You describe the problem really well, but your idea of remedies is just plain wrong.
Good example: NT IS NOT Windows. It is DEC VMS. At some point Bill Gates got Dave Cuttler and another 20-50 engineers from DEC. Does it mean that he would be entitled to all patents related to the OS (if they would exist) ???
Current system is not exactly right, but your proposal would increase the expenses for the companies tenfold. Really, why spend money on lawyers and defend yourself when you can hire the patentholder from the company that is suing you ??? It looks like the crazy mix of bribery and prostitution though, and believe me, not every inventor will have enough integrity to repel the temptations of easy money.
You also should not forget that the existence of many companies (even the big ones) is related to the IP they have.
As for Rambus & other ones like that, I'd put a cap on royalties for these "IP shacks" and reduce the time span of their patents.
I don't want to be rude, but what you're offering does not make any sense. Under your system Goldtouch could not protect its design from stealing by the Necrosoft.
The point here is that many small companies don't have enough muscle to market their production. They do either just a design or design and manufacture. Some other companies don't design their production themselves; they are perfectly happy to license a design and manufacture/sell it.
You'd be surprised to learn hom much stuff in the computer industry is an OEM. For example, go to Fry's and compare some mice models from A4Tech and Micro Innovations. They are identical.
So, there is no perfect system that will protect the inventor and won't stiffle innovation at all simultaneously. But the existing one is IMHO biased in favor of the inventor too much, and this bias need to be lessened, but not abolished completely. Otherwise the big guys will be able to copy everything they like, and every street will be called Microsoft Way:-(
All this can be designed out, if you're willing to put in the effort. The final generation of RX-7s ended up being pretty reliable, and seriously badassed.
Actually, Gen-3 RX-7 was badassed, but had a crappy quality. I remember a guy who had so many problems with the car that he sued Mazda under the lemon law and won. His site had scores of other owners who had problems too. The previous writer was right; rotary engine does not live much with turbo.
As for the next generation, it will be normally aspirated, and it will be good! It will be a hard choice for me between the RX-8 and the new Z (I have 300zx now).
It depends, really. And I can't vote for one way or another.
Let's take an example in biotech or medicine industry. Patents are everything there. It is an ability to reap reward for a huge investment in research. And what is that reward? just an ability to fund the further research! The end of a patent on some prescription drug means that the companies who has not invested a dime (and time) in research can produce the same formula drug and sell it as generic for much less. If some idiot will claim that they should be able to clone it right away because it's a capitalism, I'd say that such approach will destroy every long term research. Another bad side - do you remember how Necro$oft allegedly hijacked the design of the ergonomic mouse from Goldtouch (http://www.domis.com/sample/DOMIS/update/1999/01j an/0199ipppis.htm) ???
On the other hand, there is an issue of Rambus that does not invest anything in the reserch and manufacturing and is pretty much an IP holding shack. I'd say that even better analogy would be with the robber who "owns" a forest a'la Robin Hood and collects his tax from everyone. Most of the software patents fit the same category (Remember http://www.thestandard.net/article/display/0,1151, 3374,00.html ???).
To finalize, I'd have the following proposals: 1) Put a cap on the licensing fees; 2) Prevent companies from exclusive licensing; 3) Separate real researchers from racketeers;-) 4) And, certainly, not grant patents that are too broad. It means that the US Patent Office should spend more of my taxes on hiring people who understand technology;-)
Try thinking not only about the compiler. Compiler itself is just a small part. The big one is the library that is tied to Windows very much. It's tied so much that they haven't even produced VB for Mac (IIRC). This kills the idea of VB->JVM applets outright and makes necessary the complete rewrite of the VB runtime library from Windows-based to Java runtime library-based, that is pretty much unfeasible.
Another interesting point will be the quality. I don't think many people will argue with the fact that C/C++/Java crowd is more competent and professional on average than VB crowd. Even though there are a lot of good VB programmers, it's usually used by the lame beginners who want to become programmers:-( As the result, they will produce the code that is still not very good, so that VB will still be used for non-critical desktop-only projects.
1) A couple of years ago I've seen a very interesting quote: "The biggest choice for companies in the next 5 years will be the choice of the component model". As of now, about 2/3 of the Fortune 1000 companies have chosen CORBA. SUN's decision to pretty much abandon their own model (Remote Invocation) for CORBA plays to the strength of this argument. COM+ will be one of the strings attached with the new language; Necro$oft will try to increase the chances of using their distributed architecture.
