Re:Perl's had it's day - It's become like COBOL
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Apocalypse 5 Released
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· Score: 2
I'd prefer to think of this as provocative rather than a flame, there is a difference you know.
There is in fact a difference. Unfortunately, you're really not on the right side of it. For example: "Or even, dare I say it, to move on to languages outside the perl family for some programming and choose the right tool for the job for a change." That's not provocative, that's just insulting to those who like perl and who think that there are many jobs for which it is the right tool.
You see, provocotive is bringing up ideas that people have not thought of before. Everyone having once been five years old has thought, "does this suck" before, about prettymuch everything. Thus posting "consider that perl sucks" is not provocotive. Noone who learns a programming language doesn't consider, at some point fairly early on, "does this suck".
So while you would prefer to think of your post as provocotive, really it's just a flame. It's also fairly wrong, too, as perl is quite far from irrelevant. It's also most certainly not a universal solution, but then nothing is.
And besides all of this, Perl 6 is going to be a language which learned from Perl 1-5, so it's still one to be compared even if one slavishly follows your post.
You can't ignore the problem simply because the percentage of child molesters in society is below a certain percent!
That's nonsense. Every problem that affects under a certain percentage is ignored. How much is the problem of serial murderers who eat their victims being addressed? While this isn't a good example (because any type of murder is illegal), but the point still stands: if something is an incredibly infrequent problem, it doesn't get addressed because most ways of dealing with it will cause more difficulty than the problem really merits.
How many laws are there on the books to deal with the problem of escaped elephants tearing apart residential homes?
Now, I'm not arguing that child molestation isn't a problem, merely that it isn't the society-destroying calamity that every child being impaled on a pike would be. Now, if every child was going to be impaled on a pike, it would probably warrant handcuffing a police officer to everyone (a silly example, I know). However, less severe threats warrant less severe measures to prevent them.
the real question to ask is how much of a problem is child molestation really? If literally every child to get on the net were in really grave danger, than we need laws to keep children off of the net, as we have laws to keep them away from alcohol or tobacco.
The point is that there is great potential for children to be lured into a harmful situation in the Internet chat areas.
There are two types of potential: real and theoretical potential. There is of course great theoretical potential for harm. The important question is how much real potential for harm is there. That dictates how much action should be taken.
That being said, of course children should be educated on how to protect themselves from others, on the internet or off. That should go without saying. The real question is how much further should things go? Should it be legal to give internet access to minors despite the dangers involved?
Surely this sort of thing happens all the time in chatboxes.
Why is this so sure? I don't mean to come out one way or another on this issue, but extrapolating from one case seems to be a pretty bad method.
Moreover, how many child abusers do you think that there are in society? Do you really think that there are enough that the average child is in great danger the moment that they can communicate with someone? If so, if there really are that many child molestors, then what percentage of the population do they make up?
You see, if child moslestors make up 50% of the population or so, then it's really time to worry as fairly soon child molestation is going to become legal.
Extrapolation is a dangerous thing. Always be wary of it.
While IANAL, I did consult one about this once - when you give something away, you have no obligation to the recipient. Specifically, the recipient can't sue you if the product is defective in some manner.
IANAL either, but I did take a business law course taught by a lawyer. What you said is not quite true (at least not in NY state). When you give somebody something (not for any consideration), then you are not liable for negligence. However, you are liable for gross negligence. Gross negligence is defined as negligence which "shocks the conscience of the court".
My understanding is that it is very difficult to shock the conscience of the court, especially when you're giving something away for free. I suspect that as long as one doesn't knowingly include genuinely malicious code and keep quiet about it, that a software developer who gives away their code for free will be more than fine.
I suspect, though this is just a guess, that RedHat could probably take the position, as long as they made it clear to purchasers, that they are providing an installation and aggregation service, they are not actually selling the code that they didn't write. Thus they would be liable for bugs in the packaging or installation but not in the aggregated software. This would be reasonable, IMHO, and probably legally OK, too. Of course, that's just pure speculation on my part.
A contract is a legally binding agreement made for mutual consideration.
The GPL is a license given to redistribute a copyrighted work and derrivatives of it. It is unilateral permission given by an author to do that which a person normally cannot. There is no mutual consideration and no mutual obligation.
Actually, the second two were, in my opinion, better books than the first. I found the first one to be a bit slow, but then again you have to set up before you can move on.
That being said, star wars is an epic, and that's what the best SW stories are going to be. In a (non-tragic) epic, the important people generally don't die, even when they do dangerous things (in a tragic epic, everyone dies even when they don't do dangerous things - but I'm not really fond of those). Why is it really that important to you that people have to die if they do dangerous things? Why must dangerous things result in death or it makes a book bad?
And the truth is that people get lucky in life. When you write a story, you write about those exceptional people who get lucky more than most. If a story was about truly average people, they'd be boring. If we want to read about truly average people, we can just just skip the reading and look around.
Besides, if you dislike reaslism, why do you pick up on people getting lucky (and if anyone is going to get lucky, I would imagine that a jedi master would be the sort of person who is lucky more than most), why don't you pick on people being noble so often? Most real people want to live their lives quietly in peace and comfort and really just sort of try to adapt to any hardship that comes there way. Most people would not fight an evil empire, they'd just live in it as best they can.
So why is it such a big deal that extraordinary people have extraordinary things happen to them? Let's not forget that plenty of them are, in effect, magicians. One doesn't expect the ordinary with magicians, or at least you shouldn't.
Also, you left out the part where luke goes into a jedi trance where he needs only infinitessimal amounts of oxygen and heat to survive, thus enabling him to live long enough to be stumbled upon. Convenient? Yes. Unlikely? Yes. Impossible, well, not after you've already granted the existence of the jedi.
Besides, has it not occurred to you that the book had been following Karde's ship pricesly because at some point he would be the one who ran accross luke? (Remember, luke was not in a highly unpopulated area and so it was likely that someone would eventually run accross him.) This is a not uncommon narrative device, where you start telling a bunch of independent stories and eventually tie them together. It's not that the main characters were randomly chosen and then through a series of insanely unlikely events all happen to come together. It's that an event was picked, or perhaps a few characters were picked, and whoever happened to come along was then selected and their story fleshed out.
All this being said, in my opinion the first book is best when it is dealing with Grand Admiral Thrawn, and everyone else is less interesting. In the second and third books, however, I think that his handling of the other characters is better (or one just gets used to his take on their personalities), and they're thoroughly enjoyable reading. While I could put the first book down, the second and third I couldn't stop reading.
I was a bit dissapointed with the way that Thrawn was killed. It made perfect sense, but it was a bit... I don't know. I'd have rather than killing thrawn had been harder, even if the way he was killed made perfect sense and fit well with the rest of the plot.
"Sleeping is just a temporary recharging of batteries, and not even fully unconcious."
Proof, please? I think that a person is just a lump of cells while they're sleeping. A person who is sleeping gives no more evidence of consciousness than does a rock. (Note: random ellectical discharges in the brain during sleep do not count as consciousness any more then the CPU of my computer is conscious.)
"There is no easy absolute logically consistant 'right' here."
