. . . is to learn the meaning of the word ``level playing field."
>The Microsofties need a foot in the door among the Bush crowd so that their calls to a Bush White House are answered. Hiring one of the >candidate's consultants as their own consultant is a time-honored method to do so. Now they just need a similar friend from the Gore team.
No, they had their day in court. They spent it shooting holes in their foot, unable to even mitigate the charges that they abused their market position to destroy competitors with better products. (This assumes, of course, that they didn't employ such abusive tactics.)
And what are they doing now? Trying every behind-the-scene trick to save their sorry hineys. They & thier flacks whined about keeping government out of the high-tech business, & now that they've shown themselves unable to follow any rules, & requiring some kind of government intervention Billg & Co are smoozing big time with the lobbyists & other Beltway types to protect what they have stolen.
Microsoft: the Standard Oil Trust of our generation.
>The other problem is an incredible black hole of documentation. I've gone through everything at freshmeat, and none of them met my >criterion of being able to do multi-level backups and could span volumes of variable size. These two criterion aren't exactly difficult to >satisfy in the Windows world or even commercial UNIXes, but for linux OSS projects, it was nearly impossible to find it.
This ``incredible black hole" extends way beyond just how to use the program. Several months ago, my boss asked me to look into backup strategies, one of which is called ``Towers of Hanoi". Needless to say, nothing on Deja.com led me to understand just WTF this was. (Although I wasted several hours on reading about the math problem of the same name.;-) This book is valuable because it discusses strategies like that, as well as covers issues like hot & cold backups of databases, & related technologies like HSM & High Availability -- as well as storage technology.
My criticism of the book (which I have open at my elbow) is that Preston should have discussed commercial backup utilities in more detail -- even though he states a persuasive reason for this decision. (``Products change constantly. It would be impossible to keep this book up to date with the 50 different backup products that are available for Unix.") I still feel that providing an intelligent criticism of one or two products -- their strnegths, their weaknesses, how they work -- would help the newbie sysadmin, who seems to be the one usually delegated with this important, but unsexy task.
>My. arent WE superior? Let's just classify >EVERYONE who writes code for ALL flavors of M$ OS's as ignorant savages.
My, did I hit a nerve here? Are you a Windows programmer?
>After all, it's self evident that if you don't design single user apps for single user machines >as if they were meant for multiple users on servers you MUST be a moron.
Not my point. There are some nice single-tasking OSes out there -- Palm OS is one that comes to mind. Straightforward, doesn't leak memory. Nice work -- especially when you consider the OS was written by a handful of people while Microsoft was throwing dozens of people at their WinCE project.
But the Palm OS is designed to run for months without a reset or reboot. So you can't have memory leaks.
I'm talking about Windows NT/2K -- last I heard, MS said it was a server OS. Servers run multiple processes for multiple users, so I'd assume that this environment is multi-user & multi-tasking. But then, I think I'm superior -- according to you, & MS software shouldn't be expected to do so much.
Why MS can't write a reliable OS -- or applications for one -- with all of these qualities baffles me. They had access to the technology -- they wrote Xenix, & Dave Cutler was the project Manager for VMS before he led the NT group. They have the money to hire good programmers with experience in this kind of environment. I would think they could make NT just as reliable.
And what ought to stick in the craw of any Windows programmer is while the coders at Redmond are being paid to do it right, a bunch of amateurs without access to the technology figured out how to do it in their spare time. Based on these facts, I'd say that writing a reliable multi-tasking, multi-user OS is not rocket science any more. So why CAN'T Microsoft write better software?
>All I can say to that is: You flunked engineering economics, didn't you?
And your point is?
Here's a clue: a person makes better sense if they write sober & straight. Try it next time.
. . . while under MS Windows, the programmer has apparent no interest in the user's welfare.
I'm not sure why this is, but the records points to several possible reasons:
1) Laziness. Does anyone here remember the history of the format command in DOS? Originally, it would format the current working disk by default -- in other words, if you typed ``format" at a C:\> prompt, it the C:\ drive & everything on it was history. This was a Known Problem for several revisions of DOS (I think it was fixed in 4.0, but it could have been as late as 5.0 before that was fixed), that forced the clued to do all sorts of interesting things (e.g., rename the command, delete the command, substitute another binary for this one) to keep the newbies from toasting their data.
2) Marketing Reasons. About the time Melissa first wreaked havoc, someone asked the folks at Microsoft why Active X was turned on by default. ``We consider that an important feature," was the reply. In other words, the questionable usefulness of embeding fonts & animations in a given email outweighed the clear risk of malicious code. Newbies want 3l373 + k3wl stuff, & will pay for the new revision; sysadmins are expected to wade thru the poor documentation to support these purchases.
3) Lack of skill. Microsoft got its start in the world of microcomputers, which barely had the horsepower to run one application at a time. (Yes, there were TSR applications, but they were a bug that creative non-Microsoftie hackers turned into a feature. And were the door that allowed computer viruses to get into the OS.) Programmers at MS wrote their OS & flagship applications before they had learn how to write software that shared computer resources with other applications or users. And as we saw in #1, unless absolutely forced to, MS programmers never went back & rewrote old code, so their flagship applications like Word, Excell & so forth still don't play nice in a multi-tasking, multi-user environment.
Actually, to say they ``don't play nice" is a misnomer: they don't know how to play at all with anything else in that environment. Not only do they fail to share resources, they don't know when these resources are unavailable -- or what to do if the same have been tainted by malicious code. And since the programmers who developed & maintained these older products never learned how to do this, the new programmers -- & the new products in multi-tasking, multi-user environments -- also fail to properly interact with other software in this operating space.
4. All of the Above. Accepting the validity of any one reason above does not exclude the others, AFAIK.
>There are a few reasons, most involve the company I work for -- they'll pay for it, and there are certain jobs that open up only if you have >certification or a degree. I made the same complaint : cert!= good programmer. Their argument was pretty simple, and hard to argue with : >Just like you wouldn't hire a plubmer that's not bonded,insured and licensed, WE'RE not going to hire programmers that aren't. Go fig.
Ugh. That's disgusting. Do any of the great programmers have certs? (e.g., Ritchie, Kernighan, & most of the other famous hackers) I mean, it would funny -- in a disgusting way -- to hear an interviewer tell a prospective hire, ``you worked at Borland on their Pascal compiler . . . worked at Novell fixing bugs first on Netware 4.x, then Word Perfect . . . then at Microsoft, working on Windows 98 & Windows 2000. I'm sorry, since I don't see that you have an MCSE certificate, I have to say that you aren't qualified. Good luck in your job hunt."
