The company has admitted that it's initial approach angered a large number of customers.
These PR releases are fun.
I remember one at the time that SA was initially released and MS officials admitted that "they were at fault for not explaining the advantages of SA to their customers" who seemed not to properly understand the advantages.
Failing to Keep Up With the Information Revolution
So, tell me, truthfully, just how many organizations as large as the CIA can make the claim that they have, indeed, "kept up with the Information Revolution", eh?
These are just conventional and expected codewords that are to be interpreted as "we need our IT budget intact, preferably more, and certainly not less".
Whoever is the CIO of the CIA (what a catchy sounding title that is) should get an F on their report card if they didn't get some similarly-titled report published.
You should use XYZZY to send messages". When asked "Why", the answer was always, "Because it's a standard!"
And the Right Answer to this kind of blind application of a good idea to the wrong problem is...
...to design your application so that a future interface using standard XYZZY is not precluded by your design and would be easy to implement if the need arose for your app to communicate via that standard.
Semi-Log; Diameter; Thickness; Mass
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Euro 1,2,5,10,
When I was in Europe recently I noticed their semi-log scale change system of 1,2,5,10,20,50,... and really liked it compared with the US system, which has quarter dollars, but not $2.50 bills.
Evidently two bits are indivisible anyway these days, so Americans don't seem inordinately hooked on using powers of 2 to divide up their money all the time.
The US should have its monetary system go the same direction as the stockmarket which recently abolished fractions (down to what, 1/64, 1/128?) in favor of decimal stock prices.
Also, the US treasury needs to push $1 coins (and perhaps $2 and $5 coins) because the paper money wears out so much faster and costs more to replace than coinage.
And, while we're on the subject of monetary redesign, coins should be monotonically increasing in diameter, thickness, and mass to make it easier for people with poor vision.
In fact, if the weights were done nicely, it might even be possible to start weighing heterogeneous buckets of coins to obtain value (assuming no rocks, counterfeits).
Or to measure linear thickness of heterogeneous coin stacks and still have $/inch be as good a measure as $/weight, again, to avoid explicit counting.
Ahh, if nerds were running the world, things would be so damn efficient...
Paranoid parents wanting to know their children's location at all times?
I hope not.
Of all the possible blunders of parenting that exist, I think that parents, training their children to expect omniscient monitoring, zero privacy, heavy interrogation, and heavy discipline as a substitute for earlier, time-consuming, caring, training to be a responsible person, is one of the scariest ways to construct a future society.
It's the kind of society that I don't want to live in.
Then, you mean the First World industrialized nations should completely ignore the Third World and their problems - let the Third World decide and solve their own problems by themselves?
I'm in the First World and naively believe I have some things to make my life better and would like for other people in the Third World to enjoy those things, too.
But if you say that I'm merely an armchair quarterback with no firsthand experience of what it's like to live in the Third World, then I'll believe you. If you really don't want any help from people without firsthand experience with those problems, and believe that's best, then maybe you're right.
Feel free to create EarlOffice that reads and writes OpenOffice formats (BTW, you can find out all about OpenOffice formats without an MSDN subscription price).
Then, sell EarlOffice for a slight price over OpenOffice, because you will have added some really nice unique features to EarlOffice that are currently unavailable in OpenOffice, even though it is in all other respects interoperable.
Try to implement that same business plan with MS Word and then tell me the situation with a dominant OpenOffice would be so bad.
The OpenOffice case will include much lower barriers to entry for competition that the consumer will see a greater variety of innovative add-ons, work-alikes, etc.
So what's the surprise about this? Given the recent SEC filing, there's no surprise.
A significant step will be if MS decides that Linux is enough of a presence in the low-end server market (the one they're desperately trying to enter so there is some genuine growth of the company) that they decide to forgo the double leveraging strategy of tying products like SQL server, Exchange, and perhaps some parts of.NET so tightly to Windows. You know, like come out with a Linux version of these products to gain market share for them? If Linux keeps growing, then this will happen some day.
