Are people considering Linux/Mac desktops/servers and adding them to the environment. Windows 2000 Active Directory made it hard to add the non-MS LDAP/Kerberos machines to the network, Windows 2003 has made it harder, though Win2003R3 has apparently helped. This certainly helps lock in, but assuming Redhat/Novell decides to make it trivial to add a machine in time by creating a Win32 Program to add things to AD, and Win2003R2 added the SFU Schema Extensions by default, and all of a sudden, adding Linux services can help, a lot.
One of the things I loved with OS X Server was that their Kerberos/LDAP integrated solution worked great, and adding non-Apple Unix systems was pretty easy... authenticate against LDAP, accept Kerberos, and just Add Principal (host, HTTP, whatever) and export a Keytab. It helped that Apple used MIT Kerberos which is the best documented solution.
The thing is, if the computer market is growing at say, 8% a year, Microsoft needs to be grabbing a larger share of computer wallet to hit double-digit growth. If Linux/Apple grab extra growth, say 4% of the market each, Microsoft will see either a decline in revenues or need to increase fees, which will force people to look elsewhere.
Win2K/Win2K3 made things much tougher for small businesses compared to NT4, Active Directory is MUCH harder to setup and use than a simple NT 3.51/NT4 Single Domain, but the well priced SBS solution provided a reason to keep them in the market. However, if someone with an Enterprise Play like Redhat/Novell made an effort to make it EASY to install a Redhat Server with LDAP/Kerberos authentication for both the server AND the webserver and whatever else, you start seeing it easy to migrate Web Apps to the Unix land.
Microsoft's marketshare doesn't have to plummet for them to hurt. If they consistently lose 1.5% a year to Apple/Linux, that makes it really hard to grow Revenues and requires them to cut costs to keep up profit growth. That alone limits their ability to just walk into markets and destroy them. When Microsoft "cut off the oxygen" for Netscape with a free browser to stop the Netscape Server package from becoming a threat, they could easily eat the costs of the browser because their newly established desktop/Office Suite monopolies were furnishing massive profits.
If Microsoft managers start obsessing over hitting the numbers, and budget constraints become an important part of the Microsoft bonus structure, then you don't see Internet Explorer projects... You don't see $10-$20 million dollar blackholes on the budget to maintain monopolies.
The loss of Bill Gates also hurts, not because he is an irreplaceable manager, but because he alone had the clout to do strange things. When Apple fired "professional management" and brought Steve Jobs "back," he had the clout to do whatever he wanted. He pushed projects out the door, canceled others, etc., and could be a one man show with control of the business. Founders have MUCH MORE political capital than professional CEOs.
If Gates said, "we must destroy Netscape, regardless of costs" (or Java, or any other technology that he found a threat), he could turn the company on a dime as Founder/major Shareholder.
If Ballmer says, "to hell with profitability, we must destroy Sony PS3/Nintendo Wii, I don't care what we lose in the process," I don't think that he can do it. The heads of the gaming and lifestyle division will go ballistic that they won't make their numbers and get a bonus, and will find people on the Board to back them and get hep. If Gates said that it was a priority, it was a priority, and he could probably change the entire management incentive structure to make it happen. He could create budgets out of thin air for what he called a priority.
Any loss in marketshare for MS is a disaster financially because it destroys profit growth, and the current management lacks the complete control of the company necessary to move the way it moved under Gates.
Or isn't a parent... yet... And that all depends on your definition of 'parent'
That was kind of the point of my post. Someone said that all the do-gooders were parents, I made the point that that is a meaningless statement.
My flippant comment about "parent or biological dead-end" wasn't meant as judgement, merely meant that if you divide the world into parents and non-parents, it's rather silly.
The parents of toddlers have NOTHING in common with the parents of teenagers and have NOTHING in common with the parents of adult children. Some people fall into multiple categories, but the world isn't parents vs. the non-parents for this stuff.
Parents of small children (which is what this is discussing) have it REALLY rough by regulations forced on them by people that aren't parents of small children.
Let's see, the XP Start Bar often requires me to go moving my mouse everywhere, including moving Programs down a directory in the tree. With my Mac, everything is in Applications (which I dragged to my Doc so I can right-click and grab it) and my regularly used applications sit on my Dock. They are in the same place each time I use them, so launching them doesn't make them go hiding. My XP task bar moves things around as more applications load, forcing me to go hunt for the Window. My OS X Apps are where they launched, I can drag them elsewhere if I want (with visual sliding around cues that make it easy without thinking). If I run an App and think I'll use it later, I choose Right-click and keep in Dock, if I stop using it, I drag it off.
With OS X, when I plug in a USB device, it just starts working. A USB Key just adds itself to Finder, in a nice bank of Volumes to work with. With Windows, it grabs a drive letter, but requires a drop-down everywhere to use, and if I have multiple keys, it can be tricky to figure out what is going on.
If I plug in a new mouse on my Mac, into the keyboard's built in USB Hub, the optical light powers up and the Mac keeps working, now with Mouse. My XP machines always want to pop up bubbles and fill me in on their progress with mounting the device, finding drivers, etc. I'm really not interested in how much work it is for XP to use the USB device, I want to use it. OS X turns in on, XP wants to have a conversation.
I plugged in my Camera, and it launched some non-iPhoto app to look at the pictures. I launched iPhoto, which asked me if I wanted to make it launch when I plug my Camera in, and I click yes. Now I plug my camera in, it verifies my settings (auto copy, delete off the camera) and it gets my pictures and helps me organize events, albums etc. I have a Shutterfly and Facebook plugin, so I can choose to auto-export my pictures to those services. If I want to create a photo album for say, my son's great grandmother, I create a book, drag the pictures into it, click Buy, and it shows up at her house.
That part isn't eye candy, but it's part of the general "Apple Approach" of making the easy stuff easy. I assume that there are similar programs to iLife in the Windows world, but I haven't seen them. I have a few good friends in IT that are Windows guys. Their wives keep asking them for software to make video clips of their kids to put online. After I bought iMovie '08, I grabbed my tapes, imported my video, and had 4 or 5 little movies up online to show people, which was great. I cut 60 minutes of footage down to a 60s-90s clip easily and fast, added some transitions, and exported. If I was on an Intel Mac and not a PowerMac G5, it would have even exported fast, instead it took a while, but it looked good.
The only eye candy I can think of is the zooming to Doc and fast user switching, plus the Doc -> "Poof" when I drag something off and the doc items moving out of the way when I drag something there. That "eye candy" all gives me visual cues, and I like it. I feel like XP is focused on what it is doing (new USB device detected, USB device named "X" looking for drivers, driver found, loading, etc), not what I am doing. I really don't care HOW OS X, Linux, or Windows load my USB device, just that it shows up and I can use it. OS does that for me.
Sliding out drawers and sheets are GREAT UI devices, and Sheets kick ass compared to modal dialogs that float around. The desktop design metaphors are wonderful. I feel like I get almost nothing done when using my Windows machine compared to my Mac, and I'm a techie through and through. But with my Mac I have a series of easy to use tools that play nicely, in part because of the BSD internals. SSHKeyChain.dmg manages my SSH keys, and when I SFTP via BBEdit or SSH via Terminal, they pick them up for me and I don't need to use passwords. That's just cool. I never felt like my Windows apps cooperated that way.
YMMV, but I'm a Unix guy at heart. OS X gives me a great desktop environment that plays natively with Unix-land, without wanting to "chat." It's a great tool. I feel like Windows XP wants to be my equal partner in life.:)
Yes, any biological organism that reproduces is a parent, your argument is silly because it ignores the realities of parenting.
Parenting a toddler is physically exhausting, but generally involved very few decision if the system wasn't involved.
To suggest that the current President and First lady, or the former President and first lady, with 2 adult children or one high school aged child (when they entered office) are indicative of parents of small children (which is what the article was discussing) is absurd. The same is true of most of Congress, state legislatures, and governor's mansions.
People with power, whether they are parents or not, and most are, are generally 40-50, with their youngest child, often a single child or the younger of two, in their late teens to mid-twenties are NOT indicative of people with small children up to age 5, meaning people from the ages of 18 to 35.
The fact is, the baby boomers have pulled every ladder up behind them as they have gotten older. They have made parenting impossible... modern car seats are total disasters because they have to deal with the dangerous cars we've created... Air bags are nice tools for adults, but a disaster for small children. When I was a child I rode in the front seat next to my mother, because car seats could go in the front seat. If I dropped something, my mom could pick it up. My son can't ride in the front seat, so if he drops something, he screams because my wife can't grab something off the floor and hand it to him because he's in the back seat.
However, the baby boomers, when they had small children, had cars built around their needs. As they got older, not only did the market accommodate their new needs (no small children, teenage drivers), but the government changed regulations that made cars safer for older "parents" at the expense of younger parents. People decry the explosion of SUVs, but when you can't fit more than two car seats in the back, because they are no longer safe in the middle seat, and cars with side impact air bags require children up to age five to be in booster seats, what does a young family do? Once you have two kids, if you drive a sedan, you can't transport a friend's child (common things when I was a kid), so you need a mini-van or an SUV to have sufficient seating. If you have a third kid, you can't transport them without a mini-van. My wife carpools to work with a friend, and they pop the two kids into car seats in the back seats. Now both expecting child two, they either have to stop carpooling, or get mini-vans, because cars can't support three children, let alone four.
If you think that the powers that be with one or two children in private school HAVE ANY UNDERSTANDING what a typical family with 2-4 young children go through is absurd, but to say that they are the same because they are parents suggests that President Bush and I have a lot in common because we are both white males, it's silly.
Everyone is a parent or a biological dead-end, roping them all together as those a family with 3 small children HAS ANYTHING IN COMMON with a family with two teenage children (and 15 more years of raises and wealth accumulation behind them) is absurd. The system is run by people with teenage children terrified that anything will happen to them because they only have one or two kids and can't have more. The system is run on top of people with small children that hope nothing goes wrong but lack the resources to do anything about it.
To illustrate the point, consider the following question: If you could guarantee your children would survive to 30, but they would drop 20 IQ points and be financially dependent on your forever, if you are in your 40s and have two teenage children, you'd agree and say that it's because you'd love your children. If you ask a 25 year old couple struggling with the bills with two children and deciding on a third if they'd make that change to avoid a 5% chance of losing a child by 18, you might get a different answer. I love my son to
Accidents happen. With 300 million people in America, a 1 in 1 million chance hits 300 people a year. Each year a few children tragically drown in pools, so we've scared parents about pools, and criminalized pools (in terms of liability) without fences and fences around fences. Every child's death is a tragedy, but locking up parents that make decisions that we don't like has done far more damage than good.
Parents told that a small spanking is child abuse. Children with working single mothers going home to an empty house is an unfortunately economic reality, but if some accident happens, we arrest the parent for child endangerment.
Bad things can happen, but the modern small family size combined with an overzealous judiciary and Departments of Child Services has resulted where we want to criminalize anything going wrong.
Instead of blaming parents, look at a legal culture that expects nothing bad to happen to a child and determines a person's entire worth on the success of their children. When families with children had 4-5 children, you expected most to come out alright but occasionally something bad happens. In families of 1-2 children, anything bad is a catastrophe.
Far more harm is being done to children by overprotection than the risks of life. But its hard to blame parents when if they get hit with the 1 in a million accident (that affects dozens of children a year), they can go to jail and have their other children taken away from them.
Let's see, woman that don't breastfeed are told that they endanger their children. Women that do may be criminally charged if they don't follow the social standard in the US... A poor woman was jailed because she couldn't see a Doctor and didn't realize that the child was malnourished from breast-feeding (mathematically rare, but real and if you criminalize 2% of all women)... The breast-feeding ones make the headlines, but the push towards criminalizing parents if kids do anything wrong, including pranks and petty vandalism add up. It's hard to be a parent, because your child is a natural explorer and risk taker, and you normally just have to make sure no unreasonable danger is present. However, if a child falls and hurts himself, you can be sure that child services will show up and decide that anything you failed to do to "child-proof" your home (as if children aren't a natural part of the home) is criminal neglect, it's hard to put the fault entirely on parents.
