When this was an issue most people got browsers from their ISP. Now they could simply include a browser that didn't disable their competitor's browsers and that wasn't built into the OS to prevent removal.
Apple includes Safari but there's no lock-in. Mandrake includes Konqueror, Galleon, Mozilla, and others. All behavior allowing competition.
Microsoft's track record is terrible. They've specifically and intentionally tried anti-competitive (anything other than "May the best product win") tactics to destroy competitors.
They should have to jump through more hoops now to prove their innocence that someone who has never been caught breaking the law.
Nothing prevents competitors apps from running, except MS's dirty tricks whenever they can get away with them.
Remember the phrase "Dos ain't done till Lotus won't run"? It has come out in numerous places that it was standard practice to make subtle changes to APIs, just within documented limits (usually), specifically to break competitor's software. It could be argued that the competitor wasn't careful enough, but they did specifically target competitive software.
Because of MS's track record many people believe they shouldn't be trusted, even if they don't happen to be breaking any laws now. Trust is something earned - they blew it all and it'll (fairly) be a long time before they get the benefit of the doubt.
It's largely MS's fault that there aren't competitive x86 OSes. Unless you failed to pay attention you must have noticed that they forced illegal deals on OEMs to ship only Windows, going so far as to say that any PC shipped without Windows meant that all copies would cost retail, drove out any chance that BeOS or anyone else had.
If MS really made a better product they'd have stood by haughtily and let people try lower quality OSes, and stepped in to pick up the pieces when they failed. But they can't handle competition - almost as if they know they'd come out worse.
There's a difference between bundling apps, nobody complains when Apple does it, and restricting choice.
Microsoft has always been big on making sure you can only run their software when they have an entry in the field. They made Win 3.x claim DR-DOS wasn't fully compatible, they included undocumented API calls in 9x to make office work faster, they embrace and extend at every step.
It's like buying a toy that uses AAA batteries and finding out that it's a special type - called by the same thing as the standard, but subtly incompatible so you can't use any other brand in the toy, while their battery will work anywhere so they can claim superiority.
They also go a step further, integrating their product so deeply (IE for example) that you can't remove it. Like letting you use third-party batteries in a toy, but only along with your batteries, not instead. And of course they won't stay in the holder, and there are circuits to drain third-party batteries faster to make them look inferior.
MS had a chance to play fair, they blew it. Now everyone is examining every move of theirs and restricting their freedoms much more than if they'd been honest up front. Like restricting a criminal's right to carry a gun.
Wow, MS's games run on their OSes. How truly amazing. Feel good about yourself?
Try running Safari on your PC. Or, until recently, iTunes. Or KDE, or run Apache (usefully - it will run on Windows but it isn't recommended).
Anyways, Halo sucked. How many times did they cut and paste the same crap for those endless levels? Even for Windows only games you could surely come up with something that was actually good. If you feel the need to talk about MS's games, at least Age of Mythology is a good example of its genre. If Halo didn't have the jeep (Warthog) it wouldn't have had anything worth playing.
Yeah, that non-crippled kiosk computer I put together at my mom's work is stable because of the users... chuckle.
Maybe it's because it's Linux, running a user account. It simply doesn't let you do anything that'll screw up the system. Not because it won't do anything, but because all you could do is wipe out the files that are user writable - session data, effectively resetting it to the defaults. But you can open a shell, browse the filesystem, etc.
And no, you can't remove IE from WinXP. You can remove a few files and desktop links, but the majority of the browser is part of the HTML renderer, not seperate as decent programming practices would suggest.
The problem, imho, is not that Windows has its own html renderer - KDE does too, the problem is that everything is so tightly integrated you have security errors in email because of html, and in the file browser because of malformed links, etc.
Pretty much all the recent Linux systems ship a fully working desktop - no library download required, but the internals are loosely coupled and you could replace a subsystem if you wanted.
Few people care about a car with easy to reach spark plugs, but everyone wants a car with low maintenance and they're willing to listen to the mechanic explain that easy to reach spark plugs (etc) lower the maintenance costs. Similarly, no average Joe cares about the internals of their operating system, but nobody wants something buggy, or hard to upgrade. Even if they take it to the shop they realize that easy to maintain translates into cheaper to maintain.
Windows however is very cheap to maintain. Nobody bothers with diagnostics these days - they all wipe everything and reinstall. Much faster. If it didn't lose all your settings and much data, it'd be a good thing.
It's odd that XMMS locks up for you, it's *never* done that for me, except for once when I selected the wrong sound pluggin. Is that perhaps the problem on your system? Also, is sid stable or unstable? I installed XMMS in Xandros for a friend from unstable and got 1.2.8 which is very new - old versions did have more issues.
I use XMMS because they're very responsive to my requests. I asked for a way to order files in random play and a way to queue files even in random, and they added both in days. Amazing.
When I install Mozilla I tell people that it supports all the standards, that there are some sites which are badly coded and won't work, but that for those they can brave the popups and security problems and use IE for that site.
I can't remember what the pluggin is, but there's one to open a link in IE. Good for checking out that one stubborn site.
And if you present it as a bug in the sites, which it always is (unless it's ActiveX, which might be a bug anyways...) people are more accepting.
