Do the French have some sort of law prohibiting movement from private sector employment into the public sector?
No, the way it works in France is that if you attend a Grande Ecole, their equivalent of the Ivy League (US) or the Russell Group (UK), you "owe" time to the government to pay for it. So you would go straight from college to the civil service, then when you have served enough time, you are then free (if you choose) to get a private sector job, or continue to climb the civil service career ladder. This, again, probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but the net result is that the elite civil servants haven't worked outside it.
Google should dump Google.fr and continue doing what they're doing. That'll leave the French courts with no one to sue nationally and will be another nail in the coffin for French xenophobia.
Or simply move physical hosting of their.fr site to Switzerland. What're the French government going to do, put up a Maginot Firewall to keep it out?
If someone types in Ford, how is Google supposed to know if they're searching for Ford Motors, Gerald Ford, or informating on fording rivers
Well, that's the French government for you - they're always passing laws regulating business without thinking through the consequences. For example, they thought limiting the work week to 35 hours would force more jobs to be created. And it would - if all workers were interchangeable. Unfortunately, in the real would (which no French government official has ever worked in) they're not. Or the laws that make it very difficult to fire a worker - they thought that would cut unemployment too. Only they didn't realize that part of the risk of hiring a worker is that he is incompetent or lazy - by making it so difficult to fire, they magnified that risk, and so companies were reluctant to hire!
Basically, until the French government keeps its bungling hands out of regulating things it doesn't understand, French unemployment will never drop into the single digits, and their economy will never pull out of recession.
ROFL! Talk about naked FUD. Choice, choice, choice. Yeah, that's the Microsoft Way, isn't it? NOT.
Ummm, yes, remind me how many different Mac vendors there are? Just one you say?
Apple has always been a vertically-integrated platform. You buy the computer, the OS, the applications, the peripherals from the same company. Microsoft has always been (a little more) horizontally oriented - you might buy the OS and apps from the same place, but the computer itself and the peripherals can come from any of dozens of different suppliers. You can buy the parts and build your own PC and Windows will probably run on it... that paradigm simply doesn't exist in the Apple world.
We, for the longest time, ran on a VAX that was the equivalent to about a 486-120 MHz machine that could handle thirty developers.
One of the nice thing about DECs is that they thought in terms of lines, not characters - so you didn't have to send a packet (and hence do kernel work) with every key press. That alone was enough to give VAXen running VMS a huge edge over the same-generation Unix kit from rivals.
I disagree about "Java is boring". A lot of highly useful and highly profitable lines of business are "boring".
Java is supposed to be boring. It's the new COBOL. Before anyone wigs out, think about it. It's the general-purpose language for writing commercial data-processing applications. Sure it can do a GUI, which COBOL wasn't so good at, it can do networking and all that good stuff, but that just reflects that infrastructure and desktops have moved on. Sun understands this, which is what RAVE is all about, rapid development of relatively simple applications for data entry and so on - exactly what COBOL was about.
All the "sexy" technologies like Cold Fusion... where are they now? Still around, but they don't have anywhere near the ubiquity of Java. The more boring Java becomes, the deeper it will be entrenched, and the more secure real Java developers - people with 5 years solid experience - will be.
A super cool, fast and cheap workstation. We are talking a cheap 4-way (or 8-way) Opteron with a 3D display or something similar. It has to be the best bang-for-the-buck on the market with features and "cool factor" that no-one else has. McNeally should walk across the street from the Cupertino campus and ask Jobs how to make this happen.
This would be suicide. One of the USPs of Sun has always been that Solaris and SPARC upgrades will not break your application, full stop. You can spend millions of dollars developing code on Solaris 2.5 on a MicroSPARC-II and Sun guarantees that it will run perfectly on Solaris 10 on an UltraSPARC-IV. That is one of the reason people buy Suns, investment protection. For Sun to declare that it's changing its processor for its core product range would cost them all the people who stick to SPARC because they trust its future.
