Who is Marc Andreessen?
on
The New IT Crisis
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Isn't this the same Marc Andreessen who once responded to a criticism of all of the new bugs in Netscape with ``Hey, we don't have the time to do it right"?
And if you use software that is written to ``do it right", won't uptimes of 5 nines happen by itself?
I'm just one guy who spent a year trying to get Andreesen's software to work on hundreds of computers. I really don't have any opinion about this multi-millionaire.
Is that the fiber in Oregon this article is talking about is mostly along I-5. The original article that this story came from had a map showing where this fiber was laid. This map showed that with the exception of what the BPA had laid down, there was practically NOTHING connecting all of this fiber to the rest of the state, whether it be Bend (which is a growing high tech center) or smaller towns that fear they are doomed because they can't afford to lay & light up a network of a dozen miles back to this glut of bandwidth.
Think of it this way: these companies built several eight-lane highways linking Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and points south; they didn't bother to build more than a handful of interchanges each of which at best feeds a total of a single lane of traffic to them. This fiber will remain dark for a long, long time.
> Harassing the lawyer for doing his job is another step altogether. If he himself is harassing people, that's one thing; if he's > just protecting the spammer's rights, he's doing his job. For that matter bear in mind that the law frowns on self-help > generally.
True. But feel free to research the meaning of the word ``barratry". I'd say that if any lawyer who takes up this spammer's case, & does not quickly move to trial on any suit he raises, should be hit hard & repeatedly with this charge.
Find a friendly lawyer who will help you research this. I figure that after our spammer loses the first couple of cases, if his lawyer is ethical, he'll tell him to give up this fight. And if he doesn't, *he* will find himself caught in the same quicksand. And our spammer will be forced to find another lawyer to continue his campaign.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Until this spammer finds himself without anyone willing to accept his cases. And, strange to mention, I bet a lot of other spammers will find that they are unable to locate willing consel to sue for this alleged harrassment.
But then, IANAL. But it might be fun to watch autodarwination in process.
> What's novel about the theory in the article is that it proposes that living cells were preceded by nonliving inorganic cells.
Okay, am I the only one who is seeing a contradiction here? How can a ``cell" -- which, ignoring the existence of viruses, is the building block of life -- be considered ``nonliving" or ``inorganic"? That's about as nonsensical as saying ``atheist Christian".
And the article pointed to doesn't clear up this odd phrase. Are we talking about living objects, inanimate objects, or a concept so complex the journalists are doomed to garble any explanation?
If it's the later, can someone offer a URL to the original research so those of us whose bullshit meters are beeping at full volume can figure out just what this discovery really is about?
> But how likely is it that the Judge will actually exercise this power in anything but the most limited fashion, and if she does > that it will not be immediately appealed (possibly by the Justice Department and Microsoft together) and overturned?
US Justices almost always excercise powers like this in anything but the most limited fashion. Consider that a given; and this is why MS will be pushing the language this agreement, rather than directly testing it.
And my guess about this agreement is that MS will keep testing this until Judge Kollar-Ketelly loses patience (just as another justice did), & slaps MS down. Then MS will appeal & agrue that Kollar-Ketelly was biassed in the hope they can win another judge who might be more malliable.
I hope that Judge Kollar-Ketelly will anticipate this tactic, and tries to find an opportunity where if MS appeals, it will be at the cost of one of the many advantages they enjoy from this agreement. A poison pill, if you will.
`` For the commercial products the vendors could supply us with support costs, often broken down in such a way we could choose our support like a Chinese menu. But for the Open Source products this was not the case. Contacting the maintainers of the Open Source products and asking if anyone provided commercial support was fruitless; in one case the response was downright rude (basically a variation on RTFM) and in the other the response was more helpful, but still could not suggest anything other than being active on the mailing list."
Hmm. I guess someone is either making a lotta of money in this down economy (& doesn't know anyone scrounging for work), or is still in high school & has never wanted for toys.
I'd suggest that you try a few mailing lists or look at a couple of websites. There are lots of folks out there who are both skilled & looking for work, & who would be more than happy to offer you a quote.
``So I had to figure in the cost of one of my customer's IT staff staying active on that list and learning enough about the product to provide in-house support supplemented by the email list. Estimating this at one tenth of an FTE and that FTE at a low $80,000 per year resolved to $8,000 per year. This was nearly three times the cost of the most expensive commercial product support!"
Well, figure again that if you have any kind of enterprise-level software running, someone will have to spend some time monitoring the relevant mailling lists, periodically checking web sites for patches, et cetera. 0.1 FTE works out to being 4 hours a week . . . which seems to me twice as long as it would need. But whether you buy something from Microsoft, Oracle, Sun or download & install an Open Source solution, this constant amount of research needs to be done.
Expecting the support arm of any company to do all of this is foolish. While they will have access to resources you won't have (defect databases, source code), from my experience unless you pay a lot more than $8,000/year the support you'll get from them won't be much better -- & may be worse -- than what you get from the mailling list run by the users.
