The issue of 'wiretapping' the Internet seems to be a bit like gun control. If you make it hard to legally own a gun, you make it harder for innocents to protect themselves from criminals.
Basically, with encryption technology being what it is and open source being what it is, it is possible for those who want to conceal their data from the government. Thus, they will.
So, really, where does this put us?
1) Stupid criminals may get caught. 2) Innocents may get falsely IDed through whatever automated filtering is done on unencrypted traffic. 3) Those that have the foresight to think that they may not want their data to get intercepted will utilize the free, existing encryption tools to protect themselves.
So, basically the people that are actually skilled enough to be dangerous are unaffected by this.
Could the value for the NSA only come in if they specifically targeted a specific suspect host's traffic and applied a lot of processing power to brute forcing the encryption? If that is what they are after, I see value to national security and convicting criminals.
If it is anything else, it seems very misguided. However, there was a lot of money put into Carnivore so who knows.
However, we can also expect (in most cases) whistle-blower protection if we report improprieties, especially after efforts to correct them through official channels.
Is it just me or is not being quoted in the press an example of whistle-blower protection?
This is just a blanket statement that the statements as to the views of the organization can only be attributed to the head. This prevents the media from saying things like Joe Blow, who has done many many studies on the subject, states that 'The organization feels that nobody should drive on days that end in Y because that is when all accidents happen."
Also... I don't think this is so much a matter of censorship as it is public relations. If the media quotes someone who works in the mailroom of Microsoft (as an extreme example), they could make it look like an official statement. This is merely a policy for an organization that dictates, 'Hey dumdum... go to the top if you want our official opinion on stuff.'
Any government or office within the government (intelligence and other appropriately sensitive agencies aside) who are proud of their work should be encouraged and willing to discuss openly with the people who give them the authority and resources to do their jobs.
The media however is not the people who give them authority and resources. The media, any media, are far from the un-biased group of people who relay factual and necessary data to a needing public without editing or filtration that they would like to be thought of as.
The media 'researches' and publishes story that forward agendas and not for the public and its rights to know. There are other channels to get information out that do not involve news reporters, such as the web and print media.
I, for one, applaud not giving the media more ammo to use to create FUD which seems to have the weight of authority.
Actual, global warming is a misnomer. It is ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE!!!!!
Gosh, what couldn't fit under that term. Global warming is way too specific of a term to use to cause mass panic, even though it is adaquetly hard to prove or disprove. Can't we just go back to the old method? God did it!!
I actually agree with you on many levels. You bring up a good example; linked lists... it is a fundamental in object-oriented programming and something you would learn about in your first or second programming class. Once getting a grasp of it, you can start to understand how binary trees, arrays or arbitrary object types, etc. can function. However, in order to really grasp it, you have to have some understanding of even more basic concepts; such as how heaps and stacks work in computer memnory, what a pointer (or reference, if you are into Perl) is, and I am sure other concepts help too. All in all, taking someone from ground zero (suich as no experience even using a computer) to a full, conceptual understanding could take some work.
I think where this argument breaks down a bit is that, computers - being designed and built by technically minded people is a wholly understood subject. I do not think the functionings of the human brain or mind and human behavoir are. If so, psychologists and psychiatrists, not to mention medical doctors, would have much more fundamental and groundsweeping breakthroughs than they have. The further that we have gone in putting our trust in the 'science' of psychology and the practices of psychiatry to treat people and their behavoir, the darker and more confused the results have become.
The above poster portrays an attitude that is all too sickening to me. We have this incredibly complex science of nueroscience that seems to be able to tell us things about what the brain is doing that may or may not be linked to behavoir yet we have a growing number of people being put on 'treatment' for mental illnesses... note treatment, not cures; and growing amounts of stories of who were at least diagnosed as not being mentally or socially well, given some form of treatment, only to have disasterous concequences later. And now they want to blame it on video game addiction.
I am sorry. Any one who comes off with an attitude that they are an expert when it comes to human behavoir or brain biochemistry and can't give any sort of reference, credential, explanation or proof of their understanding by being able to produce a positive result in someone is just trying to pull the wool over your eyes and probably their own as well.
