The problem with workers owning the means of of production requires that the "workers" to all contribute equally to the success of the enterprise. Some work harder and contribute much more than some so how do you reconcile this discrepancy. Like I said before it is a fallacy that all people are equal when it comes to contributing to society and all the political correctness in the world will not change that fact.
True Socialism is people standing around with their hands out demanding products and services made possible by the minority of people who actually contribute to society. True socialism rests on the belief that everyone is equal and that is not true. If you were a microchip design engineer would you be happy making the same amount of money as the person bagging your groceries? Communism is not even worth talking about since it has never been truly tried outside of a few communes in the 60's. Economic systems like those in the small scandinavian countries do not scale up to large and more populous countries. If you want a better life you should get an education, either formal or from experience. And try to major in something other than English Lit, Political Science, or Art History. Start taking responsibility for your own well being instead of expecting the "state" to do it for you. You could take all the wealth in the world and divide it equally among everyone and the only thing you would have is everyone would be equally poor. You start taking away the monetary incentives that drive some people to excel in their chosen field and pretty soon no one will bother and you will end up with a society where everyone is on the dole until the war starts. The current economic systems all fail to take into consideration the one thing that will without a doubt lead to the next free for all war and that consideration is population control. There are just to many fucking people on the planet for any economic system to handle. The poorest countries and segments of society on earth have the highest birthrates. If they spent more time trying to improve their situations instead of fucking 24x7 or spending a good part of the day on their knees praying to their chosen diety they could probably have time to work on making a better life.
As it stands people seem to have put their faith on technology being able to solve our natural resource problems without realizing that our technology advancements depend on ever increasing amounts of natural resources. Petroleum products, metals, and rare earth elements are all being depleted at record pace trying to feed our technology advancements. Gates made his money within the system and if he wants to give some of it back in whatever form why denigrate it. The system was in place long before he came onto the scene. When MS first started IBM was the goliath in computer market but they were top heavy, overly buracratic, unbending, and royally fucked up when they decided the desktop PC was a deadend and decided to focus on the mid-range server market. By the time they realized their mistake MS and Apple had bought the rights to technology held by IBM and Xerox who considered the technology worthless. MS secured the rights to DOS for 50K and Apple snagged the UI tech from Xerox for almost nothing. No one with the kind of wealth Gates has amassed is required to give 1 single penny back but a lot of them do it anyway.
Manning broke more than an oath he broke very specific military laws which are a little different than civilian laws. The US is not going to bother with Assange because they do not have a case. Although they will probably remain vague and non-committal on the issue just to keep Assange nervous. The most he could ever be charged with is receiving stolen property and even that charge would be stretching things. The maelstrom has already subsided concerning the released data and the US is not going after Assange and risk putting the spotlight back on the information release. And the US doesn't need Sweden's assistance in grabbing Assange and if they wanted him they would already have him. All this BS about Assange being extradited to the US to face charges that include the death penalty ridiculous. Sweden, along with a lot of other countries cannot and do not extradite people to a 3rd party if the death penalty is even remotely possible.
Why is nobody asking questions about how and where the data actually originated? Is any story like this automatically considered 100% truthful just because the portrayed "villain" is a government agency or large corporation? The group releasing this information would have had to identify the FBI employee that was supposedly storing this information and the FBI employee had to have a specific security flaw to enable the theft. The flaw was described as the latest Java atomic array exploit but that exploit is not universal on every machine that happens to be running Java. Like mpst exploits there needs to be several configuration and usage patterns to utilize an exploit. Even drive by web exploits require specific user to actually visit a particular website There are a lot of questions and the group releasing the information have their own motivations that have absolutely nothing to do with hacktivism and more to do with actively trolling as many systems as possible looking for any exploitable flaw so they can show the world how smart they are and blaming an organization that just happens to be in the business of catching and prosecuting members of their little hackers club. The data could be as advertised but there are quite a few questions that need to be answered to shore up the credibility. The FBI has come out a specifically stated they have no proof of a breach and this would be pretty easy to verify by checking the machine of the FBI employee that was named. Denying the breech is risky in the extreme because you never know if some of the information stolen can be proven to be factual.