And if you pay a consultant with the expectation that she/he will do all of this & none of your staff, all you are doing is allowing someone to acquire job security at your expense.
You're going to have to allocate the FTE for maintaining this project no matter which way you go. And you'll have to convince your bosses of this fact.
> IANAL, but am really interested in the outcome of this case. Anyone care to summarize?
Sorry, but my time machine is on the fritz. (And every time I find an sbus PCMCIA card adapter on eBay, some idiot bids it beyond what I can afford to pay!)
Therefore, I can't look ahead & report to you how this ONGOING case was decided. You'll just have to wait until the US Supreme court releases their opinion.
Now the reason I can't share what happened in the Microsoft Antitrust case is that it would spoil the ending for everyone. Sometimes knowing the future is a bitch.
> I thought AOL was based on the idea of a super-BBS that people could use, in the days of Prodigy and Compuserve, > well before the Internet was remotely available to Joe 486.
AOL has been many things thru its existence. At one point, it was a Commodore 64 network, & for many years had the largest collection of software for that platform. Until one day (IIRC, in 1995) the PHB decided to remove this resource. And without any warning, it gone in the time it took to reformat a hard drive. Now about the only trace it has of its history with the Commodore is the name of a few forums -- IF the ``Quantum" discussion areas are still in existence.
In my experience, this is typically how AOL has functioned: management would make all kinds of promises to its customers, then without warning renege on these promises -- obviously because of the extra money breaking these promises would make. Steve Case swore again & again in 1993-6 that AOL would never have advertisements, that he prised the community feeling of AOL; sometime after I finally cancelled my AOL account in 1997, AOL started shoving ads onto its customers.
Internet connectivity for AOL at the beginning was an afterthought, an add-on that allowed new customers to keep relationships created on other online services (the Internet in 1992 wasn't even a buzz-word); now it's AOL's chief selling point. AOL once boasted about its member community; now it's the equivalent of a combined strip amll & red light district. In 1992, AOL had a network-based GUI that was truly better than anything short of a high-end workstation running X -- yet ran quite nicely on a 2400 baud connection; from what I hear, it's old, marred by uncontrollable commercial pop-ups & bogged down even on 56K dial-up connections.
And until recently, AOL has shown an uncanny ability at killing every technology it acquired: Navistar (a company that wrote its own competitor to Mosaic) & GNN (O'Reilly's own attempt to create a commercial web site) both were bought, operated fitfully for a year or two, then quietly euthenised, & now are barely a footnote in computer history. AOL has teated Mozilla, winamp, the AOL web server (used as part of OpenACS) far better.
It's possible that AOL could be saved, & be made a company that delivered true value to its obviously non-technical customer base; but I doubt its current management has a clue of how to accomplish this.
> 2. Folks who had the idea of waiting out the tech downturn by going to college are going to graduate only to find out that > the tech downturn isnt over yet. Worse still, now they have to pay off loans.
One sign that the tech downturn won't have ended in 12 months:
I heard last month that Intel was going to impose a 10% pay cut on all contractors (Green Badge) employees. My source expected that a number of people would quit to look for work elsewhere.
In follow-up calls, I learned practically no one took this option -- they know just how bad things are on the outside. Many of them, however, are updating their resumes & are looking for an employer who may not be as eager to demonstrate a lack of loyalty to its workers.
Geoff
Not the Study Wanted, but My Own Research
on
Open Source Studies
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· Score: 2
> Does anyone know of an online source for this study?
Well, in December of 2001 I compiled some figures to satisfy my curiousity about how long does it actually take to write reliable software, & I compared the time between releases of MS OS software -- Win 3.1 & its decendants as well as Win NT & its decendants -- with the time between releases of versions of Linux. I had expected that MS would be the winner in terms of time-to-market, but was surprised that Linux on average *was* faster.
For the product family from Win 3.1 to Win XP, MS required an average of 28.75 months, with a maximum of 41 months (between Win 3.1 & Win 95) & a minimum of 13 months (between Win ME & Win XP). For the product family from Win NT 3.1 to Win XP, the average time between releases was 24.75 months, the longest being between NT 4.0 & Win 2000, & the shortest was between NT 3.1 & 3.5.
In comparison, the average time between major releases of Linux was 20.5 months, the longest being between versions 2.2 & 2.4, the shortest was between versions 1.2 & 2.0.
I'll admit that after some thought I saw this was not entirely a fair comparison: the various Windows releases involved a much larger code base that incorporated far more functionality than the Linux kernel (e.g., a web browser & mail services), so I then compared the development cycles for two projects that maintain similarly more functional OSs: the Debian distribution of Linux, & FreeBSD. The results still showed that non-commercial software -- which was developed without a deadline set by management -- had at least as fast of development cycles.
Debian took 24 months to go from release 1.1 to 2.0 -- with an average time of 10.6 months between the minor (i.e. x.0, x.1, & x.2) releases. FreeBSD had an average time of 25 months between x.0 releases, but an average time of 18 months between new forks of the -STABLE & -CURRENT branches. (With FreeBSD I'm not sure which is a fairer way to measure cycles, but I would lean to the time between the new forks of the -STABLE & -CURRENT branches.)
