It was especially telling when i spent time in former east germany, and especially east berlin.
After seeing first hand the memorial to the berlin wall, and the destruction all across east germany (like how none of it was rebuilt during the pre-unification years), i vowed that the next time i heard some fucking _IDIOT_ saying something positive about communisim/socialism, or trying to compare whats happening in the US to what transpired in eastern europe and the soviet union, id be sure and make my token attempt to set them straight.
You sir, are seriously lacking perspective.
My wife and i flew from the US to the EU and back and no cavities were searched. We brought back food items and the customs people were very pleasant and allowed our stuff with no problems. The metal detectors detected metal on my body i didn't realize existed (i.e. in my shoes).
Having crossed the border between canada and the US several times via car, i've always been alarmed at how lax the security was - even though the trunk of my car was searched on a few occasions (i tend to seem suspicious, i guess), i never felt it was unreasonable for the border patrol to try and ascertain if i had a trunk full of bodies or guns or something.
I am all for extremely strong border protections. All are welcome in the US, so long as they play by the rules, which are set and enforced by the sole discretion of the US. I wish we were putting our troops on the mexican border instead of some of the other places they're currently deployed, but thats political suicide (behaving reasonably often is)
Controlling who enters and exits the US is a good idea. You can be sure that what the US is doing - trying to do a marginal job at asking "so, who are you?" is a damn sight less invasive than shooting women in the back, which is how things were handled in some of the regimes you're comparing the US to.
Back in the year 2000 or so, Microsoft completed the acquisition of a few ERP/business software companies, including Great Plains and Navision.
See, MS decided they wanted to start to play in that space, so they just acquired a few companies that already had established product lines.
These aquitisions were incorporated under the company "Microsoft Business Solutions", which is a sub-company of Microsoft (i.e. my paycheck says "Microsoft Business Solutions", not "Microsoft")
I work for Microsoft Business Solutions. Prior to that, I worked for Microsoft proper (my check used to say "Microsoft")
At no point in my career have I been involved with selling Windows 2003 Server, apart from maybe saying things like "gosh, this windows 2003 server sucks a lot less than windows 95, maybe you should consider upgrading?"
In anycase, when i was in Redmond from 00 to 03, I was a tester working on Visual Studio. Since 03 I've been in Fargo, ND (where the former Great Plains company was based), working as a tester on the Microsoft Business Framework, the underpinnings of the next round of business applications from the "newly formed" Microsoft Business Soluations group, which consists of people/technologies of the former products of Great Plains, Axapta, Solomon, etc.
If you were to go and look for press releases put out by MS on who they were acquiring, what those companies products were at the time, etc, you'll see that everything I am saying about MBS and the aquisitions checks out.
You can think what you want to, but what you're describing has no basis in reality. I don't know what else to tell you.
Given that i _work_ in the Microsoft Business Solutions group, i can speak partially to why Navision was purchased.
I quite assure you, the logistical considerations when collaborating with co-workers that are 12h or more time shifted from you are not trivial, not to mention some language/cultural differences that take a while to work out.
The acquisition of navision, solomon, great plains, etc to form MBS was done because MS had no offerings to speak of in the business/finaicials/ERP space, not to gain employees in Denmark, Ohio, and North Dakota.
Besdies, micrsoft already has employees in most of the world, via its services and sales organization.
Navision historically has sold its wares in europe. So patent/copyright laws in europe are very much relevant in europe.
Also, the denmark office was an aquisition which afaik is a separate company, Microsoft Business Solutions, that may be incorporated separately in Denmark for historical reasons.
let's be clear - I definitely think gates is saying something along the lines of "if you're not going to make an effort to protect software, i wont make an effort to continue investing in your economy". That seems like a reasonable thing to say, doesn't it ?
What PDF collaborative editing and authoring tools are out there?.pdf is a perfectly reasonable format if you're publishing information in final form to be electronically distributed. That is not the primary focus of Word documents. While it is true that lots of places send around word docs meaning for them to be used in a read-only fashion, thats not what Word and.doc are best at, and most commonly used for.
Also, Apple can get away with making the whole OS work natively with PDF files. Suppose that MS includes good PDF functionality in windows, thus displacing PDF Reader.
Lest anyone forget, everytime Microsoft ads any peice of functionality to the windows platform, there is some 3rd party software company out there thta wants to sue. Or a major government organization.
I personally applaud the Bush administration's intentional acceleration of greenhouse gas production, general environmental damage, and expanded fossil fuel dependancy.
Hopefully within just a few more years, enough polar ice will melt to cause a world wide coastline rise, thus eliminating all of those bozos that always vote for democrats.
I say - bring it on. All of us evangelical christians smile a bit as we hear that it looks like the end of the world is coming. We know that the world of man is doomed anyway, heck maybe the whole title fight can transpire before i have kids that have to go through it. I'm glad we finally got someone bent on accelerationg the destruction of the world in office, hopefully Jesus takes the cue.
Bouns: please note how i only care about the affects on america in my post, even though it's plainly obvious that the entire planet will suffer.
I just wnated to make sure i've upset _every possible one of slashdots whining factions_.
Where did the concept of "retirement" come from, and how did it get to be so commonplace that it is now the expectation for all Americans?
From what I can tell, there is no suggestion of concept of retirement in the Bible, for instance.
I can say that I don't really plan on retiring. I plan on slowing down, at some point, but all too often Americans bust their chops doing something they hate, get to 55 or 65 or whatever it is, then on Friday they have a lunch party at work, and Monday by 9:30 am they're sick of watching the same TV programs they'll watch for the rest of their sad bored lives.