2) Java phenomenon has spawned a huge amount of development tools from both established players like Borland, IBM & Symantec and start-ups. I'd say that there is more investment in new cross-platform Java tools than in new Windows-only tools. IMHO, the success of Microsoft environments is closely linked to the excellent development tools tied to the platform. Microsoft wants to stop the erosion and regain the developer's hearts;-)
Clinton is a scum. Pure and simple. He should be either tried as a war criminal or shot like a dog.
There were many posts here about the economics of war. It was actually Lenin who told many years ago that the politics is a concentrated expression of the economics.
But not many people gave a detailed explanation of what economics were used this time.
1) Rob Peter to pay Paul. Do you remember the hurricane in the Central America, when Clinton sent the emergency food relief by buying 10,000 pigs from farmers in Iowa and giving it to the hungry ? It was a worthy cause, and it was not expensive for the taxpayers. On the other hand, whom will these farmers vote now? I'd guess, Gore.
The same thing happened here, but on the much higher and much more cynical scale. Not everyone welcomed the end of Cold War. Besides the military establishment whose value was greatly diminished, the defence contractors felt the heat. As you know, it's not easy thing to reprofile the companies from military production towards the peaceful one. Soviet Union ruined a lot of industry trying to do the conversion in the beginning of 90-s. And they did not even have a capitalism at that time, i.e., there was a tremendous need in the goods they could have produced in these ex-military factories; here in the US all the niches of the market are already taken, so that whatever marketing direction defence contractors might take, they will be fighting established players in that area of the market.
On the other hand, the ammo and equipment used in battle is usually replenished and replaced by the government. And this equipment produced for the internal use is the most technically advanced, with the highest price tags and profit margins unlike the obsolete equipment sold to the third world countries who use it against their neighbours. And this kind of equipment is not likely to be outsourced to the other countries; so, spending these money on destroying Yugoslavia means reinvesting the significant portion of it into the American economy. Plus, Clinton reaps the great political benefits: should I remind you that in this country big business usually favor Republicans? So, rob the taxpayers and give money to the defence establishment.
2) I would not claim that all Americans are ignorant idiots when it comes to the other world (as some of my friends who live in Europe tend to think), but the sad truth is that a lot of them are (including G.W. Bush;-) There are several reasons for this, including the American culture that is pretty closed; lack of history knowledge and general ignorance among the people with lower education/income level. Here comes patriotism. Try turning on the TV and watching some movies or shows. Significant portion of them has evil terrorists/drug dealers of Serbian, Oriental, Latino, Russian or Arabic origin whose evil plots are dismantled by brave and moral-dispersing G.I.-s;-) For these on the lower level of the intellect CNN does not differ from other networks; they just see the same ideological bubblegum and propaganda stereotypes produced by live actors instead of the Hollywood! They take CNN footage and comments without a grain of salt and are just proud of their country who "restores justice in the entire world".
So, another electorate win!
3) You should not forget that this war was used to show Clinton's name in other context than the Monicagate scandal. I don't approve the Starr's hipocritic witchhunt, but it does not approve Clinton's desire to whiten by leading a "righteous war".
I thought that the above said was it before meeting with a specialist in the modern warfare. He was able to open my eyes on several factors I could not see before.
4) Sure, you know that the ammo has the "good before" date stamp. Do you know, how much it will cost to properly dismantle all of it, especially in our environmentally conscious era? It is not just much more expensive than transporting them to any destination on the Earth; you can add the cost of lost planes and still have a huge profit by choosing this way of destruction for the ammo.
5) Weapons manufacturers would kill to test their latest equipment in the real world. And they will kill innocent civilians. Just try thinking how much the tests would cost in the peaceful times. You need to find a place first and make sure there will not be possible casualties among the bystanders. And not everyone wants the tests made in their vicinity; just remember the latest protests of Puerto Ricans. It might be cynical, but the war is the only kind of maneuvers where you don't care about accidental victims among the civilians.
6) Psychological factor. The army in the US is professional. It means that only ones who want to join the army do it. The sad truth is that there are a lot of aggression in people. And the American approach is to suppress and hide it. Where people in primitive societies give the aggression an exit by "resolving" problems with fistfights or at least shouting matches, modern American culture uses lawyers for this (unless you're in some kind of ghetto where the only law is the law of force and money).
A war can be and is a way to disperse some adrenalin into the world for a lot of aggressive people who have consciously chosen the Army and do it with only a few coffins shipped home.
