Yeah because traditional referendums don't rely on corporations to print their ballots,
None of your examples are about the citizens needing to make an explicit choice to use a single private business in order to be able to participate fully in constitutional change. The analogy here would be requiring me to buy Dunbal(R) Branded Paper(TM) before I can write down my choice.
corporations to make the voting booths,
Is there a standardised voting booth design? Does a single private firm have to build one for every polling station across the country? Do I actually have to walk into the booth before I fill in my ballot paper?
corporations to make the buildings the process happens in,
Or public buildings built by public employees with public money. Or public buildings built with public money used to pay a local private firm.
the chairs people sit on,
As for buildings.
the transport people use to get to the polls, etc.
I know it's an oddity in America, but public transport built and served with public funding is fairly standard elsewhere. The older vehicles, before the global Reaganite stealing of public industries, were even built by public employees. For postal votes, we still have the public postal system.
Sometimes government relies on private business to provide goods and services - this may be appropriate for local government which can hire local firms (e.g. perhaps a carpenter to build chairs). But it is really never appropriate for a government to rely on a large corporation. Among every other disadvantage, corruption is inevitable.
You are the epitome of modern corporate culture. You destroyed the Alpha and are letting VMS rot. You outsource or offshore everything that isn't bolted down, but nothing is improved. Under Fiorina you demonstrated precisely how to run a company down for short term profit while cosying up to the corporation-friendly government. Hell, you've even ruined your reputation for building hardy calculators. Over a decade after this mess started, the only thing you have left to be proud of is the propotion of your profits which come from selling printer ink.
It's a small wonder zombie Hewlett and Packard haven't risen from the grave, given a new lease of life in death by recently shuffled Olsen, to personally escort every HP executive to the lowest region of hell.
'It is possible to register through other means, but most of the discussion takes place via Facebook,' said Berghildur Bernhardsdottir, spokeswoman for the constitutional review project."
I guess "reliance on large private corporations for operation of and participation in government" is going to be part of the new constitution? Not that it isn't de facto part of every other modern Western constitution, but now they've announced the overhaul it seems to me the right time to start being open about how the world runs now.
Which users are you thinking of? Don't handwave an argument.
No, but millions of FarmVille players will attest that Adobe technology gives good enough gaming performance.
"Look over there, it's something else."
And HTML5 performance is better than zero performance and an error message "The application could not be installed because its signature is invalid."
What is your obsession with signatures? The two top platforms have no mandatory app signing by default. It's an option for Windows but it's entirely at the discretion of the guy who controls the client machine.
Which a lot of end users are, especially users who routinely use a web application on several machines that don't belong to them.
This might be true for casual usage such as checking for information or reading mail, but which user routinely gets sustained, productive work done on machines which are in no way prepared for him to use them?
I imagine that PCs and other devices capable of running a WebKit-based browser are more common than PCs that run Windows applications, though I'm ready to be proven wrong.
Justify your statement. There are millions of deployed PCs which are several years old. We know that well over 90% of desktops run Windows and even more are capable of running Windows, while those more than 4 years old will struggle hopelessly on modern web apps.For example, there are mountains of usable Pentium IV machines which work fine as an information browser and using native desktop Office on XP - even Office XP would be fine. So many are relegated to the scrap heap because they cannot cope with less fully featuerd web incarnations of native equivalents.
I have had every flavor of Windows since Win 98SE (skipped Vista) and every version had driver problems on a regular basis.
Did you establish what you're doing wrong? I can understand simply having unsupported hardware, but problems on "every flavour... on a regular basis" implies some case unique to you.
I don't care about taking 10,000 random pieces of PC hardware, because I'm in control of which hardware I use.
What ooes that mean? Are your requirements so modest that you only need what's already in the iMac box, plus perhaps a printer and a USB drive? Even then, I had a USB drive which would lock up every so often under OS X (*), and support for my older printer required the more limited CUPS open source driver.
