Again, this is because Nader is drawing his voting block from people who would otherwise select Gore.
So what you're saying is that given only "one choice more than Russia," Gore could win the majority of the Nation. But if Nader is present, Bush could become President instead of either 'righteous' choice... even though noone could have the popular majority. Similar was the case when Clinton was elected by minority due to the Perot vote.
But what makes you think this isn't preceisely the desired effect for many voters? Some play to win, others know the rules are stacked unfairly and refuse to play, but still others play to illustrate the unfairness of the system.
A vote for Bush may help Bush to win; A vote for Gore may help Gore to win. But enough votes for Nader will emphasize more than either of those: It will prevent both the Repubmocats from winning the majority, regardless of who ends up in office. It will show that Gore lost enough appeal over his appearance of arrogance that there was a cost.
Yes, if Nader were not in the race, if the absence of the only candidate that makes sense to many of us, SOME of us may be inclined to vote for some lesser of evils named Gore. (Unless, of course, they're repulsed from voting altogether.) But a vote for Nader, to keep Bush out of the majority, is a great way to show we choose our own choices rather than those handed us by coat-tail riders from a two-headed institution. It does fine in saying "Bush and Gore make me want to RALPH!"
"Exactly why Mr. Nader is bent on doing all he can -- whether or not intended -- to deliver us into the grip of another, more strengthened Republican government still leaves me dumbfounded."
Hello?!? I don't know where these graduates get their new math, but where do these flunkies get off saying, "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush"?
Last I checked, a vote for Nader adds only to Nader. It adds nothing to either of the opposing candidates. It underscores the fact that we do deserve more than 'one choice more than Russia.' It furthers the outcry of the popular vote when the popular vote is otherwise silenced by a Duopoloistic electoral college.
Maybe instead of improving the quantity of education, they should start with the quality of their own!;-)
The show DATELINE recently did a feature about the ADM whistleblower. The parallels really struck me, considering how otherwise unrelated the cases seem...
The negotiators for competing companies, holding the world supply of Lysine, were to meet in Hawaii to forge their collusion. They laughed openly at the irony of the situation:
These competitors, by enforcing high prices, had become great friends, (Could this now be true of Apple and Corel?)
The customers were instead regarded as "the enemy."
This adversarial stance now seems consistant with Microsoft, in their EULAs and registration obstacles, in their "customer service," and in all their legal attempts to leverage an unfair advantage. It's not a hot war of bombs and missles... It's a cold war where the casualties and compromises are discretely pressured.
- Twisty
Active Desktop is proud to announce that we at Microsoft LOST YOUR COMPUTER SETTINGS once again. Click here if you like us to recover that which you cherish. Otherwise, just do nothing, and you'll be saving us the work that we should otherwise assume you desire of us.
I'm astounded at the negativism of this reporter... but one tends to see whatever one goes in expecting to see.
I was assisting a charitable Jail and Bail program for Strive Media Institute, helped by the Klingon Assault Group, and the convention atmosphere was remarkably upbeat, cooperative, and rich with humor. And while I didn't spot the obese woman clad in chain mail, there was an oriental woman in a slit dress whose image is pleasantly burned onto the retinas of many attendants.
STAR TREK GAMES
When FASA stopped producing the Star Trek Role Play Game, many felt abandoned. Many new Star Trek games, both RPGs and starship combat simulations, are now being produced by Last Unicorn Games... which it turns out was just bought up by the big ol' Wizards of the Coast. Live demonstrations of their RED ALERT ship combat gave a nice taste of a rather fast-paced tactical game.
When a reporter focuses on 'smelly teens' and he wigs out over costumed attendants, it seems he lacks a sense of adult fantasy and imagination. The T-Rex sized dragon skeleton and Wizards castle are just the beginning for a lengthy list of amazing production values.
Clearly there are many negative effects that could result from the warming trend at the poles... Glacial meltdown and thus rising water levels seems to be at the top of this list. Changing animal/plant/microbal habitats could be another. But I ask you all, "Could there be positive tradeoffs for warmer poles?"
