Microsoft has gotten so big that they are in the impossible position of trying to keep everyone happy.
No, they aren't in that situation, they put themselves into that situation. And that is exactly what is wrong with Microsoft: they want to be everything to everybody. They want their software to run everything. They want everything to be the same, uniform, for all users, for all applications, for the world.
Trying to create a universal operating system isn't just bad from a free market point of view, it's simply bad engineering. And because of Microsoft's monopolistic hold on the market, we all have to pay the price for their bad engineering.
Face it: Microsoft just can't win.
Sure they can. They can split up, and half a dozen mini-Microsoft's can compete separately in different markets, developing different solutions. Or, at least, they can stop trying to force a single solution down everybody's throat.
But, you're right, as long as Microsoft keeps up what they are doing, they will be criticized simultaneously as creating bloated software, as adding too many new features, and as being not innovative enough. And even though you may think that those statements are mutually contradictory, they are not; for each criticism, there is a large population of users for which it is true, and the only way to address that is for Microsoft to stop trying to be everything to everybody.
We used portals we consider popular--Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (built on ASP), XOOPS (PHP), Plone (Python), and Liferay and JBoss Portal (JSP).
Now, I know that Plone is a dog, and XOOPS may be popular on Sourceforge, but I don't think it's the most obvious choice for building a high performance portal using PHP. So, using these two as the basis for testing is silly.
The fact that JBoss Portal on Windows outpaces JBoss Portal on Linux has a simple reason: JBoss isn't fully open source; crucial parts of it (namely the Java runtime itself) are under Sun's control, and hell will freeze over before Sun bothers to do a good job implementing Java for their competitors' Linux systems.
As for things generally running faster on Windows, that's implausible. Differences between raw Windows and Linux system performance are at most in the single digit percentages, so if they saw any significant differences between the same applications running on top of the two platforms, either the application vendor spends more time tuning for Windows (as in Sun Java), or the testing labs screwed up.
In fact, the whole test is really ill conceived: none of the "portals" they compared provide the same functionality; it just doesn't make sense to test them against each other. Overall, this test mostly seems to test the competency of eWeek, and they aren't doing too well.
The idea of applying immune system models to spam and computer virus detection is old. Nobody has so far demonstrated that it is any better than a sound statistical approach, and this paper fails to do so as well. It's junk science.
I think the Wikipedia issues raise a bunch of questions everybody should think about. How do you know what you know? How do you verify it? Why should you trust the New York Times or Washington Post any more than your neighbor?
In the end, you can only determine fact by obtaining confirmation from multiple, independent sources. A single article, whether in Wikipedia or in the New York Times is not a reliable source to base important decisions on.
As for Ken Lay, I'm not even completely convinced he is dead, or that if he had committed suicide or his death was caused by stress, we'd know about it. With the kind of money and influence the guy had, anything is possible. Fortunately, it doesn't matter, so I don't really care whether Wikipedia or the NYT is correct.
i'm generally of the school of thought that says filenames should be restricted to ASCII.
You would be (see above). However, unlike case sensitivity, restricting file names to ASCII does cause big usability problems for non-English users.
the fact that many users of case sensitive systems resort to all lowercase to avoid the problems of case sensitivity tell me that its usability effect is anything but slight.
The fact that many users do just that shows you that they have a simple workaround: avoid upper case in languages where it makes sense.
as for programming languages i think that has more to do with the dominance of C than with the actual pros and cons of case sensitivity.
The dominance of C and its case sensitivity are both consequences of a successful, minimalistic approach to system design. The Macintosh and Windows file system design are still full of well-meaning but inept remnants of unsuccessful designs.
Case insensitivity seems like a nice, useful feature. But, in the end, it causes more harm than good: "case" is a rather odd concept, limited to certain languages, and even within those, often not well defined. In English, you can sort of get away with it. In other languages using the Latin alphabet, changes in capitalization may change the spelling of a word, and which upper and lower case characters correspond to one another are language dependent. On the other hand, in languages other than English (and to a lesser degree even in English), upper and lower case characters really do convey different meanings. "White House" means something different from "white house", and even sounds different. And different systems may mean different and incompatible things by "case insensitivity", since there is no single well-defined standard.
