Confession: I'm much smarter than I was at the time of this story, but the principle's the same.
Back in 1994, I worked for 6 weeks at Computer City, a chain of stores owned by Tandy, the same folks who own Radio Shack. I worked there for a number of reasons, one of which was to learn a bit more about computers. (And I actually did: seeing everything that Computer City had, made me realize at the time that I knew a lot less about computers than I thought I did; the store taught me nothing except how to close a sale. I've since learned a bit more about computers, enough to make an honest living at the trade.)
One day I sold a Mac. Like a lot of PC bigots, I knew very little about them, but repeated the usual line of BS that I was given, the guy wanted the item we had in stock, along with a printer & the rest of the stuff needed to make it work. So I grabbed him a cable from the Mac hardware aisle, & sold him a service policy on his purchase.
Then I got a better job, left Computer City & went on with my life. I happened to stop by there to do some shopping, when one of my former cow-orkers stopped & tried to chew me out for that sale: it turned out that I had given the guy a SCSI cable & not a Mac printer cable. Because he had the policy, Computer City had to replace 2 motherboards before they figured out what was wrong.
Personally, I have no guilt about the episode: this was only the most egregrious mistake I made while working there because they failed to offer more than a minimum of technical training. And about the time I learned enough to be competant selling computers, I knew that all of the computers sold at these retail stores were crap, & I was better off (for my sanity & pride) NOT working retail selling them.
The other weekend, I wandered into a Radio Shack for the first time in a long time, & had a look around. I noticed a couple of shelves where they offered their wireless networking hardware, & looked it over . ..
And was amazed that it was all Microsoft-branded products. Each item priced at least $10 more than what I've seen DLink & LinkSys branded hardware.
Target happened to be in the same mall, so I wandered thru their electronics section, & found that they had a shelf or two of wireless hardware -- also Microsoft branded. I took a moment to study the box containing the wireless PCMCIA card a little more carefully, & found that there was nothing explaining just what kind of chips were used in it. MS could be selling the equivalent of Winmodems here -- chips removed from the motherboard & replaced with software functionality.
I don't know how much of the wireless networking market MS thinks it can grab, but I'm already feeling sorry for the poor phone techs who will be dealing with this poorly documented hardware.
IIRC, Billings, MT was the model for the town Dashiell Hammett nicknamed ``Poisonville" in his novel ``Red Harvest". For those of you who aren't Hammett fans, this novel provided the plot that was later used in the movies ``Yojimbo", ``A Fist Full of Dollars", & ``Miller's Crossing" -- the protagonist cleans up a town ruled by rival gangs by playing them against each other.
This doesn't make Billings too attractive, but a guy's gotta go where there's work.
Geoff
So we short-shrift MIT, BSD & the rest?
on
RMS Turns 50
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
But the GUI is based on MIT's development, so shouldn't we call it GNU/MIT/Linux? And Perl & Python follow other licenses. And BTW, a number of important packages included in Linux distributions are available under the BSD license.
Why *don't* we call it ``GNU/MIT/BSD/Apache/Perl/Python/Linux"?
Or what about the fact most computers with Solaris also have various GNU utilities installed. Most of the time, the same ones that come with a Linux distribution? Why don't we call it ``GNU/Solaris". heck, it would make troubleshooting problems with a Solaris box far easier.
RMS was presented with these very same questions a few months ago on LWN, & like a broken computer program, all he could say was ``It's not the same thing" & talk around the question. He wants to talk about ``GNU/Linux". Anything else involving a program where the code was freely available matters doesn't matter to him.
As I see it, someone took RMS's idea of free software & extended it. Made the software even more free. And RMS is having problems getting his head around that fact. Too bad for him; I'm still going to call it Linux.
> Do you know how espensive that would be even if you got 50 miles to the gallon of whisky?
The bottle of whiskey you buy in the store, priced somewhere near $20-- a fifth (or liter) costs maybe a dollar to make. The rest of the cost is tax. So figure it's $5.00 a gallon -- about what the folks in Europe pay.
