This is really not a surprise. IE is an inferior product. It always has been. The market share it has received is solely attributable to the bundling with the Microsoft operating systems
This is not true at all. IE 1, 2 & 3 were not as good as Netscape Navigator and they suffered, but IE 4 was hands down better than other browsers. It mainstreamed a fully programmable DOM, where Netscape Navigator had what, document.write, and a bunch of junk about layers.
And, while we lament the death of Netscape, you do have to remember that while free IE may have killed Netscape on the client side, I'd be willing to bet that Apache utterly crushed Netscape on the server side. Does anyone remember Netscape web servers? Ah, that's a big negative. I remember even in the late 1990s our Sun admin was looking to replace Netscape web server with Apache... him and others like him really finished that company off.
The only direction IE ever could go was down. If Microsoft wants to change that then they need to do some serious work and start cooperating with the rest of world. Build a better product is the simplest way to put it.
This is very true. But you have to understand that the counterpoint to Microsoft's strategy is to get people to think about rich clients again and they are actually being rather successful with VSTO and Excel integration. I see lots of contract work with Excel front ends, instead of web front ends, these days. It's a crappy technology, but businesses pay for it.
And a lot of you guys will be screaming murder. Have you realized that GPL enforcement and Windows license enforcement comes from the same thing as Copyright law?
I read the personal appeal by Jimmy Wales and decided to pass. The reason is that he says that Wikipedia aims to be a source of all human knowledge, yet, their own editorial guidelines preclude putting in more specialized knowledge. There are also some rumors of political shenanigans behind the scenes. Look, if you want to act like a corporation, just be one, and put some ads on the thing and get on with it.
You don't have to approve of what someone eats, what drugs they take, or who they sleep with to decide whether you're willing to pay they price they want for what they're selling.
But that's the thing. You do do that, and a person's values are considered as a part of the exchange. Let's say you owned a software company. Would you hire someone that showed up to work not wearing a suit to an interview? Would you hire a felon? Would you hire someone who was a staunch socialist? Or would you hire someone who was an avowed libertarian? You know the answer to that. You are going to hire based on your values and you would argue the right to do that because it is your company. That's fine.
But the counter-argument to that is that the people, expressed through their government, have the right to set values on trade as well. You can argue that your business is yours and should morally be immune from all government regulation, but it is government regulation that confers upon corporations the notion of limited liability, and hence the "right" to play with the deposits of other people in the form of loans to you.
Libertarian economics is all well and good, but you have to take limited liability off of the table, eliminate non-compete clauses and non-disclosure agreements, get rid of patents and copyrights (to a degree), get rid of exclusive promotions and deals, in short, actually have a competitive marketplace. Without those things though, there's a lot less to attract investors, and really, there's no industrial revolution at all.
To some extent, this experiment was tried in the American civil war. The north had greater government regulation in the supply of labor and the south did not. As a result, the north got the industrial revolution and the south got slavery. They had a big war, and the south lost, because, the north had more railways, more tents, more soldiers and more guns, cannons, ships and steel... whereas the south never had to have the industrial base to build this stuff with because the free market went straight to the lowest possible wage, which was buying slaves.
And what's the world like now? Those nations that artificially raise the value of their labor, through government regulation, are making all sorts of technological breakthroughs, but those that do not, just throw bodies at problems and ultimately fail. Guess where the USA is? WE got a bunch of jerks arguing free trade and that's really just wage shopping in the other direction. You need government intervention to make an economy that advances.
Once the benefits of sending a man to the Moon exceeded the costs, free enterprise would have done so, and more cheaply than NASA ever could.
I think it is time that we challenge some basic assertions thrown around here.
I really have to dispute the idea that free enterprise is inherently less expensive than the government. Innately, the government has enormous economies of scale, and, the ability to offer its workers additional power in addition to economic compensation.
While it may have been fashionable in the 1980s to argue on behalf of the smaller, more nimble corporation as compared to a vast government, 30 years of mergers and acquisitions have left us with fewer corporations that are so large and slow they are practically governments themselves. How often have we used the word "Synergy", like it is a joke? If you can believe in any Wall Street merger, than certainly, would not the merger of all rivals into the government be the ultimate in "synergies". Clearly, libertarian arguments about the private sector versus the government are inconsistent.
What is the real case is that the free enterprise system really exists to allow the government to offload the risk of engaging in new forms of commerce, most of which are honestly speculative, onto the private citizenry. Instead of the crown gambling with its money, it allows the people to gamble, and merely takes a cut of the successful. Thus, the government does not need to be in the business of making personal computers or cars, only to tax those that are successful, in order to satisfy the needs of the crown. That's the advantage of the free market, and really, nothing else. However, it is the case when the free market collapses, and citizens are not willing to assume private risk, then the government must step in.
What a bizarre strawman you've built there. I don't know any libertarian who's made any claim to that effect. What we do claim, is that in a free market with the rule of law, the way to prosper is to offer what people want to buy. Doing business ethically is conducive to getting repeat business. People who fuck over their customers will suffer damage to their reputation, and their business will suffer as a result.
