Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
RBW wrote:
[Snip]
The marketing advance--exactly what idiot is going to trust their
sensitive data to *anyone* outside of their direct control. Clearly
this can be overcome by marketing--witness the parade of morons who
outsourced the handling of medical records to low wage countries and
the resultant fiascoes. However, smart companies are *never* going to
want to give an external entity access to their private information.
[Aside question:]
Is there a concept out there of a private key whose use is restricted to
some definable set of individuals (or processes) but the use of the key
does not involve the actual possession of the key by those defined
individuals? I'm thinking there may be a procedure where tthe object
encrypted with the public key is forwarded to a "private key server" so
to speak and it operates on the object encrypted with the public key and
returns you the decrypted product, however, although you are on the
proper ACL to get the results of applying the private key you don't
actually get your hands on the private key itself...
"M$ basically does three things, marketing, litigating and publishing
software... They suck really badly at only one of those three things"
I disagree. They are geniuses at all three of those tasks. Note that
you said *publishing* software, not *creating* software.
Maybe I should have said publishing "practical" software...
I know in my own anecdotal experience M$ products have not been
"practical" since about 1996 either cost wise or learning vis-a-vis cost
wise. For me it simply is not practical to allow their profit motive and
profit model to be a prerequisite to learning or doing the next
incremental thing I want to do with computer technology. I don't want to
be bothered with that extraneous discussion with them.
Maybe it is more practical for a company to spend @$1k for each employee
in software and countless hours retro-addressing purposefully designed
and carelessly created/allowed M$ flaws than to use alternatives... But
that seems to me to be largely a function of lack of marketplace
knowledge that allows M$ to appear relatively "practical", especially in
the last 3-4 years.
As for creating software, I'm not sure I would claim that they suck at
that either. They have created a set of applications that legions of
businesses run on. That's not a definition of "suckage" that I would
be prepared to defend.
Yeah they do suck at both... publishing "practical" software and
creating "good" software.
Regarding the first is it really "practical", absent ignorance, to
accept the premise that to do what you want to do you have to spend a
tremendous amount of time money and effort to avoid the inherent design
flaws and purposeful standards manipulations all because of a corporate
policy to compromise the marketplace?
Regarding "created" software, the fact that "legions" use it doesn't
mean that the software itself doesn't "suck". That's an issue separate
from the fact that legions sincerely believe it doesn't suck but are
sincerely wrong. The problem is starting to get critical because in the
last 10 years not only have M$ users been dumbed down by M$ (they don't
even know what a file in a folder is anymore) the sheer time, effort and
money to avoid having the software itself become a major impediment to
useful work is astounding. And wrapped up inside this whole issue is the
consistent theme of standards manipulation and inter-corporate market
dominance. I read this following article and when I was done all I could
think was, "What a pathetic waste of time on a premise (M$) that is
purposefully flawed..."
"Both charge fees for all phone calls, unless they decide it was their
software at fault, and provide only limited access to live help online
(McAfee's live chats are as difficult to connect to as its manual update
downloads).
If you're running Windows XP, you're better off sticking with the
firewall built into SP2, then downloading Microsoft's AntiSpyware and
using a mail program with a built-in spam filter, such as Microsoft's
Outlook 2003, Qualcomm's Eudora or the free Thunderbird. Then run
whatever anti-virus program came with your machine. If one isn't active,
Symantec is better than McAfee (I plan to review other anti-virus
utilities soon).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/08/AR2005100800566_2.html
What a waste of time...
This sounds to my ear like the teacher in the "Peanuts" cartoons...
While I understand the reason why Microsoft is fighting the
OpenDocument stuff in Massachusetts, once they decide to support it
(and they will) all of the old arguments about how expensive it is to
change come back into force. Microsoft has the benefit of *inertia*;
it is the entrenched interest that everybody currently uses.
Well there is the thought that engaging in business requires a constant
resistance to "inertia" to keep vital, alive and growing and regarding
the business use of software there are actual commentary that seem to
get it that movement from the current business computing status quo that
is assumed to be true may be "practical" and ready for review...
"If you're not running XP, go with the McAfee suite for now. But think
hard about whether you actually need to run Windows on your next
computer. Compared with dealing with these programs, life with Mac OS X
or Linux -- both blissfully free of spyware and viruses --may look
awfully appealing."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/08/AR2005100800566_2.html
There he said it... Right in a major media rag...
It's not just me...
Good thing M$ isn't the Beijing government...
RBW
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