Same here. I was browsing for game cracks at a LAN party (Diablo 2 won't work out of most burners - Blizzard's caring response is "Buy a new CD drive - not a burner") and I was easily navigating Russian crack sites, with nary a porn popup or anything. At the end I had an audience of three, all of whom were convinced I had some hacker-level popup blocker. Nope, just Mozilla. All three of them grabbed the copy I had and installed it that night.
They weren't anti-MS at all, and only peripherally knew of Linux, but none of them liked IE or Outlook. They just used it because it was there.
And yeah, that's why I support making Microsoft either un-bundle their software or install competitor's software, like Opera and Mozilla.
If they shipped installers they could install the selected package from CD (or the net) withouyt actually having to bloat the install with ten different browsers, etc. It would probably be the best method because they'd have to ship the OS without Media Player, not just Media Player and Real Player.
Or check your arse a bit more carefully. I'm Irish too boy, from Co Cork, and I endured two stripsearches with the old "finger up the arse" treatment at Heathrow during the late 80s as I travelled between Ireland and mainland Europe on business. The end result, for me, was an abiding hatred of both Heathrow Airport and of racial or "national" profiling.
A hatred of airports could be easily developed. I've never seen more incompotent "security" personel or more palcebo security measures than flying after 9/11. They did all the stupid nail clipper confiscation and fascist crap and yet they let the gift shops in the secured area sell nail clippers and worse. Glass plates, collectible forks, many things that could have been turned into an effective knife or shiv in seconds. Not to mention that they allowed many things onto the flight that could have been as effective as box cutters. (CDs hold enough of an edge to cut someone very badly and are easily snapped and sharpened.) They made annoying half-measures to verify if computers were real by making you turn them on, yet they didn't even attempt to check all the hiding spots on them (spare battery compartment). You could have hidden a gun inside the metal-shielded (at least on my old laptop) compartment.
The profiling... well... I grew up in Western Canada, in a fairly white neighborhood, and we were profiled on many other things. When I moved to the city with large East Indian and Chinese populations we got racially profiled a bit, depending on area, and it was no better or worse than any other profiling. (Teen punk, Male out late, Pissed-off-cop-with-chip-on-shoulder, whatever.) Happened less actually because of race. Mixed race groups got off really easily - not a gang profile I guess.
As long as cops respect the idea of innocent until proven guilty, the stops are mere checks. When they're trying to manufacture guilt, as happened to me once when younger, it's bad regardless of why they stop you.
There are also many non-Muslim Americans who hold many strong stereotypes against Islam because of one widely obscure line out of the Koran and media potrayal of the followers of the religion.
But the statement that Islam is a peaceful religion isn't true. Buddhism maybe, for all that it can be called a religion, but not Islam. (And not Christianity either, old-testament at least, and many Christians have what seems (to an outsider like me) an odd focus on that book despite the later supposedly overriding books. I'm not trying to say one is better than the other.) It may be one obscure line, but in the same way you can't judge modern Christians (for better or worse) by the words of Jesus, you can't judge Muslims by the number of lines in the Quran that supposedly support violent actions.
It's all about how the religion is presented and what the modern followers are doing with it.
In the rich and content West, few Muslims are going to be willing to throw their lives away. In poor countries many will, and they've got many predators willing to use religion to help them do it while killing as many infidels as possible. Is it Islam at fault? Not as such no, but yes, in a way it - as a social phenomenon - is.
No, the black example is very appropriate to the current situation, because it boils down to stereotypes and what the media is telling people to think.
That's a common feeling among people on both sides of the political debate - that the (liberal|conservative) media is feeding the people a line of bullshit. While all news is biased, and some more than others, I've actually seen much more tolerance of Muslims preached on TV than "Kill the towel-heads", or even a subtle form. On 9-11 I remember hearing reporters going out of their way to say "extremist" after "suspected Islamic", to tell people that Islam is a religion of peace much related to Christianity (though that can be a funny statement if examined), etc.
I've seen this is a group of people close to me. As I said (I think), I'm Irish. We've debated the IRA and the English, etc, around the dinner table before. I'm not the stereotypical rich white guy who wants the police to bust anyone from the lower classes. I'm one of the lower classes who would get searched, but I still think it can be right in some circumstance.
In times of inter-racial violence I think it would have been perfectly valid to stop cars full of white guys who were suspiciously cruising through American ghettos, perhaps to beat up a black guy on the way home late one night. It'd also make sense to investigate a car full of Black Panthers of Nation of Islam (especially the old-school version) cruising around a white area late one night.
I've been stopped by police for matching profiles before and while annoying, in all but one case they told me a met a profile (young kid at night, resembled a known thief, whatever) and checked out my reason for being around at night. Five minutes, possible theft or rape investigated, and nobody hurt.
I have experienced an over-zealous cop once when young who was convinced I was guilty and set out trying to prove it while I was spread out next to the cruiser, but I see this as a problem with the police, not with examining people who match a profile.
Though, as a scientist at heart, I maintain that profiles need to be examined for bias and hate-motivated stereotypes. Any tool can be useful, but only if you understand the consequences.
