All the bitching around my work about how hard drives used to last longer. With my limited cross section, I have 2 computers at home, both ca 1998, still running original hard drives, in fact I've obsoleted 6 workstations so far at home, none of them had hard drive failures, I had one PSU, one GPU, and one NIC failure. At work (mainly a IBM shop) I've had to replace about 20% of drives within 4 years (I admin 50 workstations). I realize there is a lot of variables, smaller read heads, faster spin rates etc, but it does seem that my old dinosaur home computers last longer than the newer PC's we have at work. I'd be curious if "power saving" is putting our data at risk.
In advanced QM you learn that you can do anything as long as it is for a short enough time that it can't be measured. I'm a strong believer that if your theory allows an irational universe then your theory isn't the "final truth". While stuff like quantum foam can be useful to aid in calculations, I don't think we have enough evidence to prove that it actually exists. A lot of QM theorists subscribe to if it can exist then it does, funny how most of them also subscribe to the god doesn't exist theory. Hmm, is an all powerful God that you can't see any less rational than an infinite collection of quantum realities being created and destroyed every 10^-20 seconds?
That is a tiny amount of energy, but it is on a single photon, not a bunch. We don't currently have a particle accelerator that can go to that high of an energy. Typical energys are 5X10^3 for medical X-ray imaging, and 4-20X10^6 for radiation treatments. This is a billion times more energy.
I can't see the courts making the vendor refund more than the cost of their OEM license from MS. So no it won't cost them anything, they still sold the computer. MS might not be happy that they couldn't sell another license of XP, but that is a different problem. Either the user won't be using Windows at all (unlikely), or they all ready have a license from a trashed computer (more likely), or they are planning on pirating a copy and so don't want to pay for the license at all (probably the most likely, but hey I'm cynical).
Absolutely. Also, indexing and searching the junk is an issue. I read a white paper a couple weeks ago about that. Everyone is keeping everything they download, taking a dozen pics a day, and then want to find one thing on their 2TB personal storage array. Also, filesystem efficiency is becoming an issue. Google and other large datacentres throw huge amounts of processing power an cashing hierachies at the problem, but how does that work for the home user? If we have 1TB thumbdrives, then we'll probably have 1PB internal drives, ouch.
Hmm, the fact that *NIX hasn't changed in 10 years is supposed to be a good thing? The average user has become much more suffisicated. Eg, my beater PC ca 1998 has a 2 button mouse with a scroll wheel, that was the cool newish interface item at the time. Now people have more like 5 buttons on their mouse, twice as many USB devices (at least). The fact that the GUI paradigm for *NIXs has survived from 1984 is telling. *NIX historically has been computer focused not user focused. Run fast and stable and the user will want to figure it out.
Windows historically may have gone too much the other way, burn through performance, to make things pretty, and simple. If it is prettier on your system people will develop for it. Now they've moved that to the development paradigm as well with Visual Studio being JIT centric, and moves to replace MFC with.Net libraries.
Who will win? I'm voting for MS at least for another 10 years, the normal user will throw RAM and GHz at the problem, and have things pretty. They also probably will be willing to throw a few hundred every few years at MS for the latest and greatest, or pirate a copy. When computers were more of a hobby for the home user it was a pain to shell that out, but now that it is most people main entertainment and part of their work, it is easier to justify. It will be interesting who supports multi-core better in 10 years, historically the science and engineering folks were the ones writting concurrent/parallel apps.
No it will just free up the OEM license for the next computer that they sell. All it will cost the computer maker presumably is the time it takes for someone to process the request, and perhaps mailing costs (if internet purchase for example). This might push them to offer more open packages eg:
One of my fellow students in university (I have a physics degree, he had double major physics, applied math, followed with MSc (Physics), PhD Math, a fairly bright guy;) ), anyways, his PhD thesis was solving electron quantum states in carbon nano-tubes. Properties he mentioned were, they are superconducting in one direction, and have total internal reflection (what causes fiber optics to be useful). So yes they will make a better internet. They also could make better electronics in general (no resistance = electrons moving as fast as they possibly can with the applied voltage).
What is the philosophy behind OLPC? That limiting computer access to the moneyed is inheritally wrong and causes them to remain impoverished. The corollary to this is that if you give them modern technology at least some will succeed. Well if they succeed do you as Microsoft want them buying MS products or, used to Linux?