Altogether, that's a Pandora's box that's not worth opening: what looked like a simple use-friendly feature, case insensitivity, turns into a localization nightmare that's even harder to explain to users than case sensitive file names.
Case sensitive file systems are the right way to go; UNIX got it right, Macintosh and Windows got it wrong. The usability benefits are slight, and the usability pitfalls and resulting system complexity are huge. For programming languages, this issue has largely been settled a couple of decades ago. It's time we get rid of case insensitivity in file systems as well.
The "news" in this story is not that people become disinterested in a story, but that the rate at which they become disinterested is quite different from what was expected.
"Expected" by who? Anybody reasonably familiar with statistics wouldn't assume that this decay is exponential because there is absolutely no reason to make that assumption; none of the models that commonly lead to exponential decay apply in this case.
Even though this guy happens to use the web, these kinds of problems aren't anything new. If you put a statistician on it, he'd either use an empirical model for the rate, or model it with a power law.
I think this "expectation" gives us a lot more about the unfamiliarity of the author with statistics than about the real world.
I don't like people who "scrub" movies, but I still think this ruling is bad. For millennia, art has progressed and evolved by taking some prior artist's work and modifying it, often in ways that the original artist didn't agree with. Except for possibly receiving financial compensation for a limited time for each copy created, artists should not have the power to control what happens to their creations after they have released them to the public.
You are outright wrong. Facism was born of Germany's humiliation in WWI, weak democractic institutions, and a widespread, simmering hatred of Jews, not of government "inefficiency".
Fascism was not some political or cultural idiosyncracy of Germans: fascist political views were rampant throughout Europe and the US. The primary difference between Germany and the rest of the world was that the Germans managed to implement a highly efficient system of surveillance that relayed any anti-governmental sentiments to the authorities and resulted in anything from losing your job and restrictions on your freedoms of association and movement to being sent to detention camps.
In fact, an efficient system of informants and surveillance for the detection of anti-governmental sentiments is a universal constant for every fascist or totalitarian regime, and it is fundamentally incompatible with a free or democratic society.
Has the memory of 9/11 faded that much?
I sure hope so, because it's about time that people view 9/11 in a more rational light. Tragic as the loss of several thousand lives is, it is not sufficient reason to throw away our liberties. Even if there was a 9/11 every year, the death toll from terrorism would still be negligible compared to other easily preventable deaths in the US. The fixation on 9/11 and terrorism is an irrational and self-destructive emotional response, not a rational policy related to security or saving human lives.
The reaction to 9/11 should have been focussed changes in airline and transportation security together with a reaffirmation of our commitment to keep our society democratic and open, not a wholesale "war on terrorism". Bush and people like you are aiding the terrorists.
but with a warrent the officials should be able to get into anywhere they want, including your electronic systems
You might also wish that pi equals 3 or that gravity were half as strong as it is, but wishing that something might be so doesn't actually make it so.
As long as we have programmable, general purpose computers, there simply is no way for ISPs to comply with this: they cannot reliably identify VoIP calls, and they cannot reliably provide wiretapping capabilities for voice or IM communications.
In the US, because of tax policy, you can make an argument that the rich have actually gotten (on average) richer at the expense of the middle class and the poor; a "trickle down" argument doesn't work in the US because what "trickles down" is arguably money that's been taken out of the pockets of the people it is supposed to trickle down on.
But in India, the poor were poor before and the rich seem to be getting richer because they are making money abroad. The money that's entering India and ending up in the hands of this small elite really does add to the overall economy and some of it will create new business opportunities for other Indians.
So, yeah, it's a myth that India has become this powerhouse of educated, low-cost middle-class workers. But it looks to me like they are better off than they were before. Increasing inequality is a problem, but arguably an acceptable one if it is due to some people doing well without other people falling off the social ladder.
No, it's because these are the wrong facts. The COA will protect you against claims that you knowingly purchased a pirated copy, but there are many other facts that need to be established in order to determine that you actually have a license (like the fact that you purchased the software at all).
Then how do you prove you have a license then? Keep the original receipt?