Okay, so Israel's policy towards Palistine is unrelated to the issue of Islam being widely connected with terrorism? Have you ever watched TLC's connections? If you have, I'm sure you had difficult time following the historical narrative. The military of Israel is in some parts a terrorist organization, just as is Hamas. I see both sides (on a military level) as dogs engaging in gross violations of the natural sphere of human rights. Yes, Sharon is an evil man, just as are the Hamas military leaders. Most people are afraid to look on
Would it be justified, then, for France to keep close tabs on visiting Americans? After all, they are about eight times more likely to kill someone during their stay than the average frenchman!
If indeed this is the case, then yes. I think paying extra attention to high-risk groups is allowable, even when I'm a member of those groups. I wouldn't specifically like being searched, but I'd understand it and it'd make as much sense as any current airport security measure.
Shouldn't we distinguish what the religion teaches from what certain fringe groups pretend the religion teaches? When KKK people use religion to condone bombing an abortion clinic, do we call it an act of Christian terrorism?
The belief that martyrdom in service of the religion will guarantee entrance to heaven is a fairly common belief, as is (in some areas) the belief that killing westerners, US citizens in particular, qualifies.
And yes, if I was an Abortion-Clinic guard I'd watch religious people closely.
Distinguishing between "member of a class containing bad people" and "bad people" is where I say you should watch them in suspicious circumstances, not arrest them on presumption of guilt.
Does the fact that many people use patriotism to justify violence mean that teaching patriotism is akin to teaching violence?
And if I saw a flag-waving love-it-or-leave-it type leaving an area after a bomb went off at an anti-war rally I would be suspicious.
It doesn't. Martyrdom in the Quran has nothing to do with killing others [...]
But the problem is that modern Islam is not the Quran, that's like saying that all Christians adhere to the word of the bible. Many reports from people who should know indicate that suicide bombers are being taught that their actions guarantee entrance to the afterlife despite any sins.
Being Christian is strongly correlated with murdering people. After all, the murder rates in the predominantly Christian United States are much higher than the murder rates in the oficially athiest China. And there are a whole lot more Christian murderers than Mulsim suicide bombers!
But being Christian isn't strongly correlated with murder (in the USA at least, to use your example). The Christian population of the USA, to my knowledge, is no more likely to murder someone, per capita, than anyone else. But, being a American Christian is strongly correlated to being from the USA which may indicate more of a tendency to murder than a non-USAian.
Besides, the issue of suicide in these attacks is an important one. Few "western" people want to die in their attacks, this is a recent (to us westerners) development and our security procedures have a hard time stopping this. Witness our policies that bags must be accompanied on a flight - this doesn't hinder a suicide bomber in the slightest yet does stop many homegrown terrorists.
Yes. Unless you can prove that there is a *statistically significant* correlation between suicide bombers and being Muslim, then there is no basis for screening them. You've got a handful of Mulsim terrorists (relatively) and a handful of Christian terrorists (IRA, among others).
If I were in England during a rash of IRA bombings I'd expect to be questioned, I am Irish (from a Catholic family) and would likely be travelling between England and Ireland. What I would find unfair would be if they found me guilty instead of just checking my luggage a bit more carefully.
Mulsims don't necessarily wear turbans. Arabs do.
I know, I was being flip. Like referring to a Scot and implying that they all wore Kilts, ignore the fact that many don't and many of the Irish do...
Have you cared to ever research the approximate percentage of Islamic population that engages in suicide bombing?
That's not the relevant statistic. The relevant statistic is how many terrorist attacks (outside of Islamic countries, where one expects a high incidence) are perpetraded by followers of Islam?
I addressed this point ("There are many more innocent...") and you apparently read it because you decided to mock it, yet you didn't seem to understand it. I know that the percentage of trouble-makers (define it however you like) is much lower than the percentage of Average-Joes who just want to live their lives.
I guess all people of the Islamic faith wear turbans... Oh boy! Why do I even bother.
Gotcha, so I need to write a graduate-level thesis on comparative middle-eastern religions in order to use a quick example? I know that not all Muslims wear turbans, and not all turban wearers are Muslim. Sheesh, it's like saying that someone is a kilt is likely to be a Scot, despite the Irish wearing kilts, and a million other minor issues.
You know, I've being watching the evening news lately and noticed a large percentage of the crime stories involve people of African decent. Maybe our police should target suspicious African Americans because of some statistic.
That's a loaded example, but if done without malice, is reasonable. If a black man robbed a bank it makes sense to watch black men, not white. If men commit more rape than women it makes sense to be suspicious of men in bushes by dark pathways at night, but it doesn't mean they're guilty.
The black example is particularly bad because there are many racists who hate blacks and will take any chance to hurt them, and because the skin color isn't the correlating factor, it's usually poverty which correlates to violent crime. If the poor are largely black in your town this may mean that blacks (in situations likely to involve violent crime) would attract more attention.
It's only a problem when you go overboard.
If there was a serial killer in your neighborhood, would you not be suspicious of anyone matching his description, despite that fact that short blonde men (for instance) aren't all serial killers? How is this different than other physical signs? Is it wrong to notice skin color and gender but not hair color or height?
Nice rant about Israel too, though you must be a bit obsessed to try to bring it into unrelated conversations.
