The fact that for most of the components, you actually *can* tear them apart and repair them, you can pull a carb apart and work on it, I'd like to see you try that on a fuel injector. Most modern cars contain single use items that are press fit and sealed at the factory, never to be serviced because you simply *cannot*.
But thats just the beginning, the geekiest thing about a 70's car is it is usually very easy to shoehorn modern technology into them and even program that shit yourself! I have a 1970s Australian muscle car and I have very big dreams of fitting all the typical modern equipment into it, with software I can tune myself from a usb port I've installed somewhere myself. I've considered hiding a touchscreen somewhere like in the glove box, running some flavour of linux on cannibalised netbook hardware, or even an ARM dev board. I've even been considering writing my own engine management software and putting it on a suitably fast micro to run my injectors/ignition. I also want a discrete under-bonnet blower with an electric clutch so I literally have an on/off switch for my boost.
I have nothing but the absolute geekiest dreams about my 70's muscle car. Playing with some fragile, locked down engineering departments toy is not geeky, but creating your own toy certainly is. The 70's muscle car is the *parfect* clean slate to do this.
Except that the head of the IPCC came out fighting, calling the claims 'voodoo science', when it was pointed out that the error had been made. I am ok with errors being made, but what upsets me hugely in the AGW debate is that both sides throw out anything to do with science in favour of simply attacking each other from a position of idealism.
It wasn't a typo, it was a poorly researched claim that they defended when the error was pointed out to them.
Honestly dude, how much of their time would be taken up posting a tweet? Nasa needs a public image, it needs to show itself off to the public and keep a good image in the public eye because thats what keeps people interested in the whole thing and thats what will hopefully inspire and draw in new engineering and science talent in the future. You may not like Twitter but Nasa certainly needs good pr.
For the time it takes the astronauts to drop a tweet here and there (albeit more or less wasted time) compared to the pr benefits of actually doing this in the first place, I'd say there is a pretty decent return on the investment.
As an Australian I know very well that there is money to be made from China, a LOT of money. China effectively protected our entire country from the global financial crisis by importing our raw materials. But theres the trick, we are the worlds largest coal mine, and we have the worlds largest gas reserves, we also supply a shitload of iron ore. If you have raw materials that China wants, you are in business, big business.
However, money made from advertising is directly related to the middle class consumerist economy. I don't think China is quite there yet but I'd agree with other slashdotters here that the point is to be there when China does become more middle class.
Anyway, we (Australia) are making ridiculous amounts of money off China right now, and it looks like it will continue that way for a while.
I explicitly stated that mathematics is not formulas and I am not talking about mathematical formulas. I am talking about logical procedures and the reasoning behind them. Constructive proofs are no different from an algorithm, in fact that is where mathematical algorithms are born, they are the same thing.
Taksbar now looks like dock did in Tiger 4 years ago.
Windows have drop shadow, like they do in OS X for a long time now.
These are fairly petty complaints. I have two cars and both have steering wheels in front of me, with climate control panels in the middle, gear shifters in the middle, and peddles under the steering wheel. What. The. Fuck?
Aero peek and aero flip 3d are rip off of expose.
Flip 3d sort of tries to do what expose does, but you could hardly call it a ripoff, and it sucks balls and nobody uses it. Whoop dee do, a fancy animated way to do alt-tab, how innovative and original of both mac and windows. Aero peek on the other hand is not even remotely close to expose, and is a very good, very useful idea in its own right. It is more of a taskbar functionality.
Windows search is still not as fast, extensive and as Spotlight is in OS X.
Instant results is pretty fast? Extensive? It is 100% customizable, it can be as extensive as I tell it to be.
So, yes, they have tried to re-implement OS X features, but as as all things Microsoft, they lack polish and taste:D. User experience is still noticeably not as good or as refined as in OS X, I doubt is can ever be without simplifying things at the OS core.
