attitude of their design teams with a heavy, blunt object. Or just shoot the lot of them.
My most recent example: IE's incestuous relationship with Windows 2000. Now I'll admit that I rather liked how information was set out in the File Manager that came in Win 3.1: on one side, you had the directories on the drive set out in a tree metaphor, & on the other side, each file was presented on its own line, with the full file name, file size, time & date the file was last written to, & attributes all in a row. Lots of information at a single glance. And if you were scared to see all of this information, well with a few clicks of the mouse you could change it to a window full of icons.
A simple, intuitive setup. And Microsoft proceded to start hosing it up.
First MS started deprecating winfile, in favor of ``Windows Explorer". Since I'm not against change, I grumbled a little, wondered about some of the design implimentations, & ended up learning how to work with this program. I could get my winfile interface, I get the information I wanted how I wanted.
So life went on. Now in Win2k, though, the Windows Explorer has been replaced with IE. Now I'm no longer looking at a list of files & their characteristics, but at an unnecessary HTML page I don't want. Resize one window the wrong way, & instead of seeing all of the columns, I get a help page I don't need & didn't ask for. Every time I go to another directory, I'm back to a window full of meaningless icons -- as far as I can see, there's no way to set & save my preferences globally. And if I'm reading a page on the web when I decide to verify some files on a local drive . . . let's just say I've been warned about my vocabulary at work.
Huh? What's that? Why don't I RTFM?? I have, boyo. But that M is truly F'ed. Click on help, & you get choices like about the World Wide Web, or ``Microsoft and the Internet." (But I'm just trying to manage files on the drives in my employer's computer, not experience this irrelevant paradigm!) Using ``Search" on their help pages to get useful information is about as useful as trying to meet Ms. Right with a poorly-written personal ad. The answer is probably out there somewhere, buried in a hint mentioned in an aside while talking about something totally unrelated.
Microsoft must believe every computer user is a moron, because they work hard writing their user interface down to a moron's level. Everyone else gets confused & either (a) believes she/he is an idiot because she/he can't figure this mess out, or (b) gets just that much more resentful at MS, & resolves to work harder at finding & using a competing -- any competing -- product for their needs.
Too bad MS is a monopoly. That makes it hard to find competing products in many catagories.
Okay, okay, I'm done ranting. I've got all of that off my chest, & can go back to work now.
Geoff
Hmm. Supposedly if J. Random Hacker writes software that causes (say) a $1000-- loss to a given corporation, this corporation can sue J. R. to recover this amount of money.
But if J. R. writes software that causes our hypothetical corporation to have an increase of (again, say) $1000--, does this mean that the corporation has to sue J. R. to pay her or him some or all of this negative damage?
Maybe these suits are afraid of & the cost of tracking down random hackers to reimberse them for their contributions.
In a nutshell, this is what this whole stupid act on the basis of these legal sharks come down to: someone writes software that increases the market for their hardware, & they get told to stop it.
And if I'm being a smart-*ss about this, it's Friday & these same legal sharks don't deserve any more of my attention than that.
Geoff
No, at one point they were designed on a Cray. Steve Jobs walked into their corporate headquarters & wanted to buy one then & there.
When Seymour Cray heard about it, he shrugged, & admitted it was an appropriate choice. ``After all, I designed that Cray on a Macintosh."
]someone had to repeat this bit of folklore.computer[
Geoff
>Here's the thing I don't really understand (well, I understand it, but I don't accept it): Most programs and games don't need that fast a
>processor, so why are people buying it? The need for speed?
'Cause they're told they need it.
A recent issue of _Consumer_Reports_ stated that a new buyer should expect a minimum speed of 1 GHz in her/his new computer (unless it's used for non-CPU intensive tasks like word processing & Email).
Sheesh, I've been using computers with an average speed in the 400-600 MHz range (well, my home computer has two 400 MHz), & I have seen no problems with any of those being ``too slow". (For once, Andy is ahead of either Bill or Linus.)
The only reason I can think that _Consumer_Reports_ would state that is because the OEMs' PR flacks talked them into it.