Agreed. C++ is more complex than Perl and closer to the metal so misunderstanding tend not to be performance impacting but stability impacting.
C++ has a million ways to do things and nobody ever uses vanilla C++, they always have their addons that change the way pointers are used, etc. There are many features of the language that are widely acknowledged to be hazardous (not even deprecated ones like goto) and yet are still in use because most C++ courses don't teach the industry wisdom.
A C programmer can follow along though, as long as their job doesn't involve rearchitecting anything.
That said, I dislike C++ because of this. It's too much of a hodgepodge and it doesn't have a niche, imho. C is used for thing where you want an idea of the machine-code output and higher level languages Scheme, Perl, Python, LISP, Haskell, Lua, are used depending on the application (customer-visible scripting, or UI scripting, or game logic, etc). C++ is a good way to interface with APIs, but I dislike doing much work in it.
That's what I do. I write a cover-letter that works as an email and where I link to my HTML resume, I've also got an HTML copy of the cover letter. Ideal for printing to give to the next tier in the process if they use printed copies.
Being that I've always seen a printed copy of my resume when I interview, I think this is important.
Oh, and I always print up a copy on nice paper and take it along for them to keep, so that the next tier has a good copy.
There are many governments I don't trust, or rather, don't trust with my back turned.
When a major religion teaches people that they can get ahead in the afterlife by killing others I tend to be wary. I'm aware that stereotypes aren't absolute, but I'm not willing to ignore a very good indicator and unfortunately for the bleeding hearts, being Islamic is strongly correlated with suicide attacks on civilians.
There's a limited ammount of time available, priorities have to be made. Do you suggest that we ignore racial or religious indicators when screening people? I think it's perfectly reasonable, even though it would target me for extra attention in some areas. I'm Irish and in periods of IRA activity I'd be suprised if British police didn't watch me more carefully.
The important thing to remember is that these indicators are not absolute. There are many more innocent people wearing Turbans than terrorists. Realizing that something is a sign requiring extra attention doesn't imply individual guilt is an important point.
Cookies were created to enable a saved state even in a stateless server environment, pretty much to allow shopping carts and such. The technology was created with this stuff in mind - that means that it couldn't have been that amazing when Amazon implemented one-click patents.
The one-click was a new idea, but it wasn't a device. It was a way of offering a service more comparable to offering blue cars instead of red, than a patentable technology.
Patents need to be new, AND contain some technological device. New alone is like crazy-gluing a calculator to a phone and selling a calculator phone. The technology aspect would be if you had to invent a way to shield the calculator from the phone.
So you are correct, I never though of one-click shopping, but I never though of gluing calculators to everything either and it's not patentable, despite the popularity of calculator-covered crap I see in novelty stores.
The evidence that MS manufactures value by printing CDs it couldn't otherwise have sold is that they've done it before. They did it after 9/11, giving the Red Cross a huge paper donation that cost them a few CDs. Of course they gave them some other things, but the bulk is bogus.
It's as if I gave you $1B in art and cash and hardware. $999,999,950 in art (my own self-apraised work), $1 in cash, and $49 in an old P1-100 with 32MB of RAM.
Sure, the hardware is real, but how much hardware (and cash) is there?
You know, maybe if MS hadn't lied their way through an anti-trust case, cheated and defrauded many other companies, and then just generally acted like dickheads by trying to convince people that open source is communist in nature and thus "unamerican" and should be forbidden by government, and many other things, we'd give them the benefit of the doubt.
The %10 of retail figure is only meaningful if those copies are going to sale to pay off the R&D costs. Copies that were created for in-house testing, for instance, aren't expected to repay R&D so their total cost to the company is for the plastic.
You say it's unfair to ammortize the costs of the R&D over one copy, but it's equally unfair to ammortize those over every copy. You can only count the ones that make it to the market.
In other words, if I printed up 1M more Win2K Pro CDs it wouldn't have anything to do with Microsoft's expenses.
Oh no, not more than I'm doing... Not at all. At latest market prices, I myself am donating $2B worth of art.
You see, the Canadian Art Gallery has a piece that they paid $5M for, consisting of a red stripe down the center of an otherwise white canvas. I am sending a CD with a similar piece of art that I produced and a license to duplicate it 400 times, thus totalling $2B dollars in value.
Now, of course we realize that even the artist who did produce this work (I don't have a link to it, but it made the all the Canadian papers a few years back) wouldn't be donating $2B in value, just on paper.
They're sending software to people who wouldn't have bought it anyways. Total cost to them, $.50 per CD, maybe. (Less if they send a few disks and a permissive license.) They don't lose a potential sale because not many people in a country with an average yearly wage of a USD1000 are going to buy a USD500 software package. (Just to invent numbers, but the idea should be clear.)
Free copies of software aren't a bad thing, so kudos on that. The issue is lying. They want to make it look like they care, but really they're sending a few plastic disks and pumping it for everything it's worth.
You can say that they're doing more than me, but I see it as them trying to milk the plight of a bunch of poor people for all it's worth. Slimy.
If you need to recoup $100 over 10 copies of a program you need to sell them for $10 each, plus markup. This doesn't change even if you press a thousand more copies and dump them in a landfill, microwave them, or give them out to people who aren't in your market (thus not cutting into the 10 copies to be sold.)