7 is easily as polished as OSX, and looks better imo, but that is opinion. OSX usability is overrated, again, my opinion, but I'm trying to point out here that each one of your arguments is purely opinion based. I find parts of the UI in OSX completely clumsy and counter intuitive, but thats me. I don't want lord Jobs telling me how to use a computer, especially when he and I appear to disagree on how that should be. I actually find that windows does what you are claiming OSX does far more than OSX: it gets out of your way. Everything in OSX seems to be about forcing you to 'experience' the OS, it always feels like the OS is meddling with whatever you are doing. There is no clear distinction between OS UI and App UI, they are hopelessly intermingled in a senseless and abstract way. Personally, I hate it. I'm not a fan of windows, I just appreciate that it lets me set it up how I like and then just gets out of my way, thus I use it for my day to day chores, I use linux where it makes sense to, and using mac just doesn't makes sense so I don't.
I don't even understand the apple bar? Why on earth would it be considered intuitive to take an applications menus, and move them out of the application window into the OS space, and then make these menus completely change depending on which window has focus? Its excessively abstract, the only reason I can see for doing things that way is because thats how it has always been done. Its not a method I would consider efficient in the modern era where we typically have hundreds of active windows.
I somewhat dispute this. OSX has a pretty UI, and it has some nice features but there are catastrophically stupid decisions that make it difficult to comprehend for me. Abstracting application menus right out of the application window? Into one universal menu bar which changes with focus? What the hell is that about? Refusing to allow me to maximise windows? Cluttering up the dock with applications *and* files/folders, shit the dock itself takes up way too much desktop space for a simple launcher. Its pretty, looks great on display but usable? I don't really agree with that.
Windows does bury options too deep, thatI agree with completely, but indexed search has cleaned that up a lot, just go to control panel and type vaguely what you are after and you will basically be there. Plus, power shell is very good, you can pretty much use that exclusively, it works for linux.
Well my original comment where I said basically this was on reddit in response to a guy who seemed to be striking out on his own. He was a programmer, and he had it in his head that because he sunk so much time and personal funds into his code, it was special. Hell maybe it is special. I still don't agree with patent protections on it.
No, mathematics is provably true within a predefined and entirely arbitrary set of rules. We consider those rules (axioms) to be innately true in themselves, but only in a naive and unprovable way. They are 'obvious' if you wish.
Its actually somewhat similar (read: identical) to computers... since the theories of computing were developed by mathematicians after all.
No, they often do not understand the problem that ends up being solved. Thats the thing. Pure maths tends to be more about, assume these conditions are met, these theorems can then be proven true. An applied mathematician, scientist or engineer will typically then discover a new technique and show that it is useful for describing the real world in some way.
This is still ridiculous to consider as patentable. Imagine if Feynman were able and willing to patent his work on quantum electrodynamics, or Einstein his work on general relativity, because these are both examples of scientists taking existing mathematical techniques and applying them to a problem. The notion that these techniques then 'belong' to these guys is ludicrous. The entire body of engineering is a collection of methods to achieve outcomes using mathematics and logical reasoning.
Marketable products, I can see a case for patent protections, somewhat, and they should be severely limited. Software patents tend not to be anything close to a complete marketable product, just pieces of random thoughts scribbled down on paper. Engineering patents are ridiculously vague also, and this annoys me.
What I would love to see is that the patent system require start to finish descriptions of a product, full design schematics, manufacturing processes and a clearly defined description of the operation of the invention. And if you cannot provide such a high level of detail then you should not be granted patent protection. You should also be required to be actively implementing your patent for it to remain valid. Patent trolling is a serious problem that needs to be dealt with, not to mention the problem we have of the patent office being swamped in millions of new patents all the time.
In maths there are virtually endless ways to prove things, however constructive proofs tend to lead to specific algorithms which are efficient. There are a number of ways to take a fourier transform for instance, but theres a reason we use the fft. The point of using a specific algorithm has to do with convergence rates, truncation error and so on, so no, you typically are talking about the one algo. There are however usually dozens and dozens of algorithms to achieve any given goal (say solving the matrix system Ax=b), but often one will be uniquely awesome (the fft).
