>I'm of the opinion that perhaps the reason why so many geeks have such low social graces is because of the way in which we are treated growing up.
I agree with you, but I think there is more to what's happening than just getting labelled, treated like dirt, & finding refuge in developing mental skills.
Joe realizes, early on, that he is not top dog. He can either double-down & suck-up to the top dog, or he can find refuge in books or other things. And to get good in any area -- be it sports, auto repair or computers -- you have to get devoted to it. While other people are out partying, getting laid or just generally goofing off, the proto-geek is playing with code, getting hardware to stuff that's not supported, basically learning the subject from the inside out.
Or, to put it simply:
Lack of social skills => increased time training self => lack of social skills
And consider: when was the last time you talked to a good automechanic who had good social skills?
The original reason for not having social skills is really not the point here: if you're autistic (let's say) with a sub-normal IQ, you're not going to be a great programmer. Good maybe. And from my limited exposure to people with mental illness, most are not high-IQ level; probably at least the same proportion as in the general population.
And lastly, let's also consider what our budding proto-geek is spending most of his time learning. If it's a useful skill -- like computers or auto repair -- our proto-geek will end up envied by everyone for having the protential at making lots of money. If it's not a useful skill -- say he's memorizing sports statistics or studying accounts of famous serial killers -- then people will just conclude he's plain weird & won't ever amount to anything.
But then, I'm probably using the word ``useful" for values defined by parents . . .
The funny thing about this whole debate is that Barbrook NEVER mentions the thesis of ``Gift Culture". His concern is with the ``Digerati", & how they mimic the Stalinist Communist Party in being the keepers of the truth, & the vanguard of the revolution.
If the man could write better, the irony of Libertarian technocrats being compared to Communists would be delightful. Unfortunately, he writes about as well as any hack acadmeic New Leftist.
>Geez... "We don't have enough hard drive space"?..."We don't have enough memory"? Go buy a couple of 27gig drives for each machine, up them to >512 megs of memory.
You're kidding, right? What you're specing out are resources more appropriate for a server than a client. (Then maybe we all need Crays to read our email!;-)
In case you're serious, GM has in the neighborhood of 40,000 dealers across the US. A 27 gig drive would set you back maybe $700 each. 512MB of memory maybe $500. That comes to 48 million dollars; say GM gets a 15% discount for buying volume, it's still more than $40 million.
If someone could walk in with an alternative OS & application, using the same existing hardware & drop a new solution for 4 or 5 million, that's a big win. Careers have been made on stuff like that.
>I mean, it's nice the guy is the operations manager for their dealer network, but this is really a non-story.
Or else he's sending up a trial balloon to see how a) The car dealer network reacts (e.g., ``No effin' way I want that Linnucks crap runnin' mah computers" or ``Give it a try -- cain't be any worse than that Microcrap on ourn computers"), or
b) See how Microsoft reacts (e.g., ``We can offer you great terms on a nationwide license to Win2000 with the same level of support we offer Intel"), or
c) Making an effort to demonstrate to someone just how hard he's looking at alternatives to their present computer system (e.g., ``I know that it crashes every day. But see how hard I'm studying alternatives? Now do you believe me when I say it's the best system we can buy? And will you authorize another business trip to Acapulco?")
There's undoubtedly more to the story than meets the eye, much of which Slashdotters prolly don't want to know. Let's just focus our attention at making the code better.
>I also find it pretty pathetic that the NSA would need to contact Microsoft and implement a backdoor to access NT.
No, what is pathetic is that over a hundred sovereign countries now have a good reason to stop buying MS software.
Fer instance, let's say you are a clerk in the UK Foreign Office, & your job is to type memos about Top Secret stuff. And someone in MI-5 discovers that your computer has been talking to one in Virginia at a suspected NSA site. Over an allegedly secure TCPIP network.
How many pairs of underwear will be soiled in this scenario:
1) The clerks? 2) The clerk's supervisor? 3) The sysadmin for the network? 4) The local MS salesdroid? 5) All of the above?
And for extra credit, s/UK Foreign Office/Chinese Foreign Ministry/ & s/pairs of underwear will be soiled/people will be executed/ ?
>Think a year or so ahead, where cable modems are more ubiquitous, and Microsoft has continued to build up influential inventment positions in a large >number of cable companies.
But you still come back to quality of content.
And the folks who choose this sort of stuff for a living right now screw it up *way* more often than they get it right. Or get screwed over by change in fashion, change in fads, or change in advertisers.
MS will wish for the days when all they had to worry about was buggy code.
>. . . look for Gates to >reinvent Microsoft as an on-line media company.
And that will be the end of Microsoft.
Think MS is having fits over Open Source software like Linux, *BSD, Apache & Samba? Publishing is a high-risk, high-cost business. Take the book industry: the traditional rule of thumb is that of ten books published every year, 7 loose money, 2 break even, & the tenth one pays for the other nine.
Television is about the same -- only where the cost of publishing the average book is in the tens of thousands, the average tv show is in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions.
And movie-making is even more risky: does anyone else out there remember how the movie _Heaven's Gate_ drove a major studio into bankrupcy?
Of course, if the folks in Redmond were truly imaginative, innovative people, who relied on their skills & not on their hands around the throat of the computer industry, they might be able to pull this off.;-)
A couple of points that have gotten overlooked that makes a RH acquisition of SCO attractive:
1. An existing customer base. Seriously, most people who have fought^Wused SCO Unix have an existing investment in Intel-based hardware. Being able to tell them that for a minimal cost they have an upgrade path to a UNIX-like OS that is cleaner than SCO & with more of a future will not only keep these customers, but will immediately increase the Linux marketshare.
BTW, I have used SCO Unix. It sucks. (You have to recompiled the kernel & reboot to change the IP address? Give me a break. Even NT has a better answer.)