That's certainly a sensible thing to do. Keep the COA as well, because it will protect you against accusations that you knowingly bought a pirated copy of Windows.
How do you prove you haven't had your license revoked?
Microsoft can't unilaterally "revoke" your license; if you can prove you purchased a license, the ball is in their court and they have to prove that you have acted in a way that caused you to lose your license.
Oh wait, we're talking about an artificial construct that Microsoft has utter control over and can use to screw you whenever they feel like it.
Spare us the fatalism. Microsoft has no power to enforce licenses, the courts have. And courts are going to be reasonable about it and decide on a case-by-case basis. A COA isn't sufficient to prove ownership, but a purchase receipt may not be necessary either. There simply is no single answer.
If you're running Windows, keep all the documentation of your purchase and license you receive. Or, just run Linux instead; then you don't have to bother.
There's a fairly significant chance of major disasters that kill hundreds of millions or billions of people over the span of a century. There's also a smaller chance that our technological civilization won't survive. But despite global warming, nuclear war, terrorism, epidemics, you name it, the human race will survive the next 100 years; you couldn't eradicate it if you tried.
Because Microsoft itself seems to imply that the COA will be your guarantee that you are using a non-pirated version of Windows. If you want to make sure that your software is licensed properly and not pirated, you need to check your COA, according to Microsoft.
Even if all of that were true (which it is not), all that says is that you can use the COA to satisfy yourself of certain facts, not to use it as evidence in court.
But it isn't true anyway. The COA tells you that your copy is "genuine", not that it is "licensed". For example, if you violate the terms of the license, you lose your license, but you still retain the COA.
Virtualization looks like necessary evil, because we are incompetent to write better OSes and Application. Virtualization is the easier route.
It's not a question of "competence", there simply is no such thing as a uniformly "better" operating system or application. DOS, for example, is an excellent operating system for some narrow set of applications, and you can hack Mach or Singularity until the cows come home and you're not going to create something better.
I would have preferred a better, from the ground-up OS any day. Hurd, or ever better Singularity!
People like you are part of the reason why software sucks so badly: you simply don't understand real-world tradeoffs. People like you design systems like Mach or Windows, systems that try to be everything to everybody; people like you throw in MLOCs of useless features and generalizations and extensibility, and all you are doing is create bigger and bigger headaches.
Virtualization is doing the right thing: it lets people focus on creating operating systems and server configurations that focus on solving specific problems. Maybe with virtualization, we can finally kill the general purpose operating system.
Various people in this thread have claimed that virtualization is a workaround for not being able to write a decent operating system. I think that's wrong. Different operating systems are legitimately different in the way in which they present high level interfaces and abstractions of low-level hardware features.
What virtualization really is is a long overdue standardization of a set of APIs that exist in many operating systems but remain hidden. By finally exposing them, we gain functionality that didn't exist previously.
If public web sites help the police track down perpertrators of illegal activities, that's a good thing. But I worry about statements like these:
"In order to understand any subculture, be it al-Qaida, witches, devil worshippers or gangs, you have to be able to know their own language," Knox said.
Devil worship and witchcraft aren't illegal in the US and are rarely linked to illegal activities; the police has no business getting involved in that "subculture" at all.
Furthermore, even when it comes to al Quaeda and gangs, they should be careful: after all, if we can get al Quaeda and gangs to limit their activities to free speech on the Internet, then that's a good thing. We should encourage these groups to use the Internet, not drive them away.
That's roughly what obese people are doing to their body; they don't increase gravity, but they do increase body mass. You can also simulate this with weight vests.
It does increase muscle mass, but other long term results are joint problems and problems with the circulatory system. Your body is optimized for a particular total body mass in standard gravity. It can adapt to some degree, but if you deviate too far, things stop working.
There is set of office apps besides MS Office and OpenOffice where ODF really would make a difference: Apple's. But, instead, Apple Pages and Keynote use their own, proprietary format, a format that isn't even consistent between Apple's own releases.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft has gotten so big that they are in the impossible position of trying to keep everyone happy.
No, they aren't in that situation, they put themselves into that situation. And that is exactly what is wrong with Microsoft: they want to be everything to everybody. They want their software to run everything. They want everything to be the same, uniform, for all users, for all applications, for the world.