You can schedule updates anytime you want. For instance you can schedule the updates to occur at 3AM instead of running them manually in the middle of the day.
China would take Taiwan eventually but Taiwan has been stock piling top line US military technology for a while and could put up a decent fight. China's navy has grown over the years but a few years ago they would have had to initiate "the 1 million man swim" plan if they wanted large numbers of troops on the ground. Right now China makes a lot of money from trading with Taiwan. And the UN is indeed worthless when it comes to doing anything more than issuing a strongly worded proclamation and most of the time they can't even agree to that.
So if you leave your house and someone breaks a window and robs you the police should arrest you for the burglary? Nobody who offers customer data access via a public network can ever be 100% secure. Attempts to take legal action against those who have taken the customary precautions of requiring passwords and security certificates (like most banks) and implementing other security measures is the beginning of the end for online data access. If a company mistakenly publishes private information a case could be made for human negligence but suing someone who has taken all the basic precautions towards security does nothing but reward the bottom feeding lawyers.
"found by some criminal organization" The group who stole and released the information can accurately be described as a "criminal organization". If you rah, rah the hackers and then look forward to filing lawsuits against the company that got hacked then you must also be in favor in catching the people who perpetrated this crime and dealing with them in the legal system.
"But the point is that there are a ton of bugs in these systems because of the difficulty and cost of releasing bug fixes" Name one bug free software system that does more than render "Hello World!". And even that better not be on a machine connected to the Internet or other public network. I you want security you need to isolate the entire system from any and all remote network accessibility. Then you need to secure the physical accessibility points which is easier and cheaper than continuously waiting for the elusive bug free software to come along. If people demanded 100% secure systems they would only be able to update their applications about once every 10 years and their OS every 20 years if they were lucky. The best thing anyone can do now is manage the risk factors and hope things work out.
Congress passed a unambiguous law before the US entered WW2 prohibiting wire tapping to catch potential German agents in the US and 15 minutes later Eisenhower wrote an executive directive to ignore the law. If the US had been defeated in WW2 he would have been prosecuted and most likely convicted but that didn't happen and Congress decided to pretend they never passed such a law. The US constitution and associated laws are not a suicide pact. Even more astonishing is that presidents Carter, Bush1, Clinton, and Bush 2 were asked what they would have done under the same situation and all of them said they would have did the same thing. Even Obama is willing to make decisions that are technically prohibited by law but laws do not cover all situations in certain circumstances. Especially when national security is involved.
There are no good guys and bad guys there is only good software and bad software. All the idiots who personalize and attack the Creator rather than the technical capabilities should quit the tech field and go into marketing where you can lies and distort the truth to match your opinions.. Of cures that requires the complainer to understand the tech in the first place.
Even the hint that a certain technology may have military applications is the surest way of getting large amounts of money to continue the research. Plus there is another world war on the horizon that will make WW2 look like a pillow fight. It's unavoidable to pretend otherwise. All those shouting "can't we all just along" will be the first killed. Should be the ultimate reality show.
I primarily develop in the.NET environment however my projects need to be able to interface with hardware such as PLC's, PBXs, and control systems requiring OS level functionality.
Its a forum post not a fucking published thesis so deal with it or don't bother reading it. Form over content is always the refuge of nitpicking complainers who would rather complain about formatting than address the actual content of the post.
Large to medium size companies using the Windows platform are notoriously slow in approving system wide platform changes. OS changes are the worst. A diligent company will insist on testing all of their existing apps under the new OS but if you have a lot of apps this takes a considerable amount of time and money and you usually end up creating something that has no more functionality than the system it is replacing. Executive types who authorize these big changes are scared to death of being blamed when stuff stops working, budget bloat, and moving time lines. The main point is that a well administered windows platform (Linux as well) works just fine. However, companies using the MS ecosystem have spent tons of money and time over the years to build their systems. They also need an overwhelming reason to scrap that work for something else and licensing fees are not enough to force the issue. I architect and develop applications for both the MS and the Linux platforms and if the MS developers adhere to some basic coding standards, design patterns, and beat practices it beats Linux hands down. Linux developer support tends to be piecemeal and all the different flavors complicate matters even more. People can despise MS for all sorts of reasons but their developer support and development tool sets are really good. This helps them attract developers which in turn means the developers build their applications on the MS platform which then translates into more sales for the MS OS and other products. The original VB might have been technically inferior but from a business point of view but it was a brilliant way to increase OS an OS product sales. It opened up the development space for novice and even experienced developers unable handle C++ or any other low level programing language.
