IIRC, it wasn't Oracle MS plundered to get MS SQL, it was Sybase. Oracle still has a product and marketshare. That's the first clue that it's a company that was never in a partnership with MS.
This whole thing smells vaguely like Microsoft's partnership with DISH Network as well, for their DishPlayer.
DISH partnered with Microsoft to get the software for DishPlayer - MS bought out some other company for the software (it's supposedly some form of BSD) - and their integrated WebTV client.
On the surface, it looks like a win for both companies. DISH gets a PVR, and a client for Web Access, and Microsoft gets MSN seats.
But the problem was, the PVR software was horribly buggy. I mean, it was really really bad. And bugs weren't fixed for something like two years. When attempts went out, things got worse. A class-action suit was actually in the pipeline. RMA rates were something like 50%, and DISH was claiming that they had 200,000 PVRs in the market. Talk about pain. They were obviously struggling on the phone-support side, they could keep enough warm bodies to man the phones, but the bodies were at best, a half-degree or so above room temperature. All this in the backdrop of DISH's proposed merger with DirecTV.
Instead of caving, DISH said Fuck You to Microsoft, sued them, and designed their own replacement to the DishPlayer - which, while buggy, was at least usable more than 20% of the time - which DishPlayer was not for many customers. (I do not know how the lawsuit turned out, but DISH also eventually provided a bugfix for DishPlayer, so the units are a lot more stable now).
In the end - DISH looks like a bad guy to customers, who started a massive grassrots campaign to bitch to the FTC to prohibit the merger (many others simply fled DISH and went to DirecTV's DirecTiVo instead). And the end product was that Charley's little bid for Satellite World Domination dies on the vine. Now DirecTV (which Microsoft also has a stake in) is a nice crispy takeover target for Murdoch.
that's a head-in-the-clouds attitude, because there's a HUGE difference between importing goods and services.
Shipping a can of beans to another country is one thing.
Shipping a JOB to another country has a direct impact on your own economic base - because the country that just lost a job is the "lucrative market" you're trying to sell your product to. And if you lower the standard of living in your own country, you're just pissing in the well.
And there are REAL effects to this that aren't so easily measurable in dollars. You put a man out of work, and then he's got to default on his home loan, his wife may have to go to work, his kids won't get as much attention at home when previously, one parent was working 50 hr weeks, now BOTH are working 60 hr weeks just to make it by - the kids won't be going to college, and may turn to a life of drugs, crime, and prostitution. They parents may begin to argue about money, maybe one will shoot the other. Maybe one will become severly ill and not able to seek treatment because they're now uninsured. Any number of bad things are much more likely to happen to a family when the job gets shipped overseas that would not have otherwised happens. And you can say that it's just too bad for Larry, getting laid off, because he wasn't as smart as Abib. But these things, when they happen to tens or hundreds of thousands of families will tend to have a negative impact on the overall well being of the nation as a whole. As certainly as a terrorist attack or a war.
IMO - CEO's that make such decisions (and economists who try to justify them) are no better than "enemy combatants" and should be treated as such.
By not wanting to fix our busted-ass educational system, by prefering instead to spend our collective tax dollars on $400 toilet seats and corporate bailouts and corporate welfare - the US has given nearly all of it's brainpower lead to competing nations - where students have a real drive to succeed, because they see what life is like around them in their native countries, and they'd rather live like Americans. They work hard, and those native countries invested dearly into an educational system. US Students, by comparison seem much more concerned about how they're going to save up for Spring Break (TM) in Daytona Beach.
It's really no suprise. Has nothing to do with racial superiority or inferiority, and every thing to do with cultural decadence.
This is true - there's a huge segment of potential and actual computer (mis)users who basically have no grasp of the concept of files and folders. They try to store everything in one folder, and as long as they only have a few things, they're alright. I believe this is the origin of "My Documents" - Microsoft's pathetic attempt to help these people out.
Oh, and we have all those things today (antigravity, rolling roads, matter converters, etc.) but they're supressed by the "Big Corporations" because they would absolutely kill their profitable businesses, which are essentially a way of enslaving mankind.
And think man, if they had mind control rays, would you necessarily know about it?
You're not counting the extra costs involved in owning/running a system with Windows XP.
- OSX does not validate it's serial number against your hardware - so if you're forced to replace a motherboard or hard drive, you don't have to call Microsoft for a new serial number.
