Of course they can grow! It just isn't likely to come at the expense of the competitors slice of the pie. Economics is not zero sum, if the entire IT industry grows and Microsoft grabs a slice of the new bit, it has grown without increasing its percentage share of the market. If a new market emerges and Microsoft grabs a slice, it has grown. If a new market emerges and Microsoft manages to dominate it, then it has grown and done very well, however under Ballmers leadership this has been and remains unlikely to happen. Now before you (and everyone else) immediately dismisses out of hand the notion that Microsoft is capable of dominating a new market, that is exactly how they came into existence! IT existed before MS, and they did it a second time with Office, and then they did it again with IE (ok that was an unfair example...)
The point is that it is entirely possible for Microsoft to grow, so there isn't much sense saying they are a poor investment. Besides, if they pay dividends then they are a worthy investment, and they do.
Just to quickly pick a point: Web apps suffer the exact same vendor lock in that any other app does. Web does not equal LAMP. Most corporate web apps are going to be written for IIS on.net or asp, so you are going to have to port them too.
People need to accept that a good part of MS dominance is simple economics, that is to say there is an important demand side factor that geeks are too easy to dismiss. People (*gasp*) want the microsoft stuff...
In Australia, a senators constituency is his entire state, so you are talking about one helluva big pile of letters there. Yes, we elect 6 senators per state and thats it, when you vote you have to fill out a form a meter long!
My major concern is that science as a whole is going to lose out in the long run, not governments, not industry, and not bankers. A lot of scientists are basically gambling away the credibility of science as it exists in the minds of the public, and that is bad for the scientists and bad for our civilisation. You are spot on in saying the politicisation of the issue is bad news but I won't let (the many) scientists off the hook here because they have been complicit in the whole affair as far as I'm concerned. I don't think I've heard a 'scientist' in the public eye in recent months, hell years, say anything other than: "There is a consensus, there is indisputable proof".
The idea of a scientific consensus concerns me to no end. Science is about proving theories wrong, you can't prove a theory correct you can only demonstrate that a given theory is better than another theory. If everybody agrees then nobody is out trying to prove the current theory wrong, and that is simply not science, its belief.
You can be both interested and passionate about cleaning up the environment AND skeptical of bad science. I know I am. It is extremely important to humanity that science remain of the highest integrity, especially for the environmentalists out there. I'm sorry but the 'return to subsistence living in a mud hut' philosophy will never wash with the masses so we have exactly one avenue: better, cleaner technology.
Now my point is this, if we don't have an active interest in science in the community then we won't have a growing community of good scientists. Without a strong and growing community of good scientists our rate of advance in engineering will decline, and we are very dependent on rapid advances in technology to solve our environmental problems. Now at best, global warming research teaches young scientists to be overly optimistic about the capabilities of statistical modeling, at worst it teaches that falsifiability is overrated and you can manipulate data to fit a belief. And when prediction after prediction turns up wrong you will take the luster off what is a very good and honorable profession, and you will inevitably turn a good portion of the public away from science altogether. This is enough of a problem already!
The pursuit of science is in and of itself a marvelous thing to be involved in, the sciences are possibly the greatest examples of all human achievement (certainly they are in my opinion). But science is not about proving things! Science is about observing, and attempting to explain, always improving your explanations. Consensus and proof are antithetical to science, and this is where this whole GW stuff is really getting dangerous to science. Predictions are going to keep turning up wrong, and all of the vast industry of scientific research is going to suffer because of it. Ultimately this means those of us who do want to help the environment are going to have a much harder time achieving anything.
Global warming has already taken control of far too much of the environmental debate, it seems now that most average people are convinced that if we 'solve' this 'problem' then we have saved the planet. Well, I for one believe there are far more important and pressing issues than a few degrees temperature change over the next century.
Wait, what? I didn't say anything about IE, what I said was that if you expect web pages to be rendered quickly and look nice then standards compliance is the only way to go. The days of Microsoft having a 90% browser share are long gone, they can't afford to design like that any more, and it seems they are taking measures to remedy this.
How successful do you think a media player would be if it played an mp3 differently to other media players? say at a different frequency so everything is faster. This idea is nonsensical, and yet we accept it as given for an internet browser?
That quote leaves out the fact that they're also necessary. The models may be bad, but until we get better ones we have to work with the ones we have now.
But thats a bit of a cop out isn't it? So let me get this straight,we don't have the technology to accurately predict things so we will go with something we know to be horridly inaccurate because we have nothing better. I'm sorry if I'm sounding a bit harsh here but thats just not good enough.
The problem I have now with climate change (I'm a skeptic of the models, as all scientific minded people should be, but I believe in the fluctuations) is there is an elephant in the room that nobody dares discuss. And here it is: The collective world is in no way ever going to come together and cut CO2 emissions to the levels that scientists claim is necessary. I'm not being hopelessly pessimistic here I honestly believe that this is simply a pragmatic and obvious view. The problems governments across the world have is that this is a giant mexican standoff. Nobody is going to give an inch lest they lose competitive advantage over other countries.