Most geologists are Uniformitarians, few are Catastrophists. (Many who are may support 'Creation Science,' but that is not my debate here.) Reality may be a mixture of those two major views... while the world is largely stable, there do appear from time to time questions about things like rapidly frozen mammoths in the former Soviet Union, or large-scale flooding on the earth.
Among those views, some have said that a greenhouse earth, with the proper atmospheric barriers so as not to overheat us, could be a flourishing garden spot from pole to pole. It would have a cooler equatorial zone as well as warmer poles.
In known reality, the coldness of the poles at present act like "energy drained mass capacitors," which create freezing weather patterns like the Alberta Clipper. But it is popular opinion than many areas had a rather tame Year 2000, with milder Winter and Summer Extremes.
Could we be seeing an upside to reducing the cyclical stresses of the hemispheres?
The poor sob in the article wearing the hooded jacket looks too much like South Park's Kenny. This episode, he will be doused with a can of JOLT, and thus electrocuted as the netware short circuits.
Many of us already plate ourselves in the armor of pagers, cellphones, PDAs, and other gadgetry. I'm all for having places to secure these devices, but I'm not about to go wearing chips on my shoulders and our parts on our sleeves.;-)
While the article is dated, it's funny to see the percpetion of Bill Gates a decade past, both by those who "get him" and those who don't...
Ester Dysan in the article mentions that Gates would end up producing NeXT software because "he's a smart businessman." While that non sequitor placed him in a warm light of misplaced optimism, the suspected 'dark side' of his alterior motives, opposing the operating system he could not own, was dead on the money.
My earliest memory of discovering "the Real Gates" came from the late eighties when watching Computer Chronicals on PBS. Before actually seeing Bill, I'd heard rumors that he must be some great software engineer, and that he used to "hold contests for programming business apps, so he could outpace them all with QuickBASIC." But the reality of his mindset was seen on the East versus West "Computer Bowl" around 1988. The three questions I saw him answer were very revealing:
(1) "SPOOL" describes a queueing operation, such as sending a document to a printer device. What does the acronym SPOOL stand for?
Gates: No clue.
Answer: Simultaneous Peripheral Operations On-Line.(Granted, it's understandable that such trivia could easily be missed, even though I knew it.)
(2) MIDI is the standard for Musical Instruments Digital Interface... but How Many pins are in a MIDI plug?
Gates: No clue.
Answer: Five. (THIS is the man who claims he will bring us multimedia on the PCs? Has he ever LOOKED at multimedia instruments or technology?)
(3) Who is the top earning CEO in the Computer Industry?
Gates: "JOHN SCULLEY OF APPLE!" (Correct!)
I think he may have even quoted the salary Sculley was making! It didn't take him a blink of an eye to issue that answer. It also took him only two more years to get that answer changed to "Bill Gates." From that point on, it was clear to me where Bill Gates "inventive" mind really is.
Clearly it doesn't take much hardware to turn a phone into a 12-dimensional Turning device (v-mail boxes do this sort of work). Rather, I think the question should be "Just what's stopping us?"... Why aren't these devices our gateway to streaming media?
Why can't one phone send a stream of a sampled audio memo from its ram to the IR of another phone directly to an FTP site? Why do we still not use Dick Tracy 2way video watches or tune cable channels wherever we go?
It's not so much a issue of bandwidth... compression just keeps getting better; Rather, it's the OS of protocols and command structures we have yet to invent. Early devices would only address the microphone and earpiece as all-useful... Actually using the packet stream is rather recent. The Microsoft school of thought is terribly constraining in its "device metaphore"... even the APIs are machines and the machines must be fed very narrow parameters. Unix goes the other way in that it's used to piping generic streams to a generic filespace. What's missing are the protocols.
Perhaps BXXP will fill this niche... or perhaps it'll take something newer still. But the silliest part of it all is that we're watching the barriers fall now and will continue to see more integration, both now and in the years to come.
In order to further enforce this agenda, they seem to be directing their "customer service" department to accuse their customers of licensing violations.
In a certain headquarters of The Salvation Army, we got a 50 user (luser?) license for Office 200 Professional. Installed it from the original CD, only for the 50 activations registration requirement to kick in. (First software I've seen to *require* registration for simple use... talk about Big Brother!) When we called about the dilemna, we were just short of being called thieves! It went something like this:
"Hi, we've installed the Office 2000 Professional on the first few of our machines and get this registration requirement."