Secondly, the variable pricing strategy of Windows and affiliated software has already been in effect overseas: it's considered so damn expensive that illicit copies are endemic. Another way of viewing it is that people willing to pay zero dollars but pay the hidden cost of enduring the risk of running illicit MS software (what that risk really costs is a matter for insurance actuaries).
Those warez users have already made their own decision, with MS out of the loop, about the discount they want and what they are willing to pay for.
Furthermore, if MS clamps down tightly on "piracy" via more sophisticated technical measures, then they may end up losing this base of warez customer that just might possibly in the future begin sending money towards Redmond after they've become addicted to MS ware.
Reminds me of a story about a friend of a friend who worked at Intel.
In the days of the Pentium III clawing its way up towards 1 GHz to compete with the early Athlons, this guy had grabbed one of the PIII's they were testing and binning and used it for his own workstation at 1 GHz, many months before the bulk of the reliable yield could be rated that high.
Thermal issues probably limit overclocking a lot more these days than a few years ago, though.
Microsoft has transformed from a growth company to a value company.
I'd argue that the position of MSFT is rather more like a utility company, just like electric, phone and water.
It enjoys a similar monopoly in its marketplace.
People using their products pretty much have to have Windows and Office at any price; there is almost as little resilience in the price/demand curve as there is for electricity from your local utility. If my electric company raised the rates from US$0.09/kWh to US$0.18/kWh, I'd still continue my service and pay up (although I'd look harder at every little appliance for potential energy savings.)
Finally, Bill has always set a stable growth plan which is turning into a stable dividend plan now that growth is finally capped due to market saturation.
The problem with a system with a proper modular design with nice, clean interfaces between the parts is...
...that it is harder to hide your system, which is where you obtain a competitive advantage.
Arguably, most of the growth of MS as a corporation is thanks to keeping things dark and hidden from competitors and, when there is danger of the system being exposed to light, changing the interfaces.
This strategy has produced financial returns far beyond anything else. The ability to hide, lock-in, and yet promote change in the face of reverse-engineering threats, is peculiar to the software industry. In the early days of the industrial revolution, once the technology leaked out of the loom factory, competition started to work its magic.
IMHO, it's a testimony to the brilliant, hard working employees of MS that Win2K and successors are as stable as they are (and they are), especially once one starts considering the corporate culture of hide `n go seek that made their jobs that much more difficult.
And they're certain to want to rope off pieces of pie for themselves.
Despite all this, though, I think the general idea of a PC with the functionality of "Athena" is a good idea. If MS uses it's big cudgel to bring down the PC decibel level (you can hear `em whining already - "but we gotta cool our 4 GHz chips!"), increase the reliability (go ahead and use cheap capacitors - we won't let you put a quad-color sticker on the outside), and standardize hardware interfaces for telephony, then that would be a largely positive move.
Of course, as Linux user, I'd like to see all these new standards published openly and available for free to anyone who thinks they could implement them.
MyCorp finally decided that IE 6 was an improvement over NS 4.7 for our Windows machines. Despite disliking the borglike tactics of MS, the decision made sense locally. It's almost easier to just let Windows have its way and use IE by default. But I would insure the security patches are up to date. Use SMS to update them.
Our migration to IE was decided before Mozilla was as good as it is now. Also, Opera ain't bad, nor Konqueror/Safari. Check `em all out and keep your internal sites W3C standards compliant so you have options in the future instead of handcuffs.
it will be really nice in a few years when widescreen TV's are the norm.
I'm a fan of wide-screen TVs and always rent the letterbox version because I know what it means when it says "This has been formatted to fit your TV."
The problem I see coming in the future is watching old 4:3 aspect TV shows on the wide screen. We'll have vertical black bars in the letterbox format of the future.
Well, I have heard that widescreen TV's will do a nonlinear stretch of the image to help fill up the space - I don't know how that looks in real life, though.
What you need are testimonials from others running mission-critical applications using FOSS.
One Fortune 500 executive won't achieve comfort with this kind of a spending and deployment decision (face it, they don't know the tech) until, unless, and, only if, they have seen more than one other Fortune 500 executive put their own necks on the chopping block, made a courageous decision, and have it succeed wildly with no glitches whatsoever.
