The fact that the most popular browser is broken and the MS does not want to fix is a result of two factors. First, MS was allowed to become and stay a monopoly, and therefore not subject to the normal free market forces. Second, the computer industry was allowed to put forth this fiction of not being responsible for the incompetent design of their products, and therefore not subject to the litigation that has protected the American public from predatory corporate practices.
I do not for a second believe that there is anything in IE that could not be fixed. However, MS has continued to refuse to implement even the simple stuff, like pop-up blockers. And there is no reason why they should. The view from the bottom line dictates to spend only that money needed to keep market share and profits. Therefore it is very reasonable to give deep discounts to institutional customers, but would be silly to waste money on improving the product merely to meet end user needs, especially when those changes could negatively impact profit in other areas.
We all need a kick in the ass to become responsible. MS has never received that kick, so all it design decision, like the deep integration between the kernel and services, between data and presentation, arbitrary changes in protocols and standards, are geared to protect market share rather than customer service.
The admonishing to stop using IE, or modify the defaults to make it more secure, are not practical. To protect market share MS has encourage Industry, Government, and Academia to use those very features that endanger the user. To redesign those web sites to work with other browsers, if at all possible, would require massive efforts. Efforts that likely would not find sufficient funding.
Make no mistake. This is a result of irresponsible behavior of a person or group of persons that prize money over all else. These problems have been know for a long time. There has been plenty of time for MS to design IE properly. There has been plenty of time for Windows to be designed properly. In fact they completely squandered the opportunity to make NT better, and then implement the better OS into the consumer version. MS could have worked on open standards that would let all browsers work instead of pushing IE only sites. Instead they chose the side of evil.
The scary thing about this is that it was rated insightful instead of funny.
The entire discussion is baseless as the linked articles do not indicate any sort of wide spread fraud. To wit: The Iowa Weights and Measures Bureau's inspection records show that inaccurate fuel meters pump out more gas than expected just as often as they shortchange customers. Records also show the rate of inaccurate pumps is down from 6 percent in recent years. eight out of 24 pumps at this one station to be shortchanging customers
So we see that in the the first article the inspectors claim that on average consumers are not affected. In the second article we find that 1/3 of the pumps are below the spec for specific delivery. The article does not state whether the rest of the pumps deliver more product. However, the article indicates that the error is about 1%. If we assume that the none of the other unit deliver more product, this means that on average the pumps deliver about 1/3% less gas. This means that if you lose 1 gallon for every 300 you buy. If one uses 20 gallons a week, you are being cheated out 2.5 gallons, or, at current prices, around $5.
True this will add up for the station, but it clearly points to sensationalist reporting. We must ask is the owner going pay someone to hack the gas units so that this magical new delivery curve is produced. Are the gas pumps capable of doing anything other than a somewhat linear deliver of gas? How accurate are the flow meters that measure the flow? Is the +/- 1% the best that can be managed with reasonable technology?
You are correct about the article, and the general correctness of what Russinovich says. You are also correct that mot posters miss the point. However, the reality is that if the article accurately represents the thrust of Russinovich's talk, then the negative posts are not totally out of line.
The fact is that everything reported in the first half of the article is a rehash of MS FUD. For instance he tries to give MS a history that stretches as far back as UNIX. Sure, if we count CP/M, Apple DOS, PC-DOS, then Windows is about the same age as Unix. However, as Russinovich appears to admit, the real birth of Windows was in 90's, and this was with the introduction of NT which was a hybrid of VMS. Windows XP has as much to with MS-DOS as Mac OS 9.0 has to do with Apple DOS.
This continues with the odd phrase 'DEC VMS Unix. While DEC VMS and Unix were both developed on DEC hardware, VMS was made to more tightly integrate with DEC hardware and replace Unix, and compete with IBM MVS. While DEC had a Unix, it was not VMS.
So, assuming that he actually used that phrase, why would he try to be misleading. To answer that we note that the article tries to bring up the issue of IP controversy of Linux. Why this would be necessary in a lecture on kernels is beyond me. We know that Linux was made to provide a OSS replace for Unix. We know that Linux has some similarities to Minix, but has a different architecture philosophy. We know the IP controversy is created to create FUD. We ask, why, in a technical discussion, it is mentioned.
And this is what points to the entire talk being nothing more than another attempt at deception by the MS forces. We know that much of what he says is not true. But most of the world does not. Most of the world is going to believe that VMS was Unix. Most of the world is going to believe that the new MS Windows was guided by a Unix guy at least equal to Torvalds. Most are going to see that the lineage of Linux is questionable, while the MS Windows is pure. Most are going to use these assumption to accept the later assertion that the Windows kernels and Linux kernels are probably becoming more closely similar, because they share the common history.
Yet, as the informed person know, these assumptions are simply wrong. It is not that there is no cross pollination between kernels. This naturally occurs. It is not that Windows had some good ideas and these were reluctantly incorporated into Linux. It is that the world seems to on this move towards *nix type OS, and, even though MS is not a *nix, and is not even based on a *nix, it wants to claim the benefits of a *nix.
VMS already lost the battle to the *nix forces. DEC is no more. We will see what happens in round two.
Even better, steal the iPod. This offer creates a ready market for hot iPods.
And the for the people who this makes no sense, it is actually quite clever. A new dell is $99. To refurbish the old iPod out fo warrenty, $99. It might be enough to get some to switch.