> I suspect many people have this expectation that they will learn something about how the Windows OS works. > >That depends on how you go about studying for the test. I've seen some pass the MCSE test by luck, or memorization, get whisked off to >the server room, and then have to deal with the pain their cluelessness causes. I've seen smart people study and get better jobs because they >deserve it. This is just like anything else -- you CAN bullshit your way through it if you try.
I guess I'm revealing how I look at the descriptions of what certification tests cover: as a reality check for what I've learned either on the job or teaching myself. If you've spent your time as an ISP phone tech (say), you think the world revolves around dialers, winsocks, & crappy modems; you're oblivious to just how much video drivers & RAM enter into the equation.
This is my gripe: instead of offering a guarrantee that the recipient understands -- on some level -- how Windows works, their certification is merely another step in indoctrinating a computer professional into the Microsoft Solution to All Problems (tm).
>Here's a summary of MS' reply. >"Rather than answering your question, we'll reiterate that we're forcing the cert. change. Despite the numerous complaints you, as current >MSCEs, have logged, we'll try to tell you that this is being requested by our customers."
Well put.
>Crap. I use Visual Basic and C++, and wanted to get my MCSD, but now, I don't know if it's worthwhile.
Why do you want this piece of paper? If you have the experience in these programming language, then it really isn't necessary for your resume. If you think it will teach you something about these languages, then you are sadly mistaken.
From watching people first study & take CNA/CNE certs, & now MCS* ones, I suspect many people have this expectation that they will learn something about how the Windows OS works. Something that will head off the usual countless hours of trial-and-error testing to determine what is actually happening behind the GUI & amongst the poorly-documented registry & the swamp of dll's -- or at least give them a clue about what is important to know about Windows.
Unfortunately it does not work -- at least in this case. This is another example of Microsoft treating its ``partners" shabbily.
> If they > really cared about TrustE having some enforcement authority, they require that users re-authorize every time privacy changes.
They obviously don't. They have set the bar so low for awarding their ``Good Seal of Secret-keeping" that only one or two percent of all sites can't climb over it -- & the requirement is nothing more than to say ``We have no policy."
Sheesh. And even then, they have found themselves forced to talk to miscreants.
Mebbe we should just link cookies.txt to/dev/null, letting these bozos know just how eager we are to share information. Unfortunately, that won't close all of the security holes.
>Cute, but nothing special. It reads like an off-the-cuff story he gave to Fortune either because they'd asked him for some comments on the >future or just because all the usual SF markets turned it down.
IIRC, there used to be a lot more or these kind of sf-narrative-as-essay stories around twenty or twenty-five years ago. About things like how we all would be looking forward to eco-disaster by the first decade of the 21st century. Or how the US & the USSR would cripple each other with a nuclear exchange, leaving Europe & Japan to pick up the pieces -- or loot the finest minds to benefit their universities.
A few decades later, I find myself a little older, probably more sick of hearing myself start *any* statement with ``I remember when" than any of you might be, & also notice things never got as bad as these stories predicted. The oceans did not die in one, mutant algeal bloom -- but we seem to be losing a lot of amphibian species. We haven't had to worry about nuclear war for over a decade, but you still wouldn't want to spend a night in a Russian jail -- or be an avowed Communist in most US ones.
People who predict the future forget how slow it takes some changes to come to pass: yes, you can connect to the Internet in almost every country of the world by phone, but in most countries the biggest challenge is to find a phone that works well enough to transmit at 9600 cps. And outside of North America, you are going to pay for that connection by the minute or second.
On the other hand, some changes happen at a pace we never foresee: about 35 years ago, I saw an exhibit at OMSI here in Portland, where a number of different people had built their own computers -- refrigerator-sized contraptions made of wood & wire with all of the computing power of a contemporary hand calculator & I wondered if I would ever be able to own one like them. My Linux box at home can crunch numbers faster than the high-end mainframes of that day.
In short, some things have gotten a little worse -- & that sucks -- while some things have gotten a little better -- & that's cool. And many things are different than they used to be.
My guess is that people who used to write pieces like this one realized that the future was going to be so different from their guesses that they lost interest in prognosticating. While people will continue to screw up & cause some things to get worse, they will also screw up & be unable to intentionally make other things worse. And the converse -- that is, people will strive towards improvements -- will also be true. Not so much balancing one another as keeping the current hobo's stew well stirred & free of scalding on the bottom.
I feel a certain ``sameness" in this discussion about how SIS duplicates UNIX symlinks -- a ``sameness" that recurs with every development that MS announces as a ``brand-new innovation."
Let's look at another much-heralded inovation from MS's past -- multitasking -- & compare how its reception mirrors the reception to SIS:
1) MS announces -- with much enthusiasm & pride -- a new development. In 2000 it was SIS; in 1992, it was multitasking under Windows.
2) Based on their enthusiasm & the amount of pride, many knowledgeable computer users expect it to be the same -- or better -- as an existing useful feature under other OS's. In 2000 SIS is compared to UNIX symlinks; in 1992 people expected preemptive, multi-user multitasking.
3) After some examination, it is discovered that the MS innovation is not as useful as first thought. SIS replaces duplicate files with a pointer, & is not actually a symlink; windows multitasking is co-operative -- a second program or process can't get its share of the processor until the first one decides it's finished.
4) The real, but marginal, added good of this innovation is soon countered by the flaws or bugs it introduces. SIS can frustrate a user making backup copies, & can reduce CPU performance as it checks for duplicates; a locked program in a co-operative multi-tasking system can lock the OS just as tight as under a single-tasking OS like DOS -- forcing a reboot.
5) Users have no way around these flaws. ``Every time I move a 40MB file to my Y2K box it slows down to a crawl because its confirming this file is not a duplicate. Byte by byte." -- ``I lost two hours of work because a program GPFed & forced me to reboot the entire system."
6) Expectations of software written by a certain company are once again lowered.
Okay, I admit the last is speculative. But a lot less than it might seem.
As the other guy said, Matrea -- the name of the VR character, not the hackeress -- bugged me almost as much as anything about this episode.