I don't know what idiot has designed the military doctrine of fighting dictators by making the population suffer, BUT IT JUST DOES NOT WORK! No external "precise strikes" will give the people power; it will just give them unfounded hope (as it happened in Iraq) or desire to close ranks behind the tiran against the external enemy (as in Yugoslavia).
In the end, we have a country that was ravaged; hunger and lack of industry in the only country of the former Soviet block that prospered without the West's help.
I have 3 computers connected to one keyboars and monitor through the special switch (Belkin OmniCube 4-port, model F1D094). It is not inexpensive at about $180 plus cables, but I save on monitors, space and convenience.
As for the older computers, they still can run SETI@HOME;-)
If he succeds in registering such a TLD, there will be more than one corporation, willing to protect its trademarks by registering their domain name with a new suffix.
It means that his claim of "not respecting trademarks and courts" might be a psychological pressure in order to push these corporations and collect a lot of registration fees.
The first significant scientist of Russia (Mikhail Lomonosov) said: "I write my friends in Italian, I write wonem in French, and I write my enemies in German";-)
This thread is mostly discussing the name of the new Duron. There is also some info about the processor itself.
I want to ask everyone a question about a motherboard support. IIRC, some early Athlon motherboards were not perfect; some of them are on the revision 1.4 or even higher now.
What do you think about the quality and stability of the motherboards ? Are they going to require a new chipset or they can use the same chipset as Athlon that is proven and pretty stable by now ?
For an English speaker this Latin-derived name may associate with "durable", but for the Russian speakers it will probably associate with "durak", that means fool in Russian.
As for me, I like the idea of dual Thunderbird better;-)
What is next? Will you start a movement in order to change the time to BL (Before Linusmas) and AL ?
What I see here is an attempt to kiss Linus's butt the way thousands of journalists kiss Bill's. Not that I have anything against Linus and Linux, but it's just not the way it should be (IMHO)!
Besides the crap, you forget a lot of things. First of all, the BSD that was long before Linux. Second, M$ Era is not finished yet. Third, if it would not be the AntiTrust lawsuit brought against MS, Compaqs and Dells of the world would be still prohibited from installing Linux et al on their desktops and notebooks (and would be pretty cautious not to install it on their servers). Whatever Red Hat and VA Linux could do, it would not be possible to make Linux that successful without the support of big guys. The lawsuit itself made MS more careful and less restrictive. Fourth, MS IS dominating the Internet with IE. Fifth, the innovation in computer area is usually done by one of three ways: 1) In the garage (Apple, Dell, HP, MS, Yahoo, Amazon). 2) An idea is created while working for a big company (in it's labs), in military or in a university. Then the inventor leaves with the idea in order to pursue it in a startup (SUN, Cisco - from universities; Compaq, Be, Sequent, 3Com - from big companies). 3) Idea is born like in 2), but the company is able to develop a product itself (C, UNIX, Java, C++) and possibly promote it.
Open Source is not about innovation, it's about leveling the field.
Prostitution is the oldest profession; journalistics is the second oldest one.
You have forced Milosevic into submission - I see it differently. You destroyed an independent country without declaring a war and put about 10 million people on the brink of hunger in order to pay billions of dollars to the american defence contractors! At the same time the power of Milosevic over Yugoslavia is just the same. What a sick joke of concept - to make a people suffer, so they will allegedly overthrow a tyranny. It never works...
Why do you forget about the "Brain Drain" inflicted by the US on the other part of world? I have a Masters degree in Computer Science that I got FOR FREE back in Russia. But I enrich an American company now and pay taxes to the American government.
Be realistic, most of the people who come here don't go back even when they have a choice.
Slashdot Mirror
You describe the problem really well, but your idea of remedies is just plain wrong.
Good example: NT IS NOT Windows. It is DEC VMS. At some point Bill Gates got Dave Cuttler and another 20-50 engineers from DEC. Does it mean that he would be entitled to all patents related to the OS (if they would exist) ???
Current system is not exactly right, but your proposal would increase the expenses for the companies tenfold. Really, why spend money on lawyers and defend yourself when you can hire the patentholder from the company that is suing you ??? It looks like the crazy mix of bribery and prostitution though, and believe me, not every inventor will have enough integrity to repel the temptations of easy money.
You also should not forget that the existence of many companies (even the big ones) is related to the IP they have.
As for Rambus & other ones like that, I'd put a cap on royalties for these "IP shacks" and reduce the time span of their patents.