"Well, let's get the product key from ya..." We read off a key from the Enigma device...
"Oh, it's no wonder. You're violating licensing!"
"No we're not, we bought another 50 user lisence." Insistance and paperwork persues to demonstrate the veracity of our right to the product we bought.
"Hmmm. Let me send you another CD with a new product key code. That should get you past it."
It'd be nice to get an apology for their false accusation. I wonder how many they persuade to crumble into the double purchase. This "guilty until proven innocent" approach must be a PR nightmare, not that Microsoft seems to worry about PR anymore. Still, it says to me that they continue a "cold warfare" to deprive the customer of money, short of violence but not short of threatening litigation.
While Gravity is comparitively weaker than forces of atomic power, one should consider the scope of influence. Most "strong" interactions are measured upon contact or in the levels and quanta of an atom's electron cloud. Electromagnetism is one of these that at least radiates to a distance similar to gravity... and thus a radio wave can be heard on the other side of the planet and beyond. Yet even EM doesn't match gravity's uniquely far reaching ability to bend space and time.
If Newton's equation is taken at face value, without factoring in theories of how gravity may be quantitized, then the sense of scope is amazing:
A single particle, no matter how small, can move an inch and change its influence on the Universe by some infinitesimal amount.
You would think Microsoft would care about the quality of its product and the service it provides to its customers. Yet their real game has always been how to take advantage of customers and partners... how to play "Cold Warefare" in leveraging the dollars and freedom from those they do business with. Hidden APIs do the customer a huge disservice, but does that stop them?
Both Microsofts would still be at liberty to invent new proprietary formats and masquerade them as standards. (Each for their own separate specialty.) Both would likely continue the trend, started by the original Microsoft, in popularizing contractual licenses instead of merely "selling" software. Both might even work vidictively to prove the courts wrong about how beneficial the breakup would be, choosing instead to make interoperability more difficult and wear it on their sleeve like an injured party.
There is little reason to believe that the remedy would really make them more compassionate to their customers. As much room for improvement as there is, there is just as much room for further failure when their only measure of success is the money they sucker us for. They'll continue to bring us some of the best innovation their money can buy... but on their terms.
Jaron Lanier (a pioneer of VR) talked of post-symbolic communication, in which the maliability of cyberspace was more expressive than abstracted language. In the meantime, we still speak in sentences and words. I think invoking and controlling apps will be as easy as speaking them out, "invoking spells" if you will.
Yet the power struggle of personal empowerment versus corporate greed tends to battle, cycling over one another. (The same people who empowered us with MSBASIC in every old home computer are now the same ones who hide APIs internally.) Since programs can not only include trojan horses and logic bombs, and lisencing has become a funny rat's maze of contractual obligations, the battle is bound to get interesting. Perhaps the very programs we "summon" will be difficult to "subjegate."(Yeah, wouldn't that make an interesting CyberPunk premise... Run with it!)
M$ has proven that a corporation can wage Cold Warfare on its own customers and partners. GNU and Open Source movements have shown that the people don't have to subject themselves to that food chain if they don't want to. Protests in "the revolt" aren't as subtle as M$'s ways... perhaps they're "hot warfare" although far short of the extreme warfare seen in nuclear exchange.
Hot and Cold running warfare. In the end, it's all very low energy physics, frigid by the cosmic scale. Programs are written either for the left-brain drudgery of corporate protocol, or for the expression of personal creativity.
GUI/Friendly config files that are XML standard... now that opens up cool implications: Not only can you edit it all with simple, user-friendly tools, but with the same tool; an all-purpose thin-client XML-form editor.
Let *nix rule in open programmability, and Mac in UI consistency; but a bridge like this could make for RAD development of UI-simple apps.
> Are there more examples of protocols, specifications, API's, whatever, that had standards for interoperability, but the Windows or Microsoft implementation fails to meet them ?
I'm sure there are. Just from experience, their Proxy Server 2.0 will default to their default to their proprietary WinNT Challenge/Response protocol for authentication. This really sucks for SETI@home, RealPlayer, and all non-MSIE (Netscape) Browsers, because the proxy won't function like a proxy to non-MS products unless you dig into the settings and disable the defaults.