Its not good I know and I agree, but given that this is the dismal situation we are in there is a fifth thing that NOBODY wants to talk about: What do we do when it happens. Every imaginable half measure to mitigate CO2 output is being attempted, and yet no plans are being put in place to deal with rising sea levels. No discussion takes place on the necessity to build for stronger storms, to capture more rainfall when it comes. Nobody seems to want to admit that if the scientists are right, we aren't stopping this thing. Not no way so long as the geopolitical situation is as it is. That is a reality that I believe we need to learn to live with. And I'm sorry, but please, prove me wrong.
The question is, "Will the pages I use the most render quickly and look nice?" NOT "Is the browser standards-compliant and will it make web development easy for people that I never see or care about?"
At then end of the day though, these are really the same thing. I see you are asserting that it is simply a developers problem, well its not always high on a particular developers mind to code for a given platform, and many simply aren't aware. Now since IE is the dominant platform, that means you lose. The site renders incorrectly because standards and/or stupid hacks are not adhered to.
Now as a sometimes web developer, I can tell you it makes a whole lot more sense for browsers to simply adhere to standards than to rely on the plethora of stupid hacks required to get around various inconsistencies. The absolute worst part is that IE6 is still floating around, and that is one mother of a pain in the ass to code for. Nothing works the way it is supposed to, and simple: if *IE6: blah; else *IE7: foo; logic is not entirely present in html or css, so you rely on javascript or other random hacks that are again not necessarily supported.
So in short: if you want pages to render right then you should support standards compliance.
Look, I'm being a Telstra fanboy, I hate Telstra with a passion. I have a friend or two on the inside, missus used to work there. They are assholes of the highest order, but there is a lot of confidence right now that things are on track. Right up until this recent situation, but I doubt that will change much. I am simply stating what I see as a purely pragmatic position: I want the NBN to go ahead, as soon as possible, the only thing that kicking Telstra out of the bidding process has done is prolong that eventuality. Hell I would LOVE to see Optus win the tender, that would be fantastic, but do you really think that things will then go ahead smoothly if Telstra is pissed off about the whole thing? They own everything for christs sake! This shit will not happen without their FTTN network being a part of it, and their copper, and everything else they own.
To some degree, yes it was a bit mean of me to compare Telstra stock to mining stock recently, but at the same time Telstra stock HAS been bucking the trend of the overall stock market, a trend which has been going on for weeks now, not just recently and not just mining stock, ALL stock. Now Even the recent fall of Telstra, 10%... Rio Tinto is down something like 70-80%!!
Yes, Telstra stock went down a bit after Sol took over, but this is a reflection of Ziggy and his ridiculously shithouse managing of the company. Its like turning a container ship. Ziggy was the governments lap dog, and it hurt the company. Sol spent his first years sacking people and spending BIG on infrastructure, so yes the company went through a rough patch. But the evidence is now out: Telstra has been going up and the rest of the stock market has been going down. Like him or hate him Sol has been good for the company. There is just a boatload of propaganda out there that says the opposite. He was employed specifically to be a government head kicker after all, and the Howard government was all to happy to play politics with an appointment they did not approve of. Seems Rudd is following suit.
Look, we ALL hate Telstra, and with good reason! But I don't like facts to be clouded by opinion, hearsay and rumour. Honestly I wish to god (or fsm) that Telstra was being driven into the ground, if they went bankrupt we could go ahead with a structural separation! But its just not what the evidence is suggesting.
Science and reason my friend! And I do apologise for being a bit earnest, but thats just me so, well sorry.
So what? The tech media doesn't report accurately on the performance of any given company, especially when it comes to Telstra, they are about as hostile as can be. Telstra is on track for financial targets and company restructuring, they have slimmed down their workforce and improved their bottom line, as well as opened up a whole new market in mobile broadband and it has been a great success story for the company. For once they were able to avoid the government forcing to share the wealth around, and for the first time since the T2 sale their stock price is going UP.
If they are off track, why is it that their stock price has been rising in the midst of the current financial downturn? Can you explain that to me? Rio Tinto is down a ridiculous amount, BHP is down, most other mining stock: the safest blue chip companies in the country are all down significant amounts. And yet Telstra is up... and this is failure?
If Sol had not been a complete success for the company the board would have had off with him years ago. This is not the case. Sol was always a contentious selection and there has always been significant displeasure amongst the shareholders leveled toward him. The government in particular was not impressed with Sol, ever. And yet he remains. All the indicators suggest he has been a success story for the company, so can you explain to me again how he is driving Telstra into the ground?
Look, I have at least some knowledge of Telstra, and I can tell you Sol is on track. They are making more money, they are meeting targets, and most importantly Telstra shares, for the first time since the T2 sale, have been going up.
That is the measure of a CEO's performance, and by that measure Sol has been a success. You might want to include some actual examples next time you try to rubuke this, but you cannot argue with this fact: In the recent financial crisis, which has caused serious damage to stock across the board (mining companies down ridiculous amounts!), Telstra stock has been rising in value. I don't know how you can look at that fact and just ignore it, then go on with a ideological position that Sol is a failure because you just think so. The evidence says the exact opposite.