I don't want to be rude, but what you're offering does not make any sense. Under your system Goldtouch could not protect its design from stealing by the Necrosoft.
:-(
The point here is that many small companies don't have enough muscle to market their production. They do either just a design or design and manufacture. Some other companies don't design their production themselves; they are perfectly happy to license a design and manufacture/sell it.
You'd be surprised to learn hom much stuff in the computer industry is an OEM. For example, go to Fry's and compare some mice models from A4Tech and Micro Innovations. They are identical.
So, there is no perfect system that will protect the inventor and won't stiffle innovation at all simultaneously. But the existing one is IMHO biased in favor of the inventor too much, and this bias need to be lessened, but not abolished completely. Otherwise the big guys will be able to copy everything they like, and every street will be called Microsoft Way
All this can be designed out, if you're willing to put in the effort. The final generation of RX-7s ended up being pretty reliable, and seriously badassed.
Actually, Gen-3 RX-7 was badassed, but had a crappy quality. I remember a guy who had so many problems with the car that he sued Mazda under the lemon law and won. His site had scores of other owners who had problems too. The previous writer was right; rotary engine does not live much with turbo.
As for the next generation, it will be normally aspirated, and it will be good! It will be a hard choice for me between the RX-8 and the new Z (I have 300zx now).
It depends, really. And I can't vote for one way or another.
j an/0199ipppis.htm) ???
, 3374,00.html ???).
;-) ;-)
Let's take an example in biotech or medicine industry. Patents are everything there. It is an ability to reap reward for a huge investment in research. And what is that reward? just an ability to fund the further research! The end of a patent on some prescription drug means that the companies who has not invested a dime (and time) in research can produce the same formula drug and sell it as generic for much less. If some idiot will claim that they should be able to clone it right away because it's a capitalism, I'd say that such approach will destroy every long term research. Another bad side - do you remember how Necro$oft allegedly hijacked the design of the ergonomic mouse from Goldtouch (http://www.domis.com/sample/DOMIS/update/1999/01
On the other hand, there is an issue of Rambus that does not invest anything in the reserch and manufacturing and is pretty much an IP holding shack. I'd say that even better analogy would be with the robber who "owns" a forest a'la Robin Hood and collects his tax from everyone. Most of the software patents fit the same category (Remember http://www.thestandard.net/article/display/0,1151
To finalize, I'd have the following proposals:
1) Put a cap on the licensing fees;
2) Prevent companies from exclusive licensing;
3) Separate real researchers from racketeers
4) And, certainly, not grant patents that are too broad. It means that the US Patent Office should spend more of my taxes on hiring people who understand technology
Try thinking not only about the compiler. Compiler itself is just a small part. The big one is the library that is tied to Windows very much. It's tied so much that they haven't even produced VB for Mac (IIRC). This kills the idea of VB->JVM applets outright and makes necessary the complete rewrite of the VB runtime library from Windows-based to Java runtime library-based, that is pretty much unfeasible.
:-( As the result, they will produce the code that is still not very good, so that VB will still be used for non-critical desktop-only projects.
Another interesting point will be the quality. I don't think many people will argue with the fact that C/C++/Java crowd is more competent and professional on average than VB crowd. Even though there are a lot of good VB programmers, it's usually used by the lame beginners who want to become programmers
1) A couple of years ago I've seen a very interesting quote: "The biggest choice for companies in the next 5 years will be the choice of the component model". As of now, about 2/3 of the Fortune 1000 companies have chosen CORBA. SUN's decision to pretty much abandon their own model (Remote Invocation) for CORBA plays to the strength of this argument.
;-)
COM+ will be one of the strings attached with the new language; Necro$oft will try to increase the chances of using their distributed architecture.
2) Java phenomenon has spawned a huge amount of development tools from both established players like Borland, IBM & Symantec and start-ups. I'd say that there is more investment in new cross-platform Java tools than in new Windows-only tools. IMHO, the success of Microsoft environments is closely linked to the excellent development tools tied to the platform.
Microsoft wants to stop the erosion and regain the developer's hearts
... Apple would buy Be, Inc instead of NeXT. They would have a modern UNIX-based OS, capable of running multiple platforms then instead of now.
But I can't think about them cannibalizing their hardware sales in order to become a software vendor on the Intel platform.