At the risk of starting another ``it sucks to be a woman in the computer industry" thread (heck, if it makes you feel better, follow up with your own rant), let's admit that working as the lone female on a coding project can suck. Not only are you putting in 70-hour days to prove you can hack code as well or better than some unwashed mook with no social skills, you have to listen to his crude jokes that aren't even funny. So what do you do relieve stress?
Tell even raunchier jokes? Maybe. Pull some practical jokes of your own on the bathless mook? Maybe. Do a body-scan of some stripper, dress her up like a dominatrix in PVC, & create your own fantasy game (might not be a FPS) around her?
I don't think so.
If Gibson did write this episode (not to argue the point), it shows that he has no idea of how women actually think. One of the charms to the X-Files is the NON-SEXUAL relationship between Mulder & Scully: even though she's stated that she thinks he's something of a loon with his obsession over the occult & paranormal, he treats her like a colleague & not like a little girl -- which I'm sure she fears or knows other FBI agents would do.
Likewise, if a woman was the second technical lead on a project as big as this one, she'd have gotten her act together a long time ago. And if she had a software project on the side to her her blow off steam, it would be a lot more interesting than the one the show's creators dreamed up.
Then again, I seem to remember somewhere that Mataeya (sp?) was a Hindi goddess of fertility or life. There was a hint at the end that the guy tech at FPS had stolen this program from her, & had perverted this into his own means of destruction -- but I may be reading too much into a confused & technically laughable script.
>As a device driver developer, I have been using every weekly build of Win2k since before Beta2. I can tell you for a fact that >Win2k is buggy and unstable. I was at the Microsoft Plugfest, where system vendors and device vendors get together and try >running their stuff together under Win2k and WinMe (Windows Millenium). Build 2195, the build that went gold was cut after the >first day of the plugfest, due to a major bug that had to be fixed. Lots of bugs were reported during the following days of testing. >NONE of these low level, at the core of OS, in the kernel type of bugs were fixed for the gold release. We were told that they >would go into SP1. In fact, the cut off date to get a fix into SP1 was the end of december. My group has already submitted Plug 'N >Play issues that will not be fixed until SP2 at the earliest. This thing is not ready for prime time! >At the plugfest, Microsoft's engineers were often stumped with problems that only a small hotel full of only three days or so of >testing; imagine what millions of users in months of continuous running will find. Win2k's bug list is so large that you have to search >for your problem at their site rather than all the known issues being made public through a definitive list. I for one would want to >read that list before I bet my e-business site on it.
Those have to be the most damning two paragraphs ever written about a Microsoft product. People whose lives depend on MS products being ``acceptible" in terms of quality right now are in a deep funk over their career prospects, & the usual computer magazines are all full of employees trying to pass the obligatory positive spin review onto their co-workers.
I would not want to be a Microsoft employee right now. Not for any amount of money.
>Microsoft is responsible for bugs in other companies' software?
Any decent OS is responsible for handling error messages from the client applications, & keeping the rest of the system chugging along.
Think about it: if you had just kicked off an application that would update records in a million-row DB table, & it could be destroyed by some newbie's error of forgetting to include a semicolon, would *YOU* trust your work to that OS?
Of course, someone in the Navy was just plain stupid for entrusting an entire ship's safety to just one computer. A single, lucky shot could disable the computer, & the warship would be just as dead in the water if it was running NT, UNIX, or some POS written by a crackhead in return for a case of Ripple. And some prime rock.
>I recommend >staying in as many dinky little 50's circa Motel's rather than the horrible chain motels. YOu can get a room in most of these places for 20 to 30 >bucks a night and some of them are real architectural gems.
Good advice. I did the cross-country thing six years ago (in my relatively new & still reliable convertible, gloat, gloat), & would call ahead each morning to make reservations for that night. One of my best discoveries was the last cottage-style motels in SE Iowa (Iowa City, to be precise).
But I offer this advice with one serious warning: expect the phone service to suck big time, especially in the USWest territory. Not to start a ``my $RBOC sucks worse than yours" thread, but from everything I have seen, the further you get away from the major metropolitan regions, the older the phone technology. All of those circa-1975 analog phone switches being replaced by the neat SS-7 compliant, state-of-the-art switches are being refurbished & installed in smaller towns whose only sins are that they aren't in a major metro region.
In short, you can have Americana or high tech, but don't expect both.
>The market for web-clued people is so skewed that some companies will hire anyone they can find, and not all of them have clue.
And if people go to classes, looking to buy a clue, they don't get value for their dollar spent.
A friend of mine started a web development program at a local university, & one of the requirements to pass the introductory class was to be able to create a floppy to boot from DOS from.
Yeah, right: your $50K UNIX server running on a sparc chip crashes, & you're REALLY going to fix it by booting DOS on the system. I doubt this is useable information even for NT servers. (``Uh, I booted to DOS, but fdisk is reporting non-DOS partitions on all of my drives. Should I reformat & reinstall?")
Needless to say, my pal dropped out of the program.
>However, the morass of lawsuits AOL is liable to bring against those of us imposing the IDP on AOL
On what grounds?
Packets are carried on the Internet under a tacit gentlemen's agreement, ``you pass my traffic & I'll pass yours." If I don't want to pass your traffic for any good reason (e.g., you're a spamhaus, or it costs too much to service you) or bad (e.g., I don't agree with your politics, I only support sites that use $PICK_AN_OS), I don't have to. And I can configure my routers & hosts how I see fit.
If there were clear legal grounds, do you think threats of IDP would have worked in the past? Alternet/UUnet has equally deep pockets, but backed down after a similar threat.
And as for dragging people into court for any trumped-up cause, there's a thing known as barratry, or abuse of legal process. While certain unethical organizations get away with this (you can ask Xenu or his twin brother Xemu about one), I seriously doubt AOL would dare to do this. Or find enough good lawyers willing to risk debarment in return for any pile of money.
And besides, routers can be flakey things: they can drop packets or lose DNS lookups for all sorts of vague technical reasons. No amount of legal threats will ever put an end to *that.*
First, all I know about AOL 5.0's nasty habits is what I've read on the Internet. But let's assume that due to either incompetant or malicious coding, it's software is causing connection problems with other ISPs, who have to devote time & money to fixing it.
Okay, instead of siccing some hungry lawyers on them, why not call for an Internet Death Penalty?
