I had this awesome business set up whereby I would get random people I just met at pubs *really* drunk, then when they passed out I would remove some organs they didn't appear to be using and sell them on. It made me heaps of money but the damn government came up and told me my business model was unacceptable! Can you believe that?/sarcasm (I don't really remove organs for cash)
The Psystar assholes are trying to profit off of someone elses work, that is all there is to it.
Hangon wait a sec, so when Apple makes it possible to purchase and install windows on macs its fair game, when Pystar makes it possible to purchase and install OSX on PCs its foul play. How the hell does that make sense?
And how in the hell does giving Apple money for their work equate to "profit off someone elses work".
You just said: A implies B, and: A = notB... Logic fail my friend.
Also, keep in mind that a bad clone can tarnish the reputation of OS X being an OS that "just works," since a good number of you know what happens when Linux or UNIX doesn't like a piece of hardware...
So what you are saying is that when the same standards apply to Apple software as they do to Microsoft or Linux based software, it may become apparent that there is no inherent superiority to OSX... Inconceivable!
But by this logic you could make the comparison to the Tesla: Its a Lotus. So what Apple is currently doing would be the same idea as Lotus suing Tesla for using their platform. Except that Lotus actively encourages this as far as I am aware, they make a sale, and they get their platform out there in the market more than they would have otherwise. Or if you don't like the analogy then consider this: Anyone can purchase any model of car from any manufacturer, modify it in any way that meets legal standards and sell it on. Furthermore anyone can purchase any engine from any manufacturer and drop it into any frame they like and sell it on. In all senses the car analogy favours Pystar in this case, as it would for any other industry. Software just has this weird pile of rules applied to it that apply to no other industry because those rules would make no sense to consumers in any other industry.
I honestly believe that Apple are more concerned about people realising Apple hardware is no better than cheap generic hardware than they are of losing control of their platform. That and Jobs has this obsessive idea that Apple must control the user experience from end to end for reasons that completely evade me.
Windows 2000 was too soon to market; for most people Windows 98SE did everything Windows was supposed to do.
No. Windows 2000 was never marketed or intended to be sold as a consumer OS, it was a business grade OS and that is all. WinXP was the first time NT technology was brought to the consumer market. Win98SE and Win2k are like Vista home premium and Vista business edition, except they had different underlying architecture.
I just do not believe that free market principles are sensible for at least a few markets/services, and of these healthcare, education and welfare spring to mind. Now don't get me wrong, I am a fairly staunch supporter of freedoms and free markets, but free markets require certain assumptions to be valid before they function correctly. Firstly you need an informed consumer base, sort of hard to inform yourself of the best choice when you a in desperate need of an emergency ward. Secondly you need decent competition on the supply side, but like many industries health has absolutely enormous barriers to entry and as such we do not have any competition, theres barely even choice with the huge undersupply of services already. Finally the extreme costs lead to an inevitable dependence on insurance services, but insurance relies on the idea that only a few of your customers require payouts. In health EVERYONE will eventually require a payout because we all rot and die, we all get sick, so premiums are so huge and insurance policies so draconian that the service becomes quite useless. This is the example of the american system. No amount of competition will drive health care costs down, we demand cutting edge technology in pristine condition, always. I do not want to be serviced by bargain seeking companies. Health care is simply an example of a service the private sector cannot efficiently provide, in my mind it is most efficiently delivered through a socialist program of non profit public insurance. It is ok to accept that some area of the economy cannot be efficiently serviced by the private sector, this is sound economic theory. Free markets or bust is just idealistic dogma.
I am not against the private sector competing along side public, as we have here in Australia (and I understand you do not in the UK?) but when they do sit side by side you can directly observe the problems the private system has, greater costs to individuals, they are efficiently operated only so long as they can pick and choose customers and so on. Private is great to get people with money through the system quickly, it is utterly hopeless when it comes to servicing every single ailment of every single person in your country, as you need in a healthy modern advanced economy.
oh you pay for it. and if you don't go to the doctor much, you probably pay more for it than you would if it was private.