If Khrushev would be the judge, he would split Microsoft into Microsoft for the industry and Microsoft for the agriculture ;-)
... spend tons of money trying to clone Bill Gates ;-)
Precisely Formulated Goals, Desired Outcome Achieved
;-) There are several reasons for this, including the American culture that is pretty closed; lack of history knowledge and general ignorance among the people with lower education/income level. Here comes patriotism. Try turning on the TV and watching some movies or shows. Significant portion of them has evil terrorists/drug dealers of Serbian, Oriental, Latino, Russian or Arabic origin whose evil plots are dismantled by brave and moral-dispersing G.I.-s ;-)
Clinton is a scum. Pure and simple. He should be either tried as a war criminal or shot like a dog.
There were many posts here about the economics of war. It was actually Lenin who told many years ago that the politics is a concentrated expression of the economics.
But not many people gave a detailed explanation of what economics were used this time.
1) Rob Peter to pay Paul.
Do you remember the hurricane in the Central America, when Clinton sent the emergency food relief by buying 10,000 pigs from farmers in Iowa and giving it to the hungry ? It was a worthy cause, and it was not expensive for the taxpayers. On the other hand, whom will these farmers vote now? I'd guess, Gore.
The same thing happened here, but on the much higher and much more cynical scale. Not everyone welcomed the end of Cold War. Besides the military establishment whose value was greatly diminished, the defence contractors felt the heat. As you know, it's not easy thing to reprofile the companies from military production towards the peaceful one. Soviet Union ruined a lot of industry trying to do the conversion in the beginning of 90-s. And they did not even have a capitalism at that time, i.e., there was a tremendous need in the goods they could have produced in these ex-military factories; here in the US all the niches of the market are already taken, so that whatever marketing direction defence contractors might take, they will be fighting established players in that area of the market.
On the other hand, the ammo and equipment used in battle is usually replenished and replaced by the government. And this equipment produced for the internal use is the most technically advanced, with the highest price tags and profit margins unlike the obsolete equipment sold to the third world countries who use it against their neighbours. And this kind of equipment is not likely to be outsourced to the other countries; so, spending these money on destroying Yugoslavia means reinvesting the significant portion of it into the American economy. Plus, Clinton reaps the great political benefits: should I remind you that in this country big business usually favor Republicans? So, rob the taxpayers and give money to the defence establishment.
2) I would not claim that all Americans are ignorant idiots when it comes to the other world (as some of my friends who live in Europe tend to think), but the sad truth is that a lot of them are (including G.W. Bush
For these on the lower level of the intellect CNN does not differ from other networks; they just see the same ideological bubblegum and propaganda stereotypes produced by live actors instead of the Hollywood! They take CNN footage and comments without a grain of salt and are just proud of their country who "restores justice in the entire world".
So, another electorate win!
3) You should not forget that this war was used to show Clinton's name in other context than the Monicagate scandal. I don't approve the Starr's hipocritic witchhunt, but it does not approve Clinton's desire to whiten by leading a "righteous war".
I thought that the above said was it before meeting with a specialist in the modern warfare. He was able to open my eyes on several factors I could not see before.
4) Sure, you know that the ammo has the "good before" date stamp. Do you know, how much it will cost to properly dismantle all of it, especially in our environmentally conscious era? It is not just much more expensive than transporting them to any destination on the Earth; you can add the cost of lost planes and still have a huge profit by choosing this way of destruction for the ammo.
5) Weapons manufacturers would kill to test their latest equipment in the real world. And they will kill innocent civilians. Just try thinking how much the tests would cost in the peaceful times. You need to find a place first and make sure there will not be possible casualties among the bystanders. And not everyone wants the tests made in their vicinity; just remember the latest protests of Puerto Ricans. It might be cynical, but the war is the only kind of maneuvers where you don't care about accidental victims among the civilians.
6) Psychological factor.
The army in the US is professional. It means that only ones who want to join the army do it. The sad truth is that there are a lot of aggression in people. And the American approach is to suppress and hide it. Where people in primitive societies give the aggression an exit by "resolving" problems with fistfights or at least shouting matches, modern American culture uses lawyers for this (unless you're in some kind of ghetto where the only law is the law of force and money).
A war can be and is a way to disperse some adrenalin into the world for a lot of aggressive people who have consciously chosen the Army and do it with only a few coffins shipped home.
I don't know what idiot has designed the military doctrine of fighting dictators by making the population suffer, BUT IT JUST DOES NOT WORK! No external "precise strikes" will give the people power; it will just give them unfounded hope (as it happened in Iraq) or desire to close ranks behind the tiran against the external enemy (as in Yugoslavia).