- OSX does not have a registry per se - so that if something gets messed up, or if some OS files get corrupted, you don't have to reinstall the OS and ALL of the applications. A system recovery in OSX is more complicated than it was in Classic, but it's still WAY less complicated than a Windows system recovery.
- Apple ships you an actual OS install disk - not some peice of crap "recovery disk" which restores your system to the factory state (kiss your data goodbye).
- The ratio of "Windows Viruses" to "OS X Viruses" is something like a quarter-million to one.
- Added risk of unpatched security exploits: When an exploit is discovered in an OS X security component, it's open source, so the linux and bsd communities are out there fixing it right away. While Apple lags a tad in providing nicely packaged easily installible fixes (as opposed to downloading a fix and compiling and installing it yourself, or even coding it yourself), you at least have that option with Apple. With Microsoft, you wait. You hope that Microsoft even acknowledges the problem - you hope that Microsoft doesn't lobby congress to pass laws that make it illegal to even disclose to the public that such a flaw exists, and you wait for the fix to get high enough on their priority list to assign developers to it.
- Anyone can develop software for OS X using tools freely distributed with the OS. To develop for Windows - aw hell, I don't even know how much an MSDN subscription costs these days. . . first born child?
- Palladium. Privacy.
- Many many fine software tools - the whole UNIX suite of command line stuff, and other free software runs on OS X, and is relatively trivial to install. Windows is mostly pay-to-play. I'm talking about Apache, MySQL, GiMP, QTSS, etc. etc.
- As a server, you can run OS X headless, (Darwin). Windows drags GUI overhead with it wherever it goes. Did you remember to disable your OpenGL screen saver?
All of these additional costs don't translate to a higher sticker price, and we can debate about TCO and admin cost till we're blue in the face. Fact is - Windows only LOOKS less expensive than OS X on the surface.
(that said, I *still* think Apple WAY overcharges for their tower hardware - considering how many generations behind their bus architecture is, and how the CPU speed hasn't ramped. Don't give me that "it's fast enough" bullshit - cause it isn't). But even considering that - with the OS - it's a better deal than Windows. Now, compared to a Linux PC. . . I'm considering "switching". (From being a 10+ year Mac user to PC/Linux).
see? I'm doing that grass a favor by killing and eating that big nasty mean grass-killing cow!
Re:A bit OT Re:Expensive pant load!
on
Lab-Grown Steak
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"change your preference"?
If you prefer to eat one thing, and then change to eathing another (for some reason, like having some wacko convince you that cows are too cute to die), that's not a preference.
I prefer to eat meat. If it's available. That's my preference. I may, at some point, due to external factors, decide to no longer eat any meat. (most likely due to the Vegan Gestapo coming by my house and putting a gun to my head and threatening to arrest me for war crimes and being an evil human oppressing animals). But that will not ever change my "preference".
I suppose that texture and other qualities would not be exactly the same as real meat - and that in time, techniques will be perfected to reproduce those qualities, but they will not be generally used because they'll increase the cost of the meat - so you and I poor people will be eating the schlock lab-grown stuff, and the uber-rich will be eating either high-quality lab stuff, or the real deal.
I'm also guessing that since it will inevitably become a mass-production process, that it will "become" unprofitable to actually raise real cows - at least on a large scale, (again, only for the uber-wealthy) - so that real, actual cows will probably become extinct, or the gene pool will become restricted. Someday, there may very well be NO cows, and even no people who remember what a real cow tastes like. Sort of reminds one of that discussion in the Matrix.
As far as reducing "cruelty" - I find vegetarianism EXTREMELY cruel by comparison. When you're eating green salad, some of those plants are actually still alive, still photosynthesizing, etc. THAT'S cruel. Not only that - staying fed only on vegetables, you're typically killing far more individual organisms, hundreds of beans have to die - compared to one cow, for a meat-eater. The one cow would feed you for weeks. So carnivores don't have the market cornered on cruelty, as far as I'm concerned. If a cow feels pain and suffers and knows when it's alive or dead - why can't a lentil? Fact is - you can't prove that any other living creature has a conscious mind - including other humans. It's Chalmers' "hard problem".
Yes, I think it's time to put this "democracy" monster to bed.
If there were TRUE Democracy, things would be very different. For instance: Look what "the people" have chosen in the past several years in the commercial marketplace. These are the kinds of decisions "the rabble" would choose - apply the same thinking to politics, and it yeilds a hideously frightening prospect:
Microsoft Windows, 95% Marketshare. Titanic - Best movie of all time. Backstreet Boyz - #1 musical group of the 20th century. Harry Potter - #1 work of literature of the 20th(21st?) century. Coke or Pepsi - your choice. Ford Escort - #1 selling car in America. GWBush - 88% Approval rating, Oct 2001.
