> If you artificially prop up prices for the benefit of a few, then competition and innovation > that would benefit the broader consumer market can suffer.
No, the lessons are bigger than that.
If you regulate prices you set the system at that moment into stone, the current winners and losers get fixed into law. Innovation becomes virtually illegal. It isn't just consumers who lose, everyone except the government blessed winners lose. And of course the government itself which gains power and can be assured the support of those who depend upon it for monopoly rents.
In short, government price fixing, regulation and government in general are BAD. Some government is a necessary evil at this point in our philosophical development but we must realize that it is always evil and thus to me kept carefully chained lest it destroy us. Worse than fire or even fissile material.
> consider Heinlein's social and political commentary in Starship Troopers
Or not. Enumerating a list of Sci-Fi authors and omitting RAH says everything ya need to know. The goal will be political indoctrination via science fiction and everything written by RAH will be right out, Starship Troopers doubly so. Amazed Card is mentioned though, he is about as counter revolutionary but a few of his works could be cherry picked but there would still be the danger a young skull full of mush might seek out some of his politically incorrect work after being introduced to Card's writing. Tolkien is safe enough, after all hippies have for decades been able to ignore the parts they don't like and read LOTR simply as a screed against the modern world.
But just to make sure everyone understands it will be politicized the last sentence of the/. summary is the tell:
"Possible areas of interest will be topics of the environment, energy conservation, war, social issues, and others."
If that is the best argument ya got it won't work in the real world. But there is a better one. A site designed to be accessable tends to be a good website, period.
Some of the reason is that accesssable sites must avoid the temptation to take the easy fix of throwing anything complicated into a flash applet or other inaccessable crap. But an equally important part is the opposite argument of one I make in another post about.aspx being the seal of crap. It isn't because the Microsoft stuff can't be made to work with enough effort, it is that only clueless people tend to pick it in the first place and clueless people will do other clueless things. Conversely, people cluefull enough to build a properly accessable site will also tend to make a generally well designed site. And host it on a better and less costly platform like a LAMP server.
I thought about making this post without even bothering to go look, but yup the site displays the 'seal of quality' up in the url bar. As soon as you see that.aspx at the end you know you are probably in for a world of pain at at site. You know things will probably suck from end to end. Performance issues, design issues, usability issues, the whole bit.
No, using Microsoft products isn't always the reason but it is always a symptom of the root problem. It is as close to a "This site designed by idiots!" logo as we are ever likely to see. Only idiots (or companies beholden to Microsoft's goodwill) pick Microsoft's inferior in every way stuff to roll out a high volume, high visibility site on. Poor design isn't caused by hosting on a Microsoft server but it is another symptom of designed by idiots.
> "Harsh copy protection" does nothing but annoy legitimate users. The pirates can easily remove it.
Of course the hard core pirates would remove it. Wouldn't matter. That step is only intended to stop casual duplication of the media. OEM preloading has already stopped 90% of owners from ever getting a clean install disc, this would stop another few percent. Just an incremental step. A windows install disc is something a legit user might need a dozen times in the life of a version of Windows so the reliability hit from the copy protection won't harm a legit user. The original media isn't likely to go defective, unlike a game that usually needs to be inserted every time you run it.
> The rest of that sentence shows a total lack of understanding of the realities of large-scale software > development and deployment. If Microsoft put out a deliberate logic bomb onto tens of millions of machines, > it is *virtually guaranteed* that some of those machines would be legitimately licensed copies that were > bought and paid for by their users (or a corporation).
Ah, but follow the logic I laid out. The copy protection stops the supply of casual copied media forcing pirates to the 'bay... or whatever replaces it now that it is going tango uniform. Microsoft itself just supplies a good percentage of the high quality pirate copies through black ops. Good stuff, clean cracks, sure to get a good reputation and be widely downloaded. Or they just download the cracked copies others release. Then identify the changed bits and build a database of changes in files that they can ensure NEVER appear in official pressed copies or masters given to OEMs. Then release updates that identify one of them and go FOOM! Release new game titles[1] that during installation and/or runtime identify one or more known bootlegs and release a time delayed kaboom so that the source of the bomb isn't easilly identifiable. Put keygens out that make good keys but with 100% identifable flags and after a suitable delay Kaboom!
Make sure every bomb goes off in a way that it is obvious that it detected a pirate copy so as not to just increase the reputation of Windows as unstable. By going at it this way the false positive rate would be as close to zero as possible, and even then it would be dealers selling bootlegs, rogue IT folk installing booteg copies, often just to get around the scarcity of official media.
Copy protection on a game fails and annoys the legal user because the use pattern is very different from an OS. Excepting games with extensive online content (and they aren't pirated often) the vendor gets few opportunities to detect piracy after the sale. An pirated OS can be detected every time a new executable is installed, at every errata update, etc. It would be fairly easy to scare most people away from a bootleg copy. Microsoft COULD reduce piracy to a single digit problem but they would be fools to do it. Because if they make the price of piracy high enough it won't force many people to buy a copy, instead they will install something else and that idea is the most horrible thing they can imagine.
[1] Especially when done in cahoots with third parties. Whether they know or not, how many games include updated.dll files or new DirectX versions, etc.
The problem is microsoft has a love/hate relationship with the pirates. They have an absolute need for piracy to be possible but not to become attractive enough (in the first world) to become popular enough to eat into their profits overmuch.
Think about it, Microsoft could eliminate 99% of piracy overnight by using harsh copy protection combined with mandatory Genuine Advantage plus a couple of targeted logic bombs launched against a few of the more flagrant pirate copies. Problem is most pirates these days either built their PC from scratch (else they would have been force fed a license) or bought a PC from a pirate. The DIY crowd is too influential to piss off and what they are doing already stops the bulk of the chopshop pirates in the developed world. If they make pirate windows too unstable in the third world where it is popular they simply can't pay so would be driven to look for alternatives.... and would find them.
So this move is easily understandable, it gives the pirates a nudge but won't overly annoy any of the major groups who pirate. The DIY type who pirates Windows because those guys pirate everything just for fun will have little trouble finding cracked copies of whatever they have been using. At all appearances nobody in the secondary markets updates anything on their damned machines already, considering how much crap spews out.
> > that will be larger than the total deficits of Bush's eight years.
> Yeah, actually including two wars in your budget will do that.
Your reasoning and facts are lacking.
1. Whether the war funding is on or off budget doesn't change the deficit numbers. It just gets around various budget caps without needing super majorities and/or increasing the baseline defense budget. Baseline budgeting is the biggest scam since Social Security, btw.
2. Total defense spending (budgeted + war supplementals) as a percentage of GDP has been below historical levels throughout the GWOT. This is one of the reasons we have had problems on the battlefield, Bush & Rummey tried to fight two wars at the same time on the cheap. There were rational reasons why they believed that was sound policy politically and fiscally, they even had a passable theory to make it work from a military pov. But it didn't work and they either couldn't admit it or didn't think Congress would actually vote for the surge until the '06 debacle and McCain basically taking the ball and running it.
3. You are almost certainly being as intellectually dishonest as most of your team. You don't object to the money, you object to the idea. Which is of course a perfectly fine thing, just be honest about it. You guys object to the GWOT on principle and would object if the cost were $0. Those who believe one or both theaters of operation were/are vital to national security likewise aren't likely to be moved by the cost unless it itself becomes a threat to the survival of the nation.
> " Like hell they will. You think all those C-levels, VPs and billionaire executives will want to move?
And I'm sure the locals said the same thing about Boeing as they happily taxed the crap out of them to fund their left coast utopia. Of course they did move their headquarters out of the state. And are building a big non-union plant down south.