The reason I haven't published this (& much of my work still remains in handwritten notes) because (1) I feel this is too good to be true for Open Source, (2) I'd like to examine non-commercial projects with a longer history (e.g. emacs or sendmail), (3) I would need a far more resilient web site to publish this on than my own personal one (gotta prepare for the/. effect), & (4) I'm not sure my methodology is solid. But if _Peopleware_ demonstrated this fact before me, then I'm more comfortable describing this bit of research, since it confirms their discovery.
> Clipboard support has already been fixed! GTK+ supports the clipboard properly since version 1.2.
Gtk+ is a toolkit or widget library. If an X application *DOESN'T* make use of it (e.g., LyX & Opera come immediately to mind), then it doesn't matter: the user is still confronted with incompatiblity progblems.
But if the applications looked to the window manager for guidance how to handle this, then one could overcome the problems multiple toolkits or widget libraries cause.
Not to say there might already be a simpler or better answer.
> There already is good "cut and paste" support... its called "gpm".
That's if one if working from a console interface. I can't help but suspect that the original poster was thinking of the nonstandardization of cut-&-paste with GUI apps . . . which is an X issue.
Good feature request, wrong team to fix it: & the philosophy of the folks developing X is not to dictate one binding solution for all. I'd say the best solution woudl be for apps to be written so that they can submit to what the window manager dictates -- not the toolkit or widget set. (ISTR that the biggest differences in how cut and paste work lie in this area.)
But systematically rewriting all of these applications -- Gnumeric, Mozilla, jpilot, etc. -- would require a lot of work.
> > What are the implications for the Internet's functionality when the inevitable arms race develops?
> I love this comparison. This indeed seems like an arms race. > On one side you have the big corps armed with heavy lawyers and lots of money. > On the other side, groups of hackers, filesharers, IT-rights activists. We're armed with technology, innovation, and a whole lotta people
It's been done before. Look at the history of alt.religion.scientology -- the Scienos on one side with money, & lawyers, a bunch of activists on the other with hackers & a clue about the Internet. So far it's been a quagmire for the Scienos, whose ideology won't allow them to compromise, let alone cut their loses & run.
Unfortunately, it's not been all that fun for the other side: this little battle has taken its toll in money, careers, & burnout. However, practically every current Scientologist will become an ex-scientologist & thus be interested in picking up the fight where another has left off.
One thing about this one fight is that it has provided a battle plan for Hollywood to follow in its own approach to the Internet & protecting content. A number of actors & musicians are Scienos, & there are only a finite number of lawyers who specialize in media law: anecdotes & experiences from the Scienos battle with the Internet have undoubtedly seeped into the studios & recording music offices. Thus Rosen's interest in attacking the personal computers of anyone connected to the Internet -- something David Miscavige, the head of the CoS, would give his right theta for.
As a result, Hollywood believes they have to fight a war where there really isn't one: as it has been said before, all but a negligible amount of this ``piracy" would vanish if simply music & films were easier to buy or rent online. The industry would make more money, consumers would have more choice -- a win-win situation.
Fortunately, these industries are far more interested in making money than in pushing an ideological point-of-view. Hopefully if we keep defeating these misguided acts, the PHB running these companies will get the message, & at last see how to make money by offering an effective online point of sale.
> Think it would be possible to program decency into them?
It depends on who you recruit into the programs.
Another lifetime or two ago, I worked at an engineering company that specialized in pulp and paper manufacturing. One of the engineers was a woman who catagorically refused to ever specify the product of a certain manufacturer for any paper mill she worked on. The reason for this was that the manufacturer (who made a bed or mat upon which the paper pulp would be laid, dried, & given a texture) advertised its product wrapped around unclothed female models.
Yes, she thought the ads were sexist. But the true point was that the material is as comfortable to the skin (roughly speaking) as the pink fiberglass used to insulate houses in the US. If you've never touched it, fiberglass insulation causes itching almost immediately & can leave a rash on the skin! She argued that the material this manufacturer had the same effect on human skin, & that she had sent a petition with several dozen signatures -- including one faculty member -- to this manufacturer -- to discontinue these ads.
Aw, this post doesn't flame Microsoft, so probably no one will read it & think about this issue.
If this is the best the pro-MS crowd can do, then MS really is in a lot of trouble!
A selection of topics that look like what an intern at MS's own PR department would pick, most of the fora empty, & the few fora that have any comments degenerate within 15 minutes into Linux vs. Windows flamefest.
Someone even thought a car accident one month ago was worth an article on this site. It took me some digging (the way they link to stories suck) to confirm what I suspected: Heikki Kanerva, one of the victims in this accident, was an employee at MS. In other words, a story so poorly written a reader really had to work at to care about it.
There *HAS* to be a better pro-MS discussion forum somewhere. Any suggestions?
> Stallman did not want to come speak for us unless we changed the name [of our users group]
He made the same demand of our user group here in Portland, OR. The reaction in our mailing list was divided: many felt he could FOAD for that demand, others agreed 110% with RMS.