The Society of Automotive Engineers, which established the existing VIN system in 1981 and expected it to last 30 years, has formed a committee to address the impending shortage.
Perhaps I am daft, or perhaps the reporting was inaccurate, but I do not see the crisis. The second quote indicates the system was established in 1981 and was expect to last 30 years, which is 2011. The first quote indicates that the numbers will run out around 2009. Does this mean that the auto industry is in crisis because of a 10% error in their estimation? It really sounds like the numbers running out was expected, and the meeting to discuss the future should just be routine.
Unlike the Y2K thing, in which everyone assumed that computers would be replaced regularly, there was certainly no doubt that we would still be making cars in 2010, and if we depended on a VIN, those cars would need one.
From a programming point of view, I am sure many database designers used the VIN as the primary key, and this is why it will cost so much to revamp. After all, we were all assured that the number will always unique. Common sense, however, tells us not to trust anything we don't have total control over, and not to make design decisions based on the assumption that outside forces will never change their minds. Therefore, it might make sense for an auto manufacturer to use the VIN as a primary key. However, I wonder why it made sense for everyone else to do the same, assuming that this is the case.
This is a good example of the random jumbling of facts to prove a point. Take at face value, the appear to prove a point, but none stand the test of rationality.
We have inklings from research that the public considers the media biased to the left. Whether this is reality of a artifact of public expectations is pretty much unknown. What is for sure is that prior assumptions, and the parent post is full of them, will tend to skew results. One of the big benefits of the scientific method is the process's ability to minimize that skew, what we called systematic error, but even when applied perfectly it is not 100% effective. Many politically based research studies do not even attempt to honestly apply the process.
So, what does this mean. First, the PRG says a large number of the press are liberal. This may be so. Then there is the assertion that about 1/5 as many people of the press voted for Bush, Sr than the general public. This may be so. However, by putting these two together, a connection is created that may or may not be valid. The author just assumed the two were connected. This may not be the case. In a country where many people call themselves independent, voting for a person does not imply political leaning. Though the two fact were put together to corroborate each other, no cooperation in fact exists. As I will note late, if we take the spectrum of political belief to be a bell curve, there are very few at the extremes and very many in the middle. The middle can go either direction.
Second, an uncited study indicates that in a certain sample of the press, 75% of those surveyed did not identify any media outlets as liberal. If , for the sake of argument, we assume the survey in fact does exist and was in fact valid, what does this mean? If we assume that the the political beliefs of the press are distributed as a normal curve, perhaps shifted a little to the left, the survey indicates that anyone further than 1 SD from the center believes that the press is too conservative. So, if believe the survey a slight bias might exist, either to the left for the press or to the right for the popular outlets, but most of the effect can be explained by the normal distribution. This study, therefore, indicates that the press is much more representative of the political spectrum than the parent posts would want us to believe.
Third, a cited study that says the press is liberally biased and that certain programs on FOX are at the center of the political spectrum. Due to the source of the reports being from a purported liberal institution, the study itself is insinuated to be fair. However, most us know that public universities do not tend to overly discriminate on political issues, being rather more concerned with the professors ability to get money and write articles. In this case if we look at the authors of the study, we find that the authors may in fact have a strong conservative bias. They both have papers defending the right of corporations to contribute money to politicians. In fact Milyo indicates that majority rule many note be so effective, and one might draw the conclusions that he longs for the day when rich white men controlled the government.
So, the parent post is an exercise in circular argument. Most of the facts are from the cited study. The study may or may not accurate represent reality. The study may or may not have hand picked data that insured the desired result. What we do know is the fact cited do not link in any meaningful manner.
What we also know is that profit making media institutions will taylor thier coverage in such a way that it will tend to maximize attration to thier chosen demographic. This would tend to indicate that the coverage is not a the center of the general populous, but the populous the media outlets wants.
Make no mistake, this leaves the Windows operating system open to a wide array of potentially fatal problems. Thousands of developers worldwide, who YOU DON"T EVEN KNOW, are going to write the code that YOU USE. You will have no assurance that the code is to the quality specifications of MS. The OS you are running may even have easter eggs added by TERRORISTS. And you will have no way of knowing.
This license also induces MASSIVE FORKING. You will have no way of knowing that the version of Windows you use will work the way you expect. Millions of version of Windows CE will be created, each slightly incompatible.
I know what you mean about the lab equipment. I have work with HP power supplies that are so old the manual come on micro fiche, yet the supplies work as well as the day they were made. I don't realy do much with HP commercial products anymore, so I don't know the quality of these..
However in the consumer market their stuff is generaly not reliable, and I think, as other posters say, that is due to the expected price and reliability of the equipment. For instance, you once spent $500 on a basic printer and it would last a really long time. You could design a really good and reliable printer because the customer would pay the money. You could make the printer overreliable because the technology was not changing that much and people expected to keep a printer for a few years, and would pay on that expectations. This was the case for many peices of equipment.
Then computing equipment became a commodity product that would be out of date in a year. Manufacturers were pressured to design equipment that would encourage customers to upgrade every year. Not every manufacturer did this, but HP, being a Windows drone, jumped on the bandwagon.
Of course it does not help that many commercial operations buy consumer level hardware and software, for example many used MS Windows 95/98 instead of NT, instead of the more appropriate commercial products.