Just to follow up on my previous point with some figures:
Australia Life expectancy: 80.5 Government expenditure on health: 17.7% of revenue Per capita expenditure (USD): $2,519 Percentage GDP spent on health care: 9.5% Doctors per 1000 people: 2.47 Nurses per 1000 people: 9.71
United Kingdom Life expectancy: 79.5 Government expenditure on health: 15.8% of revenue Per capita expenditure (USD): $2,428 Percentage GDP spent on health care: 8.0% Doctors per 1000 people: 2.30 Nurses per 1000 people: 12.12
United States Life expectancy: 77.5 Government expenditure on health: 18.5% of revenue Per capita expenditure (USD): $5,711 Percentage GDP spent on health care: 15.2% Doctors per 1000 people: 2.56 Nurses per 1000 people: 9.37
So the USA has close to the same number of doctors as Australia and the UK, but less nurses, so your waiting lists are going to be equal to or worse than ours, you spend more than double the cash per person than either Australia or the UK, more than double the percentage of GDP, and you pay more taxes for health care than the socialised examples shown. Thats right, your glorious free market system results in you paying more taxes for health care than I do.
Not only that but who on earth (especially in the climate of the current recession) believes that say an unemployed person or a casual worker or a minimum wage earner has no right to health care due to their financial situation? Because that is what all this "I should pay for my own health care" business is really implying.
In my country (Australia) you can choose whether you go with private insurance or take the free insurance we all get. If you choose private you get your taxes back. Now isn't that easy? Why the hell can't you Americans see that you can have it both ways?
If I want good healthcare, I'll save my money, and negotiate with the healthcare providers to pay them if I cannot do so right away...
Yes, because this is an option available to us all, and everybody can just plan for those life threatening illnesses that need expensive health care. Your idea I bet looks great on the screen in front of you, the theory is sound and makes logical sense right?
Your country pays the highest amount per capita gdp for its health care service. I sincerely doubt your claim is true.
The problem with private health insurance is that you cannot apply the standard model of insurance to health care: EVERYBODY will make a claim eventually. Like it or not, you are already paying through the nose for everyone elses health problems through your insurance, and due to the wonderful function of the badly regulated market you pay more than I do. I don't know what it is, be it an overly litigious society, rampant corruption or a genuinely unhealthy populace, the fact remains that your 'free market' system results in higher health care costs for everybody.
What is up with you lot? Poster claims Apple innovated a bunch of technology that it did not, I call them up on it, and mention that the more I think about it, the more I see Apple observes markets opened up by new, innovative tech and simply improves on them. I can't see anywhere that they have actually led the way, they follow and they follow with good technology. And this seems to have really upset a bunch of people.
Wow, I had a +4 yesterday and Apple troll mods have me down to +1 today!
By my standard? Utter bullshit mate, effectively what you are saying here is that Apple is the bar that defines 'innovation', complete tripe. Of course there is innovation, real technical innovation is when you come up with a novel idea and bring it to life. Putting an accelerometer into a hard drive to save data is innovation, it is not Apple innovation. Designing a cathode ray tube that can display millions of colours at a high refresh rate, then designing a liquid crystal display that can do this also, and then designing an LED panel to light the thing, amazing innovation all of it. None of it Apple. Designing a graphical user interface and input device to use it, that is innovation. That was Xerox innovation which Apple purchased.
Ok so I'll give Apple one more innovation: Desktop computing. They really hit on that idea before anyone else, then aborted it by trying to control it completely. Ultimately IBM won by opening the flood gates, with a little help from Microsoft of course.
This is serious cool aid stuff I'm copping here, I made a legitimate reply to a spurious claim and I've been moderated to oblivion while nobody can come up with a counter argument. Show me some innovations made by Apple and I'm here to listen. Calling business decisions and clever marketing 'innovation' is how MBA's justify their existence, this is a teach website and we are talking about tech.
So go on, point out some real technical innovations made by Apple, surely they exist?
You see my hypothesis is that companies like Apple and Microsoft are not capable of really making true innovations. Why? because innovation entails an unacceptable level of risk for a company this size with this level of prestige. Innovation happens in research facilities and is brought to life by startups, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft etc. purchase these startups and thus absorb their innovations. This is not a good thing a bad thing or any thing it is merely an observation of the world. I make no judgment on Apple! I am simply disputing something somebody claimed.
