Well, there is no cross-platform runtime in this case.
NeXT had OpenStep which was originally going to be pushed forward with OS X, as "Yellow Box" - theoretically, a set of runtime DLLs could have been installed on a Windows box, and the same code could run on either platform. (I don't remember if it was a common binary, fat binary, or recompile).
Certainly code written in Carbon is going to have no common technology with NeXT. Maybe apps written with Cocoa code take advantage of what used to be Yellow Box.
But number of vendors has a lot to do with it. NeXT didn't have to deal with the plethora of vendors Apple does today. Just look at Version Tracker and MacFixIt to see how many third party vendors there are for the Mac platform - how many of those are going to be able or willing to "just do a recompile" - and not link it (the recompile) with versions, features, or new licensing opportunities. The chances that all of those vendors are going to just cooperate and make everybody's lives simpler are pretty low.
comparisons with ancient history notwithstanding, my experienced imagination can come up with any number of scenarios where I, the user, can get screwed if I have "the wrong Mac" at home;
1. I buy an x86 Mac, and my favorite PPC Mac software does not run well under emulation, and the vendor has gone out of business.
2. . . . or, the vendor supplies an x86 version, but only as a new version, with a disagreeable feature-set.
3. ... or, the new version requires significant customization development effort to implement on your system.
4. . . . or, the new version has an onerous licensing scheme.
5. . . or, the new version does not work with old third-party plugins, triggering upgrade purchases from them as well, (wash, rinse, repeat all of these scenarios for each independent vendor).
Basically, all the nightmare scenarios that a closed-source software vendor can chuck at you, that you can't avoid, since you don't have the source.
I'm certainly not confident that either: 1) I'll be able to continue using up to date software on my recently purchased dual G5, 5-7 years from now. Which was my intention, when I purchased it, given that my last two Macintoshes lasted over similar timespans (though my Beige was forced into retirement due to lack of full OS X support). 2) If I update my hardware to an x86 Mac, I'll be able to run all of my current software, or find suitable ported replacements at no cost.
Three things I *am* certain of: 1) CD ripping will not be as fast on the new hardware. 2) DVD encoding will not be anywhere near as fast on the new hardware. 3) Virtual PC will be much faster on the new hardware. (yay.)
Furthermore, this STILL hurts customers and middle class people. After all, stocks are in the hands of working folks and 401(k) plans, too.
You shouldn't buy stock in a company that can't assure you that they're not going to do something illegal. ie. if a company does something illegal, or doesn't open their books and provide enough information, the market should shy away from their stocks.
Why should a blue collar worker have to pay because his company does something illegal?
The janitor at Unocal shouldn't go to jail for murder when the tank at the insecticide plant ruptures and kills 3000 people. But the accountant who decided that the company could save $30,000 a year by cutting corners on safety procedures wouLD.
On the other hand, all 5 of your proposed actions are attractive.
But #3 won't do any good unless the shareholders bear some responsibility. Oversight without responsibility becomes negligence.
Central Planning isn't what doomed their R&D efforts.
When you instead have competing R&D efforts, and the competing efforts are both profit-driven, you are very likely to end up with duplication of effort, and the efforts tend to be short-sighted.
And when there is differentiation, often the inferior thread will have backers that will purchase the superior thread in an effort to destroy it. (example: nearly every product that came out of Microsoft).
Central Planning has it's down sides, which can be eliminated by introducing a profit motive in competing efforts, but pure profit-driven R&D enterprise isn't optimal either. A balanced approach has a better chance of success. (which is why America has traditionally succeeded at this kind of thing, in the past, by investing public funds into R&D - but America's recent focus on ideological elimination of science, and public funding of anything, is going to put us at a disadvantage, as our efforts are increasingly short-sighted, driven by short-term profits, and use of financial maneuvering to eliminate competition, rather than the "better mousetrap" principle.)
While, ultimately, I'm reserving Perl as a skill ONLY used when absolutely necessary (ie. when I get stuck debugging someone else's code) - I didn't like Learning Perl, or Programming Perl, or Perl in a Nutshell. All three of these books left me frustrated and completely lost.
In sharp contrast, the Perl Cookbook, gave me answers to all of my questions. I recommend Perl Cookbook to anyone. The other books? Only to masochists.
Until the penalties outweigh the revenue, what's going to make MS stop?