This argument suffers from so many oversimplifications that have failed it boggles the mind.
Fundamentally though, libertarianism can only work in a monocultural society because everyone's definition of fair must be agreed upon in order to avoid the need for regulation. The fact is, in a country of 300 million people of wildly differing values and beliefs, this is impossible, and so we have a system of laws in place to attempt to encode what the people elect as a sort of fairness, and these laws are a compromise as they must apply to everyone. Indeed, the very idea of the law as a compromise in the United States serves to create a government that is inherently self limiting, except in the most extreme of political circumstances.
Libertarians would argue that we substitute this for a more active judiciary, and handle slights on a case by case basis, but, that would only result in the few laws we have being inconsistently applied, thus making it impossible to have any sort of predictability needed to even forecast a return on all but the most basic of capital investments. Indeed, many economists now argue that one of the largest problems in under-developed countries today is not the particular brand of government but the absence of any sort of rule of law, period. Your libertarian case by case system ultimately gets trumped by cases and cases of cash bribing people in the courts, and since there is no consistency in the law or strength to it, it is impossible to tell if someone has been bribed or merely made an honest decision.
Indeed. Otherwise known (academic pedantry notwithstanding) as an Operating System
Don't be so harsh. In some circles the operating system would be just the kernel and accompanying low level interfaces into the hardware. You wouldn't have GUI widgets or libraries for ftp, http, etc, as part of the operating system, and indeed, there are many operating systems that do not.
Next time free enterprise puts a man on the moon, you let me know.
If you capitalists hadn't have f--- up with your stupid lending decisions and dumb investments, there wouldn't be a government bailout now, would there? There was no need for government to momentarily take control of everything, until the people that previously controlled things utterly screwed up.
I wouldn't be so quick to give them accolades until they accomplish something. Like, let's see Falcon 9 actually get off the pad first without blowing up.
My problem with Notes was that a lack of a relational structure made it awkward to do something like a document management system in it, where you would want to have a table of authors recipients and other persons associated with documents in a relational sense. The hope was that you could use a notes database to represent the rich document stuff, which it could kinda do, but also, have some sort of a relational, at least more strongly typed nested collection representation with it and you simply couldn't.
You would want a nested list of authors to be well, authors, of a first name and a last name and other useful information on them, and the same with recipients, cc's, and so on. From there you could build a timeline of who saw what and wrote what correspondence about what topic and that would give you the facts of the case as a simple select. But you couldn't do that, and, at the time, Notes even had problems with just nesting tuples, period. So yeah, Notes database sucked.
And the Notes idea wasn't even novel. The idea of a Notes database being a packed record, indeed, the whole JSON concept of rich data stuffed into a database, was tried before Notes, before XML, way long ago using a system IBM developed called "PICK". PICK was an interesting hybrid in that you could stuff rich data into a field but you could also use a forerunner of a SELECT command, called LIST, to fish stuff out of it.
It's been a while since I've done Notes but I seem to recall that the database was the central problem with Notes. I seem to remember best describing it as a slightly multiuser filemaker pro flat format with a lot of hype to rip off IBM for a few billion dollars. Notes is infamous for its email client being terrible but if it had had a good database to begin with, then, 3rd parties could have salvaged a good groupware database product with add on tools or even clients. That few have emerged speaks volumes about the data in notes.
Windows isn't a cheap utility. It's an operating system that has any number of components that a developer could leverage and use. Yeah, Windows isn't free as in beer or in open, but, the developer generally doesn't pay the cost of the libraries that get bundled with it, consumers do.
So, in essence, Windows is a tax on consumers for developers to get nearly free stuff to write for. This model makes it impossible for third party library providers to actually succeed unless they deliver some niche that Windows won't do. Like, GUI kits for Windows are stagnant largely because there's no way developers will pay for a library when MS will tax Windows users for the same library for free, and consumers already being taxed, won't want to eat the tax of a competing library.
This is good and bad. It means that Windows has a single set of widgets to write for, in USER and COMMON. But, it also means that end users do not have the benefits of multiple GUI toolkits that you get in Linux, which manages to stay in the game because really, Microsoft doesn't want to spend too much money making widgets when that only collects the tax... only enough to stay ahead of Linux, and so, GUIs stagnate overall.
Therefor, Windows does have a lot of value. You pay a modest tax to make it possible for shareware developers and corporate customers to use a lot of fancy controls that are just a step ahead enough of Linux and Mac to make it difficult for users to switch, but never really far enough ahead to make you really stand up and cheer at the edge of your seat, saying, "wow, Windows is really great."
I mean, come now, would it really be that difficult for Microsoft to go crazy and add a bunch of cool widgets to Windows that were easy to program in C?