There is a very easy answer to this question. Anything that can be classified as an addition or mental disorder can be treated. This means another cash cow for pharmaceutical companies, doctors and public schools. Why public school you ask, well they get good funding in a lot of cases for kids on special education. Once special education was changed to include kids who had been diagnosed with ADHD, ADD, etc; it became a pretty big incentive for school districts to allow these diagnoses to be done and enforced within the school system.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short) is widely known to be to have a growing number of arbitrary mental disorders that are the results of opinions or other motivations, rather than being proven by hard science.
However, given the trend in our society towards a growing number of people diagnosed with mental disorders and very little restraint being placed on the APA and AMA in this area, I don't see any reason to believe this won't be rammed through. If gaming additiction was a mental disorder and one that particularly affected those who play MMOs, that is a usage base of millions that is continuing to grow. It is a matter of economics and greed, not science.
I run sendmail for my organizations inbound mail service. I spent a good amount of time tweaking it, enabled amavisd with spamassassin, writing custom access rules and milters to protect our outdated Exchange network, etc. I constantly used the O'Reilly sendmail book to figure out how to do things as sendmail configuration is anything but simple, intuitive or user-friendly. In my years with working with it, I have not found any sort of inherent security flaw that wasn't quickly fixed with a security patch. Most distributions have a pretty good base configuration for it as well.
One could argue that the benefit of sendmail is the amount of configurability it gives the admin. This is true. If you want a mail environment that is anything but vanilla with a lot of custom tweaks, sendmail is a good choice because it lays it all out for you pretty much. Postfix has similar features as well though.
This discussion is an easy one to get very biased on. What is the better choice will depend on what the specific needs for the organization are and what experience the administration team has. However, working with Postfix has a lower entry point than sendmail does. This point alone would probably make me choose Postfix for a new system design because it will reduce cost and increase flexibility in the future.
I do think it is flamebait and a sign of ignorance and/or arrogance to assert that sendmail is less secure than postfix or that no one really has a need to run it in 2007.
However, I will probably buy this book based on the review.
That's about the best, concise response I've seen.
I've learned from both sides of the table that questions about why you are looking, left or were fired are the trickiest to answer. You need to be very aware of how your response presents you.
If you were fired for being a 'fall guy', my immediate question is what lead up to this. There is never nothing that could be done about a given situation. If the company was really that bad, why did you wait to be fired? If you were a convenient target that no one objected strongly to being gotten rid of, how valuable were you really to your employer?
When interviewing someone, I look for honest answers as to why they left their previous company or why they are looking to leave. You should be willing to demonstrate that you may have held some of the responsibility for what occurred and what you learned from the situation. Claiming innocence and taking a 'victim' stance probably wouldn't work.
This is OP but, if you are looking while currently employed, you should always reply with honest reasons why the company you are interviewing with would be a good opportunity for you. Never put emphasis on the negativity of your current position or company.
Those wonderous geek toy filled beautiful workplaces where the brightest of the bright got to have board room meetings in their jeans, un-tucked button-up shirts and slightly fashionable eyewear. The most disturbing noise would be the slight hum of the CEO's segway as he drove down the hallway.
Uhm... sounds like a dotcom to me. Those all bit the dust over half a decade ago.
Unfortunately, after the first initial puppy love affair with the Internet, business has gotten much smarter about IT and tends to give it more realistic budgets for technology and man-power and expect real targets from IT that can be managed.
Also, as any industry matures, consolidation is a natural market movement. There are no longer 2343292385243 small companies out there doing XX (XX being something that actually did turn out to provitable). There are likely 5 - 10 much larger organizations doing XX. Any large organization, by its very nature, will probably feel Dilbert-ish.
I still feel that depending on what you are doing and where you live, you stand a good chance of finding a decent place of working and earning an honest dollar... Unless you would rather play with geek toys all day and impress others with your uber-geekdom rather than buckling down and actually performing a role that helps a business turn a profit.
So, is sticking on the concept of proving vs. disproving a highly theoretical concept that the value of is only understood by people that have some interest in science and should have some basic concept of scientific method pendantic or not?
I hardly think so since the concept of not being able to prove something scientifically is a core concept of scientific method... at least how it was taught to me in high school.
Thus, you can expect there to be a reaction in regards to the comment of proving vs. disproving prominently displayed from the Slashdot community.
It is very much an example of what I see quite often on Slashdot posts. The editor posts a topic and states something that very poorly represents the information being linked to. This is not a flagrant issue.