Make an undrinkable version of whiskey (e.g, it's not aged for years in expensive oak casks, the corn, wheat & other ingredients are the left-overs farmers won't feed to their cattle, etc.), the cost will fall to at least $2.50 a gallon, if not lower. That's less than what some folks in the US are paying for gas right now.
> I think the job will look bad on my resume so I will use it as a last resort regardless of the pay?
Before I got this tech-related job (my first full-time tech job since I was laid off in May of 2001), I answered the phones, taking catalog orders for the Christmas rush at $9.50 an hour. They treated me much better than Stream did.
And I was't the only former techie working there, either.
> The claim is that IBM employees who once worked with AT&T licensed code (licenses now owned by SCO), are now working on Linux and must have used IP owned by SCO in Linux.
IANAL also, but having witnessed several NDA/trade secret issues, IBM has another possible out: if their contract with SCO stated that any programmer that worked on Monterey or saw SCO information had to avoid working on OS development for, say, 12-24 months, then SCO's grounds for intellectual theft is moot. I would assume that, as the pool of programmers who do OS development is finite, no IBM lawyer would allow any programmer who worked on the joint SCO-IBM project to be permanently banned from further OS development work.
This lawsuit is nothing more than the last convulsions of a dying company; so far, SCO has yet to prove their case is any stronger than the product of jailhouse lawyering.
> I wasn't surprised to see it here on/. since he won't take feedback on it at his site.
From the tone of his article, I'm not surprised. Shoot, after reading his article, I now have little interest in participating in any of his fora.
> I can understand the pragmatic approach but with his outdated "world view" the whole email/post comes off as half-baked.
There's nothing ``pragmatic" about this. He comes over not only as arrogant, but so sure that he has all of the correct answers I lost interest in his article half way thru it. Part of the pleasure of reading any online discussion -- as well as participating -- is to watch the give & take between two different viewpoints as they explain why their viewpoints are valid. Spoelsky strikes me as someone who would rather read a couple of position papers from different sides of a topic, then draw his own conclusions, instead of following the growth of an idea in a discussion; he forgets that a good chunk of the any journey is not the destination but how one gets there. (And that anything worth writing usually is worth RE-writing.)
Yes, sometimes an online conversation drifts into uninterresting territory, or goes on too long . . . but no one is making anyone read more than she/he wants to.
The interview would probably be worth reading. Two years ago he spearheaded opposition to UCITA in Oregon -- see (hoping this doesn't get mangled in wordwrapping): http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.p hp3?ltsn=2001-04 -30-017-20-NW-CY
> In case you haven't noticed, they don't have a whole lot of subjective ratings (My 'Tang is SWEET!), but they > do have a lot of objective ratings (reliability of car's electrical system).
No, they ask you on a scale of 0-10 what you think about various aspects of the car, including things like reliability. And I doubt the average driver is familiar with how more than half a dozen cars at any one time, so they have no way to make a fair judgement. It's still subjective.
> You're not really understanding this concept, are you?
What part of ``self-selecting sample" didn't you understand?
Get 100 rednecks from East Texas together, hand them the survey from CR, & they'll most likely rate a Ford or Chevy pickup the best car. Get 100 ex-hippies together, hand them the survey from CR, & they'll most likely rate a VW the best car. Get 100 CR readers together, hand them the survey from CR, & they'll rate a Volvo or Saab the best car.
FWIW, I never said that my Mustang ``was sweet." It was a 1984 model I owned from 1992-2000, I put 100,000 miles on it, & it was far more reliable (& went to the garage far less often) than the Celica I owned just before it. (I won't bother discussing the issue of which one was more fun to drive.)
Why didn't you use J.D. Powers as an example? From what I've read, at least their samples are more representative of the general market, & ask more pointed questions (e.g. cost & number of repairs) that reduce the amount of subjectivity.
Up to now, a lot of software development depended on little more than access to a useable computer; it does not require the millions of dollars of investment that auto manufacturers require to create & launch a new car. As an example, Linus Torvalds had a mid-range 386 computer, & was interested in ``fooling around" with creating an operating system. And look where his tinkering ended up! (Granted, he had help, but many of these contributors at the beginning had little more than spare time and a computer to devote to their work; no one was relying on R&D budgets or government grants.)