This is actually true. I have a Linux site and a Windows site and the Windows site is filled with a couple of cheap apps that I wrote and the Linux site is all GPL free stuff. I've found that the Linux site actually makes me more money off of advertising revenues and I can leverage that as some experience on my resume for more work. Now in between contracts, what I'm going to do is refocus my Linux site and my Windows site into a single site that gives out a bunch of free stuff, and then, if I do want to charge for something, it won't be some crappy utility that noone registers anyway. Small utilities are advertising, in their own right.
Microsoft's leveraging of Windows Live Marketplace, a growing lead over other systems in developer tools and operating systems, an actual achievement of a total lower cost of ownership, all coupled with the continual rise in world wide computer sales, all will conspire to make Microsoft grow at a good clip for the next decade out.
Microsoft's rivals had a good opening with the gap between Windows XP and Vista, but all of their negative hype about Vista and probably Windows 7 will not dissuade the truth that Vista is actually a good product, and is better than Linux in a number of ways. KDE should not have fumbled between KDE 3.5 and 4.0 and Gnome should have been more aggressive. Linux will be a good web server but Microsoft's continued efforts to make Office a computing client platform will doom Linux in the back office as more and more applications will be based around Excel as a front end more than even the Web.
And PS... bundling the Office 2007 ribbon bar into Windows 7 is the straw that will break the Linux as a client's back.
No. The world should take notice. All of those people around the planet earth that cheered Obama's election are going to find themselves learning a hard lesson of history. Today's Democrats are against free trade, and quite frankly, as a Republican who thinks this policy has failed, I'd say, let the Dems pull the plug on it. I don't care.
My question is this. Since when does someone in the rest of the world have the same rights to the marketplace of my country as a citizen of my country. That concept is bullshit.
When push comes to shove, other countries do not, have not, or will not, contribute to American security. I don't see too many Indians flying B-17s over Germany, B-29s over Japan, landing at Okinawa, freezing their asses off at the Chosin Reservoir, fighting at Denang, and certainly not in Iraq. In a similar vein, I seem to recall that the Germans, Japanese and Chinese were all on the other side! For the last 70 years, the USA has been to war all over the planet for some cause or another and the outcome is invariably that the middle classes sent to fight and pay for these wars wind up having to compete economically with the very people that they had to fight. When do Americans actually get to benefit from American wars? I mean, we beat the Germans to have German steel knock off American steel, beat the Japanese to have Japanese cars pollute our streets, fought the Chinese to have their crap on our stores, and now, to top it all off, we go and occupy the largest oil producing nation on the planet in order to have a summer of $4/gallon gasoline and a consequent total economic meltdown.
It's sickening.
There's so many people on the right wing that talk about family values, self reliance and community, and all of it is easily revealed to be a treasonous fraud when its all brushed aside in the name of free trade. You can't have family first when you place them under the microscope of worldwide competition and declining wages. You can't say a nation is self-reliant, when, it replaces a tradition of thrift and industry with a bidding war for imported slave labor, and you can't say you favor community, when, the community factories, schools, and infrastructure all shut down because of imported crap. Republicans continually rant about the death of tradition and culture in America but remain utterly and willingly oblivious to the fact that it is their own economic ideas that cause it.
A nation is more than a geographic coincident of world wide consumers. A nation includes a common history, common art, a common cultural base. As much as someone in Japan or Germany or India or China might make a good product, they do not have the same background as the union stiff next door. My son goes to a school with that union stiff's kid, not some dickhead in Breslau.
Why should anyone complain about this? For all of his other faults, the Bush administration has given us some great new units of federal spending that we can use the same way we measure storage capacity with "libraries of congress". Why think in terms of millions or billions or even trillions, when we can say that this new NASA contract is only.005 TARPs, 0.00583 Iraq wars, 0.014 Katrinas, 0.00875 Medicare Prescription Drugs, and 0.0175 Farm bailouts.
The thing about the long tail theory is that, on the flat end of the curve, you have very small overall returns, and a lot of other people making products with the same low capital and similar returns. so, basically, you have a lot of sucky stuff, then, a few things that are actually pretty good. You can see this with windows shareware as much as you can with web sites or anything else. A lot of stuff sucks, and only a small amount of it is actually good.
God damned, and I have 9 points to give too, but not on this conversation because I blabbed already.
I would follow this user and mod him up on something else, because that comment is so great, but he logged in as A/C... so I guess he missed out, or she... as if there were any women on slashdot.
The company that I worked at used a MITM attack with self signed certificates to read everyone's HTTPS stuff during the financial crisis. I was quite surprised to find that my bank and my broker's certificates were rejected by my Firefox, and that, upon inspection, the issuer was actually my company. IE, company issued, didn't warn me, and neither did Chrome, and I have to confess that when Firefox complained, I would often switch to Chrome, because it didn't. Then, one day I looked at the certificate in Firefox, and I discovered just what that warning meant. My company was spying on me.
The atmosphere is closer to earth, but we're living in the TWILIGHT ZONE.