A big problem is that PLUG is short for ``Portland Linux/UNIX Group" -- because the various flavors of UNIX in Portland don't have their own functioning user groups. The principal activist running PLUG -- David Mandel -- is agnostic when it comes to the question ``which OS is best."
My opinion? (Warning -- flamebait follows.)
We should have offered to have changed the name of PLUG to ``Asshole Fan Club" to meet RMS' demand.
No, I didn't post this to the mailing list; tempers were already getting short concerning this topic by the time I thought of saying this.
> Why do people who know something about computers assume that this makes them qualified to give legal opinions?
Well, I'm not Canadian, nor a lawyer, but I can answer this question.
People asking for help online -- be it a computer problem, a legal problem, or a relationship problem, are looking for advice from folks who have experience with this problem, good or bad. And response from/., while clearly not definitive (*), can be a useful first step to understand what the options are to solve the problem.
Further, I understand lawyers are not as common outside the USA as they are in the home of the lawsuit & quick legal injunction. In some countries, people live their entire lives without ever meeting a lawyer. In these places, informal settlements thru negotiations are far more effective & quicker than the process of finding a lawyer, determining whether she/he is actually able to do the work well, & at the last paying said professional for either advice or to persue the matter thru legal channels.
That being said, I'm glad an expert has spoken up with an answer; the Internet (of which/. is but one small piece) works best when it connects people who need information with experts willing to offer simple, but useful, answers.
Just my US$0.02
(*) And if you are looking for advice, definietely don't make/. your only stop. Otherwise, you'd very likely end up doing the equivalent of inviting Natale Portman to go visit the goatse guy & explain to him why BSD is a dead OS.
Brett Glass wrote: ``Yet, due to the Congressional committee system, it is necessary to be heard by legislators of whom one is not a constituent for this to occur. If legislators "tune out" non-constituents, we're all effectively disenfranchised."
Now you wouldn't be thinking of a specific congressman who did this, would you? One elected from South Carolina, but who represents the Disney Corporation?
> Am I the only one > reminded of the part in American History X where the skinhead girl starts screaming "NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER!" > when she finds out that her ex-boyfriend is no longer a Nazi?
You wrote: ``Just because I'm not a hard line FSF zealot doesn't mean that I work for Microsoft PR or anything of the sort."
I'm not a hard-line FSF zealot either -- in fact I think RMS is a obsessive jerk. However, everything you have so far posted convinces me at least one of the following is true:
(1) You work for Microsoft, either as a direct employee, a contractor, or a consultant with MSCE after your name; (2) You have bought entirely into the myth that MS has created the Personal Computer, & does nothing but good for humanity; (3) You idolize one or more of MS's employees, & think that they walk on water.
Let this thread end, before you prove any further that you are a distributor of FUD.
> You are being hired for the SERVICE of taking photos. You are not hired to keep someone's > wedding negatives hostage so you can gouge per print indefinately.
I agree with this. And I suspect, most people who have a photographer for those special occasions would also. They're HIRING someone to do work, & expect that by paying money they'll receive the product with few or no strings attached.
As I understand the screed/. has linked to, what the author is predicting is not the end to photography entirely, but a shift in what is bought & sold. A photographer does the work commissioned: she/he spends a half hour shooting the photos, & at the end burns the digital masters to a CD, which is then given to her/his employers. Who then make a payment for the labor, & make use of the data on the CD.
Does this appear to force the photographer to barely make a living? Charge $70-80 for the half hour. After payment for equipment, inevitable dead time, etc., this would provide more than a living wage -- & IIRC would be about half of what people pay for photos today. Not a bad tradeoff to me.
> I would be very interested to know how Mr Open Source himself, Guns not Gnu's, Eric S. Raymond is doing.
If you had bothered to read another fora here on/., you'd find that currently Raymond can't even give his code away.
He reached the point most.com millionaires would consider was the bottom, but has still found a way to push ever downward. I wouldn't bother kicking him for his hubris at this point.
> so the multiple times were the BSA has had to spit up cash because they raided with judicial consent aern't violent?
I'm not quite sure what your post means, but I'll assume that with proper spelling & punctuation you meant to say, ``So the multiple times where the BSA [forced companies] to spit up cash -- because they raided with judicial consent -- [these raids] aren't violent?"
Did any of these BSA raids involve the use of force? By this, I mean did the BSA draw guns, strike people, or physically injure them?
There is a lot to loathe about how the BSA are the proxy enforcers for Microsoft's licensing terms, & how they are the strong arm of MS's marketing department, but no one has reported the BSA breaking down doors, kidnapping people & torturing them to pay for MS software. Unless you know something I don't -- in which case, I'm all ears.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this the same Marc Andreessen who once responded to a criticism of all of the new bugs in Netscape with ``Hey, we don't have the time to do it right"?
And if you use software that is written to ``do it right", won't uptimes of 5 nines happen by itself?
I'm just one guy who spent a year trying to get Andreesen's software to work on hundreds of computers. I really don't have any opinion about this multi-millionaire.