Look I agree, but its not entirely true that this was the full tender that Telstra was going to submit. They were saying, I believe, "heres some of it, but we need the rules changed before we give you the rest". This is just how Telstra always works, and I make no judgement as to whether this is a good or a bad thing. I do however assert that excluding Telstra from this whole process is utterly stupid at the end of the day, and that is the shitty situation we are in. Oh and by the way I never said Telstra submitted a lawful tender, but I'm not so sure the government went about this the right way in any case. Yes Telstra is arrogant but it is not incompetent, they simply expected that the defenition of 'lawful tender' would be changed to suit them, at leas in part, now I know you and everyone will balk at that notion but this is the world of gigantic corporates who own everything, and this is what Telstra will fight for. I'm not saying TElstra deserves what it wants, but I am saying that the government should negotiate with them in the interest of the country, as such this is a dual failure of both the government and Telstra. Politics is dirty business, even if it seems morally and legally wrong, we are now in a much worse place with the NBN much farther away than we were two days ago. I don't believe that this situation was inevitable.
Now on the other issue: structural separation, the reality is how do you do it? Do you think its going to be lawful to simply take the assets away from a company? They would need to be purchased, and Telstra does not have them up for sale. I think any attempt by the government to force a re-nationalisation of infrastructure will be met with high court proceedings, and Telstra will have a strong case. Now heres the really messy part: much of their infrastructure has now been built by Telstra the corporate, not Telecom to government department. So its shareholders money that has gone into building say the NextG network, or a lot of the FTTN stuff they have now. I think it is this part that holds the separation back, and this is the glaring failure of the Howard government when the sale went ahead. Sure, give a company all the nations telecommunications infrastructure and simply expect them to play nice... thats going to work! Which ever way you look at it a structural separation will be expensive and messy for the government, and a death knell for Telstra. How do you think it will be viewed by foreign investors if our government makes it legally acceptable to nationalise infrastructure? Whether they legislate or take it to the courts the result is the same: You have enshrined the right to nationalisation in law, and set precedent for acting upon it. This is not going to look good to an investor!
The best solution would be to let the company implode somehow and then follow the american model: nationalise when they ask for it. Pity, Telstra is performing well in the financial crisis (at least it was).
Basically, we are all doomed, and you've got one little man to blame: Johnny Howard.
Sol is not interested in $15 billion taxpayer dollars, Telstra explicitly requested that they be given the money as a loan, not a grant, they don't want strings.
I think a lot of posters are getting bits and pieces of this story right but have failed to put this all into the wider context. Firstly, the half assed tender is nothing amazing, this is how Telstra plays ball, at all levels. What has happened here is the government gave this decision making power to a bunch of public servants, told them they hold the cards and elected officials refused to take part in any negotiations. Now forgive me if I'm going against the grain here but that seems a little optimistic to me. Essentially the government drew up guidelines and declared they were perfect and thus further negotiation on such an enormous public works project was not necessary. A rookie governments mistake, I believe.
Now Telstra, being Telstra, had demands it wanted met. I'm not going to get into the ins and outs of whether these demands were justified or not, I'm just saying this is where they stood. Of note, they wanted two things, they did not want public money with strings that could possibly lead to future separation of the company and its infrastructure, and they wanted an explicit and very legally binding guarantee that there would be no separation in the future. I believe this government is quietly in favour of a structural separation and is at least giving it some thought (its a legal minefield but I believe the only real solution to our current telecommunications quagmire).
So Telstra, as it always does, submits a half baked tender expecting the relevant minister to come knocking and asking what needs to be discussed to fill in the blanks. Telstra, of course has the rest of the proposal ready (some 5000 pages, or so I have read) but not in a form that would be accepted without further negotiations. This time however, the government was not open to negotiations. Read that as you wish but I think only a highly questionable understanding of the extreme situation in this country would lead you to believe this plan can go ahead without Telstra. They literally hold all the cards, whoever wins the bid cannot believe for a second that you could build a network on this scale and not interact with Telstra. Oh yes people think there is competition in infrastructure, but that is a myth. A handful of small companies own hardware that is tacked on to the end of Telstras vast network, there is some that belongs to Optus but not in any significant and coherent way. Telstra literally owns all the important bits, and will be on board however this plan goes ahead, there is no avoiding it.
This result is not good for Australia. I can just about guarantee that our shiny new broadband network will not go ahead until Telstra is on board in some way, and unfortunate as it is this proabably means they will be the ones with the tender. In the end the only losers right now are us, the Australian internet users. Hell I'm ok, I've got my ADLS2+, but theres a whole crapload more people out there who don't.
I know this is slashdot and therefore ideology reigns supreme over political pragmatism, but in this case we lost, the government lost, Telstra lost, and if Telstra lost then whoever wins the tender also lost, Telstra will play it that way. Thats a pretty damn dismal situation, and honestly it could have been avoided if the damn government wasn't so hell bent on avoiding negotiations. Its a shitty situation but we have been lumped with it, so we need to work with it if we want our internets. I'm just saying is all.