As long as we all agree that your stance is not logically consistent, then I think we're fine.
"the right to decide over their own bodies "
Ok. So let the woman stop nurturing the child inside of her. That's controlling her own body. I don't see how subjecting the fetus to deadly chemicals or chopping it up into little pieces is controlling her body. It's certainly controlling the fetus's body, though.
The entire line about a woman controlling her own body sounds a lot like if, say, I broke the jaw of some woman who was annoying me and then said, "I have a right to control my own body, and I didn't want to hear her shrill voice". Sure, I have a right to control my own body, but I was also controlling her's by breaking her jaw. Similarly, if you cut a fetus up, you're controlling it's body, not its mothers.
Moreover, while I have a right to control my own body, let's say that I'm hanging on to someone who's slipped and fallen off of a ledge. I don't think that everyone will say that I had the right to let go because I wanted to open my hand and shake it vigorously at that point. Sometimes, when other lives are placed in our hands, we have a responsibility towards them. Or are people not required to take the positive action of hitting the breaks when they're about to run over someone's three year old daughter in the street, because they have the right to control their own bodies?
No, a hang nail and a tumor are a part of a person. A fetus is an entire person, but one cell from it is just a cell from a person. Are you really so dumb that you don't see the distinction? Hell, if we don't hold funerals if I remove a hang-nail from you, would you mind if I removed your hand? Noone hold's funerals for hands. Or maybe the equivalent amount of cells from your spine? Noone would hold a funeral for a hang-nail's worth of spine cells, would they? Hey, how about if I just took a pound of flesh from you. Say, your heart? A fetus who ways a pound can be aborted, and it's just a lump of cells. Isn't your heart just a lump of cells? So if it's just a lump of cells, who cares what you do with it, right?
"We don't hold funerals for hang-nails, or for the billions of early abortions performed by God that go unnoticed by us."
That's because we don't notice them. We do hold funerals for the billions of late abortions performed by God (usually just called death, but I don't see why we shouldn't call an old man dying of cancer an abortion, since his life is being aborted), but that's because we notice them.
Does this mean that we can kill sleeping people? Since sleeping people are not conscious, they just have the potential for consciousness if they wake up, why care about that lump of cells? The same for those who are in a coma, under anesthesia, etc?
And let's extend the principle - clearly retarted people are only somewhat conscious (unless you view consciousness as a binary on/off sort of thing, but then you're going to have to be a pretty strick vegan who doesn't swat flies if you want to hold that view and be consistent). Why can't we kill them? They're obviously not human in the sense of having a fully human consciousness. And while we're at it, why don't we declare anyone who thinks that science or math is geeky to not be fully human?
You see, the real problem with being pro-choice is that there is no really consistent way to hold the position without prettymuch having to believe in the clensing of the human race. The main principle of pro-choice is that simply being a member of the species homo-sapiens doesn't give you human rights. After that, where you draw the line is so arbitrary that it can't be done by anything but axiom, and very few people agree fully on their axioms. For example, you might think that retarted people aren't fully human, and someone else might think that blond people aren't fully human. Since memberhood in the species isn't the test, it's something else, you're going to have a very hard time deciding between you who is right.
In their mind, yes,their views are binding onto me. I disagree. In the US, we've all essentially agreed to, for the most part, pardon unpardonable crimes that everyone else commits and just get along, more or less because of convenience.
However, the fact that a vegetarian does not defend cows from (in his eyes) being murdered does not make him more respectable, just more practical.
Stating this more generally, yes, we all hold signficant and conflicting beliefs. Is there any solution? Well, the only actually workable one is to all hold our beliefs in different places and all have a decent military so that noonse else can force their beliefs on us. Perfect? No. But I defy you to come up with anything better (at most I will allow everyone ignoring the significance of their beliefs and ignoring their neighbors practices as a practical equivalent of that).
But the truth is, vegetarians (who are so un moral grounds) should defend cows and should try to get those who kill them thrown in prison. What's the alternative? To have vegetarians just ignore the murder going on? How can people ignoring the murder of millions (or billions) of innocents possible be a good thing?
Note: I say all this as one who is nearly carnivorous (though I'm trying to move to a more balanced diet for health reasons).
Since just being a member of the species homo sapiens isn't enough to have the status of human, why can't we strip that status from people (and then treat them like any other animal)?
Thousands of people die every day from diseases that we might be able to cure or at least treat with the help of embryonic stem cells.
Yeah, and billions of people will die in the future that killing everyone who has HIV now would prevent. However, no sane person would advocate killing everyone who tests positive for HIV. The simple fact that there are people who might be saved by whatever it is that you want to do doesn't inherently make it right.
Do you believe that pro-life people don't care about the sick? Hell, they're the people with the position that all human life is important. Do you think that pro-life people don't think about the sick, or care about them?
I believe that most people in the pro-life camp think that those in the pro-choice camp believe that killing is bad but sanctioneable. Not that killing is good.
So precisely how does the magical transformation from fetus into human occur? Where is the hard science which supports the irrational claim that people are more important than non-human animals, and that a fetus is a non-human animal which somehow turns into a human animal?
And what is the scientific name for a fetus, anyhow? I presume that a fetus is some sort of monkey until it comes out of the womb, so surely it has a different scientific name than the animals (people) that they turn into at that magical moment.
Look, unless you're calling the belief in law a superstition, you're just being ridiculous claiming that somehow "science" is against the pro-life stance. I've never yet heard of some significant biological distinction between a chicken and a fertilized chicken egg which make them different species, so why is a human and a fertilized human egg a different species? Or are you going to advance the position that a fetus isn't alive?
Why can't everyone just call a spade a spade and admit that the pro-choice stance is the very reasonable position that human life is cheap and convenient murder is unfortunate but not a big deal? Much like "collateral damage" in war, killing a fetus is killing a person, but noone is going to argue when they're dead so why bother with it?
That is a very reasonable position, and it really is the pro-choice position if you examine the matter. The alternative is mostly the supersition that every human life really is valuable and precious. You can argue that really the fact that the rich get more protection than the poor is just fine as there's no rational argument against that. You can argue that killing people isn't a big deal if there aren't going to be major consequences. That's fine. It works out.
But if you really want to disagree with all superstition, including the superstition that human life is in fact valuable, don't do it based on the supersitition that ignorance is bad or the supersition that that wisdom or knowledge is 'good'. After all, there's no actual factual evidence to show that people who know more are in any way superior or better than those who don't.
Let's say that "Bob" gets mad at "Bill" for some minor reason (e.g. Bill looked at Bob's wife the wrong way). Bob then kills Bill. Everyone else forces their belief that it was wrong to kill Bill on Bob, either in the form of inprisoning him or executing him.
"Joe" steals "Nancy's" car. The community forces their belief on Joe that he should not have stolen Nancy's car by taking it away from him and then putting him in prison for several years.
These are all examples of a group of people forcing their beliefs on another. If you think that this is incorrect, and people who think that stealing is wrong should just tell thieves their "point of view" and leave it at that, well, then, please tell me what your address is, as I could use a new car.
