You forget where the money is: it's in iPods, not in the music. They don't make any money on the music. But every platform they can hook to an iPod is a win. So doing a Linux port certainly doesn't hurt them and may help.
I'm always amazed at how many people thank Microsoft for the explosion of personal computing in the 90's. Let's see: Intel today gives you about 1000 times the performance per dollar that you got in 1990. How much cheaper has the software gotten? How much faster? Now, try again: who's responsible for the personal computer revolution?
I've been looking for months for something for a low-traffic discussion group that would mix email "push" with usenet-type threading. Users want to receive all the messages as they arrive by email, not have to go to a BB to look at stuff. On the other hand, everyone wants a nicely threaded archive of the history like a newgroup. I can't find anything that'll do it. I'm using Yahoo groups now, but I sure don't like it.
Well, they just had a Sarin leak last weak at the Umatilla weapons something-or-other here in Oregon. Sarin! Apparently they have war-heads full of the stuff. SARIN! Like right next to I-84 and few miles from the Columbia river! Why on earth do we have bombs full of Sarin???!!!
There are laws about litter, too. That hasn't solved the litter problem but it helps a bit. And just like litter, everyone needs to do their part with spam.
That's the best analogy I've seen. We're not going to stop spam with just technology, just laws, or just anything else. We need an array of tools. This law isn't perfect, but it satisfied enough people to be passable, and it's a huge step forward from a scattering of poorly enforced state laws.
I find the Yahoo proposal a little hard to understand, but I'm sure they've figured out something that'll help too. And I've heard some talk of a more secure replacement for SMTP. Bring em all on!
All laws legislate morality. That doesn't make people moral or even prevent crime, but it sure provides a way to get even and get offenders off the street. That's a very reasonable piece of what we need to control spam.
Boy would I like to see something as easy to use a filemaker that hooked into a solid DBMS. I develop stuff in FM too, but I'm embarrased to admit sometimes. But I swear I can do most anything in FM about 10 times faster than I can in Access and when i'm done it looks good and has an easy user interface. Access just makes me tear my hair out. I'm not sure if it's because FM is really so easy, or just because I'm used to it. It really irritates me to see Filemaker (the company) continuing to try to market a "database" product, when their whole reason for being is the easy forms and scripting. We've got plenty of good databases; we don't need another one. I keep hoping FileMaker would come out with a front end for MySQL et al. The last thing I want is something like Access.
Imagine someone suggesting the idea of turning over the Department of Transportation to a consortium of General Motors, Ford, and Daimler-Benz, based on the idea that non-commercial interests are holding back auto sales. Would anyone take such a proposal seriously?
God, I hope no one in the White House is reading this.
National healthcare will be run with the fairness of the IRS and the efficiency of the DMV.
We should keep it private like it is now, so we get the fairness of profit-driven HMOs along with 10 times the administrative cost of a single-payer system. Or better yet, if people can't afford $400/month insurance premiums, let 'em die. They're obviously not contributing to the economy anyway.
I don't think anyone ever thought that there was a problem with punch cards, either. I mean, you punch a card, how hard is that?
Actually, it can be quite hard. Here in Oregon, all ballots are mailed in (there are no polling places). So you have to sit at home with a pencil and try to poke out the chads on the right lines. Nothing is printed on the punch card but numbers, and you have to match up the numbers on the card with numbers on the ballot sheet.
The agenda of both policical parties is to get power and to hold onto it. It's that simple. The policies (e.g., tax the rich vs. give to the poor, less government vs. more programs) are only a means to an end.
That is simply not true... at least it's not true of any of the politicians I have met. Whichever side of the aisle they're on, they have strong principles about what government should and shouldn't do. There's a very clear distinction between the two parties about how they view the role of government.
This is the best idea I've heard: use the machines to insure a correctly marked ballot, then deposit the marked ballot and count later (using optical scanning, I assume). That would let you use the count on the voting machines as an approximate "audit" against the count from the scanners, let you easily accept manually marked ballots as well, and keep a paper form of the ballots for manual recounting if necessary.
This seems like a really safe way to count votes. I really like having an "instant capture" in the machines that can be compared against paper counts later, because it makes it really difficult to screw with the ballots without detection. It's people we have to watch out for.