(*) USB is horrible so I wouldn't be surprised if this was a problem down at the controller level, but one of my reasons for going Mac the latest time was for Firewire and they seem to have mostly abandoned that now.
Your last experience of Windows may have been somewhere in the mid '90s.
Windows driver support is excellent, and the driver vendor only "blames Microsoft" in specific cases, e.g. in the early months following change of APIs (Vista). No-one, not even the hardware manufacturer, believes it is Microsoft's responsibility to write third party drivers for every hardware product.
The greatest strength of OS X is the lack of problems with drivers.
If that's its greatest strength, it has no strength at all. Any given version of OS X supports the latest generation of Mac hardware very well, previous generations moderately well, and almost everything else barely at all.
Take 10,000 pieces of PC hardware at random. Let me know how many of them you can get working under Windows vs OS X.
Blunt question: even if it costs half as much to hire someone working in a third world country, isn't this made up for by the inefficiency of long-distance communication of and delays in understanding across cultures?
Shouting, "Oi, Bob!" across the office and having all relevant materials in front of both of you is so much better for collaboration than having to speak to someone half way across the world (assuming they're even awake).
Is there one example in the literature, anywhere, of service which has been maintained or improved following offshoring? What about in the double whammy of offshoring and outsourcing, rather than simply hiring employees abroad?
Several popular platforms require all native applications to be digitally signed, and there's so much bureaucracy in getting an application signed that a smaller firm cannot compete.
You're being deliberately vague with "several popular platforms" because you're probably referring to games consoles or something rather than general purpose platforms we're talking about. Can you get comparable gaming performance from a web app?
Local applications are usually packaged in such a way that the user must have administrator privileges to install it, and not everybody who uses a computer is its owner. [...]
"Web apps are a way of bypassing the environment's security policy." And please don't respond with the statement that HTML/Javascript engines are 100% secure so it's totally OK to break these rules as it won't have any technical consequences.
Even on a home PC, where a sympathetic administrator is usually within easy reach, downloading and installing an application is a psychological barrier to using the application.
The minute or two required to install an app is easily made up for by the improved responsiveness within the first hour of usage of a native app. If you're really lazy and impulsive - and environments with the sole purpose of selling you overcharged crap are your predator - then I can see an advantage to an instant start to your experience.
A web application runs on any platform that has a web browser.
Bahaha, no it doesn't. It runs on any platform sufficiently modern/powerful to cope with the extreme overhead of web apps, with a sufficiently modern implementation of the ever-bloating web standards, and with appropriate input/output to make the app actually usable. A simple shopping cart would be an example.
Deploying updates to an application is easier: just push the update out to your server, and it's available to all users to use immediately.
Or maybe your users want to choose whether to update.
Conventional wisdom appears to hold that efficiency in the programmers' time often outweighs runtime efficiency on the customer premises equipment.
I find web app development way harder than traditional native development. Natively I don't have every few months to learn a new set of ever-changing buzzwords and their unnecessarily complex APIs.
I wrote my first "web app" before its time over a decade ago for a well-known accounting software firm, a client relationship management system. The system's main purpose was to gain quick access to information prepared in a thoroughly customisable way. That is where HTML - not HTML&Javascript hybrid pain - can shine.
What I was kinda saying is that the Apple community in engineered such that Apple fanboys generate PR for Apple, even when Apple isn't putting words directly into their mouths.
(1) I didn't build it "for Windows 7". I built a machine using fairly modern hardware and it Just Worked[tm] with Windows 7. This is one of the great things about Windows: there's no it's-your-fault-you-aren't-using-company-approved-hardware or it's-your-fault-you-write-your-own-driver dogma. Instead, Microsoft just kicks manufacturers into writing drivers and manufacturers are interested in having their hardware supported. The goal is simply to get shit working.
(2) Look at the lifecycles for Microsoft products. XP is slightly longer than usual and part of the reason may be as you say, but a good decade is common for Microsoft.