Microsoft can press CDs for the cost of the plastic and is claiming full retail price for the value. Very deceitful.
It's pretty obviously true and I think your eagerness to flame someone blinded you. Michael's only mistake is calling it wholesale value, which implies it's the retail side which does the 1000-1 markup, not Microsoft.
Sure, they do need to recoup their losses, so that copy of MS Server 2003 might have cost 1/3 of its sticker price, all told. The 1-1000 comes in when they create CDs that will never be sold. Obviously, 98%+ of their costs are in R&D and such, very little is the little plastic disks and pieces of paper.
If they made 1M disks and then discovered a typo on the label and junked them their costs be 1M * $0.5, not 1M * $250 (or whatever)?
Similarly, if they make a million disks and store them in a warehouse, or give them out to poor Africans who never would have spent the money on the software, it doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't cut into an existing market, it doesn't require more R&D, it's just as simple as pressing disks.
And for that huge gift, software to people who probably can't afford the computers to run it on, and who would have just used free software if they didn't get MS stuff, they want to claim generosity on the order of $1B dollars... Um, not.
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When this was an issue most people got browsers from their ISP. Now they could simply include a browser that didn't disable their competitor's browsers and that wasn't built into the OS to prevent removal.
Apple includes Safari but there's no lock-in. Mandrake includes Konqueror, Galleon, Mozilla, and others. All behavior allowing competition.
Microsoft's track record is terrible. They've specifically and intentionally tried anti-competitive (anything other than "May the best product win") tactics to destroy competitors.
They should have to jump through more hoops now to prove their innocence that someone who has never been caught breaking the law.
Nothing prevents competitors apps from running, except MS's dirty tricks whenever they can get away with them.
Remember the phrase "Dos ain't done till Lotus won't run"? It has come out in numerous places that it was standard practice to make subtle changes to APIs, just within documented limits (usually), specifically to break competitor's software. It could be argued that the competitor wasn't careful enough, but they did specifically target competitive software.
Because of MS's track record many people believe they shouldn't be trusted, even if they don't happen to be breaking any laws now. Trust is something earned - they blew it all and it'll (fairly) be a long time before they get the benefit of the doubt.
It's largely MS's fault that there aren't competitive x86 OSes. Unless you failed to pay attention you must have noticed that they forced illegal deals on OEMs to ship only Windows, going so far as to say that any PC shipped without Windows meant that all copies would cost retail, drove out any chance that BeOS or anyone else had.
If MS really made a better product they'd have stood by haughtily and let people try lower quality OSes, and stepped in to pick up the pieces when they failed. But they can't handle competition - almost as if they know they'd come out worse.
There's a difference between bundling apps, nobody complains when Apple does it, and restricting choice.
Microsoft has always been big on making sure you can only run their software when they have an entry in the field. They made Win 3.x claim DR-DOS wasn't fully compatible, they included undocumented API calls in 9x to make office work faster, they embrace and extend at every step.
It's like buying a toy that uses AAA batteries and finding out that it's a special type - called by the same thing as the standard, but subtly incompatible so you can't use any other brand in the toy, while their battery will work anywhere so they can claim superiority.
They also go a step further, integrating their product so deeply (IE for example) that you can't remove it. Like letting you use third-party batteries in a toy, but only along with your batteries, not instead. And of course they won't stay in the holder, and there are circuits to drain third-party batteries faster to make them look inferior.
MS had a chance to play fair, they blew it. Now everyone is examining every move of theirs and restricting their freedoms much more than if they'd been honest up front. Like restricting a criminal's right to carry a gun.
Wow, MS's games run on their OSes. How truly amazing. Feel good about yourself?
Try running Safari on your PC. Or, until recently, iTunes. Or KDE, or run Apache (usefully - it will run on Windows but it isn't recommended).
Anyways, Halo sucked. How many times did they cut and paste the same crap for those endless levels? Even for Windows only games you could surely come up with something that was actually good. If you feel the need to talk about MS's games, at least Age of Mythology is a good example of its genre. If Halo didn't have the jeep (Warthog) it wouldn't have had anything worth playing.
Yeah, that non-crippled kiosk computer I put together at my mom's work is stable because of the users... chuckle.
Maybe it's because it's Linux, running a user account. It simply doesn't let you do anything that'll screw up the system. Not because it won't do anything, but because all you could do is wipe out the files that are user writable - session data, effectively resetting it to the defaults. But you can open a shell, browse the filesystem, etc.
And no, you can't remove IE from WinXP. You can remove a few files and desktop links, but the majority of the browser is part of the HTML renderer, not seperate as decent programming practices would suggest.
The problem, imho, is not that Windows has its own html renderer - KDE does too, the problem is that everything is so tightly integrated you have security errors in email because of html, and in the file browser because of malformed links, etc.
Pretty much all the recent Linux systems ship a fully working desktop - no library download required, but the internals are loosely coupled and you could replace a subsystem if you wanted.
Few people care about a car with easy to reach spark plugs, but everyone wants a car with low maintenance and they're willing to listen to the mechanic explain that easy to reach spark plugs (etc) lower the maintenance costs. Similarly, no average Joe cares about the internals of their operating system, but nobody wants something buggy, or hard to upgrade. Even if they take it to the shop they realize that easy to maintain translates into cheaper to maintain.