We have a supposedly conservative President that borrowed a page from arch liberal Wilson and invaded two countries in the cause of spreading freedom, has essentially nationalized banking, and meanwhile his political opponent, supposedly arch liberal, goes to church every weekend, is happily married with a beautiful family, is a totally self reliant and self made man, and ran and won an election essentially based the argument that America's economic policy and foreign policy should be more pragmatic and in the interests of Americans...
don't believe me? Get thee to You Tube, and listen to Reagan 1980 and compare that to Obama 2008 victory speech. Both guys are making the same arguments - for a more effective government, for better standards of living for the middle class, for a practical foreign policy, in defense of freedom, and above all of faith in the American people.
The only reason Obama did not get 500 electoral votes was because he is black.
My gripes about it are typically more about unneeded UI changes which hurt usability.
But what about KDE? Dude, they scrapped a desktop that was popular, flexible, and working. KDE 3.5 was already better than even Vista's shell in some ways, as is gnomes. You can do a lot with the doc bars/task bars, and in KDE you could change even the clock type to one of 40 different types, and instead of just polishing that up, they went and junked it.
Unbelievable! Really, what was in KDE 3.5 that was so terrible that the whole thing needed to be junked, from an end user perspective. Plasma might wind up being cool, but its gonna need some time to gel up a bit. And, in the meantime, I'd like gnome to just do -something-.
And, along the way, I've actually got Vista growing on me. The only thing I really don't like about it is that the start bar doesn't have "run" on it the way XP does, but other than that, Vista is better.
As bad as Vista might be to some people, Microsoft won this round, again. This time, it was because while MS made mistakes with Vista, the KDE and Gnome teams made some big ones too.
I have both Ubuntu and Vista and I prefer dual booting into Vista... I actually like the apps more on Ubuntu (kdevelop/bash), but, Vista's start bar, control panel, and user interface just nails it for me. Makes ubuntu feel old fashioned.
Unix people can complain about Vista as much as the want, but the fact is, they screwed up as bad as MS did. Microsoft doesn't hand out opportunities to attack its desktop and certainly with some of the bad Vista buzz, they did. But, the linux community blew it.
Gnome is moving at a glacial pace, and KDE is in no man's land. It's almost like, had KDE either finished 4 or just polished 3.x, or Gnome just moved more quickly, either could have had a real Vista killer, but, both missed.
What does "freedom" have to do with "human progress"? Apples and oranges, Locke and Kant.
Or Hobbes and Locke, as the case may be. You think we would have evolved a different discourse on ideology by now, but I guess its fair to say that Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore aren't quite up to the same caliber as their classical forbears.
Here's one thing that's funny. You know, Obama gets tagged as liberal and he sees himself as one too, judging by his speeches... but, if you take Ronald Reagan's 1964 and 1980 RNC speech and compare it to Obama's 2008 victory speech, you will be shocked to find that they actually are not as far apart as one might imagine them to be.
Being honest gets you ahead, if only in the long term....Working your 40 hours a week, sometimes more and sometimes less
But what if you were honestly slacking?
Not showing up for a year or two and collecting a paycheck is just plain stealing and catches up with you in the end anyhow.
How is it stealing if the company's employment is at will? I wouldn't do it because I see things the way you do, but, if someone wanted to throw their career on the line, slack off, still get stuff done but not necessarily give 100%, and ultimately got ahead by doing it, but without lying, then, what would be morally wrong with that? Einstein was finished as a patent examiner because he screwed around and got his phd, but look at what humanity as a whole got because he did it. You could say he stiffed his patent office, but, he served humanity more. Isn't that what free enterprise is supposed to do? If someone could basically turn a full time job into a part time gig, and then achieve something genuinely great by doing so, then, isn't that more economically efficient as a whole? I would argue that it is. I mean, employment is at will. Obviously, if someone can keep the balls rolling for a year, the employer could not be too upset about the whole thing, and, if society has room for some of that, and we get a few Einsteins along the way, aren't we better off?
What you don't see is that the capitalism results in the same outcome as socialism, people don't want to work because there is no point to trying to get ahead when constant outsourcing removes stability and intense pricing pressure makes it impossible to advance under less imaginitive circumstances. You have to be creative and self serving, just as much as a boss of a company is.
Your exhortations are really just like the old Soviet "You must work hard for your honesty and the glory of your country", except you say "company", instead of country. What's really the difference between legions of disaffected soviet workers that bailed because they are perpetually screwed, and western european and american workers that bail for the same reason. What's the point of competing if, you don't get a share of the victory? The more and more companies lock down IP, lock down people with non-compete agreements, the more they spy on employees, search people's records, lie to them, outsource them, the less and less people will actually believe in the very idea of hard work.
Work has to pay off, for people to want to do it. IT doesn't matter if you have investment driven capitalism or socialism, if people see that they don't get anything for their work, they are not going to do it. If you want to take a big chance and throw out your career, you can do that, but don't you think its odd that our economic system has arrived at a point such that that is what you have to do to get ahead. I mean, even in the 1970s, Jobs and Wozniak were doing the min at HP and Atari and they gave us the first practical personal computer, and ultimately, indirectly, the core of HP's business as it is today.