It's not like i can work my butt off until i am 70 and _then_ do all the stuff i didn't have time to do. My body and mind will be numb and useless as far as competitive motorsports by the time im 60, maybe even 40. If i dont invest in those interests now, i simply wont ever get to try them.
I don't know what I'll be doing as i continue to age, but I don't plan on just calling it quits some day. When you are in a financial position that traditional retirement seems like a feasability, instead of coming to a complete stop, why not slow down? Why not do something different? 60 seems like a wonderful time to start making handmade wooden furniture (assume eco nazi's have not made tree-felling illegal by then) and selling it to people. 70 seems like a great time to write books about the historical development of computer science, from an industry perspective.
If you're looking to get into a mentoring role where wisdom and experience are respected and badly needed, why not jump into academia ?
My great grandfather was a house painter until he was 94. He died when he was 95.
In my opinion, nothing is sadder than watching the mind and body of a 60 year old atrophy from non-use. Don't plan on non-use of your mind, body, and drive.
Plan to be financially _able_ to retire, but use this cushion to have complete freedom in your choices regarding what you want to work on next.
I've done my taxes by hand using excel for the last few years. All you need is a spreadsheet with basic IF(..), MIN, SUM, +, and multiple-sheet referencing capabilities (i.e. im sure wahtever spreadsheet people want to go through the pain of using on linux will work fine..)
All of the boxes you fill out on a 1040 have a number, just make column A row N hold the value for line N of the 1040. If it's a multi-box line (i.e. 5a, 5b, 5c) then use A5, B5, C5 on the spreadsheet to hold those values. If it's a computed column (write the value of blah + blah here) then embed the formula into the column.
My tax return involves 1040, Sch A, Sch B, and Sch D most years. I put each schedule on its own worksheet in excel, and then reference them between sheets.
Interestingly enough i have a book on software testing that talks about testing the 1040 form, as written in english language. In the authors opinion the 1040 form has LOTS of bugs in it.
anyone that has WinPCap on their box and doesn't know exactly what it is and why it's there is infected with _something_.
remember, users choose to have this thing remove something. It doesn't just blow winpcap away. If you see winpcap in the list and say "duh, i do network traffic analysis on this machine, i need that", don't click remove.
otoh, if winpcap has been installed so enable some sort of nasty ddos packet crafting, it should be removed. The average user has no need for it.
b) there is no logical mapping between "departments" and the various beverage refrigerators, so while your suggestion is possible, i find it highly unlikely. Not to mention that a number of people have plainly stated that if the drinks go, they're leaving. Those people still come to work in the morning.
c) i didn't mention my benefits being cut because they aren't. The stock purchase plan has been _modified_, and according to many peoples analysis, it is not as attractive as it used to be, although that is debateable. Vacation, healthcare, etc are all essentially unchanged from 4 years ago at least in how they affect me on a day to day and value basis. The biggest bneefits change that has been inconvenient deals with perscription drugs - that has been modified so that long term perscriptinos must be fulfilled via a specified mail order provider.
So basically, unless you have something factual instead of speculation or 2nd (or 3rd or 4th or whatever) hand info, STFU.
free sodas have not been cut. insurance benefits have not been cut. towel service on redmond campus was cut.
My team had its christmas party already. My old team also had its.
There isn't a "single MS christmas party", because that would be at least 40k people for redmond alone. Christmas parties have been team/division specific for a long time.
Where is the announcement that jobs are "moving to tsunami country" ? MS is doing additional hiring at multiple sites, US including (as in, multiple sites IN THE US).
a) its not a fact (because first you'd need to define superior in such a way that it was possible to objectively evaluate.. and we're talking about complex peices of software)
b) The things that keep people using MS IE are more/different than you mention.
For instance - I use IE because i rely on trusted activeX controls and seamless NTLM authentication as part of my job. I expect HTML to ALWAYS render correctly and I am not interested in changing my web browser version, or screwing with it's settings, or what have you.
At home, FIrefox is a refreshing change from IE - for many sites, firefox just does what i want - it lets me go to a web site without asking me lots of questions or doing things i dont want my browser doing. I'll concede that at this point, Firefox seems to have the home-web-surfer problem space pretty well under control (although the occasionaly rendering glitch is annoying)
OTOH, If MS could get away with turning off ActiveX and the other things in IE that the firefox nazi's always harp on, don't you think they would ? ActiveX is still a big part of IE because people use it. You might not, but you clearly aren't the entire software market.
There are not 12 editions of IE, each with a different feature set for different target markets. There is 1 browser (although you might consider IESE in W2k3 a separate "experience"). If business users rely on Active X, security zones, functional javascript, etc, MS can't very well take all that stuff out of the product because some home users can get away without it.
I don't mean to suggest that i think IE is optimal - there are plenty of things it could do better. There are lots of firefox (and other browser) users internally at MS, and the right people at MS are listening to what people don't like about IE. I don't have any more details than that.
Finally, I use IE primarily on every machine i own. I have neither popups or viruses. It's not like IE automatically means your machine is screwed. No software can be as functional and as feature rich as somebody wants while keeping stupid people from getting themselves in trouble. Firefox solves this by doing less than IE and by being a less attractive target for attack.
but stick to factually correct statements. There are plenty of things MS actually does to be upset with, so you shouldn't have to make stuff up.
Rotor is cool. I spent some time trying to port it to openBSD when it first came out but there were some sys-vish things fbsd had that obsd didn't that made porting it non-trivial (at least for someone of my skill level).