And on the subject of price, you can buy a 1U UltraSPARC-based server for about GBP 800 now - that's price-competitive with x86 offerings from Dell and IBM. You can buy a Sun desktop for GBP 1500. Sun's were overpriced for a period of a few years, but they are no longer.
Hopefully there won't be any horribly major fuckwits to completely mao up their space program
You know, it's strange. Fascists are quite rightly reviled by our culture. Yet, despite Mao, Stalin, Kim Jong-Il and other Communists, who make the Nazi's worst excesses pale in comparison, it is still considered acceptable to be a Communist in the modern-day West. I wonder why that is.
It is my contention that these two factors combine to make it plausible that China may display behavior that is uncharacteristic of China.
That is a very insightful comment. The real question is the lenghts to which the Mao Dynasty is willing to go to maintain its grip on power.
The economist Reuven Brenner says that democracy and capitalism are closely linked. Once you have private property and free trade, you have resources outside the control of the government and in the control of the market, and the market accustoms its particpants to being able to chose between competing offerings - in goods, in services, in entertainment. A totalitarian government doesn't even have to bother about censoring the press if it controls the only paper mills in the country. A popular press, tabloids and broadsheets, buying their own paper, running their own presses, selling to whoever wants to buy, adopting editorial stances... heady stuff. Once freedom starts to roll, it's nigh on unstoppable without naked force, and even then you can only postpone it. Pretty soon, China's government are going to have to decide, forwards or backwards? History isn't on the side of the Chinese establishment giving up their privileges easily.
The rest of your post focuses on the apparently negative consequences of this decision, but I'd have to say that the emperor did assess the threat correctly. In Europe, at about the same time, the rise of the merchant class was contributing to the downfall of the nobility.
Well, it was the right decision perhaps for that Emperor and his immediate family and supporters, in that it cemented his power. But it was very bad indeed for the Ming Dynasty and for China as a whole. Tiny, distant Holland was more powerful in the Pacific than China was, in the 17th century. You might say that military power isn't an end in itself, and you'd be right, but one thing Europeans understood very early on, that few other cultures did, was that military power is a function of technological and economic prowess, and that the price of that was political freedom. The power of Europe's rulers changed; no longer could they govern by fiat, so some might say they were weaker and certainly the gap between a king and a merchant had changed. But in absolute terms they had become more powerful; now a king could order an expedition to India or to the Americas, for example, something that an earlier king simply could not do, despite having the power of life and death over his subjects. The Ming Emperor of 1433 (I forget his name) failed to grasp this subtlety, and he condemned China to 500 years of subservience.
If Cheng Ho had staged a coup (altho' there was never any indication that he even wanted to), or more likely one of his supporters at court had, and Cheng's fleet had remained intact and he had been permitted to continue exploring, history would have turned out very different indeed. Perhaps European colonists heading west from Massachussets would have met Chinese settlers heading east from what we call California?
Specific company names provide your claims with credibility. It's supporting evidence that you really did the work and aren't padding your resume with made up information.
No company I've ever heard of prevents you from mentioning you worked there as an employee. The only case in which an NDA might apply is if you were employed by a consulting firm and these companies were the consulting firm's clients.
I'm a fool and I think the existence of Linux proves my point.
Open source is all about competition! Everyone who has said "I can implement that feature better than so-and-so" or added a feature from a commercial product to a free one, or deployed Linux in place of NT is actively competing. If you've ever seen a flamewar on LKML you'll know that cooperation is very little to do with it.
You're talking about the United States, right? Because last time I checked, the United States was still the largest economic house in the world, still the leader of technology innovation, and definately has the most well trained, well equipped and well educated military in the world.
Yes, the US is a European colony. That's not to disparage its nation status; I merely wanted to display that there is a clear line between the present-day US supremacy and achievements of the early European explorers like da Gama and Magellan and of course Columbus himself was cut from the same cloth. And that was a typo, i meant "500 years later" i.e. now.
if the Chinese don't do anything stupid their economic and technological superiority is functionally inevitable provided U.S. citizens don't start multiplying like mosquitoes.
History is full of inevitable things that didn't happen, and full of improbable things that did. See my earlier post about Cheng Ho for just one example.