This lawsuit will probably end up with a few lawyers making several million dollars, a number of AOL customers receiving a credit of at most $500 towards more AOL time, & continued problems with AOL software & their clueless management. An IDP would force them clean up their act & behave ethically -- & at the least the rest of the Internet would not have to deal with AOL.
Of course, if I was serious about this, I wouldn't be posting this on/. There are better fora to discuss this on. I have no real opinon about AOL either way. But if AOL pissed me off enough I wanted justice, an IDP is the solution I'd pursue -- not a lawsuit.
Well, I & some 100 of my closest friends rated that post at -850%. If we have to pay you for positive ratings, then it follows you pay us for negative ratings.
If so, then you owe us a combined $850.00. You can pay us -- thru me -- in check, credit or debit card.
[Now how do we use this argument with the software/Hollywood IP sharks?]
>Up until the 1930's somewhere, journals are pretty well >preserved. Then they suddenly get awful as paper mills switched to new methods.
s/9/8/ for most of printed materials.
I have several books I inherited that were printed in the 1800s. The two oldest -- bound periodicals from the 1830s -- handle like they were just printed a few years ago. The books from the 1870s are very brittle, & when I have children, I'll have to hide them away from the rugrats until they're old enough to understand just how fragile the darned things are.
And we're not talking quality literature here: the bound peridocials are examples of popular magazines, full of sentimental stories & poetry. At some point the covers were torn off, & my grandmother rescued them just before they were tossed into a fire pit. The one book from the 1870s are translations of Schiller, was far more carefully produced & has an inscription from my great-uncle to my great-aunt.
In a few hundred years, a lot of stuff from the 19th & 20th centuries will be lost. And it'll puzzle people how it happened.
Andreas Heldal-Lund manages xenu.net out of Norway. And Zenon used Swedish constitutional law to put the Scientology ``secret scriptures" into the Swedish public records.
As for anon.penet.fi, Julf closed that down on his own decision, not from pressure from the Finnish government. At least the Finnish government did not come barging in with a dozen lawyers & rent-a-cops, & steal his computer equipment as happened in the US -- & apparently to Johansen.
First, hearing what has happened to Jon Johansen sickens me. I always thought that the Scandinavian countries were wiser about the Internet than the US is -- look at how Sweden, Norway, & Finland have been at the forefront at defending the rights of their citizens against the manuevers of the ``Church" of Scientology to silence them.
On the other hand, everything that Signal 11 quotes here is the right route to go: it is exactly what a brave band of Netizens have been doing to fight the criminal organization I mentioned. The suits & their hirling lawyers want to keep people from knowing the truth, from sharing both the truth & the facts with other people.
Hiding information does not make it go away, but the act ensures that the good guys can't use it to benefit humanity.
Geoff
P.S. Okay, I admit I'm stupid to state this, but here's my first post to/. from my new Linux box. Worked out how to make PPP & PAP work despite Red Hat's crummy documentation. And I am proud of this achievement!
>From the posts that I've seen so far, it seems like many people are forgetting when this took place.
Perhaps. But I feel even more telling was a roundtable discussion in the latest IEEE Internet Computer Magazine (readable at http://computer.org/internet/v4n1/index.htm ) which included such Internet illuminaries as Carl Malamud, Bill Joy, & Bob Metcalfe. And Bill Gates was included for some reason; prolly because he was CEO of Microsoft.
Where the various contributors talked about the great projects they worked on in the past (e.g. Joy), or how the technology will change society in the future (e.g. Metcalfe), Gates focussed on how much money there is to make from the Internet. And didn't appear to care too much about the technology associated with the Internet -- where Lawrence Roberts shared an interesting graph showing how the price of delivering a tetrabit of data has fallen & will continue to fall over the years, Gates made a pitch for the Clear Type technology. (And forgetting to mention that it was originally developed by Apple.)
I can't help but feel that if a cure for the common cold were announced tomorrow, where most people would comment about how much it would help mankind, Gates would be figuring out a way to take over the technology & make another dozen billion dollars from it. Then complaining that he was being kept from innovating by a bunch of narrow-minded busy-bodies who are jealous of his successes.
(Note: I am not a therapist or psychiatrist, although I own a couple of books by Freud & have used prescription drugs.)
Looking this article, & recalling a couple of articles he's written in the past, Katz has a style that could be interpreted as speaking ex cathedra (although I believe he's trying to be thoughtful).
On the other hand, there are a lot of people with self-esteem issues, & I doubt the people who post to/. lack a representation from this group; how many of us decided to mess with computers & gadgets because dealing with people was too often a no-win situation. (I know that describes me.)
Katz, I believe, pushes these people's buttons without knowing it, & they lash out. Or use Katz as a target to strike out at, rather than the other irritants in their life.
In other words, Katz represents the authority figures they believe are messing up the flamer's lives, & telling him ``You suck" or ``Please die" is their contribution towards fighting against oppression.
Then again, given enough people any comment -- no matter how inoffensive (e.g., ``I like to go into the mountains & smell the air & watch the trees") -- will result with someone finding cause to start a flame war.
Geoff
Re:Just say no to anti-trust
on
AOL Nation
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· Score: 2
>Well, you point here is no good... at least if AOL is true to their word. They have already said they will be >opening their cable lines up to other ISP's.
Mebbe not. Case has already been making noises that this deal will allow the marketplace, not the government to decide how people get access.
This directly affects my home town, Portland OR, where there is a fight between the local government & ATT/TCI over cable access. Up until this development, AOL was the major corporate supporter for open access. Now he's seen as a traitor to this cause.
``Steve Case is the Benedict Arnold of the digital age, "said Jeff Chester of the Center for Media Education. ``He's campaigned all acros the country for open access. After he purchases access for AOL, he's no longer in favor of pubolic policy.
Also let me quote one of the local politicos on this, Erik Sten, Portland City Commissioner, who believes Cases words are ``code for no open access. Open access has probably lost a major champion."
Oh well, the Official Talking Heads (tm) have had their 15 minutes. They talked to Katz, they talked to Chester & to Sten. Odd that the news sources aren't talking to the folks actually out on the Internet, like the folks on/.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . is to learn the meaning of the word ``level playing field."
>The Microsofties need a foot in the door among the Bush crowd so that their calls to a Bush White House are answered. Hiring one of the
>candidate's consultants as their own consultant is a time-honored method to do so. Now they just need a similar friend from the Gore team.