Windows however is very cheap to maintain. Nobody bothers with diagnostics these days - they all wipe everything and reinstall. Much faster. If it didn't lose all your settings and much data, it'd be a good thing.
It's odd that XMMS locks up for you, it's *never* done that for me, except for once when I selected the wrong sound pluggin. Is that perhaps the problem on your system? Also, is sid stable or unstable? I installed XMMS in Xandros for a friend from unstable and got 1.2.8 which is very new - old versions did have more issues.
I use XMMS because they're very responsive to my requests. I asked for a way to order files in random play and a way to queue files even in random, and they added both in days. Amazing.
When I install Mozilla I tell people that it supports all the standards, that there are some sites which are badly coded and won't work, but that for those they can brave the popups and security problems and use IE for that site.
I can't remember what the pluggin is, but there's one to open a link in IE. Good for checking out that one stubborn site.
And if you present it as a bug in the sites, which it always is (unless it's ActiveX, which might be a bug anyways...) people are more accepting.
Same here. I was browsing for game cracks at a LAN party (Diablo 2 won't work out of most burners - Blizzard's caring response is "Buy a new CD drive - not a burner") and I was easily navigating Russian crack sites, with nary a porn popup or anything. At the end I had an audience of three, all of whom were convinced I had some hacker-level popup blocker. Nope, just Mozilla. All three of them grabbed the copy I had and installed it that night.
They weren't anti-MS at all, and only peripherally knew of Linux, but none of them liked IE or Outlook. They just used it because it was there.
And yeah, that's why I support making Microsoft either un-bundle their software or install competitor's software, like Opera and Mozilla.
If they shipped installers they could install the selected package from CD (or the net) withouyt actually having to bloat the install with ten different browsers, etc. It would probably be the best method because they'd have to ship the OS without Media Player, not just Media Player and Real Player.
Or check your arse a bit more carefully. I'm Irish too boy, from Co Cork, and I endured two stripsearches with the old "finger up the arse" treatment at Heathrow during the late 80s as I travelled between Ireland and mainland Europe on business. The end result, for me, was an abiding hatred of both Heathrow Airport and of racial or "national" profiling.
A hatred of airports could be easily developed. I've never seen more incompotent "security" personel or more palcebo security measures than flying after 9/11. They did all the stupid nail clipper confiscation and fascist crap and yet they let the gift shops in the secured area sell nail clippers and worse. Glass plates, collectible forks, many things that could have been turned into an effective knife or shiv in seconds. Not to mention that they allowed many things onto the flight that could have been as effective as box cutters. (CDs hold enough of an edge to cut someone very badly and are easily snapped and sharpened.) They made annoying half-measures to verify if computers were real by making you turn them on, yet they didn't even attempt to check all the hiding spots on them (spare battery compartment). You could have hidden a gun inside the metal-shielded (at least on my old laptop) compartment.
The profiling... well... I grew up in Western Canada, in a fairly white neighborhood, and we were profiled on many other things. When I moved to the city with large East Indian and Chinese populations we got racially profiled a bit, depending on area, and it was no better or worse than any other profiling. (Teen punk, Male out late, Pissed-off-cop-with-chip-on-shoulder, whatever.) Happened less actually because of race. Mixed race groups got off really easily - not a gang profile I guess.
As long as cops respect the idea of innocent until proven guilty, the stops are mere checks. When they're trying to manufacture guilt, as happened to me once when younger, it's bad regardless of why they stop you.
There are also many non-Muslim Americans who hold many strong stereotypes against Islam because of one widely obscure line out of the Koran and media potrayal of the followers of the religion.
But the statement that Islam is a peaceful religion isn't true. Buddhism maybe, for all that it can be called a religion, but not Islam. (And not Christianity either, old-testament at least, and many Christians have what seems (to an outsider like me) an odd focus on that book despite the later supposedly overriding books. I'm not trying to say one is better than the other.) It may be one obscure line, but in the same way you can't judge modern Christians (for better or worse) by the words of Jesus, you can't judge Muslims by the number of lines in the Quran that supposedly support violent actions.
It's all about how the religion is presented and what the modern followers are doing with it.
In the rich and content West, few Muslims are going to be willing to throw their lives away. In poor countries many will, and they've got many predators willing to use religion to help them do it while killing as many infidels as possible. Is it Islam at fault? Not as such no, but yes, in a way it - as a social phenomenon - is.
No, the black example is very appropriate to the current situation, because it boils down to stereotypes and what the media is telling people to think.
That's a common feeling among people on both sides of the political debate - that the (liberal|conservative) media is feeding the people a line of bullshit. While all news is biased, and some more than others, I've actually seen much more tolerance of Muslims preached on TV than "Kill the towel-heads", or even a subtle form. On 9-11 I remember hearing reporters going out of their way to say "extremist" after "suspected Islamic", to tell people that Islam is a religion of peace much related to Christianity (though that can be a funny statement if examined), etc.