Geoff
Is that the fiber in Oregon this article is talking about is mostly along I-5. The original article that this story came from had a map showing where this fiber was laid. This map showed that with the exception of what the BPA had laid down, there was practically NOTHING connecting all of this fiber to the rest of the state, whether it be Bend (which is a growing high tech center) or smaller towns that fear they are doomed because they can't afford to lay & light up a network of a dozen miles back to this glut of bandwidth.
Think of it this way: these companies built several eight-lane highways linking Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and points south; they didn't bother to build more than a handful of interchanges each of which at best feeds a total of a single lane of traffic to them. This fiber will remain dark for a long, long time.
Geoff
> Harassing the lawyer for doing his job is another step altogether. If he himself is harassing people, that's one thing; if he's
> just protecting the spammer's rights, he's doing his job. For that matter bear in mind that the law frowns on self-help
> generally.
True. But feel free to research the meaning of the word ``barratry". I'd say that if any lawyer who takes up this spammer's case, & does not quickly move to trial on any suit he raises, should be hit hard & repeatedly with this charge.
Find a friendly lawyer who will help you research this. I figure that after our spammer loses the first couple of cases, if his lawyer is ethical, he'll tell him to give up this fight. And if he doesn't, *he* will find himself caught in the same quicksand. And our spammer will be forced to find another lawyer to continue his campaign.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Until this spammer finds himself without anyone willing to accept his cases. And, strange to mention, I bet a lot of other spammers will find that they are unable to locate willing consel to sue for this alleged harrassment.
But then, IANAL. But it might be fun to watch autodarwination in process.
Geoff
> What's novel about the theory in the article is that it proposes that living cells were preceded by nonliving inorganic cells.
Okay, am I the only one who is seeing a contradiction here? How can a ``cell" -- which, ignoring the existence of viruses, is the building block of life -- be considered ``nonliving" or ``inorganic"? That's about as nonsensical as saying ``atheist Christian".
And the article pointed to doesn't clear up this odd phrase. Are we talking about living objects, inanimate objects, or a concept so complex the journalists are doomed to garble any explanation?
If it's the later, can someone offer a URL to the original research so those of us whose bullshit meters are beeping at full volume can figure out just what this discovery really is about?
Geoff
> But how likely is it that the Judge will actually exercise this power in anything but the most limited fashion, and if she does
> that it will not be immediately appealed (possibly by the Justice Department and Microsoft together) and overturned?
US Justices almost always excercise powers like this in anything but the most limited fashion. Consider that a given; and this is why MS will be pushing the language this agreement, rather than directly testing it.
And my guess about this agreement is that MS will keep testing this until Judge Kollar-Ketelly loses patience (just as another justice did), & slaps MS down. Then MS will appeal & agrue that Kollar-Ketelly was biassed in the hope they can win another judge who might be more malliable.
I hope that Judge Kollar-Ketelly will anticipate this tactic, and tries to find an opportunity where if MS appeals, it will be at the cost of one of the many advantages they enjoy from this agreement. A poison pill, if you will.
Geoff
`` For the commercial products the vendors could supply us with support costs, often broken down in such a way we could choose our support like a Chinese menu. But for the Open Source products this was not the case. Contacting the maintainers of the Open Source products and asking if anyone provided commercial support was fruitless; in one case the response was downright rude (basically a variation on RTFM) and in the other the response was more helpful, but still could not suggest anything other than being active on the mailing list."
Hmm. I guess someone is either making a lotta of money in this down economy (& doesn't know anyone scrounging for work), or is still in high school & has never wanted for toys.
I'd suggest that you try a few mailing lists or look at a couple of websites. There are lots of folks out there who are both skilled & looking for work, & who would be more than happy to offer you a quote.
``So I had to figure in the cost of one of my customer's IT staff staying active on that list and learning enough about the product to provide in-house support supplemented by the email list. Estimating this at one tenth of an FTE and that FTE at a low $80,000 per year resolved to $8,000 per year. This was nearly three times the cost of the most expensive commercial product support!"
Well, figure again that if you have any kind of enterprise-level software running, someone will have to spend some time monitoring the relevant mailling lists, periodically checking web sites for patches, et cetera. 0.1 FTE works out to being 4 hours a week . . . which seems to me twice as long as it would need. But whether you buy something from Microsoft, Oracle, Sun or download & install an Open Source solution, this constant amount of research needs to be done.
Expecting the support arm of any company to do all of this is foolish. While they will have access to resources you won't have (defect databases, source code), from my experience unless you pay a lot more than $8,000/year the support you'll get from them won't be much better -- & may be worse -- than what you get from the mailling list run by the users.
And if you pay a consultant with the expectation that she/he will do all of this & none of your staff, all you are doing is allowing someone to acquire job security at your expense.
You're going to have to allocate the FTE for maintaining this project no matter which way you go. And you'll have to convince your bosses of this fact.
Geoff
> IANAL, but am really interested in the outcome of this case. Anyone care to summarize?
Sorry, but my time machine is on the fritz. (And every time I find an sbus PCMCIA card adapter on eBay, some idiot bids it beyond what I can afford to pay!)