I think its a bit short sighted to say Sol has lead Telstra into decline. Barring yesterdays stock tumble Telstra stock has been moving up against the tsunami that is the current financial crisis. I'd say that shows something at least. I'm no fan of Telstra, but Sol is infinitely more capable than his bumbling predecessor. The declines were more about restructuring the company, Sol inherited a company in dramatic decline under Zwitkowski, and has turned it around at least somewhat. You have to give him some credit.
I didn't address it because its a straw man argument. Can you tell me from experience that Vista doesn't achieve more with all the resources it uses? Because I can tell you it loads my most used apps blindingly fast, because it pre-fetches them for me, as it is supposed to. Vista does more things and thus uses more resources, as for the pros and cons of this I dont know, I wouldn't run my server on it but I use the right tool for the right job. I like what Vista does for me, it improves my pc experience in a number of ways and the extra overhead I find is justified for the results I get. Your whole argument here is fallacious: if Vista used more resources than XP and did the same thing (bigger engine in the same car) then yes, your point is valid, but Vista is the bigger engine in a bigger car, it uses more fuel, but it moves more mass.
All my games run just as they did under XP.
My GUI is very much nicer than it was in XP, and I like it like that.
I noticed something months back, when reading some comparison reviews of Vista and XP, when they timed how long it took to load an app in Vista they included the animation times, and yet they did not under XP. Kind of funny you know? Didn't seem all realistic to me.
Application crashes are handled very cleanly in Vista, and I kind of like that you know. My girlfriend runs XP, Chrome beta would cause hard locks constantly, and yet nothing in Vista, but then I've not even had an application cause a hard lock on either of my two Vista machines because it seems to prevent such things from happening, it just closes the app when it freezes.
I have indexed search of anything I need, and I know this certainly uses more resources.
I have already made a lengthy post in this discussion about my experience with the advantages of Vista, and mate, I'm not a goddamn fanboy, I've just had up to my eyeballs with unfounded ridiculous claims from people who have never used Vista, which go completely against my experience and the experience of most people I know who HAVE used Vista.
So tell me, have you used it? Or is your opinion as useful as I'm assuming it is here? I'm sorry for flying off the wall but seriously mate, you pissed me off good and proper. Your arguments are simply not reasonable, you are just reiterating the unfounded catch cries of the "I hate M$ at any cost to logic and reason" crowd.
Using Google brought up wikipedia (on superfetch):
The intent is to improve performance in situations where running an anti-virus scan or back-up utility would result in otherwise recently-used information being paged out to disk, or disposed from in-memory caches, resulting in lengthy delays when a user comes back to their computer after a period of non-use.
So the entire purpose of the large ram usage is to prevent excessive swapping.
Why is it that people just rationalise away without reason, and simply justify their feelings to no end, seemingly without any logical thought whatsoever...
Yes, I might get new, top of the line stuff, but that doesnt mean my old stuff suddenly gets kicked to the curb (at least not until I start running out of space for it - at which time it is oldest/most archaic first).
So don't put Vista on the old stuff! How hard is that?
Don't balk at it when it is offered OEM on the new stuff! Why is this so hard? What is so hard about this? Come on!
Lets break down this 'absurd' reasoning shall we? I said: $1k will buy a new computer that will easily run Vista, $1k is the low end of the spectrum when buying a new machine. In response to this you ask me why you should throw out your old stuff? Don't! But its still obsolete! Nobody asked you to put Vista on your old hardware, but this rationalising as to why it should be avoided on new hardware is ridiculous in the extreme.
I don't throw out my old stuff either mate, I have a fileserver running on a 400mhz G4 Powermac, running Ubuntu (which by the way is far too bloated an OS in its standard form for this hardware and thus I run the server edition). You know, I could try and run OSX on my G4... you think that will work?
Tell me, or at least ask yourself, have you used Vista as a primary machine with all of its (nowadays reasonable) requirements met? And tried your software out? And all your hardware? Have you ever done that?
Goddamn precious little geeks and your bullshit, nobody asked you to throw out your old hardware, nobody asked you to go and buy a new computer, nobody asked you to even use Vista. Please, just use your goddamn common sense. Does your opinion count if you have not used it? No, and so just shut the fuck up in future, ok? Or, try it out, find all the bugs, and get back to me.
Why should you expect Microsoft to have full backwards compatability with all previous drivers on all their new platforms? Why is it Microsofts fault that hardware manufacturers refused to put out new drivers, or could not get them out in time?
I don't get this, when the same scenario exists for linux, there are howls and hate hoots for the hardware manufacturer. Switch Linux for Vista and suddenly its all Microsofts fault...
If driver don't exist for linux, who's fault is it? Linux? Linus? Shuttleworth? Red Hat? No, it is the responsibility of the hardware vendor to produce drivers. Vista is a platform on which you install drivers, it is not the fault of Vista that some shitty developer refuses to adopt a new model. Its tough luck but mate, do your research before you just assume things are going to work. Same thing can be said for software, if vista breaks it, that is not Microsofts fault! Do you really, honestly expect that software will be compatable with every new iteration of windows forever? Would you expect windows 98 software to have worked on XP? Because it sure as hell didn't.
Considering some Alienware hardware will set you back some $5000... yes, I would say around $1k is pretty much a middle of the road to low end amount to fork out for a computer. In fact I know few people who would pay less than that amount.