I've seen this is a group of people close to me. As I said (I think), I'm Irish. We've debated the IRA and the English, etc, around the dinner table before. I'm not the stereotypical rich white guy who wants the police to bust anyone from the lower classes. I'm one of the lower classes who would get searched, but I still think it can be right in some circumstance.
In times of inter-racial violence I think it would have been perfectly valid to stop cars full of white guys who were suspiciously cruising through American ghettos, perhaps to beat up a black guy on the way home late one night. It'd also make sense to investigate a car full of Black Panthers of Nation of Islam (especially the old-school version) cruising around a white area late one night.
I've been stopped by police for matching profiles before and while annoying, in all but one case they told me a met a profile (young kid at night, resembled a known thief, whatever) and checked out my reason for being around at night. Five minutes, possible theft or rape investigated, and nobody hurt.
I have experienced an over-zealous cop once when young who was convinced I was guilty and set out trying to prove it while I was spread out next to the cruiser, but I see this as a problem with the police, not with examining people who match a profile.
Though, as a scientist at heart, I maintain that profiles need to be examined for bias and hate-motivated stereotypes. Any tool can be useful, but only if you understand the consequences.
Okay, so Israel's policy towards Palistine is unrelated to the issue of Islam being widely connected with terrorism? Have you ever watched TLC's connections? If you have, I'm sure you had difficult time following the historical narrative. The military of Israel is in some parts a terrorist organization, just as is Hamas. I see both sides (on a military level) as dogs engaging in gross violations of the natural sphere of human rights. Yes, Sharon is an evil man, just as are the Hamas military leaders. Most people are afraid to look on
Would it be justified, then, for France to keep close tabs on visiting Americans? After all, they are about eight times more likely to kill someone during their stay than the average frenchman!
If indeed this is the case, then yes. I think paying extra attention to high-risk groups is allowable, even when I'm a member of those groups. I wouldn't specifically like being searched, but I'd understand it and it'd make as much sense as any current airport security measure.
Shouldn't we distinguish what the religion teaches from what certain fringe groups pretend the religion teaches? When KKK people use religion to condone bombing an abortion clinic, do we call it an act of Christian terrorism?
The belief that martyrdom in service of the religion will guarantee entrance to heaven is a fairly common belief, as is (in some areas) the belief that killing westerners, US citizens in particular, qualifies.
And yes, if I was an Abortion-Clinic guard I'd watch religious people closely.
Distinguishing between "member of a class containing bad people" and "bad people" is where I say you should watch them in suspicious circumstances, not arrest them on presumption of guilt.
Does the fact that many people use patriotism to justify violence mean that teaching patriotism is akin to teaching violence?
And if I saw a flag-waving love-it-or-leave-it type leaving an area after a bomb went off at an anti-war rally I would be suspicious.
Good point, thanks. Paper is cheap. (Hell, even at $1 per copy it'd be cheap insurance...)
It doesn't. Martyrdom in the Quran has nothing to do with killing others [...]
But the problem is that modern Islam is not the Quran, that's like saying that all Christians adhere to the word of the bible. Many reports from people who should know indicate that suicide bombers are being taught that their actions guarantee entrance to the afterlife despite any sins.
Being Christian is strongly correlated with murdering people. After all, the murder rates in the predominantly Christian United States are much higher than the murder rates in the oficially athiest China. And there are a whole lot more Christian murderers than Mulsim suicide bombers!
But being Christian isn't strongly correlated with murder (in the USA at least, to use your example). The Christian population of the USA, to my knowledge, is no more likely to murder someone, per capita, than anyone else. But, being a American Christian is strongly correlated to being from the USA which may indicate more of a tendency to murder than a non-USAian.
Besides, the issue of suicide in these attacks is an important one. Few "western" people want to die in their attacks, this is a recent (to us westerners) development and our security procedures have a hard time stopping this. Witness our policies that bags must be accompanied on a flight - this doesn't hinder a suicide bomber in the slightest yet does stop many homegrown terrorists.
Yes. Unless you can prove that there is a *statistically significant* correlation between suicide bombers and being Muslim, then there is no basis for screening them. You've got a handful of Mulsim terrorists (relatively) and a handful of Christian terrorists (IRA, among others).
If I were in England during a rash of IRA bombings I'd expect to be questioned, I am Irish (from a Catholic family) and would likely be travelling between England and Ireland. What I would find unfair would be if they found me guilty instead of just checking my luggage a bit more carefully.
Mulsims don't necessarily wear turbans. Arabs do.
I know, I was being flip. Like referring to a Scot and implying that they all wore Kilts, ignore the fact that many don't and many of the Irish do...
Have you cared to ever research the approximate percentage of Islamic population that engages in suicide bombing?
...") and you apparently read it because you decided to mock it, yet you didn't seem to understand it. I know that the percentage of trouble-makers (define it however you like) is much lower than the percentage of Average-Joes who just want to live their lives.
That's not the relevant statistic. The relevant statistic is how many terrorist attacks (outside of Islamic countries, where one expects a high incidence) are perpetraded by followers of Islam?
I addressed this point ("There are many more innocent
I guess all people of the Islamic faith wear turbans... Oh boy! Why do I even bother.