It's a simple matter of statistics unless you subscribe to some sort of white supremast movment and belive that Chinese minds are inherently inferior.
LOL! You really don't know history do you? Or politics or economics for that matter. It is never a "simple matter of statistics". Again, see my earlier post.
I have never understood why Mac developers and users tolerate Apple screwing them over every couple of years.
In my case, I didn't. As a former Mac C++ developer, Apple killing OpenDoc was the last straw for me. On Solaris, Sun guarantees that apps from an earlier version of Solaris will run on the latest version. On WindowsXP, Microsoft provides "compatibility modes" so you at least have a chance of getting an app that doesn't to do so (and if it was 32-bit clean to start with, there aren't many of those). So Solaris and Win32 are my platforms of choice.
if the Chinese don't do anything stupid their economic and technological superiority is functionally inevitable provided U.S. citizens don't start multiplying like mosquitoes.
History is full of inevitable things that didn't happen, and full of improbable things that did. See my earlier post about Cheng Ho for just one example.
It's a simple matter of statistics unless you subscribe to some sort of white supremast movment and belive that Chinese minds are inherently inferior.
LOL! You really don't know history do you? Or politics or economics for that matter. It is never a "simple matter of statistics". Again, see my earlier post.
I'd say it does make a difference if you're a DBA for a small or a major company. The DB is larger, the data is probably (but not necessarily) more complex and important.
That's by no means a hard and fast rule, tho'. Candidate A might have maintained a terabyte's worth of genome data for a biotech startup while candidate B might have maintained a few megabytes of names and addresses in Access for a Fortune 100.
Either way, if a candidate can't explain what they did, and why, and what the net effect was, no amount of name-dropping will help. It doesn't even have to be in dollar terms, for example "I optimized the inventory database of a major manufacturer, improving typical query response time by 500% and enabling the IT department to halve its capital expenditure over the next 2 years". That's perfectly fine for any resume (provided of course the candidate can talk intelligently about optimization techniques in an interview).
Ask yourself, is there anything you can't say about your job (for example) at Goldman Sachs that you couldn't say about "one of the top 3 investment banks"? Just write up your resume with the names on, then do a quick search and replace to "anonymize" it.
Also ask yourself why you really need to mention these names... are you hoping some of the "prestige" of these companies will rub off on you? What you did is far more important than who you did it for, especially in technology. I'd be as impressed by a DBA from Walmart or McDonalds as I would by a DBA from GS - both can talk about their experience in high-volume mission-critical OLTP, for example.
No, let's not. I know it's a pipe dream but I'd much rather see some real, proper international cooperation, and I'm sure many of the scientists working in this area would love to see this as well. With all the great minds working in this area (after all, 3 nations have individually now put humans into space) imagine what could be achieved?
Umm, absolutely nothing?
It's a fact of human nature. Without competition, there is no urgency. Without that, an unlimited amount of time and money gets spent on looking for the "perfect" solution where in competition, a decision would be made because it has to be made. NOW. Even if it's not perfect, a reasonably good (or at least, not bad) decision now is infinitely superior to a perfect decision made at some unspecified time in the future. NASA itself is proof: given time and money, scientists will get nothing done. Given a hard limit on both and someone to race against, miracles occur. There is literally centuries of evidence, that competition gets stuff done, cooperation does not. It is a fundamental part of being human, that we love to compete and are motivated by worthy adversaries. Anyone who says anything different is a fool.
They realize that almost none of the plans will come to fruition in their lifetimes, but that's okay, their descendants will put the finishing touches on and see it happen.
Chinese long-term thinking goes both ways tho'. Let me tell you a story. In 1405, the Ming emperors were well on their way to establishing naval (and hence trading) dominance in the coastal Pacific. Under the command of Admiral Cheng Ho, a Chinese fleet of 250 vessels and 28,000 men explored as far as the Persian Gulf and Ehiopia. Let me put those numbers into perspective: 600 years ago the Chinese were deploying vessels of 180M in length, that is 30M shorter than the present-day British Royal Navy's flagship. Cheng's ships were big enough that for extended voyages, they could grow food on their decks! With that sort of technological superiority, the Chinese should have established a hegemony that would have persisted today.