PS This is in Australia, in Australian dollars with Australian prices: you can translate my $1100 to something like $700 or $800 in the USA I'd say.
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Of course they can grow! It just isn't likely to come at the expense of the competitors slice of the pie. Economics is not zero sum, if the entire IT industry grows and Microsoft grabs a slice of the new bit, it has grown without increasing its percentage share of the market. If a new market emerges and Microsoft grabs a slice, it has grown. If a new market emerges and Microsoft manages to dominate it, then it has grown and done very well, however under Ballmers leadership this has been and remains unlikely to happen. Now before you (and everyone else) immediately dismisses out of hand the notion that Microsoft is capable of dominating a new market, that is exactly how they came into existence! IT existed before MS, and they did it a second time with Office, and then they did it again with IE (ok that was an unfair example...)
The point is that it is entirely possible for Microsoft to grow, so there isn't much sense saying they are a poor investment. Besides, if they pay dividends then they are a worthy investment, and they do.
Just to quickly pick a point: Web apps suffer the exact same vendor lock in that any other app does. Web does not equal LAMP. Most corporate web apps are going to be written for IIS on .net or asp, so you are going to have to port them too.
People need to accept that a good part of MS dominance is simple economics, that is to say there is an important demand side factor that geeks are too easy to dismiss. People (*gasp*) want the microsoft stuff...
In Australia, a senators constituency is his entire state, so you are talking about one helluva big pile of letters there. Yes, we elect 6 senators per state and thats it, when you vote you have to fill out a form a meter long!
My major concern is that science as a whole is going to lose out in the long run, not governments, not industry, and not bankers. A lot of scientists are basically gambling away the credibility of science as it exists in the minds of the public, and that is bad for the scientists and bad for our civilisation. You are spot on in saying the politicisation of the issue is bad news but I won't let (the many) scientists off the hook here because they have been complicit in the whole affair as far as I'm concerned. I don't think I've heard a 'scientist' in the public eye in recent months, hell years, say anything other than: "There is a consensus, there is indisputable proof".
Bad scientists, very bad.
I totally agree, and already posted a lengthy comment on this same idea. This issue really troubles me very deeply.
The idea of a scientific consensus concerns me to no end. Science is about proving theories wrong, you can't prove a theory correct you can only demonstrate that a given theory is better than another theory. If everybody agrees then nobody is out trying to prove the current theory wrong, and that is simply not science, its belief.
You can be both interested and passionate about cleaning up the environment AND skeptical of bad science. I know I am. It is extremely important to humanity that science remain of the highest integrity, especially for the environmentalists out there. I'm sorry but the 'return to subsistence living in a mud hut' philosophy will never wash with the masses so we have exactly one avenue: better, cleaner technology.
Now my point is this, if we don't have an active interest in science in the community then we won't have a growing community of good scientists. Without a strong and growing community of good scientists our rate of advance in engineering will decline, and we are very dependent on rapid advances in technology to solve our environmental problems. Now at best, global warming research teaches young scientists to be overly optimistic about the capabilities of statistical modeling, at worst it teaches that falsifiability is overrated and you can manipulate data to fit a belief. And when prediction after prediction turns up wrong you will take the luster off what is a very good and honorable profession, and you will inevitably turn a good portion of the public away from science altogether. This is enough of a problem already!
The pursuit of science is in and of itself a marvelous thing to be involved in, the sciences are possibly the greatest examples of all human achievement (certainly they are in my opinion). But science is not about proving things! Science is about observing, and attempting to explain, always improving your explanations. Consensus and proof are antithetical to science, and this is where this whole GW stuff is really getting dangerous to science. Predictions are going to keep turning up wrong, and all of the vast industry of scientific research is going to suffer because of it. Ultimately this means those of us who do want to help the environment are going to have a much harder time achieving anything.
Global warming has already taken control of far too much of the environmental debate, it seems now that most average people are convinced that if we 'solve' this 'problem' then we have saved the planet. Well, I for one believe there are far more important and pressing issues than a few degrees temperature change over the next century.
Wait, what? I didn't say anything about IE, what I said was that if you expect web pages to be rendered quickly and look nice then standards compliance is the only way to go. The days of Microsoft having a 90% browser share are long gone, they can't afford to design like that any more, and it seems they are taking measures to remedy this.
How successful do you think a media player would be if it played an mp3 differently to other media players? say at a different frequency so everything is faster. This idea is nonsensical, and yet we accept it as given for an internet browser?
But thats a bit of a cop out isn't it? So let me get this straight,we don't have the technology to accurately predict things so we will go with something we know to be horridly inaccurate because we have nothing better. I'm sorry if I'm sounding a bit harsh here but thats just not good enough.
The problem I have now with climate change (I'm a skeptic of the models, as all scientific minded people should be, but I believe in the fluctuations) is there is an elephant in the room that nobody dares discuss. And here it is: The collective world is in no way ever going to come together and cut CO2 emissions to the levels that scientists claim is necessary. I'm not being hopelessly pessimistic here I honestly believe that this is simply a pragmatic and obvious view. The problems governments across the world have is that this is a giant mexican standoff. Nobody is going to give an inch lest they lose competitive advantage over other countries.