More directly, why is it that people who believe that killing a fetus is murder only get to force their views on murder on that subset of murderers who happen to have killed people who had been born?
If your hardware doesn't work in Linux, you're supposed to submit extremely detailed bug reports
You're right! This is horrible! People should only be required to submit extremely vague, generic bug reports (e.g. "It's not working right").
Actually, why should they have to submit bug reports at all? Can't the developers just know when there are bugs and fix them, remotely downloading the binary patch to every affected person's computer, even if that computer doesn't have a network connection?
Up to 4 GB. (Or 3.8, or whatever the actual limit for usable address space per process.) That's like saying you can have it in any color you want, as long as it's black.
Linux will handle up to 4GB on a machine that can only address 4 GB. It can handle up to, I believe, 64 GB on a Xeon with the appropriate bigmem addressing in hardware, and up to more RAM than any machine is going to have in the next 10 years (approximately 8,000,000 GB of RAM) if you're running on a platform with 64 bit pointers (e.g. the alpha).
Do you know of some operating system that runs on hardware with 32 bit addressing that can
address >4 GB of RAM?
So what you're really saying is that Linux scales better than Windows or Mac OS, but not as well as... um... every other operating system in current use?
Well, what do you want? Big Iron has not particularly been available for the kernel developers to work with. After all, 128 CPU systems cost a lot of money. Quite a lot of money. This isn't really an issue of the abilities of the kernel developers so much as the limitations of the environment that they've happened to work under. My point is that they're doing better than their major competition.
User interaction with GCC ends when you hit the "enter" key.
You're right. There's never such a thing as an "error message" or a "warning". How could I have been so silly.
You've never really programmed, have you? Besides, whether the person spends most of their time with gcc, gdb, or emacs (or vi), they're still using GPL'd programs all day long. No matter which way you cut it, one of those programs is going to have a lot of user interaction.
I think this one statement sums up my biggest complaint about the open-source community: it's made up in large part of hobbyists and graduate students who couldn't care less about the requirements of real-world users.
One thing that you should really get through your head: if you use photoshop, you are not a real-world user any more than the aforementioned hobbyists and graduate students. You're a fringe user. You are a member of a tiny minority. Your preferences and views are representative of a very few people, relatively speaking.
I don't know why, but there seems to be a weird tendency among vocal graphic designers on slashdot to think that because they're not programmers they're representative members of "users" in general. You're not. Not at all. Graphic designers (and everyone else who has a real need for photoshot) are an odd, quirky group which makes up a very non-representative sample of the bucket of real-world users.
But more than this, if you think that the windows desktop is good you're just incompetent. It's a practically featureless interface made with a bunch of design decisions aimed at making it as drool-proof as practical, while failing at that but succeeding at getting in the way of work. Take the idiotic focus paradigm. Why on earth should the window recieving input have to be the window on top? Why have virtual desktops been left out of the Windows window manager for so long?
What moron thought that it would be a good idea to have the program draw and handle it's "minimize" and "close" buttons? It's always wonderful to want to minimize a program and not be able to because the program is off in some loop and currently ignoring events sent to it.
The windows desktop borders on being a joke. The Mac doesn't have virtual desktops either. Nor does it even have window manager buttons which make sense (i.e. where the pictures give some hint as to what happends when you click them). On the plus side it's pretty, but that's nothing unique to the Mac.
The truth of the matter, of course, is that as long as an interface is not absurd, people who need to use it to get work done will get used to it. In the end, "user friendliness", except in extreme cases, is mostly a matter of whether or not a person actually has to look at the documentation. That and how much people stuck on their high horses about abstract principles taken to silly extremes will bitch and moan.
Here's an example: phone numbers. Is the idea of remembering a 10 digit code for whomever you want to talk to user-friendly? Of course not. You should be able to just tell the phone who you want to talk to and it should search for them. e.g. "Phone, I want to talk to Bob Thornton, from work." and it looks up who you work with, finds bob thornton, and calls him. Is this the way reality is? No. Has the telephone been an abysmal failure because people are required to remember long strings of digits? No. People fairly quickly adapt to getting their work done, regardless of what the interface is.
The real point about Open Source Software is that it gives power and flexibility that you can't get elsewhere (patent-encumberances and tax software excluded). Whether or not you might have to RTFM is secondary.
Though honestly, quite a lot of OSS is very user-friendly. Abiword, Gnumeric, Mozilla, gcombust, evolution, etc. are all quite easy to use, given that they perform complex tasks. Hell, even the Gimp is pretty easy to use. I've done image (photograph) touchups with no real training or practice, and it turned out pretty well.
And it's not even that great; it doesn't handle large memory effectively, and it can't scale very well.
As compared to what? Linux will handle as much memory as you want to throw at it. Can you provide some evidence of a situation where linux cannot handle some amount of physical memory provided? As for the scaling, what are you comparing it to? There are not that many operating systems that scale better. Solaris, Iris, and AIX are the only three that come to mind. I'm sure that there are a few more (including the more specialized operating systems such as OS/390), but linux scales better than OSes such as windows and MacOS.
Photoshop is different. It's fundamentally user productivity software. It's not sufficient that it should simply work. It must work in a good, consistent, user-friendly way. There is no such requirement for Apache, or the Linux kernel, or GCC. Nobody sits in front of the Linux kernel all day, except for the kernel developers themselves.
Funny that you should list gcc among the programs that don't have to work in a "good, consistent, user-friendly way". I wonder if you think that noone "sits in front of [GCC] all day", considering that that is in some ways what plenty of programmers do. Remember, almost noone (as a percentage of the total populations of humans) use photoshop, either. But it's really funny that you think that there aren't requirements for a kernel, compiler, or web server to work in a good or consistent way. Do you actually believe this?
There is no adequate open-source desktop; as a long-time user of both Gnome and KDE I assert that neither one of them is worth much right now compared to the Windows desktop, or either the Mac OS "Classic" or the OS X desktops.
Well, you at least have demonstrated that your opinion isn't worth very much. I know many people, including myself, who consider windows and mac desktops to be torture compared to a unix desktop.
(Go ahead, mod this down. Like I give a damn about karma.)
Actually, the moderation system exists not to give or take karma from people, but to promote good comments to better public view while removing the noise and such from more prominent positions. Moderation is only incidentally related to karma. The point is to choose make it easier to read the better posts.
However, you are correct that changing the name of The Two Towers would be about as absurd as you can get.
How is all this related to Jar Jar? Good question. Maybe we could say that changing the name of The Two Towers is about on the level of making Jar Jar a main character?
You've got to be kidding, right? You are aware that it takes training and getting a license in order to fly a plane. A lot of training. Large numbers of hours logged in a simulator, and tests and such. Do you think that we should just get rid of the whole idea of a "pilot's license"?
(If by usuable you were referring to the passenger, then that's just wrong. Passenger's don't use an airplane. They are cargo that the airplane carries around. You could pick them all up and throw them in a big pile and it would still work (aside from the occasional death-by-crushing). But the only thing that a passanger on a plane has to do to be successful is not try to blow up the plane. That's not using the plane, and the plane isn't easy to use for a passenger. At least no more than your average room is easy to use because you just stand in it.)