I am not a hater, but thanks for trying to fan the flames anyway. The GP claimed that Apple invented a pile of technologies which they did not, technologies which they were not even the first to implement, and I called him out on it. Further to this I made the claim that there are few real innovations made by Apple, and I firmly dispute the idea that producing an attractive piece of technology in a niche somebody else created is an innovation.
I don't hate Apple, I own an ipod and I even run a server on an old G4, I like the shiny products and if they weren't price unacceptably high I would own many more Apple products. I'm not a fan of their OS but that is a cosmetic and personal choice. What I do hate is false claims made by fanboys to justify their irrational lust for a certain brand of technology. Is that ok? If you feel that what I have claimed is wrong then dispute it with content, but you have not! You have responded in precisely the manner I predicted. Without content.
A hard drive with an accelerometer? Please. My (not new) HP came with one, and you can buy off the shelf Seagate and other brand hard drives with this built in. This is not an Apple innovation.
Apple does not innovate, I do not see anywhere where they have actually made any innovation in their technology. Power PC? Joint research with IBM, chips not made by apple. Multitouch? Not new, not Apple. MP3 player? Not new, not Apple. Nothing else stands out, they use the same damn off the shelf parts as every other PC manufacturer, they have literally always done this, and their OS is kind of an overrated piece of software (one mans opinion). That leaves us with: The Magsafe connector and Firewire. Magsafe is good I admit, a very clever idea but one that a first year design student might have come up with, ie we are not talking about advanced tech here. Its a magnet. Firewire is just not so much, no matter how much the fans rave about it, it is basically just USB but a bit faster and nothing will connect to it.
But now in defense of Apple 'iInnovation(TM)' I expect comments along the lines of: "its not the parts but the sum" or "the whole user experience is innovative" and other, amorphous and content free claims. There is no innovation here, move along people or just admit that macs are shiny, so very shiny and desirable. Thats it.
Or it means that 50% of the class could not get off their asses and bother to study anything... as is my observation of 50% of the students around me at my university.
The difference is that the big schools tend to set the bar much higher, at least here in Australia they do. You might be struggling for teacher attention (this is doubtful if you are a good student) but you will be forced to solve harder problems and work through greater volumes of material. Plus you can be part of much more interesting and rewarding research projects.
The problem with this whole assessment is that it is nothing new, everyone in teaching already knows that smaller classes are superior for the student and the teacher. The issue is you can't always keep the teacher/student ratios up high enough to even have small classes. For that you need limitless funding and student demand... but then I guess we are talking about MIT.
No, search is for people who don't need to know where they put things. More to the point, even if you put everything in neat folders (as I do) and sort your email (as I do) the stuff will still pile up, and it is still faster to use the search feature to pull it out.
One thing I don't even begin to understand is users clinging on to the classic view of the control panel. What exactly is good about dropping every single icon in one big pile with no context or description. The new control panel in Vista is streets ahead of anything from the win2k days and earlier, and streets ahead of the category view in xp. Then there is the one beautiful feature that makes it work: Search. Wonderful, relational, keyword driven indexed search.
Oh no, give me a pile of shit to sift through anyday!
Except the sheep and wolf analogy has an implied zero-sum notion to it. From our fairy tales and such we think of the wolves as nasty evil creatures, but seriously look at nature: they fulfill a role in the ecosystem and are simply a part of it.
They way I would answer your question is to say we are all wolves and we are all sheep, and the analogy is simply way off mark. Do you seriously think it wise to micro-manage every aspect of the entire economy according to some predefined notion of fairness? Because that sounds like what you are implying. Its a well worn argument but I'll say it anyway: It didn't work for the Soviets, and it didn't work for the Chinese.
The real problem as I see it is already perfectly summed up in Feynmans famous appendix to the Challenger report. The real problem is we have developed highly complex financial systems that more or less require a postgraduate degree in mathematics to understand, I'm willing to bet the vast majority of people making the decisions (not the models) that led us into the current crisis had little to no real understanding of what they were dealing with, and as such they exaggerated the (lack of) risk to suit their managerial requirements. Precisely as occurred in the Challenger disaster and precisely as Feynman went to great pains to describe.
There is no vast conspiracy of criminal selfishness, no wolves and sheep, just a bunch of people working with complex mathematical constructs and absolutely no idea of how they work. The sort of PHB fuckup that most slashdotters should readily understand.