No, they had their day in court. They spent it shooting holes in their foot, unable to even mitigate the charges that they abused their market position to destroy competitors with better products. (This assumes, of course, that they didn't employ such abusive tactics.)
And what are they doing now? Trying every behind-the-scene trick to save their sorry hineys. They & thier flacks whined about keeping government out of the high-tech business, & now that they've shown themselves unable to follow any rules, & requiring some kind of government intervention Billg & Co are smoozing big time with the lobbyists & other Beltway types to protect what they have stolen.
Microsoft: the Standard Oil Trust of our generation.
Geoff
Does this mean they'll stop questioning Kevin Mitnick about this latest computer crime?
Geoff
>The other problem is an incredible black hole of documentation. I've gone through everything at freshmeat, and none of them met my
;-) This book is valuable because it discusses strategies like that, as well as covers issues like hot & cold backups of databases, & related technologies like HSM & High Availability -- as well as storage technology.
>criterion of being able to do multi-level backups and could span volumes of variable size. These two criterion aren't exactly difficult to
>satisfy in the Windows world or even commercial UNIXes, but for linux OSS projects, it was nearly impossible to find it.
This ``incredible black hole" extends way beyond just how to use the program. Several months ago, my boss asked me to look into backup strategies, one of which is called ``Towers of Hanoi". Needless to say, nothing on Deja.com led me to understand just WTF this was. (Although I wasted several hours on reading about the math problem of the same name.
My criticism of the book (which I have open at my elbow) is that Preston should have discussed commercial backup utilities in more detail -- even though he states a persuasive reason for this decision. (``Products change constantly. It would be impossible to keep this book up to date with the 50 different backup products that are available for Unix.") I still feel that providing an intelligent criticism of one or two products -- their strnegths, their weaknesses, how they work -- would help the newbie sysadmin, who seems to be the one usually delegated with this important, but unsexy task.
Geoff
>My. arent WE superior? Let's just classify
>EVERYONE who writes code for ALL flavors of M$ OS's as ignorant savages.
My, did I hit a nerve here? Are you a Windows programmer?
>After all, it's self evident that if you don't design single user apps for single user machines
>as if they were meant for multiple users on servers you MUST be a moron.
Not my point. There are some nice single-tasking OSes out there -- Palm OS is one that comes to mind. Straightforward, doesn't leak memory. Nice work -- especially when you consider the OS was written by a handful of people while Microsoft was throwing dozens of people at their WinCE project.
But the Palm OS is designed to run for months without a reset or reboot. So you can't have memory leaks.
I'm talking about Windows NT/2K -- last I heard, MS said it was a server OS. Servers run multiple processes for multiple users, so I'd assume that this environment is multi-user & multi-tasking. But then, I think I'm superior -- according to you, & MS software shouldn't be expected to do so much.
Why MS can't write a reliable OS -- or applications for one -- with all of these qualities baffles me. They had access to the technology -- they wrote Xenix, & Dave Cutler was the project Manager for VMS before he led the NT group. They have the money to hire good programmers with experience in this kind of environment. I would think they could make NT just as reliable.
And what ought to stick in the craw of any Windows programmer is while the coders at Redmond are being paid to do it right, a bunch of amateurs without access to the technology figured out how to do it in their spare time. Based on these facts, I'd say that writing a reliable multi-tasking, multi-user OS is not rocket science any more. So why CAN'T Microsoft write better software?
>All I can say to that is: You flunked engineering economics, didn't you?
And your point is?
Here's a clue: a person makes better sense if they write sober & straight. Try it next time.
Geoff
. . . while under MS Windows, the programmer has apparent no interest in the user's welfare.
I'm not sure why this is, but the records points to several possible reasons:
1) Laziness. Does anyone here remember the history of the format command in DOS? Originally, it would format the current working disk by default -- in other words, if you typed ``format" at a C:\> prompt, it the C:\ drive & everything on it was history. This was a Known Problem for several revisions of DOS (I think it was fixed in 4.0, but it could have been as late as 5.0 before that was fixed), that forced the clued to do all sorts of interesting things (e.g., rename the command, delete the command, substitute another binary for this one) to keep the newbies from toasting their data.
2) Marketing Reasons. About the time Melissa first wreaked havoc, someone asked the folks at Microsoft why Active X was turned on by default. ``We consider that an important feature," was the reply. In other words, the questionable usefulness of embeding fonts & animations in a given email outweighed the clear risk of malicious code. Newbies want 3l373 + k3wl stuff, & will pay for the new revision; sysadmins are expected to wade thru the poor documentation to support these purchases.
3) Lack of skill. Microsoft got its start in the world of microcomputers, which barely had the horsepower to run one application at a time. (Yes, there were TSR applications, but they were a bug that creative non-Microsoftie hackers turned into a feature. And were the door that allowed computer viruses to get into the OS.) Programmers at MS wrote their OS & flagship applications before they had learn how to write software that shared computer resources with other applications or users. And as we saw in #1, unless absolutely forced to, MS programmers never went back & rewrote old code, so their flagship applications like Word, Excell & so forth still don't play nice in a multi-tasking, multi-user environment.
Actually, to say they ``don't play nice" is a misnomer: they don't know how to play at all with anything else in that environment. Not only do they fail to share resources, they don't know when these resources are unavailable -- or what to do if the same have been tainted by malicious code. And since the programmers who developed & maintained these older products never learned how to do this, the new programmers -- & the new products in multi-tasking, multi-user environments -- also fail to properly interact with other software in this operating space.
4. All of the Above. Accepting the validity of any one reason above does not exclude the others, AFAIK.
Geoff
>There are a few reasons, most involve the company I work for -- they'll pay for it, and there are certain jobs that open up only if you have
>certification or a degree. I made the same complaint : cert!= good programmer. Their argument was pretty simple, and hard to argue with :
>Just like you wouldn't hire a plubmer that's not bonded,insured and licensed, WE'RE not going to hire programmers that aren't. Go fig.
Ugh. That's disgusting. Do any of the great programmers have certs? (e.g., Ritchie, Kernighan, & most of the other famous hackers) I mean, it would funny -- in a disgusting way -- to hear an interviewer tell a prospective hire, ``you worked at Borland on their Pascal compiler . . . worked at Novell fixing bugs first on Netware 4.x, then Word Perfect . . . then at Microsoft, working on Windows 98 & Windows 2000. I'm sorry, since I don't see that you have an MCSE certificate, I have to say that you aren't qualified. Good luck in your job hunt."