Even if the penalties outweigh the revenue, it won't make much of a difference. I'm personally not a big fan of cash penalties for corporate lawbreaking. The cost just gets passed on to customers. Frankly, I think that corporate law should be changed to make shareholders financially liable for some illegal activities, and also, should make employees criminally liable (ie. Jail Time for people who make decisions that lead to illegal actions). That's how crime can be deterred.
Why would he then tie himself to an Intel owned firmware that sucks in comparison to OF?:-)
Early reports from users of the new development system stated that the machine had an Intel BIOS.
Apple has been virtually silent on the issue.
Apple may tie itself to BIOS as part of a deal with Intel to get certain price or volume guarantees.
OR, Apple may tie itself to EFI as part of a deal with large music industry players, as part of a plan to guarantee DRM, in exchange for certain pricing on music. (ie. "give us DRM, or we'll price tracks lower for your Windows-based competitors).
Of course, in the absence of any firm, clear, statements from Apple, this is all speculation. Which is the whole point of my original post. This is an issue that matters a great deal - and Apple has not spoken up about it - the direction is not clear, and there's plenty of reason for concern, not just for Mac users, but also for developers.
The solution: Listeners stop listening to radio, because all the content is crap, and start listening to downloaded music, radio stations and backwards-thinking record companies who can't think outside of the box they've been in for 50 years go out of business because they suck, and customers prefer choice.
So while I wouldn't complain specifically about lack of regulation of broadcast radio content, I think that new distribution methods (napster, streaming stations, etc.) have been far too tightly regulated (thus preventing this crucial competing channel from gaining prevalence).
So to sum up my feelings on this matter: Don't regulate payola - let them slit their own throats. Remove barriers to free internet distribution (eliminate the grotesque licensing fees for internet radio, and relax "fair use" standards to allow for small-scale file-sharing).
If an advertiser is allowed to pay a radio station to broadcast a commercial for say, vacuum cleaners, then why can't a recording company pay a radio station to broadcast a commercial for say, a music album?
I really don't get the distinction.
I think the reason people have a problem with this is that they like to live in a fantasy world where radio is some kind of "entertainment", rather than 24x7 wall-to-wall advertisements. My message to them; grow up.
Now, there may be some folks who believe that the FCC regulates "public airwaves" and that they belong to the people, and the people have a "right" to direct private station owners to construct content that "serves the public good." - and while that fairy tale is a nice sentiment, rainbows and unicorns and pink fluffy bunnies have been out of style since the Reagan years. Whining about payola is sort of like wanting to add a Geneva Convention rule making gut-shots illegal because the wounded soldier would suffer too much before dying.
Also significant; Where is Apple on this? They didn't sign up for the UEFI panel? Future direction on OF vs EFI for Macintoshes is really becoming a very big question. (but this is the FIRST indication since the PPC->x86 announcement that OF might actually be in consideration)
Ahem, let's not forget that John Kerry (the candidate who received quite a few of those votes from the 49% that didn't want him back in) supported Bush's descision to go to war in Iraq.
I'd argue that around 95% of John Kerry's votes weren't FOR John Kerry, but rather, AGAINST Bush.
Because defense spending is a necessary and Constitutionally-justified federal espense. Space exploration is not.
Think of space exploration as far-sighted defense spending. Otherwise, think of how the world would be today if, in the 1940's and 1950's, the US did no ballistic missile research at all, and let the Soviets take LEO, Geosynchronous Orbit, the Moon, and everything else.
Every dollar invested into the space program, public education, interstate highways, power grids, even welfare and medicaid, is a dollar well-spent towards shoring up national defense. Just not in as direct a way as you'd like.
I know my freind's G4 iMac is pretty damn quiet. But my dual G5; as shipped, was also rather quiet, but after a couple of firmware and OS upgrades, it became very loud. On hot days, louder than any other desktop machine I've ever used. Only some servers I've worked with are louder. Most of the noise is in the fans, of course. The hard drives (Seagate 160gb SATA) are reasonably quiet.
I'd like to swap out the stock fans with something cooler - if they have to run full-blast at all times, then I hope I can find something compatible that's quieter.
The one saving grace for the dual G5 (other than it's faster than a scalded cat) is that as far as how well it handles sleep/wake, it's very, very convenient.