Let me put this another way. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that MS has done more to put.net on unix than you have. Unless you're a dotGNu or mono developer:)
If i had to guess, i'd say microsoft seriously wants everyone using.net to do so using windows and visual studio. Previously they did that by not publishing specs and not really paying attention to the thought of non-x86-windows implementations. With.net not only have they done a better than historical job making things standardized, published, and accessible, but they've even created a sample implementation for a freeware unix.
Compared to someone like cygnus, sure, it's certainly a less outstanding embrace of F/OSS, but compared to MS's other projects and historical record, it's pretty incredible.
i didn't say MS is really hoping people use.net on non MS platforms, i'm merely pointing out that MS has devoted resources to building and releasing a non-windows.net implementation. I pointed this out because it fundamentally counters your claim that.net isn't multiplatform and that MS has done nothing to make it multiplatform.
It is technically possible to make a non-windows.net implementation, and at least 2 groups have done so, one of them was MS internal and funded by MS. Don't sound shocked that MS wants you to use VS.NET on Windows servers when doing.net development and deployment. What does surprise me is that you won't even give MS credit for doing what it has.
I'd like to remind you what Sun did for Java on linux back in the day. (surely you're familiar with Karl Asha and Blackdown)
Comparatively, MS's contributions to.net on unix have been stellar.
Generic OR systems tend to not take advantage of the underlying DB's capabilities, and in any application where spending the money on a real DB makes sense, throwing all of that away by using auto-genereted OR is a shame.
ODBC was cool, but i think reality has shown that in many cases, changing DB backends just doesn't happen that often. The example you cite, develop in one place and deploy elsewhere, doesn't really seem to have much real world justification, since development SKU's of most DB's are free (i.e. if I'm going to deploy on MSSQL i'll use MSDE or the developer license of full MSSQL that comes free with the appropriate MSDN or VS skus)
OR is also a neat idea, and im working on a product that has done a fair bit in the OR space, but i look at the SQL code we're cranking out and it's a shame compared to what i'd do by hand.
It's a tradeoff I suppose between runtime performance, DBA managability, and DBMS feature use on one hand, vs design encapsulation, design aesthetics, and buzzwordiness on the other side.
Java has tried to make a lot of things commodities, but alot of what's going on in java is layering/abstraction for layering and abstractions sake.
Look for the "rotor" project. Started and released by MS folk, a shared-source.net implementation for freebsd and solaris, that even will run some WinForms apps via Tk..net is multiplatform - at least 2 non-windows-CLR versions exist (mono, rotor, and what happened to dotGnu?). But if you suggest that microsoft wants the windows version to be the best performing, easiest to use, and where they put the most investment, then you'd be right.
i dont want you having any say in wether or not i can drive. why do you think you know what is best for me ?
i am perfectly aware of the risks involved in driving on a shoulder. i evaluated the situation and chose to do so anyway.
If you'd prefer that nobody in the US is allowed to think or have independant decision making ability, just say so.
I don't see how you can justify "anyone that thinks they can do something like this just shouldn't be on the road". Why don't you express outrage about people that don't signal, or who poke along in the overtaking lane?
I'd rather make an informed decision to, in an exceptional case, violate a written law, than to habitually violate serveral out of ignorance, sloth, or contempt for others.
As someone who has had a group of drivers call the police to report on him, i do not like the idea of drivers thinking whatever they feel like doing is the law of the land and applies to everyone else.
My precise situation, if you must know.. was travelling on clear flat interstate, in the daytime. Both lanes of traffic infront of me were going under the limit, and each was 5-6 cars deep. I.e. there were 12 cars, evenly matching each other.. nobody making any progress.. nobody passing. Just a column of cars parked at under the posted limit.
The law says "keep right except to pass". What most people do is "park in left lane".
I had enough of being stuck behind these law breakers, and they clearly were not driving attentively or with repsect to the laws, so i passed the entire pack of cars on the highway shoulder, which was flat, straight, and 1-1.5 lanes wide. It was an unfortuneate decision, but i always trust my own abilities over those of other drivers (i feel reasonably justified in doing so, since i've taken numerous high speed driving courses and perform all of the maintenance on my own vehicles)
Apparently, several of these people called the police and reported a "mad man passing us on the shoulder at 100mph!". So a cop setup a stakeout for me down the road and pulled me over.
The only thing more frightening than one stupid person is a group of stupid people, all of which feel they have authority over others.
Microsoft does not run microsoft.com on their "own" linux machines.
Microsoft has a content hosting agreement with akamai, and akamai DOES use linux to host lots of things. Netcraft doesn't make any distinction between something inside the microsoft owned ip space and the netcraft content mirrors. The result is that people with a conclusion ("microsoft needs linux in order to run its website") find data to support it ("netcraft says microsoft.com content comes from linux boxes!")
In the URL you pasted, look at the "Netblock" column. Akamai, Energis, etc. HOSTING partners.
Note also that once you get into the "interesting" machines, it's all W2k or W2k3. (and when the Netblock value changes to "Microsoft").
1. AV software is mandatory on all managed computers
2. AD does nothing to prevent you from creating user accounts on a workstation you have local admin rights on. What is usually done is your AD network credentials are NOT given admin rights on your local workstation, and you create a local admin account instead (with no network rights). Note you can, using your normal user account (i.e. network rights), get local admin privs without revoking your network privs if you use "runas" properly
I've worked at MS for almost 5 years. I've never run across an employee infected with spyware on a work machine. It may happen, but I suspect the employee responsible wipes their box quietly pretty shortly after contraction of the malware.
Windows is not compiled on sun boxes. The windows build is completely self hosted, i.e. people working on longhorn are running longhorn and building private drops from their own longhorn machines. The official windows builds also happen on wintel hardware.
Sun has not made any kind of hardware in the last 10 years that has been price/performance competitive with wintel, especially for compiling (which is dominated by specint, which SPARC chips are awful at).