I remember building desktop apps and COM/DCOM objects in C++ where you had to code your own dialogs using the prepacked class libraries provided in Borland C++ or MS C++. And before that it command line vi for Unix development without a developer UI in sight. I constantly run across developers today that could not even attempt that type of programming. Now you just drag controls around, set properties, and code the event handlers and let the underlying run time take care of the details.
Your regular non-tech consumer doesn't give a shit about secure boot or even the shortcomings of the OS that developers like too pick apart when trying to prove their point that MS sucks.. Consumers want a PC to work out of the box that can run their existing apps. A vast majority of large businesses have no intention of making a wholesale change from Windows to another OS in the application space because they have too much time and money invested in their custom business applications that would need to be changed to work in another OS environment. Changing to another OS would require all their developers, system admins, and users to be retrained. And even if their program some how operated the same I have worked with several medium and large businesses who were talked into going to another OS only to find out that their existing development staff and users lacked the skill set to support such a drastic change. I had several request to re-architect applications I built that targeted the Windows environment which I did Ior 6 clients and 5 of them came back and asked me for the Windows applications. And while everyone seems to want to vilify Microsoft for the secure boot or othe control mechanisms what is thier opinion on the locked down Apple platform?. And please forget about things such as Wine, Mono, or any other applications that will allow Windows programs to almost work properly. User retraining would also have to be factored in when moving to another OS platform. None of these type of systems provide total functionality available in Windows. Individuals and small companies with limited custom application libraries can pull off the change in OS but they are in the minority. And while MS may be curently playing catchup in the phone and pad platforms they are making headway but it will not show up overnight. They are a large company with an large user base and it is hard for a company of that size to change directions on a whim. Apple almost folded as a company back in the early 90's they could not take advantage of commodity hardware which resulted in their products being more expensive than the Windows products. They lost the business sector with this strategy and practically handed MS the business orientated market. This in turn meant that the business users learned how to use Windows and they purchased Windows for personal us because that was what they were familiar with. Regardless of what I wrote here I am not some MS shill. I consider my technology agnostic and choose the technology that best fits the situation but from a career perspective someone with experience with Windows will not have a hard time finding employment. Just checkout the biggest tech job sites and compare the number of Windows development job opportunities against the opportunities offered up for non-MS solutions. If you are a professional developer or administrator making a decent living trumps any technology evangelism.
God knows the US might not do everything right but the UN has done nothing right. Anytime a country decides on a course of action they do it regardless of what the UN dictates. Countries pretend to follow UN mandates only when the issue has nothing to do with them. The situation in Syria is a good example of how a country could care less what the UN demands because the UN, like the ICC, have no way to enforce their dictates. Both the powerful and not so powerful countries routinely give the UN the finger when make decisions they feel are best for them. The UN should follow the path of the League of Nations. Also the US stewardship of the Internet root domain servers has been reliable and apolitical. The UN request for taking over the management is being driven by countries who want the power to control the content. Outside of copyright enforcement the current management has not interfered or blocked the content. The simple question is how would the UN do a better job. If countries have a problem with the current management they can create their own Internet infrastructure or firewall thier incoming Internet traffic like China has tried to do. China has the technology and money to firewall themselves in but they are fighting a losing battle. Their Twitter equivalent, Baidu, is giving the Chinese government fits because the twitter like messages get transmitted so fast the censors do not have the chance to censor the messages. The best they can do is monitor for certain words and phrases in the message in real time but it is easy to circumvent those default filters if you are careful.