And cars - if you had to spend as much time studying to use a web browser as to get a license to drive on the roads, the web would be in pretty sad shape.
Look, just face it. Computers are complex. There is nothing on this planet, made by people, that can do as many different functions as a computer can. Consequently everything else is going to be easier to use because it doesn't do as much.
Oh, and the lach mechanism is more complicated than jumping out your window (which I presume wouldn't have glass in it for simplicity). First, you have to find the latch, then you have to figure out how to pull it. Everyone should have to jump out of their windows so that they're not as confused.
You sir, are a moron. Noone in their right mind who doesn't pay the tax bill in question cares if they got a good deal. Is it news if you got a shirt at half off? No. It isn't. Someone getting a good price on something that they want happens constantly in a capitalistic society. It's irrelevant.
These people deserve to be pitied for making a bad choice. The fact that they didn't spend much money doing it is relevant only to the people whose money it is.
WHy is money so god damn sacred to you? If they all got together and bargained to get cheaper lunchmeat, and the reason that they could get it cheaper is because it had spoiled, are we still supposed to chear on these schools for their great bargaining? Or what if they could get the lunchmeat cheaper because the lunchmeat company was a front or money-laundering operation? Or because drug dealers were lacing it with cocaine or some other ingestible drug in order to gain greater market penetration in those school districts?
Why does the simple fact that someone saved money mean that we should ignore everything else and do nothing but praise them and verbally pat them on the back?
You see, when we say that Microsoft is bad, WE MEAN IT. We're not saying "we don't want to sit at the same table as microsoft", nor that "we don't want to hang out with them after school". Microsoft is bad. They are actively working towards a future that we don't want to happen. Every success for microsoft is a defeat for the rest of us. Every step closer to world domination that microsoft takes is a step farther from the freedom of the rest of the world.
I'm curious: if, say, during the gulf war there was a story about various [your country here] schools making a deal with Iraq to get history textbooks cheaply, would you have similarly condemned everyone who didn't say "they're getting a good price, this is wonderful news and all people should jump in the air with joy and exuberance"? Had someone pointed out that they were (1) Going to be getting textbooks which contained a lot of misinformation and (2) Funding biological weapons to be used against either the Iraqi people or the people of [your country here] as Sadam felt like it, would you have jumped down their throat the way that you've jumped down the throats of people pointing out that a victory for microsoft is a bad thing for the rest of the world?
First off, Christianity and Islam are competing religions (read: world views), not businesses. They are mutually exclusive by their very nature.
Ford and GM are not mutually exclusive by their nature. Neither are any of the other companies that you mentioned.
Anyhow, about your assertion: "The objective of ANY business is to BEAT THEIR COMPETITORS." Well, this is only true of bad businesses. The objective of good businesses is to make money buy selling goods or services. It is true that very frequently businesses will compete with each other, and that if their competition went away life would be easier for them. However, not all businesses are out to make all the money in the world. Plenty of businesses are happy with finding a decent niche and staying in it. For example, take a look at any given restaurant which has existed for more than 10 years but hasn't turned into a franchise. Take a look at most of the small businesses around. They really aren't all big businesses waiting to happen.
The truth of the matter is that many, if not most, people are content with a certain level of achievement and don't want to take over the world. Most people are willing to find an equilibrium with their competitors.
But to get back to your examples, just imagine if Ford had made special "Ford Gasoline" which was incompatible with all other cars (ignoring the fact that this was beyond the technology of the time), way back when, and that they only agreed to sell "Ford Gasoline" to gas stations which didn't carry any other type of gasoline. Now imagine a world with only Ford cars which cost $50,000 for the cheapest model, break down every 500 miles travelled, and somehow manage to leverage Ford brand toasters into your home. Aren't you glad that there was actually competition back when and that noone beat out their cometitors with really immoral tricks?
Anyhow, I really love this part, "Now tell me you really honestly think that would have happened if something like Windows hadn't come along to make these gosh-darn complicated new-fangled boxes usable to people that can't get their VCR to stop blinking 12:00."
(btw, I have certainly benefitted from the massive influx of personal computers etc.)
Anyhow, as to your point, I do think that this would have happened, since something like Windows didn't come along "to make these gosh-darn complicated new-fangled boxes usuable to people that can't get their VCR to stop blinking 12:00". Windows didn't simplify computing, it provided a framework for graphics.
Windows was not easy, either to use or to program. I speak as one who did both on windows 3.1 - it was a POS any way you look at it. Windows 95 was an improvement, to be sure.
However, if you think that what happened with the computer boom was either directly or indirectly facilitated by any features of windows that anyone writing an OS for the personal computer wouldn't have implemented, you're living in a dream world. Most people can't figure out anything about windows administration, and as for program installation all you need is a standard way of providing the user with access to the installed programs. Every operating system has this. Hell, I know plenty of people who prefer a text menu to hitting icons with the mouse, and people who prefer a command line (possibly with a reference card) to icons too.
Anyhow, windows came with no useful programs other than solitaire and mine sweeper. Noone every bought a computer for windows. They bought a computer for the programs that they could run on it. During the later time of windows 3.1, there were at least two competing windowing interfaces for the PC that could run dos programs, and 3 if you include linux w/ X. Programs would have come regardless of windows, and advances in hardware were driven by software, not by windows. Microsoft office only started to dominate a year or two after win95 came out, and it doesn't offer anything over its competition aside from 100% microsoft office compatibility.
The truth of the matter is that microsoft has made no discernable contributions to the world of computing that anyone who had been in the right place at the right time as Microsoft had would have done (and probably done sooner and better).
Anyhow, if you think that computers are easy to use, you're the one who is delusional. People are simply good at learning repetative tasks, such as checking their email. If you made them two 10 extra steps from what they have to do now, as long as these steps are consistent from use to use, they'd still use their email just fine.
Really, the only people who think that computers are easy to use are those who don't give tech support to their family, friends, or acquaintences. Try it some time. You'll realize just how hard most people find computers.
Ohh wait, anything that goes MS's way is bad. MS is the devil.
You in fact answered your own question. Microsoft is a company out to destroy all of their competitors, including open source software. They've stated it, they've acted the part, and they've been found guilty in a federal court of doing just this (to specific competitors).
Why do people find it so hard to understand that some of us do, in fact, believe that microsoft is bad. Why on earth does the fact that they want to make money somehow exonerate them from everything they've done to destroy competition, and somehow nullify the fact that they're a highly abusive monopoly?
In short, MICROSOFT IS EVIL. Get that through your thick skulls. If you're not part of microsoft, you do not stand to benefit from anything that they do. Not in the long run.
Note: I am counting greed as evil. It is not, in fact a virtue, and when greed is allowed to cause one to injure others, it is evil. Why do people restrict their definition of evil to killing >1,000,000 people and clubbing baby seals? There are plenty of types of evil in the world, and microsoft actively engages in several of them.
Hell, there's "Megan's Law" for sex offendors. Somehow people think it's not entirely unreasonable for people to find out about child molestors who enter their communities. Microsoft has comitted crimes. Microsoft has admitted in many, many times to anticompetitive behavior. What more do you need? Bill gates to grow a goatee and wear all black?