(3) If my 2006 iMac Core 2 Duo was only partly supported by early 2009 (e.g. Bootcamp drivers), as well as being a less than stellar experience when contrasted with Tiger, I can't imagine how badly a 10 year old machine suffers. TBH I think there was some watershed on the 10.4 to 10.5 transition - up to 10.4, OS X really did get faster with each release, as I would confirm with XPostFacto on my should-have-been-retired-far-earlier Wallstreet G3. After that, it was about writing just efficiently enough for the latest hardware.
Why is the movement of money taxed repeatedly in a way which puts the greatest pressure on the poorest? Why does the majority of government money or money in areas of natural monopoly go back to private contractors and licencees, when government could do most of the work in-house?
Because rich, powerful people everywhere - whatever label they're wearing - want your money and don't want any more competitors. This means siphoning off from your wallet at every stage so no campaign or party donor, no ex school buddy and no family member is left behind.
Finding that your machine is fast enough? Noticing that previous generation native software runs at a good speed, providing you the security of physical barriers and an uptime which doesn't require you to rely on hundreds of cooperating network, storage and service companies? Worried that it's too easy to trust the admins in your own office more than any number of competitors, foreign governments and bored hackers?
Then you want... THE CLOUD. Turn your PC into a graphical terminal and turn the UI and responsiveness clock back 15 years. Show off to your friends that, thanks to the uniquely layered framework making up THE CLOUD, only you have a machine modern and beefy enough to emulate a 4MHz Z80. You too can have what you had with Windows 95, today!
My homebuilt Windows 7 machine has been a far smoother experience than my store-built iMac. The latter was pretty smooth on Tiger, to be sure, but Leopard onward was glitchy. I'm really not sure that Apple do too much testing on their previous generation hardware.
And I'd rather have 14 years of reasonable support - thank you, XP - than 2-3 years of slightly better.
The fact that Apple and/or its faithful manage to make a big deal out of every 20 year old idea is not "negative spin". Whether it's Apple itself knowing how to drum up good PR or just insufferable fanboys preaching the word, it makes the Mac community a painful one to be around.
I've "switched to Mac" three times in my life and switched back again within a couple of years, each time leaving with a bad taste in my mouth: the first was with a Mac Plus, as the alternatives had already played and won catch-up; the second time with a PowerMac 8600 and G3 Wallstreet, as I seemed to have got in with the most religious thick-headed user group I've ever had the misfortune to encounter; the last time was with a white iMac C2D (the "educational" edition with the awesomely powerful GMA950), which managed to enter partly unsupported status before I'd even reached my third year of AppleCare and which by the last 6 months I was mostly only using in Windows 7 - everything I wanted to do in OS X I could do on Windows 7, and then I can do so much more.
I bet I'll try Mac a fourth time though, given another half decade of rest and recovery. And I still love my Mac Plus.
Because it's by far the most functional, open, well-supported, cost-effective desktop computing environment in the world. While other offerings have some of these features in greater measure (Linux - openness would be the obvious one), no other choice has an adequate measure of them all.
You remember the Third Reich? Get rid of the racism and the sense of urgency, and you basically have the EU in a couple of decades. If I think of the number of freedoms I've lost both this and that side of the Pond since 1995, I wonder whether it's immoral to carry on being productive.
Russia, maybe, because it outright steals all of their assets and jails owners,
If you take something from me, I get to take it back - even 20 years later. That's what's happening in Russia.
you have to minimize gov power so the corps must concentrate on their economic position relative to competition.
So the corps can fight it out to be the new government.
I can deal with corps by not buying from them,
Yes, if you have a large amount of fertile land and various survival skills, and are prepared to forego the luxuries of modern life, that's no problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah because traditional referendums don't rely on corporations to print their ballots,
None of your examples are about the citizens needing to make an explicit choice to use a single private business in order to be able to participate fully in constitutional change. The analogy here would be requiring me to buy Dunbal(R) Branded Paper(TM) before I can write down my choice.
corporations to make the voting booths,
Is there a standardised voting booth design? Does a single private firm have to build one for every polling station across the country? Do I actually have to walk into the booth before I fill in my ballot paper?
corporations to make the buildings the process happens in,
Or public buildings built by public employees with public money. Or public buildings built with public money used to pay a local private firm.
the chairs people sit on,
As for buildings.
the transport people use to get to the polls, etc.