Being a parent in today's age is really tough, because in the back of your mind IS busybodies that will decide that you are a negligent parent for letting your child see something that is a natural part of life. Parents have been condemned/charged if the child sees them engage in sexual acts, while co-sleeping is a natural if unpopular approach to parenting. These choices are all reasonable, whether I would make them for my child or not, but the criminalization of anything outside the norm for parenting takes some of the fun out of it.
It's not the parents... it's the system of do-gooders that make life hell on parents.
It may not seem it to Linux users, but the eye candy that Apple added generally gives you visual clues to what is going on. When I minimize a window it graphically collapses to the Dock, that's useful, because without thinking about it, I watched it drop down and keep track of it. When I switch between users, the graphical rotation visually lets me know that I've done something substantial. It breaks the visual space the way I've visually broken up the process.
It subconsciously gives me information and it useful.
The eye candy on my XP desktop at work is not useful, is mostly annoying, and doesn't help me understand my environment. That's a HUGE difference.
More and more of those proprietary applications are become Browser based, because it's less of an IT hassle. The VBA-heavy Excel spreadsheets that people use are real (and Open Office is NOT a substitute, Mac Office rarely is a substitute, Windows Excel just kicks ass), but are normally only a small portion of the office.
New companies will roll out web apps, but companies with legacy won't. In addition, you have proprietary licensed apps that aren't easy to change and are industry specific. Many of them are probably Win16 apps, because they run on Windows-32, there was no need to upgrade them and lose the Windows 3.1 users. When that stopped being an issue 10 years ago, the programmers had moved on and there wasn't necessarily a clean way to upgrade your VB2/3 applications.
Each year, the issue becomes less significant. Netscape thought that they had a solution 13 years ago, but didn't understand just HOW SLOW the business world moves. The fact is, if I have a single Windows only application to run, it makes it worthwhile to keep Windows around instead of moving to Linux.
My Windows -> Mac Migration was years ago, and I still have a Windows machine (and Parallels on some Macs) for running applications that we are stuck with. With the current gig I have, I need to RDC into my work computer to see all the file shares and run whatever I need to run there, and that is at an Internet company.
I think it depends. My parents tend to be off doing their own things all the time. Sometimes, when coming to my place (a 30-45 minute drive), they arrive in separate cars, despite both working in the town that they live in. To them, a small "commuting car" might not be reasonable.
For my family, my wife drives the family car with the car seats (she carpools with a friend, so both kids have car seats). Her drive is 27 miles to work, add in errands, etc., on the way home, and an electric car for her would need to support 100-150 miles between charges. I drive a small car for commuting. In the past, that was 10-15 miles, so a car that goes 50 miles between charges would be perfect (to have room for a few errands). Unfortunately, right now, I am commuting 250 miles round trip twice/week for a job almost two hours away, so now isn't that time to switch.
However, if we go somewhere as a family, we take the family car. It wouldn't be unreasonable for most 2-car suburban families to have 1 electric car and 1 gas-powered family car. True people complain about seeing SUVs driving around town with a single passenger going to/from the mall or grocery store, but the reality is that people won't get a dedicated car for 5 mile trips.
A family car needs to be able to haul "stuff" for short trips, and be able to go 300-1000 miles without trouble, and gas does that just fine. But for the average family, I bet you could get them to drive a "commuting car" to/from work if it was cheap and electric. If 1/3rd the cars switched over 10 years, that would be a substantial environmental improvement. Too many people are looking for Perfect solutions. Hyrbids for family cars and electric commuting cars might help.
The problem is the charging. Some people keep their cars in garages and could plug them in. The Condos down the street from me have a large parking lot with all the cars in it... you'd have to run electricity to all the parking spots, plus deal with the HOA having to foot the bill for everyone's driving, so it's a non-starter there. In addition, most people I know around me have converted their garages into extra bedrooms or rec rooms, so again, it's an electrician trip out for charging stations.
I'm not saying that it's not doable, just that a plug-in car is a solution for 1 car/multi-car family that keeps it in the garage or is willing to retrofit their electrical by the driveway. That said, a 20% switchover that uses spare capacity at night might reduce transportation pollution by 10%-15%, which is non-trivial and might be cost effective.
Salaries ARE high, just not rising against late 90
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The Science Education Myth
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Okay, engineering graduates make about double liberal arts graduates. That has been consistent for several decades, which means that the supply/demand curves for those degrees reflect that. There is a premium paid for engineering degrees, because the skills required to complete one remain in short supply. If there was an oversupply of engineers, salaries would be falling.
Are salaries rising in computer programming? It depends on your time frame, which people miss. The late 90s was an artificial boom for programmers, caused by money moving into the field from VC's, etc., chasing performance. While that is the "free market at work," the free market returns to equilibirum in the LONG RUN, not the SHORT RUN. Since most of those VCs lost investors money, clearly it wasn't a good allocation of resources. However, wages are considered downwardly inelastic... During the boom people were getting big raises, especially if they jumped companies. 20%-25% raises to jump ship in 18-30 months wasn't unheard of, it was common. So wages move up with the market, but when the market tanks, you can't just cut people's salaries 20%, so you end up doing lay-off replacements, and the laid off workers hold out for salaries.
It's also the reason that housing prices don't rapidly fall, people sit on the market and hold out for a price as long as they can, and over time inflation eats at that percentage. Same thing with salaries, you freeze them for a few years and let cost of living go up to lower them. This actually works for most people, because despite the venting on slashdot, large chunks of people's expenses are actually fixed in nominal terms... Your car payment is constant based on when you got the loan, as is your mortgage, and if you are in a state like Florida or California with locked in home stead assessment values, you annual property taxes stay flat or might even go down. So while inflation eats at discretionary spending, your fixed costs stay fixed.
Over time, wages rise at approximately inflation + 1%. Because of productivity boosting in the 90s and 2000s, maybe we'll see wages rise at inflation + 1.5% or inflation + 2%. But in anyone year, that might be the 90s boom, inflation + 6%-7%, or the 2000s "recovery" of inflation -1%, assuming that real inflation is actually a bit higher than the new government metrics.
The fact is, if we watch salaries from 1980 - 2010, for example, I bet we see an annual trend towards inflation + 1%, but with most of it in the late 80s and late 90s, with downward real/flat nominal periods in the rest of the time.
It's like people expecting rediculous returns in the stock market each year. The 8% after inflation long term returns is no a function of regular growth, it's a period of 0 +/- 3% real growth, with a few years of 20%-25% growth in there, and a couple of -10% to -15% corrections throughout.
After 8 years of massive salary growth in IT, it is perfectly normal from a human nature point of view to expect that to continue and then blame the boogeyman (globalization, outsourcing, Bush Administration), but it's also the market correcting itself.
Here is the thing, PC Gaming targets people that own their own gaming computer that they can upgrade as needed and install games on. That means that you are targeting high schoolers, college students, and recent grads, people that own a computer and have a room, not an apartment/house (they either live with their parents or a roommate). In that case, upgrading the bedroom computer where they spend a lot of free time is reasonable, which makes PC Gaming popular with the computer crowd. Walk into the equivalent place with someone more on the "jock" end of the spectrum, and a console is popular because it's not a hobby, it's a way to drink beer with friends and play a game.
Once you get into a slightly older crowd, (25-30), whether married w/o kids, married w/ kids, or sharing a place with a single roommate or significant other, the living room begins to replace the bedroom as the focus. When I was a college student, my computer got upgraded constantly. My first apartment with a roommate got whatever furniture we had lying around (mostly from my studio from earlier), but there was no upgrading it, it was whatever I had bought on sale or from Ikea.
After getting married and a new place, the bedroom changed focus, and the "playing games" moved to the Living Room, where we got a big screen and a surround sound system. Now that we have a house, a child, and one on the way, the computer sits in the office to do work, not play games. The kids gets new furniture, and the parents get what is lying around.
There are TWO factors involved: disposable income (while students are jokingly poor, ALL their income is disposable; recent grads with small ratty apartments don't make much, but all their income is disposable, young families tend to have the least for the early years, then more over time), and location of entertainment.
As the median gaming age gets older, the percentage that are high school/college kids drops and the percentage that are older with more income rises. This not only means the ability to buy games, but also the likelihood of having a Living Room with a real television and couches, and not old hand me downs. They also begin to associate the computer with work (during the day) and not recreation at home. That makes console gaming more appealing. Everyone HAS a computer, but Video card upgrades for gaming rigs are roughly as costly as the cheapest consoles (Wii/PS2) -- no longer needing to upgrade sound cards as well helps. However, once you move your hanging out out of the bedroom and into the Living room, the Console just makes more sense than the computer. Upgrading your Entertainment Center (TV/Stereo/Speakers) for gaming translates into movies and television as well.
Nintendo realized that A) parents will STILL spend whatever for their kids, B) the gamer crowd is so bored with "same old shit" that they will spend $200-$300 to be entertained, C) Westerners are rich enough that a console can be sold as an impulse buy if you price it right, and D) people aren't interested in a "media center," they want cheap entertainment.
PC Gaming won't die because some parents won't let kids have a TV in their room but will let them have a computer to "do school work." PC Gaming won't die because the family normally has one "good television" that gets competition between playing games and watching TV. PC Gaming won't die because parents buy their kid a computer going off to college, not a video game system. PC Gaming won't die because the "environment" is different... Higher resolution, closer to screen, in a chair (not on a couch) lends itself to focused game play. Console gaming is played on a couch, either in a relaxing position or in a competitive frame with a buddy. The environment is different, lending to different takes on the same game.
Stop the anti-people ideology and you'll succeed
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Blog Action Day
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· Score: 3, Insightful
All the lip service the environment has going for it and nobody is still willing to do anything about it. Many recycling programs fail because people do not want to bother with separating their trash. Free or subsidized insulation programs for the inner city poor fail fast because nobody cares to donate. Nobody fights city hall to remove laws restricting alternative power. boo hoo that you dont want to look at solar panels on my roof. Being a selfish ass does not help the environment.
I am NOT an environmentalist. I will NOT sacrifice my lifestyle for "the greater good." I am focused on my family first, idealism is a WAY distant second. However, some wise environmentalists are starting to make the programs reasonable. Our power company, no doubt as part of the deal with the government, ran a program for insulation. They inspected the insulation for free, gave a credit for insulation, and brought a list of contractors for us to choose from AND set up the install. I just had to sit at home and have a check ready when they showed up, sealed my ducts, and blew in insulation. Because of the credit, in four months I've recovered half the cost of the insulation, making it a no brainer, and the environment wins.
My roof is coming up due for replacement. The technology of panels on the roof was expensive, didn't save money in the time frame that most people own their houses, and was extremely ugly. However, the new technology of "panel roofs," where you have tile-like installations on the roof was starting to be feasible, as the labor to install on the roof was about the same, but the electrical hookups were costly. The new systems come in "sheets" so they are easier to install than roof tiles, integrate with the roof, and should, in time, cost about the same to install as a normal new roof. As the costs (after tax breaks) comes down, more people will use them. Demanding ugly roofs on people's homes with a "boo hoo" will not get you buy in, but come up with a series of tax incentives and let the free market develop solutions that people want and you can actually get progress.
If you really want recycling efforts, then you need to make it easy for people, convenient, and ideally provide some incentive to them doing so. Just like some states offer deposits with refunds for recycling cans/bottles, why not have a scale in the curb-side pickup of recycled materials, and give people a credit on their garbage bill.
People aren't sheep, people are autonomous individuals. Their willingness to spend their free time on your pet projects instead of their families is pretty limited. I don't see you offering free babysitting services or transportation for their kids to after school events to free up time for people to do what you want. I don't hear that you're donating money, you just want other people to do so.