And of course, that doesn't even scratch the surface of email filtering in Outlook Express and WebTV.
It's not the money that makes propriety (sometimes) evil, it's the artificial scarcity that does. For a business to be a business, it needs the life-giving "chi" of inflowing cash. So does business have a place if the world of free beer operating systems?
Energy moves in waves. Our biosphere is sustained by the cycling energy of daily rotations and seasonal shifts. Each member of the food chain reciprocates what it gets with what it gives. But what is given back in free beer software?
The credo of those opposing Free or Open Source software movements is usually TANSTAAFL. As mentioned in this article, software from a business can be free to some (such as non-profits) while its net pricetag is subsidized by others. Yet, the GNU project and the standards of Internet weren't built by businesses as much as they were built by individuals, each taking the personal cost of contributing. (For instance, HTML was largely inspired by Ted Nelson's early quest for Xanadu.) Some are paid back in microcelebrity or even better jobs and grants. Others have given unconditionally without reward. These pioneers made the effort, not so much for money, as for the personal empowerment of software.
Love really does make the world go around: The thing that best guarantees success is for human attention and concern to be lavished skillfully on a goal. Sometimes it seems that corporations will totally rule the world... until the court of public opinion turns the tide against them. These are like yin and yang cycling over one another: Propriety-mindedness and control versus personal liberty.
We're seeing a turn of this cycle happen when businesses turn to businesses (B2B) in a trend away from catering to consumers (B2C). Consumer backlash sometimes sparks this trend. Still, consumers have little use for computers without personal empowerment, so they will empower their own. (C2C?)
Free Beer Software will flourish just out of the human attention it gets. One day, the wireless web will be so pervasive that we can call out URLs like incantations, summoning any manner of program to be carried out. Such a post-scarcity world will be glorious!
User Interfaces must be customized to the strengths of the user. A simple GameCam may be useful to even a dolphin, yet a Stephen Hawking interface plays to a different level of symbolic genius.
Video based ("non-applicance")UIs are a wonderful field to pioneer: Once we get beyond crude motion detection, to actually interperating gestures (surpassing the work of Myron Kreuger's Videoplace), we can interface with a computer back home just by dialing it up on the videophone! Pity the Max Headroom series didn't foresee that!
Jaron Lanier invented the dataglove/powerglove, and demonstrated how it can teach eye-hand experience, even teaching himself to juggle. Yet, he regards musical instruments to be the greatest refinement of human interface. Imagine combining the genuis of Hawking, Kreuger, and Lanier into the science of UI. Add a sprinkling of Xerox PARC, Todd Rudgren, and the sense of Brenda Laurel, then simmer until done.
Talk about the next great frontier to pioneer... Let's take on the Litigation Industry!
I've known lawyers to serve their own coffers with prolonged settlement negotiations rather than serve justice. Checks and Balances would be tricky enough to institute... but Open Law?!
I believe it was Jefferson, once a lawyer, who said "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." Yet, he'd be rolling in his grave if he learned what a superhuman complexity it has grown into.
Japanese slang tends to 'smush' words together for a new buzzword, like POKE'MON means POcKEt MONsters. YOPY, similar to Yuppie, means 'Young People.' Not at all like the cheesey acrostics we use here in the States!;-D
> Yes! I'm finally going to be able to have a PDA that doesn't need to be rebooted every 5 hours of uptime.
...Although some might see Wince as 'helpful' in doing that for you, via its trecherous battery life.;^P Hopefully YOPY would differ in this department, or at least make it an easy process to resync without having to build another profile from the ground up.
If it could also avoid Wince's Tower of Babel, that would be another big plus... not a big prob for Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you're saying is that given only "one choice more than Russia," Gore could win the majority of the Nation. But if Nader is present, Bush could become President instead of either 'righteous' choice... even though noone could have the popular majority. Similar was the case when Clinton was elected by minority due to the Perot vote.
But what makes you think this isn't preceisely the desired effect for many voters? Some play to win, others know the rules are stacked unfairly and refuse to play, but still others play to illustrate the unfairness of the system.