But in 1433, the new Ming emperor and his bureaucrats grew afraid of the rapidly expanding merchant class, who were growing wealthy through international trade, and began to pass laws to limit economic growth, to keep political power firmly in the hands of the Dynasty. By 1500 it was a capital offense to own or construct a vessel with more than 2 masts.
In 1498, European explorer Vasco da Gama, in a single show, had managed to navigate to the Indian ocean. By Cheng Ho's standards, da Gama's ship was puny and his crew mere amateurs. Da Gama should have been patted on the head by vastly superior Chinese sailors and traders and sent back home. Only, there was no Chinese fleet anymore; the Mings had ordered it broken up. By 1502, Portugal in particular and Europe in general had asserted military superiority in the Indian Ocean and China had begun to turn inwards.
Now, 600 years later, a European colony is the world's dominant economic, technological and military power, Europe itself is still incredibly rich and powerful by historic standards, and China is only starting to recover from a decision made by a weak Emperor in 1433. I predict that history will repeat itself, as soon as a new Cheng Ho leads the exploration of space, the Chinese political establishment will turn on him. That's how it works in China.
So if Microsoft gets cut off, your options are still the same-- use OpenOffice or another word processor that supports Hebrew.
As Sun points out, there are differences between free and commercial office suites, namely the latter has the ability to incorporate non-free resources:
Spellchecker and thesaurus
Database component (Software AG Adabas D).
Select fonts including Windows metrically equivalent fonts and Asian language fonts
Select filters, including WordPerfect filters and Asian word processor filters
Integration of additional templates and extensive clipart gallery
Sure you can get a free dictionary or thesaurus, but not one as comprehensive as you can buy, by a long shot. Same with fonts, import filters etc. These are things that matter to the typical Star Office/MS Office user.
Slashdot Mirror
Do the French have some sort of law prohibiting movement from private sector employment into the public sector?
No, the way it works in France is that if you attend a Grande Ecole, their equivalent of the Ivy League (US) or the Russell Group (UK), you "owe" time to the government to pay for it. So you would go straight from college to the civil service, then when you have served enough time, you are then free (if you choose) to get a private sector job, or continue to climb the civil service career ladder. This, again, probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but the net result is that the elite civil servants haven't worked outside it.
Google should dump Google.fr and continue doing what they're doing. That'll leave the French courts with no one to sue nationally and will be another nail in the coffin for French xenophobia.
.fr site to Switzerland. What're the French government going to do, put up a Maginot Firewall to keep it out?
Or simply move physical hosting of their
If someone types in Ford, how is Google supposed to know if they're searching for Ford Motors, Gerald Ford, or informating on fording rivers
Well, that's the French government for you - they're always passing laws regulating business without thinking through the consequences. For example, they thought limiting the work week to 35 hours would force more jobs to be created. And it would - if all workers were interchangeable. Unfortunately, in the real would (which no French government official has ever worked in) they're not. Or the laws that make it very difficult to fire a worker - they thought that would cut unemployment too. Only they didn't realize that part of the risk of hiring a worker is that he is incompetent or lazy - by making it so difficult to fire, they magnified that risk, and so companies were reluctant to hire!
Basically, until the French government keeps its bungling hands out of regulating things it doesn't understand, French unemployment will never drop into the single digits, and their economy will never pull out of recession.
Funny to see someone call a Linux version bloated and slow...
You've never used Red Hat, then...
ROFL! Talk about naked FUD. Choice, choice, choice. Yeah, that's the Microsoft Way, isn't it? NOT.
Ummm, yes, remind me how many different Mac vendors there are? Just one you say?
Apple has always been a vertically-integrated platform. You buy the computer, the OS, the applications, the peripherals from the same company. Microsoft has always been (a little more) horizontally oriented - you might buy the OS and apps from the same place, but the computer itself and the peripherals can come from any of dozens of different suppliers. You can buy the parts and build your own PC and Windows will probably run on it... that paradigm simply doesn't exist in the Apple world.
