Re: Sure, but uhm...
It started long before that.
In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and has been considered a bad move ever since.
/gimme my towel, thankyou/
1143 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2013
They tried to handle matters as a typical $BIGCORP. There is an official process for reporting problems - and like most official processes, nearly impossible to use in practice.
But there is a difference, though. They have Zuck. He is quite able to go nuclear on this "process".
Now I'm trolling a bit, but NT can be secured quite well without breaking it, in stark contrast with the later stuff.
IE, RPC, NetBIOS and most of the other attack vectors can be either removed or bound to localhost.
Heck, why stop at that (once trolling) - it was the last decent Win32. After that, franchise was ruined via feature-creep.
"And it had one API to rule them"
Allusions to One Ring are quite justified here. Win32 API was a powerful instrument in their rise to power.
Now that power is waning, and MS does not hold sway over the whole industry anymore.
Joel noticed this happening back in 2004:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
Probably so. Then again, Eco does not say they're not dangerous, and neither did I. I'm just having trouble with a popular depiction - omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent agencies. That is probably a huge exxageration.
Even in 1984, fear of the Big Brother seems to induce more harm than said entity itself.
Umberto Eco once said:
"By now it should be quite apparent that Big Brother is an idiot who sleeps most of the time."
-
So BB wakes up, makes some ruckus, harasses people, demands to know everything about everybody. And shoots himself in both feet.
That does not seem to be very cunning, does it? Even if the footgun is a high-tech one.
Dangerous, no doubt. But what kind of dangerous - a devious mastermind, or a cretin with way too much power?
""class" is a imaginary social construct with no basis in reality"
Funny, this is so right and so wrong, at the same time.
Class seems to be like a soul - immaterial, aetherical, imaginary, unreachable, immeasurable, unreal, etc, etc. It cannot be defined properly, its existence cannot be proven, efforts to find it are rather futile.
And yet, when we conclude it does not exist, something just doesn't feel right about it, something is terribly amiss. Reality is not so real anymore.
Those little mysteries of life.
I can remember a case, where full compile was a necessity. A laptop with a mobile P4, and about the best money could buy.
Everything was dog slow - all Windows versions to date, all widespread Linux distros. P4 was never good at running i386-optimized code. Every pipeline stall resulted in a looong wait for a memory fetch.
So Gentoo compiled with i686 options was pretty much the only OS to run well there.
By the time a totalitarian government starts to look like one, it is already too late.
In the earliest phases it's just a slight disbalance of power in favour of the executive branch. General public is actually pleased - things get done without too much squabbling.
"Revisionism, historical or the kind that rewrites literature, is every bit as offensive as treason."
Only the winner, the prevailing power, gets to write the history. Others are rarely heard.
An overwhelming power can re-write the history at will. Those, who dare to call it offensive or revisionist, may well be charged with treason.
Beware.
I'm not disagreeing with you entirely. Just pointing out that bureaucracy is indeed capable of suppressing innovation. Internal turf wars, incompetent metrics, stack rankings et al take precedence over actual business. Developers have to suffer endless disruptions (labelled of course as high-priority) from HR, H&S, CF and whatnot. No wonder they will eventually walk.
An eternal tension between "doing the right thing" and "doing the thing right" mentalities, with the latter being much more persistent in big corps. Managers, who are trying to bucket that trend, will eventually burn out or just give up.
A notable exception was MS Courier project. Probably last of its kind. Developers were located on a separate campus, with virtually no ties to the rest of the organization, and given a free reign over the project. End result was an innovative product, quite on time, but unfortunately did not fit well with existing strategy. Thus killed in a heartbeat.
"Do you really think that EMC, MS, Symantec, IBM, Oracle et al can't recruit people who have original ideas? That their managers only exist to stop staff innovating and in the unlikely event that they do, the sales staff will refuse to sell the product?"
You may be sarcastic here, but in a sufficiently advanced bureaucracy that's exactly what happens. Original ideas are dangerously disruptive. Innovators are a source of constant trouble. Managers are either tied up with a red tape, or are busy tying others up. Sales dept likes predictable cash flows over anything else.
In a nutshell: Doing the Thing Right mentality prevails.
That goes for many newer Apple products, both hardware and software. Which is somewhat sad. Pursuit for perfection has mysteriously stopped halfway.
My biggest disappointment was opening up a Macbook Pro. Cheap blue motherboard, cheap cables, cheap mechanicals. Looked like a $500 Foxconn "generic" notebook.
And not only that. Rough times also affect mentality.
For some, it is an excuse for violence, for others, a necessity to support each other, in order to increase a likelyhood of survival.
In any case - during wars, people do not bitch about animal rights or CO2 or whatever it is hot this week. They have bigger issues. But in the prosperous times, they are perfectly capable to gnaw each other's throats for just such things.
We don't really need another war to set our priorities right, do we?
Well, there are different styles of doing business.
One is the brand-oriented, ivory-tower-style vertical business. Sometimes with a cult following. Like Apple. Other is more pragmatic - whatever brings the money in. Lots of different brands, lots of related companies. Big international conglomerates.
Now which way is more suitable for the energy business?
Po-2 had an advantage of surprise, no doubt. But such approach is not completely unique. Fairey Swordfish against Bismarck fits that bill very nicely. And a bunch of skiing Finns against mechanized Soviet division wasn't bad either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_battleship_Bismarck
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Suomussalmi
Yes, liability shifts may be quite dangerous.
Fine example of this is a German court deciding that WEP-encrypted network is a secure network, and therefore owner is liable any crimes conducted on the network. And there's a mountain of evidence against WEP "security". With better crypto, paid experts and supressed research it would be even harder to fend off such charges. Uphill both ways.
That's where a long hunt for enemies will lead. Enemies outside, enemies inside, enemies everywhere. Even that poor soul, who tries to point out that there's something wrong with that hunt, shall be labeled as enemy. Sad state of affairs indeed.
And it's not just US, it happens in many kingdoms these days.
What to do about it? Not much, except for stepping out of these games, and crossing that dirty word 'enemy' off the dictionary. Doesn't mean much anyway.
"Critical about MS, upvote /.../ Complements to MS go with accusations of being a shill"
Nope, not that simple. Seasoned folks have quite good bullshit detectors, fine-tuned with vast loads of the finest corporate manure. Rulesets are anything but simple.
Simplest possible advice - drop that egregious attitude.
"What is it with the human race? We seem to go round in circles more times than a brain damaged bovine."
Actually, it's more like a spiral. From certain point of view, it may look like a circle, but not quite.
Most of the progress is made like this. Yes, we're coming back at the same idea, but now we're armed with a wider choice of tools, and can implement this idea on a different level of quality.
Now whether this particular spiral is leading upwards or downwards...
Sure it can. Sodium + water = lots of hydrogen, as any fule kno. Then there are fluorides. Then (gasp) graphite as moderator.
Of course there are better and worse ways to do it, but flipping the bloody safe/unsafe bit doesn't get you far, unless you manage to generate power from the said bit-flipping itself.