What bothers me is that things like OCR and guidance systems are usually just implementations of highly sophisticated mathematical algorithms. Mathematicians do all the heavy lifting.... for free... then people come along and make millions off it.
OCR I think uses Mumford-Shah methods, and basically that there is maths doing the job for you. You see it appears unique and innovative, but really the innovation was in finding a way of doing the maths in the first place. In my opinion.
I can agree with this reasoning, but the conclusion I draw is we should patent a method, a process, and outcome as you say. But not an algorithm, and certainly not raw chunks of code. That is what I am getting at, an algorithm taken by itself, even if used in the context of a wider application, does nothing.
It seems these days software patents are nothing more than useless pieces of an idea which by themselves do nothing. I mean we are talking about a patent to protect asking a user if they want to elevate priveledges? That is a nothing if you ask me. There are too many examples of software patents that do nothings, or patents for small pieces of something that might do something... maybe.
I presented this argument to someone just the other day, but here it is again: Mathematicians develop insanely difficult and complex algorithms all the time, and must share their work in the public domain because you can't copyright or patent mathematics. Not a formula, I'm talking about full algorithms, logical procedures, proofs and so on. Algorithms which have changed the world by such orders of magnitude that no matter how novel and amazing some little piece of code looks to the programmer, compared to the work of mathematicians it is almost always will come up looking pretty much completely trivial.
Imagine if someone had patented the fast fourier transform? Or any number of a virtually infinite set of unique and groundbreaking algorithms that have literally changed the course of science. Technology and science would be weaker for it, you might not even have a job with a computer in front of you.
Now why is it that sequences of logical steps, algorithms, when developed by mathematicians are anybodies game, and yet when a programmer or a software company comes up with an algorithm, a sequence of logical steps no different to the ones in the field of mathematics, it is suddenly different and needs monopoly rights granted to the author? Do you honestly think that novel method 3.57a to make database requests in a unique way is as important to the world as something like the fft? Or the Kalman filter?
Get over yourselves programmers, your code is not special, logic is logic, patenting a logical procedure is about as wrong as it gets in my books. If you develop code and it is useful, you are going to be the foremost expert in your new system. You will make money without a patent. The problem is this isn't about putting food on the table, this is about geeks who fancy themselves Knuth thinking they ought to be millionaires.
Then let's talk pragmatics. First, out of all the endeavors the government has been involved in what percent are great successes?
You and I can both selectively choose examples of successes in the private and public sector, and that is entirely besides the point. There are successes in the public sector, you cannot deny that and I'm not going to delve into specific examples.
There are massive failures too, I'm not going to deny that either and I'm not going to pay attention to your examples in that scenario.
The fact is that pragmatism dictate we at least compare the two options side by side to determine which works best. By my reckoning, it often makes sense for the public purse to take a loss (force us to redistribute wealth through taxes if you wish) to provide a service. In Sydney, Australia where I live, public and private busses work side by side for example, the public busses are cheaper while the private busses are more reliable. The public chooses. Again in Australia, public and private health insurance work side by side, public is free and saves the lives of many when they cannot afford better, while private is better for things considered 'elective', ie the waiting lists are massively shorter. The public chooses which to go with and what is wrong with that? Hell the private health insurance industry in this country gets enormous subsidies from government, so you can hardly claim they are working efficiently in the first place.
No. I will never agree that it is right to steal from one person in order to grant some kind of "right" to another person.
Ok then make your own roads and rail, harvest and consume only your own water, deal with your own sewerage, etc ad nauseam. Further to that, find your own way to regulate the food you purchase to ensure its safety, and the medical practices for the private health care that only you pay for yourself. Then go ahead and avoid absolutely any commodity which is subsidised by the government (hint: just about everything you eat that is grown in the USA), avoid technologies developed by funding from the public sector.... etc. ad nauseam again.