Therefore, I can't look ahead & report to you how this ONGOING case was decided. You'll just have to wait until the US Supreme court releases their opinion.
Now the reason I can't share what happened in the Microsoft Antitrust case is that it would spoil the ending for everyone. Sometimes knowing the future is a bitch.
Geoff
> I thought AOL was based on the idea of a super-BBS that people could use, in the days of Prodigy and Compuserve,
> well before the Internet was remotely available to Joe 486.
AOL has been many things thru its existence. At one point, it was a Commodore 64 network, & for many years had the largest collection of software for that platform. Until one day (IIRC, in 1995) the PHB decided to remove this resource. And without any warning, it gone in the time it took to reformat a hard drive. Now about the only trace it has of its history with the Commodore is the name of a few forums -- IF the ``Quantum" discussion areas are still in existence.
In my experience, this is typically how AOL has functioned: management would make all kinds of promises to its customers, then without warning renege on these promises -- obviously because of the extra money breaking these promises would make. Steve Case swore again & again in 1993-6 that AOL would never have advertisements, that he prised the community feeling of AOL; sometime after I finally cancelled my AOL account in 1997, AOL started shoving ads onto its customers.
Internet connectivity for AOL at the beginning was an afterthought, an add-on that allowed new customers to keep relationships created on other online services (the Internet in 1992 wasn't even a buzz-word); now it's AOL's chief selling point. AOL once boasted about its member community; now it's the equivalent of a combined strip amll & red light district. In 1992, AOL had a network-based GUI that was truly better than anything short of a high-end workstation running X -- yet ran quite nicely on a 2400 baud connection; from what I hear, it's old, marred by uncontrollable commercial pop-ups & bogged down even on 56K dial-up connections.
And until recently, AOL has shown an uncanny ability at killing every technology it acquired: Navistar (a company that wrote its own competitor to Mosaic) & GNN (O'Reilly's own attempt to create a commercial web site) both were bought, operated fitfully for a year or two, then quietly euthenised, & now are barely a footnote in computer history. AOL has teated Mozilla, winamp, the AOL web server (used as part of OpenACS) far better.
It's possible that AOL could be saved, & be made a company that delivered true value to its obviously non-technical customer base; but I doubt its current management has a clue of how to accomplish this.
Geoff
> 2. Folks who had the idea of waiting out the tech downturn by going to college are going to graduate only to find out that
> the tech downturn isnt over yet. Worse still, now they have to pay off loans.
One sign that the tech downturn won't have ended in 12 months:
I heard last month that Intel was going to impose a 10% pay cut on all contractors (Green Badge) employees. My source expected that a number of people would quit to look for work elsewhere.
In follow-up calls, I learned practically no one took this option -- they know just how bad things are on the outside. Many of them, however, are updating their resumes & are looking for an employer who may not be as eager to demonstrate a lack of loyalty to its workers.
Geoff
> Does anyone know of an online source for this study?
/. effect), & (4) I'm not sure my methodology is solid. But if _Peopleware_ demonstrated this fact before me, then I'm more comfortable describing this bit of research, since it confirms their discovery.
Well, in December of 2001 I compiled some figures to satisfy my curiousity about how long does it actually take to write reliable software, & I compared the time between releases of MS OS software -- Win 3.1 & its decendants as well as Win NT & its decendants -- with the time between releases of versions of Linux. I had expected that MS would be the winner in terms of time-to-market, but was surprised that Linux on average *was* faster.
For the product family from Win 3.1 to Win XP, MS required an average of 28.75 months, with a maximum of 41 months (between Win 3.1 & Win 95) & a minimum of 13 months (between Win ME & Win XP). For the product family from Win NT 3.1 to Win XP, the average time between releases was 24.75 months, the longest being between NT 4.0 & Win 2000, & the shortest was between NT 3.1 & 3.5.
In comparison, the average time between major releases of Linux was 20.5 months, the longest being between versions 2.2 & 2.4, the shortest was between versions 1.2 & 2.0.
I'll admit that after some thought I saw this was not entirely a fair comparison: the various Windows releases involved a much larger code base that incorporated far more functionality than the Linux kernel (e.g., a web browser & mail services), so I then compared the development cycles for two projects that maintain similarly more functional OSs: the Debian distribution of Linux, & FreeBSD. The results still showed that non-commercial software -- which was developed without a deadline set by management -- had at least as fast of development cycles.
Debian took 24 months to go from release 1.1 to 2.0 -- with an average time of 10.6 months between the minor (i.e. x.0, x.1, & x.2) releases. FreeBSD had an average time of 25 months between x.0 releases, but an average time of 18 months between new forks of the -STABLE & -CURRENT branches. (With FreeBSD I'm not sure which is a fairer way to measure cycles, but I would lean to the time between the new forks of the -STABLE & -CURRENT branches.)