Trying to create a universal operating system isn't just bad from a free market point of view, it's simply bad engineering. And because of Microsoft's monopolistic hold on the market, we all have to pay the price for their bad engineering.
Face it: Microsoft just can't win.
Sure they can. They can split up, and half a dozen mini-Microsoft's can compete separately in different markets, developing different solutions. Or, at least, they can stop trying to force a single solution down everybody's throat.
But, you're right, as long as Microsoft keeps up what they are doing, they will be criticized simultaneously as creating bloated software, as adding too many new features, and as being not innovative enough. And even though you may think that those statements are mutually contradictory, they are not; for each criticism, there is a large population of users for which it is true, and the only way to address that is for Microsoft to stop trying to be everything to everybody.
Now, I know that Plone is a dog, and XOOPS may be popular on Sourceforge, but I don't think it's the most obvious choice for building a high performance portal using PHP. So, using these two as the basis for testing is silly.
The fact that JBoss Portal on Windows outpaces JBoss Portal on Linux has a simple reason: JBoss isn't fully open source; crucial parts of it (namely the Java runtime itself) are under Sun's control, and hell will freeze over before Sun bothers to do a good job implementing Java for their competitors' Linux systems.
As for things generally running faster on Windows, that's implausible. Differences between raw Windows and Linux system performance are at most in the single digit percentages, so if they saw any significant differences between the same applications running on top of the two platforms, either the application vendor spends more time tuning for Windows (as in Sun Java), or the testing labs screwed up.
In fact, the whole test is really ill conceived: none of the "portals" they compared provide the same functionality; it just doesn't make sense to test them against each other. Overall, this test mostly seems to test the competency of eWeek, and they aren't doing too well.
Yes, and those are actually good rules of thumb.
/. or anywhere else) happens to agree with reality.
And it shouldn't be surprising when popular opinion (on
The idea of applying immune system models to spam and computer virus detection is old. Nobody has so far demonstrated that it is any better than a sound statistical approach, and this paper fails to do so as well. It's junk science.
I think the Wikipedia issues raise a bunch of questions everybody should think about. How do you know what you know? How do you verify it? Why should you trust the New York Times or Washington Post any more than your neighbor?
In the end, you can only determine fact by obtaining confirmation from multiple, independent sources. A single article, whether in Wikipedia or in the New York Times is not a reliable source to base important decisions on.
As for Ken Lay, I'm not even completely convinced he is dead, or that if he had committed suicide or his death was caused by stress, we'd know about it. With the kind of money and influence the guy had, anything is possible. Fortunately, it doesn't matter, so I don't really care whether Wikipedia or the NYT is correct.
i'm english
I'm sorry.
i'm generally of the school of thought that says filenames should be restricted to ASCII.
You would be (see above). However, unlike case sensitivity, restricting file names to ASCII does cause big usability problems for non-English users.
the fact that many users of case sensitive systems resort to all lowercase to avoid the problems of case sensitivity tell me that its usability effect is anything but slight.
The fact that many users do just that shows you that they have a simple workaround: avoid upper case in languages where it makes sense.
as for programming languages i think that has more to do with the dominance of C than with the actual pros and cons of case sensitivity.
The dominance of C and its case sensitivity are both consequences of a successful, minimalistic approach to system design. The Macintosh and Windows file system design are still full of well-meaning but inept remnants of unsuccessful designs.
Case insensitivity seems like a nice, useful feature. But, in the end, it causes more harm than good: "case" is a rather odd concept, limited to certain languages, and even within those, often not well defined. In English, you can sort of get away with it. In other languages using the Latin alphabet, changes in capitalization may change the spelling of a word, and which upper and lower case characters correspond to one another are language dependent. On the other hand, in languages other than English (and to a lesser degree even in English), upper and lower case characters really do convey different meanings. "White House" means something different from "white house", and even sounds different. And different systems may mean different and incompatible things by "case insensitivity", since there is no single well-defined standard.
Altogether, that's a Pandora's box that's not worth opening: what looked like a simple use-friendly feature, case insensitivity, turns into a localization nightmare that's even harder to explain to users than case sensitive file names.