I am a capitalist, I believe in market economies and the freedom of suppliers and consumers to behave as they wish... However I am above all else a pragmatist, and I believe above all else in what *makes sense* for our highly complex society. The simple fact is, I consider living in a society where a small portion of people cannot afford health care to be impractical, it incurs a needless burden to bankrupt people for trivial things we all suffer, and it incurs a dangerous burden to have even a small subset of your population walking around unhealthy. There are other more subtle problems with unaffordable health care: Emergency rooms are over-used for trivial things for example, simply because people are scared they cannot afford routine visits to the GP, or suffer severe health problems because they cannot afford trivial medication.
Pragmatically, we pay taxes for things which the private sector cannot efficiently deliver, the role of government is to provide law, regulation and service in areas where profit motivation does not make sense. There are numerous examples of where these services are needed, and when you weigh up the pros and cons, health care seems like a pretty damn good example of one of these services. So what is the problem with the public sector freely competing with the private sector in these areas?
People deserve free health care because it makes sense for the quality of your society. Not because it is a right, or because you want to be humane, but because it simply makes sense from an efficiency point of view. And no the private sector is not *always* more efficient. The word 'always' in this context belongs to idealogues and zealots.
You cannot compare indexed search in XP to indexed search in 7, it is apples to rotten banana or something else equally bad. XP search is the pits, and it is not integrated into the OS in the way the search is in Vista/7. If you are a classic start menu guy then you are probably a lost cause anyway, although I will take the time to point out that classic or XP start menus both have the nightmarish flyout menu garbage which was the UI paradigm of 1995. When I had XP I used launchy because it rocked the earth, I use an indexed launcher on Ubuntu as well. Having that functionality in the start menu is golden and having it as an integrated part of the OS is probably the number one feature of modern windows for me. Like I said mate, try it before you bash it. The fact that you even tried to compare XP indexed search to what you ahve in 7 kind of says you haven't really tried 7 or Vista at all.
Now, I answered your question, but your attitude speaks volumes about how willing you are to listen. But anyway I'll spell it out for you in answer form:
You should move to win7 because it supports a more stable and robust driver model than XP.
You should move to 7 because it has (technical language missing) to prevent crashed apps from messing with the OS or other apps. This leads to far higher levels of operating system stability across the board. This goes for Vista too.
You should move to 7 because it has UI improvements which really do increase productivity on your workspace. Unless you are a conservative crank who refuses to learn new UI features beyond what we had in 1995.
You should move to 7 because it is a 64 bit platform which hardware vendors release drivers for.
Yeah you see now this I think sums up a lot of complaints about Vista, and 7, its not a complaint about the new feature being bad, its a complaint about it being new. Breadcrumbs allow you to navigate vertically and horizontally through many levels of folders, it might not be one button anymore but it is a useful improvement that I use a lot. Yes at first it was a bit of a drag having no up, but I got used to it and now I think its a huge improvement.
I think if more people bothered to learn the new UI tricks before bagginf Vista, there would have been a lot less complaining about it.
XP has a clumsy user interface, the flyout menu model of the start bar is ridiculous, cluttered and an all out navigation nightmare. Indexed search is present in just about every part of 7 (and Vista), which vastly improves the speed at which you can accomplish just about everything. Libraries are a brilliant addition to the explorer interface, saves me a whole lot of digging through folders and thus saves me a *lot* of time. The new taskbar is very nice, and the new UI features for window management, while they seem trivial, are a real boon, especially for widescreen monitors.
There are a bunch of under the hood improvements as well. Honestly I don't even see how your question is asked anymore, its verging on the level of troll. I guess IT nerds are just getting old.
Seriously though, give it a try, and I mean really give it a TRY, using it and saying you hate it immediately because the interface is unfamiliar is an easy cop-out and completely pointless. Anything new must always be learned.
What is so hard about clicking on the parent folder in the breadcrumbs? You can even navigate vertically and horizontally at the same time with the new explorer. Why is this hard?
Can you elaborate on how it is worse? Because I find Vista's explorer to be a large improvement over XP, and 7 is a large improvement over Vista. You never actually gave an example as to what bothers you about it.