Geoff
In every discussion of this infamous event, it seems that one important detail gets overlooked:
The failure of a single computer disabled an entire warship.
Let's be honest: if you can disable a warship by disabling a single computer, it doesn't matter what OS the machine is running. DOS, NT, Macintoshes, Linux, *BSD, Solaris & OS/390 are all equally vulnerable to a lucky shot that causes physical damage to the hardware.
The solution? Either multiple computers, or a distributed OS that can continue to run processes even while individual units are failing.
'Nuff said.
Geoff
I agreee -- the clarifications will be coming soon & fast. But not that the comments are ``technically ill-informed". It's because he's about to open a Pandora's box of hurt for the corporate music industry.
There is an old rule about not starting a war one cannot win (variously expressed as ``never invade Russia late in summer" or ``avoid a major land war in Asia"). This PHB has just declared war on all of the warez kiddies out there.
And what are these warez kiddies gonna do? Hmm, hey look Corporate Music depends on all of these sales of pop stars like Britney Spears, In Sync, & so forth. All of their names & sales are printed in the newspaper every week. What if they start burning copies of every CD & give them away? Boy, are those sales figures gonna dip & crash!
And there are probably even simpler & cheaper ways to circulate copies at NO COST to the end recipient. But since I'm not a criminal, nor do I advocate this response, I can't think of what they are.
And if you think the government can stop this kind of theft of intellectual property, then why haven't they stopped the drug trade?
My advice to the suits out there reading this is simple: get the artists behind you. People are making mp3 copies of songs & sharing them because they like the music & respect the artist. If the artists ask people using Napster or Gnutella to buy after they try, they will get the revenue. And you get the artists behind you by offering them decent recording contracts -- not by ripping them off.
Geoff
Sorry, I beat you to that. Check the IBM Patent Server.
So all of you ``First Post Lamerz" better knock it off. This is fair warning. Next time one of you lusers do this, I will sell the patent to a true scumbag of a company (No, I don't mean Microsoft -- Computer Associates would do nicely. Or maybe even Network ``Reviewing our software violates our NDA" Associates) that will track you down like a common criminal, & not only sue you but take your computer away & do even more evil stuff to you.
Now if I could only get the patent to pouring hot grits on my pants (pat. pend.) & turning women to stone (pat. pend.)
Geoff (pat. pend.)
>The reason that copyright holders are given this "right" is to give them temporary monopoly. However, if they are no longer
>using it, and they use copyright to stop further distribution, they are perverting and in fact working against the entire reason
>that copyright exists.
Good point.
One of the most hated things about copyright goes back to when it applied only to books. And that item was the fact that if a publisher bought the rights to your book, botched the selling of it, & let the work fall out of print, there was nothing that you, the author, could do to bring the book back into publication unless you could get the suits at the publishing house to return the rights to you.
Yeah, right. And Random House got to be the biggest publisher in the game by being such a nice guy.
There are a lot of books out there that remain out of print because the publisher can't figure out how to make a profit from it, but they don't want someone else doing it.
Well, at least if you can find the book in the library, you can read it. If a software manufacturer wants to sit on a product, there's no way for someone to use the program -- other than to download it from an abandonware site.
Geoff
Buddy, I'm a Boomer, & I know the details about Napster very well thankyouverymuch. (And I figure if the foks at RIAA had a clue, they'd stop racheting up the prices on every CD, & make it worth people's whiles to buy high-quality CDs over free, but lower-quality mp3s.)
In a nutshell -- yes, there are a lot of clueless people over 30. But the majority of people under are also clueless. Remember this when you decide to change the world. It just might help you to suceed.
Geoff
>But, even worse, worshipping technology in and of itself is stupid.
No argument about that. But the history of UNIX is far more interesting than other OS platforms for several reasons: it's the history of a definable sub-group of people, who are not bound by ties of employment or purchasing to one specific company, but are bound together because of the tools they created, shared, & refined.
This includes people who were interested in computer research, who were interested in developing technology or useful arts, & those who were interested in spreading the word about a technology either out of religious-like enthusiasm or to make a buck. There's a richness here that you just don't find with the history of, say, Windows 95 or the Amiga. (I know, I'm setting myself up to be flamed.)