Microsoft doesn't have to just pick up it's ball and leave. Just keep building out facilities in multiple States and countries like they have been doing and play each of them against the other for the most favorable tax and regulatory treatement. If Washington gets too aggressive on this issue threaten to move the official headquarters. There ARE a lot of nice places just in the US and many are actually pretty nice to live in. The current location wasn't even the first one ya know.
Even better leverage, especially in this crappy economy, is to just threaten to push all new hiring to more favorable business environments. I.e. threaten the politicians with a terrible press release about a new thousand headcount shop that won't be opening in the state because of the bad business climate. And if they think it is a bluff, do it and do it over until they either get a clue or the center of mass has actually moved to a better place and then really relocate the HQ.
For a company like Microsoft where they are doesn't really matter much so long as it is the sort of place key personnel wouldn't be demoralized living in. They have no ties to a natural resource, no major transportation needs, etc.
Requires court order. Who has a problem with that? With a court order you can tap phones, plant bugs, install keystroke loggers, just about anything. Seems kinda daft to be maming a fuss about putting a GPS on somebody's car, hell just use the court order to get the cell company to give a feed from their phone.
> First, who spends the time digging through the Congressional Record for this kind of stuff.
Yea, used to be we peons just took it like men... in the butt. What is up with this new fangled notion of people actually READING bills. Hell, next thing ya know Congresscritters might be forced to read the stuff they pass. Horror!
> Congress considers thousands of ideas every year, from the brilliant (health care reform) > to the idiotic (Bridges to Nowhere). Most are DOA.
So? Now we are crowdsourcing the search for bad bills and cutting em off at the knees before they have a chance to make it out of committee. This is bad how? We need to make stupidity on the part of Congresscritters painful at the ballot box. Revealing their bad ideas is a good start, ya can't vote against a congressman's stupid ideas if you never hear about em.
> What's the harm in trying out some different ideas?
You don't have to hit yourself in the head with a hammer to understand it is a bad idea. Being forced to report your every movement to the government is such a terrible idea we don't actually need to try it. It is a BAD IDEA. (See Animaniacs if you are unclear on the whole GOOD IDEA, BAD IDEA thing.) To propose it, not as the universal surveillance program it actually is, but as a mere road tax when the gas tax or a simple odometer tax at registration renewal time would achieve the stated goal with far less invasion of privacy reveals the wickedness of the author.
The argument this clown is using is exactly WHY so many distrust science. Because the scientists are so obviously political these days. Now this wouldn't be bad if they were political scientists (i.e. the fuzzy social sciences) but it has no place in physics or chemistry.
You can't have it both way folks, which view of a scientist do you want the masses to have?
1. The scientist as the almost monastic searcher for facts, discovering new wonders by relentlessly collecting facts in the field, doing careful experiments in labs full of shiny equipment, publishing carefully reasoned papers which are mercilessly peer reviewed and basically being devoted to following the facts wherever they lead. But in the end, scientists tell us how the universe works and what is possible. Engineers use that knowledge to build things after the marketing dept identifies a customer for it and then the politicians decide how to regulate and tax it.
2. Philosopher Kings. Politicians with PhDs. Victims of several bad ideas, namely that a) expertise in one narrow area implies a general wisdom; b) that rule by a technocratic elite is 'better' than rule by the consent of the governed; c) that just because science says something is possible means we must do it, because morals aren't scientific after all.
The last century has shown a marked shift in the public's idea of the word 'scientist' from the first to the second. This explains their change in attitude. In other words if Hansen and his ilk stopped the politicking and went back to their lab and produced some results that didn't get shredded people might start readjusting their views again. Even better would be if the other so called 'real scientists' policed their own a little, forcing the ones who want to take up a new career in politics to LEAVE science first. Because it should now be clear that attempts to lend the good name of science to a political argument doesn't actually work, that instead the bad name of politics attached to science.
And here is another good example of the problem. Carl Sagan's _Cosmos_. It is a wonderful introduction to science in many ways yet terribly flawed by Bad Idea A from above in that Sagan mistakenly believed himself an expert in Foreign Relations apparently for no other reason than he was a smart fellow. But the series is full of the most naive useful idiot twaddle of the sort that, with the Cold War ended, few would dispute. When the grandkids are older I plan on showing them the series and use it as an example of the problem of scientists trying to become political leaders without first investing the effort to actually become an expert.
> Because we all have different ideas of what the perfect word processor will be, this is one step closer to a happy software world.
Exactly. Most other data types standardized on one or a handful of formats long ago, it was the Microsoft monopoly that distorted things with formatted text and spreadsheets. Think about it, far more complex data is encoded in standardized formats that a multitude of programs all process and exchange data through. Look at sound, still images, vector graphics, even video! All interoperable. Meanwhile Word docs aren't even certain to be compatible between two different installs of the same version of Word. Buy a new printer and connect it to the same install and previous docs will often need to be reformatted. Good riddence to that!
Oh, and IBM didn't buy Sun; Oracle bought the corpse to loot it.
> I think it is a way for Grossman to look at this stuff from his point of view.
Exactly. He obviously hated Narnia, just from reading the review, and probably disliked Potter and instead of just writing a snarky review he set out to 'deconstruct' them. And face it, the whole field of literary criticism is esssentially the process of 'deconstructing' everything valuable in the corpus of Western Civilization and showing how corrupt and wicked it all is. Pointy headed academics do it in the form of nasty yet inscrutable papers no sane person would read, this guy does it in the novel format instead so that more people will be impacted.
And at least it appears he understands WHY both of his targets were popular by how he attacks them so he isn't a fool, just playing for the dark side's team.
> Under no variation of our language would forming a nationwide health care > organization be neither "general Welfare" nor "Commerce among the several states."
Another user already took your argument apart pretty good, but there is a much simpler argument that I'd bet money neither you or any other poster will even attempt to rebut.
Consider the time of the founding of our Republic and the writing of the new Constitution. They were careful to enumerate each and every power they wanted the Federal government to possess. After presenting their work to the nation they were assailed for giving the Federal government too much power, many detractors even using the same commerce and general welfare clauses cited in modern times. The authors (especially Publius's three incarnations) went into great detail explaining how they had done no such thing, that they had defined a carefully limited role for the new government and that no other powers assumed by it would be legitimate and after all, no law could prevent a tyranny from usurping power. Their arguments were found wanting and a Bill of Rights was added to make explicit what the authors believed was the inherent limits on the growth of the Federal government, especially Amendments 9 and 10.
So Question #1. Do you (you as either you or any other progressive brave enough to enter the fray) find a flaw with the brief history I just outlined?
Assuming the answer to #1 is no, we are lead to Question #2. What the heck was the reasoning behind all the fuss with carefully debating (for months) and codifying a detailed enumerated list of powers and then adding two amendments to make doubly certain the intent of the founders to limit the powers of the nation government? The current progressive 'interpretation' of the general welfare and commerce clauses are broad enough to be blank checks, so if that was really the intent why bother with anything else? The whole damned thing could have been shortened a lot if they just left the bits about the organization of the three branches and then just gave Congress unlimited power to secure the general welfare any way they saw fit. So explain why neither common sense nor English literacy are the right way to read the constitution.
To bring this more on topic, your argument would be roughly equal to this. A detailed spec is created for a custom software job, it begins by explaining the intended business goal the new system must meet and then it soecifies in broad outlines the requirements and a few details, say a requirement for POSIX and some realtime response requirements. Then after the consultants have agreed and signed the contracts, etc. they eventually deliver some.NET horror that meets none of the requirements but the consultants argue they should be paid because it should sorta deliver the intended goals specified... too bad it runs too slow to actually be put into service and the inability to interface it to your other systems (.NET), you should have declared those interactions. But of course the POSIX requirement was expected to make interoperability assumed. Point being you can't just read the descriptive text and ignore the pesky implementation details.