Never in my two years of running Vista has this been the case. Never. Vista may have been many things but it was never more unstable than XP, it was a much more solid platform. Just lke how XP was never more unstable than 2k, people who think otherwise I believe are viewing the past through rose-coloured glasses.
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The fact that for most of the components, you actually *can* tear them apart and repair them, you can pull a carb apart and work on it, I'd like to see you try that on a fuel injector. Most modern cars contain single use items that are press fit and sealed at the factory, never to be serviced because you simply *cannot*.
But thats just the beginning, the geekiest thing about a 70's car is it is usually very easy to shoehorn modern technology into them and even program that shit yourself! I have a 1970s Australian muscle car and I have very big dreams of fitting all the typical modern equipment into it, with software I can tune myself from a usb port I've installed somewhere myself. I've considered hiding a touchscreen somewhere like in the glove box, running some flavour of linux on cannibalised netbook hardware, or even an ARM dev board. I've even been considering writing my own engine management software and putting it on a suitably fast micro to run my injectors/ignition. I also want a discrete under-bonnet blower with an electric clutch so I literally have an on/off switch for my boost.
I have nothing but the absolute geekiest dreams about my 70's muscle car. Playing with some fragile, locked down engineering departments toy is not geeky, but creating your own toy certainly is. The 70's muscle car is the *parfect* clean slate to do this.
Except that the head of the IPCC came out fighting, calling the claims 'voodoo science', when it was pointed out that the error had been made. I am ok with errors being made, but what upsets me hugely in the AGW debate is that both sides throw out anything to do with science in favour of simply attacking each other from a position of idealism.
It wasn't a typo, it was a poorly researched claim that they defended when the error was pointed out to them.
Honestly dude, how much of their time would be taken up posting a tweet? Nasa needs a public image, it needs to show itself off to the public and keep a good image in the public eye because thats what keeps people interested in the whole thing and thats what will hopefully inspire and draw in new engineering and science talent in the future. You may not like Twitter but Nasa certainly needs good pr.
For the time it takes the astronauts to drop a tweet here and there (albeit more or less wasted time) compared to the pr benefits of actually doing this in the first place, I'd say there is a pretty decent return on the investment.
But wouldn't you assume this laptop has about zero chance of getting in control of anything critical on the ISS?
As an Australian I know very well that there is money to be made from China, a LOT of money. China effectively protected our entire country from the global financial crisis by importing our raw materials. But theres the trick, we are the worlds largest coal mine, and we have the worlds largest gas reserves, we also supply a shitload of iron ore. If you have raw materials that China wants, you are in business, big business.
However, money made from advertising is directly related to the middle class consumerist economy. I don't think China is quite there yet but I'd agree with other slashdotters here that the point is to be there when China does become more middle class.
Anyway, we (Australia) are making ridiculous amounts of money off China right now, and it looks like it will continue that way for a while.
I explicitly stated that mathematics is not formulas and I am not talking about mathematical formulas. I am talking about logical procedures and the reasoning behind them. Constructive proofs are no different from an algorithm, in fact that is where mathematical algorithms are born, they are the same thing.
These are fairly petty complaints. I have two cars and both have steering wheels in front of me, with climate control panels in the middle, gear shifters in the middle, and peddles under the steering wheel. What. The. Fuck?
Flip 3d sort of tries to do what expose does, but you could hardly call it a ripoff, and it sucks balls and nobody uses it. Whoop dee do, a fancy animated way to do alt-tab, how innovative and original of both mac and windows. Aero peek on the other hand is not even remotely close to expose, and is a very good, very useful idea in its own right. It is more of a taskbar functionality.
Instant results is pretty fast? Extensive? It is 100% customizable, it can be as extensive as I tell it to be.