There are also few (if any) BSD boxes remaining at hotmail, and it has been that way for a number of years.
Obviously the statement "there are no unix machines anywhere it microsoft" is false. I had an SGI and a linux box in my last office; the linux box i ran certain things on because it was just easier (tcpdump, samba), the SGI machine i brought to work because it broke and there are fantastic resources available to me at work.
Furhtermore, word gets around amongst the UNIX people at MS and before you know it someone with a legitimate need for a unix machine is asking about yours. In my case, we wanted to test that visual studio could consume WSDL files hosted on unix webservers. Best way to do that ? Well, i already had apache 1.3 on redhat running in my office..
On my workstations i also install SFU, as i find real commandline utilities to be extremely helpful for working with code and solving certain problems.
The point of this article is that Microsoft _runs_ on its own software. We don't depend on oracle, we depend on SQL server. We don't depend on NDS, we depend on Active Directory. We don't depend on sendmail, we use exchange. (You would cry if you saw the amount of hardware we've thrown at exchange to handle our userbase of 60k power users with multi-hundred megabyte mailboxes:)
The MS server products got to where they are today (as opposed to 10 years ago) because MS, the company, runs on them, even before they're released. Microsoft.com is one of the worlds largest web sites. The MS corporate network has one of the highest counts of attached managed PC's of any known organization. The geographical diversity of our AD rivals uh... pretty much everything.
You can't get your products to ever be good enough if you don't bet your business on them. Don't read this article and read "microsoft never looks at unix, they have no idea that firefox exists". Read it and understand that "if there is something MS needs that a competing product seems to do better, MS works at fixing it's own offering until it can solve MS's needs."
As an aside, my team develops in a version of visual studio not yet released, on a version of.net not yet released, using a messaging framework not yet released. Domain controllers in my building are running pre-released versions of upcoming Server 2003 products. Patches that get sent out to WU are deployed via all of the different patch deployment technologies we support internally first (well, usually:)
The point of all of this is - if it's not good enough to meet the needs of MS, how can it be good enough to meet the needs of other customers?
(this is why we got so much flak about hotmail historically, btw, and why there has always been pressure to convert hotmail to windows, even in the case of the USTOREs, where it made awful financial sense, but needed to happen eventually for a number of reasons)
I'm glad to report that most of the negativity about hotmail not being on windows is just incorrect and recycled bits at this point.
When VHS was introduced, it had 2x the recording capacity. I just read a link (posted in this article's comments) talking about the beta vs vhs debacle. Apparently the quantititative difference between vhs and beta equipment from a pq and audio standpoint was not detectable on normal equipment, and generally, the variance from one machine to another of a given type was more than the difference between the two types of machines.
I don't see at all what makes Blu-Ray superior. Sony and Disney, two of the most wretchedly evil litigious tail-wagging-the-dog IP companies ever are soundly behind one format. That should be a warning sign to you.
If you read the links, HD-DVD can re-use much of the existing productino equipment, whereas blu-ray needs new everything. The capacity argument is the only one in blu-ray's favor, and its not even clear that that is the case since HD-DVD can have multi-layer, multi-side discs, which ought to mean 60GB for a DL/DS disc. (Not sure if Blu-Ray can go dual layer)
The content is getting worse (when you thought it couldn't) The advertising is getting worse (when you thought it couldn't) The inconvenience is getting worse (when you thought it couldn't) The LEGAL SYSTEM is getting worse (when you thought it couldn't)
There is no reason to involve yourself in any non-authoritarian activitity unless it is on terms you agree with.
I don't buy popular music in any format. I do not go to first run movie theaters (I will not pay more than $2/person to see a movie). I do not go to blockbuster to rent DVDs (there's a DVD rental store down the street thats $1/day for a new release, or $1/wk for an old one). I do not have any kind of TV service, and I don't even have an antenna.
The RIAA, MPAA, Hollywood, TV executives, the advertising universe... they're out to take a crap in your mouth because you don't have the willpower to say "sthwaap" ("stop", spoken with a crap filled mouth impeding proper diction)
So, eliminate them from your life.
Now, everytime i read something on slashdot about how some new law is going to drill holes in your eyelids so you cant even blink during commercials, i laugh, because i said goodbye to all of that BS.
The Network broadcast tv experience, by and large, is so awful that given the choice between watching a TV broadcast and sitting alone, doing absolutely nothing, id rather sit alone, doing absolutely nothing. At least I could probably fall asleep to pass the time.
Get familiar with your public library. It's still free, and books aren't filled with advertisements.
Yet.
(infact, you might want to pick up a few classics to start memorizing them. Ray Bradbury may be come to known as a fantastic non-fiction author)
Let me ask you something. How badly are they abused? Are their fingers being cut off? Are they having firey bamboo chutes shoved into exit-only orifaces? Are they "made" to work long hours? what constitutes worker abuse, exactly?
Look at this way. Presumably, these people work an abusive VIA factory because for them, currently, _that is the best thing going_.
Yeah, its upsetting that a 10 year old girl might work 14 hrs a day in a factory somewhere.... until you consider that if that factory closed down, she might work 4 hours a day as a child prostitute instead.
I think its better for the child to keep on working for nike as opposed to polishing 30 year old men. How about you ?
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It was especially telling when i spent time in former east germany, and especially east berlin.
After seeing first hand the memorial to the berlin wall, and the destruction all across east germany (like how none of it was rebuilt during the pre-unification years), i vowed that the next time i heard some fucking _IDIOT_ saying something positive about communisim/socialism, or trying to compare whats happening in the US to what transpired in eastern europe and the soviet union, id be sure and make my token attempt to set them straight.