> Retailers just need to know that they should stock an assortment of cables close to > their boxes and their sales staff trained to sell the right cables.
And that is probably the reason for this change. Lower the price on the console in theory but let the retailers more than make it up on the cable which has insane margins anyway. Notice that zero retailers of game console or any mass consumer electronics sell inexpensive HDMI cables, even Walmart rapes yer bum pretty hard, they get $19.99 for one around here.
> Microsoft's biggest problem is that they have never, never had a long term road map...
Nope, you are thinking like a geek. Microsoft is a business, follow the money like I did. It doesn't really matter if they have a roadmap, neither does it matter if their products suck or not. Think about it. If Microsoft's stuff were insanely great would they sell any more of it? The Apple cultists are Steve's, nothing is likely to make more than a percentage or two difference there. Linux may or may not have broken the 1% barrier in the last year. Big Whoopie. So had Microsoft shot the moon and made Windows 7 everything you think it should be their market share might grow from 90% to 95%[1] over the next five years for annual unit sales growth that is lost in the rise and fall of total unit sales as the economy shrinks and grows. Meanwhile if I'm right gross revenue will be dropping hard as revenue per unit drops much faster than any kilely increase in units could make up for.
So if they were to take your advice and find a way to produce your recommended change they are still boned. If they instead found a solution to the problem I pose as their likely downfall they would survive. Darned if I can think of one, but they still have billions to throw at the problem for now.
> Apple nearly died themselves, but Steve Jobs finally proved that he has a real brain in his head > and made the kind of obvious decision that people with a lot of money usually don't have sufficient > vision to be able to make; he abandoned his old architecture entirely, and jumped ship to UNIX.
Nope. You must be too young to remember. Steve was tossed from Apple as the wild west days of that tech growth spurt ended and the professional CEOs in suits moved in. So unable to take any of the Apple tech with him he pulled a Bender and "built new better tech, with blackjack and hookers". He founded Next, Pixar, etc. and did all manner of hoopy things until Apple was desperate enough to recall their Beloved Leader from the wilderness. Apple needed a new operating system, OS 9 was a dead end and everyone knew it. Well whadda ya know, Steve just happened to have NextStep all written, debugged and ready to get Apple branding and a new shiny theme. NextStep was 1980's tech (all who saw the NeXT Cube on the cover of Byte coveted the damned thing, but seriously, who had $20K to buy one? And people thought Macs were overpriced!) but yes it was a UNIX branded system, marrying UNIX goodness to Display Postscript. So Steve made himself part of a package deal with Next Computing, a little updating in the branding and it became Display PDF, core Apple tech like Quicktime was quickly bolted on, the BSD core was essentially unchanged and OS X was born.
> UNIX is the future.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. All I know is fifteen years ago any pundit worth printing in the finest ZD rags just knew Windows was the future. Predicting the future more than year or two out is a sucker's game. I know I'm rather attached to the UNIX way... Wish Linux was. (I'm looking at you GNOME/KDE and all the *Kit foolishness.)
But whether Linux/GNU/X are still the way things are done in twenty years no longer matter as much to me, so long as the software that eventually supercedes it is Open Source/Free Software.
[1] Assuming they could gain back the non cultist Mac users who only recently switched to be trendy and perhaps blunt or reverse loses to the penguin.
> If you think the Obama administration are Marxist, then you don't know WTF a Marxist is...
Didn't really want to go there today.... but what the hell.
Ok, lets start with President Obama. Go read his autobiographies[1] where he spells it out his preference for Marxist professors himself. Then lets look up his family tree and see what shakes out. Daddy[2] gets tossed from a Socialist government in Kenya for pushing too hard for redistribution of wealth. What is left of socialism on the whole left/right thing? Yea, thought so. So now lets look at Mom, who met Obama Sr. in a Russian language class. Guess Pravda reads better in the original Russian or something. If one is being overly charitable the best you could call Ms. Dunham is a leftie hippie chick who apparently never grew up and I'm not that charitable. So finally we move on to the maternal grandparents who did most of the raising of young Obama. Not much doubt that they were Communists which makes the president a second generation red diaper baby. And this is the very short version of the case for President Obama being a Communist, there is much more awaiting your curiosity and Google is your friend. Just don't believe everything ya read out there without cross checking as some of it gets really crazy.
Now lets look at the people in his administration since, as The One Himself said, we should look to his associates to understand how he will govern. Van Jones, the Green Jobs Czar will soon be leaving because his history has become public, among which is is self confession to being a Communist. That whole controversy will have blown up and be resolved by a resignation while the number of references in the MSM probably remains zero. Consider that and wonder just how much ELSE you believe to be true because you read the NYT, watch CNN, etc and consider yourself informed is bogus or even worse never even knew about.
But the Internet is here now and you can educate yourself. Just go down the list of high officials in this administration and stick their names into Google one at a time. See how many radicals, socialists, marxists, communists, progressives, fascists, Chicago gangsters, etc. crawl out of the woodwork practically anywhere you look in this administration. And the situation isn't much better across the way in Congress, we really need to find 535 cells in a Federal Prison for that whole hive of scum and villany.
[1] WTF does it say about a guy when he writes an autobiography before doing a god damned thing and then writes another one after doing not much else. Or do you believe Jack Cashill's theory that Bill Ayers actually wrote Dreams and thus Obama didn't actually admit to being a Marxist. Doubt that answer would actually make things any better politically though.
[2] While a dirtbag of a father, multiple wives at the same time, abandoning young Barry to head off to Harvard, etc. the young Obama still makes Obama Sr. the focus of his first autobiography indicating his Communist views probably had a large influence on the boy.
> The real problem with Microsoft is that its operating system division is dragging down the entire corporation.
You are in the right ballpark but haven't found the actual danger to MSFT. Ponder this:
All of the net profit at Microsoft comes from two products, Windows and Office. The profits from those two products are currently so obscene that Microsoft's problem is to hide that fact from everyone lest the anti-trust fever get started up again, especially with a Marxist leaning administration[1] in power. So they do Zunes, Xboxes, massive R&D divisions, whatever it takes to sink most of that cash flow out of sight because if they passed all of it out as dividends it would attract far too much attention.
Except the world is changing. As average selling price on PCs fall the OEM cost of Windows has to drop eventually. The actual amount any OEM pays is of course a closely guarded secret but we know how much revenue Microsoft reports from Windows and we know roughly how many PCs are sold so do the math. To get those huge profits means they are getting a nice chunk of each box sold and the percentage has been growing as selling price drops and OEM cost of Windows has crept upward. That can't continue, in fact the word is Win7 is less expensive than Vista. The number of new PCs isn't likely to increase much and neither is the percentage of machines sold with Windows as it is hard to go higher than the current effective 100%. Put it together and revenue from Windows only goes down from here.
So what about Office? Similar problem. To date they maintained the monopoly by lock in. If you are like most people you bought the newest Office not when you wanted the new features but when someone you do business with sent you a document you couldn't open. ODF is a direct threat to that model. Forget OpenOffice.org, they are a threat but not the biggest one. Then you get the same downward price pressure as overall prices fall. It was a lot easier to sell a full retail box of Office when the PC it was being installed on was upwards of $2000. Good luck getting many people to pay $399 for Office to install on a $299 netbook. And an office worker's desktop PC is already getting down into that range. Getting corporations to stay on the Office treadmill will soon require price cutting.