Cash gifts often wind up being spent on groceries, or rent, or gasoline
I suppose forcing someone to buy an item they otherwise wouldn't could be construed to be a good thing. After all, new music or movies are a nice treat. My tendencies are not to habitually ask or give gifts. If I see something that I know someone would want, I buy and treat is as a random act of kindness.
The intersting thing is that my dad did the exact opposite. He gave me gift certificates to the grocery store. That way, if I were broke, I would be sure to have a way to buy food. If I had money, i could use it to buy fun stuff other than food. I must admit one year I abused the gift. I blew the entire wad on buying junk for a new years party.
Of course it presents a specific point of view. It is made by a person taking into account his audience.
He uses a specific set of fact patterns. Other people use other sets of fact patterns. Be an intelligent person and try to get a wide variety of fact patterns before you decide what you will consider the most likely truth. If anyone believe that any single source is going to use an objective set of fact patterns, then that person is naive beyond any help.
And please, don't confuse the office of the President with the person holding the office. Confusing the two, and inducing confusion of the two, is the first step to a dictatorship. The former is an institution. The later is a person who was elected to guard that institution. The former is something that must be protected. The later is someone who should be willing to give his reputation and life to protect and serve. This means that criticizing the person is not treason. Sometimes that person needs to be criticized. Sometimes that person is a liar. Sometimes that person is sex addict. Sometimes, for example, that person is drug addict, and we know the TV has told us that drug addicts support terrorists.
So, no hitting below the belt. No calling people traitors for exercising constitutionally protected free speech. As we used to say, if you don't like it, go to Russia. Or, in other words, if you can't take the heat, get you wussy ass out of the kitchen. So no invoking war scenarios for a war that congress never declared. And remember, all sides are torturing humans, and everyone loves their kids equally.
A similiar thing happened to me about a year ago. I was at a house concert with an indie band. I was ready to buy thier CD until I say some crap about Windows compatibility on the back. I don't know if it was DRM, and didn't really waste my time asking. I put it back and saved my money for the indie bands that distribute standard compliant CD.
I find it fascinating that IBM is now the defender of free software and Sun and MS are the defender of closed software. This is a dangerous oversimplification.
First, what MS is prompting is software licensing, not closed software. They want everyone to pay a fee to gain the privilege to use a piece of software, and in the process agree to certain things that will insure a future cash-flow. All MS wants is money in exchange for software. This was somewhat of a new idea. The software itself was the product. It was no longer part of a service. If you wanted service, that will cost extra. It extended this concept through licensing with third parties. The purchaser of a system was now entitled to no MS support. The fee only covered the use of the software. Closed source or whatever is just a means to that end. One advantage to this is that hardware, software, and services are sold separately, which creates a confusion about responsibility and minimizes support costs.
IBM, OTOH, sells services. They want to sell you the hard and soft ware as well, but they are a solutions provider. As far as I know, they always have been. Obviously back in the 70's there was no software, so they had to write it. This worked until MS told everyone that MS could provide the same service for a lesser price, which was more or less a lie, but whatever. Now IBM is just trying to make the business model work. They can put their solutions around whatever OS. They just want to sell the solutions. It turns out that the best way they can gain market-share back from MS is by supported OSS. MS really has no defense against this because they have no reputation as a service provider.
Sun is just trying to survive. The settlement is part of that survival and cannot be taken as evidence of anything. Sun has been abused as much as SCO. They have had as much technology 'misappropriated'. Unlike SCO, they are not carpet bombing the industry. They are working hard to create a competetive product.
Additionally, there are often question of why IBM did not buy out SCO. My belief is that we cannot assume they did not try. Until recently a majority of SCO stock was held by insiders, and much of the rest by institutional investors. I believe this means that it would have been very hard for IBM to just buy a block of stock at market prices, then go in and replace the board. They would have had to negotiate with the board, and one assumes that the board would have laughed at a 20 million, or even 80 million, dollar offer, which was the SCO market cap.
I never found excel that useful for scientific analysis in the first place. It was slow and I never trusted it completed. Even with macros I found it to be lacking in throughput. Instead I did data filtering C/C++/Fortran, and then plotted data in Gnuplot. It was fast an reliable.
This again shows the difference between the Mac and PC design. In most cases, the PC is designed to meet a low price point. Anything that can be removed is removed. Extra expansion slots are important because what is being sold is a bare bones system. To gain reasonable functionilty, boards will have to be added. This is not neccesarily a bad thing. It does require a level of technical know how.
OTOH, Apple tries to include the basics. This is not always possible, even at the higher price point. However, as you say, you almost never have to add a board to get basic connectivity. I was reminded of this recently when someone asked me if I my Mac was easy to network. This reminded me that Macs were always easy to network. Perhaps it was not a fast network. Perhaps in was not a widely compatible network. But everything was there for plug and play.
This type of solar power is like the space elevator. It has been around forever, the technological needs are well known, but no one can seem to get it done.
The difference is that the microwave solar power project has probably been technologically possible since before a single line of Sim City was ever written, and economically possible for at least 10 years. I remember my dad talking about how designs were making their way around the science magazines in the 70's. He said the everyone really expected a test project up by the 80's. It obviously never happened. It is really silly not to have an experimental platform in orbit, especially since there have been so many advance in solar power generation.