2. SCO owns the copyright on UNIX, last I heard. (They bought it from Novell who bought it from AT&T.) Need I say more?
>So what they're talking about here is nameservers. Right. So if all thirteen root nameservers go down, DNS will be unreliable, yes.
If I understand the distributed nature of DNS, even if these puppies blow, DNS will still return IPs for domain names. (It may require lots of sysadmins hacking the time-to-live values in their nameservers, but the problem can be patched over until these root servers are back online.)
IIRC, root servers are just one step in the IP number lookup process. When a client needs to know an IP number of a domain name, it will look to the TLD nameserver -- the servers for.com,.uk,.org, & so forth -- for the IP of the given domain. If it hasn't verified the IP address for the TLD nameserver more recently than the time to live value, THEN the client will query the root server.
In other words, the root servers only affect a tiny fraction of 1% of all of the nameserver queries executed.
Methinks NSI is spreading a little FUD, hoping that they get the contract to manage the other 11 root servers.
I've been following all of the predictions of disaster, Armageddon & widespread riotting resulting from mistakes made by some lazy programmers with a bit of amusement.
Let's start by looking at what we depend on that could be affected by the Y2K problem: there's stores, banks, insurance & financial companies, the power companies, phone companies, & water companies.
Oh yeah -- & your programmable VCR, televisions & thermostats.
Consider that stores make their money by *selling* things. If the computers in a given store all go telegraph underground, the managers will figure out some way to keep the doors open, keep the deliveries coming, & calculate how much you should pay them. They may even continue to accept checks & plastic.
Banks & insurance companies are paranoid about losing money, so they routinely print off their records. (So my wife, an ex-Key Bank accountant tells me.) They aren't going to forget you owe them money because of some Y2K bug -- at least not more frequently than they have been.
As for brokerage houses & other financial institutions, seeing how the S&P 500 has outperformed over 70% of the stock funds out there, losing money due to Y2K is the least of anyone's worries.
And the IRS has come up with a simple -- yet elegant solution for the Y2K bug: they decided that fiscal 1999 now has 99 months. So they now have a Y2007 problem. (A fun fact I also learned from my wife, the accountant.)
Power & phone companies all have tested their switches, & assure us that they will work after 1 January. This is likely because most of their equipment does not care what year it is. (For example, I understand that Nortel phone switches only care about a year value around 31 December/ 1 January to help determine a call's start & end time. Otherwise, the year value is irrelevant information.)
Water companies have it even easier: if their programmable equipment remians unfixed by the magic date, they can send a guy with a wrench to each of their switching sites & crank all of the valves open, & rely on gravity to make the deliveries.
So it comes down to the fact that programmable appliances like VCRs, thermostats, alarm clocks & televisions might fail. (Which I doubt, seeing how 25% of all VCRs are still blinking 12:00, & otherwise work just fine.) And according to the pundits, people will take to the streets & riot over this.
If the pundits are correct, then we ought to have an Open Moron Season, where we can shoot anyone rioting on 1 January. Because only a moron would take to the streets to riot because their VCRs et cetera don't work! (``Well, I never got it to work before, but now it doesn't work because of a Y2K bug. Whatever a Y2K is.")
The only downside I can see to an Open Moron Season is that companies might start laying phone support people off because once we have shot all of the morons, there will be 90% fewer calls.
The Keyboard that came with this HP Vectra VL just FSCKING SUCKS!!! Some marketroid thought it would be 313373ly k3wl to add 13 keys to adjust stuff like the speaker/earphones volume & other stuff that makes no sense to me. Thirteen miserable dirty little eraser stubs above & to the right of the 10-key pads that are already mapped -- or should be mapped -- to other keys. And they sit there untouched, cluttering the appearance of my keyboard.
And then there are those mothra-fscking Winkeys that I only hit when I make a typo. They're about as cute as a 2nd-grader playing three-card Monty on the playground & racking in the lunch money from the first-graders.
Are the PHBs at certain corporations trying so hard to make using computers easy for the average luser that they HAVE to annoy & handicap those of us who know how to use one? Maybe they get flaccid at the thought some of us are better with computers than they are, & do this out of some twisted sense of revenge for their lack of marital (or pre-marital) ability???
Okay, I know this rant's going to get moderated to -1, but I had to get all of that off my chest. Before I took this dead 540MB full-height SCSI drive I have at home & stress-tested the craniums of a few PHBs at certain corporations.
>You bash for bashing's sake. You say that Microsoft is evil. And you say that they are guilty. >
The argument is that a company having a monopoly in a given business field is bad. And you say
>Well tell me then, why giving 30,000+ people their livelyhood, making a quarter of them millionaries is bad? > I first time I heard this argument was from a former employee of MS, who praised Gates so fulsomely that most of the people who listened to this thought the guy was slightly demented -- most of whom had no definite opinion about MS one way or the other.
This must be one of the beliefs that gets drilled into each new follower of the Microsoft Cult: ``Microsoft is good because it employs 30,000 people, a quarter of whom are millionaires!"
Even though currently most of the employees are temp workers who have no hope of becoming millionaires.
Just a thought that has been rolling around in my mind . . .
Let's say Linux has kicked the stuffings out of Microsoft, & it's now sold preinstalled everywhere -- over the Internet, by phone, & at Sears & CompUSA -- & to anyone.
And you are a phone support tech who has to support people who start calls with, ``I just bought my first computer, & I can't get it to work."
If that thought does not strike fear into you, then you have never done phone support. We are talking about the truly clueless here: the folks genetically unable to tell their forward slash from their backslash, who can't be bothered to turn their cap lock key when they type in their passwords, people who have to be led by the hand to find icons on their desktop -- in short the folks who shouldn't have root on their very own systems. People too dumb to figure out how to use a Macintosh.