Maybe the reason the US hasn't gone back to the moon is because they already went several times, had a look around, bounced around, collected some rocks, planted a flag, shot some film, and decided there wasn't really much else you could do on a barren landscape with vacuum for an atmosphere. If China eventually gets to the moon that will guarantee an increase in the NASA budget to go back and make sure China or anyone else doesn't occupy the proverbial high ground. A scenerio like that would turn the project from a scientific venture to a national security matter and funding would come from the blank check military budget. After all the first NASA trips to the moon were driven by the cold war competition between the US and USSR. What we really need to build is an orbital shipyard and docking platform for manned ships. Getting to orbit and de-orbiting are the most expensive, dangerous, and time consuming tasks if you want to expand manned space exploration missions. Until that is done we can continue to use unmanned space exploration probes to collect data about the solar system.
Releasing software under a GPL or similar license is entirely up to the person that created it. If they want to give it away free they can certainly do it. However, this doesn't mean all developers should have this same mindset and distribute their work for free. Personally I have a mortgage and other expenses which need to taken care of first before I start spending my time creating software for free. And when it comes to software you usually get what you pay for. The most popular GPL'd (or similar licensing) applications such as the Linux OS, Apache, Open Office, and FireFox were developed by people who were getting paid quite well while they worked on these projects.
"You don't have to abuse the end user to have a gaming platform that allows developers to make money." Is asking the user to actually pay for their software abusive? And there is a large number of people who do live their lives with a sense of entitlement. People who want free games, free applications, free OS, free music, and free movies.
Slavery was the most sensationalist and persuasive argument for the Civil War. It made good press coverage and personalized the argument on whether to engage in the war. Slaves did exist and slavery needed to be abolished but the Civil War was a fight against Balkanization. Instead of 50 states we could have ended up going down the path of creating 50 different countries and boy wouldn't that be fun.
Your fighting an uphill battle. Limiting population growth or at least acknowledging the problem would be a start in addressing many of the ills the world currently faces. The rate things are going we will just have to rely on the next no holds bar global war to re-adjust the population and hope there are at least a couple of survivors to carry on.
Why do people assume there is a large group of developers that actually understand OS source code and are capable of locating and correcting any problems found? Most of the people with the necessary skills to do this are already busy working for companies that actually pay them for their services. The vast majority of security issues are discovered by companies and individuals who specialize in this area and expect payment for their services. OS troubleshooting and development also requires well stocked labs to test all of the different permutations of hardware and software behaviors. The low hanging fruit has already been grabbed which forces deeper analysis of the OS code to locate potential issues and determine the impact their proposed changes will have. Just because someone is half way competent in Application development does not mean they have the skills needed to understand OS development. OS development is quite different than Application development. Just downloading the OS source code and building it can be a gigantic pain in the ass when trying to sort out all of the dependencies and compiler configurations for a particular environment.
I you want a secure system you are better off making sure the system administrators and application developers are doing their jobs. Some of most harmful security issues have exploited known issues that were corrected way before someone started exploited them. And those happens because system administrators failed to stay current on their security related service packs.
Development has been outsourced more than 5 years. The big organizations also have a tendency to outsource to more than one contractor or consulting service to work on the same project which means trying to get these organizations to work together and that is a gigantic pain in the ass. Especially if the outsourced developers work for competing consulting or contracting firms. Add the fact that most companies are discovering you get what you pay for when outsourcing internationally where developer salaries are only a small fraction of what an in-house developer earns even including benefits. Usually the design and development of a new project starts out fine but the frequent turn over of developers turns the code into a mess because a lot of contractors utilize the "just make it work" principle when brought in to work on existing software developed by others. The original design goes out the window and you are inundated with hacks and workarounds that ignore the original design. Contracting or outsourcing should only be utilized for narrowly defined short term tasks if the in-house developers lack the expertise or time to build certain components.
The UN is the most dysfunctional organization going today. It makes the knuckleheads in the US Congress look like a model of prudent leadership which says a lot. Hopefully the Palestinians will continue to try and join more UN agencies which will automatically force the US to end it's participation and monetary support by law.