I came to accept this fact long ago. People are frickin idiots. True Democracy would be a very scary world.
THe same could be said for the Psalms, but you don't see that stopping the phairasee's of today using that to tell us how naughty and sinful we are. . .
Ain't that the truth. I bought a ratty copy of Lysistrada, the translation done by some guy in the 60's. I was actually looking for the naughty Beardsly illustrations more than anything else. But this translation (I forget the translator) was simply awful. I half expected to read an occasional Austin Powers' "yeah baby" every other page. He actually used the term "group grope" for the perfectly understandable, but perhaps not contemporary "orgy". ugh! Oh well. At least I got the naughty illustrations.
For me, it's the lack of. . . I guess you'd call it performance.
About two years ago, I was trying to parse a log for a customer who needed to feed it into their backup program to recover their data from tape. I had some tools I liked to use in DOS for text filtering and such, but ultimately, the 800 meg logfile kept getting lodged in Windows' throat somehow. I couldn't find any DOS tool that could handle such a large file. I even tried cutting it into smaller bits. After about two hours, I nearly gave up. I had done this sort of thing before many many times with smaller files. Ultimately, I had a freind with a Linux machine help me. He used awk, and including the time it took to read the MAN page to find out the syntax, the job was DONE in 10 minutes. Finished. File opened, parsed, and output written. The Windows machine was an 800 MHz Pentium with 512 Megs of RAM, and the Linux box was a 400 MHz Pentium with 128 megs of RAM.
I was converted that night, and haven't looked back. Except at work where we're forced to run Windows - but I use Cygwin now - and it still has problems with large files. I use Mac OS X at home, of course.
I just hope that if MS goes through all this trouble to create a decent set of tools, that they actually bother to fix whatever it is that causes the whole environment to just be absolute crap. But I doubt they will.
My favorite one is the TV commercial where they have the two kids smoking a bong in their dad's study, and one of them pulls out a gun and it goes off accidentally. Then the message flashes on the screen: "Marijuana can distort your sense of reality."
Well, what about bullshit propaganda? Doesn't THAT distort one's sense of reality? and what was the real danger there? The two teenage kids smoking pot? Or the complete idiot parent who left a loaded gun where the kids can get at it, and who did not teach his kids responsible gun ownership?
in my teens and early twenties, I didn't really have any memories I could clearly identify from before age 10, 11, 12, around there, it seemed to just be a few confusing images.
As I got into my late 20's and early 30's, some of those early memories started to come back more clearly, including an episode where I clearly remember sitting on my grandmother's lap, and her giving me a shiny new penny, and showing me the date on the penny, 1970, which would have made me 3. I remember not being able to tell what the numbers meant, and her showing me and explaining it to me, and I can see the shapes in my memory, and I still feel the newness of looking at them and not knowing what they meant, but I know what they mean now. I also have a memory involving reading, where I was 4 years old, and I was in the back seat of mom's car, she was driving down a highway, and I was reading the road signs to her. (back then, we didn't wear seatbelts in the back of cars, and we even used to stand up, walk around, etc.). Far from being concerned with my safety, she was praising me for being so smart at 4 years old.
I did not have any memory of these events when I was a teenager.
The assertion of the Open Source movement has always been that software companies should not charge for software, but that they should make money by "selling support".
Well, it's not support they should be selling, but convenience. Because what is support? The manuals. Access to people who know how to use the product, etc. But if "information is free" then the manuals should be freely copyable and distributable. And you can always go to usenet for access to people who know the product. But paid-for support doesn't get you access to unique information (an oxymoron), it gets you more convenient, quicker, access to the expertise. So in effect, you're paying for convenience. Just like people pay for the convenience (or status?) of having 20 ounces of water in a plastic bottle (rather than having to walk to the nearest drinking fountain for free).
This company needs to realize that they're not selling information. They're selling convenience. If they want to go the "selling information" route, they may as well become closed-source and proprietary.
After having been laid-off from a dotcom (large commercial software company), and now working for a government contractor, I notice huge differences in corporate culture that I don't really know what to think of.