I know it's an oddity in America, but public transport built and served with public funding is fairly standard elsewhere. The older vehicles, before the global Reaganite stealing of public industries, were even built by public employees. For postal votes, we still have the public postal system.
Sometimes government relies on private business to provide goods and services - this may be appropriate for local government which can hire local firms (e.g. perhaps a carpenter to build chairs). But it is really never appropriate for a government to rely on a large corporation. Among every other disadvantage, corruption is inevitable.
You are the epitome of modern corporate culture. You destroyed the Alpha and are letting VMS rot. You outsource or offshore everything that isn't bolted down, but nothing is improved. Under Fiorina you demonstrated precisely how to run a company down for short term profit while cosying up to the corporation-friendly government. Hell, you've even ruined your reputation for building hardy calculators. Over a decade after this mess started, the only thing you have left to be proud of is the propotion of your profits which come from selling printer ink.
It's a small wonder zombie Hewlett and Packard haven't risen from the grave, given a new lease of life in death by recently shuffled Olsen, to personally escort every HP executive to the lowest region of hell.
'It is possible to register through other means, but most of the discussion takes place via Facebook ,' said Berghildur Bernhardsdottir, spokeswoman for the constitutional review project."
I guess "reliance on large private corporations for operation of and participation in government" is going to be part of the new constitution? Not that it isn't de facto part of every other modern Western constitution, but now they've announced the overhaul it seems to me the right time to start being open about how the world runs now.
A lot of users don't own their own PC.
Which users are you thinking of? Don't handwave an argument.
No, but millions of FarmVille players will attest that Adobe technology gives good enough gaming performance.
"Look over there, it's something else."
And HTML5 performance is better than zero performance and an error message "The application could not be installed because its signature is invalid."
What is your obsession with signatures? The two top platforms have no mandatory app signing by default. It's an option for Windows but it's entirely at the discretion of the guy who controls the client machine.
Which a lot of end users are, especially users who routinely use a web application on several machines that don't belong to them.
This might be true for casual usage such as checking for information or reading mail, but which user routinely gets sustained, productive work done on machines which are in no way prepared for him to use them?
I imagine that PCs and other devices capable of running a WebKit-based browser are more common than PCs that run Windows applications, though I'm ready to be proven wrong.
Justify your statement. There are millions of deployed PCs which are several years old. We know that well over 90% of desktops run Windows and even more are capable of running Windows, while those more than 4 years old will struggle hopelessly on modern web apps.For example, there are mountains of usable Pentium IV machines which work fine as an information browser and using native desktop Office on XP - even Office XP would be fine. So many are relegated to the scrap heap because they cannot cope with less fully featuerd web incarnations of native equivalents.
I have had every flavor of Windows since Win 98SE (skipped Vista) and every version had driver problems on a regular basis.
Did you establish what you're doing wrong? I can understand simply having unsupported hardware, but problems on "every flavour... on a regular basis" implies some case unique to you.
I don't care about taking 10,000 random pieces of PC hardware, because I'm in control of which hardware I use.
What ooes that mean? Are your requirements so modest that you only need what's already in the iMac box, plus perhaps a printer and a USB drive? Even then, I had a USB drive which would lock up every so often under OS X (*), and support for my older printer required the more limited CUPS open source driver.
(*) USB is horrible so I wouldn't be surprised if this was a problem down at the controller level, but one of my reasons for going Mac the latest time was for Firewire and they seem to have mostly abandoned that now.
Your last experience of Windows may have been somewhere in the mid '90s.