If there is a full supply of used copies of a 1-month old book, then that says something: noone wants to keep this book. Why on earth do authors deserve high sale numbers when the book that they sold has so little future value (i.e. virtually noone wants to re-read it or look anything up in it or lend it to a friend)? If a mere 500 copies of a book are enough to satisfy everyone because it doesn't take long to read and it's not worth having when you're done, why should the author sell 50,000 copies?
Used books are typically not in as good condition as new books, they don't typically have the same physical feel (e.g. a new binding feels different than an old binding), and if there is really that good of a supply of used books, the book can't be worth much, regardless of what is being charged for it. Why should bad authors be subsidised by unnecessary inefficiencies. After all, the reason that it's copyright and not a tax is so that good books get rewarded more than bad books, in order to encourage good books.
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There is in fact a difference. Unfortunately, you're really not on the right side of it. For example: "Or even, dare I say it, to move on to languages outside the perl family for some programming and choose the right tool for the job for a change." That's not provocative, that's just insulting to those who like perl and who think that there are many jobs for which it is the right tool.
You see, provocotive is bringing up ideas that people have not thought of before. Everyone having once been five years old has thought, "does this suck" before, about prettymuch everything. Thus posting "consider that perl sucks" is not provocotive. Noone who learns a programming language doesn't consider, at some point fairly early on, "does this suck".
So while you would prefer to think of your post as provocotive, really it's just a flame. It's also fairly wrong, too, as perl is quite far from irrelevant. It's also most certainly not a universal solution, but then nothing is.
And besides all of this, Perl 6 is going to be a language which learned from Perl 1-5, so it's still one to be compared even if one slavishly follows your post.
That's nonsense. Every problem that affects under a certain percentage is ignored. How much is the problem of serial murderers who eat their victims being addressed? While this isn't a good example (because any type of murder is illegal), but the point still stands: if something is an incredibly infrequent problem, it doesn't get addressed because most ways of dealing with it will cause more difficulty than the problem really merits.
How many laws are there on the books to deal with the problem of escaped elephants tearing apart residential homes?
Now, I'm not arguing that child molestation isn't a problem, merely that it isn't the society-destroying calamity that every child being impaled on a pike would be. Now, if every child was going to be impaled on a pike, it would probably warrant handcuffing a police officer to everyone (a silly example, I know). However, less severe threats warrant less severe measures to prevent them.
the real question to ask is how much of a problem is child molestation really? If literally every child to get on the net were in really grave danger, than we need laws to keep children off of the net, as we have laws to keep them away from alcohol or tobacco.
There are two types of potential: real and theoretical potential. There is of course great theoretical potential for harm. The important question is how much real potential for harm is there. That dictates how much action should be taken.
That being said, of course children should be educated on how to protect themselves from others, on the internet or off. That should go without saying. The real question is how much further should things go? Should it be legal to give internet access to minors despite the dangers involved?
Why is this so sure? I don't mean to come out one way or another on this issue, but extrapolating from one case seems to be a pretty bad method.
Moreover, how many child abusers do you think that there are in society? Do you really think that there are enough that the average child is in great danger the moment that they can communicate with someone? If so, if there really are that many child molestors, then what percentage of the population do they make up?
You see, if child moslestors make up 50% of the population or so, then it's really time to worry as fairly soon child molestation is going to become legal.
Extrapolation is a dangerous thing. Always be wary of it.
IANAL either, but I did take a business law course taught by a lawyer. What you said is not quite true (at least not in NY state). When you give somebody something (not for any consideration), then you are not liable for negligence. However, you are liable for gross negligence. Gross negligence is defined as negligence which "shocks the conscience of the court".
My understanding is that it is very difficult to shock the conscience of the court, especially when you're giving something away for free. I suspect that as long as one doesn't knowingly include genuinely malicious code and keep quiet about it, that a software developer who gives away their code for free will be more than fine.
I suspect, though this is just a guess, that RedHat could probably take the position, as long as they made it clear to purchasers, that they are providing an installation and aggregation service, they are not actually selling the code that they didn't write. Thus they would be liable for bugs in the packaging or installation but not in the aggregated software. This would be reasonable, IMHO, and probably legally OK, too. Of course, that's just pure speculation on my part.
No, you're the moron.
A contract is a legally binding agreement made for mutual consideration.
The GPL is a license given to redistribute a copyrighted work and derrivatives of it. It is unilateral permission given by an author to do that which a person normally cannot. There is no mutual consideration and no mutual obligation.
Actually, the second two were, in my opinion, better books than the first. I found the first one to be a bit slow, but then again you have to set up before you can move on.
That being said, star wars is an epic, and that's what the best SW stories are going to be. In a (non-tragic) epic, the important people generally don't die, even when they do dangerous things (in a tragic epic, everyone dies even when they don't do dangerous things - but I'm not really fond of those). Why is it really that important to you that people have to die if they do dangerous things? Why must dangerous things result in death or it makes a book bad?
And the truth is that people get lucky in life. When you write a story, you write about those exceptional people who get lucky more than most. If a story was about truly average people, they'd be boring. If we want to read about truly average people, we can just just skip the reading and look around.
Besides, if you dislike reaslism, why do you pick up on people getting lucky (and if anyone is going to get lucky, I would imagine that a jedi master would be the sort of person who is lucky more than most), why don't you pick on people being noble so often? Most real people want to live their lives quietly in peace and comfort and really just sort of try to adapt to any hardship that comes there way. Most people would not fight an evil empire, they'd just live in it as best they can.
So why is it such a big deal that extraordinary people have extraordinary things happen to them? Let's not forget that plenty of them are, in effect, magicians. One doesn't expect the ordinary with magicians, or at least you shouldn't.
Also, you left out the part where luke goes into a jedi trance where he needs only infinitessimal amounts of oxygen and heat to survive, thus enabling him to live long enough to be stumbled upon. Convenient? Yes. Unlikely? Yes. Impossible, well, not after you've already granted the existence of the jedi.
Besides, has it not occurred to you that the book had been following Karde's ship pricesly because at some point he would be the one who ran accross luke? (Remember, luke was not in a highly unpopulated area and so it was likely that someone would eventually run accross him.) This is a not uncommon narrative device, where you start telling a bunch of independent stories and eventually tie them together. It's not that the main characters were randomly chosen and then through a series of insanely unlikely events all happen to come together. It's that an event was picked, or perhaps a few characters were picked, and whoever happened to come along was then selected and their story fleshed out.
All this being said, in my opinion the first book is best when it is dealing with Grand Admiral Thrawn, and everyone else is less interesting. In the second and third books, however, I think that his handling of the other characters is better (or one just gets used to his take on their personalities), and they're thoroughly enjoyable reading. While I could put the first book down, the second and third I couldn't stop reading.
I was a bit dissapointed with the way that Thrawn was killed. It made perfect sense, but it was a bit ... I don't know. I'd have rather than killing thrawn had been harder, even if the way he was killed made perfect sense and fit well with the rest of the plot.