My "old" employer was very much the stereotype portrayed here; average employee age was about 25. Had a division in India (btw - PAIN in the kiester working with these guys, 11.5 hour time-zone difference!). Very fast-paced development cycle, heavy-duty burnout. 9 times out of 10, when a problem is found, not only can we not find the person who "owns" that part of the code, but when we do, he usually inherited it from someone else, has no idea how it works, and fights tooth and nail before breaking down and digging in to look at it to fix the problem - most of the time, the fix ends up being a superficial patch or workaround.
My "new" employer is completely different. Lots of employees my age, with families. The director of our group jokingly threatened to tour the facilities on Christmas Eve and fire anyone he caught working. Our team uses extremely rigorous engineering processes in the development of our software. Everything is carefully reviewed by the team. The pace of developent is about 1/10th the pace at my old company. The result? Not necessarily a more stable product - but when a problem is found, the person who owns the code can be found, and everyone has pretty good familiarity with the code of the entire project. Problems are found and fixed, and usually fixed right. The problems in our product are mainly to do with the history of the project (the design team is blamed, but I wasn't around then).
On my old team - the morale, the attitude, had gone from; "man, WE are hot shit, we make the best damn widget, and we're on the bleeding edge" to "holy crap, we suck so bad, we're so mismanaged, I wish we could get a real team lead - etc." over the course of the past 3 years. Many of them have given up hope that they'll ever be able to really fix the product, or that it will ever "make it" in the marketplace against it's competitor. They spent the first three years rushing poor design decisions and slapping stuff together quickly, and now, instead of keeping up with the competition's features, they're ripping out huge chunks of the software and replacing it. That was the state when I left.
The morale of the new team is fairly low too - they were stuck with someone else's failed peice of garbage, but they're confident that given time, they'll fix it. They know that they're being allowed to do things right.
Certainly, this development pace would not cut it in the commercial software world. If there were a demand for bulletproof reliability and accountability in the commercial software world, maybe that would change. Right now - the commercial software world wants tomorrow's solution yesterday, at third-world sweatshop prices. Reliability, and maintainability be damned.
But I see this as only a temporary trend. I think that eventually, the market will wake up realize that that approach yeilds only a huge waste of money and resources, and that a happy medium will eventually be established as a standard. And there's going to have to be some level of accountability, so that software companies won't try to stamp "Enterprise Software" on stuff that was written like Napster. In the end, software development will truly be a professional-level engineering process. Consumer-level software may still be hacked together by people with hobbyist skillsets, but that's not how the big enterprise/mission-critical software players are going to be doing it in 2010.
How does this apply to Open Source development? I think it does - because Open Source does utilize some better processes, like peer reviews of code, etc.
Even as a veteran Mac user and unix wannabe for the past several years, I learned a lot from your post. Comments:
1. Older Macs (Beige G3) have ADB instead of USB - and nobody is writing device drivers for ADB devices in OSX. So if you have one of these older machines, *DO* invest in a USB card. However, with 10.2, there seems to be some whacked out performance bug with USB devices that slows the whole system down, so you might want to stick with 10.1.5 until they've nailed it. No, 10.2.3 does NOT fix it.
2. I can't recommend highly enough, the wonderful shareware terminal replacement, GLTerm. It's so much faster than the regular terminal, you'll often wonder just what the hell terminal.app is doing with all it's time. Maybe browsing the net for porn? Who knows?
7. Orobourous is extreeeeeeemely unstable. Unless they've fixed it since I tried it 6 months ago. I think Windowmaker is best. It's patterened after the NeXT GUI - so it's really the GUI OS X *should* have, was meant to have.
9. mi is a great little editor - and it's free.
13. 'ditto' is the command-line copy utility that is "resource fork" aware.
14. One of the great joys in life is opening new browser tabs in the background by clicking on links with the scroll-wheel button in Chimera. Chimera is great for it's non-bloatedness, but it REALLY need's ad-server blocking like it's older brother, Mozilla.
"Humans are about the most inefficient bloody electical generators you could POSSIBLY imagine." Heck, even just grow a human WITHOUT a brain (then elect him... DOH!)... our brains use up something like 60% of our total body nutrients (when at rest)."
Um, that's what they TAUGHT you to believe (along with the 2nd law of thermodynamics) - that's only true in the Matrix. Outside of the matrix, the 2nd law of thermodynamics does not apply. Now, why they chose Humans as their perpetual motion machine rather than some complicated treadmill of sponges going through a bucket of water, I have no idea.
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IIRC, it wasn't Oracle MS plundered to get MS SQL, it was Sybase. Oracle still has a product and marketshare. That's the first clue that it's a company that was never in a partnership with MS.