Case sensitive file systems are the right way to go; UNIX got it right, Macintosh and Windows got it wrong. The usability benefits are slight, and the usability pitfalls and resulting system complexity are huge. For programming languages, this issue has largely been settled a couple of decades ago. It's time we get rid of case insensitivity in file systems as well.
The "news" in this story is not that people become disinterested in a story, but that the rate at which they become disinterested is quite different from what was expected.
"Expected" by who? Anybody reasonably familiar with statistics wouldn't assume that this decay is exponential because there is absolutely no reason to make that assumption; none of the models that commonly lead to exponential decay apply in this case.
Even though this guy happens to use the web, these kinds of problems aren't anything new. If you put a statistician on it, he'd either use an empirical model for the rate, or model it with a power law.
I think this "expectation" gives us a lot more about the unfamiliarity of the author with statistics than about the real world.
I don't like people who "scrub" movies, but I still think this ruling is bad. For millennia, art has progressed and evolved by taking some prior artist's work and modifying it, often in ways that the original artist didn't agree with. Except for possibly receiving financial compensation for a limited time for each copy created, artists should not have the power to control what happens to their creations after they have released them to the public.
I think those proposals are too complicated.
All you really need for good task/E-mail based management is tagging and a connection with your scheduler. Several E-mail clients already offer that.
Spread spectrum using pseudo-random sequences is an encryption method, and an effective one, if the pesudo-random number generator is well chosen.
Whether it was intended to be used as such as part of Galileo is another question.
You are outright wrong. Facism was born of Germany's humiliation in WWI, weak democractic institutions, and a widespread, simmering hatred of Jews, not of government "inefficiency".
Fascism was not some political or cultural idiosyncracy of Germans: fascist political views were rampant throughout Europe and the US. The primary difference between Germany and the rest of the world was that the Germans managed to implement a highly efficient system of surveillance that relayed any anti-governmental sentiments to the authorities and resulted in anything from losing your job and restrictions on your freedoms of association and movement to being sent to detention camps.
In fact, an efficient system of informants and surveillance for the detection of anti-governmental sentiments is a universal constant for every fascist or totalitarian regime, and it is fundamentally incompatible with a free or democratic society.
Has the memory of 9/11 faded that much?
I sure hope so, because it's about time that people view 9/11 in a more rational light. Tragic as the loss of several thousand lives is, it is not sufficient reason to throw away our liberties. Even if there was a 9/11 every year, the death toll from terrorism would still be negligible compared to other easily preventable deaths in the US. The fixation on 9/11 and terrorism is an irrational and self-destructive emotional response, not a rational policy related to security or saving human lives.
The reaction to 9/11 should have been focussed changes in airline and transportation security together with a reaffirmation of our commitment to keep our society democratic and open, not a wholesale "war on terrorism". Bush and people like you are aiding the terrorists.
but with a warrent the officials should be able to get into anywhere they want, including your electronic systems
You might also wish that pi equals 3 or that gravity were half as strong as it is, but wishing that something might be so doesn't actually make it so.
As long as we have programmable, general purpose computers, there simply is no way for ISPs to comply with this: they cannot reliably identify VoIP calls, and they cannot reliably provide wiretapping capabilities for voice or IM communications.
Well, I hope so; Google will get my business.
In the US, because of tax policy, you can make an argument that the rich have actually gotten (on average) richer at the expense of the middle class and the poor; a "trickle down" argument doesn't work in the US because what "trickles down" is arguably money that's been taken out of the pockets of the people it is supposed to trickle down on.
But in India, the poor were poor before and the rich seem to be getting richer because they are making money abroad. The money that's entering India and ending up in the hands of this small elite really does add to the overall economy and some of it will create new business opportunities for other Indians.
So, yeah, it's a myth that India has become this powerhouse of educated, low-cost middle-class workers. But it looks to me like they are better off than they were before. Increasing inequality is a problem, but arguably an acceptable one if it is due to some people doing well without other people falling off the social ladder.
Because facts have no place in a court of law
No, it's because these are the wrong facts. The COA will protect you against claims that you knowingly purchased a pirated copy, but there are many other facts that need to be established in order to determine that you actually have a license (like the fact that you purchased the software at all).