So if both of the products that bring in the cash are about to see revenue slashed, even if they maintain their current market share, it means one of two things must soon happen.
1. Money losing divisions become profitable. Xbox make a profit? How? Bing and the whole Internet Division makes money? Really?
2. Money losing divisions get closed down. Investors are sad.
So unless somebody has a different view of the numbers it looks like Microsoft jumped the shark with Vista[2] and it is all downhill from here. Note that in my look at the situation Linux, Open Source, etc. have almost zero role in what I project happening, just the consequences of Moore's Law and finally getting documents into the same standards track that things like images and html did long ago. If Linux does manage to erode Microsoft market share and/or provide additional pricing pressure, both of which are likely, the revenue problems are even more grim.
[1] This post isn't intended to be about politics, but when more than half the people in and around the White House either ARE Marxists or have close associations with Marxists, assuming the outbreak of attacks against a rapacious convicted monopolist at the slightest excuse pretty much has to be something a prudent investing world would take into any risk assessment. Bush's letting em go with a stern talking to ain't likely to be repeated.
[2] Don't take that as an O.B. slam at Vista, just saying that it was unlucky enough to be version in release as they hit peak revenue.
> As someone who uses Windows but has an open mind, I don't care who is at fault.
Fair enough on one level but totally unfair on the one that matters here. If the criticism of the Linux community is they concentrate their effort on things that mortals care little for this one doesn't work since the performance of Flash Player is entirely out of their hands.
Flash sucks everywhere, just to varying degrees depending on platform. Go watch the fun in the netbook space as the Intel Atom is being unfairly blamed by clueless pundits for the inability of netbooks with the newer 1280x720 and 1388x768 displays to play full screen Flash video (on Windows XP btw.). We nerds on slashdot know better of course, the problem is Adobe being mindless idiots who can't figure out how to properly use a scaled video surface.
I'd like some green group to calculate how many YouTube videos have been played and how many GigaWatt Hours of electricity have been wasted on software colorspace conversion and scaling because Adobe can't figure out how to use well documented and commonly available features on every video card made in the last fifteen years.
No, you are just a fool speaking of things he knows nothing of. You should go into politics.
I'll give 10-1 odds what you are actually wanting to replace is GNOME, KDE, Qt or Gtk and you haven't a fracking clue what part X actually plays in your desktop experience. You ain't the first newbie blathering on about replacing X and you won't be the last. Some have actually attempted to do it... I didn't follow closely but they never made it past talking and designing... In the end, once you actually study things and start planning you realize that whatever you wanted to do can be done on X and you get the device support for free instead of spending man decades reinventing a whole hell of a lot of wheels.
> Just like folks at Apple realized with their OS X, we in the Linux world, need an alternative to X.
See? Total lack of clue. What happened with OS X is with Steve's return Apple got NextStep as their long sought replacement for OS 9. OS X 10.0 is pretty much NextStep with an OS 9 emulator app tossed in. NextStep has always been Display Postscript based so no suprise there... and no rejection of X. Then they tossed in an rootless X server so it could run traditional *NIX apps.
> I heard that Google Chrome OS will get rid of it entirely.
Only is Google is a bunch of mindless idiots. Hint: Google isn't a bunch of mindless idiots, they understand what X provides. Remember, X provides mechanism, not policy. That means you can implement pretty much any UI atop it. Witness WINE implementing Win32 and in many cases having it run faster atop X than GDI.
> What is this "support" shit? It's running Linux, If you want OGG just apt-get install it.
Not exactly. You CAN do that if you like tearing through your battery in minutes though. The Nokia N series uses a DSP to do the heavy multimedia lifting and that part isn't open[1]. So supported formats work well, while a raw port of Mplayer eats battery life with software decoding on the ARM core. Later ports of mplayer on the Nokia devices use the DSP when it can. So unless Vorbis and Theora get supported on the DSP nobody will want to use them.
[1] Well it is 'open' in the sense that it isn't crypto locked or anything but it is closed in the sense no open tools exist to compile code for it.
It gets worse. They dropped support for the 770 too quick. Hacker Editions aren't even a good faith effort unless they either release the source to EVERYTHING or continue to provide support for the parts they keep closed. The 770 won't associate with a WiFi access point if an 802.11n unit is within range. Note I said in range, not just that it won't associate with an N access point and the N770 has very good WiFi range. The bug was closed anyway as WONTFIX.
Then we get the N8x0 series. They just put the N810 to pasture, new units are still popping up, and you can forget any support on it as all their resources have moved on to newer things. Now they are offering this new device while already announcing it is toast because they are changing out the entire GUI toolkit. Just how many times do they plan to rewrite everything? Who do they think they are, RedHat?:)
They want 3rd party developers but look at the hell they put them through. Apps have had to undergo major changes between every OS revision. There was apparently a big bar between OS 2007 (the last one that ran well on the N770, it is very RAM constrained at 64MB) and OS 2008. This means no PIM app was ever completed to a usable point for the N770 for example. Then OS 2008 was a big change but most 3rd paty apps do appear to have made the jump. But this new version is very different and has already been announced as an end of life branch of development. So of course thousands of apps will get ported, enough to compete with Palm and the iPhone! Step right up and drop $600 bux..... Even though no previous version had a thousand apps even in a 0.1 state.
Somebody needs to take a cluestick to Nokia's executives.
> They will eke out a miserable existence and remember earth fondly and try to be > live off of what they are doing for humanity.
No, if it were possible to eke out an existence there wouldn't be a problem getting people to volunteer, hell if I were single I'd go. But unless regular supply drops came you wouldn't be surviving long until you had a pretty good base built out.
But get a self sustaining population out there and I'm confident that they wouldn't just survive they would find a way to thrive. And who wouldn't want the opportunity to carve out a nice place on a new world?
I'm really getting tired of this notion of the Supreme Court trumping everything including basic reading comprehension. This isn't some bad Star Trek episode (The Omega Glory) where the 'sacred words' are only for a few, we are all supposed to read and be able to understand them.
Facts:
1. The original Articles of Confederation did include a perpetual union clause. Didn't stop the States from dropping out and reforming under the current Constitution.
2. The States are soverign, the USA is but a creation of them.
3. Nothing actually IN the constitution even implies states may not leave. Several attempts were made by the the very people who wrote the damned thing.
> In order to secede, you'd have to get a constitutional amendment passed.
No, that wouldn't stop em. The primary reason state are wanting out is because the Federal government has been wiping their arses on the Constitution for decades. If the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 9th and 10th Amendments are ALL dead letters it would be madness to believe a new one would be honored. No, there is only one way out if a State wishes to leave: Possession of one or more fusion bombs and a working delivery system. The current Federal Government is all about force, thus the credible threat of force is the only thing it would respect.
The government can make all the regs they want, the telcoes render then null and void. We already have plenty of rules against junk faxes, violating the do not call registery, outright scam calls, etc. Now what do you do when you get one? The ones you would want to make pay always either blank out the caller-id or put a totally bogus (I get a lot of 1-555-* myself) number into the field. So that means the telco would have to give you the identity of the caller. Obviously THEY know who it is, they have the billing records. But you would need a court order to pry that information from them. I have even tried calling them and saying the last call into my line was illegal, and if they couldn't give me the info could they report it to the FTC, law enforcement, anybody? on my behalf. Nope, customer records are private without a court order and the phone company isn't interested in policing customers who pay them a hell of a lot more then you do.
So good luck getting the spammers/scammers to actually pay any fines until they get notorious enough for the FTC to run a sting against one.
Slashdot Mirror
> If you artificially prop up prices for the benefit of a few, then competition and innovation
> that would benefit the broader consumer market can suffer.