However, this particularly one did make me hang my head in shame at continuing to read Slashdot for news, expecting to find topics presented in a knowledgable fashion. This is something I would expect from mainstream media or in casual conversation, not from a site that brands itself as 'news for nerds'.
I'm sorry... I view the scientific method and particularly this point of it pretty damn important to the progress of our scientific and technical knowledge over that past few centuries. I see it as a bit more than pendantism.
You don't need to bring in the Big Damn Hammer(TM) the first time you bring this up for someone.
There needs to be a progressive counseling approach on this.
First step, make people aware of things and the way they need to be and why.
Second step, do an inspection at some in the near future and bring up any problems found to the person directly in a semi-formal, verbal warning style.
If things progress further, your company probably has a written warning policy in place and further counseling steps all leading up to being fired.
These steps are there for use and really give you a progressive path to allow someone to correct themselves before you have to fire them, get fired yourself or otherwise make the area harder to run.
If some behavior is being mandated in your area and it needs to happen that way, you need to make the people there put the behavior in and get rid of the ones who can't or won't.
This sort of progressive counseling works both ways though. There are people who I would have fired on the spot if I had the choice but was forced to put these steps in. Many have proven me wrong, straightened out and become some of my most valued employees. Really what you are doing is providing them with the opportunity to become a better teammate for you using tools that have progressive stronger messages.
No civilization can be ideal unless it is comprised of ideal individuals.
That being said you bring up two specific examples, neither of which I think have anything to do with the issue being argued and then imply my political affiliation.
I happen to be very happy with my Treo 650 with service provided by Cingular in Los Angeles. I do not feel stuck in the 90's with it.
I won't argue with the fact that our medical system is extremely screwed up. It is however extremely heavily regulated by various governmental bodies. Also, the consumers of medical services are not individuals who receive the service, it is other corporations (medical insurance companies). I agree that other medical systems where the individual has much more individual choice over who they see than a low cost HMO plans are much better off. Those who can afford PPOs do get some decent medical services but pay much more. The medical industry in the US is a good example of a vested interest that has lost sight of who it is serving and is allowed to continue to do so with legislation... which points back to the US government.
All of what you are talking about will be driven by the success of Vista.
Why was ME a blip? Because it was crap and Microsoft realized and the consumers realized it. If Vista is crap, Microsoft will take what they learned regarding its market success and come out with its new OS. Microsoft is still nimble enough to respond well to outside pressures. Windows 98 was a result of anti-trust litigation surrounding Windows 95 and Internet Explorer. If you remember, Microsoft actually lost the battle on that one in regards to being able to ship IE with 95... so they quickly got 98 on the shelves.
Microsoft does not have the power to dictate what users will accept against their will. They are just a dominant force in the marketplace that has the nimbleness and altertness to stay there.
You are ignoring market pressures and what will actually happen down the line for these two types of technicians.
First off, the customer will know whether you fixed a problem or not. Secondly, a knowledgable PC tech who actually knew how to resolve issues would be able to isolate the issue and tell the customer what to do about it or what not to expect. The other guy would be demanding payment for nothing but time... something which a lot of customers would not pay and any but the most extremely stupid would begrudge.
The responsible PC tech is going to gain a reputation of being someone who knows his stuff, was able to help on the 5 other issues the person was having and will get referrals from satisfied customers (if he works for himself) or positive feedback to his employee.
Anyone who runs a business will tell you that customer satisfaction, customer retention and customer referral are what build a business. It is extremely hard and expensive to get new business while getting business from an existing, satisfied customer base is low cost or downright free. An untrustworthy, unscrupulous technician is loosing out on later business and will be the one who is much more likely to go out of business or loose his job.
What does matter is that Microsoft can just dictate a feature set to us. They do have to pander somewhat to the consumer and will have to do so in order to remain viable no matter what the apparent market conditions are.
What personal experiences do you have that lead you to your second?
Consumers have expectations when they buy technology. When these expectations are not met, they usually are more than passive about dealing with the fact that what they spent their hard earned money doesn't do what they thought it should.
This is especially true when it comes to new things. If they run into some vague technical challenge where they can not use some function or another, it will either be brought up to be resolved or not, depending on how much the consumer REALLY needs it and how much that feature is of the total use of the item. Cost of the item will also play a factor.