This is even more an issue, as with the free versions of Visual studio, MS is allowing people to learn how to develop for MS platforms for free. MS has always believed strongly in the "we don't sell the OS, we sell the ecosystem" philosophy, and that is what they are trying to do. Help people learn to develop for their products, so they continue to have a growing market for upgrades.
I think we have freeware/OSS to thank for a lot of that actually. I've used file sharing programs that had a dozen releases and every one was a beta:) Similarly with some of the programs that used to ship with KDE. I'm not sure what they are trying to get at, is it "sorry that it doesn't work, but well, it is beta?" kind of reasoning:) I think some logical structure to release numbers makes sense, like MySQL's even odd methodology, if it ends in an even digit it is general release, if odd then it is beta/pre-release.
IMO.Net obsoleted Java at.Net 1.1. Java can be used, but from then on.Net had more features, better performance, and "language independance" is a winner. Java is useful, and there is probably a 5 year window where people coming through a CS degree, learned OOP on Java (before it switched back to C++/C#, at least that is what happened at my school, and a few others I know of), so there is a lot of developers out there more comfortable with Java. So if it suits the projects needs, go for it. However, I love being able to code in the language that the solution comes into my head, if VB then VB.net, if Cish then C# or managed C++. While Eclipse is nice, it is still behind VS as an IDE, I know it is kind of a non-technical reasoning, but VS looks better, andVS feels more "integrated" to me. Add to it a large range of 3rd party vendors that supply pluggins to VS (I use Component Softwares CVS/RCS plugin for example, it seemlessly plugs into Windows as a whole, VS recognizes it as does office and Win explorer), and I'm able to integrate my whole dev env not just the editor/designer into one app.
Hmm, not sure if I agree with that. Admittedly it is corporate site, so has a spin factor, but you should watch some channel 9 videos (interesting interviews with the techies behind MS products). Every single one of them says how shocked they were about the level of customer focus, and that is why they like working at MS. Various product groups talk about dropping what they were working on and adding features that users requested while beta testing.
Also such things like Visual studio, sorry java fans but Eclipse is not a competitor, in my opinion no one is within 5 years of MS in the IDE game. Still they add feature after feature, LINQ, more testing capablities, WPF (admittedly part of the OS SDK still), etc. Another example would be office, people complain about how many changes were made, however in that market again no real competition, people that are going to pay for an office suite 95% of the time will pick office. They didn't have to risk all the change, they chose to, because rightly or wrongly they thought it would improve the user experience.
Wow, at first glance I thought it was referring to confirming that the viewers are of age, but no its the performers. Seems strange, I thought is is illegial in most parts of the states to take part in pornography if you are under 18. If so, having to confirm who you are hiring is of age would be analogous to having to check a drivers license of someone applying for a trucker job, or a social to confirm that someone can legally work. I don't see how this is overly burdensome.
Both XP and linux are good options I have both, and like both. Linux updates apps to the latest version much nicer, in that you don't have to get a disc in the mail, go through the update, where as a lot of companies (eg. Matlab) mail the upgrade discs so your at least a week behind, and some installers are really stupid and reinstall the whole app, or at least it feels that way. XP, much easier to find drivers for, and as far as drivers go, tend to have better installers than their linux counterparts IMHO. Anyways, shy of device issues, both would be a matter of automated updates, which really shouldn't count against the OS as for most of them you can still be using the system.
Linux favors rapid releases, why not the developer version is available and has feature x, why can't I have it now (actually you can;)). This is easy to do in free software, your not asking much of the end user (especially in Ubuntu), click the update button wait 20 minutes done.
MS has a different philosophy, and so has to go in larger steps. They need to market their software, they need to convince users to shell out money for it, they need to convince oems to pre-install it, and negotiate the pricing structure. All this leads to larger more substantial releases. Completely reworked GUI's, privilege schemes, filesystems etc. I'm sorry going from KDE 3.5.7 to 3.5.8 doesn't strike me as a major upgrade. Similarly with the kernel changes. I upgraded my Kubuntu from 7.4 to 7.10 and didn't notice a difference.
Now I didn't spend time reading up of a bunch of forums for some of the more obscure features, I honestly don't care if I can turn my multiple desktops into a spinning Rubix cube, I only use the one desktop anyways, I can't stand having more than 4 things open at once, and can't be bothered to remember which desktop I opened what in.
Anyways, MS has to make major changes to convince people to upgrade, or at least make people think they got their moneys worth. Unfortunately, major changes screw over the end users that have spend 5 years learning keyboard shortcuts, or what have you. Stability issues will crop up and might take a year or so to get worked out.