No wonder you guys never get a chance to leave the US and see what the rest of the world is about.
Hi Mr. Troll, meet Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, meet Mr. Troll.
Flying across the Atlantic is expensive and time consuming. Less expensive and time consuming that it was by boat before the airplane, but still expensive and time consuming.
Most Americans are unlikely to make it to Europe more than once or twice, at most, because it's expensive. A 10k-15k trip is a LOT of money for most people, and if they do the trip, it's likely a lifetime of wanting to go. Of those that do go, they likely get to see a half dozen cities in Europe, with limited exposure.
Most Europeans don't make it here either. They may make a trip to New York City, or a vacation in Miami, FL, but they won't see America. Europeans will never travel to Iowa, Mississippi, Alabama, etc. There is a LOT to the United States, many different subcultures, not so disimilar to the EU's collection of countries, other than the Union here is MUCH more established, has a shared language, and actually ratified it's Constitution.
Complaining that Americans don't routinely travel to different European Cities is about as fair as complaining the Europeans fail to make trips to Albany, NY or other cities that they have no interest in.
Yes, by International Treaty and somewhat compliance with US law, any creation is automatically copyrighted. That doesn't mean that a court will rule that everything is a derivative. There are a lot of claims via the GPL FAQ and other assertions that quite frankly have NEVER been established by court precedent. Most of copyright law is derived from Common Law, Precedents, and to a much lesser extent, statutes.
The FSF requires assignment of copyright because as the sole holder of the copyrights, they have standing to enforce it.
We actually have NO clue what a court would rule with a use of a GPL'd library that is a small component of a larger application, where the GPL'd library is owned by multiple authors. A court COULD rule that the GPL is in effect, and either cease distributing or comply, or it could rule that nobody has standing to sue, so while the code is used without license, nobody can enforce it.
A trademark is "lost" from lack of enforcement, a copyright is not. However, maintaining copyright, and have standing to sue, are very difference.
Statutory penalties ONLY apply to copyrights registered with the government, which given the release early, release often mantra of open source projects, is relatively impossible. If you don't register each version, and they use a non-registered version, it's very possible that statutory penalties will not apply.
What makes something a derivative work, in terms of compiled software code, therefore requiring the the derivative work be required to be licensed under the GPL or even belong to the original copyright owner.
It seems unlikely that a Court would see program Foo available under the GPL, and rule that the GPL is somehow unfair and shouldn't be enforceable. But what would a court rule? What about derivative works.
For example, if I take Application Foo, modify it to be a library that is called by my Application Bar, a court might logically conclude that it is a derivative work if Bar is pretty trivial... Maybe a court would care about static linking vs. dynamic linking vs. sockets, but I have no idea what they would think of the matter.
In a more complicated sense, if Application Foo is 95% of the Foo-Bar combination, Foo-Bar is clearly derived from Foo. However, what if Foo is only 5% of the Application, is Foo-Bar still a derivative work?
What if a court rules that Bar is NOT a derivative work, not bound by the GPL? Well, they still need a distribution license for Foo, right? Well, maybe... if Foo has a single owner, perhaps a Court decides to award damages halt the shipment unless a licensing agreement is reached. A court might decide that given the general free licensing of Foo, there are no damages, and therefore they will only order damages with a reasonable licensing agreement going forward.
What if there are multiple owners of Foo, all licensed under the GPL, and none of them comprise a substantial amount of the combined Foo-Bar code? What if the authors of Bar contacted the listed authors about distribution, and most of the emails came back with no response? Might a court rule that they have abandoned the software? It shouldn't matter, but who knows. Most abandon-ware issues involve software that conceivably could be re-released commercially. What happens when the authors all disappear, or most of them? If you owners of the copyright are unreachable, and the ones taking action are only owners of trivial amounts of the code, might the courts just decide that they have no standing and go home?
The BIG concern with the GPL falling is that the courts decide that by releasing the source code, binaries, and everything freely with no "use" license to the general public, that you have effectively placed your software in the public domain. That seems like a bigger risk for the "thousands of authors" projects, because if a program has a single author that makes it available under the GPL, and is contactable, it might be seen as reasonable if there is the ability to license it under other terms.
There is also the issue of patches. Does the submitted of a patch ACTUALLY have copyright on it? That is assumed as given on Slashdot, but I'm not 100% convinced. The patch is CLEARLY a derivative work, and isn't necessary a creative expression protected under copyright. If it is a bug fix, it seems that a court might reasonably conclude that this is simply a factual correction, and not be protected.
It seems unlikely that a court will rules that you can take GPL'd code, wrap your extensions on it, and do what you want. However, if you are UNABLE to comply (closed source library that you call), I have NO IDEA what a court would decide. They might decide that it is infringement, find for the plaintiff for $1 and close the case, who knows.
The court challenges won't be head on, they'll be over minor areas of disagreement.
No guarantees, but looking at Apple's past, it is unlikely that PPC support drops in 10.6. I would expect them to drop G4 support, but I would expect one more rev for the G5 users. It is possible that they would support dual core G5s or quad G5s for a 10.7, but at a certain point, you want to drop the PPC line.
I have a bunch of PPC Macs doing various things, and would like to see support maintained, but realistically, this is probably the last rev supporting the G4... It is also possible that the G5 sticks around for a while, as there are certain environments that MAY be stuck on them for a while if they have PPC only software that won't run under Rosetta... Dropping the G4 lets them abandon PPC-32 and therefore only support PPC-64, x86, x86-64.
The only problem that they have with "late model" G4s is that the Powerbook was G4 until the switch. My Tibook 1Ghz from 4.5 years ago (don't use it, have a MBP from almost two years ago now, wow, and no itch to upgrade) wasn't that much slower than the late-model G4 Powerbooks, I think that they went up to 1.42 Ghz or something, but ditching them before the 5 year Mark isn't really Apple's style.
I expect my Macbook Pro to have a "short" lifespan, because it was 32-bit when it NEVER made sense for Apple to go to 32-bit Intel. I didn't understand why they didn't push the transition off a few months to go straight 64-bit Intel. On the other hand, my prediction is:
10.6 G5, x86, x86-64 10.7 x86, x86-64 10.8 x86-64 only
However, with the slower OS X release cycles, it's possible that they dump the PPC and x86-32 at once, and make 10.7 x86-64 only. I assume that the 32-bit legacy libraries will stick forever, but who knows. I am concerned because I have some internal Cocoa Apps using a library more or less abandoned and being nervous about losing support. If the library was made Universal I could recompile universal, but that looks unlikely, so Rosetta it is. The last OS/system that supports Rosetta may be something I have to stockpile, or find a good contractor to modernize the code, ditch the library, and use the internal Cocoa libraries that made it irrelevant when 10.3 shipped.:)
Who knows, if I could somehow actually get ahold of a x800 XT Card for my G5, keep getting back-ordered, I'd probably keep it as my home office computer for a few more years. With two 20" Apple monitors, it's fine for working from home, no heavy crunching, and it's a pleasant environment. If the turbo.264 and iMovie 08 incompatibilities get worked out, that's another reason to push off upgrading the home machine.
Sun bought StarOffice, originally with the plans of selling a cheap office suite. Sun never expected to "take-over" the market, unless they were insane, but rather to hurt Microsoft. Sun and Microsoft fought in the Server room, and in engineering workstations. Microsoft has nearly unlimited resources from their Desktop and Office monopolies.
If ALL Sun accomplished with StarOffice was getting a few Microsoft Site licenses to use it as leverage to pay Microsoft less money, Sun "won." If you see the world as a two player game (which Sun did), then hurting your opponent helps you. Same reason militaries bomb weapons manufacturing plants, to stop the resupply of arms. Microsoft can support.Net and other technology projects that hurt Sun because they make so much money on their two main products, that the losses elsewhere are rounding errors.
Sun wanted to fight for the control of the set-top box market with Java, cell phones with Java, etc. Anything that Sun does to deny Microsoft resources makes it harder for Microsoft to compete elsewhere. Microsoft failed to keep growing profits at the same rate, their stock price flat-lined, and their expansion into other markets was slowed.
It's the same reason that Linux advocates only compare themselves to Microsoft, they see it as a two-player game.
Assuming that you don't observe the Laws of Family purity, since you hold them in complete contempt, you simply don't understand the practical implementation of these laws.
Since only a tiny handful of people implement these laws today, you will forgive me for a lack of comprehensive knowledge on the subject. I was talking about ancient (500-100 BCE) use of these laws.
Regarding a handful, there are probably around 1m Orthodox Jews in the US, another 2m in Israel, and another few million "Traditional" Jews in Israel. I have no idea what percentage observe family purity, but it's NOT an obscure subject, and among the religiously practicing, seen as the basis of strong Jewish marriages.
It's a general "bodily fluids" make you impure idea. After ejaculation, a man is impure as well. To avoid nocturnal emissions screwing up the Yom Kippur service (requiring a last minute substitute), the High Priest had to stay up all night.
This doesn't even make any sense, mainly because you're misinterpreting. Since semen is stored in the body BEFORE ejaculation, logically ejaculation should make the body MORE pure if it's the fluid itself that's the problem. A similar idea is present in Hinduism, specifically Tantra, wherin a man is not supposed to ejaculate to PRESERVE the semem because it supposedly contains "vital energy".
You're just wrong. There is no "preservation" of bodily fluids. A man who ejaculates is impure until he cleans himself and waits until the following sundown. A woman who receives that ejaculation is similarly impure until such cleaning. Trying to trace it to a Hindu Pagan ideal fits your agenda, but ignores a clear reading of the text. Bodily fluids = impurity, straight out of the Torah. Contact with the dead also renders impurity. Lots of the Torah refers to purity and impurity, and how much it really applied even in Temple Days is up for debate, as it is doubtful that all but the wealthiest Judeans ever traveled to the Temple.
There is nothing in the bible that suggests that sex is wrong, sinful, or immoral.
Genesis clearly states that the pain of childbirth is a direct punishment for Eve's transgressions. Genesis strongly implies that no sex or reproduction took place before the Fall and that sex and reproduction are the result of the Fall, and hence, inherently evil.
Eve's transgression had nothing to do with sex. Indeed, the Bible is explicit in that they covered their bodies as a result of their knowledge, and that prior to this, there was no need to.
A literal read of Genesis is that all these events took place on Day 6 (quite a busy day), and given that the Hebrew word of Yom refers to day, but in Biblical Hebrew also refers to units of time, a literalist read is probably unnecessary. The pain of childbirth and needing to work simply demonstrates that mankind is responsible for their actions, and that it wasn't the Creator's ill will that gave them a rough lot in life, and they were offered perfection and chose reality. It also sets the stage for Jewish punishments later on, including the plague of Darkness killing many Israelites, the Golden Calf, costing non-Levites their role in the Temple, and the first exile. If you believe that the Bible was made up by Ezra, then this story serves to establish Priestly dominance, by placing responsibility on the rest of the people.
Since there were never Jews in Egypt and Exodus is fictional, this argument doesn't hold much weight.
That seems unlikely. There is archaeological evidence that the Egyptians THOUGHT that they wiped out the Israelites, and the Biblical Jewish practice is HEAVILY based upon Egyptian practices. Most major Jewish practices are modified from the Egyptian ones, making the dedication to the God of Israel in
While the old stereotypes are hard to kill off, country club Republicans vs. Union member Democrats, the shifting economy of the past twenty years and the changing workforce has DRAMATICALLY changed the political orientation. While a few populist Democrats are out there (Edwards comes to mind), if you look at the big leaders, they are the "New Democrats" and they have gotten tremendous support from Wall Street and the people of means. The Republican Party has increasingly become the middle class party, while the Democrats have become the dominant party of the rich and poor, and some of it is self interest.
While the "old money" rich remain the country club Republicans, concerned about preserving their wealth, you see the spoiled children and the reckless hedonism that is only availble to the rich doesn't really jive with the Christian values wing of the GOP. So what explains the divide?