A vote for Bush may help Bush to win; A vote for Gore may help Gore to win. But enough votes for Nader will emphasize more than either of those: It will prevent both the Repubmocats from winning the majority, regardless of who ends up in office. It will show that Gore lost enough appeal over his appearance of arrogance that there was a cost.
Yes, if Nader were not in the race, if the absence of the only candidate that makes sense to many of us, SOME of us may be inclined to vote for some lesser of evils named Gore. (Unless, of course, they're repulsed from voting altogether.) But a vote for Nader, to keep Bush out of the majority, is a great way to show we choose our own choices rather than those handed us by coat-tail riders from a two-headed institution. It does fine in saying "Bush and Gore make me want to RALPH!"
Last I checked, a vote for Nader adds only to Nader. It adds nothing to either of the opposing candidates. It underscores the fact that we do deserve more than 'one choice more than Russia.' It furthers the outcry of the popular vote when the popular vote is otherwise silenced by a Duopoloistic electoral college.
Maybe instead of improving the quantity of education, they should start with the quality of their own! ;-)
The negotiators for competing companies, holding the world supply of Lysine, were to meet in Hawaii to forge their collusion. They laughed openly at the irony of the situation:
- These competitors, by enforcing high prices, had become great friends, (Could this now be true of Apple and Corel?)
- The customers were instead regarded as "the enemy."
This adversarial stance now seems consistant with Microsoft, in their EULAs and registration obstacles, in their "customer service," and in all their legal attempts to leverage an unfair advantage. It's not a hot war of bombs and missles... It's a cold war where the casualties and compromises are discretely pressured.- Twisty
Active Desktop is proud to announce that we at Microsoft LOST YOUR COMPUTER SETTINGS once again. Click here if you like us to recover that which you cherish. Otherwise, just do nothing, and you'll be saving us the work that we should otherwise assume you desire of us.
I was assisting a charitable Jail and Bail program for Strive Media Institute, helped by the Klingon Assault Group, and the convention atmosphere was remarkably upbeat, cooperative, and rich with humor. And while I didn't spot the obese woman clad in chain mail, there was an oriental woman in a slit dress whose image is pleasantly burned onto the retinas of many attendants.
STAR TREK GAMES
When FASA stopped producing the Star Trek Role Play Game, many felt abandoned. Many new Star Trek games, both RPGs and starship combat simulations, are now being produced by Last Unicorn Games... which it turns out was just bought up by the big ol' Wizards of the Coast. Live demonstrations of their RED ALERT ship combat gave a nice taste of a rather fast-paced tactical game.
When a reporter focuses on 'smelly teens' and he wigs out over costumed attendants, it seems he lacks a sense of adult fantasy and imagination. The T-Rex sized dragon skeleton and Wizards castle are just the beginning for a lengthy list of amazing production values.
Most geologists are Uniformitarians, few are Catastrophists. (Many who are may support 'Creation Science,' but that is not my debate here.) Reality may be a mixture of those two major views... while the world is largely stable, there do appear from time to time questions about things like rapidly frozen mammoths in the former Soviet Union, or large-scale flooding on the earth.
Among those views, some have said that a greenhouse earth, with the proper atmospheric barriers so as not to overheat us, could be a flourishing garden spot from pole to pole. It would have a cooler equatorial zone as well as warmer poles.
In known reality, the coldness of the poles at present act like "energy drained mass capacitors," which create freezing weather patterns like the Alberta Clipper. But it is popular opinion than many areas had a rather tame Year 2000, with milder Winter and Summer Extremes.
Could we be seeing an upside to reducing the cyclical stresses of the hemispheres?
Many of us already plate ourselves in the armor of pagers, cellphones, PDAs, and other gadgetry. I'm all for having places to secure these devices, but I'm not about to go wearing chips on my shoulders and our parts on our sleeves. ;-)
Ester Dysan in the article mentions that Gates would end up producing NeXT software because "he's a smart businessman." While that non sequitor placed him in a warm light of misplaced optimism, the suspected 'dark side' of his alterior motives, opposing the operating system he could not own, was dead on the money.