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This is really not a surprise. IE is an inferior product. It always has been. The market share it has received is solely attributable to the bundling with the Microsoft operating systems
This is not true at all. IE 1, 2 & 3 were not as good as Netscape Navigator and they suffered, but IE 4 was hands down better than other browsers. It mainstreamed a fully programmable DOM, where Netscape Navigator had what, document.write, and a bunch of junk about layers.
And, while we lament the death of Netscape, you do have to remember that while free IE may have killed Netscape on the client side, I'd be willing to bet that Apache utterly crushed Netscape on the server side. Does anyone remember Netscape web servers? Ah, that's a big negative. I remember even in the late 1990s our Sun admin was looking to replace Netscape web server with Apache... him and others like him really finished that company off.
The only direction IE ever could go was down. If Microsoft wants to change that then they need to do some serious work and start cooperating with the rest of world. Build a better product is the simplest way to put it.
This is very true. But you have to understand that the counterpoint to Microsoft's strategy is to get people to think about rich clients again and they are actually being rather successful with VSTO and Excel integration. I see lots of contract work with Excel front ends, instead of web front ends, these days. It's a crappy technology, but businesses pay for it.
And a lot of you guys will be screaming murder. Have you realized that GPL enforcement and Windows license enforcement comes from the same thing as Copyright law?
I read the personal appeal by Jimmy Wales and decided to pass. The reason is that he says that Wikipedia aims to be a source of all human knowledge, yet, their own editorial guidelines preclude putting in more specialized knowledge. There are also some rumors of political shenanigans behind the scenes. Look, if you want to act like a corporation, just be one, and put some ads on the thing and get on with it.
You don't have to approve of what someone eats, what drugs they take, or who they sleep with to decide whether you're willing to pay they price they want for what they're selling.
But that's the thing. You do do that, and a person's values are considered as a part of the exchange. Let's say you owned a software company. Would you hire someone that showed up to work not wearing a suit to an interview? Would you hire a felon? Would you hire someone who was a staunch socialist? Or would you hire someone who was an avowed libertarian? You know the answer to that. You are going to hire based on your values and you would argue the right to do that because it is your company. That's fine.
But the counter-argument to that is that the people, expressed through their government, have the right to set values on trade as well. You can argue that your business is yours and should morally be immune from all government regulation, but it is government regulation that confers upon corporations the notion of limited liability, and hence the "right" to play with the deposits of other people in the form of loans to you.
Libertarian economics is all well and good, but you have to take limited liability off of the table, eliminate non-compete clauses and non-disclosure agreements, get rid of patents and copyrights (to a degree), get rid of exclusive promotions and deals, in short, actually have a competitive marketplace. Without those things though, there's a lot less to attract investors, and really, there's no industrial revolution at all.
To some extent, this experiment was tried in the American civil war. The north had greater government regulation in the supply of labor and the south did not. As a result, the north got the industrial revolution and the south got slavery. They had a big war, and the south lost, because, the north had more railways, more tents, more soldiers and more guns, cannons, ships and steel... whereas the south never had to have the industrial base to build this stuff with because the free market went straight to the lowest possible wage, which was buying slaves.
And what's the world like now? Those nations that artificially raise the value of their labor, through government regulation, are making all sorts of technological breakthroughs, but those that do not, just throw bodies at problems and ultimately fail. Guess where the USA is? WE got a bunch of jerks arguing free trade and that's really just wage shopping in the other direction.
You need government intervention to make an economy that advances.
Once the benefits of sending a man to the Moon exceeded the costs, free enterprise would have done so, and more cheaply than NASA ever could.
I think it is time that we challenge some basic assertions thrown around here.
I really have to dispute the idea that free enterprise is inherently less expensive than the government. Innately, the government has enormous economies of scale, and, the ability to offer its workers additional power in addition to economic compensation.
While it may have been fashionable in the 1980s to argue on behalf of the smaller, more nimble corporation as compared to a vast government, 30 years of mergers and acquisitions have left us with fewer corporations that are so large and slow they are practically governments themselves. How often have we used the word "Synergy", like it is a joke? If you can believe in any Wall Street merger, than certainly, would not the merger of all rivals into the government be the ultimate in "synergies". Clearly, libertarian arguments about the private sector versus the government are inconsistent.
What is the real case is that the free enterprise system really exists to allow the government to offload the risk of engaging in new forms of commerce, most of which are honestly speculative, onto the private citizenry. Instead of the crown gambling with its money, it allows the people to gamble, and merely takes a cut of the successful. Thus, the government does not need to be in the business of making personal computers or cars, only to tax those that are successful, in order to satisfy the needs of the crown. That's the advantage of the free market, and really, nothing else. However, it is the case when the free market collapses, and citizens are not willing to assume private risk, then the government must step in.
What a bizarre strawman you've built there. I don't know any libertarian who's made any claim to that effect. What we do claim, is that in a free market with the rule of law, the way to prosper is to offer what people want to buy. Doing business ethically is conducive to getting repeat business. People who fuck over their customers will suffer damage to their reputation, and their business will suffer as a result.