Democrats tend to be better for the stock market. While the media likes to use the Dow (with an easy to understand number) as a barometer of the economy, it isn't. The Dow is 30 stocks, and the broader and more useful S&P 500 is 500 stocks, there are something like 10000 publicly traded securities in the US and many times that in terms of private businesses. The Democrats tend to be pro-safety net, and general pro protections for the "little guy." The net effect of these regulations is to raise barriers to entry of business, even if that isn't intended. Since the S&P 500 is really the performance of the top 500 companies (more or less), it indicated a concentration of wealth more than anything else.
The well to do care more about "the economy" (as in, the stock market) for their wealth increasing than care about their jobs and incomes (and therefore taxes), which pushes them into the Democratic Party camp. The regulations increase the returns to big businesses. For all the whining about Sarbox, the cost of compliance to S&P 500 companies is a rounding error, the cost to smaller companies is massive, which means that fewer small companies go public, which keeps the capital chasing fewer companies and increases the market.
The Republican Party is made up of the self employed and small business owners, who care about taxes and their earnings FAR more than they care about the stock market, and middle-class rural and exurban America. For them taxes are a real burden, and their livelihood, not their investment portfolio, determine their quality of life. The middle-class Republicans see that Democratic plans to "help the poor" tend to help people below them on the social ladder, which creates competition for them and their children, and feel that their taxes go to help others. They feel squeezed, they KNOW that the rich don't care about the tax burden, they figure that they don't pay it, and know that the burden falls on them. On social issues, they see that the left-wing embraces social changes that they don't like, and don't identify with.
The Democratic Party sees a shrinking middle class as a source of panic, despite the fact that long term surveys show that the middle-class is shrinking by the top part moving further up. The stock market, replacing pensions, has meant that anti-corporate rhetoric isn't helpful... The workers aren't slaves to the Kapitalists, the workers now own the means of production, albeit in a diversified way through mutual funds...:)
As people get older, their potential for future income increases drops... People in their 20s may jump jobs for a 20% raise, but less so in their 30s or 40s, but their 401(k) balances are slowly getting bigger. Once your "earnings on investments" exceed your "contributions" your wealth is determined less on what you do and more on what the market does, which is causing a shift in thoughts.
Bush slashed tax rates by 2%-3% and it was "one of the largest tax cuts ever," but real people who see that their wages normally increase by 1% - 2% a year over inflation suddenly saw a 3%-5% increase in o
It's a bad translation. The Hebrew words Tame & Tahor only relate to issues of ritual. IE. Someone who comes into contact with the dead is Tame (impure). That doesn't mean we don't revere our dead. Laws of purity are a spiritual issue, not relating to valuations of greater than or less than. Though some forms of impurity are more "difficult" or prohibit more activities. Earlier pre-diasporah forms of Judiasm dealt largely with it. Taharat Hamishpacha, is one of the few forms of this idea left. And it largely favors the woman. As it is often used by women to avoid abuse or to throw their weight around in the marriage.
I don't accept the argument of "some Jews are doing it wrong" when this used to be mainstream practice. Saying it is a "spiritual issue" that has no practical affect on women in laughable. I don't know how this is supposed to prevent abuse or help women "throw their weight around" except in the sense that they can insist on a separate dwelling. Modern menustral shacks are quite a bit nicer that the term "shack" implies for those few Jews who continue this practice. None of this obviates the fact that this is clearly a sexist doctrine.
Your arguments are self-satisfying and based upon what seems to be a lot of ignorance. You have had two people try to explain your misconceptions from bad translations, and you simply insist that they don't know what they are talking about. Your use of the terms "shacks" is intentionally inflammatory, and is chosen simply to do so. Assuming that you don't observe the Laws of Family purity, since you hold them in complete contempt, you simply don't understand the practical implementation of these laws.
Purity doesn't only apply to women either. It's a general "bodily fluids" make you impure idea... After ejaculation, a man is impure as well. To avoid nocturnal emissions screwing up the Yom Kippur service (requiring a last minute substitute), the High Priest had to stay up all night. Given that most women are not interested in sex during the menstrual period, and your contention that this is all about men "taking women" whenever they want, clearly telling the men that the women are off limits is hardly anti-woman.
Pagan societies had different rules. Women were often worth more than women depending on skills and background, in Jewish law women were always worth less in large part because they weren't allowed to acquire valuable skills and weren't allowed to market their sexuality. This was all pretty deliberately done to limit their power.
Market? Skills? In an agrarian society? Okay, I get it, Prostitution empowered women and Jewish law was to punish them and keep their power away. Except for one thing, Biblical law doesn't SPECIFICALLY prohibit prostitution. It gets more or less banned in a backwards manner by Rabbinic Law, because one wouldn't want their daughter to have to have that life, and one is obligated to give her a better life, but paying for sex is IN the Bible... The Biblical prohibitions that lead to a ban on Prostitution was an ogligation to provide for your daughter and wife.
You are taking 21st Century conditions, applying the Bible, and saying "evil sexist." The Bible doesn't CREATE marriage, it governs it. It doesn't CREATE slavery, it governs and restricts it. There is nothing in the Bible arguing FOR these conditions, but rather the rules that govern the conditions of it. That is my issue with your method of argumentation. Each major evolution of Jewish Law has been to incorporate changes around it to make things better. The conditions for women in the Bible are CERTAINLY better than they were in Egypt. The conditions in the Talmud were certainly better than they were under Roman occupation.
Indeed, not only is there a strong Rabbinic trend to NOT ban sexual behavior within marriage, one of the interesting issues in Rabbinic Law that is new is dealing with the fact that people not on
The only message that I can think is that the US is going to do B-52 runs into the Persian Gulf, to make the Iranians nervous and tempt one of there AA crews to get nervous, shoot at us, and provoke a fight. If the Iranians think that we are prepared to do bombing runs immediately, they MIGHT not care... but if they think that we might ACCIDENTALLY nuke them, that might affect things, no?
Does it change the security procedures in Iran if you think that provoke the US -> a few conventional weapons in sensitive areas changes to, we might nuke the hell out of you and blame it on paperwork snafus?
I dunno, but I can't imagine news media running this story without SOME clearance... They generally check before running something that might endanger national security. It's one thing to expose an arguably illegal CIA prison operation, and I think that the NY Times gave a heads up so that national security wouldn't be damaged (get sensitive stuff out before the story)... Our media LOVES Yellow Journalism and sensationalism, but blatantly undermining national security with this sort of stuff, not likely.
Right, the other post is correct, the last unified Israelite government was King Solomon... the unified Monarchy didn't last long. The Judean Kingdom held out for a bid longer, but it fell relatively quickly.
However, while Judea was a vassal state, it was the Jews living there. A vassal state has a lot of autonomy. As long as the taxes flowed up to the Empire controlling them, the Jews were in control of day-to-day affairs. When Rome abolished Judea's status of a client Kingdom and put it under direct control of Rome was when the Jews started the multiple rebellions.
I appreciate your commends as well, I think that they are correct. Jesus the historical figure was absolutely a rebel rousing Jewish leader. Some of his teachings are allegorical, some challenge the Rabbinic/Preistly leaders of the day, etc., but not outright challenge Written Torah law. What his followers did with his words is another story, but the famous quotes of Jesus become MUCH more interesting if one understands Jewish law, particularly as it existed during the Second Temple era.
However, I wanted to take issue with some of your characterizations:
I'd like to also throw in that the Bible, especially the period where Jesus is teaching (beginning of the new testament) was a time when women were not allowed to speak in places of worship, not allowed to testify in court (their witness didn't count), and were generally viewed as a means for a man to 1) take his pleasure and 2) pass on his bloodline and raise sons.
It is important to understand that in Jewish law, things are divided into permitted and non-permitted, and obligatory and non-obligatory. Jewish law is quite binary, there are few shades of grey... as an exception to this, the Hassidic/Hareidi cultures of the past two hundred years introduce a WHOLE BUNCH of grey, because they prohibit things via Minhag (binding custom) or Mensorah (custom) to their followers, but because a Beit Din (House of Law) has no jurisdiction outside of their area, you have things prohibited to followers of one Rabbi that are permitted to another. This introduces a LOT of grey areas of things that aren't permitted but are to be avoided. However, the areas you are addressing come from basic Jewish law.
1. Women were not allowed to speak in places of worship
While American Protestants and Liberal Jews have turned their places of worship into general social halls, basically as social clubs that have religious services on Sunday/Saturday respecfully, that was not historically the case. In Catholic Europe, the Churches held daily services and were fundamentally focused on religious matters, including matters that many today would consider secular in nature, but both Jewish and Christian Law is ALL encompassing on matters (roughly two Thirds of the Jewish Talmud and Shulchan Aruch cover matters of business -- not things considered "religious" in the post enlightenment world). If you look in Israel, where Jews are the majority, the Beit Knessets/Schules (Hebrew/Yiddish for synagogue) are places of worship and learning, not community centers. One would go to a synagogue for Morning or Afternoon/Evening services, or to the study hall during the day for Torah learning, not to discuss community affairs.
As a result, the "speaking in place of worship" is referring to either A) leading services, or B) teaching words of Torah. Now, under Jewish Law these are both privileges and honors to the person that does them, but also obligations upon the people doing them. Because women are generally exempt from time-based obligations for a variety of reasons, they are NOT required to do these commandments. Because Jewish law does not separate obligation from privilege, women are not permitted these functions. In other words, if you permit women to lead services and teach Torah, then the obligation falls on them. It isn't really fair to expect women to fulfill ALL the female oriented obligations (which are just as time consuming and all consuming as the male ones) PLUS the male ones, so the prohibition holds.
Think about it, how quickly did it go from "women are allowed to hold jobs" to "women are expected to hold jobs" in modern America? Few married women with children would consider working outside the home a privilege, but now an obligation. The "extended adolescence" of singles in their 20s and several years married before having children has affected how women view themselves, but it has also put obligations on them that previous generations didn't have. Few homes divide housework or child rearing evenly,
In 1967 there were 1.1 million Arabs living in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria (Judea and Samaria comprise the "West Bank of the Jordan"). According to PLO/PA numbers today, there are 3.5 million Arabs living there. Even if the PLO/PA is exaggerating by 1 milion as some claim, they have still more than doubled in size (and officially more than tripled).
If one wants to claim that Israel is "killing off the Palestinians" or "engaging in genocide," they are doing a pretty awful job. The world Jewish population was decreased by 1/3 during the Nazi's comparatively short reign, so Israel watching them triple in a longer "occupation" shows that if the Jews ARE trying to engage in genocide as their critics claim, they are doing a pretty horrendous job of it.
A few thousand dying in a war with populations in the millions is normal casualty levels, NOT genocide.
Uh, they most certainly did not. Gaza was captured by Egypt in 1949, and Judea and Samaria were captured by Trans-Jordan (the state created East of the Jordan, on the East bank) giving the new Kingdom of Jordan both the West Bank of the Jordan River and the East Bank of the Jordan River. The name West Bank became popular at this time, because Trans-Jordan was created on the East Bank, and they then captured the West Bank of the Jordan. But any ancient maps of "Palestina" would refer to the sub-regions by their names of Judea and Samaria, West Bank was a term coined for the 19 years of Jordanian occupation.
Israel didn't capture ANY of the land from "Palestinians" in 1967. In FACT, the PLO Charter specifically renounced ANY claims to Gaza, and the West Bank of the Jordan, and focused entirely on Jewish controlled land.
The sooner everyone acknowledges facts, it becomes easier to want to come up with a humane solution for the Palestinians. But the more credence you give to bizarre and fact-free "rights" the HARDER you get to a solution.
In 1929, the Hebron Pogroms wipes out a Jewish community dating back to Biblical Times. Hebron is one of the holiest cities in the Jewish faith, where Abraham bought the first land in Canaan for the Jewish people, where the Cave of the Patriarchs is. Because the Hebrew Patriarchs were adopted by Islam (which claimed a connection through Ishmael as the Ishmaelites were an Arab tribe), they claim it as a holy city to Islam.
