The Hive Archive

Monad, what have you become? I found the following on Arul Kumaravel’s blog:

When I saw this, I actually looked to make sure it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke. I’ve been hearing about Monad for some time, it was yet another promised feature that Vista won’t have. It sounded impressive, for once Microsoft was going to create a command line interface, and they were going to clean up the cruft that has accumulated in the past 40 years of computing.

It was/is supposed to be completely object oriented, a cut above the poor UNIX text interfaces. I was just impressed they had finally listened to their customers pleading and begging for a way to script and use the command line to admin Windows boxes.

Then I run across an idiot on Slashdot where someone was using this example to brag about Monad! Most of the time when people type LOL, they aren’t really laughing out loud, but this time, my lungs hurt from laughing so hard. Have these people actually used a command line interface? The reason the commands are so small in UNIX is that they are faster to type!

This syntax in Monad looks like it was dreamt up by someone that saw a UNIX shell a couple times and said, “wow, these commands don’t make much sense, how would a new user know what cd or ls or ps means?”

If this is the state of Monad, I can’t imagine ever using it. The whole point of a command line interface is that I can ssh to a machine over any kind of network and quickly type and do useful work. I was ready to give them a shot, but if they’ve missed this most basic point, I don’t see how it would be useful. Probably not a surprise that Microsoft can’t get a text interface right, but I was hoping.

I leave with a quote:

[ebnf] is monad pronounced like gonad?

Lem Bingley at IT week blogs about the millions of blogs now running adsense that rarely, if ever break the $100 limit that Google requires before they cut you a check. This made sense in the early days of Adsense, since they were still mailing checks to everyone. It certainly isn’t cost effective for Google to mail out $0.10 checks all over the world.

However, with electronic transfers now enabled, they’ve kept the limit the same. Even banks don’t make this much money of the float. If Yahoo or MSN really wanted to cut into the long tail of adsense, they would lower the minimum payout for electronic transfers to something more like $25/month. The other major complaint that I have with Adsense, is that I am not allowed to set a bid price on what ads can appear on my site. Google controls it. If they determine that my page rates $0.01 ads, that’s the ad they place.

Granted, it is in their best interest as well as mine to put the ad most likely to recieve a legit click-through. However, it may not be in my best interest to clutter up my page with $0.01 advertisements. I should be able to set a minimum bid price for an ad to appear on my site. If I bid too high, then ads don’t show up, but since I’m not making much money anyway, I probably won’t care. My visitors will be more likely to come back and read something else I wrote.

I am very much looking forward to good competition in this space. I’ve tried the Yahoo Beta program and it isn’t close yet. I hope it gets better soon.

Bruce Schneier, noted security expert, summarizes some of what is being said about Vista’s new security model. It is amazing how clueless Microsoft can be in ignoring the security models that have proven themselves to be successful and useful in other operating systems. This is one area where I wouldn’t give Microsoft flack for not innovating. Security is tough, learn from the mistakes others have made!

I’m very disappointed with this, especially because NTFS has such a fine grained permissions system. They could have really pulled off something nice. Thankfully, I’ve been using nothing but Linux and Apple OSX for the past month. If more games were available for OSX, there would be no need for Windows in my life ever again.