No, the lessons are bigger than that.
If you regulate prices you set the system at that moment into stone, the current winners and losers get fixed into law. Innovation becomes virtually illegal. It isn't just consumers who lose, everyone except the government blessed winners lose. And of course the government itself which gains power and can be assured the support of those who depend upon it for monopoly rents.
In short, government price fixing, regulation and government in general are BAD. Some government is a necessary evil at this point in our philosophical development but we must realize that it is always evil and thus to me kept carefully chained lest it destroy us. Worse than fire or even fissile material.
> consider Heinlein's social and political commentary in Starship Troopers
Or not. Enumerating a list of Sci-Fi authors and omitting RAH says everything ya need to know. The goal will be political indoctrination via science fiction and everything written by RAH will be right out, Starship Troopers doubly so. Amazed Card is mentioned though, he is about as counter revolutionary but a few of his works could be cherry picked but there would still be the danger a young skull full of mush might seek out some of his politically incorrect work after being introduced to Card's writing. Tolkien is safe enough, after all hippies have for decades been able to ignore the parts they don't like and read LOTR simply as a screed against the modern world.
But just to make sure everyone understands it will be politicized the last sentence of the /. summary is the tell:
"Possible areas of interest will be topics of the environment, energy conservation, war, social issues, and others."
> "It's the right thing to do."
If that is the best argument ya got it won't work in the real world. But there is a better one. A site designed to be accessable tends to be a good website, period.
Some of the reason is that accesssable sites must avoid the temptation to take the easy fix of throwing anything complicated into a flash applet or other inaccessable crap. But an equally important part is the opposite argument of one I make in another post about .aspx being the seal of crap. It isn't because the Microsoft stuff can't be made to work with enough effort, it is that only clueless people tend to pick it in the first place and clueless people will do other clueless things. Conversely, people cluefull enough to build a properly accessable site will also tend to make a generally well designed site. And host it on a better and less costly platform like a LAMP server.
I thought about making this post without even bothering to go look, but yup the site displays the 'seal of quality' up in the url bar. As soon as you see that .aspx at the end you know you are probably in for a world of pain at at site. You know things will probably suck from end to end. Performance issues, design issues, usability issues, the whole bit.
No, using Microsoft products isn't always the reason but it is always a symptom of the root problem. It is as close to a "This site designed by idiots!" logo as we are ever likely to see. Only idiots (or companies beholden to Microsoft's goodwill) pick Microsoft's inferior in every way stuff to roll out a high volume, high visibility site on. Poor design isn't caused by hosting on a Microsoft server but it is another symptom of designed by idiots.
> "Harsh copy protection" does nothing but annoy legitimate users. The pirates can easily remove it.
Of course the hard core pirates would remove it. Wouldn't matter. That step is only intended to stop casual duplication of the media. OEM preloading has already stopped 90% of owners from ever getting a clean install disc, this would stop another few percent. Just an incremental step. A windows install disc is something a legit user might need a dozen times in the life of a version of Windows so the reliability hit from the copy protection won't harm a legit user. The original media isn't likely to go defective, unlike a game that usually needs to be inserted every time you run it.
> The rest of that sentence shows a total lack of understanding of the realities of large-scale software
> development and deployment. If Microsoft put out a deliberate logic bomb onto tens of millions of machines,
> it is *virtually guaranteed* that some of those machines would be legitimately licensed copies that were
> bought and paid for by their users (or a corporation).
Ah, but follow the logic I laid out. The copy protection stops the supply of casual copied media forcing pirates to the 'bay... or whatever replaces it now that it is going tango uniform. Microsoft itself just supplies a good percentage of the high quality pirate copies through black ops. Good stuff, clean cracks, sure to get a good reputation and be widely downloaded. Or they just download the cracked copies others release. Then identify the changed bits and build a database of changes in files that they can ensure NEVER appear in official pressed copies or masters given to OEMs. Then release updates that identify one of them and go FOOM! Release new game titles[1] that during installation and/or runtime identify one or more known bootlegs and release a time delayed kaboom so that the source of the bomb isn't easilly identifiable. Put keygens out that make good keys but with 100% identifable flags and after a suitable delay Kaboom!
Make sure every bomb goes off in a way that it is obvious that it detected a pirate copy so as not to just increase the reputation of Windows as unstable. By going at it this way the false positive rate would be as close to zero as possible, and even then it would be dealers selling bootlegs, rogue IT folk installing booteg copies, often just to get around the scarcity of official media.
Copy protection on a game fails and annoys the legal user because the use pattern is very different from an OS. Excepting games with extensive online content (and they aren't pirated often) the vendor gets few opportunities to detect piracy after the sale. An pirated OS can be detected every time a new executable is installed, at every errata update, etc. It would be fairly easy to scare most people away from a bootleg copy. Microsoft COULD reduce piracy to a single digit problem but they would be fools to do it. Because if they make the price of piracy high enough it won't force many people to buy a copy, instead they will install something else and that idea is the most horrible thing they can imagine.
[1] Especially when done in cahoots with third parties. Whether they know or not, how many games include updated .dll files or new DirectX versions, etc.
The problem is microsoft has a love/hate relationship with the pirates. They have an absolute need for piracy to be possible but not to become attractive enough (in the first world) to become popular enough to eat into their profits overmuch.
Think about it, Microsoft could eliminate 99% of piracy overnight by using harsh copy protection combined with mandatory Genuine Advantage plus a couple of targeted logic bombs launched against a few of the more flagrant pirate copies. Problem is most pirates these days either built their PC from scratch (else they would have been force fed a license) or bought a PC from a pirate. The DIY crowd is too influential to piss off and what they are doing already stops the bulk of the chopshop pirates in the developed world. If they make pirate windows too unstable in the third world where it is popular they simply can't pay so would be driven to look for alternatives.... and would find them.
So this move is easily understandable, it gives the pirates a nudge but won't overly annoy any of the major groups who pirate. The DIY type who pirates Windows because those guys pirate everything just for fun will have little trouble finding cracked copies of whatever they have been using. At all appearances nobody in the secondary markets updates anything on their damned machines already, considering how much crap spews out.
> > that will be larger than the total deficits of Bush's eight years.
> Yeah, actually including two wars in your budget will do that.
Your reasoning and facts are lacking.
1. Whether the war funding is on or off budget doesn't change the deficit numbers. It just gets around various budget caps without needing super majorities and/or increasing the baseline defense budget. Baseline budgeting is the biggest scam since Social Security, btw.
2. Total defense spending (budgeted + war supplementals) as a percentage of GDP has been below historical levels throughout the GWOT. This is one of the reasons we have had problems on the battlefield, Bush & Rummey tried to fight two wars at the same time on the cheap. There were rational reasons why they believed that was sound policy politically and fiscally, they even had a passable theory to make it work from a military pov. But it didn't work and they either couldn't admit it or didn't think Congress would actually vote for the surge until the '06 debacle and McCain basically taking the ball and running it.
3. You are almost certainly being as intellectually dishonest as most of your team. You don't object to the money, you object to the idea. Which is of course a perfectly fine thing, just be honest about it. You guys object to the GWOT on principle and would object if the cost were $0. Those who believe one or both theaters of operation were/are vital to national security likewise aren't likely to be moved by the cost unless it itself becomes a threat to the survival of the nation.
> " Like hell they will. You think all those C-levels, VPs and billionaire executives will want to move?
And I'm sure the locals said the same thing about Boeing as they happily taxed the crap out of them to fund their left coast utopia. Of course they did move their headquarters out of the state. And are building a big non-union plant down south.