The reason I haven't published this (& much of my work still remains in handwritten notes) because (1) I feel this is too good to be true for Open Source, (2) I'd like to examine non-commercial projects with a longer history (e.g. emacs or sendmail), (3) I would need a far more resilient web site to publish this on than my own personal one (gotta prepare for the
Geoff
> Clipboard support has already been fixed! GTK+ supports the clipboard properly since version 1.2.
Gtk+ is a toolkit or widget library. If an X application *DOESN'T* make use of it (e.g., LyX & Opera come immediately to mind), then it doesn't matter: the user is still confronted with incompatiblity progblems.
But if the applications looked to the window manager for guidance how to handle this, then one could overcome the problems multiple toolkits or widget libraries cause.
Not to say there might already be a simpler or better answer.
Geoff
> There already is good "cut and paste" support... its called "gpm".
That's if one if working from a console interface. I can't help but suspect that the original poster was thinking of the nonstandardization of cut-&-paste with GUI apps . . . which is an X issue.
Good feature request, wrong team to fix it: & the philosophy of the folks developing X is not to dictate one binding solution for all. I'd say the best solution woudl be for apps to be written so that they can submit to what the window manager dictates -- not the toolkit or widget set. (ISTR that the biggest differences in how cut and paste work lie in this area.)
But systematically rewriting all of these applications -- Gnumeric, Mozilla, jpilot, etc. -- would require a lot of work.
Geoff
You left out my favorite part of this quote -- the sentence immediately before what you quoted:
``A lot of the really technical people who really understood the protocol appear to have left Microsoft."
From the rumors surrounding the release of Win2000, I suspect that this loss of technical expertise is not limited to the SMB protocol alone.
Geoff
> > What are the implications for the Internet's functionality when the inevitable arms race develops?
> I love this comparison. This indeed seems like an arms race.
> On one side you have the big corps armed with heavy lawyers and lots of money.
> On the other side, groups of hackers, filesharers, IT-rights activists. We're armed with technology, innovation, and a whole lotta people
It's been done before. Look at the history of alt.religion.scientology -- the Scienos on one side with money, & lawyers, a bunch of activists on the other with hackers & a clue about the Internet. So far it's been a quagmire for the Scienos, whose ideology won't allow them to compromise, let alone cut their loses & run.
Unfortunately, it's not been all that fun for the other side: this little battle has taken its toll in money, careers, & burnout. However, practically every current Scientologist will become an ex-scientologist & thus be interested in picking up the fight where another has left off.
One thing about this one fight is that it has provided a battle plan for Hollywood to follow in its own approach to the Internet & protecting content. A number of actors & musicians are Scienos, & there are only a finite number of lawyers who specialize in media law: anecdotes & experiences from the Scienos battle with the Internet have undoubtedly seeped into the studios & recording music offices. Thus Rosen's interest in attacking the personal computers of anyone connected to the Internet -- something David Miscavige, the head of the CoS, would give his right theta for.
As a result, Hollywood believes they have to fight a war where there really isn't one: as it has been said before, all but a negligible amount of this ``piracy" would vanish if simply music & films were easier to buy or rent online. The industry would make more money, consumers would have more choice -- a win-win situation.
Fortunately, these industries are far more interested in making money than in pushing an ideological point-of-view. Hopefully if we keep defeating these misguided acts, the PHB running these companies will get the message, & at last see how to make money by offering an effective online point of sale.
Geoff
> Think it would be possible to program decency into them?
It depends on who you recruit into the programs.
Another lifetime or two ago, I worked at an engineering company that specialized in pulp and paper manufacturing. One of the engineers was a woman who catagorically refused to ever specify the product of a certain manufacturer for any paper mill she worked on. The reason for this was that the manufacturer (who made a bed or mat upon which the paper pulp would be laid, dried, & given a texture) advertised its product wrapped around unclothed female models.
Yes, she thought the ads were sexist. But the true point was that the material is as comfortable to the skin (roughly speaking) as the pink fiberglass used to insulate houses in the US. If you've never touched it, fiberglass insulation causes itching almost immediately & can leave a rash on the skin! She argued that the material this manufacturer had the same effect on human skin, & that she had sent a petition with several dozen signatures -- including one faculty member -- to this manufacturer -- to discontinue these ads.
Aw, this post doesn't flame Microsoft, so probably no one will read it & think about this issue.
Geoff
If this is the best the pro-MS crowd can do, then MS really is in a lot of trouble!
A selection of topics that look like what an intern at MS's own PR department would pick, most of the fora empty, & the few fora that have any comments
degenerate within 15 minutes into Linux vs. Windows flamefest.
Someone even thought a car accident one month ago was worth an article on this site. It took me some digging (the way they link to stories suck) to confirm what I suspected: Heikki Kanerva, one of the victims in this accident, was an employee at MS. In other words, a story so poorly written a reader really had to work at to care about it.
There *HAS* to be a better pro-MS discussion forum somewhere. Any suggestions?
Geoff
> Stallman did not want to come speak for us unless we changed the name [of our users group]
He made the same demand of our user group here in Portland, OR. The reaction in our mailing list was divided: many felt he could FOAD for that demand, others agreed 110% with RMS.