Unfortunately, the abuse of patents and the outrageous extension of copyright now makes it far more difficult for anyone to just ``fool around" & create something in the US. It's looking more & more likely that the next killer software will be written outside the US (& Europe) where patents & copyright are routinely ignored.
I usd to have a subscription to SR a few years ago. I was amazed that they consistently rated practically all sportscars down (even ones that I have found should be rated highly, such as the Mustang), & many import cars up (such as Volvo & Saab). Then I learned that SR creates their ratings based on feedback from their subscribers, who also are asked to pay to have their votes counted.
In short, all SR does is reflect the opinions of its readers. That's why I dropped my subscription.
Maybe the reason MS won't include popup blocking because they're afraid it might offend websites that depend on ads^W^W^W^W^Wtheir customers.
Gates & Co. have frequently stated that their customers aren't the end users, but major corporations like Dell, Fortune 500 customers, the record companies -- all of whom have interests that do not always coincide with end users like you & me. However the technology reporters too often overlook or forget this definition, & erroneously assume that for MS the customer is always the end user.
> Dell can't stay loyal to Microsoft and not go down with them.
Maybe, but every Dell employee is more interested in keeping his employer in business than sucking up to Microsoft; they make nice to MS only because Dell's bottom line depends on good terms with Bill & Co. While even now it's still not crystal clear that Linux has the momentum to take over the server space (although I would say it's only a matter of time before it does), they have to watch what they say for fear of pissing off Redmond. So I'd guess right now Dell is making all sorts of cooing noises to their contacts at Microsoft, while preparing behind the scenes for a possible Linux win in the server space. Once that happens, they'll be able to shrug & say ``But we have to sell what the market wants to buy" & begin the inevitable migration from their dependency on Windows, perhaps even making a serious effort to sell Linux desktops.
Then it will be just a question of how quickly Dell can reposition itself to join the Linux seachange. Without a lot of research, I wouldn't bet that Dell can't do it -- nor would I bet that they can.
> I thought he was including linux in when he said "unix is dead".
Consider that this PHB was choosing his words carefully. His peers at Microsoft will read this & think, ``Oboy! He's including Linux & that BSD thing, & is endorsing Windows on the server! This is the loyalty we are looking for!" If he had said ``proprietary Unices are dead," the same Microsofties would be calling him up & complaining that he's not with the program & biting the hand that feeds him, & darkly hint that the Windows license fees may be increased in the next negotiations.
Dell dare not piss off Microsoft. Not until it's clear they're in a clear downward business spiral.
> A lucky few will make generous amounts of money, while the rest will scramble to survive. > > Such is the case in any industry where the work is a lot of fun, and I say this as a warning because the same thing can easily > happen to computer programmers. Why? Because programming is a fun and rewarding job, and as soon as the general > public figures this out you will have a situation where a) a lucky few get to be paid as programmers b) a lot of > programming work gets done for free by the many trying to "make it" in the business.
Maybe. But I sincerely doubt it. Why? Because programmers are creating something that is of real use, whereas musicians -- as with any artist -- produce something that has no useable value, & survive on the perception that their work has an audience who is willing to pay money to experience what they have created.
In short, someone is always needed to write drivers, debug existing code, write wrapper scripts, & do the thousand-&-one things that wouldn't be accomplished if someone wasn't being paid. A programmer may end up earning as much as a ditch digger, but there will always be a demand for her/his work. Meanwhile, one can always stop buying novels or new CDs if one is unemployed (which I was forced to do), but if the car breaks, you are forced to run a balance on the credit card (which I did).
In my case, the age of 12 would have been the right time for some advice:
1. Get to know your mother well: she'll be dead in a year.
2. The woman your Dad will marry will be a bitch. You will be better off getting a GED so you can move away sooner.
3. You can get into a better college, & you can make a living from working with computers.
4. It'll be twenty years before medical science recognizes that children don't outgrow ADD; start understanding ways to live with it now.
Then again, all of these points are very specific to me; I don't know if anyone could generalize from them for ideas they would tell their own 12-year-old self.