You sir, are seriously lacking perspective.
My wife and i flew from the US to the EU and back and no cavities were searched. We brought back food items and the customs people were very pleasant and allowed our stuff with no problems. The metal detectors detected metal on my body i didn't realize existed (i.e. in my shoes).
Having crossed the border between canada and the US several times via car, i've always been alarmed at how lax the security was - even though the trunk of my car was searched on a few occasions (i tend to seem suspicious, i guess), i never felt it was unreasonable for the border patrol to try and ascertain if i had a trunk full of bodies or guns or something.
I am all for extremely strong border protections. All are welcome in the US, so long as they play by the rules, which are set and enforced by the sole discretion of the US. I wish we were putting our troops on the mexican border instead of some of the other places they're currently deployed, but thats political suicide (behaving reasonably often is)
Controlling who enters and exits the US is a good idea. You can be sure that what the US is doing - trying to do a marginal job at asking "so, who are you?" is a damn sight less invasive than shooting women in the back, which is how things were handled in some of the regimes you're comparing the US to.
Back in the year 2000 or so, Microsoft completed the acquisition of a few ERP/business software companies, including Great Plains and Navision.
See, MS decided they wanted to start to play in that space, so they just acquired a few companies that already had established product lines.
These aquitisions were incorporated under the company "Microsoft Business Solutions", which is a sub-company of Microsoft (i.e. my paycheck says "Microsoft Business Solutions", not "Microsoft")
I work for Microsoft Business Solutions. Prior to that, I worked for Microsoft proper (my check used to say "Microsoft")
At no point in my career have I been involved with selling Windows 2003 Server, apart from maybe saying things like "gosh, this windows 2003 server sucks a lot less than windows 95, maybe you should consider upgrading?"
In anycase, when i was in Redmond from 00 to 03, I was a tester working on Visual Studio. Since 03 I've been in Fargo, ND (where the former Great Plains company was based), working as a tester on the Microsoft Business Framework, the underpinnings of the next round of business applications from the "newly formed" Microsoft Business Soluations group, which consists of people/technologies of the former products of Great Plains, Axapta, Solomon, etc.
If you were to go and look for press releases put out by MS on who they were acquiring, what those companies products were at the time, etc, you'll see that everything I am saying about MBS and the aquisitions checks out.
You can think what you want to, but what you're describing has no basis in reality. I don't know what else to tell you.
Think again.
Given that i _work_ in the Microsoft Business Solutions group, i can speak partially to why Navision was purchased.
I quite assure you, the logistical considerations when collaborating with co-workers that are 12h or more time shifted from you are not trivial, not to mention some language/cultural differences that take a while to work out.
The acquisition of navision, solomon, great plains, etc to form MBS was done because MS had no offerings to speak of in the business/finaicials/ERP space, not to gain employees in Denmark, Ohio, and North Dakota.
Besdies, micrsoft already has employees in most of the world, via its services and sales organization.
Your theory is completely ridiculous.
Navision historically has sold its wares in europe. So patent/copyright laws in europe are very much relevant in europe.
Also, the denmark office was an aquisition which afaik is a separate company, Microsoft Business Solutions, that may be incorporated separately in Denmark for historical reasons.
let's be clear - I definitely think gates is saying something along the lines of "if you're not going to make an effort to protect software, i wont make an effort to continue investing in your economy". That seems like a reasonable thing to say, doesn't it ?
I'll tell you how .doc is better than .pdf
.pdf is a perfectly reasonable format if you're publishing information in final form to be electronically distributed. That is not the primary focus of Word documents. While it is true that lots of places send around word docs meaning for them to be used in a read-only fashion, thats not what Word and .doc are best at, and most commonly used for.
What pdf editors are you familiar with ?
What PDF collaborative editing and authoring tools are out there?
Also, Apple can get away with making the whole OS work natively with PDF files. Suppose that MS includes good PDF functionality in windows, thus displacing PDF Reader.
Lest anyone forget, everytime Microsoft ads any peice of functionality to the windows platform, there is some 3rd party software company out there thta wants to sue. Or a major government organization.
I personally applaud the Bush administration's intentional acceleration of greenhouse gas production, general environmental damage, and expanded fossil fuel dependancy.
Hopefully within just a few more years, enough polar ice will melt to cause a world wide coastline rise, thus eliminating all of those bozos that always vote for democrats.
I say - bring it on. All of us evangelical christians smile a bit as we hear that it looks like the end of the world is coming. We know that the world of man is doomed anyway, heck maybe the whole title fight can transpire before i have kids that have to go through it. I'm glad we finally got someone bent on accelerationg the destruction of the world in office, hopefully Jesus takes the cue.
Bouns: please note how i only care about the affects on america in my post, even though it's plainly obvious that the entire planet will suffer.
I just wnated to make sure i've upset _every possible one of slashdots whining factions_.
I have a question.
Where did the concept of "retirement" come from, and how did it get to be so commonplace that it is now the expectation for all Americans?
From what I can tell, there is no suggestion of concept of retirement in the Bible, for instance.
I can say that I don't really plan on retiring. I plan on slowing down, at some point, but all too often Americans bust their chops doing something they hate, get to 55 or 65 or whatever it is, then on Friday they have a lunch party at work, and Monday by 9:30 am they're sick of watching the same TV programs they'll watch for the rest of their sad bored lives.
It's not like i can work my butt off until i am 70 and _then_ do all the stuff i didn't have time to do. My body and mind will be numb and useless as far as competitive motorsports by the time im 60, maybe even 40. If i dont invest in those interests now, i simply wont ever get to try them.