Getting those testimonials might be hard for an individual on their own ("Mr. Big's office, how may I help you? Right...."), but the web is full of articles showing different businesses using FOSS successfully.
If you were tied into a vendor with a lot of FOSS contacts (eg, RH, IBM), then they could probably help you find those important reference testimonials. Sun is late getting on board the FOSS bandwagon, despite having produced a lot the standards and technology that has made it possible. Their Solaris servers will run FOSS just fine and interoperate with Linux machines, etc.
Yeah...sounds suspiciously like Extreme Programming to me.
And, AFAICT, that's tantamount to constant rewriting.
The assumptions are valid, though. Namely,
software is always improvable.
Whether it will actually improve under applied effort is another matter.
If you take the XP approach, then refactoring even at even the highest levels may be justifiable, and if you write in "refactoring" into your XP code dev plan from the get go, then you won't have to write a special, rejectable, proposal for "rewrite from scratch".
Anyway, the usual motivation for doing The Re-Write has to be when some typical lurking maintainance or debugging chore, or "small feature enhancement" takes a helluva a lot longer than the decision makers like. Sometimes, Joe's a bad programmer is the reason it took so long; other times, it's because Joe was handed a plate of spaghetti masquerading as code.
If you can say, truthfully, that those exact same debug/feature enhancements would have cost x% less if done within the framework of the hypothetical rewritten code base of the future, then money allocators will do the amortization and figure out if it justifies the expense.
I'd wildly guess the rewrite shouldn't cost more than about 3 times what annual debug/support/maintenance costs. Others here may know better, though.
Heh. I love the way some people are so good at "language linkage". It's as fun as DoubleSpeak.
Be certain that any news article about some gripe-posting site getting prosecuted under this act will quote an available industry spokesman:
"MS does not comment on ongoing legal proceedings. However, it is company policy to draw the line at illegal hacker sites that violate the anti-pornography clause of our EULA."
Well, MS is as large as some governments, it should be no surprise if they start using political language for all it's worth.
when you leave you're forced to liquidate all your holdings in the company.
As long as the company size is growing or stable there's no problem here.
What, pray tell, would happen if some big contracts didn't come through and a bunch of people were all let go at the same time?
Seems to me, with the constrained marketplace for SAIC shares, you could get a big drop in the effective share price. The people going out the door would be doubly pissed: once for having been let go, once for getting a pittance for their shares as they depart into the ranks of the unemployed.
If the IPv6 standard were to have come out earlier it would have had a better chance of people wanting to deploy it because of the apparent crisis in IPv4 address space exhaustion.
Now, with NAT, no one wants to muck around with their network infrastructure. You're talking about committing expert people's time and buying new hardware. Since March 2000, committing big bucks to IT has been considered uncool. Do more for less, etc.
No, IPv4 will have to show itself to be a real impediment (performance, security, complexity) in some way that IPv6 solves before IPv6 adoption will take off anywhere except places with more money and experts than most businesses.
OK, so are they really doing away with those old interfaces, or just pretending they're not there, not documenting them, etc?
I'd be impressed if the API was condensed into 8k well-documented routines that completely spanned win32 functionality. Like, if another company were to provide the same 8k routines they could, albeit with less performance, run any and all win32 applications (on different hardware, under different OS, etc.).
The team would come up with a large problem space of sequences of HTML tags, markup, attribute values (negative numbers, zeroes, missing, mIXed case, etc.).
That's an excellent idea.
In fact, I think such an application already exists. IIRC, it's called something like FrontPage.
With regards to memory management, I think it's a hard problem to do both the rigorous checks and still keep 99% performance under general use.
There's no free lunch, and I think the best approach is to start coding more carefully, like the OpenBSD folks do.
Slashdot Mirror
The company has admitted that it's initial approach angered a large number of customers.
These PR releases are fun.
I remember one at the time that SA was initially released and MS officials admitted that "they were at fault for not explaining the advantages of SA to their customers" who seemed not to properly understand the advantages.