That is probably a hardware/OS problem. Your sound card IRQ is being shared with your video card's IRQ.
He did say that he didn't experience the same problem with winamp, so it probably is that app's problem, not the platform's.
We, for the longest time, ran on a VAX that was the equivalent to about a 486-120 MHz machine that could handle thirty developers.
One of the nice thing about DECs is that they thought in terms of lines, not characters - so you didn't have to send a packet (and hence do kernel work) with every key press. That alone was enough to give VAXen running VMS a huge edge over the same-generation Unix kit from rivals.
Heres how you can explain the thing... Microsoft is insecure.
You would have a very, very hard time proving that Exchange is more insecure than Sendmail.
I disagree about "Java is boring". A lot of highly useful and highly profitable lines of business are "boring".
Java is supposed to be boring. It's the new COBOL. Before anyone wigs out, think about it. It's the general-purpose language for writing commercial data-processing applications. Sure it can do a GUI, which COBOL wasn't so good at, it can do networking and all that good stuff, but that just reflects that infrastructure and desktops have moved on. Sun understands this, which is what RAVE is all about, rapid development of relatively simple applications for data entry and so on - exactly what COBOL was about.
All the "sexy" technologies like Cold Fusion... where are they now? Still around, but they don't have anywhere near the ubiquity of Java. The more boring Java becomes, the deeper it will be entrenched, and the more secure real Java developers - people with 5 years solid experience - will be.
A super cool, fast and cheap workstation. We are talking a cheap 4-way (or 8-way) Opteron with a 3D display or something similar. It has to be the best bang-for-the-buck on the market with features and "cool factor" that no-one else has. McNeally should walk across the street from the Cupertino campus and ask Jobs how to make this happen.
This would be suicide. One of the USPs of Sun has always been that Solaris and SPARC upgrades will not break your application, full stop. You can spend millions of dollars developing code on Solaris 2.5 on a MicroSPARC-II and Sun guarantees that it will run perfectly on Solaris 10 on an UltraSPARC-IV. That is one of the reason people buy Suns, investment protection. For Sun to declare that it's changing its processor for its core product range would cost them all the people who stick to SPARC because they trust its future.
And on the subject of price, you can buy a 1U UltraSPARC-based server for about GBP 800 now - that's price-competitive with x86 offerings from Dell and IBM. You can buy a Sun desktop for GBP 1500. Sun's were overpriced for a period of a few years, but they are no longer.
The emperor sent Admiral Cheng-Ho out to search for, and kill the emperor's political rival - his own brother.
That's an interesting theory, but I can't find it in any of my books. Do you have a reference?
Hopefully there won't be any horribly major fuckwits to completely mao up their space program
You know, it's strange. Fascists are quite rightly reviled by our culture. Yet, despite Mao, Stalin, Kim Jong-Il and other Communists, who make the Nazi's worst excesses pale in comparison, it is still considered acceptable to be a Communist in the modern-day West. I wonder why that is.
It is my contention that these two factors combine to make it plausible that China may display behavior that is uncharacteristic of China.
That is a very insightful comment. The real question is the lenghts to which the Mao Dynasty is willing to go to maintain its grip on power.
The economist Reuven Brenner says that democracy and capitalism are closely linked. Once you have private property and free trade, you have resources outside the control of the government and in the control of the market, and the market accustoms its particpants to being able to chose between competing offerings - in goods, in services, in entertainment. A totalitarian government doesn't even have to bother about censoring the press if it controls the only paper mills in the country. A popular press, tabloids and broadsheets, buying their own paper, running their own presses, selling to whoever wants to buy, adopting editorial stances... heady stuff. Once freedom starts to roll, it's nigh on unstoppable without naked force, and even then you can only postpone it. Pretty soon, China's government are going to have to decide, forwards or backwards? History isn't on the side of the Chinese establishment giving up their privileges easily.
The rest of your post focuses on the apparently negative consequences of this decision, but I'd have to say that the emperor did assess the threat correctly. In Europe, at about the same time, the rise of the merchant class was contributing to the downfall of the nobility.