> Hm, Copernicus found himself in a similar dilemma. Only it wasn't zealotry he was charged with, it was heresy.
I suspect you mean s/Copernicus/Gallileo/
Copernicus died the day his book was published. But there is evidence that Gallileo received some negative attention from the authorities during his lifetime.
> Here's a bit of common junk science from the article: > In a study of 8,000 tech projects in businesses, only 16 percent of the new systems were deemed successes > > What, exactly, is a "tech project"? Define "new systems". What criteria is applied to conclude whether things may be > "deem successes" and by whom?
This figure doesn't sound that far out of line to me. In another study quoted in the IEEE _Computer Magazine_, 2 out of 3 MAJOR projects (e.g., with budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars), are never completed. And in this instance, this figure referred to software installs or upgrades -- e.g., installing or upgrading an Oracle database, migrating from one mail system to MS Outlook, etc.
(FWIW, smaller projects had a much higher rate of success -- IIRC, somewhere in the 70-80% range.)
And if you added to that miserable 66% failure rate all of the projects that were completed, but later rolled back, abandoned, or judged to have been a disaster, an 84% failure rate is believable. In the last few years, I saw a previous employer -- a telco -- give up on migrating its billing system to a new system, I watched the city I live in lose millions of dollars in revenue in trying to upgrade its billing system for water & sewer charges. These were completed projects that couldn't be accurately called ``successes".
> I could pick this apart in my sleep.
Probably. But the fact that many organizations would be much better off adopting an ``if it isn't broke, don't fix it" attitude towards their technology is damning enough about our industry.
> At any rate, this is just *another* example of how stupid the DMCA is and how it's being used way out of its scope.
Solution: sue someone with standing to show that this law is constitutionally vague. Lexmark looks like a good target.
IIRC, the whole point of the DMCA was to prevent piracy -- so lots of lawmakers claimed, & so the lobbyists who shovelled them lots of money claimed.
As we have seen in this article -- & others -- this law is being abused to prevent competition, & thus labelling people who have a legitimate reason to reverse engineer devices as ``criminals" or ``pirates". Which is clearly not the intent of the law.
(Someone with a law degree could probably hone this to a far more serviceable point. But I Am Not A Lawyer.)
Then, there is the problem of raising the money to make this suit work. And hoping that it lands before enough judges who have a clue to agree that this thing is unconstitutional. I'm under no illusion that it would be far cheaper & easier to simply repeal the law.
Geoff
Re:Whatever happened to smart advertising?
on
Next-Gen Pop-up Ads
·
· Score: 2
For smart advertising to work, you need smart advertisers.
That might sound like a flip comment, but think about it: most advertising is done with a ``knock on enough doors and eventually one opens" mentallity. Advertisers don't realize that if they knock too loudly or too often on enough doors, people will start reacting with more than a simple no -- perhaps with physical violence.
If someone looks at a webpage where I'm selling something, presumably they want to buy; that they didn't, could be for any numbe of reasons: wrong price, uncertainty about the quality, or that they were still gathering information to make an informed purchase. A pop-up on exit questionaire could help me learn those things, but due to Orbitz and X10, few would bother with that kind of questionaire nowadays, & even fewer would provide useful information. (Telling someone ``you suck for using pop-ups" wouldn't help in that situation.)
That would be a smart way of using pop-ups. But using them for aggressive advertising has poisoned the well for using that tool to talk to the customer & learning exactly what they want to buy. And so the Internet spirals downwards to television.
Slashdot Mirror
Confession: I'm much smarter than I was at the time of this story, but the principle's the same.
Back in 1994, I worked for 6 weeks at Computer City, a chain of stores owned by Tandy, the same folks who own Radio Shack. I worked there for a number of reasons, one of which was to learn a bit more about computers. (And I actually did: seeing everything that Computer City had, made me realize at the time that I knew a lot less about computers than I thought I did; the store taught me nothing except how to close a sale. I've since learned a bit more about computers, enough to make an honest living at the trade.)