The big obstacles I see are safety, environmental, economics, and military. Obviously, the satellite is transmitting a lot of power, and so a large buffer area will be needed to prevent casualty. Such an area will be a site of environmental damage, so we will have to study that. I doubt that the power generation will yet be profitable, but that does not preclude launching a test vehicle and building a test site. Finally, the satellite will be hard to defend and would be a target for those who with to disable a country, but unlikely more so than the GPS vehicles.
Most of these are equally true of fission power, which has received tons of money for little results. I wonder if the Big Problem is that many researchers are not comfortable with the cost and complexity of space research, and may therefore shy away from it. The ones who are confortable with space are tend to be more focused on military needs.
I have often wished that apple would build a cell phone, and the buttons are a big reason why. The form factor of the phone is determined by the buttons and the screen. The buttons are getting smaller and the screen is getting larger. In fact, the buttons are so small as to be useless.
I almost never dial a call. The only reason the buttons are needed is to program the phone. Otheriwse the phone features often negate the need to manually dial a call. If the phone synched with my mac, then there would be little reason for them. If I do need to dial the phone, perhaps a touch screen can be used that will display a numeric or full alpha keyboard. This would also allow notes to be taken during a conversation, something that is very difficult to do with current phones.
In fact I envision this phone to be the size of an ipod mini, and have all the feature of the most advance phone, without the anachronistic 'features'. For example, I would replace a built in speaker and microphone with a bluetooth headset. All the buttons and gizmos could be replaced by the ipod nav pad. A 1-2 gig hard disk could hold all your pictures and even record conversations. I can even imagine an optional bluetooth keyboard for those would want one, for texting and the like.
The issue is even more complex. The punishment for a crime should not encourage the suspect to use a greater level of violence to avoid capture than already in use in the crime. The punishment should also not put innocent bystanders at increased risk.
For example at sporting events certain behaviors are prohibited. The emphasized punishment for the behavior is ejection from the venue. If the action is a crime, the event may press charges. Most events that I have attended do not say that all prohibited action will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The reason, I believe, is because such statement might encourage suspects to be more resistant to the punishment, an in the process put innocent people at risk. For example, one can imagine some object accidently getting thrown onto the court. This obviously put player health at risk, and arguable could be the basis for a criminal prosecution. If the suspects thought that jail time was a real possibility, then they might choose to use violence to defend themselves, as the jail time might not be significantly increased. As it is, they have an incentive to leave quietly to avoid further punishment.
And this is what the theaters are missing. By attaching a five year penalty to a nonviolent action, they are endangering my health, the health of staff, and the well being of any police called to enforce the action. I mean is someone who is risking five years for recording a movie going to worry about 10 years for injuring the people around him in his attempt to avoid capture? Is such a person going to worry about the riot he or she causes as they pull a gun to try to escape? I know that this is the extreme possibility, but one must make a full analysis before passing these laws.
People will do really stupid stuff out of fear. In the US we try hard to have a fair and open process of law to minimize that fear. The problem is that process is becoming less fair, for instance by the reduced access to proper representation for those who cannot afford it, and as a consequence these parties tend to feel they have less to lose, which makes them more a threat to society.
IE is an application front end. It allows a gui to be tacked on backend applications much more cheaply than traditional methods. It also allows cross platform compatibility(meaning that each version of MS Windows is an incompatable system).
For internal apps, this model makes alot of sense. The organazation has control of the computers and can insure consistent configuration, training, and security. The users can be monitored and likewise the users can trust the content. Therefore there is no issue with the server taking control of the client machine.
The problem is that web designers tend to assume that everyone on the internet should trust them, and everyone who uses IE tends to believe they can trust all web designers. Generic web pages are designed using features, and often frivoulous features at that, that require the server to control the host computer is scary ways.
I think MS realizes the problem and used security zones to try to provide a method by which IE can switch between a web browser and application front end. The problem is that like many failed security measures, it became too incovinent. Almost all internet sites should be marked as untrusted as placed in the lowest zone, but because so many sites are written badly, user tend to be forced to trust them or not get anything done.
A good example of this is the local school district, which standardized on IE and uses IE features extensively. Within the schools there is little problems. The district does a good job at protecting and training internal users. The problem is that the internet pages, including the home page, only works well on IE. In this way the district is forcing students and parents to use a browser that is verifiable unsafe. Internally they have a need to use IE. Externally, there is little reason for them to ignore standard best practice.
One thing that Sinclair pointed out in The Jungle was how new immigrants were abused on their arrival by the meat packing plants. They could work at the plants, but the plants didn't pay enough to live. They could have a company sponsored place to live, but could be kicked with little cause. They could pay to have a lawyer look at the contracts, but all lawyers were connected to the company, and there would be no job and no house if all terms were not agreed to.
This seems absolutely socialist behavior compared to what is being promoted by these licensing agreements. At least the immigrants knew they were being fucked and had the ability to discern exactly how fucked they were before they signed the papers. Now agreements are not even generally made available prior to the contract signing, i.e. purchase, and are often made available in hard copy only after the additional agreement is reached. I admire companies like verizon suppling their agreements before a contract, i.e. sale, is reached. However, one has to wonder when the courts are going to decide that the general populous is just too stupid to comprehend these agreements. which are written for corporate lawyers, and therefore have to be ruled null and void.
it is worse than that. I have flash installed, but have it on demand (flashblocker). I can't see a thing.