7 is easily as polished as OSX, and looks better imo, but that is opinion. OSX usability is overrated, again, my opinion, but I'm trying to point out here that each one of your arguments is purely opinion based. I find parts of the UI in OSX completely clumsy and counter intuitive, but thats me. I don't want lord Jobs telling me how to use a computer, especially when he and I appear to disagree on how that should be. I actually find that windows does what you are claiming OSX does far more than OSX: it gets out of your way. Everything in OSX seems to be about forcing you to 'experience' the OS, it always feels like the OS is meddling with whatever you are doing. There is no clear distinction between OS UI and App UI, they are hopelessly intermingled in a senseless and abstract way. Personally, I hate it. I'm not a fan of windows, I just appreciate that it lets me set it up how I like and then just gets out of my way, thus I use it for my day to day chores, I use linux where it makes sense to, and using mac just doesn't makes sense so I don't.
Now we disagree, isn't that nice?
I don't even understand the apple bar? Why on earth would it be considered intuitive to take an applications menus, and move them out of the application window into the OS space, and then make these menus completely change depending on which window has focus? Its excessively abstract, the only reason I can see for doing things that way is because thats how it has always been done. Its not a method I would consider efficient in the modern era where we typically have hundreds of active windows.
I somewhat dispute this. OSX has a pretty UI, and it has some nice features but there are catastrophically stupid decisions that make it difficult to comprehend for me. Abstracting application menus right out of the application window? Into one universal menu bar which changes with focus? What the hell is that about? Refusing to allow me to maximise windows? Cluttering up the dock with applications *and* files/folders, shit the dock itself takes up way too much desktop space for a simple launcher. Its pretty, looks great on display but usable? I don't really agree with that.
Windows does bury options too deep, thatI agree with completely, but indexed search has cleaned that up a lot, just go to control panel and type vaguely what you are after and you will basically be there. Plus, power shell is very good, you can pretty much use that exclusively, it works for linux.
I'm really not so sure about that...
Well my original comment where I said basically this was on reddit in response to a guy who seemed to be striking out on his own. He was a programmer, and he had it in his head that because he sunk so much time and personal funds into his code, it was special. Hell maybe it is special. I still don't agree with patent protections on it.
No, mathematics is provably true within a predefined and entirely arbitrary set of rules. We consider those rules (axioms) to be innately true in themselves, but only in a naive and unprovable way. They are 'obvious' if you wish.
Its actually somewhat similar (read: identical) to computers... since the theories of computing were developed by mathematicians after all.
No, they often do not understand the problem that ends up being solved. Thats the thing. Pure maths tends to be more about, assume these conditions are met, these theorems can then be proven true. An applied mathematician, scientist or engineer will typically then discover a new technique and show that it is useful for describing the real world in some way.
This is still ridiculous to consider as patentable. Imagine if Feynman were able and willing to patent his work on quantum electrodynamics, or Einstein his work on general relativity, because these are both examples of scientists taking existing mathematical techniques and applying them to a problem. The notion that these techniques then 'belong' to these guys is ludicrous. The entire body of engineering is a collection of methods to achieve outcomes using mathematics and logical reasoning.
Marketable products, I can see a case for patent protections, somewhat, and they should be severely limited. Software patents tend not to be anything close to a complete marketable product, just pieces of random thoughts scribbled down on paper. Engineering patents are ridiculously vague also, and this annoys me.
What I would love to see is that the patent system require start to finish descriptions of a product, full design schematics, manufacturing processes and a clearly defined description of the operation of the invention. And if you cannot provide such a high level of detail then you should not be granted patent protection. You should also be required to be actively implementing your patent for it to remain valid. Patent trolling is a serious problem that needs to be dealt with, not to mention the problem we have of the patent office being swamped in millions of new patents all the time.
In maths there are virtually endless ways to prove things, however constructive proofs tend to lead to specific algorithms which are efficient. There are a number of ways to take a fourier transform for instance, but theres a reason we use the fft. The point of using a specific algorithm has to do with convergence rates, truncation error and so on, so no, you typically are talking about the one algo. There are however usually dozens and dozens of algorithms to achieve any given goal (say solving the matrix system Ax=b), but often one will be uniquely awesome (the fft).
