Microsoft in 2008 365
r.jimenezz writes "Over at Wired there's an entertaining article written by Gary Wolf. It purports to be a memo written by a 2008-Microsoft-employed Linus Torvalds to Bill, arguing against Steve Ballmer's desire to go back to the untenable OS monopoly proposition instead of the 'new order': Windows is now some sort of desktop environment on top of an open OS!"
Waaay out of context in fact. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's poking fun at the movie "Independence Day". The PowerBook that manages to establish an authenticated PPP session, get an IP address, transfer a virus to the alien host (pun intended), then REMOTELY EXECUTE IT.
Okay, yes, I'm a unix admin, mac user, network engineer, and the mere concept has my dying on the floor laughing as I watch the Classic environment do that.
Anyway, point is....I'm betting the author has watched that movie recently.
it's not exactly in line with this article ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, with their cash, they could probably also quickly be the world's largest X company for nearly any X
Microsoft has adopted to market changes before, and they will in the future. (And then, of course, one day they won't exist any more
timothy
Re:But what about Debian/NT? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds familiar... (Score:4, Interesting)
As sad as I am to say it, Cringley already fielded this one sometime in 2002 or 2003 I believe. He had a slightly insane theory that a proprietary Windows interface on top of a Linux kernel would be the best of both worlds.
I doubt it would ever happen but it would be definately interesting. Just think if Windows made the shift, there would no longer be ANY operating systems in active development that weren't based on UNIX in some way.
Is that a far-fetch dream or a reality slowly taking shape?
Re:I read this and found it to be terribly funny (Score:5, Interesting)
First, there's the free drinks. Every building has at least one Kitchen. In my building, on my floor alone, there are 2. On floors 2 and 3 there are 2 more kitchens each, for a total of 6 in the building. In each kitchen is the type of floor-standing refrigerator you'd see at the grocery store or a 7-11, the kind they keep soft drinks in. Well, much like the grocery store or 7-11, just about every soft drink you could want is in there. Every "Coke" and "Pepsi" variant, Root Beer, Nestea, Dr. Pepper, different juices (cranberry, grapefruit, grape, apple, orange, V8), skim/2%/whole/chocolate milk, a variety of Talking Rain, and so forth. Not to mention the 12 flavors of Tea and a similarly diverse variety of coffee. Are you powered by mountain dew? Your batteries will never run low at Microsoft.
Second, there's the hours. Want to come in at 10am? ok, come in at 10. Want to work the weekend? no prob, you've got 24 hour building access thanks to your security badge. When you get sick of sitting at your desk, you can walk down the hall to a fooseball or ping-pong table and take a breather. Or, if you're in a building with an atrium (like mine) you can go sit there and read for a while. They don't micro-manage you, they like assigning people tasks and then letting those people handle those tasks independently.
So I'm a perl wizard (I have a beard and a hat too!) and I can do things with perl that is beyond the comprehension of most of the people I work with. Which is absolutely fine, really, because it takes me about an hour to accomplish something that would take 4 hours for them to do by hand. I tell them it'll take two hours and I've still got an extra hour to read slashdot.
I've never once had somebody look over my shoulder, and I work in a cube farm. There's 40 cubes in this room, and they aren't even cubes so much as the partitioned desks you see in a call center. Nobody is walking up behind me to check in on me. I produce my deliverables and they show me their gratitude.
Now, the downsides... Nothing works, and that's OK. Or rather, when something doesn't work the way it SHOULD work, people just shrug it off and accept it. The internal network can at some times be as slow as a 56k modem, and that's OK. (I'm not making this up, I speed-tested it) When the tools crash persistently day after day? That's OK. There's a standard of established mediocrity within the company's internal tools that probably serves to reinforce their release of crappy products. This is pretty much the only downside really, and I could see Linus doing his fair share to alleviate this problem at least in the division in which he would be working.
A minor downside is the "independent work" thing I mentioned above. Sometimes tasks get subdivided to the point where you've got 4 people working on a one-man job and the only way to accomplish anything is to have all 4 of those people in the same room at the same time, which can be a daunting task to accomplish. But this is really quite trivial compared to the acceptance of mediocrity that seems to pervade the campus.
Re:Sounds like a pretty good idea to me... (Score:3, Interesting)
1 - Having an independant window manager, so that the application's frame is NOT under its own control. This wins you several things, including being able to move or iconify an App that is unresponsive.
2 - Remotability that is not an added afterthought. Remotability that is always there, and always usable.
3 - Picking and choosing your interface tools that help (this has a lot to do with #1 above).
4 - mouse focus how you like it.
Re:Interesting thing is... (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to use slackware, and was all for compiling software by hand, then i installed gentoo and its package management system is amazing (far, far better than windows) - it even has a gui (porthole) which my gf uses to install/upgrade stuff.
I loved slackware, but i could never use it again on my desktop.
Re:But what about Debian/NT? (Score:4, Interesting)
The NT kernel was designed from the beginning to support different environments, including POSIX and Win32. Each environment subsystem consists of a server process that maintains common state specific to the environment, and a set of client libraries that translate the environment's API to the native API and calls to the server. Win32 is an environment subsystem and so is SFU.
For some reason, cygwin (which debian-win32 uses) insists on using only Win32, so they have to resort to kludges to make certain things like fork() work.
Now that SFU is free, I don't see why debian-win32 couldn't use that instead of cygwin.
As it stands, Interop Systems [interopsystems.com] has the best collection of packages for SFU. Most of the essential stuff is there, but it's still a far cry from Debian's library.
Not Representative of MSFT (Score:4, Interesting)
The parent post is a superficial and completely unrepresentative perspective of Microsoft. The author seemed to be pandering to Slashdot preconceptions more than anything. In reality, Microsoft is an amazing company full of ridiculously intelligent CS folks i.e. top students from top CS programs. Whereas at many companies I've been exposed to, there are a couple smart people here and there and everyone else is just sleepwalking, Microsoft is almost entirely composed of smartest-guy-in-the-room types.
Some notes:
* This guy is a contractor. Contractors are generally not very well-respected at Microsoft. The quality people are full-time almost without exception.
* Almost no one at Microsoft works in a cubicle. Full-time employees have real offices with real doors that close so that you can concentrate.
* There is no "acceptance of mediocrity" at Microsoft. In fact, it is entirely the opposite. There is a culture of self-criticism and self-castigation throughout the company, especially in divisions like Office.
* The only times I observed the internal network to be "slow" was when the company was dogfooding an early release. If the network were really as slow as the author describes, people would not be able to get their work done.
* What internal tools are you referring to? RAID (the bug-tracking system) is pretty great overall and all of the business process management stuff was the best I've seen at any company.
I'll leave it at that.
Re:Not Representative of MSFT (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not Representative of MSFT (Score:2, Interesting)
In any case, your graduate student sounds like precisely the sort of bright, pragmatic person that is typical at MS...not a part of the supposed "culture of mediocrity" dreamed up by some contractor.