Not mostly business, use, but business use was why I got the high end rather than a step down (6Mb versus 4Mb). Really what was nice was the upload, as it jumped from 128k to 756k between the two options, and I was at the time doing a lot of sql queries from one DB and inserting into another, so when doing work at home(about 5 hrs a week) my upload/download traffic was fairly symmetric so this package should have been a big win. I noticed about a doubling of performance, on my upload but no where near what the "quoted rate was". Being the system admin, I was able to confirm I had the DB's to myslef so that wasn't the issue. We could have a slow gateway server or something but we have high end equipment (new IBM blades, new Cisco switches, top of the line SAN etc) so I doubt that was the issue.
Well, I'm from Canada, and we don't have the RIAA blowing wind up the governments arse as Braveheart put it (though they are trying they aren't completely successful). Anyways, I haven't heard of anyone getting successfully sued for using p2p here, however the cable provider in my area (Rogers) still packet filters really bad. I have a 6Mb connection. I consistently can get 800k or so from a single site download. I turn on edonkey, and I'm lucky to get 16k. We are talking 37,500% difference. What the hell. Can they really claim that they are that desperate for bandwidth that they need to trottle that much? If so why am I able to pull 800k at all, and often from several sites at the same time?
As for the "it was in your contract arguement". Well it is in every contract that I've seen for internet services, but that doesn't make it right. P2P is not illegial here (as ruled by the supreme court), they have no proof that I'm downloading copyrighted material (actually I'm downloading different OS's, and public domain stuff), but still it is a clause. It isn't a matter of take it or leave it for me are most people, the fact is the internet is a major part of society now, people are trying to use the service they paid for (don't sell me 6Mb if there is no way you'll let me use it).
In my case as well, I bought the highest speed available, because I often work from home, I didn't want to be billing my employer for time I waited for my slow connection. Will guess what? My ISP thinks all encrypted packets are a p2p agent in disguise, so I get throttled way down as soon as I start my VPN connection. Yet another clause in my contract says if I cancel my service within 2 years, I get slapped with a nice penalty, so I'm stuck for another year or so. At any rate, the it is in the contract, doesn't make the clause ethical, if your choice is to stay off the internet, or accept the clause (as I contend it is, as everyone has that clause), then your saying in affect "don't do this behaviour because we decided it is too hard to provide sufficient bandwidth to give you the level of service you paid for, and if you don't like it then don't use the internet". This is unfair, for the first part it is a business standard practice trying to enforce a law that doesn't exist, secondly it is limiting access to information to people that agree with you, with the added consequences of the people that don't agree with you having limited ability to work from home, or gain technical expertise.
Sure people will pay for new features (if they are important enough to them). However, I don't know of many companies that would want everyone to see the modifications they paid for. Talk a CMS for example, you pay for feature X. Now all your competitors have access to it for free, or your devulging the inner workings of your business processes, which could be copied, or in some cases offend your customers (seeing something like if customer == YourCompetitor { discount += 50% } ) would really piss you off I bet:) In the article linked to from a slashdot post last week (nobel laurate in economics), the paper:
SEQUENTIAL INNOVATION, PATENTS,
AND IMITATION
James Bessen
Eric Maskin
Mentions that the vast majority of software companies rank software patents or copyrights as a low priority in controlling the market, they attribute a much greater wait to lead time, and the difficulty a competitor will have catching up. Essentially what happens, is you can't code the whole product, and the new features as quick as the first company can modify the existing product to have those new features so you are excluded from the market.
To quote RMS himself, speaking for the philosophy behind the GPL, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html
he does believe all software should be free. His arguement why people would continue to program in his Utopia is that 1)programming is fun, and 2) there are other sources of funds to get paid to program such as universities. Here's what I think about both of those
1) Sure programming is fun. But can you do it full time without getting paid for it? How many people would know it is fun if their was no financial insentive to learn? Think of all the open source projects on say, Sourceforge. Only what maybe 10% of them actually get fully developed. It either a) becomes not fun, or b) the developer losses interest/doesn't have time. How many OSS programs have crappy documentation, or a critical feature that never gets implemented because it is inherently a boring/"unfun" job?
2) Really, RMS? Universities? How big a budget do they have? How many graduating undergrads get full time jobs at the university, what maybe one per year per school? What will everyone else do, get advanced degrees and try to find a faculty position? First off only about 20% of students are considered good enough for grad school, are we going to lower the standard? Who's going to fund the faculty positions? Corporations I suppose because their going to be really gratful for all the free software. Well OSS has been huge for the last 12 years or so (gcc is the first thing to come to mind for truely widespread adoption), how many OSS projects are actually rewarding their developers comparibly to corporate jobs? IMHO we need both OSS and proprietary software, the proprietary stuff pays for the education and living expenses of people, who may choose to donate some time to a OSS project.