One day I sold a Mac. Like a lot of PC bigots, I knew very little about them, but repeated the usual line of BS that I was given, the guy wanted the item we had in stock, along with a printer & the rest of the stuff needed to make it work. So I grabbed him a cable from the Mac hardware aisle, & sold him a service policy on his purchase.
Then I got a better job, left Computer City & went on with my life. I happened to stop by there to do some shopping, when one of my former cow-orkers stopped & tried to chew me out for that sale: it turned out that I had given the guy a SCSI cable & not a Mac printer cable. Because he had the policy, Computer City had to replace 2 motherboards before they figured out what was wrong.
Personally, I have no guilt about the episode: this was only the most egregrious mistake I made while working there because they failed to offer more than a minimum of technical training. And about the time I learned enough to be competant selling computers, I knew that all of the computers sold at these retail stores were crap, & I was better off (for my sanity & pride) NOT working retail selling them.
Geoff
The other weekend, I wandered into a Radio Shack for the first time in a long time, & had a look around. I noticed a couple of shelves where they offered their wireless networking hardware, & looked it over . . .
And was amazed that it was all Microsoft-branded products. Each item priced at least $10 more than what I've seen DLink & LinkSys branded hardware.
Target happened to be in the same mall, so I wandered thru their electronics section, & found that they had a shelf or two of wireless hardware -- also Microsoft branded. I took a moment to study the box containing the wireless PCMCIA card a little more carefully, & found that there was nothing explaining just what kind of chips were used in it. MS could be selling the equivalent of Winmodems here -- chips removed from the motherboard & replaced with software functionality.
I don't know how much of the wireless networking market MS thinks it can grab, but I'm already feeling sorry for the poor phone techs who will be dealing with this poorly documented hardware.
Geoff
IIRC, Billings, MT was the model for the town Dashiell Hammett nicknamed ``Poisonville" in his novel ``Red Harvest". For those of you who aren't Hammett fans, this novel provided the plot that was later used in the movies ``Yojimbo", ``A Fist Full of Dollars", & ``Miller's Crossing" -- the protagonist cleans up a town ruled by rival gangs by playing them against each other.
This doesn't make Billings too attractive, but a guy's gotta go where there's work.
Geoff
But the GUI is based on MIT's development, so shouldn't we call it GNU/MIT/Linux? And Perl & Python follow other licenses. And BTW, a number of important packages included in Linux distributions are available under the BSD license.
Why *don't* we call it ``GNU/MIT/BSD/Apache/Perl/Python/Linux"?
Or what about the fact most computers with Solaris also have various GNU utilities installed. Most of the time, the same ones that come with a Linux distribution? Why don't we call it ``GNU/Solaris". heck, it would make troubleshooting problems with a Solaris box far easier.
RMS was presented with these very same questions a few months ago on LWN, & like a broken computer program, all he could say was ``It's not the same thing" & talk around the question. He wants to talk about ``GNU/Linux". Anything else involving a program where the code was freely available matters doesn't matter to him.
As I see it, someone took RMS's idea of free software & extended it. Made the software even more free. And RMS is having problems getting his head around that fact. Too bad for him; I'm still going to call it Linux.
Geoff
> Do you know how espensive that would be even if you got 50 miles to the gallon of whisky?
The bottle of whiskey you buy in the store, priced somewhere near $20-- a fifth (or liter) costs maybe a dollar to make. The rest of the cost is tax. So figure it's $5.00 a gallon -- about what the folks in Europe pay.
Make an undrinkable version of whiskey (e.g, it's not aged for years in expensive oak casks, the corn, wheat & other ingredients are the left-overs farmers won't feed to their cattle, etc.), the cost will fall to at least $2.50 a gallon, if not lower. That's less than what some folks in the US are paying for gas right now.
It's affordable.
Geoff
> I think the job will look bad on my resume so I will use it as a last resort regardless of the pay?
Before I got this tech-related job (my first full-time tech job since I was laid off in May of 2001), I answered the phones, taking catalog orders for the Christmas rush at $9.50 an hour. They treated me much better than Stream did.
And I was't the only former techie working there, either.
Geoff
> The claim is that IBM employees who once worked with AT&T licensed code (licenses now owned by SCO), are now working on Linux and must have used IP owned by SCO in Linux.