Can you give a citation for that quote? It's really cool
"Sleeping is just a temporary recharging of batteries, and not even fully unconcious."
Proof, please? I think that a person is just a lump of cells while they're sleeping. A person who is sleeping gives no more evidence of consciousness than does a rock. (Note: random ellectical discharges in the brain during sleep do not count as consciousness any more then the CPU of my computer is conscious.)
"There is no easy absolute logically consistant 'right' here."
As long as we all agree that your stance is not logically consistent, then I think we're fine.
"the right to decide over their own bodies "
Ok. So let the woman stop nurturing the child inside of her. That's controlling her own body. I don't see how subjecting the fetus to deadly chemicals or chopping it up into little pieces is controlling her body. It's certainly controlling the fetus's body, though.
The entire line about a woman controlling her own body sounds a lot like if, say, I broke the jaw of some woman who was annoying me and then said, "I have a right to control my own body, and I didn't want to hear her shrill voice". Sure, I have a right to control my own body, but I was also controlling her's by breaking her jaw. Similarly, if you cut a fetus up, you're controlling it's body, not its mothers.
Moreover, while I have a right to control my own body, let's say that I'm hanging on to someone who's slipped and fallen off of a ledge. I don't think that everyone will say that I had the right to let go because I wanted to open my hand and shake it vigorously at that point. Sometimes, when other lives are placed in our hands, we have a responsibility towards them. Or are people not required to take the positive action of hitting the breaks when they're about to run over someone's three year old daughter in the street, because they have the right to control their own bodies?
"A hang-nail is human. A tumor is human."
No, a hang nail and a tumor are a part of a person. A fetus is an entire person, but one cell from it is just a cell from a person. Are you really so dumb that you don't see the distinction? Hell, if we don't hold funerals if I remove a hang-nail from you, would you mind if I removed your hand? Noone hold's funerals for hands. Or maybe the equivalent amount of cells from your spine? Noone would hold a funeral for a hang-nail's worth of spine cells, would they? Hey, how about if I just took a pound of flesh from you. Say, your heart? A fetus who ways a pound can be aborted, and it's just a lump of cells. Isn't your heart just a lump of cells? So if it's just a lump of cells, who cares what you do with it, right?
"We don't hold funerals for hang-nails, or for the billions of early abortions performed by God that go unnoticed by us."
That's because we don't notice them. We do hold funerals for the billions of late abortions performed by God (usually just called death, but I don't see why we shouldn't call an old man dying of cancer an abortion, since his life is being aborted), but that's because we notice them.
Does this mean that we can kill sleeping people? Since sleeping people are not conscious, they just have the potential for consciousness if they wake up, why care about that lump of cells? The same for those who are in a coma, under anesthesia, etc?
And let's extend the principle - clearly retarted people are only somewhat conscious (unless you view consciousness as a binary on/off sort of thing, but then you're going to have to be a pretty strick vegan who doesn't swat flies if you want to hold that view and be consistent). Why can't we kill them? They're obviously not human in the sense of having a fully human consciousness. And while we're at it, why don't we declare anyone who thinks that science or math is geeky to not be fully human?
You see, the real problem with being pro-choice is that there is no really consistent way to hold the position without prettymuch having to believe in the clensing of the human race. The main principle of pro-choice is that simply being a member of the species homo-sapiens doesn't give you human rights. After that, where you draw the line is so arbitrary that it can't be done by anything but axiom, and very few people agree fully on their axioms. For example, you might think that retarted people aren't fully human, and someone else might think that blond people aren't fully human. Since memberhood in the species isn't the test, it's something else, you're going to have a very hard time deciding between you who is right.
In their mind, yes,their views are binding onto me. I disagree. In the US, we've all essentially agreed to, for the most part, pardon unpardonable crimes that everyone else commits and just get along, more or less because of convenience.
However, the fact that a vegetarian does not defend cows from (in his eyes) being murdered does not make him more respectable, just more practical.
Stating this more generally, yes, we all hold signficant and conflicting beliefs. Is there any solution? Well, the only actually workable one is to all hold our beliefs in different places and all have a decent military so that noonse else can force their beliefs on us. Perfect? No. But I defy you to come up with anything better (at most I will allow everyone ignoring the significance of their beliefs and ignoring their neighbors practices as a practical equivalent of that).
But the truth is, vegetarians (who are so un moral grounds) should defend cows and should try to get those who kill them thrown in prison. What's the alternative? To have vegetarians just ignore the murder going on? How can people ignoring the murder of millions (or billions) of innocents possible be a good thing?
Note: I say all this as one who is nearly carnivorous (though I'm trying to move to a more balanced diet for health reasons).
Since just being a member of the species homo sapiens isn't enough to have the status of human, why can't we strip that status from people (and then treat them like any other animal)?
Yeah, and billions of people will die in the future that killing everyone who has HIV now would prevent. However, no sane person would advocate killing everyone who tests positive for HIV. The simple fact that there are people who might be saved by whatever it is that you want to do doesn't inherently make it right.
Do you believe that pro-life people don't care about the sick? Hell, they're the people with the position that all human life is important. Do you think that pro-life people don't think about the sick, or care about them?
I believe that most people in the pro-life camp think that those in the pro-choice camp believe that killing is bad but sanctioneable. Not that killing is good.
So precisely how does the magical transformation from fetus into human occur? Where is the hard science which supports the irrational claim that people are more important than non-human animals, and that a fetus is a non-human animal which somehow turns into a human animal?
And what is the scientific name for a fetus, anyhow? I presume that a fetus is some sort of monkey until it comes out of the womb, so surely it has a different scientific name than the animals (people) that they turn into at that magical moment.
Look, unless you're calling the belief in law a superstition, you're just being ridiculous claiming that somehow "science" is against the pro-life stance. I've never yet heard of some significant biological distinction between a chicken and a fertilized chicken egg which make them different species, so why is a human and a fertilized human egg a different species? Or are you going to advance the position that a fetus isn't alive?
Why can't everyone just call a spade a spade and admit that the pro-choice stance is the very reasonable position that human life is cheap and convenient murder is unfortunate but not a big deal? Much like "collateral damage" in war, killing a fetus is killing a person, but noone is going to argue when they're dead so why bother with it?
That is a very reasonable position, and it really is the pro-choice position if you examine the matter. The alternative is mostly the supersition that every human life really is valuable and precious. You can argue that really the fact that the rich get more protection than the poor is just fine as there's no rational argument against that. You can argue that killing people isn't a big deal if there aren't going to be major consequences. That's fine. It works out.
But if you really want to disagree with all superstition, including the superstition that human life is in fact valuable, don't do it based on the supersitition that ignorance is bad or the supersition that that wisdom or knowledge is 'good'. After all, there's no actual factual evidence to show that people who know more are in any way superior or better than those who don't.
Let's say that "Bob" gets mad at "Bill" for some minor reason (e.g. Bill looked at Bob's wife the wrong way). Bob then kills Bill. Everyone else forces their belief that it was wrong to kill Bill on Bob, either in the form of inprisoning him or executing him.