Jews have been living in "Palestine" since before it was renamed from Judea to Palestina.
When Jews were fleeing WWII to Palestine, local Arab riots and rebellions prevents Jews from escaping there. Those escaping weren't "stealing" land, they were moving to collective farms of Jews that BOUGHT the land from the previous owners. Sure they didn't buy ALL the land, but Jews weren't stealing them.
But as the 1929 Pogroms indicate, attacking the Jews in "Palestina" pre-dates Israel.
Israel didn't found it's state with Terrorism. It was granted permission to form by UN Decree, and permission to be settled by Mandate from the League of Nations.
Israel doesn't HAVE a Constitution. It has a Declaration of Independence, but you can't rewrite those. And Israel's is hardly religiously influenced considering that the closest religious reference allowed by the Zionists was "Rock of Israel" which was a bone to the Mizrachi Party. The only thing Israel has in it's Basic Laws is the Right of Return, but most Western societies allow descendants of citizens to become fast tracked to citizens. Since Israel considers itself the successor to the Second Jewish Commonwealth, it considers Jewish people to be the descendants of exiled Judeans, perfectly legitimate under Jewish law.
Is the United Kingdom not a Democracy because the Church of England, headed by the Monarch, is the official religion? Catholicism has special status in France, Italy, and several other European Democracies as the official state religion. Likewise, a Catholic "heir" to the British throne is skipped over in succession, as a Catholic cannot become Monarch because that would threaten the state religion.
Many of the United States has State religions in the early days of the US. The First Amendment was drafted to prevent a Federal State Religion and trample over the rights of each of the united States to have their own state religion. I wouldn't call revolutionary Massachusetts and Pennsylvania non-Democracies, would you.
The facts simply don't bear out your anti-Israel, anti-Semetic, and anti-Western diatribe.
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Are people considering Linux/Mac desktops/servers and adding them to the environment. Windows 2000 Active Directory made it hard to add the non-MS LDAP/Kerberos machines to the network, Windows 2003 has made it harder, though Win2003R3 has apparently helped. This certainly helps lock in, but assuming Redhat/Novell decides to make it trivial to add a machine in time by creating a Win32 Program to add things to AD, and Win2003R2 added the SFU Schema Extensions by default, and all of a sudden, adding Linux services can help, a lot.
One of the things I loved with OS X Server was that their Kerberos/LDAP integrated solution worked great, and adding non-Apple Unix systems was pretty easy... authenticate against LDAP, accept Kerberos, and just Add Principal (host, HTTP, whatever) and export a Keytab. It helped that Apple used MIT Kerberos which is the best documented solution.
The thing is, if the computer market is growing at say, 8% a year, Microsoft needs to be grabbing a larger share of computer wallet to hit double-digit growth. If Linux/Apple grab extra growth, say 4% of the market each, Microsoft will see either a decline in revenues or need to increase fees, which will force people to look elsewhere.
Win2K/Win2K3 made things much tougher for small businesses compared to NT4, Active Directory is MUCH harder to setup and use than a simple NT 3.51/NT4 Single Domain, but the well priced SBS solution provided a reason to keep them in the market. However, if someone with an Enterprise Play like Redhat/Novell made an effort to make it EASY to install a Redhat Server with LDAP/Kerberos authentication for both the server AND the webserver and whatever else, you start seeing it easy to migrate Web Apps to the Unix land.
Microsoft's marketshare doesn't have to plummet for them to hurt. If they consistently lose 1.5% a year to Apple/Linux, that makes it really hard to grow Revenues and requires them to cut costs to keep up profit growth. That alone limits their ability to just walk into markets and destroy them. When Microsoft "cut off the oxygen" for Netscape with a free browser to stop the Netscape Server package from becoming a threat, they could easily eat the costs of the browser because their newly established desktop/Office Suite monopolies were furnishing massive profits.
If Microsoft managers start obsessing over hitting the numbers, and budget constraints become an important part of the Microsoft bonus structure, then you don't see Internet Explorer projects... You don't see $10-$20 million dollar blackholes on the budget to maintain monopolies.
The loss of Bill Gates also hurts, not because he is an irreplaceable manager, but because he alone had the clout to do strange things. When Apple fired "professional management" and brought Steve Jobs "back," he had the clout to do whatever he wanted. He pushed projects out the door, canceled others, etc., and could be a one man show with control of the business. Founders have MUCH MORE political capital than professional CEOs.
If Gates said, "we must destroy Netscape, regardless of costs" (or Java, or any other technology that he found a threat), he could turn the company on a dime as Founder/major Shareholder.
If Ballmer says, "to hell with profitability, we must destroy Sony PS3/Nintendo Wii, I don't care what we lose in the process," I don't think that he can do it. The heads of the gaming and lifestyle division will go ballistic that they won't make their numbers and get a bonus, and will find people on the Board to back them and get hep. If Gates said that it was a priority, it was a priority, and he could probably change the entire management incentive structure to make it happen. He could create budgets out of thin air for what he called a priority.
Any loss in marketshare for MS is a disaster financially because it destroys profit growth, and the current management lacks the complete control of the company necessary to move the way it moved under Gates.
That was kind of the point of my post. Someone said that all the do-gooders were parents, I made the point that that is a meaningless statement.
My flippant comment about "parent or biological dead-end" wasn't meant as judgement, merely meant that if you divide the world into parents and non-parents, it's rather silly.
The parents of toddlers have NOTHING in common with the parents of teenagers and have NOTHING in common with the parents of adult children. Some people fall into multiple categories, but the world isn't parents vs. the non-parents for this stuff.
Parents of small children (which is what this is discussing) have it REALLY rough by regulations forced on them by people that aren't parents of small children.
Let's see, the XP Start Bar often requires me to go moving my mouse everywhere, including moving Programs down a directory in the tree. With my Mac, everything is in Applications (which I dragged to my Doc so I can right-click and grab it) and my regularly used applications sit on my Dock. They are in the same place each time I use them, so launching them doesn't make them go hiding. My XP task bar moves things around as more applications load, forcing me to go hunt for the Window. My OS X Apps are where they launched, I can drag them elsewhere if I want (with visual sliding around cues that make it easy without thinking). If I run an App and think I'll use it later, I choose Right-click and keep in Dock, if I stop using it, I drag it off.
:)
With OS X, when I plug in a USB device, it just starts working. A USB Key just adds itself to Finder, in a nice bank of Volumes to work with. With Windows, it grabs a drive letter, but requires a drop-down everywhere to use, and if I have multiple keys, it can be tricky to figure out what is going on.
If I plug in a new mouse on my Mac, into the keyboard's built in USB Hub, the optical light powers up and the Mac keeps working, now with Mouse. My XP machines always want to pop up bubbles and fill me in on their progress with mounting the device, finding drivers, etc. I'm really not interested in how much work it is for XP to use the USB device, I want to use it. OS X turns in on, XP wants to have a conversation.
I plugged in my Camera, and it launched some non-iPhoto app to look at the pictures. I launched iPhoto, which asked me if I wanted to make it launch when I plug my Camera in, and I click yes. Now I plug my camera in, it verifies my settings (auto copy, delete off the camera) and it gets my pictures and helps me organize events, albums etc. I have a Shutterfly and Facebook plugin, so I can choose to auto-export my pictures to those services. If I want to create a photo album for say, my son's great grandmother, I create a book, drag the pictures into it, click Buy, and it shows up at her house.
That part isn't eye candy, but it's part of the general "Apple Approach" of making the easy stuff easy. I assume that there are similar programs to iLife in the Windows world, but I haven't seen them. I have a few good friends in IT that are Windows guys. Their wives keep asking them for software to make video clips of their kids to put online. After I bought iMovie '08, I grabbed my tapes, imported my video, and had 4 or 5 little movies up online to show people, which was great. I cut 60 minutes of footage down to a 60s-90s clip easily and fast, added some transitions, and exported. If I was on an Intel Mac and not a PowerMac G5, it would have even exported fast, instead it took a while, but it looked good.
The only eye candy I can think of is the zooming to Doc and fast user switching, plus the Doc -> "Poof" when I drag something off and the doc items moving out of the way when I drag something there. That "eye candy" all gives me visual cues, and I like it. I feel like XP is focused on what it is doing (new USB device detected, USB device named "X" looking for drivers, driver found, loading, etc), not what I am doing. I really don't care HOW OS X, Linux, or Windows load my USB device, just that it shows up and I can use it. OS does that for me.
Sliding out drawers and sheets are GREAT UI devices, and Sheets kick ass compared to modal dialogs that float around. The desktop design metaphors are wonderful. I feel like I get almost nothing done when using my Windows machine compared to my Mac, and I'm a techie through and through. But with my Mac I have a series of easy to use tools that play nicely, in part because of the BSD internals. SSHKeyChain.dmg manages my SSH keys, and when I SFTP via BBEdit or SSH via Terminal, they pick them up for me and I don't need to use passwords. That's just cool. I never felt like my Windows apps cooperated that way.
YMMV, but I'm a Unix guy at heart. OS X gives me a great desktop environment that plays natively with Unix-land, without wanting to "chat." It's a great tool. I feel like Windows XP wants to be my equal partner in life.
Alex
Alex
Yes, any biological organism that reproduces is a parent, your argument is silly because it ignores the realities of parenting.
Parenting a toddler is physically exhausting, but generally involved very few decision if the system wasn't involved.
To suggest that the current President and First lady, or the former President and first lady, with 2 adult children or one high school aged child (when they entered office) are indicative of parents of small children (which is what the article was discussing) is absurd. The same is true of most of Congress, state legislatures, and governor's mansions.
People with power, whether they are parents or not, and most are, are generally 40-50, with their youngest child, often a single child or the younger of two, in their late teens to mid-twenties are NOT indicative of people with small children up to age 5, meaning people from the ages of 18 to 35.
The fact is, the baby boomers have pulled every ladder up behind them as they have gotten older. They have made parenting impossible... modern car seats are total disasters because they have to deal with the dangerous cars we've created... Air bags are nice tools for adults, but a disaster for small children. When I was a child I rode in the front seat next to my mother, because car seats could go in the front seat. If I dropped something, my mom could pick it up. My son can't ride in the front seat, so if he drops something, he screams because my wife can't grab something off the floor and hand it to him because he's in the back seat.
However, the baby boomers, when they had small children, had cars built around their needs. As they got older, not only did the market accommodate their new needs (no small children, teenage drivers), but the government changed regulations that made cars safer for older "parents" at the expense of younger parents. People decry the explosion of SUVs, but when you can't fit more than two car seats in the back, because they are no longer safe in the middle seat, and cars with side impact air bags require children up to age five to be in booster seats, what does a young family do? Once you have two kids, if you drive a sedan, you can't transport a friend's child (common things when I was a kid), so you need a mini-van or an SUV to have sufficient seating. If you have a third kid, you can't transport them without a mini-van. My wife carpools to work with a friend, and they pop the two kids into car seats in the back seats. Now both expecting child two, they either have to stop carpooling, or get mini-vans, because cars can't support three children, let alone four.
If you think that the powers that be with one or two children in private school HAVE ANY UNDERSTANDING what a typical family with 2-4 young children go through is absurd, but to say that they are the same because they are parents suggests that President Bush and I have a lot in common because we are both white males, it's silly.
Everyone is a parent or a biological dead-end, roping them all together as those a family with 3 small children HAS ANYTHING IN COMMON with a family with two teenage children (and 15 more years of raises and wealth accumulation behind them) is absurd. The system is run by people with teenage children terrified that anything will happen to them because they only have one or two kids and can't have more. The system is run on top of people with small children that hope nothing goes wrong but lack the resources to do anything about it.