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The problem with workers owning the means of of production requires that the "workers" to all contribute equally to the success of the enterprise. Some work harder and contribute much more than some so how do you reconcile this discrepancy. Like I said before it is a fallacy that all people are equal when it comes to contributing to society and all the political correctness in the world will not change that fact.
True Socialism is people standing around with their hands out demanding products and services made possible by the minority of people who actually contribute to society. True socialism rests on the belief that everyone is equal and that is not true. If you were a microchip design engineer would you be happy making the same amount of money as the person bagging your groceries? Communism is not even worth talking about since it has never been truly tried outside of a few communes in the 60's. Economic systems like those in the small scandinavian countries do not scale up to large and more populous countries. If you want a better life you should get an education, either formal or from experience. And try to major in something other than English Lit, Political Science, or Art History. Start taking responsibility for your own well being instead of expecting the "state" to do it for you.
You could take all the wealth in the world and divide it equally among everyone and the only thing you would have is everyone would be equally poor. You start taking away the monetary incentives that drive some people to excel in their chosen field and pretty soon no one will bother and you will end up with a society where everyone is on the dole until the war starts. The current economic systems all fail to take into consideration the one thing that will without a doubt lead to the next free for all war and that consideration is population control. There are just to many fucking people on the planet for any economic system to handle. The poorest countries and segments of society on earth have the highest birthrates. If they spent more time trying to improve their situations instead of fucking 24x7 or spending a good part of the day on their knees praying to their chosen diety they could probably have time to work on making a better life.
As it stands people seem to have put their faith on technology being able to solve our natural resource problems without realizing that our technology advancements depend on ever increasing amounts of natural resources. Petroleum products, metals, and rare earth elements are all being depleted at record pace trying to feed our technology advancements.
Gates made his money within the system and if he wants to give some of it back in whatever form why denigrate it. The system was in place long before he came onto the scene. When MS first started IBM was the goliath in computer market but they were top heavy, overly buracratic, unbending, and royally fucked up when they decided the desktop PC was a deadend and decided to focus on the mid-range server market. By the time they realized their mistake MS and Apple had bought the rights to technology held by IBM and Xerox who considered the technology worthless. MS secured the rights to DOS for 50K and Apple snagged the UI tech from Xerox for almost nothing. No one with the kind of wealth Gates has amassed is required to give 1 single penny back but a lot of them do it anyway.
Manning broke more than an oath he broke very specific military laws which are a little different than civilian laws. The US is not going to bother with Assange because they do not have a case. Although they will probably remain vague and non-committal on the issue just to keep Assange nervous. The most he could ever be charged with is receiving stolen property and even that charge would be stretching things. The maelstrom has already subsided concerning the released data and the US is not going after Assange and risk putting the spotlight back on the information release. And the US doesn't need Sweden's assistance in grabbing Assange and if they wanted him they would already have him. All this BS about Assange being extradited to the US to face charges that include the death penalty ridiculous. Sweden, along with a lot of other countries cannot and do not extradite people to a 3rd party if the death penalty is even remotely possible.
Why is nobody asking questions about how and where the data actually originated? Is any story like this automatically considered 100% truthful just because the portrayed "villain" is a government agency or large corporation? The group releasing this information would have had to identify the FBI employee that was supposedly storing this information and the FBI employee had to have a specific security flaw to enable the theft. The flaw was described as the latest Java atomic array exploit but that exploit is not universal on every machine that happens to be running Java. Like mpst exploits there needs to be several configuration and usage patterns to utilize an exploit. Even drive by web exploits require specific user to actually visit a particular website There are a lot of questions and the group releasing the information have their own motivations that have absolutely nothing to do with hacktivism and more to do with actively trolling as many systems as possible looking for any exploitable flaw so they can show the world how smart they are and blaming an organization that just happens to be in the business of catching and prosecuting members of their little hackers club. The data could be as advertised but there are quite a few questions that need to be answered to shore up the credibility. The FBI has come out a specifically stated they have no proof of a breach and this would be pretty easy to verify by checking the machine of the FBI employee that was named. Denying the breech is risky in the extreme because you never know if some of the information stolen can be proven to be factual.