Ok so how old are you? In 1998 the internet was fairly common, of course it looked nothing like it does now but there were thriving warez scenes, those were the days of napster and so on after all. Shit mate I started getting into web dev around 97/98 so it couldn't have been that obscure. Those were the days of irc, aol, the dotcom boom and so forth. But in those days everyone said it: "Microsoft just does not understand the internet" and in part it was true, all they had was IE and hotmail, MSN was then a failure and the rapid ascension of google was upon us. Google won and everybody agreed that MS just did not get it. MS believed early on that they could take it and shape it into their own thing and then control it, and they failed.
However to make this claim in 2008 is fairly obviously wrong and downright stupid. They understand the internet just fine mate, just because their business model does not line up with the free and open ideals of the internet does not mean they misunderstand it. Internet based updates? Hello: IIS,.net, ASP, Silverlight even seems promising if you ask me and if it takes off could really (unfortunately) give the competition a run for their money, or it could flop. The point is they do not fail at the internet because they failed to defeat Google, nobody has been able to put a dent in Google. MS has an online presence, they use the internet to both update and monitor the status of every copy of windows out there. Shit they even have half a clue when it comes to security these days. In the corporate world Microsoft owns the internet (outlook, exchange, and aforementioned server/client web technologies) and thats where the money is.
Microsoft understand the internet alright, just maybe not in the way the you understand it. They make use of it where they need to, and sit back and watch where they do not need to be a part of it. They may want greater market share but I think like 90% of the geeks here you just get a little bit too excited at any sort of idea of MS failure.
So in short: 1998 called, they want their argument back.
Yes, with non-root accounts and most of the major configuration hidden away in.config files they aren't going to be messing with any important settings. Compare this to Windows where people encounter.dll and other important system files on a day-to-day basis
Excuse me? By default.dll files and system files are hidden and should not be able to be un-hidden without elevated privileges. Basically if you are encountering your.dlls regularly you're doing it wrong. In Vista you can't touch these files without elevated privileges, sort of like oh I don't know, linux?
I'm all for a good solid criticism of microsoft and their faults, but seriously dude this is just FUD with a capital everything. You sir are as bad as the MS FUD brigade and you are doing oss no service with this zealous bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
I had this awesome business set up whereby I would get random people I just met at pubs *really* drunk, then when they passed out I would remove some organs they didn't appear to be using and sell them on. It made me heaps of money but the damn government came up and told me my business model was unacceptable! Can you believe that? /sarcasm (I don't really remove organs for cash)
Hangon wait a sec, so when Apple makes it possible to purchase and install windows on macs its fair game, when Pystar makes it possible to purchase and install OSX on PCs its foul play. How the hell does that make sense?
And how in the hell does giving Apple money for their work equate to "profit off someone elses work".
You just said: A implies B, and: A = notB... Logic fail my friend.
Um, last I checked they sell it... You know, for like... cash? Dollars, these things: $$$
Sorry to go all sarcastic on you but mate you are far off the mark here.
So what you are saying is that when the same standards apply to Apple software as they do to Microsoft or Linux based software, it may become apparent that there is no inherent superiority to OSX... Inconceivable!
But by this logic you could make the comparison to the Tesla: Its a Lotus. So what Apple is currently doing would be the same idea as Lotus suing Tesla for using their platform. Except that Lotus actively encourages this as far as I am aware, they make a sale, and they get their platform out there in the market more than they would have otherwise. Or if you don't like the analogy then consider this: Anyone can purchase any model of car from any manufacturer, modify it in any way that meets legal standards and sell it on. Furthermore anyone can purchase any engine from any manufacturer and drop it into any frame they like and sell it on. In all senses the car analogy favours Pystar in this case, as it would for any other industry. Software just has this weird pile of rules applied to it that apply to no other industry because those rules would make no sense to consumers in any other industry.
I honestly believe that Apple are more concerned about people realising Apple hardware is no better than cheap generic hardware than they are of losing control of their platform. That and Jobs has this obsessive idea that Apple must control the user experience from end to end for reasons that completely evade me.
No. Windows 2000 was never marketed or intended to be sold as a consumer OS, it was a business grade OS and that is all. WinXP was the first time NT technology was brought to the consumer market. Win98SE and Win2k are like Vista home premium and Vista business edition, except they had different underlying architecture.