If you have ever worked in a tech support or IT department, you will know that consumers do have a demand that things work properly. It is true that computers are still at a level of complexity that no un-technical user will find himself totally free of plaguing issues or things they wish they knew how to do better. Most technical users could find things about their own computer that they would change at any given time but are deemed small enough to be relegated to the back burner.
Consumers also listen to each other about their experiences with products. They also pay attention to reviews written for consumers. A product's reputation for quality, reliability and performance are all key factors that users weigh when consuming, especially something that has the price tag of a new computer.
Whether or not DRM plays a big role in Vista's performance as a product remains to be seen.
You make it almost sound like technical consumers are blind moles digging in the dirt for tubers and will eat any one they come across with no throught to any digestive problems that may result from this. This just simply is not the case.
If this is true (which I don't believe it really is) than none of us much to worry. No organization that feels it no longer has to provide what its consumer wants but decides it can enforce upon its usership what it dictates is not long for this world.
Even governments crumble when they forget this. If you want to argue this, point out a government that is still extant and has been so for more than a couple of hundred years and is still around. If you want to complain about Bush and our government, I would agree and say you have some valid points but this only really started being the case in the last century, starting in the 20s or so and has been getting progressively worse. Unless things are improved in our government soon, it too unfortunately will bite the dust.
We don't have to look too far into the past to see that not every Microsoft OS product has been a raging success. *cough* *cough* Windows ME
Happy Windows ME users were few and far between in my experience. Not having native USB support as well as having a host of stability issues that were hard to debug, etc. few people upgraded to it or quickly upgraded away from it when XP became wildly available.
I realize that the document linked to is written with what seems to be an almost inflammatory bias, it does sound that the Vista Content Protection is a move in the wrong direction for the content publishing industry and lawyers rather than the consumers.
Not even Microsoft is immune to the forces of the market. They do have dominance in a field where migrations away from a product are often expensive and time consuming but, at the very least, if they produce a crap product, people will not upgrade to it.
People making new purchases are much freer to choose from a competitor that may not have the same problems.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue of 'wiretapping' the Internet seems to be a bit like gun control. If you make it hard to legally own a gun, you make it harder for innocents to protect themselves from criminals.
Basically, with encryption technology being what it is and open source being what it is, it is possible for those who want to conceal their data from the government. Thus, they will.
So, really, where does this put us?
1) Stupid criminals may get caught.
2) Innocents may get falsely IDed through whatever automated filtering is done on unencrypted traffic.
3) Those that have the foresight to think that they may not want their data to get intercepted will utilize the free, existing encryption tools to protect themselves.
So, basically the people that are actually skilled enough to be dangerous are unaffected by this.
Could the value for the NSA only come in if they specifically targeted a specific suspect host's traffic and applied a lot of processing power to brute forcing the encryption? If that is what they are after, I see value to national security and convicting criminals.
If it is anything else, it seems very misguided. However, there was a lot of money put into Carnivore so who knows.
However, we can also expect (in most cases) whistle-blower protection if we report improprieties, especially after efforts to correct them through official channels.
Is it just me or is not being quoted in the press an example of whistle-blower protection?
This is just a blanket statement that the statements as to the views of the organization can only be attributed to the head. This prevents the media from saying things like Joe Blow, who has done many many studies on the subject, states that 'The organization feels that nobody should drive on days that end in Y because that is when all accidents happen."
That actually looks like a cool site.
Also... I don't think this is so much a matter of censorship as it is public relations. If the media quotes someone who works in the mailroom of Microsoft (as an extreme example), they could make it look like an official statement. This is merely a policy for an organization that dictates, 'Hey dumdum... go to the top if you want our official opinion on stuff.'
Any government or office within the government (intelligence and other appropriately sensitive agencies aside) who are proud of their work should be encouraged and willing to discuss openly with the people who give them the authority and resources to do their jobs.
The media however is not the people who give them authority and resources. The media, any media, are far from the un-biased group of people who relay factual and necessary data to a needing public without editing or filtration that they would like to be thought of as.
The media 'researches' and publishes story that forward agendas and not for the public and its rights to know. There are other channels to get information out that do not involve news reporters, such as the web and print media.
I, for one, applaud not giving the media more ammo to use to create FUD which seems to have the weight of authority.
I can hide from you by shutting my eyes!!
Actual, global warming is a misnomer. It is ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE!!!!!
Gosh, what couldn't fit under that term. Global warming is way too specific of a term to use to cause mass panic, even though it is adaquetly hard to prove or disprove. Can't we just go back to the old method? God did it!!
