this is total bullshit. i mean, this is the stuff that really gets
to me. on the amiga, circa mid-to-late eighties, we were doing
plug-and-play devices that were just as complex as those available
today. you turn off your machine, open it up, push a card in any
slot, close it up and turn it on, then use the installer disk that
came with it that usually dropped a single .device file in your
/devices directory (where it belonged, not all over your fucking
hard drive) and it _worked_! i fucking _hate_ microshit. period.
they are total shit.
it's funny. i'm working on a couple of journal papers this week
and my advisor told me we should tone down some of the
anti-microsquish rhetoric in them just in case micro$hit reads them
or wants to give us money someday. now, i was pretty sure i had
removed the inflammatory comments that always creep in my first
drafts before i gave it to him. i asked which line in particular
rubbed him, and possibly microcrap the wrong way. i was
semi-surprise to discover that it was the following (with reference
to "network-centric" computing):
Companies like Sun and Netscape are leading the way and Microsoft
is rapidly catching up in this area.
doh! i guess he didn't read my little activex/com/ole discussion
we just shipped with our new software release. you, too, can read
the rhetoric at url
http://www.infospheres.caltech.edu/releases/II-1.0a/discussions/com_ole.html
> The technology, which promised to simplify the installation of
> peripherals through such functions as hot-swapping and automatic
> device detection, doesn't always work properly when a user loads
> new, complex applications, Grove said. Even Windows NT, which Intel
> is loading on all of its in-house servers and desktops, does not
> fully support Plug and Play and will not until at least next year.
>
> Grove said that if software had stayed at the same level of
> complexity it was at in 1994, Plug and Play would have worked as
> originally planned. But it hasn't.
>
> "We've pushed computers to the edge of usability," he said. "We
> load new applications on machines in ways we could never have
> dreamt of, and we're moving that boundary forward aggressively.''
obviously, they don't dream of anything but $$$.
> Having learned this lesson, Grove predicted that USB will not be a
> panacea for the difficulties and frustrations of device
> installation and management.
blah blah blah.
a quick story: my girlfriend, mary, is now working as a rollout
manager for the exchange group within kaiser is (west coast). yes,
they have a group just for rolling out a new mail system. now, not
that they are trying to convince the whole company that they have to
upgrade every machine in the company to something big enough that
it can support exchange well. they are working toward making every
desktop machine within a few months be a pentium or pentium pro
running nt 4.0 with at least 16mb of ram. note that we're talking
about _thousands_ of systems and, the silly things about it, the
company is actually _buying_ this drivel! meaning, they are really
planning on doing this. anyway, i could go on for hours about how
shitty their i.s. is (no organization, no policies, no security, etc
etc etc) but i wanted to tell you about an interesting little
feature of exchange that mary told me about yesterday.
basically, if exchange detects a url in a mail message it makes it
a link. the problem is, you cannot cut-and-paste out the link
because the whole text of the url is an active button and, if you
click on it, it automatically tries to run ie, regardless of whether
or not it is installed on your system. in fact, _it has no
facility to support any other browser at all_.
no further comments from me about microslut...for today.
joe