IANAL also, but having witnessed several NDA/trade secret issues, IBM has another possible out: if their contract with SCO stated that any programmer that worked on Monterey or saw SCO information had to avoid working on OS development for, say, 12-24 months, then SCO's grounds for intellectual theft is moot. I would assume that, as the pool of programmers who do OS development is finite, no IBM lawyer would allow any programmer who worked on the joint SCO-IBM project to be permanently banned from further OS development work.
This lawsuit is nothing more than the last convulsions of a dying company; so far, SCO has yet to prove their case is any stronger than the product of jailhouse lawyering.
Geoff
> I wasn't surprised to see it here on /. since he won't take feedback on it at his site.
From the tone of his article, I'm not surprised. Shoot, after reading his article, I now have little interest in participating in any of his fora.
> I can understand the pragmatic approach but with his outdated "world view" the whole email/post comes off as half-baked.
There's nothing ``pragmatic" about this. He comes over not only as arrogant, but so sure that he has all of the correct answers I lost interest in his article half way thru it. Part of the pleasure of reading any online discussion -- as well as participating -- is to watch the give & take between two different viewpoints as they explain why their viewpoints are valid. Spoelsky strikes me as someone who would rather read a couple of position papers from different sides of a topic, then draw his own conclusions, instead of following the growth of an idea in a discussion; he forgets that a good chunk of the any journey is not the destination but how one gets there. (And that anything worth writing usually is worth RE-writing.)
Yes, sometimes an online conversation drifts into uninterresting territory, or goes on too long . . . but no one is making anyone read more than she/he wants to.
Geoff
The interview would probably be worth reading. Two years ago he spearheaded opposition to UCITA in Oregon -- see (hoping this doesn't get mangled in wordwrapping):p hp3?ltsn=2001-04 -30-017-20-NW-CY
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.
Geoff
> ...except that... Ken Kesey died a couple of years ago.
Not a problem, depending on how you define the word ``chillin'".
I'll stay warm & alive, thankyouverymuch.
Geoff
> I'm not sure what "SR" is
I meant CR -- for Consumer Reports.
> In case you haven't noticed, they don't have a whole lot of subjective ratings (My 'Tang is SWEET!), but they
> do have a lot of objective ratings (reliability of car's electrical system).
No, they ask you on a scale of 0-10 what you think about various aspects of the car, including things like reliability. And I doubt the average driver is familiar with how more than half a dozen cars at any one time, so they have no way to make a fair judgement. It's still subjective.
> You're not really understanding this concept, are you?
What part of ``self-selecting sample" didn't you understand?
Get 100 rednecks from East Texas together, hand them the survey from CR, & they'll most likely rate a Ford or Chevy pickup the best car. Get 100 ex-hippies together, hand them the survey from CR, & they'll most likely rate a VW the best car. Get 100 CR readers together, hand them the survey from CR, & they'll rate a Volvo or Saab the best car.
FWIW, I never said that my Mustang ``was sweet." It was a 1984 model I owned from 1992-2000, I put 100,000 miles on it, & it was far more reliable (& went to the garage far less often) than the Celica I owned just before it. (I won't bother discussing the issue of which one was more fun to drive.)
Why didn't you use J.D. Powers as an example? From what I've read, at least their samples are more representative of the general market, & ask more pointed questions (e.g. cost & number of repairs) that reduce the amount of subjectivity.
Geoff
I believe you're far more correct than you think.
Up to now, a lot of software development depended on little more than access to a useable computer; it does not require the millions of dollars of investment that auto manufacturers require to create & launch a new car. As an example, Linus Torvalds had a mid-range 386 computer, & was interested in ``fooling around" with creating an operating system. And look where his tinkering ended up! (Granted, he had help, but many of these contributors at the beginning had little more than spare time and a computer to devote to their work; no one was relying on R&D budgets or government grants.)
Unfortunately, the abuse of patents and the outrageous extension of copyright now makes it far more difficult for anyone to just ``fool around" & create something in the US. It's looking more & more likely that the next killer software will be written outside the US (& Europe) where patents & copyright are routinely ignored.