However, just on the virtue of the irrational increase of the Google stock price, the Google stock becomes an ideal vehicle for making money. They're not investing in Google. They're gaming a phenomenon. As long as one has a large amount of idle capital, and as long as one has the discipline to bail, even well before the peak (it's greed that causes people to stay in long after it's ceased being wise), then one can make buttloads of money. And who loses are usually institutional investors.
Of course, this is not what we think of when we think of the honorable and noble traditions of Capitalism. It represents one of the less savory elements. Who is paying for the dotcom crash? Medical insurance companies (and other institutional investors) who were not nimble enough to bail when the decline started, lost buttloads of money, and they simply passed it on to their customers. If you're wondering why your health insurance rates are shooting up - that's why. For those of us who gamed the market and made a buttload, it's payback. For those who were hourly schmoes during the dotcom boom, and didn't game the market, didn't make buttloads - they are getting screwed.
Over 12 years of mergers and acquisitions, I have to say that the end product of dozens of backup software company amounts to; pretty much no technical advancement over that time period. It's a sordid story of successive purchases of competitors for the purpose of eliminating competition. The Garter folks called it "consolidation" - as if it was just fairly normal evolution of an industry. The end result was certainly not what I was raised to believe should be the outcome of rigorous competition in a "Free Market". So much for ideology.
There were a few interesting and novel products I knew of - all of which were eliminated by this strategy.
Palindrome Network Archivist (tape-based backup). Veritas Client Exec/Netbackup Pro (backup to network server dasd). Telebackup. (Client Exec came about during the brief period when the company was owned by Seagate - who also sold disk drives, of course, so why would they not want disk to be the target of backups, instead of tapes? Was a cool idea, because it eliminated a lot of the problems caused by tape's sequential access mode, and also the heinous amount of money the industry charges for tape drives and blank tapes)
When my position became redundant after a merger, I never looked back, so I don't really know the state of the industry today. (Though, I know that Veritas was just swallowed by Symantec, and I'm not sure what their plans are for the backup product lines).
Given all that, I'm very pessimistic about the future of desktop backup. It seems that the immutable authoritarian culture of IT that so hates the Fat Client approach, has made meaningful development of this technology unprofitable. The message?: Keep your personal data on the server, and we'll back it up to tape (and hope to god we can find and read the tape later).
As far as remote backup - from all the horror stories I heard back in the day, I would not trust any remote backup solution, period. Telebackup was a fairly novel approach, they'd sell you a client, and back your data up encrypted over the internet (in an age where most home-clients were dial up), and if you were lucky, they'd mail you a set of restore CD's constructed from the server that contained the backups. They're gone now, but I recall a small up-and-coming competitor in the San Diego area with a similar concept - I think they got bought by CA.
Of course, where I work now, we're using ADSM - which; at my old jobs, is what the marketing geeks used to say they wanted our backup software to be "when it grows up." Having more direct experience with ADSM, I can say that was a pretty naive attitude for guys with half the education, and twice the salary of our typical developers. But hey, that was the dotcom era. . .
You can defer email. You can defer IM. You can not defer a persistent phone caller, because your co-workers will bug you about the ringing. You can not defer the goon squad from popping by your cubicle every 5 minutes to ask you something.
(That said, my visit to Novell in Provo back in 1996 was enlightening. They had cube walls that went up to the ceiling. And doors that closed. I tell this story every time it comes up at my current job that people are complaining about goon-visits, in hopes that management will get a clue).
Let us look to our brothers and sisters across the pond. Suffering from two attacks, have they cowered in fear, begging the government to take their rights?
We fought for independence from them over 200 years ago. Now, we're not fit to carry their collective jock straps. Instead, we flee in terror like herd animals, gladly trading our liberty for security.
In 200 years, history will not look favorably upon the cowardice of THIS American generation.
Unfortunately, when HP bent over, and seductively waved it's corporate hieney at Microsoft and Intel, they gave up any chance they had of "inventing the future".
On the bright side, Kay will probably end up getting hired at a real company that wants to actually innovate.
Slashdot Mirror
actually, "the power of CPAN" is verboten where I work. I can look shit up in books, but I can't download code. Dumb rules.
Anyway, I feel kind of guilty for getting modded to 5 for ripping those books, but I thank all the responders for their tips on good perl books.
Well, there is no cross-platform runtime in this case.
NeXT had OpenStep which was originally going to be pushed forward with OS X, as "Yellow Box" - theoretically, a set of runtime DLLs could have been installed on a Windows box, and the same code could run on either platform. (I don't remember if it was a common binary, fat binary, or recompile).