I don't know what I'll be doing as i continue to age, but I don't plan on just calling it quits some day. When you are in a financial position that traditional retirement seems like a feasability, instead of coming to a complete stop, why not slow down? Why not do something different? 60 seems like a wonderful time to start making handmade wooden furniture (assume eco nazi's have not made tree-felling illegal by then) and selling it to people. 70 seems like a great time to write books about the historical development of computer science, from an industry perspective.
If you're looking to get into a mentoring role where wisdom and experience are respected and badly needed, why not jump into academia ?
My great grandfather was a house painter until he was 94. He died when he was 95.
In my opinion, nothing is sadder than watching the mind and body of a 60 year old atrophy from non-use. Don't plan on non-use of your mind, body, and drive.
Plan to be financially _able_ to retire, but use this cushion to have complete freedom in your choices regarding what you want to work on next.
I've done my taxes by hand using excel for the last few years. All you need is a spreadsheet with basic IF(..), MIN, SUM, +, and multiple-sheet referencing capabilities (i.e. im sure wahtever spreadsheet people want to go through the pain of using on linux will work fine..)
All of the boxes you fill out on a 1040 have a number, just make column A row N hold the value for line N of the 1040. If it's a multi-box line (i.e. 5a, 5b, 5c) then use A5, B5, C5 on the spreadsheet to hold those values. If it's a computed column (write the value of blah + blah here) then embed the formula into the column.
My tax return involves 1040, Sch A, Sch B, and Sch D most years. I put each schedule on its own worksheet in excel, and then reference them between sheets.
Interestingly enough i have a book on software testing that talks about testing the 1040 form, as written in english language. In the authors opinion the 1040 form has LOTS of bugs in it.
anyone that has WinPCap on their box and doesn't know exactly what it is and why it's there is infected with _something_.
remember, users choose to have this thing remove something. It doesn't just blow winpcap away. If you see winpcap in the list and say "duh, i do network traffic analysis on this machine, i need that", don't click remove.
otoh, if winpcap has been installed so enable some sort of nasty ddos packet crafting, it should be removed. The average user has no need for it.
Microsoft ISA Server at least supports transparent SSL pass through.
That is, you are SSL'd to the proxy, and the proxy makes a new SSL connection outbound on your behalf. That means it gets what is in the middle.
You'd only catch wind of this if you were paying very close attention to certificates and what not.
a) it's "morale" money
b) there is no logical mapping between "departments" and the various beverage refrigerators, so while your suggestion is possible, i find it highly unlikely. Not to mention that a number of people have plainly stated that if the drinks go, they're leaving. Those people still come to work in the morning.
c) i didn't mention my benefits being cut because they aren't. The stock purchase plan has been _modified_, and according to many peoples analysis, it is not as attractive as it used to be, although that is debateable. Vacation, healthcare, etc are all essentially unchanged from 4 years ago at least in how they affect me on a day to day and value basis. The biggest bneefits change that has been inconvenient deals with perscription drugs - that has been modified so that long term perscriptinos must be fulfilled via a specified mail order provider.
So basically, unless you have something factual instead of speculation or 2nd (or 3rd or 4th or whatever) hand info, STFU.
free sodas have not been cut. insurance benefits have not been cut. towel service on redmond campus was cut.
My team had its christmas party already. My old team also had its.
There isn't a "single MS christmas party", because that would be at least 40k people for redmond alone. Christmas parties have been team/division specific for a long time.
Where is the announcement that jobs are "moving to tsunami country" ? MS is doing additional hiring at multiple sites, US including (as in, multiple sites IN THE US).
a) its not a fact
(because first you'd need to define superior in such a way that it was possible to objectively evaluate.. and we're talking about complex peices of software)
b) The things that keep people using MS IE are more/different than you mention.
For instance - I use IE because i rely on trusted activeX controls and seamless NTLM authentication as part of my job. I expect HTML to ALWAYS render correctly and I am not interested in changing my web browser version, or screwing with it's settings, or what have you.
At home, FIrefox is a refreshing change from IE - for many sites, firefox just does what i want - it lets me go to a web site without asking me lots of questions or doing things i dont want my browser doing. I'll concede that at this point, Firefox seems to have the home-web-surfer problem space pretty well under control (although the occasionaly rendering glitch is annoying)
OTOH, If MS could get away with turning off ActiveX and the other things in IE that the firefox nazi's always harp on, don't you think they would ? ActiveX is still a big part of IE because people use it. You might not, but you clearly aren't the entire software market.
There are not 12 editions of IE, each with a different feature set for different target markets. There is 1 browser (although you might consider IESE in W2k3 a separate "experience"). If business users rely on Active X, security zones, functional javascript, etc, MS can't very well take all that stuff out of the product because some home users can get away without it.
I don't mean to suggest that i think IE is optimal - there are plenty of things it could do better. There are lots of firefox (and other browser) users internally at MS, and the right people at MS are listening to what people don't like about IE. I don't have any more details than that.
Finally, I use IE primarily on every machine i own. I have neither popups or viruses. It's not like IE automatically means your machine is screwed. No software can be as functional and as feature rich as somebody wants while keeping stupid people from getting themselves in trouble. Firefox solves this by doing less than IE and by being a less attractive target for attack.
but stick to factually correct statements. There are plenty of things MS actually does to be upset with, so you shouldn't have to make stuff up.
.net on unix than you have. Unless you're a dotGNu or mono developer :)
.net to do so using windows and visual studio. Previously they did that by not publishing specs and not really paying attention to the thought of non-x86-windows implementations. With .net not only have they done a better than historical job making things standardized, published, and accessible, but they've even created a sample implementation for a freeware unix.