Heh. Like no one understood.
Failing to Keep Up With the Information Revolution
So, tell me, truthfully, just how many organizations as large as the CIA can make the claim that they have, indeed, "kept up with the Information Revolution", eh?
These are just conventional and expected codewords that are to be interpreted as "we need our IT budget intact, preferably more, and certainly not less".
Whoever is the CIO of the CIA (what a catchy sounding title that is) should get an F on their report card if they didn't get some similarly-titled report published.
You should use XYZZY to send messages". When asked "Why", the answer was always, "Because it's a standard!"
And the Right Answer to this kind of blind application of a good idea to the wrong problem is...
...to design your application so that a future interface using standard XYZZY is not precluded by your design and would be easy to implement if the need arose for your app to communicate via that standard.
Euro 1,2,5,10,
When I was in Europe recently I noticed their semi-log scale change system of 1,2,5,10,20,50,... and really liked it compared with the US system, which has quarter dollars, but not $2.50 bills.
Evidently two bits are indivisible anyway these days, so Americans don't seem inordinately hooked on using powers of 2 to divide up their money all the time.
The US should have its monetary system go the same direction as the stockmarket which recently abolished fractions (down to what, 1/64, 1/128?) in favor of decimal stock prices.
Also, the US treasury needs to push $1 coins (and perhaps $2 and $5 coins) because the paper money wears out so much faster and costs more to replace than coinage.
And, while we're on the subject of monetary redesign, coins should be monotonically increasing in diameter, thickness, and mass to make it easier for people with poor vision.
In fact, if the weights were done nicely, it might even be possible to start weighing heterogeneous buckets of coins to obtain value (assuming no rocks, counterfeits).
Or to measure linear thickness of heterogeneous coin stacks and still have $/inch be as good a measure as $/weight, again, to avoid explicit counting.
Ahh, if nerds were running the world, things would be so damn efficient...
Paranoid parents wanting to know their children's location at all times?
I hope not.
Of all the possible blunders of parenting that exist, I think that parents, training their children to expect omniscient monitoring, zero privacy, heavy interrogation, and heavy discipline as a substitute for earlier, time-consuming, caring, training to be a responsible person, is one of the scariest ways to construct a future society.
It's the kind of society that I don't want to live in.
Then, you mean the First World industrialized nations should completely ignore the Third World and their problems - let the Third World decide and solve their own problems by themselves?
I'm in the First World and naively believe I have some things to make my life better and would like for other people in the Third World to enjoy those things, too.
But if you say that I'm merely an armchair quarterback with no firsthand experience of what it's like to live in the Third World, then I'll believe you. If you really don't want any help from people without firsthand experience with those problems, and believe that's best, then maybe you're right.
Hmmm...well, the binaries in Windows are kind of hard for me to figure out what exactly is going on.
How about if I start patching Windows with random i386 instruction codes instead of Windows Update?
I'll let you know as soon as I get something good working.
What shall we do then?
Feel free to create EarlOffice that reads and writes OpenOffice formats (BTW, you can find out all about OpenOffice formats without an MSDN subscription price).
Then, sell EarlOffice for a slight price over OpenOffice, because you will have added some really nice unique features to EarlOffice that are currently unavailable in OpenOffice, even though it is in all other respects interoperable.
Try to implement that same business plan with MS Word and then tell me the situation with a dominant OpenOffice would be so bad.
The OpenOffice case will include much lower barriers to entry for competition that the consumer will see a greater variety of innovative add-ons, work-alikes, etc.
So what's the surprise about this? Given the recent SEC filing, there's no surprise.
A significant step will be if MS decides that Linux is enough of a presence in the low-end server market (the one they're desperately trying to enter so there is some genuine growth of the company) that they decide to forgo the double leveraging strategy of tying products like SQL server, Exchange, and perhaps some parts of .NET so tightly to Windows. You know, like come out with a Linux version of these products to gain market share for them? If Linux keeps growing, then this will happen some day.