``But computers ought to be easy to use!" they always whine. ``Why do I need to read a book to use my computer? All I want to do is [ email XXX | write my term paper | play solitaire | look at the pictures on the Internet ]."
Unfortunately we are going to have to support these morons if we want Linux to make it into the mainstream. Unless we can convince them that if you have to be trained & licensed to drive a car, you should at least read a book or two before you boot up a computer & proceed to trash their system.
Yes, I did my time in Tech Support. Almost two years. Why do you ask?
>Let's face it: Microsoft only stregths are (a) its ruthlessness (b) its ability to make money any which way they can and (c) its ability to churn >out evil FUD and buggy program. It does *not* take a good programmer to create a crappy program.
I would disagree with your last sentence, & state instead that it is a fourth strength: MS knows at what point its software is ``just good enough" to release. Whether it meets the specification, even if the specification has a typo in it, or deciding just how many bugs need to be fixed to be better than its competition (whether said competition is another company, or an older version of the software), or even if a choice between features coddles an entry-level user while handicapping an experienced one.
DOS, for example, had the ability to address 640K of RAM -- 10x more than other existing OS's -- but this ability does not increase without much work & pain. It was ``just good enough" in meeting IBM's specifications.
When WinWord had to compete with WordPerfect, bug-killing was a priority at Redmond; now that Word has no significant competition, the folks at MS devote their resources to creating more ``features" like dancing paperclips.
And trying to avoid the resource hog of Word with either notepad or wordpad leads to constant petty frustrations. (Try editting & saving a perl script in wordpad & not having to remove the.txt extention either program ``helpfully" adds. Bleh.)
Further, MS makes their software ``just open enough" -- more open than Apple did, as well as the other non-UNIX operating systems before it -- but not one line more. Otherwise, software would not break with every revision of Windows, whether a documented revision or not.
When MS to embrace an Open Standard means to follow it ``just enough" to claim technical obedience -- but not too much, or else someone else might reverse engineer the product, & create a better one for less money.
> And, yes, Bill Gate$ is bland: he >simply hides his greedy eyes behind an affable geek mask. Here is a man who will sell his own mother to make a buck. And because he >knows decent people do not like that kind of behaviour, he tries to hide as bast as he can -- but more and more people realize the truth.
Actually, I think not selling his mother for a buck is one of the few business ethics he has. He appears to get along quite well with his father, who runs the charitable foundation.
Microsoft is run as the extreme form of a corporation: every calculation is made to maximize reportable profit in a way no other corporation has done before. (Watching MS dominate the computer industry is like watching play a winning Civ II game.) Employees are expected to devote every waking minute to the company while on the other hand every attempt is made to reduce the benefits paid to employees -- which is why Microsoft is having legal troubles with their numerous legions of permanent temporary workers. Partnerships are made with other companies & then abused so that MS can learn their technologies & steal their market, while keeping as much of the Windows internals an ``intellectual secret" as possible.
I can't imagine a more aggressive company than Microsoft -- unless you repealed the laws on slavery, barratry & commerce.
>To me, the beginning of the end for Micro$oft is 1995.
Actually, I have always seen 1995 as the apex of MS's dominance of the computer industry. On one hand, they released Win95 to widespread enthusiasm, on the other hand, they pulled off a major realignment of th eocmpany to focus on the Internet. Since then, it's all been either defeats or qualified successes. All that growth we see in Microsoft is cancer, & when MS falls, it will be faster than Romanov Russia.
Well, Rob is prolly pissed, but I doubt at you. I bet that the following exchange at Andover.com occured:
PHB (nattily attired in that trendy kewl hacker look): We know how much work Slashdot requires from you, Rob, & we want to take some of that burden off of your shoulders. Let you set your priorities.
Rob (thinks about a bug that has been hounding him for the last few weeks, but he hasn't had the time to make it a priority): That would be good.
PHB: So we're going to devote some resources to you & Mr Taco.
Rob (``Mr Taco"? Oh boy!): Sure, there's some guys I don't like to deal with. Marketroids. I've got better things to do than hand out clues to the clue-resistant.
PHB: Good. We've got a PR firm on retainer, & I'll talk to them.
Rob (thinking about that bug, & seeing what he needs to do to fix it): Whatever. I need to do some stuff.
Fast forward to this morning. Not only does Rob realize what the PR firm is actually doing for him, but he now realizes that to keep them from doing it again, he'll have to spend more time away from the stuff he'd rather be doing.
Not a pretty picture to have first thing in the morning.
This article demonstrates why many Slashdot readers feel Katz misses the mark in his articles. He misses two things in this epitaph for Amazon's hipness: what they did right -- & what they did wrong.
What they did right was a simple thing: combining a forum with a sales site. It allowed customers to talk to each other, to help to select the best product. That Amazon offered lower prices than the average corner store was just an added benefit.
Some of the more Net-savvy observers thought that Amazon had a clue about how the Internet worked: it's about communication, & building a community by sharing information. People who use the Internet aren't eyeballs -- to quote the Cluetrain Manefesto -- they are talking to each other: & if you aren't listening as well as talking, people will stop listening to you.
Then Amazon decided to spam people on the Internet, which was the wrong thing to do. Anyone with an email address will tell you that they don't like spam, & this is a surefire way to break up the exchange of information.
This proved that Bezos believed that he only had a gizmo, a single cheap trick that garned him attention. Since that moment, every step Amazon has taken only shows that they don't understand the Internet: they've rolled over when the ``Church" of Scientology complained about listing _A Piece of Blue Sky_ in their catalog, they've deleted comments from their forums to appease publishers. And Amazon has yet to show how it will ever make a profit.
Instead of making his points by detailing these actions -- as well as others -- Katz is content to make generalizations on Slashdot better saved for people less informed.
I hope Jon will consider this when he writes his next article.