To illustrate the point, consider the following question: If you could guarantee your children would survive to 30, but they would drop 20 IQ points and be financially dependent on your forever, if you are in your 40s and have two teenage children, you'd agree and say that it's because you'd love your children. If you ask a 25 year old couple struggling with the bills with two children and deciding on a third if they'd make that change to avoid a 5% chance of losing a child by 18, you might get a different answer. I love my son to
Accidents happen. With 300 million people in America, a 1 in 1 million chance hits 300 people a year. Each year a few children tragically drown in pools, so we've scared parents about pools, and criminalized pools (in terms of liability) without fences and fences around fences. Every child's death is a tragedy, but locking up parents that make decisions that we don't like has done far more damage than good.
Parents told that a small spanking is child abuse. Children with working single mothers going home to an empty house is an unfortunately economic reality, but if some accident happens, we arrest the parent for child endangerment.
Bad things can happen, but the modern small family size combined with an overzealous judiciary and Departments of Child Services has resulted where we want to criminalize anything going wrong.
Instead of blaming parents, look at a legal culture that expects nothing bad to happen to a child and determines a person's entire worth on the success of their children. When families with children had 4-5 children, you expected most to come out alright but occasionally something bad happens. In families of 1-2 children, anything bad is a catastrophe.
Far more harm is being done to children by overprotection than the risks of life. But its hard to blame parents when if they get hit with the 1 in a million accident (that affects dozens of children a year), they can go to jail and have their other children taken away from them.
Let's see, woman that don't breastfeed are told that they endanger their children. Women that do may be criminally charged if they don't follow the social standard in the US... A poor woman was jailed because she couldn't see a Doctor and didn't realize that the child was malnourished from breast-feeding (mathematically rare, but real and if you criminalize 2% of all women)... The breast-feeding ones make the headlines, but the push towards criminalizing parents if kids do anything wrong, including pranks and petty vandalism add up. It's hard to be a parent, because your child is a natural explorer and risk taker, and you normally just have to make sure no unreasonable danger is present. However, if a child falls and hurts himself, you can be sure that child services will show up and decide that anything you failed to do to "child-proof" your home (as if children aren't a natural part of the home) is criminal neglect, it's hard to put the fault entirely on parents.
Being a parent in today's age is really tough, because in the back of your mind IS busybodies that will decide that you are a negligent parent for letting your child see something that is a natural part of life. Parents have been condemned/charged if the child sees them engage in sexual acts, while co-sleeping is a natural if unpopular approach to parenting. These choices are all reasonable, whether I would make them for my child or not, but the criminalization of anything outside the norm for parenting takes some of the fun out of it.
It's not the parents... it's the system of do-gooders that make life hell on parents.
It may not seem it to Linux users, but the eye candy that Apple added generally gives you visual clues to what is going on. When I minimize a window it graphically collapses to the Dock, that's useful, because without thinking about it, I watched it drop down and keep track of it. When I switch between users, the graphical rotation visually lets me know that I've done something substantial. It breaks the visual space the way I've visually broken up the process.
It subconsciously gives me information and it useful.
The eye candy on my XP desktop at work is not useful, is mostly annoying, and doesn't help me understand my environment. That's a HUGE difference.
More and more of those proprietary applications are become Browser based, because it's less of an IT hassle. The VBA-heavy Excel spreadsheets that people use are real (and Open Office is NOT a substitute, Mac Office rarely is a substitute, Windows Excel just kicks ass), but are normally only a small portion of the office.
New companies will roll out web apps, but companies with legacy won't. In addition, you have proprietary licensed apps that aren't easy to change and are industry specific. Many of them are probably Win16 apps, because they run on Windows-32, there was no need to upgrade them and lose the Windows 3.1 users. When that stopped being an issue 10 years ago, the programmers had moved on and there wasn't necessarily a clean way to upgrade your VB2/3 applications.
Each year, the issue becomes less significant. Netscape thought that they had a solution 13 years ago, but didn't understand just HOW SLOW the business world moves. The fact is, if I have a single Windows only application to run, it makes it worthwhile to keep Windows around instead of moving to Linux.
My Windows -> Mac Migration was years ago, and I still have a Windows machine (and Parallels on some Macs) for running applications that we are stuck with. With the current gig I have, I need to RDC into my work computer to see all the file shares and run whatever I need to run there, and that is at an Internet company.
I think it depends. My parents tend to be off doing their own things all the time. Sometimes, when coming to my place (a 30-45 minute drive), they arrive in separate cars, despite both working in the town that they live in. To them, a small "commuting car" might not be reasonable.
For my family, my wife drives the family car with the car seats (she carpools with a friend, so both kids have car seats). Her drive is 27 miles to work, add in errands, etc., on the way home, and an electric car for her would need to support 100-150 miles between charges. I drive a small car for commuting. In the past, that was 10-15 miles, so a car that goes 50 miles between charges would be perfect (to have room for a few errands). Unfortunately, right now, I am commuting 250 miles round trip twice/week for a job almost two hours away, so now isn't that time to switch.
However, if we go somewhere as a family, we take the family car. It wouldn't be unreasonable for most 2-car suburban families to have 1 electric car and 1 gas-powered family car. True people complain about seeing SUVs driving around town with a single passenger going to/from the mall or grocery store, but the reality is that people won't get a dedicated car for 5 mile trips.
A family car needs to be able to haul "stuff" for short trips, and be able to go 300-1000 miles without trouble, and gas does that just fine. But for the average family, I bet you could get them to drive a "commuting car" to/from work if it was cheap and electric. If 1/3rd the cars switched over 10 years, that would be a substantial environmental improvement. Too many people are looking for Perfect solutions. Hyrbids for family cars and electric commuting cars might help.
The problem is the charging. Some people keep their cars in garages and could plug them in. The Condos down the street from me have a large parking lot with all the cars in it... you'd have to run electricity to all the parking spots, plus deal with the HOA having to foot the bill for everyone's driving, so it's a non-starter there. In addition, most people I know around me have converted their garages into extra bedrooms or rec rooms, so again, it's an electrician trip out for charging stations.
I'm not saying that it's not doable, just that a plug-in car is a solution for 1 car/multi-car family that keeps it in the garage or is willing to retrofit their electrical by the driveway. That said, a 20% switchover that uses spare capacity at night might reduce transportation pollution by 10%-15%, which is non-trivial and might be cost effective.
Okay, engineering graduates make about double liberal arts graduates. That has been consistent for several decades, which means that the supply/demand curves for those degrees reflect that. There is a premium paid for engineering degrees, because the skills required to complete one remain in short supply. If there was an oversupply of engineers, salaries would be falling.
Are salaries rising in computer programming? It depends on your time frame, which people miss. The late 90s was an artificial boom for programmers, caused by money moving into the field from VC's, etc., chasing performance. While that is the "free market at work," the free market returns to equilibirum in the LONG RUN, not the SHORT RUN. Since most of those VCs lost investors money, clearly it wasn't a good allocation of resources. However, wages are considered downwardly inelastic... During the boom people were getting big raises, especially if they jumped companies. 20%-25% raises to jump ship in 18-30 months wasn't unheard of, it was common. So wages move up with the market, but when the market tanks, you can't just cut people's salaries 20%, so you end up doing lay-off replacements, and the laid off workers hold out for salaries.
It's also the reason that housing prices don't rapidly fall, people sit on the market and hold out for a price as long as they can, and over time inflation eats at that percentage. Same thing with salaries, you freeze them for a few years and let cost of living go up to lower them. This actually works for most people, because despite the venting on slashdot, large chunks of people's expenses are actually fixed in nominal terms... Your car payment is constant based on when you got the loan, as is your mortgage, and if you are in a state like Florida or California with locked in home stead assessment values, you annual property taxes stay flat or might even go down. So while inflation eats at discretionary spending, your fixed costs stay fixed.
Over time, wages rise at approximately inflation + 1%. Because of productivity boosting in the 90s and 2000s, maybe we'll see wages rise at inflation + 1.5% or inflation + 2%. But in anyone year, that might be the 90s boom, inflation + 6%-7%, or the 2000s "recovery" of inflation -1%, assuming that real inflation is actually a bit higher than the new government metrics.
The fact is, if we watch salaries from 1980 - 2010, for example, I bet we see an annual trend towards inflation + 1%, but with most of it in the late 80s and late 90s, with downward real/flat nominal periods in the rest of the time.
It's like people expecting rediculous returns in the stock market each year. The 8% after inflation long term returns is no a function of regular growth, it's a period of 0 +/- 3% real growth, with a few years of 20%-25% growth in there, and a couple of -10% to -15% corrections throughout.
After 8 years of massive salary growth in IT, it is perfectly normal from a human nature point of view to expect that to continue and then blame the boogeyman (globalization, outsourcing, Bush Administration), but it's also the market correcting itself.
Alex
Here is the thing, PC Gaming targets people that own their own gaming computer that they can upgrade as needed and install games on. That means that you are targeting high schoolers, college students, and recent grads, people that own a computer and have a room, not an apartment/house (they either live with their parents or a roommate). In that case, upgrading the bedroom computer where they spend a lot of free time is reasonable, which makes PC Gaming popular with the computer crowd. Walk into the equivalent place with someone more on the "jock" end of the spectrum, and a console is popular because it's not a hobby, it's a way to drink beer with friends and play a game.
Once you get into a slightly older crowd, (25-30), whether married w/o kids, married w/ kids, or sharing a place with a single roommate or significant other, the living room begins to replace the bedroom as the focus. When I was a college student, my computer got upgraded constantly. My first apartment with a roommate got whatever furniture we had lying around (mostly from my studio from earlier), but there was no upgrading it, it was whatever I had bought on sale or from Ikea.
After getting married and a new place, the bedroom changed focus, and the "playing games" moved to the Living Room, where we got a big screen and a surround sound system. Now that we have a house, a child, and one on the way, the computer sits in the office to do work, not play games. The kids gets new furniture, and the parents get what is lying around.
There are TWO factors involved: disposable income (while students are jokingly poor, ALL their income is disposable; recent grads with small ratty apartments don't make much, but all their income is disposable, young families tend to have the least for the early years, then more over time), and location of entertainment.
As the median gaming age gets older, the percentage that are high school/college kids drops and the percentage that are older with more income rises. This not only means the ability to buy games, but also the likelihood of having a Living Room with a real television and couches, and not old hand me downs. They also begin to associate the computer with work (during the day) and not recreation at home. That makes console gaming more appealing. Everyone HAS a computer, but Video card upgrades for gaming rigs are roughly as costly as the cheapest consoles (Wii/PS2) -- no longer needing to upgrade sound cards as well helps. However, once you move your hanging out out of the bedroom and into the Living room, the Console just makes more sense than the computer. Upgrading your Entertainment Center (TV/Stereo/Speakers) for gaming translates into movies and television as well.
Nintendo realized that A) parents will STILL spend whatever for their kids, B) the gamer crowd is so bored with "same old shit" that they will spend $200-$300 to be entertained, C) Westerners are rich enough that a console can be sold as an impulse buy if you price it right, and D) people aren't interested in a "media center," they want cheap entertainment.
PC Gaming won't die because some parents won't let kids have a TV in their room but will let them have a computer to "do school work." PC Gaming won't die because the family normally has one "good television" that gets competition between playing games and watching TV. PC Gaming won't die because parents buy their kid a computer going off to college, not a video game system. PC Gaming won't die because the "environment" is different... Higher resolution, closer to screen, in a chair (not on a couch) lends itself to focused game play. Console gaming is played on a couch, either in a relaxing position or in a competitive frame with a buddy. The environment is different, lending to different takes on the same game.
I am NOT an environmentalist. I will NOT sacrifice my lifestyle for "the greater good." I am focused on my family first, idealism is a WAY distant second. However, some wise environmentalists are starting to make the programs reasonable. Our power company, no doubt as part of the deal with the government, ran a program for insulation. They inspected the insulation for free, gave a credit for insulation, and brought a list of contractors for us to choose from AND set up the install. I just had to sit at home and have a check ready when they showed up, sealed my ducts, and blew in insulation. Because of the credit, in four months I've recovered half the cost of the insulation, making it a no brainer, and the environment wins.