This whole thing smells vaguely like Microsoft's partnership with DISH Network as well, for their DishPlayer.
DISH partnered with Microsoft to get the software for DishPlayer - MS bought out some other company for the software (it's supposedly some form of BSD) - and their integrated WebTV client.
On the surface, it looks like a win for both companies. DISH gets a PVR, and a client for Web Access, and Microsoft gets MSN seats.
But the problem was, the PVR software was horribly buggy. I mean, it was really really bad. And bugs weren't fixed for something like two years. When attempts went out, things got worse. A class-action suit was actually in the pipeline. RMA rates were something like 50%, and DISH was claiming that they had 200,000 PVRs in the market. Talk about pain. They were obviously struggling on the phone-support side, they could keep enough warm bodies to man the phones, but the bodies were at best, a half-degree or so above room temperature. All this in the backdrop of DISH's proposed merger with DirecTV.
Instead of caving, DISH said Fuck You to Microsoft, sued them, and designed their own replacement to the DishPlayer - which, while buggy, was at least usable more than 20% of the time - which DishPlayer was not for many customers.
(I do not know how the lawsuit turned out, but DISH also eventually provided a bugfix for DishPlayer, so the units are a lot more stable now).
In the end - DISH looks like a bad guy to customers, who started a massive grassrots campaign to bitch to the FTC to prohibit the merger (many others simply fled DISH and went to DirecTV's DirecTiVo instead). And the end product was that Charley's little bid for Satellite World Domination dies on the vine. Now DirecTV (which Microsoft also has a stake in) is a nice crispy takeover target for Murdoch.
No. If current trends continue, we simply won't be hearing from the likes of Chomsky anymore.
that's a head-in-the-clouds attitude, because there's a HUGE difference between importing goods and services.
Shipping a can of beans to another country is one thing.
Shipping a JOB to another country has a direct impact on your own economic base - because the country that just lost a job is the "lucrative market" you're trying to sell your product to. And if you lower the standard of living in your own country, you're just pissing in the well.
And there are REAL effects to this that aren't so easily measurable in dollars. You put a man out of work, and then he's got to default on his home loan, his wife may have to go to work, his kids won't get as much attention at home when previously, one parent was working 50 hr weeks, now BOTH are working 60 hr weeks just to make it by - the kids won't be going to college, and may turn to a life of drugs, crime, and prostitution. They parents may begin to argue about money, maybe one will shoot the other. Maybe one will become severly ill and not able to seek treatment because they're now uninsured. Any number of bad things are much more likely to happen to a family when the job gets shipped overseas that would not have otherwised happens. And you can say that it's just too bad for Larry, getting laid off, because he wasn't as smart as Abib. But these things, when they happen to tens or hundreds of thousands of families will tend to have a negative impact on the overall well being of the nation as a whole. As certainly as a terrorist attack or a war.
IMO - CEO's that make such decisions (and economists who try to justify them) are no better than "enemy combatants" and should be treated as such.
By not wanting to fix our busted-ass educational system, by prefering instead to spend our collective tax dollars on $400 toilet seats and corporate bailouts and corporate welfare - the US has given nearly all of it's brainpower lead to competing nations - where students have a real drive to succeed, because they see what life is like around them in their native countries, and they'd rather live like Americans. They work hard, and those native countries invested dearly into an educational system. US Students, by comparison seem much more concerned about how they're going to save up for Spring Break (TM) in Daytona Beach.
It's really no suprise. Has nothing to do with racial superiority or inferiority, and every thing to do with cultural decadence.
This is true - there's a huge segment of potential and actual computer (mis)users who basically have no grasp of the concept of files and folders. They try to store everything in one folder, and as long as they only have a few things, they're alright. I believe this is the origin of "My Documents" - Microsoft's pathetic attempt to help these people out.
Oh, and we have all those things today (antigravity, rolling roads, matter converters, etc.) but they're supressed by the "Big Corporations" because they would absolutely kill their profitable businesses, which are essentially a way of enslaving mankind.
And think man, if they had mind control rays, would you necessarily know about it?
You're not counting the extra costs involved in owning/running a system with Windows XP.
- OSX does not validate it's serial number against your hardware - so if you're forced to replace a motherboard or hard drive, you don't have to call Microsoft for a new serial number.
- OSX does not have a registry per se - so that if something gets messed up, or if some OS files get corrupted, you don't have to reinstall the OS and ALL of the applications. A system recovery in OSX is more complicated than it was in Classic, but it's still WAY less complicated than a Windows system recovery.