A last thought concerning Amazon: had Sanford Wallace taken Cyberpromo thru an IPO, I wonder if its shares would have reached a couple of hundreds of dollars apiece, too? From what I could tell, Wallace at least made money at some points from that company.
people are willing to stay in the same job for several years. And once a tech worker gets to a certain skill level, if your boss or job pisses you off, it's easier to get another job at better (or at least equal) pay than it is to organize.
Especially since the minute management gets wind of what you're doing, they will be out to get rid of you, or make your life a living hell -- or both.
Most IT jobs tend to be bearable enough that people aren't going to organize. Those that aren't -- e.g. end user support in a sweatshop like Stream -- have tremendous turnover & will never get the necessary signatures to bring a union in. And as long as other businesses can recruit people out of phone support hells, that turnover will continue to be tremendous.
>*Guilty secret* I really like lynx. what is stopping someone from making a console based browser with some >minor graphical capabilites (image rendering/tables). Anyone know how plausible this would be? I could >envision it with a GUI like linuxconf has in RH when executed from the console.
Absoutely nothing is stopping anyone from attempting this. The source for Lynx is available for download, & it is GPL'd IIRC. and if reading thousands of lines of code distributed over several dozen files intimidates you, look at the source code for Bobcat, a DOS version of Lynx, which I've been using as a Cliff Notes to the Lynx code base.
Then again, take a look at Grail, a browser written using Python. From what I've read, it also has some graphical qualities.
I like the analogy to a global conversation, but I don't like the comparison to a cocktail party. Cocktail parties tend to be accumulations of shallow people trying to prove to each other how important they are, in order to either bolster their egos or to get laid.
While there are some shallow people around here (& hopefully I'm not one of them),/. has always seemed to me to be more of a bull session after a long work day: a time we gripe, joke, & brainstorm over what we know.
>Completely apart from whether or not this legal action has any merit, couldn't Harvard get >in a lot more trouble for destroying evidence in a suit than they are likely to face in the suit itself?
>The author missed the real thrust of MS's efforts to get more webserver share. > >It's not IIS, or some small webserver- it's Office 2k and the followups. No matter what Slashdot readers may >think of Office, it is the office suite the world runs on. The newest version of Office have very tight integration >with the web and IIS- for example, you can place live spreadsheets on the web using Excel. This is going to go >over big in office intranets- it makes sharing documents really trivial.
As valid as your points are, I think MS has a serious weakness in pursuing this strategy: the new Office 2K costs an arm & a leg for what even ZDNet has labelled minor enhancements.
In this battle, MS's biggest opponent is not Apache, Linux or even the *BSDs, but older versions of Office. And the PHBs might listen this time when the techs point out buying the latest software at $600 a seat is not a good idea, & that they should stay with the current revision.
>I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft used them to make us Linux users out to look bad.
A couple of links to show that Microsoft has done this in the past:
The Bartko affair is retold at http://www.pjprimer.com/jihad.html
Case Roole reprinted a link to Brill's Content on Microsoft's PR's machine -- both the good side & the bad side -- at http://www.brillscontent.com/features/bill_0998.ht ml.
Based on stories like these, I'm sure some of these Anonymous Cowards are MS employees. But at the same time, I'm also sure some of them are people who think that an email flame will convince people not to use MS software. And the only way they can be shown this does not work is to let them learn for themselves.
>This is a just new twist on old FUD. Now not only is Linux hard to install, but its hard for technical people to >install.
I wouldn't call this FUD. People who live in the Windows world seem to have a different criteria for evaluating reality, a fact that was made very obvious to me recently when I got a couple of Windows Magazines by accident. The mixure of incredulity, ignorance & (of course) awe at the Smart People of Redmond(tm) I found in that periodical has to be seen to be believed.
There seems to be two kinds of Windows People: those who apparently believe all press releases as scientific truth, & those who have been burned on Microsoft's mendacity & so believe since ``they're all liars", that MS is no worse than any of the others.
These are odd patterns of thought, & I'm not sure how one can combat these patterns of thinking, but one can't troubleshoot problems unless the problem is identified.
>I prefer Spam to telemarketers! > >At least with Spam, I can just hit the delete key and it is gone! I suppose I could just hang up on the >telemarketers, but years of social conditioning make that nearly impossible...
Caller ID is your friend!
I've found from experience that any call that comes thru as ``Anonymous" or ``Unavailable" is a telemarketer -- especially if there is no phone number included. And as I & my wife have ignored those calls, over the months these junk calls have tapered off.
>I just got an email from somebody wanting to sell me space on their server and they said that they were >'spam tolerant'. What good is it if your network administrator is in on the crime??????
I got the same spam too, last night. It was funny, in a sorta ``let's laugh at the mental retard who's trying to scam us" way. It was an offer to join a yet-to-be-created domain, mentioning a mailbox at eudoramail.com & another at bigfoot.com, & sent from an open sendmail port in Spain -- in other words, this site doesn't exist yet. The price was $24.95 a month, or $99.80 for three months. (Read it twice to see how it's a great deal!)
If the dweeb who created this email ever does connect his site to the 'Net, be assured that it won't stay connected for more than a few days. Sanford Wallace wore down the patience of backbone providers with his unrepentant ways. And if he has more than a pair of brain cells, said dweeb will take what money he gets & spend it on toys -- although mommy & daddy might wonder where their 12-year-old kid got ahold of almost a hundred dollars to buy his comic books & soda pop with.
It was the best laugh I've had concerning the Internet in a long while.
Slashdot Mirror
>I'm of the opinion that perhaps the reason why so many geeks have such low social graces is because of the way in which we are treated growing up.
I agree with you, but I think there is more to what's happening than just getting labelled, treated like dirt, & finding refuge in developing mental skills.