I just do not believe that free market principles are sensible for at least a few markets/services, and of these healthcare, education and welfare spring to mind. Now don't get me wrong, I am a fairly staunch supporter of freedoms and free markets, but free markets require certain assumptions to be valid before they function correctly. Firstly you need an informed consumer base, sort of hard to inform yourself of the best choice when you a in desperate need of an emergency ward. Secondly you need decent competition on the supply side, but like many industries health has absolutely enormous barriers to entry and as such we do not have any competition, theres barely even choice with the huge undersupply of services already. Finally the extreme costs lead to an inevitable dependence on insurance services, but insurance relies on the idea that only a few of your customers require payouts. In health EVERYONE will eventually require a payout because we all rot and die, we all get sick, so premiums are so huge and insurance policies so draconian that the service becomes quite useless. This is the example of the american system. No amount of competition will drive health care costs down, we demand cutting edge technology in pristine condition, always. I do not want to be serviced by bargain seeking companies. Health care is simply an example of a service the private sector cannot efficiently provide, in my mind it is most efficiently delivered through a socialist program of non profit public insurance. It is ok to accept that some area of the economy cannot be efficiently serviced by the private sector, this is sound economic theory. Free markets or bust is just idealistic dogma.
I am not against the private sector competing along side public, as we have here in Australia (and I understand you do not in the UK?) but when they do sit side by side you can directly observe the problems the private system has, greater costs to individuals, they are efficiently operated only so long as they can pick and choose customers and so on. Private is great to get people with money through the system quickly, it is utterly hopeless when it comes to servicing every single ailment of every single person in your country, as you need in a healthy modern advanced economy.
Just to follow up on my previous point with some figures:
Australia
Life expectancy: 80.5
Government expenditure on health: 17.7% of revenue
Per capita expenditure (USD): $2,519
Percentage GDP spent on health care: 9.5%
Doctors per 1000 people: 2.47
Nurses per 1000 people: 9.71
United Kingdom
Life expectancy: 79.5
Government expenditure on health: 15.8% of revenue
Per capita expenditure (USD): $2,428
Percentage GDP spent on health care: 8.0%
Doctors per 1000 people: 2.30
Nurses per 1000 people: 12.12
United States
Life expectancy: 77.5
Government expenditure on health: 18.5% of revenue
Per capita expenditure (USD): $5,711
Percentage GDP spent on health care: 15.2%
Doctors per 1000 people: 2.56
Nurses per 1000 people: 9.37
Source
So the USA has close to the same number of doctors as Australia and the UK, but less nurses, so your waiting lists are going to be equal to or worse than ours, you spend more than double the cash per person than either Australia or the UK, more than double the percentage of GDP, and you pay more taxes for health care than the socialised examples shown. Thats right, your glorious free market system results in you paying more taxes for health care than I do.
Not only that but who on earth (especially in the climate of the current recession) believes that say an unemployed person or a casual worker or a minimum wage earner has no right to health care due to their financial situation? Because that is what all this "I should pay for my own health care" business is really implying.
In my country (Australia) you can choose whether you go with private insurance or take the free insurance we all get. If you choose private you get your taxes back. Now isn't that easy? Why the hell can't you Americans see that you can have it both ways?
Yes, because this is an option available to us all, and everybody can just plan for those life threatening illnesses that need expensive health care. Your idea I bet looks great on the screen in front of you, the theory is sound and makes logical sense right?
Your country pays the highest amount per capita gdp for its health care service. I sincerely doubt your claim is true.
The problem with private health insurance is that you cannot apply the standard model of insurance to health care: EVERYBODY will make a claim eventually. Like it or not, you are already paying through the nose for everyone elses health problems through your insurance, and due to the wonderful function of the badly regulated market you pay more than I do. I don't know what it is, be it an overly litigious society, rampant corruption or a genuinely unhealthy populace, the fact remains that your 'free market' system results in higher health care costs for everybody.
And? Did I make any mention of windows and linux?
What is up with you lot? Poster claims Apple innovated a bunch of technology that it did not, I call them up on it, and mention that the more I think about it, the more I see Apple observes markets opened up by new, innovative tech and simply improves on them. I can't see anywhere that they have actually led the way, they follow and they follow with good technology. And this seems to have really upset a bunch of people.