Well, it was the right decision perhaps for that Emperor and his immediate family and supporters, in that it cemented his power. But it was very bad indeed for the Ming Dynasty and for China as a whole. Tiny, distant Holland was more powerful in the Pacific than China was, in the 17th century. You might say that military power isn't an end in itself, and you'd be right, but one thing Europeans understood very early on, that few other cultures did, was that military power is a function of technological and economic prowess, and that the price of that was political freedom. The power of Europe's rulers changed; no longer could they govern by fiat, so some might say they were weaker and certainly the gap between a king and a merchant had changed. But in absolute terms they had become more powerful; now a king could order an expedition to India or to the Americas, for example, something that an earlier king simply could not do, despite having the power of life and death over his subjects. The Ming Emperor of 1433 (I forget his name) failed to grasp this subtlety, and he condemned China to 500 years of subservience.
If Cheng Ho had staged a coup (altho' there was never any indication that he even wanted to), or more likely one of his supporters at court had, and Cheng's fleet had remained intact and he had been permitted to continue exploring, history would have turned out very different indeed. Perhaps European colonists heading west from Massachussets would have met Chinese settlers heading east from what we call California?
Specific company names provide your claims with credibility. It's supporting evidence that you really did the work and aren't padding your resume with made up information.
No company I've ever heard of prevents you from mentioning you worked there as an employee. The only case in which an NDA might apply is if you were employed by a consulting firm and these companies were the consulting firm's clients.
I'm a fool and I think the existence of Linux proves my point.
Open source is all about competition! Everyone who has said "I can implement that feature better than so-and-so" or added a feature from a commercial product to a free one, or deployed Linux in place of NT is actively competing. If you've ever seen a flamewar on LKML you'll know that cooperation is very little to do with it.
You're talking about the United States, right? Because last time I checked, the United States was still the largest economic house in the world, still the leader of technology innovation, and definately has the most well trained, well equipped and well educated military in the world.
Yes, the US is a European colony. That's not to disparage its nation status; I merely wanted to display that there is a clear line between the present-day US supremacy and achievements of the early European explorers like da Gama and Magellan and of course Columbus himself was cut from the same cloth. And that was a typo, i meant "500 years later" i.e. now.
if the Chinese don't do anything stupid their economic and technological superiority is functionally inevitable provided U.S. citizens don't start multiplying like mosquitoes.
History is full of inevitable things that didn't happen, and full of improbable things that did. See my earlier post about Cheng Ho for just one example.
It's a simple matter of statistics unless you subscribe to some sort of white supremast movment and belive that Chinese minds are inherently inferior.
LOL! You really don't know history do you? Or politics or economics for that matter. It is never a "simple matter of statistics". Again, see my earlier post.
I have never understood why Mac developers and users tolerate Apple screwing them over every couple of years.
In my case, I didn't. As a former Mac C++ developer, Apple killing OpenDoc was the last straw for me. On Solaris, Sun guarantees that apps from an earlier version of Solaris will run on the latest version. On WindowsXP, Microsoft provides "compatibility modes" so you at least have a chance of getting an app that doesn't to do so (and if it was 32-bit clean to start with, there aren't many of those). So Solaris and Win32 are my platforms of choice.
if the Chinese don't do anything stupid their economic and technological superiority is functionally inevitable provided U.S. citizens don't start multiplying like mosquitoes.
History is full of inevitable things that didn't happen, and full of improbable things that did. See my earlier post about Cheng Ho for just one example.
It's a simple matter of statistics unless you subscribe to some sort of white supremast movment and belive that Chinese minds are inherently inferior.
LOL! You really don't know history do you? Or politics or economics for that matter. It is never a "simple matter of statistics". Again, see my earlier post.
I'd say it does make a difference if you're a DBA for a small or a major company. The DB is larger, the data is probably (but not necessarily) more complex and important.
That's by no means a hard and fast rule, tho'. Candidate A might have maintained a terabyte's worth of genome data for a biotech startup while candidate B might have maintained a few megabytes of names and addresses in Access for a Fortune 100.