Bob Saget stands up.
"Boo this man. Have you ever sucked dick for WoW gold?"
I actually agree with you on many levels. You bring up a good example; linked lists... it is a fundamental in object-oriented programming and something you would learn about in your first or second programming class. Once getting a grasp of it, you can start to understand how binary trees, arrays or arbitrary object types, etc. can function. However, in order to really grasp it, you have to have some understanding of even more basic concepts; such as how heaps and stacks work in computer memnory, what a pointer (or reference, if you are into Perl) is, and I am sure other concepts help too. All in all, taking someone from ground zero (suich as no experience even using a computer) to a full, conceptual understanding could take some work.
I think where this argument breaks down a bit is that, computers - being designed and built by technically minded people is a wholly understood subject. I do not think the functionings of the human brain or mind and human behavoir are. If so, psychologists and psychiatrists, not to mention medical doctors, would have much more fundamental and groundsweeping breakthroughs than they have. The further that we have gone in putting our trust in the 'science' of psychology and the practices of psychiatry to treat people and their behavoir, the darker and more confused the results have become.
The above poster portrays an attitude that is all too sickening to me. We have this incredibly complex science of nueroscience that seems to be able to tell us things about what the brain is doing that may or may not be linked to behavoir yet we have a growing number of people being put on 'treatment' for mental illnesses... note treatment, not cures; and growing amounts of stories of who were at least diagnosed as not being mentally or socially well, given some form of treatment, only to have disasterous concequences later. And now they want to blame it on video game addiction.
I am sorry. Any one who comes off with an attitude that they are an expert when it comes to human behavoir or brain biochemistry and can't give any sort of reference, credential, explanation or proof of their understanding by being able to produce a positive result in someone is just trying to pull the wool over your eyes and probably their own as well.
If you can't explain something in simple enough terms for anyone to get it, you obviously don't have a very good grasp on it yourself.
So, respectfully, STFU.
There is a very easy answer to this question. Anything that can be classified as an addition or mental disorder can be treated. This means another cash cow for pharmaceutical companies, doctors and public schools. Why public school you ask, well they get good funding in a lot of cases for kids on special education. Once special education was changed to include kids who had been diagnosed with ADHD, ADD, etc; it became a pretty big incentive for school districts to allow these diagnoses to be done and enforced within the school system.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short) is widely known to be to have a growing number of arbitrary mental disorders that are the results of opinions or other motivations, rather than being proven by hard science.
http://www.cchr.com/index.cfm/6519
However, given the trend in our society towards a growing number of people diagnosed with mental disorders and very little restraint being placed on the APA and AMA in this area, I don't see any reason to believe this won't be rammed through. If gaming additiction was a mental disorder and one that particularly affected those who play MMOs, that is a usage base of millions that is continuing to grow. It is a matter of economics and greed, not science.
I run sendmail for my organizations inbound mail service. I spent a good amount of time tweaking it, enabled amavisd with spamassassin, writing custom access rules and milters to protect our outdated Exchange network, etc. I constantly used the O'Reilly sendmail book to figure out how to do things as sendmail configuration is anything but simple, intuitive or user-friendly. In my years with working with it, I have not found any sort of inherent security flaw that wasn't quickly fixed with a security patch. Most distributions have a pretty good base configuration for it as well.
One could argue that the benefit of sendmail is the amount of configurability it gives the admin. This is true. If you want a mail environment that is anything but vanilla with a lot of custom tweaks, sendmail is a good choice because it lays it all out for you pretty much. Postfix has similar features as well though.
This discussion is an easy one to get very biased on. What is the better choice will depend on what the specific needs for the organization are and what experience the administration team has. However, working with Postfix has a lower entry point than sendmail does. This point alone would probably make me choose Postfix for a new system design because it will reduce cost and increase flexibility in the future.
I do think it is flamebait and a sign of ignorance and/or arrogance to assert that sendmail is less secure than postfix or that no one really has a need to run it in 2007.
However, I will probably buy this book based on the review.
That's about the best, concise response I've seen.
I've learned from both sides of the table that questions about why you are looking, left or were fired are the trickiest to answer. You need to be very aware of how your response presents you.