Wow, I had a +4 yesterday and Apple troll mods have me down to +1 today!
By my standard? Utter bullshit mate, effectively what you are saying here is that Apple is the bar that defines 'innovation', complete tripe. Of course there is innovation, real technical innovation is when you come up with a novel idea and bring it to life. Putting an accelerometer into a hard drive to save data is innovation, it is not Apple innovation. Designing a cathode ray tube that can display millions of colours at a high refresh rate, then designing a liquid crystal display that can do this also, and then designing an LED panel to light the thing, amazing innovation all of it. None of it Apple. Designing a graphical user interface and input device to use it, that is innovation. That was Xerox innovation which Apple purchased.
Ok so I'll give Apple one more innovation: Desktop computing. They really hit on that idea before anyone else, then aborted it by trying to control it completely. Ultimately IBM won by opening the flood gates, with a little help from Microsoft of course.
This is serious cool aid stuff I'm copping here, I made a legitimate reply to a spurious claim and I've been moderated to oblivion while nobody can come up with a counter argument. Show me some innovations made by Apple and I'm here to listen. Calling business decisions and clever marketing 'innovation' is how MBA's justify their existence, this is a teach website and we are talking about tech.
So go on, point out some real technical innovations made by Apple, surely they exist?
You see my hypothesis is that companies like Apple and Microsoft are not capable of really making true innovations. Why? because innovation entails an unacceptable level of risk for a company this size with this level of prestige. Innovation happens in research facilities and is brought to life by startups, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft etc. purchase these startups and thus absorb their innovations. This is not a good thing a bad thing or any thing it is merely an observation of the world. I make no judgment on Apple! I am simply disputing something somebody claimed.
Goddamn it mods "-1 disagree" is not an option!
I am not a hater, but thanks for trying to fan the flames anyway. The GP claimed that Apple invented a pile of technologies which they did not, technologies which they were not even the first to implement, and I called him out on it. Further to this I made the claim that there are few real innovations made by Apple, and I firmly dispute the idea that producing an attractive piece of technology in a niche somebody else created is an innovation.
I don't hate Apple, I own an ipod and I even run a server on an old G4, I like the shiny products and if they weren't price unacceptably high I would own many more Apple products. I'm not a fan of their OS but that is a cosmetic and personal choice. What I do hate is false claims made by fanboys to justify their irrational lust for a certain brand of technology. Is that ok? If you feel that what I have claimed is wrong then dispute it with content, but you have not! You have responded in precisely the manner I predicted. Without content.
A hard drive with an accelerometer? Please. My (not new) HP came with one, and you can buy off the shelf Seagate and other brand hard drives with this built in. This is not an Apple innovation.
Apple does not innovate, I do not see anywhere where they have actually made any innovation in their technology. Power PC? Joint research with IBM, chips not made by apple. Multitouch? Not new, not Apple. MP3 player? Not new, not Apple. Nothing else stands out, they use the same damn off the shelf parts as every other PC manufacturer, they have literally always done this, and their OS is kind of an overrated piece of software (one mans opinion). That leaves us with: The Magsafe connector and Firewire. Magsafe is good I admit, a very clever idea but one that a first year design student might have come up with, ie we are not talking about advanced tech here. Its a magnet. Firewire is just not so much, no matter how much the fans rave about it, it is basically just USB but a bit faster and nothing will connect to it.
But now in defense of Apple 'iInnovation(TM)' I expect comments along the lines of: "its not the parts but the sum" or "the whole user experience is innovative" and other, amorphous and content free claims. There is no innovation here, move along people or just admit that macs are shiny, so very shiny and desirable. Thats it.
Shiny and desirable != innovation
Or it means that 50% of the class could not get off their asses and bother to study anything... as is my observation of 50% of the students around me at my university.
The difference is that the big schools tend to set the bar much higher, at least here in Australia they do. You might be struggling for teacher attention (this is doubtful if you are a good student) but you will be forced to solve harder problems and work through greater volumes of material. Plus you can be part of much more interesting and rewarding research projects.