Its not good I know and I agree, but given that this is the dismal situation we are in there is a fifth thing that NOBODY wants to talk about: What do we do when it happens. Every imaginable half measure to mitigate CO2 output is being attempted, and yet no plans are being put in place to deal with rising sea levels. No discussion takes place on the necessity to build for stronger storms, to capture more rainfall when it comes. Nobody seems to want to admit that if the scientists are right, we aren't stopping this thing. Not no way so long as the geopolitical situation is as it is. That is a reality that I believe we need to learn to live with. And I'm sorry, but please, prove me wrong.
At then end of the day though, these are really the same thing. I see you are asserting that it is simply a developers problem, well its not always high on a particular developers mind to code for a given platform, and many simply aren't aware. Now since IE is the dominant platform, that means you lose. The site renders incorrectly because standards and/or stupid hacks are not adhered to.
Now as a sometimes web developer, I can tell you it makes a whole lot more sense for browsers to simply adhere to standards than to rely on the plethora of stupid hacks required to get around various inconsistencies. The absolute worst part is that IE6 is still floating around, and that is one mother of a pain in the ass to code for. Nothing works the way it is supposed to, and simple: if *IE6: blah; else *IE7: foo; logic is not entirely present in html or css, so you rely on javascript or other random hacks that are again not necessarily supported.
So in short: if you want pages to render right then you should support standards compliance.
Are you saying that Gene Ray Is not a physicist!?!
How dare you sir.
I like it!
Look, I'm being a Telstra fanboy, I hate Telstra with a passion. I have a friend or two on the inside, missus used to work there. They are assholes of the highest order, but there is a lot of confidence right now that things are on track. Right up until this recent situation, but I doubt that will change much. I am simply stating what I see as a purely pragmatic position: I want the NBN to go ahead, as soon as possible, the only thing that kicking Telstra out of the bidding process has done is prolong that eventuality. Hell I would LOVE to see Optus win the tender, that would be fantastic, but do you really think that things will then go ahead smoothly if Telstra is pissed off about the whole thing? They own everything for christs sake! This shit will not happen without their FTTN network being a part of it, and their copper, and everything else they own.
To some degree, yes it was a bit mean of me to compare Telstra stock to mining stock recently, but at the same time Telstra stock HAS been bucking the trend of the overall stock market, a trend which has been going on for weeks now, not just recently and not just mining stock, ALL stock. Now Even the recent fall of Telstra, 10%... Rio Tinto is down something like 70-80%!!
Yes, Telstra stock went down a bit after Sol took over, but this is a reflection of Ziggy and his ridiculously shithouse managing of the company. Its like turning a container ship. Ziggy was the governments lap dog, and it hurt the company. Sol spent his first years sacking people and spending BIG on infrastructure, so yes the company went through a rough patch. But the evidence is now out: Telstra has been going up and the rest of the stock market has been going down. Like him or hate him Sol has been good for the company. There is just a boatload of propaganda out there that says the opposite. He was employed specifically to be a government head kicker after all, and the Howard government was all to happy to play politics with an appointment they did not approve of. Seems Rudd is following suit.
Look, we ALL hate Telstra, and with good reason! But I don't like facts to be clouded by opinion, hearsay and rumour. Honestly I wish to god (or fsm) that Telstra was being driven into the ground, if they went bankrupt we could go ahead with a structural separation! But its just not what the evidence is suggesting.
Science and reason my friend! And I do apologise for being a bit earnest, but thats just me so, well sorry.
So what? The tech media doesn't report accurately on the performance of any given company, especially when it comes to Telstra, they are about as hostile as can be. Telstra is on track for financial targets and company restructuring, they have slimmed down their workforce and improved their bottom line, as well as opened up a whole new market in mobile broadband and it has been a great success story for the company. For once they were able to avoid the government forcing to share the wealth around, and for the first time since the T2 sale their stock price is going UP.
If they are off track, why is it that their stock price has been rising in the midst of the current financial downturn? Can you explain that to me? Rio Tinto is down a ridiculous amount, BHP is down, most other mining stock: the safest blue chip companies in the country are all down significant amounts. And yet Telstra is up... and this is failure?
If Sol had not been a complete success for the company the board would have had off with him years ago. This is not the case. Sol was always a contentious selection and there has always been significant displeasure amongst the shareholders leveled toward him. The government in particular was not impressed with Sol, ever. And yet he remains. All the indicators suggest he has been a success story for the company, so can you explain to me again how he is driving Telstra into the ground?
Look, I have at least some knowledge of Telstra, and I can tell you Sol is on track. They are making more money, they are meeting targets, and most importantly Telstra shares, for the first time since the T2 sale, have been going up.
That is the measure of a CEO's performance, and by that measure Sol has been a success. You might want to include some actual examples next time you try to rubuke this, but you cannot argue with this fact: In the recent financial crisis, which has caused serious damage to stock across the board (mining companies down ridiculous amounts!), Telstra stock has been rising in value. I don't know how you can look at that fact and just ignore it, then go on with a ideological position that Sol is a failure because you just think so. The evidence says the exact opposite.