The stupidity is that this is not a site trying to support itself by selling third party products. this site is dedicated to promoting a single product, and should be designed to promote said product is any many different ways as possible to as many different people as possible. The way it is set up just indicates a careless webmaster or incompetant management. In many cases, the advertisements are actualy made with more care than the product, which in this case bodes ill for the movie.
Congratulations on getting to be an extra. Went to the page, went to guerrilla marketing, and tried to look the money and forum link. In camino got an error on both, too many redirects. May not be your site, but something seems like it is broken.
That says it all. That is why i think firefly is a better that the late incarnations of Star Trek and B5. Don't get me wrong. B5 is a wonderful story that is more ambitious and make a better effort to be technically accurate than practically any other sci-fi show. And Star Trek is great, it is the Granddaddy.
But the time travel, unless we are traveling in time and not space, is the overused plot device of the past ten or 15 years. Enterprise sucks because that is the basis of the whole show, and hopefully they can compensate for the mistake. B5 was nearly fatally wounded by it's misuse of the time line.
But Firefly concentrates on the basics. The relationships. The flawed characters. The goal of living life the best you can. You don't have people floating willy nilly in and out of time. You don't have have people going back and forth in time so that the writers can cowardly destroy a ship at the beginning of the episode only to have it resurrected at the end. All you have is a totally unbelievable ship floating throughout a totally unbelievable universe with totally unbelievable characters. Just like real life.
This is also why Battlestar Galactica was so cool.
Slashdot Mirror
Just part of g-ds plan fill the work with joyful noise, and smoke out the guy next to you, of course.
I do not for a second believe that there is anything in IE that could not be fixed. However, MS has continued to refuse to implement even the simple stuff, like pop-up blockers. And there is no reason why they should. The view from the bottom line dictates to spend only that money needed to keep market share and profits. Therefore it is very reasonable to give deep discounts to institutional customers, but would be silly to waste money on improving the product merely to meet end user needs, especially when those changes could negatively impact profit in other areas.
We all need a kick in the ass to become responsible. MS has never received that kick, so all it design decision, like the deep integration between the kernel and services, between data and presentation, arbitrary changes in protocols and standards, are geared to protect market share rather than customer service.
The admonishing to stop using IE, or modify the defaults to make it more secure, are not practical. To protect market share MS has encourage Industry, Government, and Academia to use those very features that endanger the user. To redesign those web sites to work with other browsers, if at all possible, would require massive efforts. Efforts that likely would not find sufficient funding.
Make no mistake. This is a result of irresponsible behavior of a person or group of persons that prize money over all else. These problems have been know for a long time. There has been plenty of time for MS to design IE properly. There has been plenty of time for Windows to be designed properly. In fact they completely squandered the opportunity to make NT better, and then implement the better OS into the consumer version. MS could have worked on open standards that would let all browsers work instead of pushing IE only sites. Instead they chose the side of evil.
The entire discussion is baseless as the linked articles do not indicate any sort of wide spread fraud. To wit:
The Iowa Weights and Measures Bureau's inspection records show that inaccurate fuel meters pump out more gas than expected just as often as they shortchange customers. Records also show the rate of inaccurate pumps is down from 6 percent in recent years.
eight out of 24 pumps at this one station to be shortchanging customers
So we see that in the the first article the inspectors claim that on average consumers are not affected. In the second article we find that 1/3 of the pumps are below the spec for specific delivery. The article does not state whether the rest of the pumps deliver more product. However, the article indicates that the error is about 1%. If we assume that the none of the other unit deliver more product, this means that on average the pumps deliver about 1/3% less gas. This means that if you lose 1 gallon for every 300 you buy. If one uses 20 gallons a week, you are being cheated out 2.5 gallons, or, at current prices, around $5.
True this will add up for the station, but it clearly points to sensationalist reporting. We must ask is the owner going pay someone to hack the gas units so that this magical new delivery curve is produced. Are the gas pumps capable of doing anything other than a somewhat linear deliver of gas? How accurate are the flow meters that measure the flow? Is the +/- 1% the best that can be managed with reasonable technology?
The fact is that everything reported in the first half of the article is a rehash of MS FUD. For instance he tries to give MS a history that stretches as far back as UNIX. Sure, if we count CP/M, Apple DOS, PC-DOS, then Windows is about the same age as Unix. However, as Russinovich appears to admit, the real birth of Windows was in 90's, and this was with the introduction of NT which was a hybrid of VMS. Windows XP has as much to with MS-DOS as Mac OS 9.0 has to do with Apple DOS.
This continues with the odd phrase 'DEC VMS Unix. While DEC VMS and Unix were both developed on DEC hardware, VMS was made to more tightly integrate with DEC hardware and replace Unix, and compete with IBM MVS. While DEC had a Unix, it was not VMS.
So, assuming that he actually used that phrase, why would he try to be misleading. To answer that we note that the article tries to bring up the issue of IP controversy of Linux. Why this would be necessary in a lecture on kernels is beyond me. We know that Linux was made to provide a OSS replace for Unix. We know that Linux has some similarities to Minix, but has a different architecture philosophy. We know the IP controversy is created to create FUD. We ask, why, in a technical discussion, it is mentioned.