Secondly, the variable pricing strategy of Windows and affiliated software has already been in effect overseas: it's considered so damn expensive that illicit copies are endemic. Another way of viewing it is that people willing to pay zero dollars but pay the hidden cost of enduring the risk of running illicit MS software (what that risk really costs is a matter for insurance actuaries).
Those warez users have already made their own decision, with MS out of the loop, about the discount they want and what they are willing to pay for.
Furthermore, if MS clamps down tightly on "piracy" via more sophisticated technical measures, then they may end up losing this base of warez customer that just might possibly in the future begin sending money towards Redmond after they've become addicted to MS ware.
It's all very strange.
but I want to get a sense of what others have done in this situation."
Ask him if you could go with him to the new corporation.
Reminds me of a story about a friend of a friend who worked at Intel.
In the days of the Pentium III clawing its way up towards 1 GHz to compete with the early Athlons, this guy had grabbed one of the PIII's they were testing and binning and used it for his own workstation at 1 GHz, many months before the bulk of the reliable yield could be rated that high.
Thermal issues probably limit overclocking a lot more these days than a few years ago, though.
Microsoft has transformed from a growth company to a value company.
I'd argue that the position of MSFT is rather more like a utility company, just like electric, phone and water.
It enjoys a similar monopoly in its marketplace.
People using their products pretty much have to have Windows and Office at any price; there is almost as little resilience in the price/demand curve as there is for electricity from your local utility. If my electric company raised the rates from US$0.09/kWh to US$0.18/kWh, I'd still continue my service and pay up (although I'd look harder at every little appliance for potential energy savings.)
Finally, Bill has always set a stable growth plan which is turning into a stable dividend plan now that growth is finally capped due to market saturation.
a system that had proper modular design
Yes. Yes. Yes.
The problem with a system with a proper modular design with nice, clean interfaces between the parts is...
...that it is harder to hide your system, which is where you obtain a competitive advantage.
Arguably, most of the growth of MS as a corporation is thanks to keeping things dark and hidden from competitors and, when there is danger of the system being exposed to light, changing the interfaces.
This strategy has produced financial returns far beyond anything else. The ability to hide, lock-in, and yet promote change in the face of reverse-engineering threats, is peculiar to the software industry. In the early days of the industrial revolution, once the technology leaked out of the loom factory, competition started to work its magic.
IMHO, it's a testimony to the brilliant, hard working employees of MS that Win2K and successors are as stable as they are (and they are), especially once one starts considering the corporate culture of hide `n go seek that made their jobs that much more difficult.
Yes, we all know that it's true.
And they're certain to want to rope off pieces of pie for themselves.
Despite all this, though, I think the general idea of a PC with the functionality of "Athena" is a good idea. If MS uses it's big cudgel to bring down the PC decibel level (you can hear `em whining already - "but we gotta cool our 4 GHz chips!"), increase the reliability (go ahead and use cheap capacitors - we won't let you put a quad-color sticker on the outside), and standardize hardware interfaces for telephony, then that would be a largely positive move.
Of course, as Linux user, I'd like to see all these new standards published openly and available for free to anyone who thinks they could implement them.
MyCorp finally decided that IE 6 was an improvement over NS 4.7 for our Windows machines. Despite disliking the borglike tactics of MS, the decision made sense locally. It's almost easier to just let Windows have its way and use IE by default. But I would insure the security patches are up to date. Use SMS to update them.
Our migration to IE was decided before Mozilla was as good as it is now. Also, Opera ain't bad, nor Konqueror/Safari. Check `em all out and keep your internal sites W3C standards compliant so you have options in the future instead of handcuffs.
it will be really nice in a few years when widescreen TV's are the norm.
I'm a fan of wide-screen TVs and always rent the letterbox version because I know what it means when it says "This has been formatted to fit your TV."
The problem I see coming in the future is watching old 4:3 aspect TV shows on the wide screen. We'll have vertical black bars in the letterbox format of the future.
Well, I have heard that widescreen TV's will do a nonlinear stretch of the image to help fill up the space - I don't know how that looks in real life, though.