The problem with this whole assessment is that it is nothing new, everyone in teaching already knows that smaller classes are superior for the student and the teacher. The issue is you can't always keep the teacher/student ratios up high enough to even have small classes. For that you need limitless funding and student demand... but then I guess we are talking about MIT.
Did it ever occur to you to simply reach up to the search box and type.... "mouse"??
No, search is for people who don't need to know where they put things. More to the point, even if you put everything in neat folders (as I do) and sort your email (as I do) the stuff will still pile up, and it is still faster to use the search feature to pull it out.
One thing I don't even begin to understand is users clinging on to the classic view of the control panel. What exactly is good about dropping every single icon in one big pile with no context or description. The new control panel in Vista is streets ahead of anything from the win2k days and earlier, and streets ahead of the category view in xp. Then there is the one beautiful feature that makes it work: Search. Wonderful, relational, keyword driven indexed search.
Oh no, give me a pile of shit to sift through anyday!
Aren't stocks actually considered a type of money in the fiat system? As in stock is *literally* money (not folding of course!).
Except the sheep and wolf analogy has an implied zero-sum notion to it. From our fairy tales and such we think of the wolves as nasty evil creatures, but seriously look at nature: they fulfill a role in the ecosystem and are simply a part of it.
They way I would answer your question is to say we are all wolves and we are all sheep, and the analogy is simply way off mark. Do you seriously think it wise to micro-manage every aspect of the entire economy according to some predefined notion of fairness? Because that sounds like what you are implying. Its a well worn argument but I'll say it anyway: It didn't work for the Soviets, and it didn't work for the Chinese.
The real problem as I see it is already perfectly summed up in Feynmans famous appendix to the Challenger report. The real problem is we have developed highly complex financial systems that more or less require a postgraduate degree in mathematics to understand, I'm willing to bet the vast majority of people making the decisions (not the models) that led us into the current crisis had little to no real understanding of what they were dealing with, and as such they exaggerated the (lack of) risk to suit their managerial requirements. Precisely as occurred in the Challenger disaster and precisely as Feynman went to great pains to describe.
There is no vast conspiracy of criminal selfishness, no wolves and sheep, just a bunch of people working with complex mathematical constructs and absolutely no idea of how they work. The sort of PHB fuckup that most slashdotters should readily understand.
Ok so how old are you? In 1998 the internet was fairly common, of course it looked nothing like it does now but there were thriving warez scenes, those were the days of napster and so on after all. Shit mate I started getting into web dev around 97/98 so it couldn't have been that obscure. Those were the days of irc, aol, the dotcom boom and so forth. But in those days everyone said it: "Microsoft just does not understand the internet" and in part it was true, all they had was IE and hotmail, MSN was then a failure and the rapid ascension of google was upon us. Google won and everybody agreed that MS just did not get it. MS believed early on that they could take it and shape it into their own thing and then control it, and they failed.
However to make this claim in 2008 is fairly obviously wrong and downright stupid. They understand the internet just fine mate, just because their business model does not line up with the free and open ideals of the internet does not mean they misunderstand it. Internet based updates? Hello: IIS, .net, ASP, Silverlight even seems promising if you ask me and if it takes off could really (unfortunately) give the competition a run for their money, or it could flop. The point is they do not fail at the internet because they failed to defeat Google, nobody has been able to put a dent in Google. MS has an online presence, they use the internet to both update and monitor the status of every copy of windows out there. Shit they even have half a clue when it comes to security these days. In the corporate world Microsoft owns the internet (outlook, exchange, and aforementioned server/client web technologies) and thats where the money is.
Microsoft understand the internet alright, just maybe not in the way the you understand it. They make use of it where they need to, and sit back and watch where they do not need to be a part of it. They may want greater market share but I think like 90% of the geeks here you just get a little bit too excited at any sort of idea of MS failure.
So in short: 1998 called, they want their argument back.
1998 called, they want their argument back.
Excuse me? By default .dll files and system files are hidden and should not be able to be un-hidden without elevated privileges. Basically if you are encountering your .dlls regularly you're doing it wrong. In Vista you can't touch these files without elevated privileges, sort of like oh I don't know, linux?
I'm all for a good solid criticism of microsoft and their faults, but seriously dude this is just FUD with a capital everything. You sir are as bad as the MS FUD brigade and you are doing oss no service with this zealous bullshit.