The phone companies must love criminals then, this is probably ~10 months or so bills per month, nice. That is why I mention Al Queda and Jihad in every phone call, I want to run up the FBI/NSA bill:)
Hehe. One good thing about Canada is that we have a moderate party. Although pretty much all of them are moderate compared to the US. What if you are pro-choice, but not a tree hugger? What if you are pro gun control, but don't want to legalize what is by definition illegal-immigrants? I guess you can vote for Giuliani if he gets the GOP nomination:) (I think he is as close to a moderate as you'll get)
How about stuff like Sun. Sure you can have the OS for free. But if you can't figure out a problem with the OS (we had an issue with a SAN configuration for example that required hex level coding of device configuration parameters), they come in and charge you 600/hr. What I was getting at is with SaaS most people will be concerned with the upfront cost, say $10/month/PC for an office suite. Then they find something doesn't work on their new thin client, or they are missing a feature, and get nailed by the vendor. SLA's will only protect you so far, in my experience something always comes up that causes the SLA to not be in place. Example: you pushed senior management for a 24/7 SLA so you could do afterhours maintanence, they declined, now an upgrade needs to be done, and they insist it be done after hours. You then ask them for 6k extra to cover vendor costs, and they are like, our SLA was only 1k per year, and I say yeah, that is why we should have gone with the better agreement:)
Anyways, the vendor will want to recoop the employees salary + travel expenses, plus a portion of his training costs, plus their profit, and the end user will be shocked that in one days work they burn through more money than the cost of the hardware (as was the case with our SAN configuration issue). I agree sometimes you are willing to burn through some money to get things done. As is the case sometimes with us, we have internal resources, but if they are all busy with equally important things, the next important thing gets contracted out.
Thats not what I was getting at. The clueless people you describe,your words, were the average user. What I was getting at is the average user is unable (or unwilling) to code their own software. Thus the skills to program are rare and deserve greater than average reimbursement. We don't expect physicians to give their skills away, so why should software engineers? RMS is a good programmer, as are many if not most FOSS developers. My arguement is with the philosophy that because some people donate time to a project, and the project has a bunch of benifits because of the transparency OSS licences enforce, thus everything should be free and open to gain the same benifits.
IMO if software was free by law, virtually no one would go into computer science (think philosophy, when was the last time you saw 2k+ philosophy students at one school). People need to be paid for the majority of their work. They might give some time away, as I do, to something they would like to work on, but they will be damned if they'd make less then they could at an easier line of work.
Hmm, I don't know if that makes any sense. It would be analogous to forcing car companies to release the engineering drawings of all the parts in your car. They aren't going to do that, some of the stuff is trade secret.
I've been doing IT/programming for the last 8 years. It never ceases to amaze me how many intelligent people, in computer science at university or already in the field are such activists for such nonsense. I love conversations with them like:
Me: Why are you in computer science?
Them: Because I really like computers, and and there is a lot of demand for it, and I'll get a good job.
Later on they rant about how all software should be free, and everyone should see the source code. Well how is anyone going to pay you for it then? Duh. SaaS or something can sort of work, we'll make the program, and you'll pay for service. But then people get bitchy when you try to bill them 600/hr for the service (not realizing there is 10hrs of programming for every hour of tech support). The company ends up getting a bad reputation, because either they are too expensive, or users try to figure it out themselves and can't, then whine when they break it.
Where are the free food advocates? How about the free house advocates?
Bottom line software is expensive, because it requires a lot of knowledge to make, lots of smart, long educated people go into making it. As well it is a high risk business, if your 6mths late with your implementation of your idea, you might not recoup your costs, or worse get sued.
Versus a lower percentage into say a house. You have a couple dozen architects hours (usually spread over a dozen or so cookie cutter houses), and the rest are skilled yes, but not necessarily demaining of someone in say the top 10% of the world for IQ, or physical dextarity, or strength. There are more people capable of learning the skill, where as I'd put forth, that this isn't the case with engineering and programming. And, you know you'll get paid, because you have the costumer up front that picked your drawing and said, yes, build me 12 of these on this property.