You can schedule updates anytime you want. For instance you can schedule the updates to occur at 3AM instead of running them manually in the middle of the day.
China would take Taiwan eventually but Taiwan has been stock piling top line US military technology for a while and could put up a decent fight. China's navy has grown over the years but a few years ago they would have had to initiate "the 1 million man swim" plan if they wanted large numbers of troops on the ground. Right now China makes a lot of money from trading with Taiwan. And the UN is indeed worthless when it comes to doing anything more than issuing a strongly worded proclamation and most of the time they can't even agree to that.
So if you leave your house and someone breaks a window and robs you the police should arrest you for the burglary? Nobody who offers customer data access via a public network can ever be 100% secure. Attempts to take legal action against those who have taken the customary precautions of requiring passwords and security certificates (like most banks) and implementing other security measures is the beginning of the end for online data access. If a company mistakenly publishes private information a case could be made for human negligence but suing someone who has taken all the basic precautions towards security does nothing but reward the bottom feeding lawyers.
"found by some criminal organization" The group who stole and released the information can accurately be described as a "criminal organization". If you rah, rah the hackers and then look forward to filing lawsuits against the company that got hacked then you must also be in favor in catching the people who perpetrated this crime and dealing with them in the legal system.
"But the point is that there are a ton of bugs in these systems because of the difficulty and cost of releasing bug fixes" Name one bug free software system that does more than render "Hello World!". And even that better not be on a machine connected to the Internet or other public network. I you want security you need to isolate the entire system from any and all remote network accessibility. Then you need to secure the physical accessibility points which is easier and cheaper than continuously waiting for the elusive bug free software to come along. If people demanded 100% secure systems they would only be able to update their applications about once every 10 years and their OS every 20 years if they were lucky. The best thing anyone can do now is manage the risk factors and hope things work out.
Congress passed a unambiguous law before the US entered WW2 prohibiting wire tapping to catch potential German agents in the US and 15 minutes later Eisenhower wrote an executive directive to ignore the law. If the US had been defeated in WW2 he would have been prosecuted and most likely convicted but that didn't happen and Congress decided to pretend they never passed such a law. The US constitution and associated laws are not a suicide pact. Even more astonishing is that presidents Carter, Bush1, Clinton, and Bush 2 were asked what they would have done under the same situation and all of them said they would have did the same thing. Even Obama is willing to make decisions that are technically prohibited by law but laws do not cover all situations in certain circumstances. Especially when national security is involved.
There are no good guys and bad guys there is only good software and bad software. All the idiots who personalize and attack the Creator rather than the technical capabilities should quit the tech field and go into marketing where you can lies and distort the truth to match your opinions.. Of cures that requires the complainer to understand the tech in the first place.
Even the hint that a certain technology may have military applications is the surest way of getting large amounts of money to continue the research. Plus there is another world war on the horizon that will make WW2 look like a pillow fight. It's unavoidable to pretend otherwise. All those shouting "can't we all just along" will be the first killed. Should be the ultimate reality show.
I primarily develop in the .NET environment however my projects need to be able to interface with hardware such as PLC's, PBXs, and control systems requiring OS level functionality.
Its a forum post not a fucking published thesis so deal with it or don't bother reading it. Form over content is always the refuge of nitpicking complainers who would rather complain about formatting than address the actual content of the post.
Large to medium size companies using the Windows platform are notoriously slow in approving system wide platform changes. OS changes are the worst. A diligent company will insist on testing all of their existing apps under the new OS but if you have a lot of apps this takes a considerable amount of time and money and you usually end up creating something that has no more functionality than the system it is replacing. Executive types who authorize these big changes are scared to death of being blamed when stuff stops working, budget bloat, and moving time lines. The main point is that a well administered windows platform (Linux as well) works just fine. However, companies using the MS ecosystem have spent tons of money and time over the years to build their systems. They also need an overwhelming reason to scrap that work for something else and licensing fees are not enough to force the issue. I architect and develop applications for both the MS and the Linux platforms and if the MS developers adhere to some basic coding standards, design patterns, and beat practices it beats Linux hands down. Linux developer support tends to be piecemeal and all the different flavors complicate matters even more. People can despise MS for all sorts of reasons but their developer support and development tool sets are really good. This helps them attract developers which in turn means the developers build their applications on the MS platform which then translates into more sales for the MS OS and other products. The original VB might have been technically inferior but from a business point of view but it was a brilliant way to increase OS an OS product sales. It opened up the development space for novice and even experienced developers unable handle C++ or any other low level programing language.