Joe realizes, early on, that he is not top dog. He can either double-down & suck-up to the top dog, or he can find refuge in books or other things. And to get good in any area -- be it sports, auto repair or computers -- you have to get devoted to it. While other people are out partying, getting laid or just generally goofing off, the proto-geek is playing with code, getting hardware to stuff that's not supported, basically learning the subject from the inside out.
Or, to put it simply:
Lack of social skills => increased time training self => lack of social skills
And consider: when was the last time you talked to a good automechanic who had good social skills?
The original reason for not having social skills is really not the point here: if you're autistic (let's say) with a sub-normal IQ, you're not going to be a great programmer. Good maybe. And from my limited exposure to people with mental illness, most are not high-IQ level; probably at least the same proportion as in the general population.
And lastly, let's also consider what our budding proto-geek is spending most of his time learning. If it's a useful skill -- like computers or auto repair -- our proto-geek will end up envied by everyone for having the protential at making lots of money. If it's not a useful skill -- say he's memorizing sports statistics or studying accounts of famous serial killers -- then people will just conclude he's plain weird & won't ever amount to anything.
But then, I'm probably using the word ``useful" for values defined by parents . . .
Geoff
The funny thing about this whole debate is that Barbrook NEVER mentions the thesis of ``Gift Culture". His concern is with the ``Digerati", & how they mimic the Stalinist Communist Party in being the keepers of the truth, & the vanguard of the revolution.
If the man could write better, the irony of Libertarian technocrats being compared to Communists would be delightful. Unfortunately, he writes about as well as any hack acadmeic New Leftist.
Geoff
>Geez... "We don't have enough hard drive space"? ..."We don't have enough memory"? Go buy a couple of 27gig drives for each machine, up them to
;-)
>512 megs of memory.
You're kidding, right? What you're specing out are resources more appropriate for a server than a client. (Then maybe we all need Crays to read our email!
In case you're serious, GM has in the neighborhood of 40,000 dealers across the US. A 27 gig drive would set you back maybe $700 each. 512MB of memory maybe $500. That comes to 48 million dollars; say GM gets a 15% discount for buying volume, it's still more than $40 million.
If someone could walk in with an alternative OS & application, using the same existing hardware & drop a new solution for 4 or 5 million, that's a big win. Careers have been made on stuff like that.
Geoff
>I mean, it's nice the guy is the operations manager for their dealer network, but this is really a non-story.
Or else he's sending up a trial balloon to see how
a) The car dealer network reacts (e.g., ``No effin' way I want that Linnucks crap runnin' mah computers" or ``Give it a try -- cain't be any worse than that Microcrap on ourn computers"), or
b) See how Microsoft reacts (e.g., ``We can offer you great terms on a nationwide license to Win2000 with the same level of support we offer Intel"), or
c) Making an effort to demonstrate to someone just how hard he's looking at alternatives to their present computer system (e.g., ``I know that it crashes every day. But see how hard I'm studying alternatives? Now do you believe me when I say it's the best system we can buy? And will you authorize another business trip to Acapulco?")
There's undoubtedly more to the story than meets the eye, much of which Slashdotters prolly don't want to know. Let's just focus our attention at making the code better.
Geoff
>I also find it pretty pathetic that the NSA would need to contact Microsoft and implement a backdoor to access NT.
No, what is pathetic is that over a hundred sovereign countries now have a good reason to stop buying MS software.
Fer instance, let's say you are a clerk in the UK Foreign Office, & your job is to type memos about Top Secret stuff. And someone in MI-5 discovers that your computer has been talking to one in Virginia at a suspected NSA site. Over an allegedly secure TCPIP network.
How many pairs of underwear will be soiled in this scenario:
1) The clerks?
2) The clerk's supervisor?
3) The sysadmin for the network?
4) The local MS salesdroid?
5) All of the above?
And for extra credit, s/UK Foreign Office/Chinese Foreign Ministry/ & s/pairs of underwear will be soiled/people will be executed/ ?
Geoff
>Think a year or so ahead, where cable modems are more ubiquitous, and Microsoft has continued to build up influential inventment positions in a large
>number of cable companies.
But you still come back to quality of content.
And the folks who choose this sort of stuff for a living right now screw it up *way* more often than they get it right. Or get screwed over by change in fashion, change in fads, or change in advertisers.
MS will wish for the days when all they had to worry about was buggy code.
Geoff
>. . . look for Gates to
;-)
>reinvent Microsoft as an on-line media company.
And that will be the end of Microsoft.
Think MS is having fits over Open Source software like Linux, *BSD, Apache & Samba? Publishing is a high-risk, high-cost business. Take the book industry: the traditional rule of thumb is that of ten books published every year, 7 loose money, 2 break even, & the tenth one pays for the other nine.
Television is about the same -- only where the cost of publishing the average book is in the tens of thousands, the average tv show is in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions.
And movie-making is even more risky: does anyone else out there remember how the movie _Heaven's Gate_ drove a major studio into bankrupcy?
Of course, if the folks in Redmond were truly imaginative, innovative people, who relied on their skills & not on their hands around the throat of the computer industry, they might be able to pull this off.
Geoff
A couple of points that have gotten overlooked that makes a RH acquisition of SCO attractive:
1. An existing customer base. Seriously, most people who have fought^Wused SCO Unix have an existing investment in Intel-based hardware. Being able to tell them that for a minimal cost they have an upgrade path to a UNIX-like OS that is cleaner than SCO & with more of a future will not only keep these customers, but will immediately increase the Linux marketshare.
BTW, I have used SCO Unix. It sucks. (You have to recompiled the kernel & reboot to change the IP address? Give me a break. Even NT has a better answer.)
2. SCO owns the copyright on UNIX, last I heard. (They bought it from Novell who bought it from AT&T.) Need I say more?
Geoff
>So what they're talking about here is nameservers. Right. So if all thirteen root nameservers go down, DNS will be unreliable, yes.