Microsoft doesn't have to just pick up it's ball and leave. Just keep building out facilities in multiple States and countries like they have been doing and play each of them against the other for the most favorable tax and regulatory treatement. If Washington gets too aggressive on this issue threaten to move the official headquarters. There ARE a lot of nice places just in the US and many are actually pretty nice to live in. The current location wasn't even the first one ya know.
Even better leverage, especially in this crappy economy, is to just threaten to push all new hiring to more favorable business environments. I.e. threaten the politicians with a terrible press release about a new thousand headcount shop that won't be opening in the state because of the bad business climate. And if they think it is a bluff, do it and do it over until they either get a clue or the center of mass has actually moved to a better place and then really relocate the HQ.
For a company like Microsoft where they are doesn't really matter much so long as it is the sort of place key personnel wouldn't be demoralized living in. They have no ties to a natural resource, no major transportation needs, etc.
Requires court order. Who has a problem with that? With a court order you can tap phones, plant bugs, install keystroke loggers, just about anything. Seems kinda daft to be maming a fuss about putting a GPS on somebody's car, hell just use the court order to get the cell company to give a feed from their phone.
> First, who spends the time digging through the Congressional Record for this kind of stuff.
Yea, used to be we peons just took it like men... in the butt. What is up with this new fangled notion of people actually READING bills. Hell, next thing ya know Congresscritters might be forced to read the stuff they pass. Horror!
> Congress considers thousands of ideas every year, from the brilliant (health care reform)
> to the idiotic (Bridges to Nowhere). Most are DOA.
So? Now we are crowdsourcing the search for bad bills and cutting em off at the knees before they have a chance to make it out of committee. This is bad how? We need to make stupidity on the part of Congresscritters painful at the ballot box. Revealing their bad ideas is a good start, ya can't vote against a congressman's stupid ideas if you never hear about em.
> What's the harm in trying out some different ideas?
You don't have to hit yourself in the head with a hammer to understand it is a bad idea. Being forced to report your every movement to the government is such a terrible idea we don't actually need to try it. It is a BAD IDEA. (See Animaniacs if you are unclear on the whole GOOD IDEA, BAD IDEA thing.) To propose it, not as the universal surveillance program it actually is, but as a mere road tax when the gas tax or a simple odometer tax at registration renewal time would achieve the stated goal with far less invasion of privacy reveals the wickedness of the author.
The argument this clown is using is exactly WHY so many distrust science. Because the scientists are so obviously political these days. Now this wouldn't be bad if they were political scientists (i.e. the fuzzy social sciences) but it has no place in physics or chemistry.
You can't have it both way folks, which view of a scientist do you want the masses to have?
1. The scientist as the almost monastic searcher for facts, discovering new wonders by relentlessly collecting facts in the field, doing careful experiments in labs full of shiny equipment, publishing carefully reasoned papers which are mercilessly peer reviewed and basically being devoted to following the facts wherever they lead. But in the end, scientists tell us how the universe works and what is possible. Engineers use that knowledge to build things after the marketing dept identifies a customer for it and then the politicians decide how to regulate and tax it.
2. Philosopher Kings. Politicians with PhDs. Victims of several bad ideas, namely that a) expertise in one narrow area implies a general wisdom; b) that rule by a technocratic elite is 'better' than rule by the consent of the governed; c) that just because science says something is possible means we must do it, because morals aren't scientific after all.
The last century has shown a marked shift in the public's idea of the word 'scientist' from the first to the second. This explains their change in attitude. In other words if Hansen and his ilk stopped the politicking and went back to their lab and produced some results that didn't get shredded people might start readjusting their views again. Even better would be if the other so called 'real scientists' policed their own a little, forcing the ones who want to take up a new career in politics to LEAVE science first. Because it should now be clear that attempts to lend the good name of science to a political argument doesn't actually work, that instead the bad name of politics attached to science.
And here is another good example of the problem. Carl Sagan's _Cosmos_. It is a wonderful introduction to science in many ways yet terribly flawed by Bad Idea A from above in that Sagan mistakenly believed himself an expert in Foreign Relations apparently for no other reason than he was a smart fellow. But the series is full of the most naive useful idiot twaddle of the sort that, with the Cold War ended, few would dispute. When the grandkids are older I plan on showing them the series and use it as an example of the problem of scientists trying to become political leaders without first investing the effort to actually become an expert.
> Because we all have different ideas of what the perfect word processor will be, this is one step closer to a happy software world.
Exactly. Most other data types standardized on one or a handful of formats long ago, it was the Microsoft monopoly that distorted things with formatted text and spreadsheets. Think about it, far more complex data is encoded in standardized formats that a multitude of programs all process and exchange data through. Look at sound, still images, vector graphics, even video! All interoperable. Meanwhile Word docs aren't even certain to be compatible between two different installs of the same version of Word. Buy a new printer and connect it to the same install and previous docs will often need to be reformatted. Good riddence to that!
Oh, and IBM didn't buy Sun; Oracle bought the corpse to loot it.
> I think it is a way for Grossman to look at this stuff from his point of view.
Exactly. He obviously hated Narnia, just from reading the review, and probably disliked Potter and instead of just writing a snarky review he set out to 'deconstruct' them. And face it, the whole field of literary criticism is esssentially the process of 'deconstructing' everything valuable in the corpus of Western Civilization and showing how corrupt and wicked it all is. Pointy headed academics do it in the form of nasty yet inscrutable papers no sane person would read, this guy does it in the novel format instead so that more people will be impacted.
And at least it appears he understands WHY both of his targets were popular by how he attacks them so he isn't a fool, just playing for the dark side's team.
> Under no variation of our language would forming a nationwide health care
> organization be neither "general Welfare" nor "Commerce among the several states."
Another user already took your argument apart pretty good, but there is a much simpler argument that I'd bet money neither you or any other poster will even attempt to rebut.
Consider the time of the founding of our Republic and the writing of the new Constitution. They were careful to enumerate each and every power they wanted the Federal government to possess. After presenting their work to the nation they were assailed for giving the Federal government too much power, many detractors even using the same commerce and general welfare clauses cited in modern times. The authors (especially Publius's three incarnations) went into great detail explaining how they had done no such thing, that they had defined a carefully limited role for the new government and that no other powers assumed by it would be legitimate and after all, no law could prevent a tyranny from usurping power. Their arguments were found wanting and a Bill of Rights was added to make explicit what the authors believed was the inherent limits on the growth of the Federal government, especially Amendments 9 and 10.
So Question #1. Do you (you as either you or any other progressive brave enough to enter the fray) find a flaw with the brief history I just outlined?
Assuming the answer to #1 is no, we are lead to Question #2. What the heck was the reasoning behind all the fuss with carefully debating (for months) and codifying a detailed enumerated list of powers and then adding two amendments to make doubly certain the intent of the founders to limit the powers of the nation government? The current progressive 'interpretation' of the general welfare and commerce clauses are broad enough to be blank checks, so if that was really the intent why bother with anything else? The whole damned thing could have been shortened a lot if they just left the bits about the organization of the three branches and then just gave Congress unlimited power to secure the general welfare any way they saw fit. So explain why neither common sense nor English literacy are the right way to read the constitution.
To bring this more on topic, your argument would be roughly equal to this. A detailed spec is created for a custom software job, it begins by explaining the intended business goal the new system must meet and then it soecifies in broad outlines the requirements and a few details, say a requirement for POSIX and some realtime response requirements. Then after the consultants have agreed and signed the contracts, etc. they eventually deliver some .NET horror that meets none of the requirements but the consultants argue they should be paid because it should sorta deliver the intended goals specified... too bad it runs too slow to actually be put into service and the inability to interface it to your other systems (.NET), you should have declared those interactions. But of course the POSIX requirement was expected to make interoperability assumed. Point being you can't just read the descriptive text and ignore the pesky implementation details.