Look I agree, but its not entirely true that this was the full tender that Telstra was going to submit. They were saying, I believe, "heres some of it, but we need the rules changed before we give you the rest". This is just how Telstra always works, and I make no judgement as to whether this is a good or a bad thing. I do however assert that excluding Telstra from this whole process is utterly stupid at the end of the day, and that is the shitty situation we are in. Oh and by the way I never said Telstra submitted a lawful tender, but I'm not so sure the government went about this the right way in any case. Yes Telstra is arrogant but it is not incompetent, they simply expected that the defenition of 'lawful tender' would be changed to suit them, at leas in part, now I know you and everyone will balk at that notion but this is the world of gigantic corporates who own everything, and this is what Telstra will fight for. I'm not saying TElstra deserves what it wants, but I am saying that the government should negotiate with them in the interest of the country, as such this is a dual failure of both the government and Telstra. Politics is dirty business, even if it seems morally and legally wrong, we are now in a much worse place with the NBN much farther away than we were two days ago. I don't believe that this situation was inevitable.
Now on the other issue: structural separation, the reality is how do you do it? Do you think its going to be lawful to simply take the assets away from a company? They would need to be purchased, and Telstra does not have them up for sale. I think any attempt by the government to force a re-nationalisation of infrastructure will be met with high court proceedings, and Telstra will have a strong case. Now heres the really messy part: much of their infrastructure has now been built by Telstra the corporate, not Telecom to government department. So its shareholders money that has gone into building say the NextG network, or a lot of the FTTN stuff they have now. I think it is this part that holds the separation back, and this is the glaring failure of the Howard government when the sale went ahead. Sure, give a company all the nations telecommunications infrastructure and simply expect them to play nice... thats going to work! Which ever way you look at it a structural separation will be expensive and messy for the government, and a death knell for Telstra. How do you think it will be viewed by foreign investors if our government makes it legally acceptable to nationalise infrastructure? Whether they legislate or take it to the courts the result is the same: You have enshrined the right to nationalisation in law, and set precedent for acting upon it. This is not going to look good to an investor!
The best solution would be to let the company implode somehow and then follow the american model: nationalise when they ask for it. Pity, Telstra is performing well in the financial crisis (at least it was).
Basically, we are all doomed, and you've got one little man to blame: Johnny Howard.
Sol is not interested in $15 billion taxpayer dollars, Telstra explicitly requested that they be given the money as a loan, not a grant, they don't want strings.
I think a lot of posters are getting bits and pieces of this story right but have failed to put this all into the wider context. Firstly, the half assed tender is nothing amazing, this is how Telstra plays ball, at all levels. What has happened here is the government gave this decision making power to a bunch of public servants, told them they hold the cards and elected officials refused to take part in any negotiations. Now forgive me if I'm going against the grain here but that seems a little optimistic to me. Essentially the government drew up guidelines and declared they were perfect and thus further negotiation on such an enormous public works project was not necessary. A rookie governments mistake, I believe.
Now Telstra, being Telstra, had demands it wanted met. I'm not going to get into the ins and outs of whether these demands were justified or not, I'm just saying this is where they stood. Of note, they wanted two things, they did not want public money with strings that could possibly lead to future separation of the company and its infrastructure, and they wanted an explicit and very legally binding guarantee that there would be no separation in the future. I believe this government is quietly in favour of a structural separation and is at least giving it some thought (its a legal minefield but I believe the only real solution to our current telecommunications quagmire).
So Telstra, as it always does, submits a half baked tender expecting the relevant minister to come knocking and asking what needs to be discussed to fill in the blanks. Telstra, of course has the rest of the proposal ready (some 5000 pages, or so I have read) but not in a form that would be accepted without further negotiations. This time however, the government was not open to negotiations. Read that as you wish but I think only a highly questionable understanding of the extreme situation in this country would lead you to believe this plan can go ahead without Telstra. They literally hold all the cards, whoever wins the bid cannot believe for a second that you could build a network on this scale and not interact with Telstra. Oh yes people think there is competition in infrastructure, but that is a myth. A handful of small companies own hardware that is tacked on to the end of Telstras vast network, there is some that belongs to Optus but not in any significant and coherent way. Telstra literally owns all the important bits, and will be on board however this plan goes ahead, there is no avoiding it.
This result is not good for Australia. I can just about guarantee that our shiny new broadband network will not go ahead until Telstra is on board in some way, and unfortunate as it is this proabably means they will be the ones with the tender. In the end the only losers right now are us, the Australian internet users. Hell I'm ok, I've got my ADLS2+, but theres a whole crapload more people out there who don't.
I know this is slashdot and therefore ideology reigns supreme over political pragmatism, but in this case we lost, the government lost, Telstra lost, and if Telstra lost then whoever wins the tender also lost, Telstra will play it that way. Thats a pretty damn dismal situation, and honestly it could have been avoided if the damn government wasn't so hell bent on avoiding negotiations. Its a shitty situation but we have been lumped with it, so we need to work with it if we want our internets. I'm just saying is all.