And this is what points to the entire talk being nothing more than another attempt at deception by the MS forces. We know that much of what he says is not true. But most of the world does not. Most of the world is going to believe that VMS was Unix. Most of the world is going to believe that the new MS Windows was guided by a Unix guy at least equal to Torvalds. Most are going to see that the lineage of Linux is questionable, while the MS Windows is pure. Most are going to use these assumption to accept the later assertion that the Windows kernels and Linux kernels are probably becoming more closely similar, because they share the common history.
Yet, as the informed person know, these assumptions are simply wrong. It is not that there is no cross pollination between kernels. This naturally occurs. It is not that Windows had some good ideas and these were reluctantly incorporated into Linux. It is that the world seems to on this move towards *nix type OS, and, even though MS is not a *nix, and is not even based on a *nix, it wants to claim the benefits of a *nix.
VMS already lost the battle to the *nix forces. DEC is no more. We will see what happens in round two.
And the for the people who this makes no sense, it is actually quite clever. A new dell is $99. To refurbish the old iPod out fo warrenty, $99. It might be enough to get some to switch.
The Society of Automotive Engineers, which established the existing VIN system in 1981 and expected it to last 30 years, has formed a committee to address the impending shortage.
Perhaps I am daft, or perhaps the reporting was inaccurate, but I do not see the crisis. The second quote indicates the system was established in 1981 and was expect to last 30 years, which is 2011. The first quote indicates that the numbers will run out around 2009. Does this mean that the auto industry is in crisis because of a 10% error in their estimation? It really sounds like the numbers running out was expected, and the meeting to discuss the future should just be routine.
Unlike the Y2K thing, in which everyone assumed that computers would be replaced regularly, there was certainly no doubt that we would still be making cars in 2010, and if we depended on a VIN, those cars would need one.
From a programming point of view, I am sure many database designers used the VIN as the primary key, and this is why it will cost so much to revamp. After all, we were all assured that the number will always unique. Common sense, however, tells us not to trust anything we don't have total control over, and not to make design decisions based on the assumption that outside forces will never change their minds. Therefore, it might make sense for an auto manufacturer to use the VIN as a primary key. However, I wonder why it made sense for everyone else to do the same, assuming that this is the case.
We have inklings from research that the public considers the media biased to the left. Whether this is reality of a artifact of public expectations is pretty much unknown. What is for sure is that prior assumptions, and the parent post is full of them, will tend to skew results. One of the big benefits of the scientific method is the process's ability to minimize that skew, what we called systematic error, but even when applied perfectly it is not 100% effective. Many politically based research studies do not even attempt to honestly apply the process.
So, what does this mean. First, the PRG says a large number of the press are liberal. This may be so. Then there is the assertion that about 1/5 as many people of the press voted for Bush, Sr than the general public. This may be so. However, by putting these two together, a connection is created that may or may not be valid. The author just assumed the two were connected. This may not be the case. In a country where many people call themselves independent, voting for a person does not imply political leaning. Though the two fact were put together to corroborate each other, no cooperation in fact exists. As I will note late, if we take the spectrum of political belief to be a bell curve, there are very few at the extremes and very many in the middle. The middle can go either direction.
Second, an uncited study indicates that in a certain sample of the press, 75% of those surveyed did not identify any media outlets as liberal. If , for the sake of argument, we assume the survey in fact does exist and was in fact valid, what does this mean? If we assume that the the political beliefs of the press are distributed as a normal curve, perhaps shifted a little to the left, the survey indicates that anyone further than 1 SD from the center believes that the press is too conservative. So, if believe the survey a slight bias might exist, either to the left for the press or to the right for the popular outlets, but most of the effect can be explained by the normal distribution. This study, therefore, indicates that the press is much more representative of the political spectrum than the parent posts would want us to believe.
Third, a cited study that says the press is liberally biased and that certain programs on FOX are at the center of the political spectrum. Due to the source of the reports being from a purported liberal institution, the study itself is insinuated to be fair. However, most us know that public universities do not tend to overly discriminate on political issues, being rather more concerned with the professors ability to get money and write articles. In this case if we look at the authors of the study, we find that the authors may in fact have a strong conservative bias. They both have papers defending the right of corporations to contribute money to politicians. In fact Milyo indicates that majority rule many note be so effective, and one might draw the conclusions that he longs for the day when rich white men controlled the government.
So, the parent post is an exercise in circular argument. Most of the facts are from the cited study. The study may or may not accurate represent reality. The study may or may not have hand picked data that insured the desired result. What we do know is the fact cited do not link in any meaningful manner.
What we also know is that profit making media institutions will taylor thier coverage in such a way that it will tend to maximize attration to thier chosen demographic. This would tend to indicate that the coverage is not a the center of the general populous, but the populous the media outlets wants.
This license also induces MASSIVE FORKING. You will have no way of knowing that the version of Windows you use will work the way you expect. Millions of version of Windows CE will be created, each slightly incompatible.
It must be the chauvinism.
I don't disagree with sentiment, but really,
get
a
life!
However in the consumer market their stuff is generaly not reliable, and I think, as other posters say, that is due to the expected price and reliability of the equipment. For instance, you once spent $500 on a basic printer and it would last a really long time. You could design a really good and reliable printer because the customer would pay the money. You could make the printer overreliable because the technology was not changing that much and people expected to keep a printer for a few years, and would pay on that expectations. This was the case for many peices of equipment.