> Retailers just need to know that they should stock an assortment of cables close to
> their boxes and their sales staff trained to sell the right cables.
And that is probably the reason for this change. Lower the price on the console in theory but let the retailers more than make it up on the cable which has insane margins anyway. Notice that zero retailers of game console or any mass consumer electronics sell inexpensive HDMI cables, even Walmart rapes yer bum pretty hard, they get $19.99 for one around here.
> Microsoft's biggest problem is that they have never, never had a long term road map...
Nope, you are thinking like a geek. Microsoft is a business, follow the money like I did. It doesn't really matter if they have a roadmap, neither does it matter if their products suck or not. Think about it. If Microsoft's stuff were insanely great would they sell any more of it? The Apple cultists are Steve's, nothing is likely to make more than a percentage or two difference there. Linux may or may not have broken the 1% barrier in the last year. Big Whoopie. So had Microsoft shot the moon and made Windows 7 everything you think it should be their market share might grow from 90% to 95%[1] over the next five years for annual unit sales growth that is lost in the rise and fall of total unit sales as the economy shrinks and grows. Meanwhile if I'm right gross revenue will be dropping hard as revenue per unit drops much faster than any kilely increase in units could make up for.
So if they were to take your advice and find a way to produce your recommended change they are still boned. If they instead found a solution to the problem I pose as their likely downfall they would survive. Darned if I can think of one, but they still have billions to throw at the problem for now.
> Apple nearly died themselves, but Steve Jobs finally proved that he has a real brain in his head
> and made the kind of obvious decision that people with a lot of money usually don't have sufficient
> vision to be able to make; he abandoned his old architecture entirely, and jumped ship to UNIX.
Nope. You must be too young to remember. Steve was tossed from Apple as the wild west days of that tech growth spurt ended and the professional CEOs in suits moved in. So unable to take any of the Apple tech with him he pulled a Bender and "built new better tech, with blackjack and hookers". He founded Next, Pixar, etc. and did all manner of hoopy things until Apple was desperate enough to recall their Beloved Leader from the wilderness. Apple needed a new operating system, OS 9 was a dead end and everyone knew it. Well whadda ya know, Steve just happened to have NextStep all written, debugged and ready to get Apple branding and a new shiny theme. NextStep was 1980's tech (all who saw the NeXT Cube on the cover of Byte coveted the damned thing, but seriously, who had $20K to buy one? And people thought Macs were overpriced!) but yes it was a UNIX branded system, marrying UNIX goodness to Display Postscript. So Steve made himself part of a package deal with Next Computing, a little updating in the branding and it became Display PDF, core Apple tech like Quicktime was quickly bolted on, the BSD core was essentially unchanged and OS X was born.
> UNIX is the future.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. All I know is fifteen years ago any pundit worth printing in the finest ZD rags just knew Windows was the future. Predicting the future more than year or two out is a sucker's game. I know I'm rather attached to the UNIX way... Wish Linux was. (I'm looking at you GNOME/KDE and all the *Kit foolishness.)
But whether Linux/GNU/X are still the way things are done in twenty years no longer matter as much to me, so long as the software that eventually supercedes it is Open Source/Free Software.
[1] Assuming they could gain back the non cultist Mac users who only recently switched to be trendy and perhaps blunt or reverse loses to the penguin.
> If you think the Obama administration are Marxist, then you don't know WTF a Marxist is...
Didn't really want to go there today.... but what the hell.
Ok, lets start with President Obama. Go read his autobiographies[1] where he spells it out his preference for Marxist professors himself. Then lets look up his family tree and see what shakes out. Daddy[2] gets tossed from a Socialist government in Kenya for pushing too hard for redistribution of wealth. What is left of socialism on the whole left/right thing? Yea, thought so. So now lets look at Mom, who met Obama Sr. in a Russian language class. Guess Pravda reads better in the original Russian or something. If one is being overly charitable the best you could call Ms. Dunham is a leftie hippie chick who apparently never grew up and I'm not that charitable. So finally we move on to the maternal grandparents who did most of the raising of young Obama. Not much doubt that they were Communists which makes the president a second generation red diaper baby. And this is the very short version of the case for President Obama being a Communist, there is much more awaiting your curiosity and Google is your friend. Just don't believe everything ya read out there without cross checking as some of it gets really crazy.
Now lets look at the people in his administration since, as The One Himself said, we should look to his associates to understand how he will govern. Van Jones, the Green Jobs Czar will soon be leaving because his history has become public, among which is is self confession to being a Communist. That whole controversy will have blown up and be resolved by a resignation while the number of references in the MSM probably remains zero. Consider that and wonder just how much ELSE you believe to be true because you read the NYT, watch CNN, etc and consider yourself informed is bogus or even worse never even knew about.
But the Internet is here now and you can educate yourself. Just go down the list of high officials in this administration and stick their names into Google one at a time. See how many radicals, socialists, marxists, communists, progressives, fascists, Chicago gangsters, etc. crawl out of the woodwork practically anywhere you look in this administration. And the situation isn't much better across the way in Congress, we really need to find 535 cells in a Federal Prison for that whole hive of scum and villany.
[1] WTF does it say about a guy when he writes an autobiography before doing a god damned thing and then writes another one after doing not much else. Or do you believe Jack Cashill's theory that Bill Ayers actually wrote Dreams and thus Obama didn't actually admit to being a Marxist. Doubt that answer would actually make things any better politically though.
[2] While a dirtbag of a father, multiple wives at the same time, abandoning young Barry to head off to Harvard, etc. the young Obama still makes Obama Sr. the focus of his first autobiography indicating his Communist views probably had a large influence on the boy.
> The real problem with Microsoft is that its operating system division is dragging down the entire corporation.
You are in the right ballpark but haven't found the actual danger to MSFT. Ponder this:
All of the net profit at Microsoft comes from two products, Windows and Office. The profits from those two products are currently so obscene that Microsoft's problem is to hide that fact from everyone lest the anti-trust fever get started up again, especially with a Marxist leaning administration[1] in power. So they do Zunes, Xboxes, massive R&D divisions, whatever it takes to sink most of that cash flow out of sight because if they passed all of it out as dividends it would attract far too much attention.
Except the world is changing. As average selling price on PCs fall the OEM cost of Windows has to drop eventually. The actual amount any OEM pays is of course a closely guarded secret but we know how much revenue Microsoft reports from Windows and we know roughly how many PCs are sold so do the math. To get those huge profits means they are getting a nice chunk of each box sold and the percentage has been growing as selling price drops and OEM cost of Windows has crept upward. That can't continue, in fact the word is Win7 is less expensive than Vista. The number of new PCs isn't likely to increase much and neither is the percentage of machines sold with Windows as it is hard to go higher than the current effective 100%. Put it together and revenue from Windows only goes down from here.
So what about Office? Similar problem. To date they maintained the monopoly by lock in. If you are like most people you bought the newest Office not when you wanted the new features but when someone you do business with sent you a document you couldn't open. ODF is a direct threat to that model. Forget OpenOffice.org, they are a threat but not the biggest one. Then you get the same downward price pressure as overall prices fall. It was a lot easier to sell a full retail box of Office when the PC it was being installed on was upwards of $2000. Good luck getting many people to pay $399 for Office to install on a $299 netbook. And an office worker's desktop PC is already getting down into that range. Getting corporations to stay on the Office treadmill will soon require price cutting.