Rotor is cool. I spent some time trying to port it to openBSD when it first came out but there were some sys-vish things fbsd had that obsd didn't that made porting it non-trivial (at least for someone of my skill level).
Let me put this another way. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that MS has done more to put
If i had to guess, i'd say microsoft seriously wants everyone using
Compared to someone like cygnus, sure, it's certainly a less outstanding embrace of F/OSS, but compared to MS's other projects and historical record, it's pretty incredible.
i didn't say MS is really hoping people use .net on non MS platforms, i'm merely pointing out that MS has devoted resources to building and releasing a non-windows .net implementation. I pointed this out because it fundamentally counters your claim that .net isn't multiplatform and that MS has done nothing to make it multiplatform.
.net implementation, and at least 2 groups have done so, one of them was MS internal and funded by MS. Don't sound shocked that MS wants you to use VS.NET on Windows servers when doing .net development and deployment. What does surprise me is that you won't even give MS credit for doing what it has.
.net on unix have been stellar.
It is technically possible to make a non-windows
I'd like to remind you what Sun did for Java on linux back in the day. (surely you're familiar with Karl Asha and Blackdown)
Comparatively, MS's contributions to
Generic OR systems tend to not take advantage of the underlying DB's capabilities, and in any application where spending the money on a real DB makes sense, throwing all of that away by using auto-genereted OR is a shame.
ODBC was cool, but i think reality has shown that in many cases, changing DB backends just doesn't happen that often. The example you cite, develop in one place and deploy elsewhere, doesn't really seem to have much real world justification, since development SKU's of most DB's are free (i.e. if I'm going to deploy on MSSQL i'll use MSDE or the developer license of full MSSQL that comes free with the appropriate MSDN or VS skus)
OR is also a neat idea, and im working on a product that has done a fair bit in the OR space, but i look at the SQL code we're cranking out and it's a shame compared to what i'd do by hand.
It's a tradeoff I suppose between runtime performance, DBA managability, and DBMS feature use on one hand, vs design encapsulation, design aesthetics, and buzzwordiness on the other side.
Java has tried to make a lot of things commodities, but alot of what's going on in java is layering/abstraction for layering and abstractions sake.
MS _did_ do some work to make .net cross platform.
.net implementation for freebsd and solaris, that even will run some WinForms apps via Tk. .net is multiplatform - at least 2 non-windows-CLR versions exist (mono, rotor, and what happened to dotGnu?). But if you suggest that microsoft wants the windows version to be the best performing, easiest to use, and where they put the most investment, then you'd be right.
Look for the "rotor" project. Started and released by MS folk, a shared-source
i dont want you having any say in wether or not i can drive. why do you think you know what is best for me ?
i am perfectly aware of the risks involved in driving on a shoulder. i evaluated the situation and chose to do so anyway.
If you'd prefer that nobody in the US is allowed to think or have independant decision making ability, just say so.
I don't see how you can justify "anyone that thinks they can do something like this just shouldn't be on the road". Why don't you express outrage about people that don't signal, or who poke along in the overtaking lane?
I'd rather make an informed decision to, in an exceptional case, violate a written law, than to habitually violate serveral out of ignorance, sloth, or contempt for others.
i take issue with one of your points.
Self policing is the same thing as mob rule.
As someone who has had a group of drivers call the police to report on him, i do not like the idea of drivers thinking whatever they feel like doing is the law of the land and applies to everyone else.
My precise situation, if you must know.. was travelling on clear flat interstate, in the daytime. Both lanes of traffic infront of me were going under the limit, and each was 5-6 cars deep. I.e. there were 12 cars, evenly matching each other.. nobody making any progress.. nobody passing. Just a column of cars parked at under the posted limit.
The law says "keep right except to pass". What most people do is "park in left lane".
I had enough of being stuck behind these law breakers, and they clearly were not driving attentively or with repsect to the laws, so i passed the entire pack of cars on the highway shoulder, which was flat, straight, and 1-1.5 lanes wide. It was an unfortuneate decision, but i always trust my own abilities over those of other drivers (i feel reasonably justified in doing so, since i've taken numerous high speed driving courses and perform all of the maintenance on my own vehicles)
Apparently, several of these people called the police and reported a "mad man passing us on the shoulder at 100mph!". So a cop setup a stakeout for me down the road and pulled me over.
The only thing more frightening than one stupid person is a group of stupid people, all of which feel they have authority over others.
Microsoft does not run microsoft.com on their "own" linux machines.
Microsoft has a content hosting agreement with akamai, and akamai DOES use linux to host lots of things. Netcraft doesn't make any distinction between something inside the microsoft owned ip space and the netcraft content mirrors. The result is that people with a conclusion ("microsoft needs linux in order to run its website") find data to support it ("netcraft says microsoft.com content comes from linux boxes!")
In the URL you pasted, look at the "Netblock" column. Akamai, Energis, etc. HOSTING partners.
Note also that once you get into the "interesting" machines, it's all W2k or W2k3. (and when the Netblock value changes to "Microsoft").
1. AV software is mandatory on all managed computers
2. AD does nothing to prevent you from creating user accounts on a workstation you have local admin rights on. What is usually done is your AD network credentials are NOT given admin rights on your local workstation, and you create a local admin account instead (with no network rights). Note you can, using your normal user account (i.e. network rights), get local admin privs without revoking your network privs if you use "runas" properly
I've worked at MS for almost 5 years. I've never run across an employee infected with spyware on a work machine. It may happen, but I suspect the employee responsible wipes their box quietly pretty shortly after contraction of the malware.