.com, .uk, .org, & so forth -- for the IP of the given domain. If it hasn't verified the IP address for the TLD nameserver more recently than the time to live value, THEN the client will query the root server.
If I understand the distributed nature of DNS, even if these puppies blow, DNS will still return IPs for domain names. (It may require lots of sysadmins hacking the time-to-live values in their nameservers, but the problem can be patched over until these root servers are back online.)
IIRC, root servers are just one step in the IP number lookup process. When a client needs to know an IP number of a domain name, it will look to the TLD nameserver -- the servers for
In other words, the root servers only affect a tiny fraction of 1% of all of the nameserver queries executed.
Methinks NSI is spreading a little FUD, hoping that they get the contract to manage the other 11 root servers.
Geoff
I've been following all of the predictions of disaster, Armageddon & widespread riotting resulting from mistakes made by some lazy programmers with a bit of amusement.
Let's start by looking at what we depend on that could be affected by the Y2K problem: there's stores, banks, insurance & financial companies, the power companies, phone companies, & water companies.
Oh yeah -- & your programmable VCR, televisions & thermostats.
Consider that stores make their money by *selling* things. If the computers in a given store all go telegraph underground, the managers will figure out some way to keep the doors open, keep the deliveries coming, & calculate how much you should pay them. They may even continue to accept checks & plastic.
Banks & insurance companies are paranoid about losing money, so they routinely print off their records. (So my wife, an ex-Key Bank accountant tells me.) They aren't going to forget you owe them money because of some Y2K bug -- at least not more frequently than they have been.
As for brokerage houses & other financial institutions, seeing how the S&P 500 has outperformed over 70% of the stock funds out there, losing money due to Y2K is the least of anyone's worries.
And the IRS has come up with a simple -- yet elegant solution for the Y2K bug: they decided that fiscal 1999 now has 99 months. So they now have a Y2007 problem. (A fun fact I also learned from my wife, the accountant.)
Power & phone companies all have tested their switches, & assure us that they will work after 1 January. This is likely because most of their equipment does not care what year it is. (For example, I understand that Nortel phone switches only care about a year value around 31 December/ 1 January to help determine a call's start & end time. Otherwise, the year value is irrelevant information.)
Water companies have it even easier: if their programmable equipment remians unfixed by the magic date, they can send a guy with a wrench to each of their switching sites & crank all of the valves open, & rely on gravity to make the deliveries.
So it comes down to the fact that programmable appliances like VCRs, thermostats, alarm clocks & televisions might fail. (Which I doubt, seeing how 25% of all VCRs are still blinking 12:00, & otherwise work just fine.) And according to the pundits, people will take to the streets & riot over this.
If the pundits are correct, then we ought to have an Open Moron Season, where we can shoot anyone rioting on 1 January. Because only a moron would take to the streets to riot because their VCRs et cetera don't work! (``Well, I never got it to work before, but now it doesn't work because of a Y2K bug. Whatever a Y2K is.")
The only downside I can see to an Open Moron Season is that companies might start laying phone support people off because once we have shot all of the morons, there will be 90% fewer calls.
]me? a BOFH?[
Geoff
Not exactly relevant to what you posted but . . .
The Keyboard that came with this HP Vectra VL just FSCKING SUCKS!!! Some marketroid thought it would be 313373ly k3wl to add 13 keys to adjust stuff like the speaker/earphones volume & other stuff that makes no sense to me. Thirteen miserable dirty little eraser stubs above & to the right of the 10-key pads that are already mapped -- or should be mapped -- to other keys. And they sit there untouched, cluttering the appearance of my keyboard.
And then there are those mothra-fscking Winkeys that I only hit when I make a typo. They're about as cute as a 2nd-grader playing three-card Monty on the playground & racking in the lunch money from the first-graders.
Are the PHBs at certain corporations trying so hard to make using computers easy for the average luser that they HAVE to annoy & handicap those of us who know how to use one? Maybe they get flaccid at the thought some of us are better with computers than they are, & do this out of some twisted sense of revenge for their lack of marital (or pre-marital) ability???
Okay, I know this rant's going to get moderated to -1, but I had to get all of that off my chest. Before I took this dead 540MB full-height SCSI drive I have at home & stress-tested the craniums of a few PHBs at certain corporations.
Geoff
>You bash for bashing's sake. You say that Microsoft is evil. And you say that they are guilty.
>
The argument is that a company having a monopoly in a given business field is bad. And you say
>Well tell me then, why giving 30,000+ people their livelyhood, making a quarter of them millionaries is bad?
>
I first time I heard this argument was from a former employee of MS, who praised Gates so fulsomely that most of the people who listened to this thought the guy was slightly demented -- most of whom had no definite opinion about MS one way or the other.
This must be one of the beliefs that gets drilled into each new follower of the Microsoft Cult: ``Microsoft is good because it employs 30,000 people, a quarter of whom are millionaires!"
Even though currently most of the employees are temp workers who have no hope of becoming millionaires.
Geoff
Just a thought that has been rolling around in my mind . . .
Let's say Linux has kicked the stuffings out of Microsoft, & it's now sold preinstalled everywhere -- over the Internet, by phone, & at Sears & CompUSA -- & to anyone.
And you are a phone support tech who has to support people who start calls with, ``I just bought my first computer, & I can't get it to work."
If that thought does not strike fear into you, then you have never done phone support. We are talking about the truly clueless here: the folks genetically unable to tell their forward slash from their backslash, who can't be bothered to turn their cap lock key when they type in their passwords, people who have to be led by the hand to find icons on their desktop -- in short the folks who shouldn't have root on their very own systems. People too dumb to figure out how to use a Macintosh.