What bothers me is that things like OCR and guidance systems are usually just implementations of highly sophisticated mathematical algorithms. Mathematicians do all the heavy lifting.... for free... then people come along and make millions off it.
OCR I think uses Mumford-Shah methods, and basically that there is maths doing the job for you. You see it appears unique and innovative, but really the innovation was in finding a way of doing the maths in the first place. In my opinion.
I can agree with this reasoning, but the conclusion I draw is we should patent a method, a process, and outcome as you say. But not an algorithm, and certainly not raw chunks of code. That is what I am getting at, an algorithm taken by itself, even if used in the context of a wider application, does nothing.
It seems these days software patents are nothing more than useless pieces of an idea which by themselves do nothing. I mean we are talking about a patent to protect asking a user if they want to elevate priveledges? That is a nothing if you ask me. There are too many examples of software patents that do nothings, or patents for small pieces of something that might do something... maybe.
I presented this argument to someone just the other day, but here it is again: Mathematicians develop insanely difficult and complex algorithms all the time, and must share their work in the public domain because you can't copyright or patent mathematics. Not a formula, I'm talking about full algorithms, logical procedures, proofs and so on. Algorithms which have changed the world by such orders of magnitude that no matter how novel and amazing some little piece of code looks to the programmer, compared to the work of mathematicians it is almost always will come up looking pretty much completely trivial.
Imagine if someone had patented the fast fourier transform? Or any number of a virtually infinite set of unique and groundbreaking algorithms that have literally changed the course of science. Technology and science would be weaker for it, you might not even have a job with a computer in front of you.
Now why is it that sequences of logical steps, algorithms, when developed by mathematicians are anybodies game, and yet when a programmer or a software company comes up with an algorithm, a sequence of logical steps no different to the ones in the field of mathematics, it is suddenly different and needs monopoly rights granted to the author? Do you honestly think that novel method 3.57a to make database requests in a unique way is as important to the world as something like the fft? Or the Kalman filter?
Get over yourselves programmers, your code is not special, logic is logic, patenting a logical procedure is about as wrong as it gets in my books. If you develop code and it is useful, you are going to be the foremost expert in your new system. You will make money without a patent. The problem is this isn't about putting food on the table, this is about geeks who fancy themselves Knuth thinking they ought to be millionaires.
You and I can both selectively choose examples of successes in the private and public sector, and that is entirely besides the point. There are successes in the public sector, you cannot deny that and I'm not going to delve into specific examples.
There are massive failures too, I'm not going to deny that either and I'm not going to pay attention to your examples in that scenario.
The fact is that pragmatism dictate we at least compare the two options side by side to determine which works best. By my reckoning, it often makes sense for the public purse to take a loss (force us to redistribute wealth through taxes if you wish) to provide a service. In Sydney, Australia where I live, public and private busses work side by side for example, the public busses are cheaper while the private busses are more reliable. The public chooses. Again in Australia, public and private health insurance work side by side, public is free and saves the lives of many when they cannot afford better, while private is better for things considered 'elective', ie the waiting lists are massively shorter. The public chooses which to go with and what is wrong with that? Hell the private health insurance industry in this country gets enormous subsidies from government, so you can hardly claim they are working efficiently in the first place.
Ok then make your own roads and rail, harvest and consume only your own water, deal with your own sewerage, etc ad nauseam. Further to that, find your own way to regulate the food you purchase to ensure its safety, and the medical practices for the private health care that only you pay for yourself. Then go ahead and avoid absolutely any commodity which is subsidised by the government (hint: just about everything you eat that is grown in the USA), avoid technologies developed by funding from the public sector.... etc. ad nauseam again.
I am a capitalist, I believe in market economies and the freedom of suppliers and consumers to behave as they wish... However I am above all else a pragmatist, and I believe above all else in what *makes sense* for our highly complex society. The simple fact is, I consider living in a society where a small portion of people cannot afford health care to be impractical, it incurs a needless burden to bankrupt people for trivial things we all suffer, and it incurs a dangerous burden to have even a small subset of your population walking around unhealthy. There are other more subtle problems with unaffordable health care: Emergency rooms are over-used for trivial things for example, simply because people are scared they cannot afford routine visits to the GP, or suffer severe health problems because they cannot afford trivial medication.