Microsoft themselves (or maybe it was some MS exec) said that every user of Windoze needs to install a virus protection program and a firewall. It seems to me that this is essentially an admission that Windoze as it comes from the box is not fit for use. Whatever the hell their EULA says, there has to be some implied fitness for use warranty on any product that people buy. If it isn't, then there should be a big red label on the package that says "Not fit for use without " whatever it takes.
Actually, he didn't even criticize Microsoft. What the report said was that having all computers run the same OS was a risk to security. Just like having only one species of a crop would be a huge risk to agriculture. Single species are vulnerable in both biology and computer networks.
This seems to me to be awfully rational.
If they fired him for that kind of thinking, then it's probably their loss, not his.
I think I'm hearing a bit of "let them eat cake". Most of the users we're talking about don't know they're running a computer. They're accessing the web, doing email, and reading and writing documents using some appliance they've bought or been told to use for that purpose.
Let me take a stab at dividing people who use computers into technical skills and locations.
There's people who know absolutely nothing about the machine they run (what hard drive?), people who understand applications and documents (if it's text it must be WORD), and people skilled enough to install a piece of software or upgrade an OS (weenies). Then there's/.ers, who are off the scale and not numerous enough to count.
I'm going to guess the computer user population is distributed like this: Percent of users: location HD? WORD weenie
Home users 20 7 3 Small Office 10 10 10 University 5 0 5 Big Co. 15 10 5
(Yikes... I need a TABLE tag) If that's more or less true, and big co people have someone to take care of them, then your left with 35% - more than 1/3 - of all computer users that could not possibly run a system update.
That's the problem. Fully 1/3 of the users might as well be using a toaster-oven. It just needs to work.
The flaw in the MS theory (assuming there's any flaw in a monopoly) is that they act like everyone's at least a WORDie, if not a weenie. They and their partners-in-crime like Dell need to do something different for people in these different situations. Ignoring the differences is like selling prescription drugs over the counter.
This is a nice theory. Of course, so are communism, libertarianism and reagonomics (<--troll). They're all just useless, because they ignore reality.
When a big company buys a big piece of software, the license agreement is negotiated to something mutually understood and acceptable. When millions of people buy software from a monopoly in an office supply store, there is no negotiation. The monopoly gets exactly what it wants, and in this case has had the law written to its specifications just to make sure.
So fogeddaboutit. Ain't gonna be no rights unless you can come up with some big campaign contributions.
Notice that he isn't claiming that M$ will be held directly responsible (Would make as much sense as holding Cox responisible for local exploits in the kernel),
... or holding Ford responsible for exploding Pintos... oh wait...
I don't know what MS actually paidl, but I do know that the P&L shown to stockholders and the SEC has nothing to do with how they file tax returns. The accounting is substantially different.
Here's a classic: our electric company (Portland General Electric) has an allowance for income taxes in the rates they charge. And they have a multi-million dollar account on the balance sheet for taxes due. But guess what? They're owned by Enron, so the money they collect from me to pay taxes to my state goes to Enron and they give it to George Bush or something. They sure as hell don't pay any taxes.
A lot of people seem to think that selling internationally involves shipping a product and accepting a payment. It's not that simple. Every country has customs inspectors who are charged with making sure that whatever is shipped inot the country is legal and has appropriate tarrifs paid. So you have to have an import license to ship some kinds of things. And then there's the tax issue. If I sell something in Germany, I own the German government a VAT. (17% as I recall.) So you have to be prepared to deal with that. Most companies export their products to local sales subsidiaries at a transfer price, which substantially lowers the tax consequences and moves the profit from the US to the foreign operation. Yada Yada Yada. Selling internationally and meeting the legal requirements of both the selling and receiving countries is not easy.
You might be able to get the text out in your example, but try it on a long document that's been edited a lot. The text will be all over the place, because when you make an edit, it adds editing info to the document instead of changing the original text.
Everyone writing to their congressentity on the same
day would make quite a bit of difference, especially if those
letters are polite, concise, and well-thought-out.
You've got to be kidding. The only thing that will make a difference is a campaign contribution. If you want to stop this stuff, you've got to form a PAC, raise money, and dangle it out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are all the civilized countries in Europe?