Windows driver support is excellent, and the driver vendor only "blames Microsoft" in specific cases, e.g. in the early months following change of APIs (Vista). No-one, not even the hardware manufacturer, believes it is Microsoft's responsibility to write third party drivers for every hardware product.
The greatest strength of OS X is the lack of problems with drivers.
If that's its greatest strength, it has no strength at all. Any given version of OS X supports the latest generation of Mac hardware very well, previous generations moderately well, and almost everything else barely at all.
Take 10,000 pieces of PC hardware at random. Let me know how many of them you can get working under Windows vs OS X.
Blunt question: even if it costs half as much to hire someone working in a third world country, isn't this made up for by the inefficiency of long-distance communication of and delays in understanding across cultures?
Shouting, "Oi, Bob!" across the office and having all relevant materials in front of both of you is so much better for collaboration than having to speak to someone half way across the world (assuming they're even awake).
Is there one example in the literature, anywhere, of service which has been maintained or improved following offshoring? What about in the double whammy of offshoring and outsourcing, rather than simply hiring employees abroad?
Several popular platforms require all native applications to be digitally signed, and there's so much bureaucracy in getting an application signed that a smaller firm cannot compete.
You're being deliberately vague with "several popular platforms" because you're probably referring to games consoles or something rather than general purpose platforms we're talking about. Can you get comparable gaming performance from a web app?
Local applications are usually packaged in such a way that the user must have administrator privileges to install it, and not everybody who uses a computer is its owner. [...]
"Web apps are a way of bypassing the environment's security policy." And please don't respond with the statement that HTML/Javascript engines are 100% secure so it's totally OK to break these rules as it won't have any technical consequences.
Even on a home PC, where a sympathetic administrator is usually within easy reach, downloading and installing an application is a psychological barrier to using the application.
The minute or two required to install an app is easily made up for by the improved responsiveness within the first hour of usage of a native app. If you're really lazy and impulsive - and environments with the sole purpose of selling you overcharged crap are your predator - then I can see an advantage to an instant start to your experience.
A web application runs on any platform that has a web browser.
Bahaha, no it doesn't. It runs on any platform sufficiently modern/powerful to cope with the extreme overhead of web apps, with a sufficiently modern implementation of the ever-bloating web standards, and with appropriate input/output to make the app actually usable. A simple shopping cart would be an example.
Deploying updates to an application is easier: just push the update out to your server, and it's available to all users to use immediately.
Or maybe your users want to choose whether to update.
Conventional wisdom appears to hold that efficiency in the programmers' time often outweighs runtime efficiency on the customer premises equipment.
I find web app development way harder than traditional native development. Natively I don't have every few months to learn a new set of ever-changing buzzwords and their unnecessarily complex APIs.
I wrote my first "web app" before its time over a decade ago for a well-known accounting software firm, a client relationship management system. The system's main purpose was to gain quick access to information prepared in a thoroughly customisable way. That is where HTML - not HTML&Javascript hybrid pain - can shine.
What I was kinda saying is that the Apple community in engineered such that Apple fanboys generate PR for Apple, even when Apple isn't putting words directly into their mouths.
(1) I didn't build it "for Windows 7". I built a machine using fairly modern hardware and it Just Worked[tm] with Windows 7. This is one of the great things about Windows: there's no it's-your-fault-you-aren't-using-company-approved-hardware or it's-your-fault-you-write-your-own-driver dogma. Instead, Microsoft just kicks manufacturers into writing drivers and manufacturers are interested in having their hardware supported. The goal is simply to get shit working.
(2) Look at the lifecycles for Microsoft products. XP is slightly longer than usual and part of the reason may be as you say, but a good decade is common for Microsoft.
(3) If my 2006 iMac Core 2 Duo was only partly supported by early 2009 (e.g. Bootcamp drivers), as well as being a less than stellar experience when contrasted with Tiger, I can't imagine how badly a 10 year old machine suffers. TBH I think there was some watershed on the 10.4 to 10.5 transition - up to 10.4, OS X really did get faster with each release, as I would confirm with XPostFacto on my should-have-been-retired-far-earlier Wallstreet G3. After that, it was about writing just efficiently enough for the latest hardware.