This argument suffers from so many oversimplifications that have failed it boggles the mind.
Fundamentally though, libertarianism can only work in a monocultural society because everyone's definition of fair must be agreed upon in order to avoid the need for regulation. The fact is, in a country of 300 million people of wildly differing values and beliefs, this is impossible, and so we have a system of laws in place to attempt to encode what the people elect as a sort of fairness, and these laws are a compromise as they must apply to everyone. Indeed, the very idea of the law as a compromise in the United States serves to create a government that is inherently self limiting, except in the most extreme of political circumstances.
Libertarians would argue that we substitute this for a more active judiciary, and handle slights on a case by case basis, but, that would only result in the few laws we have being inconsistently applied, thus making it impossible to have any sort of predictability needed to even forecast a return on all but the most basic of capital investments. Indeed, many economists now argue that one of the largest problems in under-developed countries today is not the particular brand of government but the absence of any sort of rule of law, period. Your libertarian case by case system ultimately gets trumped by cases and cases of cash bribing people in the courts, and since there is no consistency in the law or strength to it, it is impossible to tell if someone has been bribed or merely made an honest decision.
Indeed. Otherwise known (academic pedantry notwithstanding) as an Operating System
Don't be so harsh. In some circles the operating system would be just the kernel and accompanying low level interfaces into the hardware. You wouldn't have GUI widgets or libraries for ftp, http, etc, as part of the operating system, and indeed, there are many operating systems that do not.
Next time free enterprise puts a man on the moon, you let me know.
If you capitalists hadn't have f--- up with your stupid lending decisions and dumb investments, there wouldn't be a government bailout now, would there? There was no need for government to momentarily take control of everything, until the people that previously controlled things utterly screwed up.
I wouldn't be so quick to give them accolades until they accomplish something. Like, let's see Falcon 9 actually get off the pad first without blowing up.
My problem with Notes was that a lack of a relational structure made it awkward to do something like a document management system in it, where you would want to have a table of authors recipients and other persons associated with documents in a relational sense. The hope was that you could use a notes database to represent the rich document stuff, which it could kinda do, but also, have some sort of a relational, at least more strongly typed nested collection representation with it and you simply couldn't.
You would want a nested list of authors to be well, authors, of a first name and a last name and other useful information on them, and the same with recipients, cc's, and so on. From there you could build a timeline of who saw what and wrote what correspondence about what topic and that would give you the facts of the case as a simple select. But you couldn't do that, and, at the time, Notes even had problems with just nesting tuples, period. So yeah, Notes database sucked.
And the Notes idea wasn't even novel. The idea of a Notes database being a packed record, indeed, the whole JSON concept of rich data stuffed into a database, was tried before Notes, before XML, way long ago using a system IBM developed called "PICK". PICK was an interesting hybrid in that you could stuff rich data into a field but you could also use a forerunner of a SELECT command, called LIST, to fish stuff out of it.
It's been a while since I've done Notes but I seem to recall that the database was the central problem with Notes. I seem to remember best describing it as a slightly multiuser filemaker pro flat format with a lot of hype to rip off IBM for a few billion dollars. Notes is infamous for its email client being terrible but if it had had a good database to begin with, then, 3rd parties could have salvaged a good groupware database product with add on tools or even clients. That few have emerged speaks volumes about the data in notes.
Windows isn't a cheap utility. It's an operating system that has any number of components that a developer could leverage and use. Yeah, Windows isn't free as in beer or in open, but, the developer generally doesn't pay the cost of the libraries that get bundled with it, consumers do.
So, in essence, Windows is a tax on consumers for developers to get nearly free stuff to write for. This model makes it impossible for third party library providers to actually succeed unless they deliver some niche that Windows won't do. Like, GUI kits for Windows are stagnant largely because there's no way developers will pay for a library when MS will tax Windows users for the same library for free, and consumers already being taxed, won't want to eat the tax of a competing library.
This is good and bad. It means that Windows has a single set of widgets to write for, in USER and COMMON. But, it also means that end users do not have the benefits of multiple GUI toolkits that you get in Linux, which manages to stay in the game because really, Microsoft doesn't want to spend too much money making widgets when that only collects the tax... only enough to stay ahead of Linux, and so, GUIs stagnate overall.
Therefor, Windows does have a lot of value. You pay a modest tax to make it possible for shareware developers and corporate customers to use a lot of fancy controls that are just a step ahead enough of Linux and Mac to make it difficult for users to switch, but never really far enough ahead to make you really stand up and cheer at the edge of your seat, saying, "wow, Windows is really great."
I mean, come now, would it really be that difficult for Microsoft to go crazy and add a bunch of cool widgets to Windows that were easy to program in C?
This is actually true. I have a Linux site and a Windows site and the Windows site is filled with a couple of cheap apps that I wrote and the Linux site is all GPL free stuff. I've found that the Linux site actually makes me more money off of advertising revenues and I can leverage that as some experience on my resume for more work. Now in between contracts, what I'm going to do is refocus my Linux site and my Windows site into a single site that gives out a bunch of free stuff, and then, if I do want to charge for something, it won't be some crappy utility that noone registers anyway. Small utilities are advertising, in their own right.