> I suspect many people have this expectation that they will learn something about how the Windows OS works.
>
>That depends on how you go about studying for the test. I've seen some pass the MCSE test by luck, or memorization, get whisked off to
>the server room, and then have to deal with the pain their cluelessness causes. I've seen smart people study and get better jobs because they
>deserve it. This is just like anything else -- you CAN bullshit your way through it if you try.
I guess I'm revealing how I look at the descriptions of what certification tests cover: as a reality check for what I've learned either on the job or teaching myself. If you've spent your time as an ISP phone tech (say), you think the world revolves around dialers, winsocks, & crappy modems; you're oblivious to just how much video drivers & RAM enter into the equation.
This is my gripe: instead of offering a guarrantee that the recipient understands -- on some level -- how Windows works, their certification is merely another step in indoctrinating a computer professional into the Microsoft Solution to All Problems (tm).
Geoff
>Here's a summary of MS' reply.
>"Rather than answering your question, we'll reiterate that we're forcing the cert. change. Despite the numerous complaints you, as current
>MSCEs, have logged, we'll try to tell you that this is being requested by our customers."
Well put.
>Crap. I use Visual Basic and C++, and wanted to get my MCSD, but now, I don't know if it's worthwhile.
Why do you want this piece of paper? If you have the experience in these programming language, then it really isn't necessary for your resume. If you think it will teach you something about these languages, then you are sadly mistaken.
From watching people first study & take CNA/CNE certs, & now MCS* ones, I suspect many people have this expectation that they will learn something about how the Windows OS works. Something that will head off the usual countless hours of trial-and-error testing to determine what is actually happening behind the GUI & amongst the poorly-documented registry & the swamp of dll's -- or at least give them a clue about what is important to know about Windows.
Unfortunately it does not work -- at least in this case. This is another example of Microsoft treating its ``partners" shabbily.
Geoff
> If they
/dev/null, letting these bozos know just how eager we are to share information. Unfortunately, that won't close all of the security holes.
> really cared about TrustE having some enforcement authority, they require that users re-authorize every time privacy changes.
They obviously don't. They have set the bar so low for awarding their ``Good Seal of Secret-keeping" that only one or two percent of all sites can't climb over it -- & the requirement is nothing more than to say ``We have no policy."
Sheesh. And even then, they have found themselves forced to talk to miscreants.
Mebbe we should just link cookies.txt to
Geoff
>Cute, but nothing special. It reads like an off-the-cuff story he gave to Fortune either because they'd asked him for some comments on the
>future or just because all the usual SF markets turned it down.
IIRC, there used to be a lot more or these kind of sf-narrative-as-essay stories around twenty or twenty-five years ago. About things like how we all would be looking forward to eco-disaster by the first decade of the 21st century. Or how the US & the USSR would cripple each other with a nuclear exchange, leaving Europe & Japan to pick up the pieces -- or loot the finest minds to benefit their universities.
A few decades later, I find myself a little older, probably more sick of hearing myself start *any* statement with ``I remember when" than any of you might be, & also notice things never got as bad as these stories predicted. The oceans did not die in one, mutant algeal bloom -- but we seem to be losing a lot of amphibian species. We haven't had to worry about nuclear war for over a decade, but you still wouldn't want to spend a night in a Russian jail -- or be an avowed Communist in most US ones.
People who predict the future forget how slow it takes some changes to come to pass: yes, you can connect to the Internet in almost every country of the world by phone, but in most countries the biggest challenge is to find a phone that works well enough to transmit at 9600 cps. And outside of North America, you are going to pay for that connection by the minute or second.
On the other hand, some changes happen at a pace we never foresee: about 35 years ago, I saw an exhibit at OMSI here in Portland, where a number of different people had built their own computers -- refrigerator-sized contraptions made of wood & wire with all of the computing power of a contemporary hand calculator & I wondered if I would ever be able to own one like them. My Linux box at home can crunch numbers faster than the high-end mainframes of that day.
In short, some things have gotten a little worse -- & that sucks -- while some things have gotten a little better -- & that's cool. And many things are different than they used to be.
My guess is that people who used to write pieces like this one realized that the future was going to be so different from their guesses that they lost interest in prognosticating. While people will continue to screw up & cause some things to get worse, they will also screw up & be unable to intentionally make other things worse. And the converse -- that is, people will strive towards improvements -- will also be true. Not so much balancing one another as keeping the current hobo's stew well stirred & free of scalding on the bottom.
Geoff
I feel a certain ``sameness" in this discussion about how SIS duplicates UNIX symlinks -- a ``sameness" that recurs with every development that MS announces as a ``brand-new innovation."
Let's look at another much-heralded inovation from MS's past -- multitasking -- & compare how its reception mirrors the reception to SIS:
1) MS announces -- with much enthusiasm & pride -- a new development. In 2000 it was SIS; in 1992, it was multitasking under Windows.
2) Based on their enthusiasm & the amount of pride, many knowledgeable computer users expect it to be the same -- or better -- as an existing useful feature under other OS's. In 2000 SIS is compared to UNIX symlinks; in 1992 people expected preemptive, multi-user multitasking.
3) After some examination, it is discovered that the MS innovation is not as useful as first thought. SIS replaces duplicate files with a pointer, & is not actually a symlink; windows multitasking is co-operative -- a second program or process can't get its share of the processor until the first one decides it's finished.
4) The real, but marginal, added good of this innovation is soon countered by the flaws or bugs it introduces. SIS can frustrate a user making backup copies, & can reduce CPU performance as it checks for duplicates; a locked program in a co-operative multi-tasking system can lock the OS just as tight as under a single-tasking OS like DOS -- forcing a reboot.
5) Users have no way around these flaws. ``Every time I move a 40MB file to my Y2K box it slows down to a crawl because its confirming this file is not a duplicate. Byte by byte." -- ``I lost two hours of work because a program GPFed & forced me to reboot the entire system."
6) Expectations of software written by a certain company are once again lowered.
Okay, I admit the last is speculative. But a lot less than it might seem.
Geoff
As the other guy said, Matrea -- the name of the VR character, not the hackeress -- bugged me almost as much as anything about this episode.