Either way, if a candidate can't explain what they did, and why, and what the net effect was, no amount of name-dropping will help. It doesn't even have to be in dollar terms, for example "I optimized the inventory database of a major manufacturer, improving typical query response time by 500% and enabling the IT department to halve its capital expenditure over the next 2 years". That's perfectly fine for any resume (provided of course the candidate can talk intelligently about optimization techniques in an interview).
Ask yourself, is there anything you can't say about your job (for example) at Goldman Sachs that you couldn't say about "one of the top 3 investment banks"? Just write up your resume with the names on, then do a quick search and replace to "anonymize" it.
Also ask yourself why you really need to mention these names... are you hoping some of the "prestige" of these companies will rub off on you? What you did is far more important than who you did it for, especially in technology. I'd be as impressed by a DBA from Walmart or McDonalds as I would by a DBA from GS - both can talk about their experience in high-volume mission-critical OLTP, for example.
No, let's not. I know it's a pipe dream but I'd much rather see some real, proper international cooperation, and I'm sure many of the scientists working in this area would love to see this as well. With all the great minds working in this area (after all, 3 nations have individually now put humans into space) imagine what could be achieved?
Umm, absolutely nothing?
It's a fact of human nature. Without competition, there is no urgency. Without that, an unlimited amount of time and money gets spent on looking for the "perfect" solution where in competition, a decision would be made because it has to be made. NOW. Even if it's not perfect, a reasonably good (or at least, not bad) decision now is infinitely superior to a perfect decision made at some unspecified time in the future. NASA itself is proof: given time and money, scientists will get nothing done. Given a hard limit on both and someone to race against, miracles occur. There is literally centuries of evidence, that competition gets stuff done, cooperation does not. It is a fundamental part of being human, that we love to compete and are motivated by worthy adversaries. Anyone who says anything different is a fool.
They realize that almost none of the plans will come to fruition in their lifetimes, but that's okay, their descendants will put the finishing touches on and see it happen.
Chinese long-term thinking goes both ways tho'. Let me tell you a story. In 1405, the Ming emperors were well on their way to establishing naval (and hence trading) dominance in the coastal Pacific. Under the command of Admiral Cheng Ho, a Chinese fleet of 250 vessels and 28,000 men explored as far as the Persian Gulf and Ehiopia. Let me put those numbers into perspective: 600 years ago the Chinese were deploying vessels of 180M in length, that is 30M shorter than the present-day British Royal Navy's flagship. Cheng's ships were big enough that for extended voyages, they could grow food on their decks! With that sort of technological superiority, the Chinese should have established a hegemony that would have persisted today.
But in 1433, the new Ming emperor and his bureaucrats grew afraid of the rapidly expanding merchant class, who were growing wealthy through international trade, and began to pass laws to limit economic growth, to keep political power firmly in the hands of the Dynasty. By 1500 it was a capital offense to own or construct a vessel with more than 2 masts.
In 1498, European explorer Vasco da Gama, in a single show, had managed to navigate to the Indian ocean. By Cheng Ho's standards, da Gama's ship was puny and his crew mere amateurs. Da Gama should have been patted on the head by vastly superior Chinese sailors and traders and sent back home. Only, there was no Chinese fleet anymore; the Mings had ordered it broken up. By 1502, Portugal in particular and Europe in general had asserted military superiority in the Indian Ocean and China had begun to turn inwards.
Now, 600 years later, a European colony is the world's dominant economic, technological and military power, Europe itself is still incredibly rich and powerful by historic standards, and China is only starting to recover from a decision made by a weak Emperor in 1433. I predict that history will repeat itself, as soon as a new Cheng Ho leads the exploration of space, the Chinese political establishment will turn on him. That's how it works in China.
As Sun points out, there are differences between free and commercial office suites, namely the latter has the ability to incorporate non-free resources:
Sure you can get a free dictionary or thesaurus, but not one as comprehensive as you can buy, by a long shot. Same with fonts, import filters etc. These are things that matter to the typical Star Office/MS Office user.