If you disagree that software is hard, do you really think that the 90% or so end users that give you a blank stare when you explain a simple trouble shooting problem to them (like my computers froze, did you try to reboot it?), could start hacking together a CMS system in C++? The rarer the raw materials the more something is worth.
The strange thing about cigarettes is that no matter how much you tax them, people still buy as much as they used to. Yeah, they might not be paying all the taxes though. The majority of smokers in my area drive an hour to an indian reserve(or have someone pick up theirs while their there) and pick up a dozen or so cartons at $15 a piece (compare to 50 with taxes at the local stores). The end result is more carbon immissions and a bunch of bitchy smokers. Also, most of them claim to smoke more when they have a bunch left, so buying by the thousands is probably not the best for them.
You can only tax so much, before you drive people out of the legal market. These people are addicts and will do what it takes to get their fix. I don't like the current system, I think the government should go one way or another. Either make illegal the substances that have a sin tax associated with it, or, drop the taxes on them. Don't say they aren't good, you have to pay more but can do it anyways. How do we know if the taxes impossed are going to cover the costs of treatment in the future, when we don't know the method of treatment that will be used?
I work at a cancer centre. The more advanced types of radiation treatments, like what you'd need for a lung, think about it you have a moving object, near a bunch of organs with huge change in density (air pockets), rather than something less dynamic like a breast or a prostate. With current methods, our machine costs about 2M, and staff time, your looking at about 3000 dollars for a couple hours of treatment time (spread over a couple weeks).
In order to treat the more advanced cases like lung, you need another 1M for a better imager on the machine, and easily triple the staff time to plan the patient. So roughly $5000 for treatment. Not only that lung is more likely to spread of cause other complications, like being on a respirator for the rest of your life. Anyways, thats my rant about that, there can be an order of magnitude or two difference between estimated and treatment cost, because new technologies come in. In a socialist healthcare system like Canada, you end up paying for the more expensive treatment because it will give better patient care.
A better solution would be, if you smoke you have no health coverage and you have to pay for your own treatments (either a list of smoking related diseases, or everything, to make sure we don't miss a disease that is caused by smoking or whatever sin we are punishing).
Often the Linux community tries to push the open source equivalent on you, ogg. However, with a little bit of time you can find so many alternatives, that the problem becomes information overload, since its all free, I'll take the little bit of frustration, inorder to find the "product" closest to my wish list. Kudos to the Ubuntu distro team, even our head of IT at work (3000 employees), says if he was to replace windows on the enterprise it would be with Ubuntu.
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All the bitching around my work about how hard drives used to last longer. With my limited cross section, I have 2 computers at home, both ca 1998, still running original hard drives, in fact I've obsoleted 6 workstations so far at home, none of them had hard drive failures, I had one PSU, one GPU, and one NIC failure. At work (mainly a IBM shop) I've had to replace about 20% of drives within 4 years (I admin 50 workstations). I realize there is a lot of variables, smaller read heads, faster spin rates etc, but it does seem that my old dinosaur home computers last longer than the newer PC's we have at work. I'd be curious if "power saving" is putting our data at risk.
To see which candidates would admit they don't know the answer and which would try to guess.
In advanced QM you learn that you can do anything as long as it is for a short enough time that it can't be measured. I'm a strong believer that if your theory allows an irational universe then your theory isn't the "final truth". While stuff like quantum foam can be useful to aid in calculations, I don't think we have enough evidence to prove that it actually exists. A lot of QM theorists subscribe to if it can exist then it does, funny how most of them also subscribe to the god doesn't exist theory. Hmm, is an all powerful God that you can't see any less rational than an infinite collection of quantum realities being created and destroyed every 10^-20 seconds?
That is a tiny amount of energy, but it is on a single photon, not a bunch. We don't currently have a particle accelerator that can go to that high of an energy. Typical energys are 5X10^3 for medical X-ray imaging, and 4-20X10^6 for radiation treatments. This is a billion times more energy.
I can't see the courts making the vendor refund more than the cost of their OEM license from MS. So no it won't cost them anything, they still sold the computer. MS might not be happy that they couldn't sell another license of XP, but that is a different problem. Either the user won't be using Windows at all (unlikely), or they all ready have a license from a trashed computer (more likely), or they are planning on pirating a copy and so don't want to pay for the license at all (probably the most likely, but hey I'm cynical).
Absolutely. Also, indexing and searching the junk is an issue. I read a white paper a couple weeks ago about that. Everyone is keeping everything they download, taking a dozen pics a day, and then want to find one thing on their 2TB personal storage array. Also, filesystem efficiency is becoming an issue. Google and other large datacentres throw huge amounts of processing power an cashing hierachies at the problem, but how does that work for the home user? If we have 1TB thumbdrives, then we'll probably have 1PB internal drives, ouch.