Geoff
> Check a Consumer Reports.
And that is a better sampling in what way?
I usd to have a subscription to SR a few years ago. I was amazed that they consistently rated practically all sportscars down (even ones that I have found should be rated highly, such as the Mustang), & many import cars up (such as Volvo & Saab). Then I learned that SR creates their ratings based on feedback from their subscribers, who also are asked to pay to have their votes counted.
In short, all SR does is reflect the opinions of its readers. That's why I dropped my subscription.
Geoff
> Maybe spammers should be forced to consume one can of Spam(TM) for each piece of spam that they e-mail.
And would you allow them to open the can first? If so, it might not be as effective of a punishment.
> But then again, I have always been partial to ironic punishments;-)
I'll take that as a ``no".
However, the cans Spam comes in are not made of iron. I'd guess they're made of an aluminum or a tin compound.
Geoff
Maybe the reason MS won't include popup blocking because they're afraid it might offend websites that depend on ads^W^W^W^W^Wtheir customers.
Gates & Co. have frequently stated that their customers aren't the end users, but major corporations like Dell, Fortune 500 customers, the record companies -- all of whom have interests that do not always coincide with end users like you & me. However the technology reporters too often overlook or forget this definition, & erroneously assume that for MS the customer is always the end user.
Geoff
> Dell can't stay loyal to Microsoft and not go down with them.
Maybe, but every Dell employee is more interested in keeping his employer in business than sucking up to Microsoft; they make nice to MS only because Dell's bottom line depends on good terms with Bill & Co. While even now it's still not crystal clear that Linux has the momentum to take over the server space (although I would say it's only a matter of time before it does), they have to watch what they say for fear of pissing off Redmond. So I'd guess right now Dell is making all sorts of cooing noises to their contacts at Microsoft, while preparing behind the scenes for a possible Linux win in the server space. Once that happens, they'll be able to shrug & say ``But we have to sell what the market wants to buy" & begin the inevitable migration from their dependency on Windows, perhaps even making a serious effort to sell Linux desktops.
Then it will be just a question of how quickly Dell can reposition itself to join the Linux seachange. Without a lot of research, I wouldn't bet that Dell can't do it -- nor would I bet that they can.
Geoff
> I thought he was including linux in when he said "unix is dead".
Consider that this PHB was choosing his words carefully. His peers at Microsoft will read this & think, ``Oboy! He's including Linux & that BSD thing, & is endorsing Windows on the server! This is the loyalty we are looking for!" If he had said ``proprietary Unices are dead," the same Microsofties would be calling him up & complaining that he's not with the program & biting the hand that feeds him, & darkly hint that the Windows license fees may be increased in the next negotiations.
Dell dare not piss off Microsoft. Not until it's clear they're in a clear downward business spiral.
Geoff
> A lucky few will make generous amounts of money, while the rest will scramble to survive.
>
> Such is the case in any industry where the work is a lot of fun, and I say this as a warning because the same thing can easily
> happen to computer programmers. Why? Because programming is a fun and rewarding job, and as soon as the general
> public figures this out you will have a situation where a) a lucky few get to be paid as programmers b) a lot of
> programming work gets done for free by the many trying to "make it" in the business.
Maybe. But I sincerely doubt it. Why? Because programmers are creating something that is of real use, whereas musicians -- as with any artist -- produce something that has no useable value, & survive on the perception that their work has an audience who is willing to pay money to experience what they have created.
In short, someone is always needed to write drivers, debug existing code, write wrapper scripts, & do the thousand-&-one things that wouldn't be accomplished if someone wasn't being paid. A programmer may end up earning as much as a ditch digger, but there will always be a demand for her/his work. Meanwhile, one can always stop buying novels or new CDs if one is unemployed (which I was forced to do), but if the car breaks, you are forced to run a balance on the credit card (which I did).
Geoff
In my case, the age of 12 would have been the right time for some advice:
1. Get to know your mother well: she'll be dead in a year.
2. The woman your Dad will marry will be a bitch. You will be better off getting a GED so you can move away sooner.
3. You can get into a better college, & you can make a living from working with computers.
4. It'll be twenty years before medical science recognizes that children don't outgrow ADD; start understanding ways to live with it now.