- Apple ships you an actual OS install disk - not some peice of crap "recovery disk" which restores your system to the factory state (kiss your data goodbye).
- The ratio of "Windows Viruses" to "OS X Viruses" is something like a quarter-million to one.
- Added risk of unpatched security exploits: When an exploit is discovered in an OS X security component, it's open source, so the linux and bsd communities are out there fixing it right away. While Apple lags a tad in providing nicely packaged easily installible fixes (as opposed to downloading a fix and compiling and installing it yourself, or even coding it yourself), you at least have that option with Apple. With Microsoft, you wait. You hope that Microsoft even acknowledges the problem - you hope that Microsoft doesn't lobby congress to pass laws that make it illegal to even disclose to the public that such a flaw exists, and you wait for the fix to get high enough on their priority list to assign developers to it.
- Anyone can develop software for OS X using tools freely distributed with the OS. To develop for Windows - aw hell, I don't even know how much an MSDN subscription costs these days. . . first born child?
- Palladium. Privacy.
- Many many fine software tools - the whole UNIX suite of command line stuff, and other free software runs on OS X, and is relatively trivial to install. Windows is mostly pay-to-play. I'm talking about Apache, MySQL, GiMP, QTSS, etc. etc.
- As a server, you can run OS X headless, (Darwin). Windows drags GUI overhead with it wherever it goes. Did you remember to disable your OpenGL screen saver?
All of these additional costs don't translate to a higher sticker price, and we can debate about TCO and admin cost till we're blue in the face. Fact is - Windows only LOOKS less expensive than OS X on the surface.
(that said, I *still* think Apple WAY overcharges for their tower hardware - considering how many generations behind their bus architecture is, and how the CPU speed hasn't ramped. Don't give me that "it's fast enough" bullshit - cause it isn't). But even considering that - with the OS - it's a better deal than Windows. Now, compared to a Linux PC. . . I'm considering "switching". (From being a 10+ year Mac user to PC/Linux).
IMO - it's the PRICE of the G4 towers that's impinging on the sales of G4 towers.
see? I'm doing that grass a favor by killing and eating that big nasty mean grass-killing cow!
"change your preference"?
If you prefer to eat one thing, and then change to eathing another (for some reason, like having some wacko convince you that cows are too cute to die), that's not a preference.
I prefer to eat meat. If it's available. That's my preference. I may, at some point, due to external factors, decide to no longer eat any meat. (most likely due to the Vegan Gestapo coming by my house and putting a gun to my head and threatening to arrest me for war crimes and being an evil human oppressing animals). But that will not ever change my "preference".
I suppose that texture and other qualities would not be exactly the same as real meat - and that in time, techniques will be perfected to reproduce those qualities, but they will not be generally used because they'll increase the cost of the meat - so you and I poor people will be eating the schlock lab-grown stuff, and the uber-rich will be eating either high-quality lab stuff, or the real deal.
I'm also guessing that since it will inevitably become a mass-production process, that it will "become" unprofitable to actually raise real cows - at least on a large scale, (again, only for the uber-wealthy) - so that real, actual cows will probably become extinct, or the gene pool will become restricted. Someday, there may very well be NO cows, and even no people who remember what a real cow tastes like. Sort of reminds one of that discussion in the Matrix.
As far as reducing "cruelty" - I find vegetarianism EXTREMELY cruel by comparison. When you're eating green salad, some of those plants are actually still alive, still photosynthesizing, etc. THAT'S cruel. Not only that - staying fed only on vegetables, you're typically killing far more individual organisms, hundreds of beans have to die - compared to one cow, for a meat-eater. The one cow would feed you for weeks. So carnivores don't have the market cornered on cruelty, as far as I'm concerned. If a cow feels pain and suffers and knows when it's alive or dead - why can't a lentil?
Fact is - you can't prove that any other living creature has a conscious mind - including other humans. It's Chalmers' "hard problem".
Yes, I think it's time to put this "democracy" monster to bed.
If there were TRUE Democracy, things would be very different.
For instance: Look what "the people" have chosen in the past several years in the commercial marketplace. These are the kinds of decisions "the rabble" would choose - apply the same thinking to politics, and it yeilds a hideously frightening prospect:
Microsoft Windows, 95% Marketshare.
Titanic - Best movie of all time.
Backstreet Boyz - #1 musical group of the 20th century.
Harry Potter - #1 work of literature of the 20th(21st?) century.