In the end, we have a country that was ravaged; hunger and lack of industry in the only country of the former Soviet block that prospered without the West's help.
God Bless America!
I have 3 computers connected to one keyboars and monitor through the special switch (Belkin OmniCube 4-port, model F1D094). It is not inexpensive at about $180 plus cables, but I save on monitors, space and convenience.
;-)
As for the older computers, they still can run SETI@HOME
If he succeds in registering such a TLD, there will be more than one corporation, willing to protect its trademarks by registering their domain name with a new suffix.
It means that his claim of "not respecting trademarks and courts" might be a psychological pressure in order to push these corporations and collect a lot of registration fees.
http://www.ecocap.demon.co.uk/
...
Just read, how many languages have spawned English
The first significant scientist of Russia (Mikhail Lomonosov) said: "I write my friends in Italian, I write wonem in French, and I write my enemies in German" ;-)
This thread is mostly discussing the name of the new Duron. There is also some info about the processor itself.
I want to ask everyone a question about a motherboard support. IIRC, some early Athlon motherboards were not perfect; some of them are on the revision 1.4 or even higher now.
What do you think about the quality and stability of the motherboards ? Are they going to require a new chipset or they can use the same chipset as Athlon that is proven and pretty stable by now ?
"Zorak" - there is no such a word (or it's some archaic word I don't know).
;-)))))
As for the "brak", it has two meanings:
1) Marriage
2) Flaw, defect, defective merchandise.
Looking at the divorce statistics, you should admire the wisdom of the Russian folk
The name is lame :-(
;-)
For an English speaker this Latin-derived name may associate with "durable", but for the Russian speakers it will probably associate with "durak", that means fool in Russian.
As for me, I like the idea of dual Thunderbird better
Look at their
It shows, that PIII-1000 is 1.5 times faster than dual Xeon-667 on both CPU tests (CPU/FPU and multimedia), but looses on the memory speed test because of Rambu$.
What is next? Will you start a movement in order to change the time to BL (Before Linusmas) and AL ?
What I see here is an attempt to kiss Linus's butt the way thousands of journalists kiss Bill's. Not that I have anything against Linus and Linux, but it's just not the way it should be (IMHO)!
Besides the crap, you forget a lot of things. First of all, the BSD that was long before Linux. Second, M$ Era is not finished yet. Third, if it would not be the AntiTrust lawsuit brought against MS, Compaqs and Dells of the world would be still prohibited from installing Linux et al on their desktops and notebooks (and would be pretty cautious not to install it on their servers). Whatever Red Hat and VA Linux could do, it would not be possible to make Linux that successful without the support of big guys. The lawsuit itself made MS more careful and less restrictive. Fourth, MS IS dominating the Internet with IE. Fifth, the innovation in computer area is usually done by one of three ways:
1) In the garage (Apple, Dell, HP, MS, Yahoo, Amazon).
2) An idea is created while working for a big company (in it's labs), in military or in a university. Then the inventor leaves with the idea in order to pursue it in a startup (SUN, Cisco - from universities; Compaq, Be, Sequent, 3Com - from big companies).
3) Idea is born like in 2), but the company is able to develop a product itself (C, UNIX, Java, C++) and possibly promote it.
Open Source is not about innovation, it's about leveling the field.
Prostitution is the oldest profession; journalistics is the second oldest one.
A few years of playing with Oracle taught me to use optimization hints for the majoruty of non-trivial queries where I need the performance.
Hints (and clever use of indexes) helped me to improve the responce time for interactive queries three to five times.
by this argument, we should all be using {YUCK} Windows NT {/YUCK} ;-)
You have forced Milosevic into submission - I see it differently. You destroyed an independent country without declaring a war and put about 10 million people on the brink of hunger in order to pay billions of dollars to the american defence contractors! ...
At the same time the power of Milosevic over Yugoslavia is just the same. What a sick joke of concept - to make a people suffer, so they will allegedly overthrow a tyranny. It never works
Unfortunately, inferior Digital/Compaq owns the superior Alpha whether superior Sun owns the inferior UltraSparc :-(
If Sun would own Alpha, it would have a "momentum" and marketing push strong enough to survive.
Why do you forget about the "Brain Drain" inflicted by the US on the other part of world? I have a Masters degree in Computer Science that I got FOR FREE back in Russia. But I enrich an American company now and pay taxes to the American government.
Be realistic, most of the people who come here don't go back even when they have a choice.