I think its a bit short sighted to say Sol has lead Telstra into decline. Barring yesterdays stock tumble Telstra stock has been moving up against the tsunami that is the current financial crisis. I'd say that shows something at least. I'm no fan of Telstra, but Sol is infinitely more capable than his bumbling predecessor. The declines were more about restructuring the company, Sol inherited a company in dramatic decline under Zwitkowski, and has turned it around at least somewhat. You have to give him some credit.
I didn't address it because its a straw man argument. Can you tell me from experience that Vista doesn't achieve more with all the resources it uses? Because I can tell you it loads my most used apps blindingly fast, because it pre-fetches them for me, as it is supposed to. Vista does more things and thus uses more resources, as for the pros and cons of this I dont know, I wouldn't run my server on it but I use the right tool for the right job. I like what Vista does for me, it improves my pc experience in a number of ways and the extra overhead I find is justified for the results I get. Your whole argument here is fallacious: if Vista used more resources than XP and did the same thing (bigger engine in the same car) then yes, your point is valid, but Vista is the bigger engine in a bigger car, it uses more fuel, but it moves more mass.
All my games run just as they did under XP.
My GUI is very much nicer than it was in XP, and I like it like that.
I noticed something months back, when reading some comparison reviews of Vista and XP, when they timed how long it took to load an app in Vista they included the animation times, and yet they did not under XP. Kind of funny you know? Didn't seem all realistic to me.
Application crashes are handled very cleanly in Vista, and I kind of like that you know. My girlfriend runs XP, Chrome beta would cause hard locks constantly, and yet nothing in Vista, but then I've not even had an application cause a hard lock on either of my two Vista machines because it seems to prevent such things from happening, it just closes the app when it freezes.
I have indexed search of anything I need, and I know this certainly uses more resources.
I have already made a lengthy post in this discussion about my experience with the advantages of Vista, and mate, I'm not a goddamn fanboy, I've just had up to my eyeballs with unfounded ridiculous claims from people who have never used Vista, which go completely against my experience and the experience of most people I know who HAVE used Vista.
So tell me, have you used it? Or is your opinion as useful as I'm assuming it is here? I'm sorry for flying off the wall but seriously mate, you pissed me off good and proper. Your arguments are simply not reasonable, you are just reiterating the unfounded catch cries of the "I hate M$ at any cost to logic and reason" crowd.
Try it, then get back to me.
Using Google brought up wikipedia (on superfetch):
So the entire purpose of the large ram usage is to prevent excessive swapping.
Why is it that people just rationalise away without reason, and simply justify their feelings to no end, seemingly without any logical thought whatsoever...
So don't put Vista on the old stuff! How hard is that?
Don't balk at it when it is offered OEM on the new stuff! Why is this so hard? What is so hard about this? Come on!
Lets break down this 'absurd' reasoning shall we? I said: $1k will buy a new computer that will easily run Vista, $1k is the low end of the spectrum when buying a new machine. In response to this you ask me why you should throw out your old stuff? Don't! But its still obsolete! Nobody asked you to put Vista on your old hardware, but this rationalising as to why it should be avoided on new hardware is ridiculous in the extreme.
I don't throw out my old stuff either mate, I have a fileserver running on a 400mhz G4 Powermac, running Ubuntu (which by the way is far too bloated an OS in its standard form for this hardware and thus I run the server edition). You know, I could try and run OSX on my G4... you think that will work?
Tell me, or at least ask yourself, have you used Vista as a primary machine with all of its (nowadays reasonable) requirements met? And tried your software out? And all your hardware? Have you ever done that?
Goddamn precious little geeks and your bullshit, nobody asked you to throw out your old hardware, nobody asked you to go and buy a new computer, nobody asked you to even use Vista. Please, just use your goddamn common sense. Does your opinion count if you have not used it? No, and so just shut the fuck up in future, ok? Or, try it out, find all the bugs, and get back to me.
Why should you expect Microsoft to have full backwards compatability with all previous drivers on all their new platforms? Why is it Microsofts fault that hardware manufacturers refused to put out new drivers, or could not get them out in time?
I don't get this, when the same scenario exists for linux, there are howls and hate hoots for the hardware manufacturer. Switch Linux for Vista and suddenly its all Microsofts fault...
If driver don't exist for linux, who's fault is it? Linux? Linus? Shuttleworth? Red Hat? No, it is the responsibility of the hardware vendor to produce drivers. Vista is a platform on which you install drivers, it is not the fault of Vista that some shitty developer refuses to adopt a new model. Its tough luck but mate, do your research before you just assume things are going to work. Same thing can be said for software, if vista breaks it, that is not Microsofts fault! Do you really, honestly expect that software will be compatable with every new iteration of windows forever? Would you expect windows 98 software to have worked on XP? Because it sure as hell didn't.
Considering some Alienware hardware will set you back some $5000... yes, I would say around $1k is pretty much a middle of the road to low end amount to fork out for a computer. In fact I know few people who would pay less than that amount.
PS This is in Australia, in Australian dollars with Australian prices: you can translate my $1100 to something like $700 or $800 in the USA I'd say.
Oh god thank you for a rational assessment!! It really is that simple, and it confounds me why people wont even give it a try.
And for the record, no SP1 didn't fix much at all.