Certainly code written in Carbon is going to have no common technology with NeXT. Maybe apps written with Cocoa code take advantage of what used to be Yellow Box.
But number of vendors has a lot to do with it. NeXT didn't have to deal with the plethora of vendors Apple does today. Just look at Version Tracker and MacFixIt to see how many third party vendors there are for the Mac platform - how many of those are going to be able or willing to "just do a recompile" - and not link it (the recompile) with versions, features, or new licensing opportunities. The chances that all of those vendors are going to just cooperate and make everybody's lives simpler are pretty low.
comparisons with ancient history notwithstanding, my experienced imagination can come up with any number of scenarios where I, the user, can get screwed if I have "the wrong Mac" at home;
.. or, the new version requires significant customization development effort to implement on your system.
1. I buy an x86 Mac, and my favorite PPC Mac software does not run well under emulation, and the vendor has gone out of business.
2. . . . or, the vendor supplies an x86 version, but only as a new version, with a disagreeable feature-set.
3. .
4. . . . or, the new version has an onerous licensing scheme.
5. . . or, the new version does not work with old third-party plugins, triggering upgrade purchases from them as well, (wash, rinse, repeat all of these scenarios for each independent vendor).
Basically, all the nightmare scenarios that a closed-source software vendor can chuck at you, that you can't avoid, since you don't have the source.
I'm certainly not confident that either:
1) I'll be able to continue using up to date software on my recently purchased dual G5, 5-7 years from now. Which was my intention, when I purchased it, given that my last two Macintoshes lasted over similar timespans (though my Beige was forced into retirement due to lack of full OS X support).
2) If I update my hardware to an x86 Mac, I'll be able to run all of my current software, or find suitable ported replacements at no cost.
Three things I *am* certain of:
1) CD ripping will not be as fast on the new hardware.
2) DVD encoding will not be anywhere near as fast on the new hardware.
3) Virtual PC will be much faster on the new hardware. (yay.)
Several orders of magnatude FEWER software vendors to deal with there. . .
Furthermore, this STILL hurts customers and middle class people. After all, stocks are in the hands of working folks and 401(k) plans, too.
You shouldn't buy stock in a company that can't assure you that they're not going to do something illegal. ie. if a company does something illegal, or doesn't open their books and provide enough information, the market should shy away from their stocks.
Why should a blue collar worker have to pay because his company does something illegal?
The janitor at Unocal shouldn't go to jail for murder when the tank at the insecticide plant ruptures and kills 3000 people. But the accountant who decided that the company could save $30,000 a year by cutting corners on safety procedures wouLD.
On the other hand, all 5 of your proposed actions are attractive.
But #3 won't do any good unless the shareholders bear some responsibility. Oversight without responsibility becomes negligence.
Central Planning isn't what doomed their R&D efforts.
When you instead have competing R&D efforts, and the competing efforts are both profit-driven, you are very likely to end up with duplication of effort, and the efforts tend to be short-sighted.
And when there is differentiation, often the inferior thread will have backers that will purchase the superior thread in an effort to destroy it. (example: nearly every product that came out of Microsoft).
Central Planning has it's down sides, which can be eliminated by introducing a profit motive in competing efforts, but pure profit-driven R&D enterprise isn't optimal either. A balanced approach has a better chance of success. (which is why America has traditionally succeeded at this kind of thing, in the past, by investing public funds into R&D - but America's recent focus on ideological elimination of science, and public funding of anything, is going to put us at a disadvantage, as our efforts are increasingly short-sighted, driven by short-term profits, and use of financial maneuvering to eliminate competition, rather than the "better mousetrap" principle.)
While, ultimately, I'm reserving Perl as a skill ONLY used when absolutely necessary (ie. when I get stuck debugging someone else's code) - I didn't like Learning Perl, or Programming Perl, or Perl in a Nutshell. All three of these books left me frustrated and completely lost.
In sharp contrast, the Perl Cookbook, gave me answers to all of my questions. I recommend Perl Cookbook to anyone. The other books? Only to masochists.
Until the penalties outweigh the revenue, what's going to make MS stop?
Even if the penalties outweigh the revenue, it won't make much of a difference. I'm personally not a big fan of cash penalties for corporate lawbreaking. The cost just gets passed on to customers. Frankly, I think that corporate law should be changed to make shareholders financially liable for some illegal activities, and also, should make employees criminally liable (ie. Jail Time for people who make decisions that lead to illegal actions). That's how crime can be deterred.