My roof is coming up due for replacement. The technology of panels on the roof was expensive, didn't save money in the time frame that most people own their houses, and was extremely ugly. However, the new technology of "panel roofs," where you have tile-like installations on the roof was starting to be feasible, as the labor to install on the roof was about the same, but the electrical hookups were costly. The new systems come in "sheets" so they are easier to install than roof tiles, integrate with the roof, and should, in time, cost about the same to install as a normal new roof. As the costs (after tax breaks) comes down, more people will use them. Demanding ugly roofs on people's homes with a "boo hoo" will not get you buy in, but come up with a series of tax incentives and let the free market develop solutions that people want and you can actually get progress.
If you really want recycling efforts, then you need to make it easy for people, convenient, and ideally provide some incentive to them doing so. Just like some states offer deposits with refunds for recycling cans/bottles, why not have a scale in the curb-side pickup of recycled materials, and give people a credit on their garbage bill.
People aren't sheep, people are autonomous individuals. Their willingness to spend their free time on your pet projects instead of their families is pretty limited. I don't see you offering free babysitting services or transportation for their kids to after school events to free up time for people to do what you want. I don't hear that you're donating money, you just want other people to do so.
Hi Mr. Troll, meet Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, meet Mr. Troll.
Flying across the Atlantic is expensive and time consuming. Less expensive and time consuming that it was by boat before the airplane, but still expensive and time consuming.
Most Americans are unlikely to make it to Europe more than once or twice, at most, because it's expensive. A 10k-15k trip is a LOT of money for most people, and if they do the trip, it's likely a lifetime of wanting to go. Of those that do go, they likely get to see a half dozen cities in Europe, with limited exposure.
Most Europeans don't make it here either. They may make a trip to New York City, or a vacation in Miami, FL, but they won't see America. Europeans will never travel to Iowa, Mississippi, Alabama, etc. There is a LOT to the United States, many different subcultures, not so disimilar to the EU's collection of countries, other than the Union here is MUCH more established, has a shared language, and actually ratified it's Constitution.
Complaining that Americans don't routinely travel to different European Cities is about as fair as complaining the Europeans fail to make trips to Albany, NY or other cities that they have no interest in.
Yes, by International Treaty and somewhat compliance with US law, any creation is automatically copyrighted. That doesn't mean that a court will rule that everything is a derivative. There are a lot of claims via the GPL FAQ and other assertions that quite frankly have NEVER been established by court precedent. Most of copyright law is derived from Common Law, Precedents, and to a much lesser extent, statutes.
The FSF requires assignment of copyright because as the sole holder of the copyrights, they have standing to enforce it.
We actually have NO clue what a court would rule with a use of a GPL'd library that is a small component of a larger application, where the GPL'd library is owned by multiple authors. A court COULD rule that the GPL is in effect, and either cease distributing or comply, or it could rule that nobody has standing to sue, so while the code is used without license, nobody can enforce it.
A trademark is "lost" from lack of enforcement, a copyright is not. However, maintaining copyright, and have standing to sue, are very difference.
Statutory penalties ONLY apply to copyrights registered with the government, which given the release early, release often mantra of open source projects, is relatively impossible. If you don't register each version, and they use a non-registered version, it's very possible that statutory penalties will not apply.
What makes something a derivative work, in terms of compiled software code, therefore requiring the the derivative work be required to be licensed under the GPL or even belong to the original copyright owner.
It seems unlikely that a Court would see program Foo available under the GPL, and rule that the GPL is somehow unfair and shouldn't be enforceable. But what would a court rule? What about derivative works.
For example, if I take Application Foo, modify it to be a library that is called by my Application Bar, a court might logically conclude that it is a derivative work if Bar is pretty trivial... Maybe a court would care about static linking vs. dynamic linking vs. sockets, but I have no idea what they would think of the matter.
In a more complicated sense, if Application Foo is 95% of the Foo-Bar combination, Foo-Bar is clearly derived from Foo. However, what if Foo is only 5% of the Application, is Foo-Bar still a derivative work?
What if a court rules that Bar is NOT a derivative work, not bound by the GPL? Well, they still need a distribution license for Foo, right? Well, maybe... if Foo has a single owner, perhaps a Court decides to award damages halt the shipment unless a licensing agreement is reached. A court might decide that given the general free licensing of Foo, there are no damages, and therefore they will only order damages with a reasonable licensing agreement going forward.
What if there are multiple owners of Foo, all licensed under the GPL, and none of them comprise a substantial amount of the combined Foo-Bar code? What if the authors of Bar contacted the listed authors about distribution, and most of the emails came back with no response? Might a court rule that they have abandoned the software? It shouldn't matter, but who knows. Most abandon-ware issues involve software that conceivably could be re-released commercially. What happens when the authors all disappear, or most of them? If you owners of the copyright are unreachable, and the ones taking action are only owners of trivial amounts of the code, might the courts just decide that they have no standing and go home?
The BIG concern with the GPL falling is that the courts decide that by releasing the source code, binaries, and everything freely with no "use" license to the general public, that you have effectively placed your software in the public domain. That seems like a bigger risk for the "thousands of authors" projects, because if a program has a single author that makes it available under the GPL, and is contactable, it might be seen as reasonable if there is the ability to license it under other terms.
There is also the issue of patches. Does the submitted of a patch ACTUALLY have copyright on it? That is assumed as given on Slashdot, but I'm not 100% convinced. The patch is CLEARLY a derivative work, and isn't necessary a creative expression protected under copyright. If it is a bug fix, it seems that a court might reasonably conclude that this is simply a factual correction, and not be protected.
It seems unlikely that a court will rules that you can take GPL'd code, wrap your extensions on it, and do what you want. However, if you are UNABLE to comply (closed source library that you call), I have NO IDEA what a court would decide. They might decide that it is infringement, find for the plaintiff for $1 and close the case, who knows.
The court challenges won't be head on, they'll be over minor areas of disagreement.
No guarantees, but looking at Apple's past, it is unlikely that PPC support drops in 10.6. I would expect them to drop G4 support, but I would expect one more rev for the G5 users. It is possible that they would support dual core G5s or quad G5s for a 10.7, but at a certain point, you want to drop the PPC line.
:)
I have a bunch of PPC Macs doing various things, and would like to see support maintained, but realistically, this is probably the last rev supporting the G4... It is also possible that the G5 sticks around for a while, as there are certain environments that MAY be stuck on them for a while if they have PPC only software that won't run under Rosetta... Dropping the G4 lets them abandon PPC-32 and therefore only support PPC-64, x86, x86-64.
The only problem that they have with "late model" G4s is that the Powerbook was G4 until the switch. My Tibook 1Ghz from 4.5 years ago (don't use it, have a MBP from almost two years ago now, wow, and no itch to upgrade) wasn't that much slower than the late-model G4 Powerbooks, I think that they went up to 1.42 Ghz or something, but ditching them before the 5 year Mark isn't really Apple's style.
I expect my Macbook Pro to have a "short" lifespan, because it was 32-bit when it NEVER made sense for Apple to go to 32-bit Intel. I didn't understand why they didn't push the transition off a few months to go straight 64-bit Intel. On the other hand, my prediction is:
10.6 G5, x86, x86-64
10.7 x86, x86-64
10.8 x86-64 only
However, with the slower OS X release cycles, it's possible that they dump the PPC and x86-32 at once, and make 10.7 x86-64 only. I assume that the 32-bit legacy libraries will stick forever, but who knows. I am concerned because I have some internal Cocoa Apps using a library more or less abandoned and being nervous about losing support. If the library was made Universal I could recompile universal, but that looks unlikely, so Rosetta it is. The last OS/system that supports Rosetta may be something I have to stockpile, or find a good contractor to modernize the code, ditch the library, and use the internal Cocoa libraries that made it irrelevant when 10.3 shipped.
Who knows, if I could somehow actually get ahold of a x800 XT Card for my G5, keep getting back-ordered, I'd probably keep it as my home office computer for a few more years. With two 20" Apple monitors, it's fine for working from home, no heavy crunching, and it's a pleasant environment. If the turbo.264 and iMovie 08 incompatibilities get worked out, that's another reason to push off upgrading the home machine.
Sun bought StarOffice, originally with the plans of selling a cheap office suite. Sun never expected to "take-over" the market, unless they were insane, but rather to hurt Microsoft. Sun and Microsoft fought in the Server room, and in engineering workstations. Microsoft has nearly unlimited resources from their Desktop and Office monopolies.
.Net and other technology projects that hurt Sun because they make so much money on their two main products, that the losses elsewhere are rounding errors.
If ALL Sun accomplished with StarOffice was getting a few Microsoft Site licenses to use it as leverage to pay Microsoft less money, Sun "won." If you see the world as a two player game (which Sun did), then hurting your opponent helps you. Same reason militaries bomb weapons manufacturing plants, to stop the resupply of arms. Microsoft can support
Sun wanted to fight for the control of the set-top box market with Java, cell phones with Java, etc. Anything that Sun does to deny Microsoft resources makes it harder for Microsoft to compete elsewhere. Microsoft failed to keep growing profits at the same rate, their stock price flat-lined, and their expansion into other markets was slowed.
It's the same reason that Linux advocates only compare themselves to Microsoft, they see it as a two-player game.
Regarding a handful, there are probably around 1m Orthodox Jews in the US, another 2m in Israel, and another few million "Traditional" Jews in Israel. I have no idea what percentage observe family purity, but it's NOT an obscure subject, and among the religiously practicing, seen as the basis of strong Jewish marriages.
You're just wrong. There is no "preservation" of bodily fluids. A man who ejaculates is impure until he cleans himself and waits until the following sundown. A woman who receives that ejaculation is similarly impure until such cleaning. Trying to trace it to a Hindu Pagan ideal fits your agenda, but ignores a clear reading of the text. Bodily fluids = impurity, straight out of the Torah. Contact with the dead also renders impurity. Lots of the Torah refers to purity and impurity, and how much it really applied even in Temple Days is up for debate, as it is doubtful that all but the wealthiest Judeans ever traveled to the Temple.
Eve's transgression had nothing to do with sex. Indeed, the Bible is explicit in that they covered their bodies as a result of their knowledge, and that prior to this, there was no need to.
A literal read of Genesis is that all these events took place on Day 6 (quite a busy day), and given that the Hebrew word of Yom refers to day, but in Biblical Hebrew also refers to units of time, a literalist read is probably unnecessary. The pain of childbirth and needing to work simply demonstrates that mankind is responsible for their actions, and that it wasn't the Creator's ill will that gave them a rough lot in life, and they were offered perfection and chose reality. It also sets the stage for Jewish punishments later on, including the plague of Darkness killing many Israelites, the Golden Calf, costing non-Levites their role in the Temple, and the first exile. If you believe that the Bible was made up by Ezra, then this story serves to establish Priestly dominance, by placing responsibility on the rest of the people.
That seems unlikely. There is archaeological evidence that the Egyptians THOUGHT that they wiped out the Israelites, and the Biblical Jewish practice is HEAVILY based upon Egyptian practices. Most major Jewish practices are modified from the Egyptian ones, making the dedication to the God of Israel in
While the old stereotypes are hard to kill off, country club Republicans vs. Union member Democrats, the shifting economy of the past twenty years and the changing workforce has DRAMATICALLY changed the political orientation. While a few populist Democrats are out there (Edwards comes to mind), if you look at the big leaders, they are the "New Democrats" and they have gotten tremendous support from Wall Street and the people of means. The Republican Party has increasingly become the middle class party, while the Democrats have become the dominant party of the rich and poor, and some of it is self interest.
:)
While the "old money" rich remain the country club Republicans, concerned about preserving their wealth, you see the spoiled children and the reckless hedonism that is only availble to the rich doesn't really jive with the Christian values wing of the GOP. So what explains the divide?