"Joe" steals "Nancy's" car. The community forces their belief on Joe that he should not have stolen Nancy's car by taking it away from him and then putting him in prison for several years.
These are all examples of a group of people forcing their beliefs on another. If you think that this is incorrect, and people who think that stealing is wrong should just tell thieves their "point of view" and leave it at that, well, then, please tell me what your address is, as I could use a new car.
More directly, why is it that people who believe that killing a fetus is murder only get to force their views on murder on that subset of murderers who happen to have killed people who had been born?
You're right! This is horrible! People should only be required to submit extremely vague, generic bug reports (e.g. "It's not working right").
Actually, why should they have to submit bug reports at all? Can't the developers just know when there are bugs and fix them, remotely downloading the binary patch to every affected person's computer, even if that computer doesn't have a network connection?
Linux will handle up to 4GB on a machine that can only address 4 GB. It can handle up to, I believe, 64 GB on a Xeon with the appropriate bigmem addressing in hardware, and up to more RAM than any machine is going to have in the next 10 years (approximately 8,000,000 GB of RAM) if you're running on a platform with 64 bit pointers (e.g. the alpha).
Do you know of some operating system that runs on hardware with 32 bit addressing that can address >4 GB of RAM?
Well, what do you want? Big Iron has not particularly been available for the kernel developers to work with. After all, 128 CPU systems cost a lot of money. Quite a lot of money. This isn't really an issue of the abilities of the kernel developers so much as the limitations of the environment that they've happened to work under. My point is that they're doing better than their major competition.
You're right. There's never such a thing as an "error message" or a "warning". How could I have been so silly.
You've never really programmed, have you? Besides, whether the person spends most of their time with gcc, gdb, or emacs (or vi), they're still using GPL'd programs all day long. No matter which way you cut it, one of those programs is going to have a lot of user interaction.
One thing that you should really get through your head: if you use photoshop, you are not a real-world user any more than the aforementioned hobbyists and graduate students. You're a fringe user. You are a member of a tiny minority. Your preferences and views are representative of a very few people, relatively speaking.
I don't know why, but there seems to be a weird tendency among vocal graphic designers on slashdot to think that because they're not programmers they're representative members of "users" in general. You're not. Not at all. Graphic designers (and everyone else who has a real need for photoshot) are an odd, quirky group which makes up a very non-representative sample of the bucket of real-world users.
But more than this, if you think that the windows desktop is good you're just incompetent. It's a practically featureless interface made with a bunch of design decisions aimed at making it as drool-proof as practical, while failing at that but succeeding at getting in the way of work. Take the idiotic focus paradigm. Why on earth should the window recieving input have to be the window on top? Why have virtual desktops been left out of the Windows window manager for so long?
What moron thought that it would be a good idea to have the program draw and handle it's "minimize" and "close" buttons? It's always wonderful to want to minimize a program and not be able to because the program is off in some loop and currently ignoring events sent to it.
The windows desktop borders on being a joke. The Mac doesn't have virtual desktops either. Nor does it even have window manager buttons which make sense (i.e. where the pictures give some hint as to what happends when you click them). On the plus side it's pretty, but that's nothing unique to the Mac.
The truth of the matter, of course, is that as long as an interface is not absurd, people who need to use it to get work done will get used to it. In the end, "user friendliness", except in extreme cases, is mostly a matter of whether or not a person actually has to look at the documentation. That and how much people stuck on their high horses about abstract principles taken to silly extremes will bitch and moan.
Here's an example: phone numbers. Is the idea of remembering a 10 digit code for whomever you want to talk to user-friendly? Of course not. You should be able to just tell the phone who you want to talk to and it should search for them. e.g. "Phone, I want to talk to Bob Thornton, from work." and it looks up who you work with, finds bob thornton, and calls him. Is this the way reality is? No. Has the telephone been an abysmal failure because people are required to remember long strings of digits? No. People fairly quickly adapt to getting their work done, regardless of what the interface is.
The real point about Open Source Software is that it gives power and flexibility that you can't get elsewhere (patent-encumberances and tax software excluded). Whether or not you might have to RTFM is secondary.
Though honestly, quite a lot of OSS is very user-friendly. Abiword, Gnumeric, Mozilla, gcombust, evolution, etc. are all quite easy to use, given that they perform complex tasks. Hell, even the Gimp is pretty easy to use. I've done image (photograph) touchups with no real training or practice, and it turned out pretty well.
As compared to what? Linux will handle as much memory as you want to throw at it. Can you provide some evidence of a situation where linux cannot handle some amount of physical memory provided? As for the scaling, what are you comparing it to? There are not that many operating systems that scale better. Solaris, Iris, and AIX are the only three that come to mind. I'm sure that there are a few more (including the more specialized operating systems such as OS/390), but linux scales better than OSes such as windows and MacOS.
Funny that you should list gcc among the programs that don't have to work in a "good, consistent, user-friendly way". I wonder if you think that noone "sits in front of [GCC] all day", considering that that is in some ways what plenty of programmers do. Remember, almost noone (as a percentage of the total populations of humans) use photoshop, either. But it's really funny that you think that there aren't requirements for a kernel, compiler, or web server to work in a good or consistent way. Do you actually believe this?
Well, you at least have demonstrated that your opinion isn't worth very much. I know many people, including myself, who consider windows and mac desktops to be torture compared to a unix desktop.
Actually, the moderation system exists not to give or take karma from people, but to promote good comments to better public view while removing the noise and such from more prominent positions. Moderation is only incidentally related to karma. The point is to choose make it easier to read the better posts.
However, you are correct that changing the name of The Two Towers would be about as absurd as you can get.
How is all this related to Jar Jar? Good question. Maybe we could say that changing the name of The Two Towers is about on the level of making Jar Jar a main character?
You've got to be kidding, right? You are aware that it takes training and getting a license in order to fly a plane. A lot of training. Large numbers of hours logged in a simulator, and tests and such. Do you think that we should just get rid of the whole idea of a "pilot's license"?
(If by usuable you were referring to the passenger, then that's just wrong. Passenger's don't use an airplane. They are cargo that the airplane carries around. You could pick them all up and throw them in a big pile and it would still work (aside from the occasional death-by-crushing). But the only thing that a passanger on a plane has to do to be successful is not try to blow up the plane. That's not using the plane, and the plane isn't easy to use for a passenger. At least no more than your average room is easy to use because you just stand in it.)
And cars - if you had to spend as much time studying to use a web browser as to get a license to drive on the roads, the web would be in pretty sad shape.
Look, just face it. Computers are complex. There is nothing on this planet, made by people, that can do as many different functions as a computer can. Consequently everything else is going to be easier to use because it doesn't do as much.
Oh, and the lach mechanism is more complicated than jumping out your window (which I presume wouldn't have glass in it for simplicity). First, you have to find the latch, then you have to figure out how to pull it. Everyone should have to jump out of their windows so that they're not as confused.
You sir, are a moron. Noone in their right mind who doesn't pay the tax bill in question cares if they got a good deal. Is it news if you got a shirt at half off? No. It isn't. Someone getting a good price on something that they want happens constantly in a capitalistic society. It's irrelevant.