Microsoft's leveraging of Windows Live Marketplace, a growing lead over other systems in developer tools and operating systems, an actual achievement of a total lower cost of ownership, all coupled with the continual rise in world wide computer sales, all will conspire to make Microsoft grow at a good clip for the next decade out.
Microsoft's rivals had a good opening with the gap between Windows XP and Vista, but all of their negative hype about Vista and probably Windows 7 will not dissuade the truth that Vista is actually a good product, and is better than Linux in a number of ways. KDE should not have fumbled between KDE 3.5 and 4.0 and Gnome should have been more aggressive. Linux will be a good web server but Microsoft's continued efforts to make Office a computing client platform will doom Linux in the back office as more and more applications will be based around Excel as a front end more than even the Web.
And PS... bundling the Office 2007 ribbon bar into Windows 7 is the straw that will break the Linux as a client's back.
No. The world should take notice. All of those people around the planet earth that cheered Obama's election are going to find themselves learning a hard lesson of history. Today's Democrats are against free trade, and quite frankly, as a Republican who thinks this policy has failed, I'd say, let the Dems pull the plug on it. I don't care.
My question is this. Since when does someone in the rest of the world have the same rights to the marketplace of my country as a citizen of my country. That concept is bullshit.
When push comes to shove, other countries do not, have not, or will not, contribute to American security. I don't see too many Indians flying B-17s over Germany, B-29s over Japan, landing at Okinawa, freezing their asses off at the Chosin Reservoir, fighting at Denang, and certainly not in Iraq. In a similar vein, I seem to recall that the Germans, Japanese and Chinese were all on the other side! For the last 70 years, the USA has been to war all over the planet for some cause or another and the outcome is invariably that the middle classes sent to fight and pay for these wars wind up having to compete economically with the very people that they had to fight. When do Americans actually get to benefit from American wars? I mean, we beat the Germans to have German steel knock off American steel, beat the Japanese to have Japanese cars pollute our streets, fought the Chinese to have their crap on our stores, and now, to top it all off, we go and occupy the largest oil producing nation on the planet in order to have a summer of $4/gallon gasoline and a consequent total economic meltdown.
It's sickening.
There's so many people on the right wing that talk about family values, self reliance and community, and all of it is easily revealed to be a treasonous fraud when its all brushed aside in the name of free trade. You can't have family first when you place them under the microscope of worldwide competition and declining wages. You can't say a nation is self-reliant, when, it replaces a tradition of thrift and industry with a bidding war for imported slave labor, and you can't say you favor community, when, the community factories, schools, and infrastructure all shut down because of imported crap. Republicans continually rant about the death of tradition and culture in America but remain utterly and willingly oblivious to the fact that it is their own economic ideas that cause it.
A nation is more than a geographic coincident of world wide consumers. A nation includes a common history, common art, a common cultural base. As much as someone in Japan or Germany or India or China might make a good product, they do not have the same background as the union stiff next door.
My son goes to a school with that union stiff's kid, not some dickhead in Breslau.
I'm glad to know that an indy gamer can make a living and it gives me hope to try with something worth the sale.
Why should anyone complain about this? For all of his other faults, the Bush administration has given us some great new units of federal spending that we can use the same way we measure storage capacity with "libraries of congress". Why think in terms of millions or billions or even trillions, when we can say that this new NASA contract is only .005 TARPs, 0.00583 Iraq wars, 0.014 Katrinas, 0.00875 Medicare Prescription Drugs, and 0.0175 Farm bailouts.
It's chump change!
The thing about the long tail theory is that, on the flat end of the curve, you have very small overall returns, and a lot of other people making products with the same low capital and similar returns. so, basically, you have a lot of sucky stuff, then, a few things that are actually pretty good. You can see this with windows shareware as much as you can with web sites or anything else. A lot of stuff sucks, and only a small amount of it is actually good.
God damned, and I have 9 points to give too, but not on this conversation because I blabbed already.
I would follow this user and mod him up on something else, because that comment is so great, but he logged in as A/C... so I guess he missed out, or she... as if there were any women on slashdot.
The company that I worked at used a MITM attack with self signed certificates to read everyone's HTTPS stuff during the financial crisis. I was quite surprised to find that my bank and my broker's certificates were rejected by my Firefox, and that, upon inspection, the issuer was actually my company. IE, company issued, didn't warn me, and neither did Chrome, and I have to confess that when Firefox complained, I would often switch to Chrome, because it didn't. Then, one day I looked at the certificate in Firefox, and I discovered just what that warning meant. My company was spying on me.
The atmosphere is closer to earth, but we're living in the TWILIGHT ZONE.