You forget where the money is: it's in iPods, not in the music. They don't make any money on the music. But every platform they can hook to an iPod is a win. So doing a Linux port certainly doesn't hurt them and may help.
I'm always amazed at how many people thank Microsoft for the explosion of personal computing in the 90's. Let's see: Intel today gives you about 1000 times the performance per dollar that you got in 1990. How much cheaper has the software gotten? How much faster? Now, try again: who's responsible for the personal computer revolution?
I've been looking for months for something for a low-traffic discussion group that would mix email "push" with usenet-type threading. Users want to receive all the messages as they arrive by email, not have to go to a BB to look at stuff. On the other hand, everyone wants a nicely threaded archive of the history like a newgroup. I can't find anything that'll do it. I'm using Yahoo groups now, but I sure don't like it.
Well, they just had a Sarin leak last weak at the Umatilla weapons something-or-other here in Oregon. Sarin! Apparently they have war-heads full of the stuff. SARIN! Like right next to I-84 and few miles from the Columbia river! Why on earth do we have bombs full of Sarin???!!!
My God. I thought Ayn Rand was dead. Or are you Ken Lay in disguise?
There are laws about litter, too. That hasn't solved the litter problem but it helps a bit. And just like litter, everyone needs to do their part with spam.
That's the best analogy I've seen. We're not going to stop spam with just technology, just laws, or just anything else. We need an array of tools. This law isn't perfect, but it satisfied enough people to be passable, and it's a huge step forward from a scattering of poorly enforced state laws.
I find the Yahoo proposal a little hard to understand, but I'm sure they've figured out something that'll help too. And I've heard some talk of a more secure replacement for SMTP. Bring em all on!
All laws legislate morality. That doesn't make people moral or even prevent crime, but it sure provides a way to get even and get offenders off the street. That's a very reasonable piece of what we need to control spam.
Boy would I like to see something as easy to use a filemaker that hooked into a solid DBMS. I develop stuff in FM too, but I'm embarrased to admit sometimes. But I swear I can do most anything in FM about 10 times faster than I can in Access and when i'm done it looks good and has an easy user interface. Access just makes me tear my hair out. I'm not sure if it's because FM is really so easy, or just because I'm used to it.
It really irritates me to see Filemaker (the company) continuing to try to market a "database" product, when their whole reason for being is the easy forms and scripting. We've got plenty of good databases; we don't need another one. I keep hoping FileMaker would come out with a front end for MySQL et al. The last thing I want is something like Access.
Fresh out of mod points or I'd toss you one. That was TOO finny.
Imagine someone suggesting the idea of turning over the Department of Transportation to a consortium of General Motors, Ford, and Daimler-Benz, based on the idea that non-commercial interests are holding back auto sales. Would anyone take such a proposal seriously?
God, I hope no one in the White House is reading this.
National healthcare will be run with the fairness of the IRS and the efficiency of the DMV.
We should keep it private like it is now, so we get the fairness of profit-driven HMOs along with 10 times the administrative cost of a single-payer system. Or better yet, if people can't afford $400/month insurance premiums, let 'em die. They're obviously not contributing to the economy anyway.
[score: -5: way off topic]
I don't think anyone ever thought that there was a problem with punch cards, either. I mean, you punch a card, how hard is that?
Actually, it can be quite hard. Here in Oregon, all ballots are mailed in (there are no polling places). So you have to sit at home with a pencil and try to poke out the chads on the right lines. Nothing is printed on the punch card but numbers, and you have to match up the numbers on the card with numbers on the ballot sheet.
The agenda of both policical parties is to get power and to hold onto it. It's that simple. The policies (e.g., tax the rich vs. give to the poor, less government vs. more programs) are only a means to an end.
... at least it's not true of any of the politicians I have met. Whichever side of the aisle they're on, they have strong principles about what government should and shouldn't do. There's a very clear distinction between the two parties about how they view the role of government.
That is simply not true
This is the best idea I've heard: use the machines to insure a correctly marked ballot, then deposit the marked ballot and count later (using optical scanning, I assume). That would let you use the count on the voting machines as an approximate "audit" against the count from the scanners, let you easily accept manually marked ballots as well, and keep a paper form of the ballots for manual recounting if necessary.