Why would he then tie himself to an Intel owned firmware that sucks in comparison to OF? :-)
Early reports from users of the new development system stated that the machine had an Intel BIOS.
Apple has been virtually silent on the issue.
Apple may tie itself to BIOS as part of a deal with Intel to get certain price or volume guarantees.
OR, Apple may tie itself to EFI as part of a deal with large music industry players, as part of a plan to guarantee DRM, in exchange for certain pricing on music. (ie. "give us DRM, or we'll price tracks lower for your Windows-based competitors).
Of course, in the absence of any firm, clear, statements from Apple, this is all speculation. Which is the whole point of my original post. This is an issue that matters a great deal - and Apple has not spoken up about it - the direction is not clear, and there's plenty of reason for concern, not just for Mac users, but also for developers.
I guarantee Ebbers gets off on appeal. It's not over yet.
The solution:
Listeners stop listening to radio, because all the content is crap, and start listening to downloaded music, radio stations and backwards-thinking record companies who can't think outside of the box they've been in for 50 years go out of business because they suck, and customers prefer choice.
So while I wouldn't complain specifically about lack of regulation of broadcast radio content, I think that new distribution methods (napster, streaming stations, etc.) have been far too tightly regulated (thus preventing this crucial competing channel from gaining prevalence).
So to sum up my feelings on this matter:
Don't regulate payola - let them slit their own throats. Remove barriers to free internet distribution (eliminate the grotesque licensing fees for internet radio, and relax "fair use" standards to allow for small-scale file-sharing).
I agree.
If an advertiser is allowed to pay a radio station to broadcast a commercial for say, vacuum cleaners, then why can't a recording company pay a radio station to broadcast a commercial for say, a music album?
I really don't get the distinction.
I think the reason people have a problem with this is that they like to live in a fantasy world where radio is some kind of "entertainment", rather than 24x7 wall-to-wall advertisements. My message to them; grow up.
Now, there may be some folks who believe that the FCC regulates "public airwaves" and that they belong to the people, and the people have a "right" to direct private station owners to construct content that "serves the public good." - and while that fairy tale is a nice sentiment, rainbows and unicorns and pink fluffy bunnies have been out of style since the Reagan years. Whining about payola is sort of like wanting to add a Geneva Convention rule making gut-shots illegal because the wounded soldier would suffer too much before dying.
#6 sounds significant to me as well.
Also significant;
Where is Apple on this? They didn't sign up for the UEFI panel? Future direction on OF vs EFI for Macintoshes is really becoming a very big question. (but this is the FIRST indication since the PPC->x86 announcement that OF might actually be in consideration)
Along the way there will be TONS of greed and corruption, but don't confuse that with the honest growth that is occurring.
Same goes for the US!
Honest!
Because the majority of your voting public re-elected a war president.
You mis-spelled "whore".
Ahem, let's not forget that John Kerry (the candidate who received quite a few of those votes from the 49% that didn't want him back in) supported Bush's descision to go to war in Iraq.
I'd argue that around 95% of John Kerry's votes weren't FOR John Kerry, but rather, AGAINST Bush.
I'm sorry, that's classified.
Just call up Karl Rove and tell him you're a reporter. He'll be happy to share.
Because defense spending is a necessary and Constitutionally-justified federal espense. Space exploration is not.
/ index_np.html
Think of space exploration as far-sighted defense spending. Otherwise, think of how the world would be today if, in the 1940's and 1950's, the US did no ballistic missile research at all, and let the Soviets take LEO, Geosynchronous Orbit, the Moon, and everything else.
Every dollar invested into the space program, public education, interstate highways, power grids, even welfare and medicaid, is a dollar well-spent towards shoring up national defense. Just not in as direct a way as you'd like.
What is money POORLY invested in defense or national security, is $200 Billion to invade a country, destabilize it's govenrment so it can be taken over by Iran. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/07/21/iran
Sadly, my experience is different.
I know my freind's G4 iMac is pretty damn quiet. But my dual G5; as shipped, was also rather quiet, but after a couple of firmware and OS upgrades, it became very loud. On hot days, louder than any other desktop machine I've ever used. Only some servers I've worked with are louder. Most of the noise is in the fans, of course. The hard drives (Seagate 160gb SATA) are reasonably quiet.