Democrats tend to be better for the stock market. While the media likes to use the Dow (with an easy to understand number) as a barometer of the economy, it isn't. The Dow is 30 stocks, and the broader and more useful S&P 500 is 500 stocks, there are something like 10000 publicly traded securities in the US and many times that in terms of private businesses. The Democrats tend to be pro-safety net, and general pro protections for the "little guy." The net effect of these regulations is to raise barriers to entry of business, even if that isn't intended. Since the S&P 500 is really the performance of the top 500 companies (more or less), it indicated a concentration of wealth more than anything else.
The well to do care more about "the economy" (as in, the stock market) for their wealth increasing than care about their jobs and incomes (and therefore taxes), which pushes them into the Democratic Party camp. The regulations increase the returns to big businesses. For all the whining about Sarbox, the cost of compliance to S&P 500 companies is a rounding error, the cost to smaller companies is massive, which means that fewer small companies go public, which keeps the capital chasing fewer companies and increases the market.
The Republican Party is made up of the self employed and small business owners, who care about taxes and their earnings FAR more than they care about the stock market, and middle-class rural and exurban America. For them taxes are a real burden, and their livelihood, not their investment portfolio, determine their quality of life. The middle-class Republicans see that Democratic plans to "help the poor" tend to help people below them on the social ladder, which creates competition for them and their children, and feel that their taxes go to help others. They feel squeezed, they KNOW that the rich don't care about the tax burden, they figure that they don't pay it, and know that the burden falls on them. On social issues, they see that the left-wing embraces social changes that they don't like, and don't identify with.
The Democratic Party sees a shrinking middle class as a source of panic, despite the fact that long term surveys show that the middle-class is shrinking by the top part moving further up. The stock market, replacing pensions, has meant that anti-corporate rhetoric isn't helpful... The workers aren't slaves to the Kapitalists, the workers now own the means of production, albeit in a diversified way through mutual funds...
As people get older, their potential for future income increases drops... People in their 20s may jump jobs for a 20% raise, but less so in their 30s or 40s, but their 401(k) balances are slowly getting bigger. Once your "earnings on investments" exceed your "contributions" your wealth is determined less on what you do and more on what the market does, which is causing a shift in thoughts.
Bush slashed tax rates by 2%-3% and it was "one of the largest tax cuts ever," but real people who see that their wages normally increase by 1% - 2% a year over inflation suddenly saw a 3%-5% increase in o
Your arguments are self-satisfying and based upon what seems to be a lot of ignorance. You have had two people try to explain your misconceptions from bad translations, and you simply insist that they don't know what they are talking about. Your use of the terms "shacks" is intentionally inflammatory, and is chosen simply to do so. Assuming that you don't observe the Laws of Family purity, since you hold them in complete contempt, you simply don't understand the practical implementation of these laws.
Purity doesn't only apply to women either. It's a general "bodily fluids" make you impure idea... After ejaculation, a man is impure as well. To avoid nocturnal emissions screwing up the Yom Kippur service (requiring a last minute substitute), the High Priest had to stay up all night. Given that most women are not interested in sex during the menstrual period, and your contention that this is all about men "taking women" whenever they want, clearly telling the men that the women are off limits is hardly anti-woman.
Market? Skills? In an agrarian society? Okay, I get it, Prostitution empowered women and Jewish law was to punish them and keep their power away. Except for one thing, Biblical law doesn't SPECIFICALLY prohibit prostitution. It gets more or less banned in a backwards manner by Rabbinic Law, because one wouldn't want their daughter to have to have that life, and one is obligated to give her a better life, but paying for sex is IN the Bible... The Biblical prohibitions that lead to a ban on Prostitution was an ogligation to provide for your daughter and wife.
You are taking 21st Century conditions, applying the Bible, and saying "evil sexist." The Bible doesn't CREATE marriage, it governs it. It doesn't CREATE slavery, it governs and restricts it. There is nothing in the Bible arguing FOR these conditions, but rather the rules that govern the conditions of it. That is my issue with your method of argumentation. Each major evolution of Jewish Law has been to incorporate changes around it to make things better. The conditions for women in the Bible are CERTAINLY better than they were in Egypt. The conditions in the Talmud were certainly better than they were under Roman occupation.
Indeed, not only is there a strong Rabbinic trend to NOT ban sexual behavior within marriage, one of the interesting issues in Rabbinic Law that is new is dealing with the fact that people not on
The only message that I can think is that the US is going to do B-52 runs into the Persian Gulf, to make the Iranians nervous and tempt one of there AA crews to get nervous, shoot at us, and provoke a fight. If the Iranians think that we are prepared to do bombing runs immediately, they MIGHT not care... but if they think that we might ACCIDENTALLY nuke them, that might affect things, no?
Does it change the security procedures in Iran if you think that provoke the US -> a few conventional weapons in sensitive areas changes to, we might nuke the hell out of you and blame it on paperwork snafus?
I dunno, but I can't imagine news media running this story without SOME clearance... They generally check before running something that might endanger national security. It's one thing to expose an arguably illegal CIA prison operation, and I think that the NY Times gave a heads up so that national security wouldn't be damaged (get sensitive stuff out before the story)... Our media LOVES Yellow Journalism and sensationalism, but blatantly undermining national security with this sort of stuff, not likely.
Alex
Right, the other post is correct, the last unified Israelite government was King Solomon... the unified Monarchy didn't last long. The Judean Kingdom held out for a bid longer, but it fell relatively quickly.
However, while Judea was a vassal state, it was the Jews living there. A vassal state has a lot of autonomy. As long as the taxes flowed up to the Empire controlling them, the Jews were in control of day-to-day affairs. When Rome abolished Judea's status of a client Kingdom and put it under direct control of Rome was when the Jews started the multiple rebellions.
However, I wanted to take issue with some of your characterizations:
It is important to understand that in Jewish law, things are divided into permitted and non-permitted, and obligatory and non-obligatory. Jewish law is quite binary, there are few shades of grey... as an exception to this, the Hassidic/Hareidi cultures of the past two hundred years introduce a WHOLE BUNCH of grey, because they prohibit things via Minhag (binding custom) or Mensorah (custom) to their followers, but because a Beit Din (House of Law) has no jurisdiction outside of their area, you have things prohibited to followers of one Rabbi that are permitted to another. This introduces a LOT of grey areas of things that aren't permitted but are to be avoided. However, the areas you are addressing come from basic Jewish law.
1. Women were not allowed to speak in places of worship
While American Protestants and Liberal Jews have turned their places of worship into general social halls, basically as social clubs that have religious services on Sunday/Saturday respecfully, that was not historically the case. In Catholic Europe, the Churches held daily services and were fundamentally focused on religious matters, including matters that many today would consider secular in nature, but both Jewish and Christian Law is ALL encompassing on matters (roughly two Thirds of the Jewish Talmud and Shulchan Aruch cover matters of business -- not things considered "religious" in the post enlightenment world). If you look in Israel, where Jews are the majority, the Beit Knessets/Schules (Hebrew/Yiddish for synagogue) are places of worship and learning, not community centers. One would go to a synagogue for Morning or Afternoon/Evening services, or to the study hall during the day for Torah learning, not to discuss community affairs.
As a result, the "speaking in place of worship" is referring to either A) leading services, or B) teaching words of Torah. Now, under Jewish Law these are both privileges and honors to the person that does them, but also obligations upon the people doing them. Because women are generally exempt from time-based obligations for a variety of reasons, they are NOT required to do these commandments. Because Jewish law does not separate obligation from privilege, women are not permitted these functions. In other words, if you permit women to lead services and teach Torah, then the obligation falls on them. It isn't really fair to expect women to fulfill ALL the female oriented obligations (which are just as time consuming and all consuming as the male ones) PLUS the male ones, so the prohibition holds.
Think about it, how quickly did it go from "women are allowed to hold jobs" to "women are expected to hold jobs" in modern America? Few married women with children would consider working outside the home a privilege, but now an obligation. The "extended adolescence" of singles in their 20s and several years married before having children has affected how women view themselves, but it has also put obligations on them that previous generations didn't have. Few homes divide housework or child rearing evenly,
In 1967 there were 1.1 million Arabs living in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria (Judea and Samaria comprise the "West Bank of the Jordan"). According to PLO/PA numbers today, there are 3.5 million Arabs living there. Even if the PLO/PA is exaggerating by 1 milion as some claim, they have still more than doubled in size (and officially more than tripled).
If one wants to claim that Israel is "killing off the Palestinians" or "engaging in genocide," they are doing a pretty awful job. The world Jewish population was decreased by 1/3 during the Nazi's comparatively short reign, so Israel watching them triple in a longer "occupation" shows that if the Jews ARE trying to engage in genocide as their critics claim, they are doing a pretty horrendous job of it.
A few thousand dying in a war with populations in the millions is normal casualty levels, NOT genocide.
Uh, they most certainly did not. Gaza was captured by Egypt in 1949, and Judea and Samaria were captured by Trans-Jordan (the state created East of the Jordan, on the East bank) giving the new Kingdom of Jordan both the West Bank of the Jordan River and the East Bank of the Jordan River. The name West Bank became popular at this time, because Trans-Jordan was created on the East Bank, and they then captured the West Bank of the Jordan. But any ancient maps of "Palestina" would refer to the sub-regions by their names of Judea and Samaria, West Bank was a term coined for the 19 years of Jordanian occupation.
Israel didn't capture ANY of the land from "Palestinians" in 1967. In FACT, the PLO Charter specifically renounced ANY claims to Gaza, and the West Bank of the Jordan, and focused entirely on Jewish controlled land.
The sooner everyone acknowledges facts, it becomes easier to want to come up with a humane solution for the Palestinians. But the more credence you give to bizarre and fact-free "rights" the HARDER you get to a solution.
In 1929, the Hebron Pogroms wipes out a Jewish community dating back to Biblical Times. Hebron is one of the holiest cities in the Jewish faith, where Abraham bought the first land in Canaan for the Jewish people, where the Cave of the Patriarchs is. Because the Hebrew Patriarchs were adopted by Islam (which claimed a connection through Ishmael as the Ishmaelites were an Arab tribe), they claim it as a holy city to Islam.
Jews have been living in "Palestine" since before it was renamed from Judea to Palestina.
When Jews were fleeing WWII to Palestine, local Arab riots and rebellions prevents Jews from escaping there. Those escaping weren't "stealing" land, they were moving to collective farms of Jews that BOUGHT the land from the previous owners. Sure they didn't buy ALL the land, but Jews weren't stealing them.
But as the 1929 Pogroms indicate, attacking the Jews in "Palestina" pre-dates Israel.
Israel didn't found it's state with Terrorism. It was granted permission to form by UN Decree, and permission to be settled by Mandate from the League of Nations.
Israel doesn't HAVE a Constitution. It has a Declaration of Independence, but you can't rewrite those. And Israel's is hardly religiously influenced considering that the closest religious reference allowed by the Zionists was "Rock of Israel" which was a bone to the Mizrachi Party. The only thing Israel has in it's Basic Laws is the Right of Return, but most Western societies allow descendants of citizens to become fast tracked to citizens. Since Israel considers itself the successor to the Second Jewish Commonwealth, it considers Jewish people to be the descendants of exiled Judeans, perfectly legitimate under Jewish law.
Is the United Kingdom not a Democracy because the Church of England, headed by the Monarch, is the official religion? Catholicism has special status in France, Italy, and several other European Democracies as the official state religion. Likewise, a Catholic "heir" to the British throne is skipped over in succession, as a Catholic cannot become Monarch because that would threaten the state religion.
Many of the United States has State religions in the early days of the US. The First Amendment was drafted to prevent a Federal State Religion and trample over the rights of each of the united States to have their own state religion. I wouldn't call revolutionary Massachusetts and Pennsylvania non-Democracies, would you.
The facts simply don't bear out your anti-Israel, anti-Semetic, and anti-Western diatribe.