Windows is not compiled on sun boxes. The windows build is completely self hosted, i.e. people working on longhorn are running longhorn and building private drops from their own longhorn machines. The official windows builds also happen on wintel hardware.
:)
.net not yet released, using a messaging framework not yet released. Domain controllers in my building are running pre-released versions of upcoming Server 2003 products. Patches that get sent out to WU are deployed via all of the different patch deployment technologies we support internally first (well, usually :)
Sun has not made any kind of hardware in the last 10 years that has been price/performance competitive with wintel, especially for compiling (which is dominated by specint, which SPARC chips are awful at).
There are also few (if any) BSD boxes remaining at hotmail, and it has been that way for a number of years.
Obviously the statement "there are no unix machines anywhere it microsoft" is false. I had an SGI and a linux box in my last office; the linux box i ran certain things on because it was just easier (tcpdump, samba), the SGI machine i brought to work because it broke and there are fantastic resources available to me at work.
Furhtermore, word gets around amongst the UNIX people at MS and before you know it someone with a legitimate need for a unix machine is asking about yours. In my case, we wanted to test that visual studio could consume WSDL files hosted on unix webservers. Best way to do that ? Well, i already had apache 1.3 on redhat running in my office..
On my workstations i also install SFU, as i find real commandline utilities to be extremely helpful for working with code and solving certain problems.
The point of this article is that Microsoft _runs_ on its own software. We don't depend on oracle, we depend on SQL server. We don't depend on NDS, we depend on Active Directory. We don't depend on sendmail, we use exchange. (You would cry if you saw the amount of hardware we've thrown at exchange to handle our userbase of 60k power users with multi-hundred megabyte mailboxes
The MS server products got to where they are today (as opposed to 10 years ago) because MS, the company, runs on them, even before they're released. Microsoft.com is one of the worlds largest web sites. The MS corporate network has one of the highest counts of attached managed PC's of any known organization. The geographical diversity of our AD rivals uh... pretty much everything.
You can't get your products to ever be good enough if you don't bet your business on them. Don't read this article and read "microsoft never looks at unix, they have no idea that firefox exists". Read it and understand that "if there is something MS needs that a competing product seems to do better, MS works at fixing it's own offering until it can solve MS's needs."
As an aside, my team develops in a version of visual studio not yet released, on a version of
The point of all of this is - if it's not good enough to meet the needs of MS, how can it be good enough to meet the needs of other customers?
(this is why we got so much flak about hotmail historically, btw, and why there has always been pressure to convert hotmail to windows, even in the case of the USTOREs, where it made awful financial sense, but needed to happen eventually for a number of reasons)
I'm glad to report that most of the negativity about hotmail not being on windows is just incorrect and recycled bits at this point.
What made Betamax superior ?
When VHS was introduced, it had 2x the recording capacity. I just read a link (posted in this article's comments) talking about the beta vs vhs debacle. Apparently the quantititative difference between vhs and beta equipment from a pq and audio standpoint was not detectable on normal equipment, and generally, the variance from one machine to another of a given type was more than the difference between the two types of machines.
I don't see at all what makes Blu-Ray superior. Sony and Disney, two of the most wretchedly evil litigious tail-wagging-the-dog IP companies ever are soundly behind one format. That should be a warning sign to you.
If you read the links, HD-DVD can re-use much of the existing productino equipment, whereas blu-ray needs new everything. The capacity argument is the only one in blu-ray's favor, and its not even clear that that is the case since HD-DVD can have multi-layer, multi-side discs, which ought to mean 60GB for a DL/DS disc. (Not sure if Blu-Ray can go dual layer)
Just stop watching TV.
The content is getting worse (when you thought it couldn't)
The advertising is getting worse (when you thought it couldn't)
The inconvenience is getting worse (when you thought it couldn't)
The LEGAL SYSTEM is getting worse (when you thought it couldn't)
There is no reason to involve yourself in any non-authoritarian activitity unless it is on terms you agree with.
I don't buy popular music in any format. I do not go to first run movie theaters (I will not pay more than $2/person to see a movie). I do not go to blockbuster to rent DVDs (there's a DVD rental store down the street thats $1/day for a new release, or $1/wk for an old one). I do not have any kind of TV service, and I don't even have an antenna.
The RIAA, MPAA, Hollywood, TV executives, the advertising universe... they're out to take a crap in your mouth because you don't have the willpower to say "sthwaap" ("stop", spoken with a crap filled mouth impeding proper diction)
So, eliminate them from your life.
Now, everytime i read something on slashdot about how some new law is going to drill holes in your eyelids so you cant even blink during commercials, i laugh, because i said goodbye to all of that BS.
The Network broadcast tv experience, by and large, is so awful that given the choice between watching a TV broadcast and sitting alone, doing absolutely nothing, id rather sit alone, doing absolutely nothing. At least I could probably fall asleep to pass the time.
Get familiar with your public library. It's still free, and books aren't filled with advertisements.
Yet.
(infact, you might want to pick up a few classics to start memorizing them. Ray Bradbury may be come to known as a fantastic non-fiction author)
VIA abuses its workers?
... until you consider that if that factory closed down, she might work 4 hours a day as a child prostitute instead.
Let me ask you something. How badly are they abused? Are their fingers being cut off? Are they having firey bamboo chutes shoved into exit-only orifaces? Are they "made" to work long hours? what constitutes worker abuse, exactly?
Look at this way. Presumably, these people work an abusive VIA factory because for them, currently, _that is the best thing going_.
Yeah, its upsetting that a 10 year old girl might work 14 hrs a day in a factory somewhere.
I think its better for the child to keep on working for nike as opposed to polishing 30 year old men. How about you ?