``But computers ought to be easy to use!" they always whine. ``Why do I need to read a book to use my computer? All I want to do is [ email XXX | write my term paper | play solitaire | look at the pictures on the Internet ]."
Unfortunately we are going to have to support these morons if we want Linux to make it into the mainstream. Unless we can convince them that if you have to be trained & licensed to drive a car, you should at least read a book or two before you boot up a computer & proceed to trash their system.
Yes, I did my time in Tech Support. Almost two years. Why do you ask?
Geoff
>Let's face it: Microsoft only stregths are (a) its ruthlessness (b) its ability to make money any which way they can and (c) its ability to churn
.txt extention either program ``helpfully" adds. Bleh.)
>out evil FUD and buggy program. It does *not* take a good programmer to create a crappy program.
I would disagree with your last sentence, & state instead that it is a fourth strength: MS knows at what point its software is ``just good enough" to release. Whether it meets the specification, even if the specification has a typo in it, or deciding just how many bugs need to be fixed to be better than its competition (whether said competition is another company, or an older version of the software), or even if a choice between features coddles an entry-level user while handicapping an experienced one.
DOS, for example, had the ability to address 640K of RAM -- 10x more than other existing OS's -- but this ability does not increase without much work & pain. It was ``just good enough" in meeting IBM's specifications.
When WinWord had to compete with WordPerfect, bug-killing was a priority at Redmond; now that Word has no significant competition, the folks at MS devote their resources to creating more ``features" like dancing paperclips.
And trying to avoid the resource hog of Word with either notepad or wordpad leads to constant petty frustrations. (Try editting & saving a perl script in wordpad & not having to remove the
Further, MS makes their software ``just open enough" -- more open than Apple did, as well as the other non-UNIX operating systems before it -- but not one line more. Otherwise, software would not break with every revision of Windows, whether a documented revision or not.
When MS to embrace an Open Standard means to follow it ``just enough" to claim technical obedience -- but not too much, or else someone else might reverse engineer the product, & create a better one for less money.
> And, yes, Bill Gate$ is bland: he
>simply hides his greedy eyes behind an affable geek mask. Here is a man who will sell his own mother to make a buck. And because he
>knows decent people do not like that kind of behaviour, he tries to hide as bast as he can -- but more and more people realize the truth.
Actually, I think not selling his mother for a buck is one of the few business ethics he has. He appears to get along quite well with his father, who runs the charitable foundation.
Microsoft is run as the extreme form of a corporation: every calculation is made to maximize reportable profit in a way no other corporation has done before. (Watching MS dominate the computer industry is like watching play a winning Civ II game.) Employees are expected to devote every waking minute to the company while on the other hand every attempt is made to reduce the benefits paid to employees -- which is why Microsoft is having legal troubles with their numerous legions of permanent temporary workers. Partnerships are made with other companies & then abused so that MS can learn their technologies & steal their market, while keeping as much of the Windows internals an ``intellectual secret" as possible.
I can't imagine a more aggressive company than Microsoft -- unless you repealed the laws on slavery, barratry & commerce.
>To me, the beginning of the end for Micro$oft is 1995.
Actually, I have always seen 1995 as the apex of MS's dominance of the computer industry. On one hand, they released Win95 to widespread enthusiasm, on the other hand, they pulled off a major realignment of th eocmpany to focus on the Internet. Since then, it's all been either defeats or qualified successes. All that growth we see in Microsoft is cancer, & when MS falls, it will be faster than Romanov Russia.
Geoff
Well, Rob is prolly pissed, but I doubt at you. I bet that the following exchange at Andover.com occured:
PHB (nattily attired in that trendy kewl hacker look): We know how much work Slashdot requires from you, Rob, & we want to take some of that burden off of your shoulders. Let you set your priorities.
Rob (thinks about a bug that has been hounding him for the last few weeks, but he hasn't had the time to make it a priority): That would be good.
PHB: So we're going to devote some resources to you & Mr Taco.
Rob (``Mr Taco"? Oh boy!): Sure, there's some guys I don't like to deal with. Marketroids. I've got better things to do than hand out clues to the clue-resistant.
PHB: Good. We've got a PR firm on retainer, & I'll talk to them.
Rob (thinking about that bug, & seeing what he needs to do to fix it): Whatever. I need to do some stuff.
Fast forward to this morning. Not only does Rob realize what the PR firm is actually doing for him, but he now realizes that to keep them from doing it again, he'll have to spend more time away from the stuff he'd rather be doing.
Not a pretty picture to have first thing in the morning.
Geoff
This article demonstrates why many Slashdot readers feel Katz misses the mark in his articles. He misses two things in this epitaph for Amazon's hipness: what they did right -- & what they did wrong.
What they did right was a simple thing: combining a forum with a sales site. It allowed customers to talk to each other, to help to select the best product. That Amazon offered lower prices than the average corner store was just an added benefit.
Some of the more Net-savvy observers thought that Amazon had a clue about how the Internet worked: it's about communication, & building a community by sharing information. People who use the Internet aren't eyeballs -- to quote the Cluetrain Manefesto -- they are talking to each other: & if you aren't listening as well as talking, people will stop listening to you.
Then Amazon decided to spam people on the Internet, which was the wrong thing to do. Anyone with an email address will tell you that they don't like spam, & this is a surefire way to break up the exchange of information.
This proved that Bezos believed that he only had a gizmo, a single cheap trick that garned him attention. Since that moment, every step Amazon has taken only shows that they don't understand the Internet: they've rolled over when the ``Church" of Scientology complained about listing _A Piece of Blue Sky_ in their catalog, they've deleted comments from their forums to appease publishers. And Amazon has yet to show how it will ever make a profit.
Instead of making his points by detailing these actions -- as well as others -- Katz is content to make generalizations on Slashdot better saved for people less informed.