So if both of the products that bring in the cash are about to see revenue slashed, even if they maintain their current market share, it means one of two things must soon happen.
1. Money losing divisions become profitable. Xbox make a profit? How? Bing and the whole Internet Division makes money? Really?
2. Money losing divisions get closed down. Investors are sad.
So unless somebody has a different view of the numbers it looks like Microsoft jumped the shark with Vista[2] and it is all downhill from here. Note that in my look at the situation Linux, Open Source, etc. have almost zero role in what I project happening, just the consequences of Moore's Law and finally getting documents into the same standards track that things like images and html did long ago. If Linux does manage to erode Microsoft market share and/or provide additional pricing pressure, both of which are likely, the revenue problems are even more grim.
[1] This post isn't intended to be about politics, but when more than half the people in and around the White House either ARE Marxists or have close associations with Marxists, assuming the outbreak of attacks against a rapacious convicted monopolist at the slightest excuse pretty much has to be something a prudent investing world would take into any risk assessment. Bush's letting em go with a stern talking to ain't likely to be repeated.
[2] Don't take that as an O.B. slam at Vista, just saying that it was unlucky enough to be version in release as they hit peak revenue.
> As someone who uses Windows but has an open mind, I don't care who is at fault.
Fair enough on one level but totally unfair on the one that matters here. If the criticism of the Linux community is they concentrate their effort on things that mortals care little for this one doesn't work since the performance of Flash Player is entirely out of their hands.
Flash sucks everywhere, just to varying degrees depending on platform. Go watch the fun in the netbook space as the Intel Atom is being unfairly blamed by clueless pundits for the inability of netbooks with the newer 1280x720 and 1388x768 displays to play full screen Flash video (on Windows XP btw.). We nerds on slashdot know better of course, the problem is Adobe being mindless idiots who can't figure out how to properly use a scaled video surface.
I'd like some green group to calculate how many YouTube videos have been played and how many GigaWatt Hours of electricity have been wasted on software colorspace conversion and scaling because Adobe can't figure out how to use well documented and commonly available features on every video card made in the last fifteen years.
> I would like to hear from anyone who disagrees.
No, you are just a fool speaking of things he knows nothing of. You should go into politics.
I'll give 10-1 odds what you are actually wanting to replace is GNOME, KDE, Qt or Gtk and you haven't a fracking clue what part X actually plays in your desktop experience. You ain't the first newbie blathering on about replacing X and you won't be the last. Some have actually attempted to do it... I didn't follow closely but they never made it past talking and designing... In the end, once you actually study things and start planning you realize that whatever you wanted to do can be done on X and you get the device support for free instead of spending man decades reinventing a whole hell of a lot of wheels.
> Just like folks at Apple realized with their OS X, we in the Linux world, need an alternative to X.
See? Total lack of clue. What happened with OS X is with Steve's return Apple got NextStep as their long sought replacement for OS 9. OS X 10.0 is pretty much NextStep with an OS 9 emulator app tossed in. NextStep has always been Display Postscript based so no suprise there... and no rejection of X. Then they tossed in an rootless X server so it could run traditional *NIX apps.
> I heard that Google Chrome OS will get rid of it entirely.
Only is Google is a bunch of mindless idiots. Hint: Google isn't a bunch of mindless idiots, they understand what X provides. Remember, X provides mechanism, not policy. That means you can implement pretty much any UI atop it. Witness WINE implementing Win32 and in many cases having it run faster atop X than GDI.
> What is this "support" shit? It's running Linux, If you want OGG just apt-get install it.
Not exactly. You CAN do that if you like tearing through your battery in minutes though. The Nokia N series uses a DSP to do the heavy multimedia lifting and that part isn't open[1]. So supported formats work well, while a raw port of Mplayer eats battery life with software decoding on the ARM core. Later ports of mplayer on the Nokia devices use the DSP when it can. So unless Vorbis and Theora get supported on the DSP nobody will want to use them.
[1] Well it is 'open' in the sense that it isn't crypto locked or anything but it is closed in the sense no open tools exist to compile code for it.
It gets worse. They dropped support for the 770 too quick. Hacker Editions aren't even a good faith effort unless they either release the source to EVERYTHING or continue to provide support for the parts they keep closed. The 770 won't associate with a WiFi access point if an 802.11n unit is within range. Note I said in range, not just that it won't associate with an N access point and the N770 has very good WiFi range. The bug was closed anyway as WONTFIX.
Then we get the N8x0 series. They just put the N810 to pasture, new units are still popping up, and you can forget any support on it as all their resources have moved on to newer things. Now they are offering this new device while already announcing it is toast because they are changing out the entire GUI toolkit. Just how many times do they plan to rewrite everything? Who do they think they are, RedHat? :)
They want 3rd party developers but look at the hell they put them through. Apps have had to undergo major changes between every OS revision. There was apparently a big bar between OS 2007 (the last one that ran well on the N770, it is very RAM constrained at 64MB) and OS 2008. This means no PIM app was ever completed to a usable point for the N770 for example. Then OS 2008 was a big change but most 3rd paty apps do appear to have made the jump. But this new version is very different and has already been announced as an end of life branch of development. So of course thousands of apps will get ported, enough to compete with Palm and the iPhone! Step right up and drop $600 bux..... Even though no previous version had a thousand apps even in a 0.1 state.
Somebody needs to take a cluestick to Nokia's executives.
> They will eke out a miserable existence and remember earth fondly and try to be
> live off of what they are doing for humanity.
No, if it were possible to eke out an existence there wouldn't be a problem getting people to volunteer, hell if I were single I'd go. But unless regular supply drops came you wouldn't be surviving long until you had a pretty good base built out.
But get a self sustaining population out there and I'm confident that they wouldn't just survive they would find a way to thrive. And who wouldn't want the opportunity to carve out a nice place on a new world?
> The Supreme Court's decision... [blah blah]
I'm really getting tired of this notion of the Supreme Court trumping everything including basic reading comprehension. This isn't some bad Star Trek episode (The Omega Glory) where the 'sacred words' are only for a few, we are all supposed to read and be able to understand them.
Facts:
1. The original Articles of Confederation did include a perpetual union clause. Didn't stop the States from dropping out and reforming under the current Constitution.
2. The States are soverign, the USA is but a creation of them.
3. Nothing actually IN the constitution even implies states may not leave. Several attempts were made by the the very people who wrote the damned thing.
> In order to secede, you'd have to get a constitutional amendment passed.
No, that wouldn't stop em. The primary reason state are wanting out is because the Federal government has been wiping their arses on the Constitution for decades. If the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 9th and 10th Amendments are ALL dead letters it would be madness to believe a new one would be honored. No, there is only one way out if a State wishes to leave: Possession of one or more fusion bombs and a working delivery system. The current Federal Government is all about force, thus the credible threat of force is the only thing it would respect.
The government can make all the regs they want, the telcoes render then null and void. We already have plenty of rules against junk faxes, violating the do not call registery, outright scam calls, etc. Now what do you do when you get one? The ones you would want to make pay always either blank out the caller-id or put a totally bogus (I get a lot of 1-555-* myself) number into the field. So that means the telco would have to give you the identity of the caller. Obviously THEY know who it is, they have the billing records. But you would need a court order to pry that information from them. I have even tried calling them and saying the last call into my line was illegal, and if they couldn't give me the info could they report it to the FTC, law enforcement, anybody? on my behalf. Nope, customer records are private without a court order and the phone company isn't interested in policing customers who pay them a hell of a lot more then you do.
So good luck getting the spammers/scammers to actually pay any fines until they get notorious enough for the FTC to run a sting against one.