I remember building desktop apps and COM/DCOM objects in C++ where you had to code your own dialogs using the prepacked class libraries provided in Borland C++ or MS C++. And before that it command line vi for Unix development without a developer UI in sight. I constantly run across developers today that could not even attempt that type of programming. Now you just drag controls around, set properties, and code the event handlers and let the underlying run time take care of the details.
Your regular non-tech consumer doesn't give a shit about secure boot or even the shortcomings of the OS that developers like too pick apart when trying to prove their point that MS sucks.. Consumers want a PC to work out of the box that can run their existing apps. A vast majority of large businesses have no intention of making a wholesale change from Windows to another OS in the application space because they have too much time and money invested in their custom business applications that would need to be changed to work in another OS environment. Changing to another OS would require all their developers, system admins, and users to be retrained. And even if their program some how operated the same I have worked with several medium and large businesses who were talked into going to another OS only to find out that their existing development staff and users lacked the skill set to support such a drastic change. I had several request to re-architect applications I built that targeted the Windows environment which I did Ior 6 clients and 5 of them came back and asked me for the Windows applications. And while everyone seems to want to vilify Microsoft for the secure boot or othe control mechanisms what is thier opinion on the locked down Apple platform?. And please forget about things such as Wine, Mono, or any other applications that will allow Windows programs to almost work properly. User retraining would also have to be factored in when moving to another OS platform. None of these type of systems provide total functionality available in Windows. Individuals and small companies with limited custom application libraries can pull off the change in OS but they are in the minority. And while MS may be curently playing catchup in the phone and pad platforms they are making headway but it will not show up overnight. They are a large company with an large user base and it is hard for a company of that size to change directions on a whim. Apple almost folded as a company back in the early 90's they could not take advantage of commodity hardware which resulted in their products being more expensive than the Windows products. They lost the business sector with this strategy and practically handed MS the business orientated market. This in turn meant that the business users learned how to use Windows and they purchased Windows for personal us because that was what they were familiar with. Regardless of what I wrote here I am not some MS shill. I consider my technology agnostic and choose the technology that best fits the situation but from a career perspective someone with experience with Windows will not have a hard time finding employment. Just checkout the biggest tech job sites and compare the number of Windows development job opportunities against the opportunities offered up for non-MS solutions. If you are a professional developer or administrator making a decent living trumps any technology evangelism.
God knows the US might not do everything right but the UN has done nothing right. Anytime a country decides on a course of action they do it regardless of what the UN dictates. Countries pretend to follow UN mandates only when the issue has nothing to do with them. The situation in Syria is a good example of how a country could care less what the UN demands because the UN, like the ICC, have no way to enforce their dictates. Both the powerful and not so powerful countries routinely give the UN the finger when make decisions they feel are best for them. The UN should follow the path of the League of Nations. Also the US stewardship of the Internet root domain servers has been reliable and apolitical. The UN request for taking over the management is being driven by countries who want the power to control the content. Outside of copyright enforcement the current management has not interfered or blocked the content. The simple question is how would the UN do a better job. If countries have a problem with the current management they can create their own Internet infrastructure or firewall thier incoming Internet traffic like China has tried to do. China has the technology and money to firewall themselves in but they are fighting a losing battle. Their Twitter equivalent, Baidu, is giving the Chinese government fits because the twitter like messages get transmitted so fast the censors do not have the chance to censor the messages. The best they can do is monitor for certain words and phrases in the message in real time but it is easy to circumvent those default filters if you are careful.