At the risk of starting another ``it sucks to be a woman in the computer industry" thread (heck, if it makes you feel better, follow up with your own rant), let's admit that working as the lone female on a coding project can suck. Not only are you putting in 70-hour days to prove you can hack code as well or better than some unwashed mook with no social skills, you have to listen to his crude jokes that aren't even funny. So what do you do relieve stress?
Tell even raunchier jokes? Maybe. Pull some practical jokes of your own on the bathless mook? Maybe. Do a body-scan of some stripper, dress her up like a dominatrix in PVC, & create your own fantasy game (might not be a FPS) around her?
I don't think so.
If Gibson did write this episode (not to argue the point), it shows that he has no idea of how women actually think. One of the charms to the X-Files is the NON-SEXUAL relationship between Mulder & Scully: even though she's stated that she thinks he's something of a loon with his obsession over the occult & paranormal, he treats her like a colleague & not like a little girl -- which I'm sure she fears or knows other FBI agents would do.
Likewise, if a woman was the second technical lead on a project as big as this one, she'd have gotten her act together a long time ago. And if she had a software project on the side to her her blow off steam, it would be a lot more interesting than the one the show's creators dreamed up.
Then again, I seem to remember somewhere that Mataeya (sp?) was a Hindi goddess of fertility or life. There was a hint at the end that the guy tech at FPS had stolen this program from her, & had perverted this into his own means of destruction -- but I may be reading too much into a confused & technically laughable script.
Sigh.
It's clearly the last season for the X-Files.
Geoff
>But to make it a good game...we'd have to agree on something that actually beats M$.
You mean, something that M$ beats?
If so, how about the frustrated sysadmin, who has been trying to keep the NT box from going down for last 6 days?
Geoff
>As a device driver developer, I have been using every weekly build of Win2k since before Beta2. I can tell you for a fact that
>Win2k is buggy and unstable. I was at the Microsoft Plugfest, where system vendors and device vendors get together and try
>running their stuff together under Win2k and WinMe (Windows Millenium). Build 2195, the build that went gold was cut after the
>first day of the plugfest, due to a major bug that had to be fixed. Lots of bugs were reported during the following days of testing.
>NONE of these low level, at the core of OS, in the kernel type of bugs were fixed for the gold release. We were told that they
>would go into SP1. In fact, the cut off date to get a fix into SP1 was the end of december. My group has already submitted Plug 'N
>Play issues that will not be fixed until SP2 at the earliest. This thing is not ready for prime time!
>At the plugfest, Microsoft's engineers were often stumped with problems that only a small hotel full of only three days or so of
>testing; imagine what millions of users in months of continuous running will find. Win2k's bug list is so large that you have to search
>for your problem at their site rather than all the known issues being made public through a definitive list. I for one would want to
>read that list before I bet my e-business site on it.
Those have to be the most damning two paragraphs ever written about a Microsoft product. People whose lives depend on MS products being ``acceptible" in terms of quality right now are in a deep funk over their career prospects, & the usual computer magazines are all full of employees trying to pass the obligatory positive spin review onto their co-workers.
I would not want to be a Microsoft employee right now. Not for any amount of money.
Geoff
>Microsoft is responsible for bugs in other companies' software?
Any decent OS is responsible for handling error messages from the client applications, & keeping the rest of the system chugging along.
Think about it: if you had just kicked off an application that would update records in a million-row DB table, & it could be destroyed by some newbie's error of forgetting to include a semicolon, would *YOU* trust your work to that OS?
Of course, someone in the Navy was just plain stupid for entrusting an entire ship's safety to just one computer. A single, lucky shot could disable the computer, & the warship would be just as dead in the water if it was running NT, UNIX, or some POS written by a crackhead in return for a case of Ripple. And some prime rock.
Geoff
>I recommend
>staying in as many dinky little 50's circa Motel's rather than the horrible chain motels. YOu can get a room in most of these places for 20 to 30
>bucks a night and some of them are real architectural gems.
Good advice. I did the cross-country thing six years ago (in my relatively new & still reliable convertible, gloat, gloat), & would call ahead each morning to make reservations for that night. One of my best discoveries was the last cottage-style motels in SE Iowa (Iowa City, to be precise).
But I offer this advice with one serious warning: expect the phone service to suck big time, especially in the USWest territory. Not to start a ``my $RBOC sucks worse than yours" thread, but from everything I have seen, the further you get away from the major metropolitan regions, the older the phone technology. All of those circa-1975 analog phone switches being replaced by the neat SS-7 compliant, state-of-the-art switches are being refurbished & installed in smaller towns whose only sins are that they aren't in a major metro region.
In short, you can have Americana or high tech, but don't expect both.
Geoff
>The market for web-clued people is so skewed that some companies will hire anyone they can find, and not all of them have clue.
And if people go to classes, looking to buy a clue, they don't get value for their dollar spent.
A friend of mine started a web development program at a local university, & one of the requirements to pass the introductory class was to be able to create a floppy to boot from DOS from.
Yeah, right: your $50K UNIX server running on a sparc chip crashes, & you're REALLY going to fix it by booting DOS on the system. I doubt this is useable information even for NT servers. (``Uh, I booted to DOS, but fdisk is reporting non-DOS partitions on all of my drives. Should I reformat & reinstall?")
Needless to say, my pal dropped out of the program.
Geoff
>However, the morass of lawsuits AOL is liable to bring against those of us imposing the IDP on AOL
On what grounds?
Packets are carried on the Internet under a tacit gentlemen's agreement, ``you pass my traffic & I'll pass yours." If I don't want to pass your traffic for any good reason (e.g., you're a spamhaus, or it costs too much to service you) or bad (e.g., I don't agree with your politics, I only support sites that use $PICK_AN_OS), I don't have to. And I can configure my routers & hosts how I see fit.
If there were clear legal grounds, do you think threats of IDP would have worked in the past? Alternet/UUnet has equally deep pockets, but backed down after a similar threat.
And as for dragging people into court for any trumped-up cause, there's a thing known as barratry, or abuse of legal process. While certain unethical organizations get away with this (you can ask Xenu or his twin brother Xemu about one), I seriously doubt AOL would dare to do this. Or find enough good lawyers willing to risk debarment in return for any pile of money.
And besides, routers can be flakey things: they can drop packets or lose DNS lookups for all sorts of vague technical reasons. No amount of legal threats will ever put an end to *that.*
Geoff
First, all I know about AOL 5.0's nasty habits is what I've read on the Internet. But let's assume that due to either incompetant or malicious coding, it's software is causing connection problems with other ISPs, who have to devote time & money to fixing it.