If you were fired for being a 'fall guy', my immediate question is what lead up to this. There is never nothing that could be done about a given situation. If the company was really that bad, why did you wait to be fired? If you were a convenient target that no one objected strongly to being gotten rid of, how valuable were you really to your employer?
When interviewing someone, I look for honest answers as to why they left their previous company or why they are looking to leave. You should be willing to demonstrate that you may have held some of the responsibility for what occurred and what you learned from the situation. Claiming innocence and taking a 'victim' stance probably wouldn't work.
This is OP but, if you are looking while currently employed, you should always reply with honest reasons why the company you are interviewing with would be a good opportunity for you. Never put emphasis on the negativity of your current position or company.
Those wonderous geek toy filled beautiful workplaces where the brightest of the bright got to have board room meetings in their jeans, un-tucked button-up shirts and slightly fashionable eyewear. The most disturbing noise would be the slight hum of the CEO's segway as he drove down the hallway.
Uhm... sounds like a dotcom to me. Those all bit the dust over half a decade ago.
Unfortunately, after the first initial puppy love affair with the Internet, business has gotten much smarter about IT and tends to give it more realistic budgets for technology and man-power and expect real targets from IT that can be managed.
Also, as any industry matures, consolidation is a natural market movement. There are no longer 2343292385243 small companies out there doing XX (XX being something that actually did turn out to provitable). There are likely 5 - 10 much larger organizations doing XX. Any large organization, by its very nature, will probably feel Dilbert-ish.
I still feel that depending on what you are doing and where you live, you stand a good chance of finding a decent place of working and earning an honest dollar... Unless you would rather play with geek toys all day and impress others with your uber-geekdom rather than buckling down and actually performing a role that helps a business turn a profit.
Actually, which sells unnecessary upgrades to Vista.
I am confused here.
So, is sticking on the concept of proving vs. disproving a highly theoretical concept that the value of is only understood by people that have some interest in science and should have some basic concept of scientific method pendantic or not?
I hardly think so since the concept of not being able to prove something scientifically is a core concept of scientific method... at least how it was taught to me in high school.
Thus, you can expect there to be a reaction in regards to the comment of proving vs. disproving prominently displayed from the Slashdot community.
It is very much an example of what I see quite often on Slashdot posts. The editor posts a topic and states something that very poorly represents the information being linked to. This is not a flagrant issue.
However, this particularly one did make me hang my head in shame at continuing to read Slashdot for news, expecting to find topics presented in a knowledgable fashion. This is something I would expect from mainstream media or in casual conversation, not from a site that brands itself as 'news for nerds'.
I'm sorry... I view the scientific method and particularly this point of it pretty damn important to the progress of our scientific and technical knowledge over that past few centuries. I see it as a bit more than pendantism.
You don't need to bring in the Big Damn Hammer(TM) the first time you bring this up for someone.
There needs to be a progressive counseling approach on this.
First step, make people aware of things and the way they need to be and why.
Second step, do an inspection at some in the near future and bring up any problems found to the person directly in a semi-formal, verbal warning style.
If things progress further, your company probably has a written warning policy in place and further counseling steps all leading up to being fired.
These steps are there for use and really give you a progressive path to allow someone to correct themselves before you have to fire them, get fired yourself or otherwise make the area harder to run.
If some behavior is being mandated in your area and it needs to happen that way, you need to make the people there put the behavior in and get rid of the ones who can't or won't.
This sort of progressive counseling works both ways though. There are people who I would have fired on the spot if I had the choice but was forced to put these steps in. Many have proven me wrong, straightened out and become some of my most valued employees. Really what you are doing is providing them with the opportunity to become a better teammate for you using tools that have progressive stronger messages.
No civilization can be ideal unless it is comprised of ideal individuals.
That being said you bring up two specific examples, neither of which I think have anything to do with the issue being argued and then imply my political affiliation.
I happen to be very happy with my Treo 650 with service provided by Cingular in Los Angeles. I do not feel stuck in the 90's with it.
I won't argue with the fact that our medical system is extremely screwed up. It is however extremely heavily regulated by various governmental bodies. Also, the consumers of medical services are not individuals who receive the service, it is other corporations (medical insurance companies). I agree that other medical systems where the individual has much more individual choice over who they see than a low cost HMO plans are much better off. Those who can afford PPOs do get some decent medical services but pay much more. The medical industry in the US is a good example of a vested interest that has lost sight of who it is serving and is allowed to continue to do so with legislation... which points back to the US government.