Windows historically may have gone too much the other way, burn through performance, to make things pretty, and simple. If it is prettier on your system people will develop for it. Now they've moved that to the development paradigm as well with Visual Studio being JIT centric, and moves to replace MFC with .Net libraries.
Who will win? I'm voting for MS at least for another 10 years, the normal user will throw RAM and GHz at the problem, and have things pretty. They also probably will be willing to throw a few hundred every few years at MS for the latest and greatest, or pirate a copy. When computers were more of a hobby for the home user it was a pain to shell that out, but now that it is most people main entertainment and part of their work, it is easier to justify. It will be interesting who supports multi-core better in 10 years, historically the science and engineering folks were the ones writting concurrent/parallel apps.
PC $999 (899 w/o OS)
One of my fellow students in university (I have a physics degree, he had double major physics, applied math, followed with MSc (Physics), PhD Math, a fairly bright guy ;) ), anyways, his PhD thesis was solving electron quantum states in carbon nano-tubes. Properties he mentioned were, they are superconducting in one direction, and have total internal reflection (what causes fiber optics to be useful). So yes they will make a better internet. They also could make better electronics in general (no resistance = electrons moving as fast as they possibly can with the applied voltage).
This is even more an issue, as with the free versions of Visual studio, MS is allowing people to learn how to develop for MS platforms for free. MS has always believed strongly in the "we don't sell the OS, we sell the ecosystem" philosophy, and that is what they are trying to do. Help people learn to develop for their products, so they continue to have a growing market for upgrades.
IMO .Net obsoleted Java at .Net 1.1. Java can be used, but from then on .Net had more features, better performance, and "language independance" is a winner. Java is useful, and there is probably a 5 year window where people coming through a CS degree, learned OOP on Java (before it switched back to C++/C#, at least that is what happened at my school, and a few others I know of), so there is a lot of developers out there more comfortable with Java. So if it suits the projects needs, go for it. However, I love being able to code in the language that the solution comes into my head, if VB then VB.net, if Cish then C# or managed C++. While Eclipse is nice, it is still behind VS as an IDE, I know it is kind of a non-technical reasoning, but VS looks better, andVS feels more "integrated" to me. Add to it a large range of 3rd party vendors that supply pluggins to VS (I use Component Softwares CVS/RCS plugin for example, it seemlessly plugs into Windows as a whole, VS recognizes it as does office and Win explorer), and I'm able to integrate my whole dev env not just the editor/designer into one app.
Also such things like Visual studio, sorry java fans but Eclipse is not a competitor, in my opinion no one is within 5 years of MS in the IDE game. Still they add feature after feature, LINQ, more testing capablities, WPF (admittedly part of the OS SDK still), etc. Another example would be office, people complain about how many changes were made, however in that market again no real competition, people that are going to pay for an office suite 95% of the time will pick office. They didn't have to risk all the change, they chose to, because rightly or wrongly they thought it would improve the user experience.
Wow, at first glance I thought it was referring to confirming that the viewers are of age, but no its the performers. Seems strange, I thought is is illegial in most parts of the states to take part in pornography if you are under 18. If so, having to confirm who you are hiring is of age would be analogous to having to check a drivers license of someone applying for a trucker job, or a social to confirm that someone can legally work. I don't see how this is overly burdensome.
Both XP and linux are good options I have both, and like both. Linux updates apps to the latest version much nicer, in that you don't have to get a disc in the mail, go through the update, where as a lot of companies (eg. Matlab) mail the upgrade discs so your at least a week behind, and some installers are really stupid and reinstall the whole app, or at least it feels that way. XP, much easier to find drivers for, and as far as drivers go, tend to have better installers than their linux counterparts IMHO. Anyways, shy of device issues, both would be a matter of automated updates, which really shouldn't count against the OS as for most of them you can still be using the system.
MS has a different philosophy, and so has to go in larger steps. They need to market their software, they need to convince users to shell out money for it, they need to convince oems to pre-install it, and negotiate the pricing structure. All this leads to larger more substantial releases. Completely reworked GUI's, privilege schemes, filesystems etc. I'm sorry going from KDE 3.5.7 to 3.5.8 doesn't strike me as a major upgrade. Similarly with the kernel changes. I upgraded my Kubuntu from 7.4 to 7.10 and didn't notice a difference.