This seems like a really safe way to count votes. I really like having an "instant capture" in the machines that can be compared against paper counts later, because it makes it really difficult to screw with the ballots without detection. It's people we have to watch out for.
Microsoft themselves (or maybe it was some MS exec) said that every user of Windoze needs to install a virus protection program and a firewall.
It seems to me that this is essentially an admission that Windoze as it comes from the box is not fit for use. Whatever the hell their EULA says, there has to be some implied fitness for use warranty on any product that people buy.
If it isn't, then there should be a big red label on the package that says "Not fit for use without " whatever it takes.
Actually, he didn't even criticize Microsoft. What the report said was that having all computers run the same OS was a risk to security. Just like having only one species of a crop would be a huge risk to agriculture. Single species are vulnerable in both biology and computer networks.
This seems to me to be awfully rational.
If they fired him for that kind of thinking, then it's probably their loss, not his.
I think I'm hearing a bit of "let them eat cake". Most of the users we're talking about don't know they're running a computer. They're accessing the web, doing email, and reading and writing documents using some appliance they've bought or been told to use for that purpose.
/.ers, who are off the scale and not numerous enough to count.
Let me take a stab at dividing people who use computers into technical skills and locations.
There's people who know absolutely nothing about the machine they run (what hard drive?), people who understand applications and documents (if it's text it must be WORD), and people skilled enough to install a piece of software or upgrade an OS (weenies). Then there's
I'm going to guess the computer user population is distributed like this:
Percent of users:
location HD? WORD weenie
Home users 20 7 3
Small Office 10 10 10
University 5 0 5
Big Co. 15 10 5
(Yikes... I need a TABLE tag)
If that's more or less true, and big co people have someone to take care of them, then your left with 35% - more than 1/3 - of all computer users that could not possibly run a system update.
That's the problem. Fully 1/3 of the users might as well be using a toaster-oven. It just needs to work.
The flaw in the MS theory (assuming there's any flaw in a monopoly) is that they act like everyone's at least a WORDie, if not a weenie. They and their partners-in-crime like Dell need to do something different for people in these different situations. Ignoring the differences is like selling prescription drugs over the counter.
This is a nice theory. Of course, so are communism, libertarianism and reagonomics (<--troll). They're all just useless, because they ignore reality.
When a big company buys a big piece of software, the license agreement is negotiated to something mutually understood and acceptable. When millions of people buy software from a monopoly in an office supply store, there is no negotiation. The monopoly gets exactly what it wants, and in this case has had the law written to its specifications just to make sure.
So fogeddaboutit. Ain't gonna be no rights unless you can come up with some big campaign contributions.
I could introduce you to some beers that are NOT disappointing. The rest, I'd have to agree with.
... or holding Ford responsible for exploding Pintos... oh wait...
I don't know what MS actually paidl, but I do know that the P&L shown to stockholders and the SEC has nothing to do with how they file tax returns. The accounting is substantially different.
Here's a classic: our electric company (Portland General Electric) has an allowance for income taxes in the rates they charge. And they have a multi-million dollar account on the balance sheet for taxes due. But guess what? They're owned by Enron, so the money they collect from me to pay taxes to my state goes to Enron and they give it to George Bush or something. They sure as hell don't pay any taxes.
A lot of people seem to think that selling internationally involves shipping a product and accepting a payment. It's not that simple. Every country has customs inspectors who are charged with making sure that whatever is shipped inot the country is legal and has appropriate tarrifs paid. So you have to have an import license to ship some kinds of things. And then there's the tax issue. If I sell something in Germany, I own the German government a VAT. (17% as I recall.) So you have to be prepared to deal with that. Most companies export their products to local sales subsidiaries at a transfer price, which substantially lowers the tax consequences and moves the profit from the US to the foreign operation. Yada Yada Yada.
Selling internationally and meeting the legal requirements of both the selling and receiving countries is not easy.
Uh, actually, that's _exactly_ what they were convicted of. All the squabbling was about the penalty, not the crime.
You might be able to get the text out in your example, but try it on a long document that's been edited a lot. The text will be all over the place, because when you make an edit, it adds editing info to the document instead of changing the original text.
You've got to be kidding. The only thing that will make a difference is a campaign contribution. If you want to stop this stuff, you've got to form a PAC, raise money, and dangle it out there.