Then again, all of these points are very specific to me; I don't know if anyone could generalize from them for ideas they would tell their own 12-year-old self.
Geoff
> Hm, Copernicus found himself in a similar dilemma. Only it wasn't zealotry he was charged with, it was heresy.
I suspect you mean s/Copernicus/Gallileo/
Copernicus died the day his book was published. But there is evidence that Gallileo received some negative attention from the authorities during his lifetime.
Geoff
Possible questions for /. polls:
1) How many people will repeat this line? (My wife told me the morning DJ on the radio channel she listens to already made this joke.)
2) How long before this joke is entirely lame? More quickly than the news Kevin Mitnick had his web site hacked?
Geoff
> Here's a bit of common junk science from the article:
> In a study of 8,000 tech projects in businesses, only 16 percent of the new systems were deemed successes
>
> What, exactly, is a "tech project"? Define "new systems". What criteria is applied to conclude whether things may be
> "deem successes" and by whom?
This figure doesn't sound that far out of line to me. In another study quoted in the IEEE _Computer Magazine_, 2 out of 3 MAJOR projects (e.g., with budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars), are never completed. And in this instance, this figure referred to software installs or upgrades -- e.g., installing or upgrading an Oracle database, migrating from one mail system to MS Outlook, etc.
(FWIW, smaller projects had a much higher rate of success -- IIRC, somewhere in the 70-80% range.)
And if you added to that miserable 66% failure rate all of the projects that were completed, but later rolled back, abandoned, or judged to have been a disaster, an 84% failure rate is believable. In the last few years, I saw a previous employer -- a telco -- give up on migrating its billing system to a new system, I watched the city I live in lose millions of dollars in revenue in trying to upgrade its billing system for water & sewer charges. These were completed projects that couldn't be accurately called ``successes".
> I could pick this apart in my sleep.
Probably. But the fact that many organizations would be much better off adopting an ``if it isn't broke, don't fix it" attitude towards their technology is damning enough about our industry.
Geoff
> At any rate, this is just *another* example of how stupid the DMCA is and how it's being used way out of its scope.
Solution: sue someone with standing to show that this law is constitutionally vague. Lexmark looks like a good target.
IIRC, the whole point of the DMCA was to prevent piracy -- so lots of lawmakers claimed, & so the lobbyists who shovelled them lots of money claimed.
As we have seen in this article -- & others -- this law is being abused to prevent competition, & thus labelling people who have a legitimate reason to reverse engineer devices as ``criminals" or ``pirates". Which is clearly not the intent of the law.
(Someone with a law degree could probably hone this to a far more serviceable point. But I Am Not A Lawyer.)
Then, there is the problem of raising the money to make this suit work. And hoping that it lands before enough judges who have a clue to agree that this thing is unconstitutional. I'm under no illusion that it would be far cheaper & easier to simply repeal the law.
Geoff
For smart advertising to work, you need smart advertisers.
That might sound like a flip comment, but think about it: most advertising is done with a ``knock on enough doors and eventually one opens" mentallity. Advertisers don't realize that if they knock too loudly or too often on enough doors, people will start reacting with more than a simple no -- perhaps with physical violence.
If someone looks at a webpage where I'm selling something, presumably they want to buy; that they didn't, could be for any numbe of reasons: wrong price, uncertainty about the quality, or that they were still gathering information to make an informed purchase. A pop-up on exit questionaire could help me learn those things, but due to Orbitz and X10, few would bother with that kind of questionaire nowadays, & even fewer would provide useful information. (Telling someone ``you suck for using pop-ups" wouldn't help in that situation.)
That would be a smart way of using pop-ups. But using them for aggressive advertising has poisoned the well for using that tool to talk to the customer & learning exactly what they want to buy. And so the Internet spirals downwards to television.
Geoff
> And I swear I'll break the fingers of anyone who makes that 'In soviet Russia....' joke.
Hey, I overheard Bill Gates make that joke to Larry Ellison. Go get 'em tiger!
Geoff