All of what you are talking about will be driven by the success of Vista.
Why was ME a blip? Because it was crap and Microsoft realized and the consumers realized it. If Vista is crap, Microsoft will take what they learned regarding its market success and come out with its new OS. Microsoft is still nimble enough to respond well to outside pressures. Windows 98 was a result of anti-trust litigation surrounding Windows 95 and Internet Explorer. If you remember, Microsoft actually lost the battle on that one in regards to being able to ship IE with 95... so they quickly got 98 on the shelves.
Microsoft does not have the power to dictate what users will accept against their will. They are just a dominant force in the marketplace that has the nimbleness and altertness to stay there.
You are ignoring market pressures and what will actually happen down the line for these two types of technicians.
First off, the customer will know whether you fixed a problem or not. Secondly, a knowledgable PC tech who actually knew how to resolve issues would be able to isolate the issue and tell the customer what to do about it or what not to expect. The other guy would be demanding payment for nothing but time... something which a lot of customers would not pay and any but the most extremely stupid would begrudge.
The responsible PC tech is going to gain a reputation of being someone who knows his stuff, was able to help on the 5 other issues the person was having and will get referrals from satisfied customers (if he works for himself) or positive feedback to his employee.
Anyone who runs a business will tell you that customer satisfaction, customer retention and customer referral are what build a business. It is extremely hard and expensive to get new business while getting business from an existing, satisfied customer base is low cost or downright free. An untrustworthy, unscrupulous technician is loosing out on later business and will be the one who is much more likely to go out of business or loose his job.
oops...
What does matter is that Microsoft can't just dictate a feature set (or lack there of) to us.
What does matter is that Microsoft can just dictate a feature set to us. They do have to pander somewhat to the consumer and will have to do so in order to remain viable no matter what the apparent market conditions are.
I can see your first argument.
What personal experiences do you have that lead you to your second?
Consumers have expectations when they buy technology. When these expectations are not met, they usually are more than passive about dealing with the fact that what they spent their hard earned money doesn't do what they thought it should.
This is especially true when it comes to new things. If they run into some vague technical challenge where they can not use some function or another, it will either be brought up to be resolved or not, depending on how much the consumer REALLY needs it and how much that feature is of the total use of the item. Cost of the item will also play a factor.
If you have ever worked in a tech support or IT department, you will know that consumers do have a demand that things work properly. It is true that computers are still at a level of complexity that no un-technical user will find himself totally free of plaguing issues or things they wish they knew how to do better. Most technical users could find things about their own computer that they would change at any given time but are deemed small enough to be relegated to the back burner.
Consumers also listen to each other about their experiences with products. They also pay attention to reviews written for consumers. A product's reputation for quality, reliability and performance are all key factors that users weigh when consuming, especially something that has the price tag of a new computer.
Whether or not DRM plays a big role in Vista's performance as a product remains to be seen.
You make it almost sound like technical consumers are blind moles digging in the dirt for tubers and will eat any one they come across with no throught to any digestive problems that may result from this. This just simply is not the case.
If this is true (which I don't believe it really is) than none of us much to worry. No organization that feels it no longer has to provide what its consumer wants but decides it can enforce upon its usership what it dictates is not long for this world.
Even governments crumble when they forget this. If you want to argue this, point out a government that is still extant and has been so for more than a couple of hundred years and is still around. If you want to complain about Bush and our government, I would agree and say you have some valid points but this only really started being the case in the last century, starting in the 20s or so and has been getting progressively worse. Unless things are improved in our government soon, it too unfortunately will bite the dust.
Not true.
We don't have to look too far into the past to see that not every Microsoft OS product has been a raging success. *cough* *cough* Windows ME
Happy Windows ME users were few and far between in my experience. Not having native USB support as well as having a host of stability issues that were hard to debug, etc. few people upgraded to it or quickly upgraded away from it when XP became wildly available.
I realize that the document linked to is written with what seems to be an almost inflammatory bias, it does sound that the Vista Content Protection is a move in the wrong direction for the content publishing industry and lawyers rather than the consumers.
Not even Microsoft is immune to the forces of the market. They do have dominance in a field where migrations away from a product are often expensive and time consuming but, at the very least, if they produce a crap product, people will not upgrade to it.
People making new purchases are much freer to choose from a competitor that may not have the same problems.