These people deserve to be pitied for making a bad choice. The fact that they didn't spend much money doing it is relevant only to the people whose money it is.
WHy is money so god damn sacred to you? If they all got together and bargained to get cheaper lunchmeat, and the reason that they could get it cheaper is because it had spoiled, are we still supposed to chear on these schools for their great bargaining? Or what if they could get the lunchmeat cheaper because the lunchmeat company was a front or money-laundering operation? Or because drug dealers were lacing it with cocaine or some other ingestible drug in order to gain greater market penetration in those school districts?
Why does the simple fact that someone saved money mean that we should ignore everything else and do nothing but praise them and verbally pat them on the back?
You see, when we say that Microsoft is bad, WE MEAN IT. We're not saying "we don't want to sit at the same table as microsoft", nor that "we don't want to hang out with them after school". Microsoft is bad. They are actively working towards a future that we don't want to happen. Every success for microsoft is a defeat for the rest of us. Every step closer to world domination that microsoft takes is a step farther from the freedom of the rest of the world.
I'm curious: if, say, during the gulf war there was a story about various [your country here] schools making a deal with Iraq to get history textbooks cheaply, would you have similarly condemned everyone who didn't say "they're getting a good price, this is wonderful news and all people should jump in the air with joy and exuberance"? Had someone pointed out that they were (1) Going to be getting textbooks which contained a lot of misinformation and (2) Funding biological weapons to be used against either the Iraqi people or the people of [your country here] as Sadam felt like it, would you have jumped down their throat the way that you've jumped down the throats of people pointing out that a victory for microsoft is a bad thing for the rest of the world?
First off, Christianity and Islam are competing religions (read: world views), not businesses. They are mutually exclusive by their very nature.
Ford and GM are not mutually exclusive by their nature. Neither are any of the other companies that you mentioned.
Anyhow, about your assertion: "The objective of ANY business is to BEAT THEIR COMPETITORS." Well, this is only true of bad businesses. The objective of good businesses is to make money buy selling goods or services. It is true that very frequently businesses will compete with each other, and that if their competition went away life would be easier for them. However, not all businesses are out to make all the money in the world. Plenty of businesses are happy with finding a decent niche and staying in it. For example, take a look at any given restaurant which has existed for more than 10 years but hasn't turned into a franchise. Take a look at most of the small businesses around. They really aren't all big businesses waiting to happen.
The truth of the matter is that many, if not most, people are content with a certain level of achievement and don't want to take over the world. Most people are willing to find an equilibrium with their competitors.
But to get back to your examples, just imagine if Ford had made special "Ford Gasoline" which was incompatible with all other cars (ignoring the fact that this was beyond the technology of the time), way back when, and that they only agreed to sell "Ford Gasoline" to gas stations which didn't carry any other type of gasoline. Now imagine a world with only Ford cars which cost $50,000 for the cheapest model, break down every 500 miles travelled, and somehow manage to leverage Ford brand toasters into your home. Aren't you glad that there was actually competition back when and that noone beat out their cometitors with really immoral tricks?
Anyhow, I really love this part, "Now tell me you really honestly think that would have happened if something like Windows hadn't come along to make these gosh-darn complicated new-fangled boxes usable to people that can't get their VCR to stop blinking 12:00."
(btw, I have certainly benefitted from the massive influx of personal computers etc.)
Anyhow, as to your point, I do think that this would have happened, since something like Windows didn't come along "to make these gosh-darn complicated new-fangled boxes usuable to people that can't get their VCR to stop blinking 12:00". Windows didn't simplify computing, it provided a framework for graphics.
Windows was not easy, either to use or to program. I speak as one who did both on windows 3.1 - it was a POS any way you look at it. Windows 95 was an improvement, to be sure.
However, if you think that what happened with the computer boom was either directly or indirectly facilitated by any features of windows that anyone writing an OS for the personal computer wouldn't have implemented, you're living in a dream world. Most people can't figure out anything about windows administration, and as for program installation all you need is a standard way of providing the user with access to the installed programs. Every operating system has this. Hell, I know plenty of people who prefer a text menu to hitting icons with the mouse, and people who prefer a command line (possibly with a reference card) to icons too.
Anyhow, windows came with no useful programs other than solitaire and mine sweeper. Noone every bought a computer for windows. They bought a computer for the programs that they could run on it. During the later time of windows 3.1, there were at least two competing windowing interfaces for the PC that could run dos programs, and 3 if you include linux w/ X. Programs would have come regardless of windows, and advances in hardware were driven by software, not by windows. Microsoft office only started to dominate a year or two after win95 came out, and it doesn't offer anything over its competition aside from 100% microsoft office compatibility.
The truth of the matter is that microsoft has made no discernable contributions to the world of computing that anyone who had been in the right place at the right time as Microsoft had would have done (and probably done sooner and better).
Anyhow, if you think that computers are easy to use, you're the one who is delusional. People are simply good at learning repetative tasks, such as checking their email. If you made them two 10 extra steps from what they have to do now, as long as these steps are consistent from use to use, they'd still use their email just fine.
Really, the only people who think that computers are easy to use are those who don't give tech support to their family, friends, or acquaintences. Try it some time. You'll realize just how hard most people find computers.
You in fact answered your own question. Microsoft is a company out to destroy all of their competitors, including open source software. They've stated it, they've acted the part, and they've been found guilty in a federal court of doing just this (to specific competitors).
Why do people find it so hard to understand that some of us do, in fact, believe that microsoft is bad. Why on earth does the fact that they want to make money somehow exonerate them from everything they've done to destroy competition, and somehow nullify the fact that they're a highly abusive monopoly?
In short, MICROSOFT IS EVIL. Get that through your thick skulls. If you're not part of microsoft, you do not stand to benefit from anything that they do. Not in the long run.
Note: I am counting greed as evil. It is not, in fact a virtue, and when greed is allowed to cause one to injure others, it is evil. Why do people restrict their definition of evil to killing >1,000,000 people and clubbing baby seals? There are plenty of types of evil in the world, and microsoft actively engages in several of them.
Hell, there's "Megan's Law" for sex offendors. Somehow people think it's not entirely unreasonable for people to find out about child molestors who enter their communities. Microsoft has comitted crimes. Microsoft has admitted in many, many times to anticompetitive behavior. What more do you need? Bill gates to grow a goatee and wear all black?
If there is a full supply of used copies of a 1-month old book, then that says something: noone wants to keep this book. Why on earth do authors deserve high sale numbers when the book that they sold has so little future value (i.e. virtually noone wants to re-read it or look anything up in it or lend it to a friend)? If a mere 500 copies of a book are enough to satisfy everyone because it doesn't take long to read and it's not worth having when you're done, why should the author sell 50,000 copies?
Used books are typically not in as good condition as new books, they don't typically have the same physical feel (e.g. a new binding feels different than an old binding), and if there is really that good of a supply of used books, the book can't be worth much, regardless of what is being charged for it. Why should bad authors be subsidised by unnecessary inefficiencies. After all, the reason that it's copyright and not a tax is so that good books get rewarded more than bad books, in order to encourage good books.