To refute God, first you must define Him.
Proceed.
to exploit.
The problem is not too much government or too much corporation. It's too much human.
Econoetica
To someone who cannot say his/her Rs, that's pretty much econerotica. And, while I'm not sure what that is yet, I'm sure it's exploititillative.
That's OK, Apple have been doing that for decades.
Why is the movement of money taxed repeatedly in a way which puts the greatest pressure on the poorest? Why does the majority of government money or money in areas of natural monopoly go back to private contractors and licencees, when government could do most of the work in-house?
Because rich, powerful people everywhere - whatever label they're wearing - want your money and don't want any more competitors. This means siphoning off from your wallet at every stage so no campaign or party donor, no ex school buddy and no family member is left behind.
Finding that your machine is fast enough? Noticing that previous generation native software runs at a good speed, providing you the security of physical barriers and an uptime which doesn't require you to rely on hundreds of cooperating network, storage and service companies? Worried that it's too easy to trust the admins in your own office more than any number of competitors, foreign governments and bored hackers?
Then you want... THE CLOUD. Turn your PC into a graphical terminal and turn the UI and responsiveness clock back 15 years. Show off to your friends that, thanks to the uniquely layered framework making up THE CLOUD, only you have a machine modern and beefy enough to emulate a 4MHz Z80. You too can have what you had with Windows 95, today!
'sok, I wouldn't expect an Apple fanboy to care for detail.
Mod parent (-1, criticises both Apple and its fanboy culture)
My homebuilt Windows 7 machine has been a far smoother experience than my store-built iMac. The latter was pretty smooth on Tiger, to be sure, but Leopard onward was glitchy. I'm really not sure that Apple do too much testing on their previous generation hardware.
And I'd rather have 14 years of reasonable support - thank you, XP - than 2-3 years of slightly better.
The fact that Apple and/or its faithful manage to make a big deal out of every 20 year old idea is not "negative spin". Whether it's Apple itself knowing how to drum up good PR or just insufferable fanboys preaching the word, it makes the Mac community a painful one to be around.
I've "switched to Mac" three times in my life and switched back again within a couple of years, each time leaving with a bad taste in my mouth: the first was with a Mac Plus, as the alternatives had already played and won catch-up; the second time with a PowerMac 8600 and G3 Wallstreet, as I seemed to have got in with the most religious thick-headed user group I've ever had the misfortune to encounter; the last time was with a white iMac C2D (the "educational" edition with the awesomely powerful GMA950), which managed to enter partly unsupported status before I'd even reached my third year of AppleCare and which by the last 6 months I was mostly only using in Windows 7 - everything I wanted to do in OS X I could do on Windows 7, and then I can do so much more.
I bet I'll try Mac a fourth time though, given another half decade of rest and recovery. And I still love my Mac Plus.
I must be some sort of masochist.
Because it's by far the most functional, open, well-supported, cost-effective desktop computing environment in the world. While other offerings have some of these features in greater measure (Linux - openness would be the obvious one), no other choice has an adequate measure of them all.
You're listing the freedoms that the Reich wanted to grant the ethnically favoured across Europe, yes?
You remember the Third Reich? Get rid of the racism and the sense of urgency, and you basically have the EU in a couple of decades. If I think of the number of freedoms I've lost both this and that side of the Pond since 1995, I wonder whether it's immoral to carry on being productive.
Russia, maybe, because it outright steals all of their assets and jails owners,
If you take something from me, I get to take it back - even 20 years later. That's what's happening in Russia.
you have to minimize gov power so the corps must concentrate on their economic position relative to competition.
So the corps can fight it out to be the new government.
I can deal with corps by not buying from them,
Yes, if you have a large amount of fertile land and various survival skills, and are prepared to forego the luxuries of modern life, that's no problem.