Then computing equipment became a commodity product that would be out of date in a year. Manufacturers were pressured to design equipment that would encourage customers to upgrade every year. Not every manufacturer did this, but HP, being a Windows drone, jumped on the bandwagon.
Of course it does not help that many commercial operations buy consumer level hardware and software, for example many used MS Windows 95/98 instead of NT, instead of the more appropriate commercial products.
I suppose forcing someone to buy an item they otherwise wouldn't could be construed to be a good thing. After all, new music or movies are a nice treat. My tendencies are not to habitually ask or give gifts. If I see something that I know someone would want, I buy and treat is as a random act of kindness.
The intersting thing is that my dad did the exact opposite. He gave me gift certificates to the grocery store. That way, if I were broke, I would be sure to have a way to buy food. If I had money, i could use it to buy fun stuff other than food. I must admit one year I abused the gift. I blew the entire wad on buying junk for a new years party.
Of course it presents a specific point of view. It is made by a person taking into account his audience.
He uses a specific set of fact patterns. Other people use other sets of fact patterns. Be an intelligent person and try to get a wide variety of fact patterns before you decide what you will consider the most likely truth. If anyone believe that any single source is going to use an objective set of fact patterns, then that person is naive beyond any help.
And please, don't confuse the office of the President with the person holding the office. Confusing the two, and inducing confusion of the two, is the first step to a dictatorship. The former is an institution. The later is a person who was elected to guard that institution. The former is something that must be protected. The later is someone who should be willing to give his reputation and life to protect and serve. This means that criticizing the person is not treason. Sometimes that person needs to be criticized. Sometimes that person is a liar. Sometimes that person is sex addict. Sometimes, for example, that person is drug addict, and we know the TV has told us that drug addicts support terrorists.
So, no hitting below the belt. No calling people traitors for exercising constitutionally protected free speech. As we used to say, if you don't like it, go to Russia. Or, in other words, if you can't take the heat, get you wussy ass out of the kitchen. So no invoking war scenarios for a war that congress never declared. And remember, all sides are torturing humans, and everyone loves their kids equally.
A similiar thing happened to me about a year ago. I was at a house concert with an indie band. I was ready to buy thier CD until I say some crap about Windows compatibility on the back. I don't know if it was DRM, and didn't really waste my time asking. I put it back and saved my money for the indie bands that distribute standard compliant CD.
First, what MS is prompting is software licensing, not closed software. They want everyone to pay a fee to gain the privilege to use a piece of software, and in the process agree to certain things that will insure a future cash-flow. All MS wants is money in exchange for software. This was somewhat of a new idea. The software itself was the product. It was no longer part of a service. If you wanted service, that will cost extra. It extended this concept through licensing with third parties. The purchaser of a system was now entitled to no MS support. The fee only covered the use of the software. Closed source or whatever is just a means to that end. One advantage to this is that hardware, software, and services are sold separately, which creates a confusion about responsibility and minimizes support costs.
IBM, OTOH, sells services. They want to sell you the hard and soft ware as well, but they are a solutions provider. As far as I know, they always have been. Obviously back in the 70's there was no software, so they had to write it. This worked until MS told everyone that MS could provide the same service for a lesser price, which was more or less a lie, but whatever. Now IBM is just trying to make the business model work. They can put their solutions around whatever OS. They just want to sell the solutions. It turns out that the best way they can gain market-share back from MS is by supported OSS. MS really has no defense against this because they have no reputation as a service provider.
Sun is just trying to survive. The settlement is part of that survival and cannot be taken as evidence of anything. Sun has been abused as much as SCO. They have had as much technology 'misappropriated'. Unlike SCO, they are not carpet bombing the industry. They are working hard to create a competetive product.
Additionally, there are often question of why IBM did not buy out SCO. My belief is that we cannot assume they did not try. Until recently a majority of SCO stock was held by insiders, and much of the rest by institutional investors. I believe this means that it would have been very hard for IBM to just buy a block of stock at market prices, then go in and replace the board. They would have had to negotiate with the board, and one assumes that the board would have laughed at a 20 million, or even 80 million, dollar offer, which was the SCO market cap.
I never found excel that useful for scientific analysis in the first place. It was slow and I never trusted it completed. Even with macros I found it to be lacking in throughput. Instead I did data filtering C/C++/Fortran, and then plotted data in Gnuplot. It was fast an reliable.
OTOH, Apple tries to include the basics. This is not always possible, even at the higher price point. However, as you say, you almost never have to add a board to get basic connectivity. I was reminded of this recently when someone asked me if I my Mac was easy to network. This reminded me that Macs were always easy to network. Perhaps it was not a fast network. Perhaps in was not a widely compatible network. But everything was there for plug and play.
The difference is that the microwave solar power project has probably been technologically possible since before a single line of Sim City was ever written, and economically possible for at least 10 years. I remember my dad talking about how designs were making their way around the science magazines in the 70's. He said the everyone really expected a test project up by the 80's. It obviously never happened. It is really silly not to have an experimental platform in orbit, especially since there have been so many advance in solar power generation.
The big obstacles I see are safety, environmental, economics, and military. Obviously, the satellite is transmitting a lot of power, and so a large buffer area will be needed to prevent casualty. Such an area will be a site of environmental damage, so we will have to study that. I doubt that the power generation will yet be profitable, but that does not preclude launching a test vehicle and building a test site. Finally, the satellite will be hard to defend and would be a target for those who with to disable a country, but unlikely more so than the GPS vehicles.