I hope Jon will consider this when he writes his next article.
A last thought concerning Amazon: had Sanford Wallace taken Cyberpromo thru an IPO, I wonder if its shares would have reached a couple of hundreds of dollars apiece, too? From what I could tell, Wallace at least made money at some points from that company.
Geoff
people are willing to stay in the same job for several years. And once a tech worker gets to a certain skill level, if your boss or job pisses you off, it's easier to get another job at better (or at least equal) pay than it is to organize.
Especially since the minute management gets wind of what you're doing, they will be out to get rid of you, or make your life a living hell -- or both.
Most IT jobs tend to be bearable enough that people aren't going to organize. Those that aren't -- e.g. end user support in a sweatshop like Stream -- have tremendous turnover & will never get the necessary signatures to bring a union in. And as long as other businesses can recruit people out of phone support hells, that turnover will continue to be tremendous.
If this equation ever changes, though . . .
Geoff
>*Guilty secret* I really like lynx. what is stopping someone from making a console based browser with some
>minor graphical capabilites (image rendering/tables). Anyone know how plausible this would be? I could
>envision it with a GUI like linuxconf has in RH when executed from the console.
Absoutely nothing is stopping anyone from attempting this. The source for Lynx is available for download, & it is GPL'd IIRC. and if reading thousands of lines of code distributed over several dozen files intimidates you, look at the source code for Bobcat, a DOS version of Lynx, which I've been using as a Cliff Notes to the Lynx code base.
Then again, take a look at Grail, a browser written using Python. From what I've read, it also has some graphical qualities.
Geoff
I like the analogy to a global conversation, but I don't like the comparison to a cocktail party. Cocktail parties tend to be accumulations of shallow people trying to prove to each other how important they are, in order to either bolster their egos or to get laid.
/. has always seemed to me to be more of a bull session after a long work day: a time we gripe, joke, & brainstorm over what we know.
While there are some shallow people around here (& hopefully I'm not one of them),
Geoff
>Completely apart from whether or not this legal action has any merit, couldn't Harvard get
>in a lot more trouble for destroying evidence in a suit than they are likely to face in the suit itself?
Bill Gates & his executives would disagree.
>The author missed the real thrust of MS's efforts to get more webserver share.
>
>It's not IIS, or some small webserver- it's Office 2k and the followups. No matter what Slashdot readers may
>think of Office, it is the office suite the world runs on. The newest version of Office have very tight integration
>with the web and IIS- for example, you can place live spreadsheets on the web using Excel. This is going to go
>over big in office intranets- it makes sharing documents really trivial.
As valid as your points are, I think MS has a serious weakness in pursuing this strategy: the new Office 2K costs an arm & a leg for what even ZDNet has labelled minor enhancements.
In this battle, MS's biggest opponent is not Apache, Linux or even the *BSDs, but older versions of Office. And the PHBs might listen this time when the techs point out buying the latest software at $600 a seat is not a good idea, & that they should stay with the current revision.
Geoff
>I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft used them to make us Linux users out to look bad.
t ml.
A couple of links to show that Microsoft has done this in the past:
The Bartko affair is retold at http://www.pjprimer.com/jihad.html
Case Roole reprinted a link to Brill's Content on Microsoft's PR's machine -- both the good side & the bad side -- at http://www.brillscontent.com/features/bill_0998.h
Based on stories like these, I'm sure some of these Anonymous Cowards are MS employees. But at the same time, I'm also sure some of them are people who think that an email flame will convince people not to use MS software. And the only way they can be shown this does not work is to let them learn for themselves.
>This is a just new twist on old FUD. Now not only is Linux hard to install, but its hard for technical people to
>install.
I wouldn't call this FUD. People who live in the Windows world seem to have a different criteria for evaluating reality, a fact that was made very obvious to me recently when I got a couple of Windows Magazines by accident. The mixure of incredulity, ignorance & (of course) awe at the Smart People of Redmond(tm) I found in that periodical has to be seen to be believed.
There seems to be two kinds of Windows People: those who apparently believe all press releases as scientific truth, & those who have been burned on Microsoft's mendacity & so believe since ``they're all liars", that MS is no worse than any of the others.
These are odd patterns of thought, & I'm not sure how one can combat these patterns of thinking, but one can't troubleshoot problems unless the problem is identified.
Geoff
>I prefer Spam to telemarketers! ...
>
>At least with Spam, I can just hit the delete key and it is gone! I suppose I could just hang up on the
>telemarketers, but years of social conditioning make that nearly impossible
Caller ID is your friend!
I've found from experience that any call that comes thru as ``Anonymous" or ``Unavailable" is a telemarketer -- especially if there is no phone number included. And as I & my wife have ignored those calls, over the months these junk calls have tapered off.
YMMV.
Geoff
>I just got an email from somebody wanting to sell me space on their server and they said that they were
>'spam tolerant'. What good is it if your network administrator is in on the crime??????
I got the same spam too, last night. It was funny, in a sorta ``let's laugh at the mental retard who's trying to scam us" way. It was an offer to join a yet-to-be-created domain, mentioning a mailbox at eudoramail.com & another at bigfoot.com, & sent from an open sendmail port in Spain -- in other words, this site doesn't exist yet. The price was $24.95 a month, or $99.80 for three months. (Read it twice to see how it's a great deal!)
If the dweeb who created this email ever does connect his site to the 'Net, be assured that it won't stay connected for more than a few days. Sanford Wallace wore down the patience of backbone providers with his unrepentant ways. And if he has more than a pair of brain cells, said dweeb will take what money he gets & spend it on toys -- although mommy & daddy might wonder where their 12-year-old kid got ahold of almost a hundred dollars to buy his comic books & soda pop with.
It was the best laugh I've had concerning the Internet in a long while.
Geoff