Pragmatically, we pay taxes for things which the private sector cannot efficiently deliver, the role of government is to provide law, regulation and service in areas where profit motivation does not make sense. There are numerous examples of where these services are needed, and when you weigh up the pros and cons, health care seems like a pretty damn good example of one of these services. So what is the problem with the public sector freely competing with the private sector in these areas?
People deserve free health care because it makes sense for the quality of your society. Not because it is a right, or because you want to be humane, but because it simply makes sense from an efficiency point of view. And no the private sector is not *always* more efficient. The word 'always' in this context belongs to idealogues and zealots.
You cannot compare indexed search in XP to indexed search in 7, it is apples to rotten banana or something else equally bad. XP search is the pits, and it is not integrated into the OS in the way the search is in Vista/7. If you are a classic start menu guy then you are probably a lost cause anyway, although I will take the time to point out that classic or XP start menus both have the nightmarish flyout menu garbage which was the UI paradigm of 1995. When I had XP I used launchy because it rocked the earth, I use an indexed launcher on Ubuntu as well. Having that functionality in the start menu is golden and having it as an integrated part of the OS is probably the number one feature of modern windows for me. Like I said mate, try it before you bash it. The fact that you even tried to compare XP indexed search to what you ahve in 7 kind of says you haven't really tried 7 or Vista at all.
Now, I answered your question, but your attitude speaks volumes about how willing you are to listen. But anyway I'll spell it out for you in answer form:
You should move to win7 because it supports a more stable and robust driver model than XP.
You should move to 7 because it has (technical language missing) to prevent crashed apps from messing with the OS or other apps. This leads to far higher levels of operating system stability across the board. This goes for Vista too.
You should move to 7 because it has UI improvements which really do increase productivity on your workspace. Unless you are a conservative crank who refuses to learn new UI features beyond what we had in 1995.
You should move to 7 because it is a 64 bit platform which hardware vendors release drivers for.
Yeah you see now this I think sums up a lot of complaints about Vista, and 7, its not a complaint about the new feature being bad, its a complaint about it being new. Breadcrumbs allow you to navigate vertically and horizontally through many levels of folders, it might not be one button anymore but it is a useful improvement that I use a lot. Yes at first it was a bit of a drag having no up, but I got used to it and now I think its a huge improvement.
I think if more people bothered to learn the new UI tricks before bagginf Vista, there would have been a lot less complaining about it.
XP has a clumsy user interface, the flyout menu model of the start bar is ridiculous, cluttered and an all out navigation nightmare. Indexed search is present in just about every part of 7 (and Vista), which vastly improves the speed at which you can accomplish just about everything. Libraries are a brilliant addition to the explorer interface, saves me a whole lot of digging through folders and thus saves me a *lot* of time. The new taskbar is very nice, and the new UI features for window management, while they seem trivial, are a real boon, especially for widescreen monitors.
There are a bunch of under the hood improvements as well. Honestly I don't even see how your question is asked anymore, its verging on the level of troll. I guess IT nerds are just getting old.
Seriously though, give it a try, and I mean really give it a TRY, using it and saying you hate it immediately because the interface is unfamiliar is an easy cop-out and completely pointless. Anything new must always be learned.
What is so hard about clicking on the parent folder in the breadcrumbs? You can even navigate vertically and horizontally at the same time with the new explorer. Why is this hard?
Can you elaborate on how it is worse? Because I find Vista's explorer to be a large improvement over XP, and 7 is a large improvement over Vista. You never actually gave an example as to what bothers you about it.
Never in my two years of running Vista has this been the case. Never. Vista may have been many things but it was never more unstable than XP, it was a much more solid platform. Just lke how XP was never more unstable than 2k, people who think otherwise I believe are viewing the past through rose-coloured glasses.
Now ymmv but that is my experience.