Coke or Pepsi - your choice.
Ford Escort - #1 selling car in America.
GWBush - 88% Approval rating, Oct 2001.
I came to accept this fact long ago. People are frickin idiots. True Democracy would be a very scary world.
THe same could be said for the Psalms, but you don't see that stopping the phairasee's of today using that to tell us how naughty and sinful we are. . .
Ain't that the truth. I bought a ratty copy of Lysistrada, the translation done by some guy in the 60's. I was actually looking for the naughty Beardsly illustrations more than anything else. But this translation (I forget the translator) was simply awful. I half expected to read an occasional Austin Powers' "yeah baby" every other page. He actually used the term "group grope" for the perfectly understandable, but perhaps not contemporary "orgy". ugh!
Oh well. At least I got the naughty illustrations.
do I really want a graphical display of all the porn pages I've visited recently sitting out in a tray on my browser?
"if they funded all medical research we'd never cure anything, just get more drugs to treat symptoms..."
.um, hello?
. .
For me, it's the lack of. . . I guess you'd call it performance.
About two years ago, I was trying to parse a log for a customer who needed to feed it into their backup program to recover their data from tape. I had some tools I liked to use in DOS for text filtering and such, but ultimately, the 800 meg logfile kept getting lodged in Windows' throat somehow. I couldn't find any DOS tool that could handle such a large file. I even tried cutting it into smaller bits. After about two hours, I nearly gave up. I had done this sort of thing before many many times with smaller files. Ultimately, I had a freind with a Linux machine help me. He used awk, and including the time it took to read the MAN page to find out the syntax, the job was DONE in 10 minutes. Finished. File opened, parsed, and output written. The Windows machine was an 800 MHz Pentium with 512 Megs of RAM, and the Linux box was a 400 MHz Pentium with 128 megs of RAM.
I was converted that night, and haven't looked back. Except at work where we're forced to run Windows - but I use Cygwin now - and it still has problems with large files. I use Mac OS X at home, of course.
I just hope that if MS goes through all this trouble to create a decent set of tools, that they actually bother to fix whatever it is that causes the whole environment to just be absolute crap. But I doubt they will.
My favorite one is the TV commercial where they have the two kids smoking a bong in their dad's study, and one of them pulls out a gun and it goes off accidentally. Then the message flashes on the screen: "Marijuana can distort your sense of reality."
Well, what about bullshit propaganda? Doesn't THAT distort one's sense of reality?
and what was the real danger there? The two teenage kids smoking pot? Or the complete idiot parent who left a loaded gun where the kids can get at it, and who did not teach his kids responsible gun ownership?
two words.
tulip bulbs.
in my teens and early twenties, I didn't really have any memories I could clearly identify from before age 10, 11, 12, around there, it seemed to just be a few confusing images.
As I got into my late 20's and early 30's, some of those early memories started to come back more clearly, including an episode where I clearly remember sitting on my grandmother's lap, and her giving me a shiny new penny, and showing me the date on the penny, 1970, which would have made me 3. I remember not being able to tell what the numbers meant, and her showing me and explaining it to me, and I can see the shapes in my memory, and I still feel the newness of looking at them and not knowing what they meant, but I know what they mean now. I also have a memory involving reading, where I was 4 years old, and I was in the back seat of mom's car, she was driving down a highway, and I was reading the road signs to her. (back then, we didn't wear seatbelts in the back of cars, and we even used to stand up, walk around, etc.). Far from being concerned with my safety, she was praising me for being so smart at 4 years old.
I did not have any memory of these events when I was a teenager.
The assertion of the Open Source movement has always been that software companies should not charge for software, but that they should make money by "selling support".
Well, it's not support they should be selling, but convenience. Because what is support? The manuals. Access to people who know how to use the product, etc. But if "information is free" then the manuals should be freely copyable and distributable. And you can always go to usenet for access to people who know the product. But paid-for support doesn't get you access to unique information (an oxymoron), it gets you more convenient, quicker, access to the expertise. So in effect, you're paying for convenience. Just like people pay for the convenience (or status?) of having 20 ounces of water in a plastic bottle (rather than having to walk to the nearest drinking fountain for free).
This company needs to realize that they're not selling information. They're selling convenience. If they want to go the "selling information" route, they may as well become closed-source and proprietary.
After having been laid-off from a dotcom (large commercial software company), and now working for a government contractor, I notice huge differences in corporate culture that I don't really know what to think of.