A big problem is that PLUG is short for ``Portland Linux/UNIX Group" -- because the various flavors of UNIX in Portland don't have their own functioning user groups. The principal activist running PLUG -- David Mandel -- is agnostic when it comes to the question ``which OS is best."
My opinion? (Warning -- flamebait follows.)
We should have offered to have changed the name of PLUG to ``Asshole Fan Club" to meet RMS' demand.
No, I didn't post this to the mailing list; tempers were already getting short concerning this topic by the time I thought of saying this.
Geoff
> Why do people who know something about computers assume that this makes them qualified to give legal opinions?
/., while clearly not definitive (*), can be a useful first step to understand what the options are to solve the problem.
/. is but one small piece) works best when it connects people who need information with experts willing to offer simple, but useful, answers.
/. your only stop. Otherwise, you'd very likely end up doing the equivalent of inviting Natale Portman to go visit the goatse guy & explain to him why BSD is a dead OS.
Well, I'm not Canadian, nor a lawyer, but I can answer this question.
People asking for help online -- be it a computer problem, a legal problem, or a relationship problem, are looking for advice from folks who have experience with this problem, good or bad. And response from
Further, I understand lawyers are not as common outside the USA as they are in the home of the lawsuit & quick legal injunction. In some countries, people live their entire lives without ever meeting a lawyer. In these places, informal settlements thru negotiations are far more effective & quicker than the process of finding a lawyer, determining whether she/he is actually able to do the work well, & at the last paying said professional for either advice or to persue the matter thru legal channels.
That being said, I'm glad an expert has spoken up with an answer; the Internet (of which
Just my US$0.02
(*) And if you are looking for advice, definietely don't make
Geoff
Brett Glass wrote:
``Yet, due to the Congressional committee system, it is necessary to be heard by legislators of whom one is not a constituent for this to occur. If legislators "tune out" non-constituents, we're all effectively disenfranchised."
Now you wouldn't be thinking of a specific congressman who did this, would you? One elected from South Carolina, but who represents the Disney Corporation?
Geoff
> Am I the only one
> reminded of the part in American History X where the skinhead girl starts screaming "NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER!"
> when she finds out that her ex-boyfriend is no longer a Nazi?
No further comment is needed.
Geoff
You wrote: ``Just because I'm not a hard line FSF zealot doesn't mean that I work for Microsoft PR or anything of the sort."
I'm not a hard-line FSF zealot either -- in fact I think RMS is a obsessive jerk. However, everything you have so far posted convinces me at least one of the following is true:
(1) You work for Microsoft, either as a direct employee, a contractor, or a consultant with MSCE after your name;
(2) You have bought entirely into the myth that MS has created the Personal Computer, & does nothing but good for humanity;
(3) You idolize one or more of MS's employees, & think that they walk on water.
Let this thread end, before you prove any further that you are a distributor of FUD.
Geoff
> You are being hired for the SERVICE of taking photos. You are not hired to keep someone's
/. has linked to, what the author is predicting is not the end to photography entirely, but a shift in what is bought & sold. A photographer does the work commissioned: she/he spends a half hour shooting the photos, & at the end burns the digital masters to a CD, which is then given to her/his employers. Who then make a payment for the labor, & make use of the data on the CD.
> wedding negatives hostage so you can gouge per print indefinately.
I agree with this. And I suspect, most people who have a photographer for those special occasions would also. They're HIRING someone to do work, & expect that by paying money they'll receive the product with few or no strings attached.
As I understand the screed
Does this appear to force the photographer to barely make a living? Charge $70-80 for the half hour. After payment for equipment, inevitable dead time, etc., this would provide more than a living wage -- & IIRC would be about half of what people pay for photos today. Not a bad tradeoff to me.
Geoff
I also have one. The last line of dialogue (if you don't mind spoilers) is:
`` `I'm sorry' ain't gonna save our sorry butts right now."
But I'm not sure if I should give the line to CB or his long-suffering sidekick ``Li'l Anime Fan."
Geoff
> I would be very interested to know how Mr Open Source himself, Guns not Gnu's, Eric S. Raymond is doing.
/., you'd find that currently Raymond can't even give his code away.
.com millionaires would consider was the bottom, but has still found a way to push ever downward. I wouldn't bother kicking him for his hubris at this point.
If you had bothered to read another fora here on
He reached the point most
Geoff
> so the multiple times were the BSA has had to spit up cash because they raided with judicial consent aern't violent?
I'm not quite sure what your post means, but I'll assume that with proper spelling & punctuation you meant to say, ``So the multiple times where the BSA [forced companies] to spit up cash -- because they raided with judicial consent -- [these raids] aren't violent?"
Did any of these BSA raids involve the use of force? By this, I mean did the BSA draw guns, strike people, or physically injure them?
There is a lot to loathe about how the BSA are the proxy enforcers for Microsoft's licensing terms, & how they are the strong arm of MS's marketing department, but no one has reported the BSA breaking down doors, kidnapping people & torturing them to pay for MS software. Unless you know something I don't -- in which case, I'm all ears.
Geoff