/. There are better fora to discuss this on. I have no real opinon about AOL either way. But if AOL pissed me off enough I wanted justice, an IDP is the solution I'd pursue -- not a lawsuit.
Okay, instead of siccing some hungry lawyers on them, why not call for an Internet Death Penalty?
This lawsuit will probably end up with a few lawyers making several million dollars, a number of AOL customers receiving a credit of at most $500 towards more AOL time, & continued problems with AOL software & their clueless management. An IDP would force them clean up their act & behave ethically -- & at the least the rest of the Internet would not have to deal with AOL.
Of course, if I was serious about this, I wouldn't be posting this on
Geoff
Well, I & some 100 of my closest friends rated that post at -850%. If we have to pay you for positive ratings, then it follows you pay us for negative ratings.
If so, then you owe us a combined $850.00. You can pay us -- thru me -- in check, credit or debit card.
[Now how do we use this argument with the software/Hollywood IP sharks?]
Geoff
>Up until the 1930's somewhere, journals are pretty well
>preserved. Then they suddenly get awful as paper mills switched to new methods.
s/9/8/ for most of printed materials.
I have several books I inherited that were printed in the 1800s. The two oldest -- bound periodicals from the 1830s -- handle like they were just printed a few years ago. The books from the 1870s are very brittle, & when I have children, I'll have to hide them away from the rugrats until they're old enough to understand just how fragile the darned things are.
And we're not talking quality literature here: the bound peridocials are examples of popular magazines, full of sentimental stories & poetry. At some point the covers were torn off, & my grandmother rescued them just before they were tossed into a fire pit. The one book from the 1870s are translations of Schiller, was far more carefully produced & has an inscription from my great-uncle to my great-aunt.
In a few hundred years, a lot of stuff from the 19th & 20th centuries will be lost. And it'll puzzle people how it happened.
Geoff
Andreas Heldal-Lund manages xenu.net out of Norway. And Zenon used Swedish constitutional law to put the Scientology ``secret scriptures" into the Swedish public records.
As for anon.penet.fi, Julf closed that down on his own decision, not from pressure from the Finnish government. At least the Finnish government did not come barging in with a dozen lawyers & rent-a-cops, & steal his computer equipment as happened in the US -- & apparently to Johansen.
Geoff (not the other one)
First, hearing what has happened to Jon Johansen sickens me. I always thought that the Scandinavian countries were wiser about the Internet than the US is -- look at how Sweden, Norway, & Finland have been at the forefront at defending the rights of their citizens against the manuevers of the ``Church" of Scientology to silence them.
/. from my new Linux box. Worked out how to make PPP & PAP work despite Red Hat's crummy documentation. And I am proud of this achievement!
On the other hand, everything that Signal 11 quotes here is the right route to go: it is exactly what a brave band of Netizens have been doing to fight the criminal organization I mentioned. The suits & their hirling lawyers want to keep people from knowing the truth, from sharing both the truth & the facts with other people.
Hiding information does not make it go away, but the act ensures that the good guys can't use it to benefit humanity.
Geoff
P.S. Okay, I admit I'm stupid to state this, but here's my first post to
>From the posts that I've seen so far, it seems like many people are forgetting when this took place.
Perhaps. But I feel even more telling was a roundtable discussion in the latest IEEE Internet Computer Magazine (readable at http://computer.org/internet/v4n1/index.htm ) which included such Internet illuminaries as Carl Malamud, Bill Joy, & Bob Metcalfe. And Bill Gates was included for some reason; prolly because he was CEO of Microsoft.
Where the various contributors talked about the great projects they worked on in the past (e.g. Joy), or how the technology will change society in the future (e.g. Metcalfe), Gates focussed on how much money there is to make from the Internet. And didn't appear to care too much about the technology associated with the Internet -- where Lawrence Roberts shared an interesting graph showing how the price of delivering a tetrabit of data has fallen & will continue to fall over the years, Gates made a pitch for the Clear Type technology. (And forgetting to mention that it was originally developed by Apple.)
I can't help but feel that if a cure for the common cold were announced tomorrow, where most people would comment about how much it would help mankind, Gates would be figuring out a way to take over the technology & make another dozen billion dollars from it. Then complaining that he was being kept from innovating by a bunch of narrow-minded busy-bodies who are jealous of his successes.
Geoff
(Note: I am not a therapist or psychiatrist, although I own a couple of books by Freud & have used prescription drugs.)
/. lack a representation from this group; how many of us decided to mess with computers & gadgets because dealing with people was too often a no-win situation. (I know that describes me.)
Looking this article, & recalling a couple of articles he's written in the past, Katz has a style that could be interpreted as speaking ex cathedra (although I believe he's trying to be thoughtful).
On the other hand, there are a lot of people with self-esteem issues, & I doubt the people who post to
Katz, I believe, pushes these people's buttons without knowing it, & they lash out. Or use Katz as a target to strike out at, rather than the other irritants in their life.
In other words, Katz represents the authority figures they believe are messing up the flamer's lives, & telling him ``You suck" or ``Please die" is their contribution towards fighting against oppression.
Then again, given enough people any comment -- no matter how inoffensive (e.g., ``I like to go into the mountains & smell the air & watch the trees") -- will result with someone finding cause to start a flame war.
Geoff
>Well, you point here is no good... at least if AOL is true to their word. They have already said they will be
/.
>opening their cable lines up to other ISP's.
Mebbe not. Case has already been making noises that this deal will allow the marketplace, not the government to decide how people get access.
This directly affects my home town, Portland OR, where there is a fight between the local government & ATT/TCI over cable access. Up until this development, AOL was the major corporate supporter for open access. Now he's seen as a traitor to this cause.
``Steve Case is the Benedict Arnold of the digital age, "said Jeff Chester of the Center for Media Education. ``He's campaigned all acros the country for open access. After he purchases access for AOL, he's no longer in favor of pubolic policy.
Also let me quote one of the local politicos on this, Erik Sten, Portland City Commissioner, who believes Cases words are ``code for no open access. Open access has probably lost a major champion."
Oh well, the Official Talking Heads (tm) have had their 15 minutes. They talked to Katz, they talked to Chester & to Sten. Odd that the news sources aren't talking to the folks actually out on the Internet, like the folks on
Geoff