Geoff
>Aside from the whole "Us and Them" treatment of contractors (Blue badges are Gods, all else are worthless scum), it extends to their view of the world in general.
It's exactly the same at Intel, except the contractors have Green badges. And contractors are limited to 18 months on any one contract.
This is the reason a growing number of people won't work at Intel, except at a premium over market rate.
Geoff
>So I would wait for a few more weeks, and see if the situation improves.
About a year ago, they moved all of the older posts to an inobvious location; in other words, first you had to do a search in the current archive, then you could do a search in the older archive.
Then a few months ago came the announced re-organization. So far, all they have told us is the same promise that the older archives should be back online.
Deja has been stupid about this. Right now, they are -- or were -- the only people who offered this service. They could have offered the older posts as a premium service -- maybe charged to the user by charging ISPs. Instead they apparently decided this unique service was not worth offering, & have discontinued it.
That would be typical yuppie dot-com thinking. I'd like to think that Deja didn't subscribe to that kind of thinking.
Geoff
For those of you who flunked Oregon geography, Washington Co. is to the West of Portland. 25 years ago it was part-rural, part-suburban. Then Intel came in, built a half-dozen campuses, invited their suppliers to also build there, & now it looks like SV North.
Lots of suburban sprawl, Hwy 26 is a parking lot of the day, & unless you have a blue badge & are vested in lots of stock, you have to put up with dweebs who happened to be lucky & have too much attitude. And every few years Intel (or Nike) complains that they need more tax subsidies, or else they're gonna take their new construction elsewhere.
Meanwhile, they bulldoze more & more of the native oak & pine -- & I mean real pine, not Douglas Fir -- so that they can build another office sprawl, plant it plane trees, & water the hell out of the grass so that you won't want to sit on it. It looks more like California every day.
Okay, this is probably nothing more than an articulate rant, but I feel better for having said it. And I look forward to seeing the movie.
Geoff
Sorry for the rant. But people like that make me sick that I like computers.
>That's like the pot calling the dinner plate black. Ziff-Davis has a long history of getting lots of actual money from MS for
>advertising, and a long history of generating glowing reviews of every new MS product...
Naw, it's like the most notorious whore on the street screaming abuse at a couple of teenagers for doing it with a stranger 'cause they thought the guy had a cute moustache & bought 'em a six-pack.
I can't believe anyone read this article & didn't fall over laughing uncontrollably. Especially in the Ziff-Davis editorial offices. EVERYBODY knows that ZD picks their Editor's Choice based on number of advertising bought. It's been that way for at least a decade.
Frank Sinatra once compared female journalists to prostitutes, the apologized the next day to the prostitutes. Maybe I ought to follow ol' Blue-eye's example & apologize to the two-bit whores for comparing them to ZD.
]knowing my karma is going to Hell in a handbasket[
Geoff
>I hate to be the one to point it out, because I like having karma, but you neglected to mention that some folks may have moved from >SCO to say.... Windows NT? Good point. I interviewed at a company who had a SCO Unix app. It was a turn-key product for doctor offices. The interviewer mentioned they were planning on migrating this to NT. And no, they hadn't considered either Linux or *BSD. One of the reasons I decided I didn't want the job well before the interview was over. While I had been unemployed for a couple of months, I wasn't *that* desperate for work. Geoff
>Why is everyone always bashing on drug smugglers?
I dunno. They seem to be universally disliked by governments everywhere, & was the first example that came to my mind.
Whyn't we just Godwinize this line of argument, & say that anyone seeking secrecy is obviously in the business of trafficing in kiddie pr0n? that's right, all of those folks who just want to be left alone are trading pics about how they made Junior do it with Fido!
(Except that there aren't enough child molestors out there on the 'Net trading pics to make it worth the law enforcement agencies' while to ask for an international agreement to watch the 'Net for dirtbags abusing the fiber in this way. They'd rather argue that drug dealers are encrypting all of their dealings with PGP, rot-13, & other computer generated cyphers, & that's why they need to be able to decrypt every communication out there.)
Geoff