Now I didn't spend time reading up of a bunch of forums for some of the more obscure features, I honestly don't care if I can turn my multiple desktops into a spinning Rubix cube, I only use the one desktop anyways, I can't stand having more than 4 things open at once, and can't be bothered to remember which desktop I opened what in.
Anyways, MS has to make major changes to convince people to upgrade, or at least make people think they got their moneys worth. Unfortunately, major changes screw over the end users that have spend 5 years learning keyboard shortcuts, or what have you. Stability issues will crop up and might take a year or so to get worked out.
Not mostly business, use, but business use was why I got the high end rather than a step down (6Mb versus 4Mb). Really what was nice was the upload, as it jumped from 128k to 756k between the two options, and I was at the time doing a lot of sql queries from one DB and inserting into another, so when doing work at home(about 5 hrs a week) my upload/download traffic was fairly symmetric so this package should have been a big win. I noticed about a doubling of performance, on my upload but no where near what the "quoted rate was". Being the system admin, I was able to confirm I had the DB's to myslef so that wasn't the issue. We could have a slow gateway server or something but we have high end equipment (new IBM blades, new Cisco switches, top of the line SAN etc) so I doubt that was the issue.
As for the "it was in your contract arguement". Well it is in every contract that I've seen for internet services, but that doesn't make it right. P2P is not illegial here (as ruled by the supreme court), they have no proof that I'm downloading copyrighted material (actually I'm downloading different OS's, and public domain stuff), but still it is a clause. It isn't a matter of take it or leave it for me are most people, the fact is the internet is a major part of society now, people are trying to use the service they paid for (don't sell me 6Mb if there is no way you'll let me use it).
In my case as well, I bought the highest speed available, because I often work from home, I didn't want to be billing my employer for time I waited for my slow connection. Will guess what? My ISP thinks all encrypted packets are a p2p agent in disguise, so I get throttled way down as soon as I start my VPN connection. Yet another clause in my contract says if I cancel my service within 2 years, I get slapped with a nice penalty, so I'm stuck for another year or so. At any rate, the it is in the contract, doesn't make the clause ethical, if your choice is to stay off the internet, or accept the clause (as I contend it is, as everyone has that clause), then your saying in affect "don't do this behaviour because we decided it is too hard to provide sufficient bandwidth to give you the level of service you paid for, and if you don't like it then don't use the internet". This is unfair, for the first part it is a business standard practice trying to enforce a law that doesn't exist, secondly it is limiting access to information to people that agree with you, with the added consequences of the people that don't agree with you having limited ability to work from home, or gain technical expertise.
SEQUENTIAL INNOVATION, PATENTS, AND IMITATION
James Bessen Eric Maskin
Mentions that the vast majority of software companies rank software patents or copyrights as a low priority in controlling the market, they attribute a much greater wait to lead time, and the difficulty a competitor will have catching up. Essentially what happens, is you can't code the whole product, and the new features as quick as the first company can modify the existing product to have those new features so you are excluded from the market.
To quote RMS himself, speaking for the philosophy behind the GPL, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html he does believe all software should be free. His arguement why people would continue to program in his Utopia is that 1)programming is fun, and 2) there are other sources of funds to get paid to program such as universities. Here's what I think about both of those
1) Sure programming is fun. But can you do it full time without getting paid for it? How many people would know it is fun if their was no financial insentive to learn? Think of all the open source projects on say, Sourceforge. Only what maybe 10% of them actually get fully developed. It either a) becomes not fun, or b) the developer losses interest/doesn't have time. How many OSS programs have crappy documentation, or a critical feature that never gets implemented because it is inherently a boring/"unfun" job?
2) Really, RMS? Universities? How big a budget do they have? How many graduating undergrads get full time jobs at the university, what maybe one per year per school? What will everyone else do, get advanced degrees and try to find a faculty position? First off only about 20% of students are considered good enough for grad school, are we going to lower the standard? Who's going to fund the faculty positions? Corporations I suppose because their going to be really gratful for all the free software. Well OSS has been huge for the last 12 years or so (gcc is the first thing to come to mind for truely widespread adoption), how many OSS projects are actually rewarding their developers comparibly to corporate jobs? IMHO we need both OSS and proprietary software, the proprietary stuff pays for the education and living expenses of people, who may choose to donate some time to a OSS project.