My "old" employer was very much the stereotype portrayed here; average employee age was about 25. Had a division in India (btw - PAIN in the kiester working with these guys, 11.5 hour time-zone difference!). Very fast-paced development cycle, heavy-duty burnout. 9 times out of 10, when a problem is found, not only can we not find the person who "owns" that part of the code, but when we do, he usually inherited it from someone else, has no idea how it works, and fights tooth and nail before breaking down and digging in to look at it to fix the problem - most of the time, the fix ends up being a superficial patch or workaround.
My "new" employer is completely different. Lots of employees my age, with families. The director of our group jokingly threatened to tour the facilities on Christmas Eve and fire anyone he caught working. Our team uses extremely rigorous engineering processes in the development of our software. Everything is carefully reviewed by the team. The pace of developent is about 1/10th the pace at my old company. The result? Not necessarily a more stable product - but when a problem is found, the person who owns the code can be found, and everyone has pretty good familiarity with the code of the entire project. Problems are found and fixed, and usually fixed right. The problems in our product are mainly to do with the history of the project (the design team is blamed, but I wasn't around then).
On my old team - the morale, the attitude, had gone from; "man, WE are hot shit, we make the best damn widget, and we're on the bleeding edge" to "holy crap, we suck so bad, we're so mismanaged, I wish we could get a real team lead - etc." over the course of the past 3 years. Many of them have given up hope that they'll ever be able to really fix the product, or that it will ever "make it" in the marketplace against it's competitor. They spent the first three years rushing poor design decisions and slapping stuff together quickly, and now, instead of keeping up with the competition's features, they're ripping out huge chunks of the software and replacing it. That was the state when I left.
The morale of the new team is fairly low too - they were stuck with someone else's failed peice of garbage, but they're confident that given time, they'll fix it. They know that they're being allowed to do things right.
Certainly, this development pace would not cut it in the commercial software world. If there were a demand for bulletproof reliability and accountability in the commercial software world, maybe that would change. Right now - the commercial software world wants tomorrow's solution yesterday, at third-world sweatshop prices. Reliability, and maintainability be damned.
But I see this as only a temporary trend. I think that eventually, the market will wake up realize that that approach yeilds only a huge waste of money and resources, and that a happy medium will eventually be established as a standard. And there's going to have to be some level of accountability, so that software companies won't try to stamp "Enterprise Software" on stuff that was written like Napster. In the end, software development will truly be a professional-level engineering process. Consumer-level software may still be hacked together by people with hobbyist skillsets, but that's not how the big enterprise/mission-critical software players are going to be doing it in 2010.
How does this apply to Open Source development? I think it does - because Open Source does utilize some better processes, like peer reviews of code, etc.
SWEET.
Even as a veteran Mac user and unix wannabe for the past several years, I learned a lot from your post. Comments:
1. Older Macs (Beige G3) have ADB instead of USB - and nobody is writing device drivers for ADB devices in OSX. So if you have one of these older machines, *DO* invest in a USB card. However, with 10.2, there seems to be some whacked out performance bug with USB devices that slows the whole system down, so you might want to stick with 10.1.5 until they've nailed it. No, 10.2.3 does NOT fix it.
2. I can't recommend highly enough, the wonderful shareware terminal replacement, GLTerm. It's so much faster than the regular terminal, you'll often wonder just what the hell terminal.app is doing with all it's time. Maybe browsing the net for porn? Who knows?
7. Orobourous is extreeeeeeemely unstable. Unless they've fixed it since I tried it 6 months ago. I think Windowmaker is best. It's patterened after the NeXT GUI - so it's really the GUI OS X *should* have, was meant to have.
9. mi is a great little editor - and it's free.
13. 'ditto' is the command-line copy utility that is "resource fork" aware.
14. One of the great joys in life is opening new browser tabs in the background by clicking on links with the scroll-wheel button in Chimera. Chimera is great for it's non-bloatedness, but it REALLY need's ad-server blocking like it's older brother, Mozilla.
"Humans are about the most inefficient bloody electical generators you could POSSIBLY imagine." Heck, even just grow a human WITHOUT a brain (then elect him... DOH!)... our brains use up something like 60% of our total body nutrients (when at rest)."
Um, that's what they TAUGHT you to believe (along with the 2nd law of thermodynamics) - that's only true in the Matrix. Outside of the matrix, the 2nd law of thermodynamics does not apply. Now, why they chose Humans as their perpetual motion machine rather than some complicated treadmill of sponges going through a bucket of water, I have no idea.