My earliest memory of discovering "the Real Gates" came from the late eighties when watching Computer Chronicals on PBS. Before actually seeing Bill, I'd heard rumors that he must be some great software engineer, and that he used to "hold contests for programming business apps, so he could outpace them all with QuickBASIC." But the reality of his mindset was seen on the East versus West "Computer Bowl" around 1988. The three questions I saw him answer were very revealing:
(1) "SPOOL" describes a queueing operation, such as sending a document to a printer device. What does the acronym SPOOL stand for?
Gates: No clue.
Answer: Simultaneous Peripheral Operations On-Line.(Granted, it's understandable that such trivia could easily be missed, even though I knew it.)
(2) MIDI is the standard for Musical Instruments Digital Interface... but How Many pins are in a MIDI plug?
Gates: No clue.
Answer: Five. (THIS is the man who claims he will bring us multimedia on the PCs? Has he ever LOOKED at multimedia instruments or technology?)
(3) Who is the top earning CEO in the Computer Industry?
Gates: "JOHN SCULLEY OF APPLE!" (Correct!)
I think he may have even quoted the salary Sculley was making! It didn't take him a blink of an eye to issue that answer. It also took him only two more years to get that answer changed to "Bill Gates." From that point on, it was clear to me where Bill Gates "inventive" mind really is.
Why can't one phone send a stream of a sampled audio memo from its ram to the IR of another phone directly to an FTP site? Why do we still not use Dick Tracy 2way video watches or tune cable channels wherever we go?
It's not so much a issue of bandwidth... compression just keeps getting better; Rather, it's the OS of protocols and command structures we have yet to invent. Early devices would only address the microphone and earpiece as all-useful... Actually using the packet stream is rather recent. The Microsoft school of thought is terribly constraining in its "device metaphore"... even the APIs are machines and the machines must be fed very narrow parameters. Unix goes the other way in that it's used to piping generic streams to a generic filespace. What's missing are the protocols.
Perhaps BXXP will fill this niche... or perhaps it'll take something newer still. But the silliest part of it all is that we're watching the barriers fall now and will continue to see more integration, both now and in the years to come.
In a certain headquarters of The Salvation Army, we got a 50 user (luser?) license for Office 200 Professional. Installed it from the original CD, only for the 50 activations registration requirement to kick in. (First software I've seen to *require* registration for simple use... talk about Big Brother!) When we called about the dilemna, we were just short of being called thieves! It went something like this:
"Hi, we've installed the Office 2000 Professional on the first few of our machines and get this registration requirement."
"Well, let's get the product key from ya..."
We read off a key from the Enigma device...
"Oh, it's no wonder. You're violating licensing!"
"No we're not, we bought another 50 user lisence." Insistance and paperwork persues to demonstrate the veracity of our right to the product we bought.
"Hmmm. Let me send you another CD with a new product key code. That should get you past it."
It'd be nice to get an apology for their false accusation. I wonder how many they persuade to crumble into the double purchase. This "guilty until proven innocent" approach must be a PR nightmare, not that Microsoft seems to worry about PR anymore. Still, it says to me that they continue a "cold warfare" to deprive the customer of money, short of violence but not short of threatening litigation.
Most "strong" interactions are measured upon contact or in the levels and quanta of an atom's electron cloud.
Electromagnetism is one of these that at least radiates to a distance similar to gravity... and thus a radio wave can be heard on the other side of the planet and beyond. Yet even EM doesn't match gravity's uniquely far reaching ability to bend space and time.
If Newton's equation is taken at face value, without factoring in theories of how gravity may be quantitized, then the sense of scope is amazing:
Makes you feel empowered, doesn't it?Both Microsofts would still be at liberty to invent new proprietary formats and masquerade them as standards. (Each for their own separate specialty.) Both would likely continue the trend, started by the original Microsoft, in popularizing contractual licenses instead of merely "selling" software. Both might even work vidictively to prove the courts wrong about how beneficial the breakup would be, choosing instead to make interoperability more difficult and wear it on their sleeve like an injured party.
There is little reason to believe that the remedy would really make them more compassionate to their customers. As much room for improvement as there is, there is just as much room for further failure when their only measure of success is the money they sucker us for. They'll continue to bring us some of the best innovation their money can buy... but on their terms.