Maybe the reason the US hasn't gone back to the moon is because they already went several times, had a look around, bounced around, collected some rocks, planted a flag, shot some film, and decided there wasn't really much else you could do on a barren landscape with vacuum for an atmosphere. If China eventually gets to the moon that will guarantee an increase in the NASA budget to go back and make sure China or anyone else doesn't occupy the proverbial high ground. A scenerio like that would turn the project from a scientific venture to a national security matter and funding would come from the blank check military budget. After all the first NASA trips to the moon were driven by the cold war competition between the US and USSR. What we really need to build is an orbital shipyard and docking platform for manned ships. Getting to orbit and de-orbiting are the most expensive, dangerous, and time consuming tasks if you want to expand manned space exploration missions. Until that is done we can continue to use unmanned space exploration probes to collect data about the solar system.
Releasing software under a GPL or similar license is entirely up to the person that created it. If they want to give it away free they can certainly do it. However, this doesn't mean all developers should have this same mindset and distribute their work for free. Personally I have a mortgage and other expenses which need to taken care of first before I start spending my time creating software for free. And when it comes to software you usually get what you pay for. The most popular GPL'd (or similar licensing) applications such as the Linux OS, Apache, Open Office, and FireFox were developed by people who were getting paid quite well while they worked on these projects.
"You don't have to abuse the end user to have a gaming platform that allows developers to make money."
Is asking the user to actually pay for their software abusive? And there is a large number of people who do live their lives with a sense of entitlement. People who want free games, free applications, free OS, free music, and free movies.
Slavery was the most sensationalist and persuasive argument for the Civil War. It made good press coverage and personalized the argument on whether to engage in the war. Slaves did exist and slavery needed to be abolished but the Civil War was a fight against Balkanization. Instead of 50 states we could have ended up going down the path of creating 50 different countries and boy wouldn't that be fun.
Your fighting an uphill battle. Limiting population growth or at least acknowledging the problem would be a start in addressing many of the ills the world currently faces. The rate things are going we will just have to rely on the next no holds bar global war to re-adjust the population and hope there are at least a couple of survivors to carry on.
Why do people assume there is a large group of developers that actually understand OS source code and are capable of locating and correcting any problems found? Most of the people with the necessary skills to do this are already busy working for companies that actually pay them for their services. The vast majority of security issues are discovered by companies and individuals who specialize in this area and expect payment for their services. OS troubleshooting and development also requires well stocked labs to test all of the different permutations of hardware and software behaviors. The low hanging fruit has already been grabbed which forces deeper analysis of the OS code to locate potential issues and determine the impact their proposed changes will have. Just because someone is half way competent in Application development does not mean they have the skills needed to understand OS development. OS development is quite different than Application development. Just downloading the OS source code and building it can be a gigantic pain in the ass when trying to sort out all of the dependencies and compiler configurations for a particular environment.
I you want a secure system you are better off making sure the system administrators and application developers are doing their jobs. Some of most harmful security issues have exploited known issues that were corrected way before someone started exploited them. And those happens because system administrators failed to stay current on their security related service packs.
Development has been outsourced more than 5 years. The big organizations also have a tendency to outsource to more than one contractor or consulting service to work on the same project which means trying to get these organizations to work together and that is a gigantic pain in the ass. Especially if the outsourced developers work for competing consulting or contracting firms. Add the fact that most companies are discovering you get what you pay for when outsourcing internationally where developer salaries are only a small fraction of what an in-house developer earns even including benefits. Usually the design and development of a new project starts out fine but the frequent turn over of developers turns the code into a mess because a lot of contractors utilize the "just make it work" principle when brought in to work on existing software developed by others. The original design goes out the window and you are inundated with hacks and workarounds that ignore the original design. Contracting or outsourcing should only be utilized for narrowly defined short term tasks if the in-house developers lack the expertise or time to build certain components.
The UN is the most dysfunctional organization going today. It makes the knuckleheads in the US Congress look like a model of prudent leadership which says a lot. Hopefully the Palestinians will continue to try and join more UN agencies which will automatically force the US to end it's participation and monetary support by law.