Then how do you prove you have a license then? Keep the original receipt?
That's certainly a sensible thing to do. Keep the COA as well, because it will protect you against accusations that you knowingly bought a pirated copy of Windows.
How do you prove you haven't had your license revoked?
Microsoft can't unilaterally "revoke" your license; if you can prove you purchased a license, the ball is in their court and they have to prove that you have acted in a way that caused you to lose your license.
Oh wait, we're talking about an artificial construct that Microsoft has utter control over and can use to screw you whenever they feel like it.
Spare us the fatalism. Microsoft has no power to enforce licenses, the courts have. And courts are going to be reasonable about it and decide on a case-by-case basis. A COA isn't sufficient to prove ownership, but a purchase receipt may not be necessary either. There simply is no single answer.
If you're running Windows, keep all the documentation of your purchase and license you receive. Or, just run Linux instead; then you don't have to bother.
There's a fairly significant chance of major disasters that kill hundreds of millions or billions of people over the span of a century. There's also a smaller chance that our technological civilization won't survive. But despite global warming, nuclear war, terrorism, epidemics, you name it, the human race will survive the next 100 years; you couldn't eradicate it if you tried.
Because Microsoft itself seems to imply that the COA will be your guarantee that you are using a non-pirated version of Windows. If you want to make sure that your software is licensed properly and not pirated, you need to check your COA, according to Microsoft.
Even if all of that were true (which it is not), all that says is that you can use the COA to satisfy yourself of certain facts, not to use it as evidence in court.
But it isn't true anyway. The COA tells you that your copy is "genuine", not that it is "licensed". For example, if you violate the terms of the license, you lose your license, but you still retain the COA.
I suggest you do a bit of background reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Of_Satan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicca
Virtualization looks like necessary evil, because we are incompetent to write better OSes and Application. Virtualization is the easier route.
It's not a question of "competence", there simply is no such thing as a uniformly "better" operating system or application. DOS, for example, is an excellent operating system for some narrow set of applications, and you can hack Mach or Singularity until the cows come home and you're not going to create something better.
I would have preferred a better, from the ground-up OS any day. Hurd, or ever better Singularity!
People like you are part of the reason why software sucks so badly: you simply don't understand real-world tradeoffs. People like you design systems like Mach or Windows, systems that try to be everything to everybody; people like you throw in MLOCs of useless features and generalizations and extensibility, and all you are doing is create bigger and bigger headaches.
Virtualization is doing the right thing: it lets people focus on creating operating systems and server configurations that focus on solving specific problems. Maybe with virtualization, we can finally kill the general purpose operating system.
Various people in this thread have claimed that virtualization is a workaround for not being able to write a decent operating system. I think that's wrong. Different operating systems are legitimately different in the way in which they present high level interfaces and abstractions of low-level hardware features.
What virtualization really is is a long overdue standardization of a set of APIs that exist in many operating systems but remain hidden. By finally exposing them, we gain functionality that didn't exist previously.
If public web sites help the police track down perpertrators of illegal activities, that's a good thing. But I worry about statements like these:
"In order to understand any subculture, be it al-Qaida, witches, devil worshippers or gangs, you have to be able to know their own language," Knox said.
Devil worship and witchcraft aren't illegal in the US and are rarely linked to illegal activities; the police has no business getting involved in that "subculture" at all.
Furthermore, even when it comes to al Quaeda and gangs, they should be careful: after all, if we can get al Quaeda and gangs to limit their activities to free speech on the Internet, then that's a good thing. We should encourage these groups to use the Internet, not drive them away.
That's roughly what obese people are doing to their body; they don't increase gravity, but they do increase body mass. You can also simulate this with weight vests.
It does increase muscle mass, but other long term results are joint problems and problems with the circulatory system. Your body is optimized for a particular total body mass in standard gravity. It can adapt to some degree, but if you deviate too far, things stop working.
There is set of office apps besides MS Office and OpenOffice where ODF really would make a difference: Apple's. But, instead, Apple Pages and Keynote use their own, proprietary format, a format that isn't even consistent between Apple's own releases.