We have a supposedly conservative President that borrowed a page from arch liberal Wilson and invaded two countries in the cause of spreading freedom, has essentially nationalized banking, and meanwhile his political opponent, supposedly arch liberal, goes to church every weekend, is happily married with a beautiful family, is a totally self reliant and self made man, and ran and won an election essentially based the argument that America's economic policy and foreign policy should be more pragmatic and in the interests of Americans...
don't believe me? Get thee to You Tube, and listen to Reagan 1980 and compare that to Obama 2008 victory speech. Both guys are making the same arguments - for a more effective government, for better standards of living for the middle class, for a practical foreign policy, in defense of freedom, and above all of faith in the American people.
The only reason Obama did not get 500 electoral votes was because he is black.
My gripes about it are typically more about unneeded UI changes which hurt usability.
But what about KDE? Dude, they scrapped a desktop that was popular, flexible, and working. KDE 3.5 was already better than even Vista's shell in some ways, as is gnomes. You can do a lot with the doc bars/task bars, and in KDE you could change even the clock type to one of 40 different types, and instead of just polishing that up, they went and junked it.
Unbelievable! Really, what was in KDE 3.5 that was so terrible that the whole thing needed to be junked, from an end user perspective. Plasma might wind up being cool, but its gonna need some time to gel up a bit. And, in the meantime, I'd like gnome to just do -something-.
And, along the way, I've actually got Vista growing on me. The only thing I really don't like about it is that the start bar doesn't have "run" on it the way XP does, but other than that, Vista is better.
As bad as Vista might be to some people, Microsoft won this round, again. This time, it was because while MS made mistakes with Vista, the KDE and Gnome teams made some big ones too.
I have both Ubuntu and Vista and I prefer dual booting into Vista... I actually like the apps more on Ubuntu (kdevelop/bash), but, Vista's start bar, control panel, and user interface just nails it for me. Makes ubuntu feel old fashioned.
Unix people can complain about Vista as much as the want, but the fact is, they screwed up as bad as MS did. Microsoft doesn't hand out opportunities to attack its desktop and certainly with some of the bad Vista buzz, they did. But, the linux community blew it.
Gnome is moving at a glacial pace, and KDE is in no man's land. It's almost like, had KDE either finished 4 or just polished 3.x, or Gnome just moved more quickly, either could have had a real Vista killer, but, both missed.
What does "freedom" have to do with "human progress"? Apples and oranges, Locke and Kant.
Or Hobbes and Locke, as the case may be. You think we would have evolved a different discourse on ideology by now, but I guess its fair to say that Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore aren't quite up to the same caliber as their classical forbears.
Here's one thing that's funny. You know, Obama gets tagged as liberal and he sees himself as one too, judging by his speeches... but, if you take Ronald Reagan's 1964 and 1980 RNC speech and compare it to Obama's 2008 victory speech, you will be shocked to find that they actually are not as far apart as one might imagine them to be.
Being honest gets you ahead, if only in the long term....Working your 40 hours a week, sometimes more and sometimes less
But what if you were honestly slacking?
Not showing up for a year or two and collecting a paycheck is just plain stealing and catches up with you in the end anyhow.
How is it stealing if the company's employment is at will? I wouldn't do it because I see things the way you do, but, if someone wanted to throw their career on the line, slack off, still get stuff done but not necessarily give 100%, and ultimately got ahead by doing it, but without lying, then, what would be morally wrong with that? Einstein was finished as a patent examiner because he screwed around and got his phd, but look at what humanity as a whole got because he did it. You could say he stiffed his patent office, but, he served humanity more. Isn't that what free enterprise is supposed to do? If someone could basically turn a full time job into a part time gig, and then achieve something genuinely great by doing so, then, isn't that more economically efficient as a whole? I would argue that it is. I mean, employment is at will. Obviously, if someone can keep the balls rolling for a year, the employer could not be too upset about the whole thing, and, if society has room for some of that, and we get a few Einsteins along the way, aren't we better off?
What you don't see is that the capitalism results in the same outcome as socialism, people don't want to work because there is no point to trying to get ahead when constant outsourcing removes stability and intense pricing pressure makes it impossible to advance under less imaginitive circumstances. You have to be creative and self serving, just as much as a boss of a company is.
Your exhortations are really just like the old Soviet "You must work hard for your honesty and the glory of your country", except you say "company", instead of country. What's really the difference between legions of disaffected soviet workers that bailed because they are perpetually screwed, and western european and american workers that bail for the same reason. What's the point of competing if, you don't get a share of the victory? The more and more companies lock down IP, lock down people with non-compete agreements, the more they spy on employees, search people's records, lie to them, outsource them, the less and less people will actually believe in the very idea of hard work.
Work has to pay off, for people to want to do it. IT doesn't matter if you have investment driven capitalism or socialism, if people see that they don't get anything for their work, they are not going to do it. If you want to take a big chance and throw out your career, you can do that, but don't you think its odd that our economic system has arrived at a point such that that is what you have to do to get ahead. I mean, even in the 1970s, Jobs and Wozniak were doing the min at HP and Atari and they gave us the first practical personal computer, and ultimately, indirectly, the core of HP's business as it is today.