Yet the power struggle of personal empowerment versus corporate greed tends to battle, cycling over one another. (The same people who empowered us with MSBASIC in every old home computer are now the same ones who hide APIs internally.) Since programs can not only include trojan horses and logic bombs, and lisencing has become a funny rat's maze of contractual obligations, the battle is bound to get interesting. Perhaps the very programs we "summon" will be difficult to "subjegate."(Yeah, wouldn't that make an interesting CyberPunk premise... Run with it!)
M$ has proven that a corporation can wage Cold Warfare on its own customers and partners. GNU and Open Source movements have shown that the people don't have to subject themselves to that food chain if they don't want to. Protests in "the revolt" aren't as subtle as M$'s ways... perhaps they're "hot warfare" although far short of the extreme warfare seen in nuclear exchange.
Hot and Cold running warfare. In the end, it's all very low energy physics, frigid by the cosmic scale. Programs are written either for the left-brain drudgery of corporate protocol, or for the expression of personal creativity.
New meaning to "capturing eyes", too.
Not only can you edit it all with simple, user-friendly tools, but with the same tool; an all-purpose thin-client XML-form editor.
Let *nix rule in open programmability, and Mac in UI consistency; but a bridge like this could make for RAD development of UI-simple apps.
I'm sure there are. Just from experience, their Proxy Server 2.0 will default to their default to their proprietary WinNT Challenge/Response protocol for authentication. This really sucks for SETI@home, RealPlayer, and all non-MSIE (Netscape) Browsers, because the proxy won't function like a proxy to non-MS products unless you dig into the settings and disable the defaults.
And of course, that doesn't even scratch the surface of email filtering in Outlook Express and WebTV.
Energy moves in waves. Our biosphere is sustained by the cycling energy of daily rotations and seasonal shifts. Each member of the food chain reciprocates what it gets with what it gives. But what is given back in free beer software?
The credo of those opposing Free or Open Source software movements is usually TANSTAAFL. As mentioned in this article, software from a business can be free to some (such as non-profits) while its net pricetag is subsidized by others. Yet, the GNU project and the standards of Internet weren't built by businesses as much as they were built by individuals, each taking the personal cost of contributing. (For instance, HTML was largely inspired by Ted Nelson's early quest for Xanadu.) Some are paid back in microcelebrity or even better jobs and grants. Others have given unconditionally without reward. These pioneers made the effort, not so much for money, as for the personal empowerment of software.
Love really does make the world go around: The thing that best guarantees success is for human attention and concern to be lavished skillfully on a goal. Sometimes it seems that corporations will totally rule the world... until the court of public opinion turns the tide against them. These are like yin and yang cycling over one another: Propriety-mindedness and control versus personal liberty.
We're seeing a turn of this cycle happen when businesses turn to businesses (B2B) in a trend away from catering to consumers (B2C). Consumer backlash sometimes sparks this trend. Still, consumers have little use for computers without personal empowerment, so they will empower their own. (C2C?)
Free Beer Software will flourish just out of the human attention it gets. One day, the wireless web will be so pervasive that we can call out URLs like incantations, summoning any manner of program to be carried out. Such a post-scarcity world will be glorious!
Video based ("non-applicance")UIs are a wonderful field to pioneer: Once we get beyond crude motion detection, to actually interperating gestures (surpassing the work of Myron Kreuger's Videoplace), we can interface with a computer back home just by dialing it up on the videophone! Pity the Max Headroom series didn't foresee that!
Jaron Lanier invented the dataglove/powerglove, and demonstrated how it can teach eye-hand experience, even teaching himself to juggle. Yet, he regards musical instruments to be the greatest refinement of human interface. Imagine combining the genuis of Hawking, Kreuger, and Lanier into the science of UI. Add a sprinkling of Xerox PARC, Todd Rudgren, and the sense of Brenda Laurel, then simmer until done.
I've known lawyers to serve their own coffers with prolonged settlement negotiations rather than serve justice. Checks and Balances would be tricky enough to institute... but Open Law?!
I believe it was Jefferson, once a lawyer, who said "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." Yet, he'd be rolling in his grave if he learned what a superhuman complexity it has grown into.
Not at all like the cheesey acrostics we use here in the States!
If it could also avoid Wince's Tower of Babel, that would be another big plus... not a big prob for Linux.