Most of these are equally true of fission power, which has received tons of money for little results. I wonder if the Big Problem is that many researchers are not comfortable with the cost and complexity of space research, and may therefore shy away from it. The ones who are confortable with space are tend to be more focused on military needs.
I almost never dial a call. The only reason the buttons are needed is to program the phone. Otheriwse the phone features often negate the need to manually dial a call. If the phone synched with my mac, then there would be little reason for them. If I do need to dial the phone, perhaps a touch screen can be used that will display a numeric or full alpha keyboard. This would also allow notes to be taken during a conversation, something that is very difficult to do with current phones.
In fact I envision this phone to be the size of an ipod mini, and have all the feature of the most advance phone, without the anachronistic 'features'. For example, I would replace a built in speaker and microphone with a bluetooth headset. All the buttons and gizmos could be replaced by the ipod nav pad. A 1-2 gig hard disk could hold all your pictures and even record conversations. I can even imagine an optional bluetooth keyboard for those would want one, for texting and the like.
For example at sporting events certain behaviors are prohibited. The emphasized punishment for the behavior is ejection from the venue. If the action is a crime, the event may press charges. Most events that I have attended do not say that all prohibited action will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The reason, I believe, is because such statement might encourage suspects to be more resistant to the punishment, an in the process put innocent people at risk. For example, one can imagine some object accidently getting thrown onto the court. This obviously put player health at risk, and arguable could be the basis for a criminal prosecution. If the suspects thought that jail time was a real possibility, then they might choose to use violence to defend themselves, as the jail time might not be significantly increased. As it is, they have an incentive to leave quietly to avoid further punishment.
And this is what the theaters are missing. By attaching a five year penalty to a nonviolent action, they are endangering my health, the health of staff, and the well being of any police called to enforce the action. I mean is someone who is risking five years for recording a movie going to worry about 10 years for injuring the people around him in his attempt to avoid capture? Is such a person going to worry about the riot he or she causes as they pull a gun to try to escape? I know that this is the extreme possibility, but one must make a full analysis before passing these laws.
People will do really stupid stuff out of fear. In the US we try hard to have a fair and open process of law to minimize that fear. The problem is that process is becoming less fair, for instance by the reduced access to proper representation for those who cannot afford it, and as a consequence these parties tend to feel they have less to lose, which makes them more a threat to society.
For internal apps, this model makes alot of sense. The organazation has control of the computers and can insure consistent configuration, training, and security. The users can be monitored and likewise the users can trust the content. Therefore there is no issue with the server taking control of the client machine.
The problem is that web designers tend to assume that everyone on the internet should trust them, and everyone who uses IE tends to believe they can trust all web designers. Generic web pages are designed using features, and often frivoulous features at that, that require the server to control the host computer is scary ways.
I think MS realizes the problem and used security zones to try to provide a method by which IE can switch between a web browser and application front end. The problem is that like many failed security measures, it became too incovinent. Almost all internet sites should be marked as untrusted as placed in the lowest zone, but because so many sites are written badly, user tend to be forced to trust them or not get anything done.
A good example of this is the local school district, which standardized on IE and uses IE features extensively. Within the schools there is little problems. The district does a good job at protecting and training internal users. The problem is that the internet pages, including the home page, only works well on IE. In this way the district is forcing students and parents to use a browser that is verifiable unsafe. Internally they have a need to use IE. Externally, there is little reason for them to ignore standard best practice.
This seems absolutely socialist behavior compared to what is being promoted by these licensing agreements. At least the immigrants knew they were being fucked and had the ability to discern exactly how fucked they were before they signed the papers. Now agreements are not even generally made available prior to the contract signing, i.e. purchase, and are often made available in hard copy only after the additional agreement is reached. I admire companies like verizon suppling their agreements before a contract, i.e. sale, is reached. However, one has to wonder when the courts are going to decide that the general populous is just too stupid to comprehend these agreements. which are written for corporate lawyers, and therefore have to be ruled null and void.
The stupidity is that this is not a site trying to support itself by selling third party products. this site is dedicated to promoting a single product, and should be designed to promote said product is any many different ways as possible to as many different people as possible. The way it is set up just indicates a careless webmaster or incompetant management. In many cases, the advertisements are actualy made with more care than the product, which in this case bodes ill for the movie.
Congratulations on getting to be an extra. Went to the page, went to guerrilla marketing, and tried to look the money and forum link. In camino got an error on both, too many redirects. May not be your site, but something seems like it is broken.
But the time travel, unless we are traveling in time and not space, is the overused plot device of the past ten or 15 years. Enterprise sucks because that is the basis of the whole show, and hopefully they can compensate for the mistake. B5 was nearly fatally wounded by it's misuse of the time line.
But Firefly concentrates on the basics. The relationships. The flawed characters. The goal of living life the best you can. You don't have people floating willy nilly in and out of time. You don't have have people going back and forth in time so that the writers can cowardly destroy a ship at the beginning of the episode only to have it resurrected at the end. All you have is a totally unbelievable ship floating throughout a totally unbelievable universe with totally unbelievable characters. Just like real life.
This is also why Battlestar Galactica was so cool.
That leaves all the sacred places for Macs, and all the mundane places for *nix.