The phone companies must love criminals then, this is probably ~10 months or so bills per month, nice. That is why I mention Al Queda and Jihad in every phone call, I want to run up the FBI/NSA bill :)
Hehe. One good thing about Canada is that we have a moderate party. Although pretty much all of them are moderate compared to the US. What if you are pro-choice, but not a tree hugger? What if you are pro gun control, but don't want to legalize what is by definition illegal-immigrants? I guess you can vote for Giuliani if he gets the GOP nomination :) (I think he is as close to a moderate as you'll get)
Anyways, the vendor will want to recoop the employees salary + travel expenses, plus a portion of his training costs, plus their profit, and the end user will be shocked that in one days work they burn through more money than the cost of the hardware (as was the case with our SAN configuration issue). I agree sometimes you are willing to burn through some money to get things done. As is the case sometimes with us, we have internal resources, but if they are all busy with equally important things, the next important thing gets contracted out.
IMO if software was free by law, virtually no one would go into computer science (think philosophy, when was the last time you saw 2k+ philosophy students at one school). People need to be paid for the majority of their work. They might give some time away, as I do, to something they would like to work on, but they will be damned if they'd make less then they could at an easier line of work.
I've been doing IT/programming for the last 8 years. It never ceases to amaze me how many intelligent people, in computer science at university or already in the field are such activists for such nonsense. I love conversations with them like:
Me: Why are you in computer science?
Them: Because I really like computers, and and there is a lot of demand for it, and I'll get a good job.
Later on they rant about how all software should be free, and everyone should see the source code. Well how is anyone going to pay you for it then? Duh. SaaS or something can sort of work, we'll make the program, and you'll pay for service. But then people get bitchy when you try to bill them 600/hr for the service (not realizing there is 10hrs of programming for every hour of tech support). The company ends up getting a bad reputation, because either they are too expensive, or users try to figure it out themselves and can't, then whine when they break it.
Where are the free food advocates? How about the free house advocates?
Bottom line software is expensive, because it requires a lot of knowledge to make, lots of smart, long educated people go into making it. As well it is a high risk business, if your 6mths late with your implementation of your idea, you might not recoup your costs, or worse get sued.
Versus a lower percentage into say a house. You have a couple dozen architects hours (usually spread over a dozen or so cookie cutter houses), and the rest are skilled yes, but not necessarily demaining of someone in say the top 10% of the world for IQ, or physical dextarity, or strength. There are more people capable of learning the skill, where as I'd put forth, that this isn't the case with engineering and programming. And, you know you'll get paid, because you have the costumer up front that picked your drawing and said, yes, build me 12 of these on this property.
If you disagree that software is hard, do you really think that the 90% or so end users that give you a blank stare when you explain a simple trouble shooting problem to them (like my computers froze, did you try to reboot it?), could start hacking together a CMS system in C++? The rarer the raw materials the more something is worth.
You can only tax so much, before you drive people out of the legal market. These people are addicts and will do what it takes to get their fix. I don't like the current system, I think the government should go one way or another. Either make illegal the substances that have a sin tax associated with it, or, drop the taxes on them. Don't say they aren't good, you have to pay more but can do it anyways. How do we know if the taxes impossed are going to cover the costs of treatment in the future, when we don't know the method of treatment that will be used?
I work at a cancer centre. The more advanced types of radiation treatments, like what you'd need for a lung, think about it you have a moving object, near a bunch of organs with huge change in density (air pockets), rather than something less dynamic like a breast or a prostate. With current methods, our machine costs about 2M, and staff time, your looking at about 3000 dollars for a couple hours of treatment time (spread over a couple weeks).
In order to treat the more advanced cases like lung, you need another 1M for a better imager on the machine, and easily triple the staff time to plan the patient. So roughly $5000 for treatment. Not only that lung is more likely to spread of cause other complications, like being on a respirator for the rest of your life. Anyways, thats my rant about that, there can be an order of magnitude or two difference between estimated and treatment cost, because new technologies come in. In a socialist healthcare system like Canada, you end up paying for the more expensive treatment because it will give better patient care.
A better solution would be, if you smoke you have no health coverage and you have to pay for your own treatments (either a list of smoking related diseases, or everything, to make sure we don't miss a disease that is caused by smoking or whatever sin we are punishing).
Often the Linux community tries to push the open source equivalent on you, ogg. However, with a little bit of time you can find so many alternatives, that the problem becomes information overload, since its all free, I'll take the little bit of frustration, inorder to find the "product" closest to my wish list. Kudos to the Ubuntu distro team, even our head of IT at work (3000 employees), says if he was to replace windows on the enterprise it would be with Ubuntu.