I'd like to swap out the stock fans with something cooler - if they have to run full-blast at all times, then I hope I can find something compatible that's quieter.
The one saving grace for the dual G5 (other than it's faster than a scalded cat) is that as far as how well it handles sleep/wake, it's very, very convenient.
bah, all my computers get their time from a time server, no worries here.
However, just on the virtue of the irrational increase of the Google stock price, the Google stock becomes an ideal vehicle for making money. They're not investing in Google. They're gaming a phenomenon. As long as one has a large amount of idle capital, and as long as one has the discipline to bail, even well before the peak (it's greed that causes people to stay in long after it's ceased being wise), then one can make buttloads of money. And who loses are usually institutional investors.
Of course, this is not what we think of when we think of the honorable and noble traditions of Capitalism. It represents one of the less savory elements. Who is paying for the dotcom crash? Medical insurance companies (and other institutional investors) who were not nimble enough to bail when the decline started, lost buttloads of money, and they simply passed it on to their customers. If you're wondering why your health insurance rates are shooting up - that's why. For those of us who gamed the market and made a buttload, it's payback. For those who were hourly schmoes during the dotcom boom, and didn't game the market, didn't make buttloads - they are getting screwed.
I used to work for a backup software company.
Over 12 years of mergers and acquisitions, I have to say that the end product of dozens of backup software company amounts to; pretty much no technical advancement over that time period. It's a sordid story of successive purchases of competitors for the purpose of eliminating competition. The Garter folks called it "consolidation" - as if it was just fairly normal evolution of an industry. The end result was certainly not what I was raised to believe should be the outcome of rigorous competition in a "Free Market". So much for ideology.
There were a few interesting and novel products I knew of - all of which were eliminated by this strategy.
Palindrome Network Archivist (tape-based backup). Veritas Client Exec/Netbackup Pro (backup to network server dasd). Telebackup.
(Client Exec came about during the brief period when the company was owned by Seagate - who also sold disk drives, of course, so why would they not want disk to be the target of backups, instead of tapes? Was a cool idea, because it eliminated a lot of the problems caused by tape's sequential access mode, and also the heinous amount of money the industry charges for tape drives and blank tapes)
When my position became redundant after a merger, I never looked back, so I don't really know the state of the industry today. (Though, I know that Veritas was just swallowed by Symantec, and I'm not sure what their plans are for the backup product lines).
Given all that, I'm very pessimistic about the future of desktop backup. It seems that the immutable authoritarian culture of IT that so hates the Fat Client approach, has made meaningful development of this technology unprofitable. The message?: Keep your personal data on the server, and we'll back it up to tape (and hope to god we can find and read the tape later).
As far as remote backup - from all the horror stories I heard back in the day, I would not trust any remote backup solution, period. Telebackup was a fairly novel approach, they'd sell you a client, and back your data up encrypted over the internet (in an age where most home-clients were dial up), and if you were lucky, they'd mail you a set of restore CD's constructed from the server that contained the backups. They're gone now, but I recall a small up-and-coming competitor in the San Diego area with a similar concept - I think they got bought by CA.
Of course, where I work now, we're using ADSM - which; at my old jobs, is what the marketing geeks used to say they wanted our backup software to be "when it grows up." Having more direct experience with ADSM, I can say that was a pretty naive attitude for guys with half the education, and twice the salary of our typical developers. But hey, that was the dotcom era. . .
You can defer email.
You can defer IM.
You can not defer a persistent phone caller, because your co-workers will bug you about the ringing.
You can not defer the goon squad from popping by your cubicle every 5 minutes to ask you something.
(That said, my visit to Novell in Provo back in 1996 was enlightening. They had cube walls that went up to the ceiling. And doors that closed. I tell this story every time it comes up at my current job that people are complaining about goon-visits, in hopes that management will get a clue).
Let us look to our brothers and sisters across the pond. Suffering from two attacks, have they cowered in fear, begging the government to take their rights?
We fought for independence from them over 200 years ago. Now, we're not fit to carry their collective jock straps. Instead, we flee in terror like herd animals, gladly trading our liberty for security.
In 200 years, history will not look favorably upon the cowardice of THIS American generation.
Unfortunately, when HP bent over, and seductively waved it's corporate hieney at Microsoft and Intel, they gave up any chance they had of "inventing the future".
On the bright side, Kay will probably end up getting hired at a real company that wants to actually innovate.