Let's please stop this debate now before it dips down into the Score:-3 territory.
What you need are testimonials from others running mission-critical applications using FOSS.
One Fortune 500 executive won't achieve comfort with this kind of a spending and deployment decision (face it, they don't know the tech) until, unless, and, only if, they have seen more than one other Fortune 500 executive put their own necks on the chopping block, made a courageous decision, and have it succeed wildly with no glitches whatsoever.
Getting those testimonials might be hard for an individual on their own ("Mr. Big's office, how may I help you? Right...."), but the web is full of articles showing different businesses using FOSS successfully.
If you were tied into a vendor with a lot of FOSS contacts (eg, RH, IBM), then they could probably help you find those important reference testimonials. Sun is late getting on board the FOSS bandwagon, despite having produced a lot the standards and technology that has made it possible. Their Solaris servers will run FOSS just fine and interoperate with Linux machines, etc.
What, $9.95?
Yes, almost.
$9.95/month
Yeah...sounds suspiciously like Extreme Programming to me.
And, AFAICT, that's tantamount to constant rewriting.
The assumptions are valid, though. Namely,
Whether it will actually improve under applied effort is another matter.If you take the XP approach, then refactoring even at even the highest levels may be justifiable, and if you write in "refactoring" into your XP code dev plan from the get go, then you won't have to write a special, rejectable, proposal for "rewrite from scratch".
Anyway, the usual motivation for doing The Re-Write has to be when some typical lurking maintainance or debugging chore, or "small feature enhancement" takes a helluva a lot longer than the decision makers like. Sometimes, Joe's a bad programmer is the reason it took so long; other times, it's because Joe was handed a plate of spaghetti masquerading as code.
If you can say, truthfully, that those exact same debug/feature enhancements would have cost x% less if done within the framework of the hypothetical rewritten code base of the future, then money allocators will do the amortization and figure out if it justifies the expense.
I'd wildly guess the rewrite shouldn't cost more than about 3 times what annual debug/support/maintenance costs. Others here may know better, though.
Heh. I love the way some people are so good at "language linkage". It's as fun as DoubleSpeak.
Be certain that any news article about some gripe-posting site getting prosecuted under this act will quote an available industry spokesman:
Well, MS is as large as some governments, it should be no surprise if they start using political language for all it's worth.
when you leave you're forced to liquidate all your holdings in the company.
As long as the company size is growing or stable there's no problem here.
What, pray tell, would happen if some big contracts didn't come through and a bunch of people were all let go at the same time?
Seems to me, with the constrained marketplace for SAIC shares, you could get a big drop in the effective share price. The people going out the door would be doubly pissed: once for having been let go, once for getting a pittance for their shares as they depart into the ranks of the unemployed.
If the IPv6 standard were to have come out earlier it would have had a better chance of people wanting to deploy it because of the apparent crisis in IPv4 address space exhaustion.
Now, with NAT, no one wants to muck around with their network infrastructure. You're talking about committing expert people's time and buying new hardware. Since March 2000, committing big bucks to IT has been considered uncool. Do more for less, etc.
No, IPv4 will have to show itself to be a real impediment (performance, security, complexity) in some way that IPv6 solves before IPv6 adoption will take off anywhere except places with more money and experts than most businesses.
OK, so are they really doing away with those old interfaces, or just pretending they're not there, not documenting them, etc?
I'd be impressed if the API was condensed into 8k well-documented routines that completely spanned win32 functionality. Like, if another company were to provide the same 8k routines they could, albeit with less performance, run any and all win32 applications (on different hardware, under different OS, etc.).
The team would come up with a large problem space of sequences of HTML tags, markup, attribute values (negative numbers, zeroes, missing, mIXed case, etc.).
That's an excellent idea.
In fact, I think such an application already exists. IIRC, it's called something like FrontPage.
With regards to memory management, I think it's a hard problem to do both the rigorous checks and still keep 99% performance under general use.
There's no free lunch, and I think the best approach is to start coding more carefully, like the OpenBSD folks do.