Gotcha, so I need to write a graduate-level thesis on comparative middle-eastern religions in order to use a quick example? I know that not all Muslims wear turbans, and not all turban wearers are Muslim. Sheesh, it's like saying that someone is a kilt is likely to be a Scot, despite the Irish wearing kilts, and a million other minor issues.
You know, I've being watching the evening news lately and noticed a large percentage of the crime stories involve people of African decent. Maybe our police should target suspicious African Americans because of some statistic.
That's a loaded example, but if done without malice, is reasonable. If a black man robbed a bank it makes sense to watch black men, not white. If men commit more rape than women it makes sense to be suspicious of men in bushes by dark pathways at night, but it doesn't mean they're guilty.
The black example is particularly bad because there are many racists who hate blacks and will take any chance to hurt them, and because the skin color isn't the correlating factor, it's usually poverty which correlates to violent crime. If the poor are largely black in your town this may mean that blacks (in situations likely to involve violent crime) would attract more attention.
It's only a problem when you go overboard.
If there was a serial killer in your neighborhood, would you not be suspicious of anyone matching his description, despite that fact that short blonde men (for instance) aren't all serial killers? How is this different than other physical signs? Is it wrong to notice skin color and gender but not hair color or height?
Nice rant about Israel too, though you must be a bit obsessed to try to bring it into unrelated conversations.
Agreed. C++ is more complex than Perl and closer to the metal so misunderstanding tend not to be performance impacting but stability impacting.
C++ has a million ways to do things and nobody ever uses vanilla C++, they always have their addons that change the way pointers are used, etc. There are many features of the language that are widely acknowledged to be hazardous (not even deprecated ones like goto) and yet are still in use because most C++ courses don't teach the industry wisdom.
A C programmer can follow along though, as long as their job doesn't involve rearchitecting anything.
That said, I dislike C++ because of this. It's too much of a hodgepodge and it doesn't have a niche, imho. C is used for thing where you want an idea of the machine-code output and higher level languages Scheme, Perl, Python, LISP, Haskell, Lua, are used depending on the application (customer-visible scripting, or UI scripting, or game logic, etc). C++ is a good way to interface with APIs, but I dislike doing much work in it.
That's what I do. I write a cover-letter that works as an email and where I link to my HTML resume, I've also got an HTML copy of the cover letter. Ideal for printing to give to the next tier in the process if they use printed copies.
Being that I've always seen a printed copy of my resume when I interview, I think this is important.
Oh, and I always print up a copy on nice paper and take it along for them to keep, so that the next tier has a good copy.
There are many governments I don't trust, or rather, don't trust with my back turned.
When a major religion teaches people that they can get ahead in the afterlife by killing others I tend to be wary. I'm aware that stereotypes aren't absolute, but I'm not willing to ignore a very good indicator and unfortunately for the bleeding hearts, being Islamic is strongly correlated with suicide attacks on civilians.
There's a limited ammount of time available, priorities have to be made. Do you suggest that we ignore racial or religious indicators when screening people? I think it's perfectly reasonable, even though it would target me for extra attention in some areas. I'm Irish and in periods of IRA activity I'd be suprised if British police didn't watch me more carefully.
The important thing to remember is that these indicators are not absolute. There are many more innocent people wearing Turbans than terrorists. Realizing that something is a sign requiring extra attention doesn't imply individual guilt is an important point.
Cookies were created to enable a saved state even in a stateless server environment, pretty much to allow shopping carts and such. The technology was created with this stuff in mind - that means that it couldn't have been that amazing when Amazon implemented one-click patents.
The one-click was a new idea, but it wasn't a device. It was a way of offering a service more comparable to offering blue cars instead of red, than a patentable technology.
Patents need to be new, AND contain some technological device. New alone is like crazy-gluing a calculator to a phone and selling a calculator phone. The technology aspect would be if you had to invent a way to shield the calculator from the phone.
So you are correct, I never though of one-click shopping, but I never though of gluing calculators to everything either and it's not patentable, despite the popularity of calculator-covered crap I see in novelty stores.
The evidence that MS manufactures value by printing CDs it couldn't otherwise have sold is that they've done it before. They did it after 9/11, giving the Red Cross a huge paper donation that cost them a few CDs. Of course they gave them some other things, but the bulk is bogus.
It's as if I gave you $1B in art and cash and hardware. $999,999,950 in art (my own self-apraised work), $1 in cash, and $49 in an old P1-100 with 32MB of RAM.
Sure, the hardware is real, but how much hardware (and cash) is there?
You know, maybe if MS hadn't lied their way through an anti-trust case, cheated and defrauded many other companies, and then just generally acted like dickheads by trying to convince people that open source is communist in nature and thus "unamerican" and should be forbidden by government, and many other things, we'd give them the benefit of the doubt.
The %10 of retail figure is only meaningful if those copies are going to sale to pay off the R&D costs. Copies that were created for in-house testing, for instance, aren't expected to repay R&D so their total cost to the company is for the plastic.
You say it's unfair to ammortize the costs of the R&D over one copy, but it's equally unfair to ammortize those over every copy. You can only count the ones that make it to the market.
In other words, if I printed up 1M more Win2K Pro CDs it wouldn't have anything to do with Microsoft's expenses.
Oh no, not more than I'm doing... Not at all. At latest market prices, I myself am donating $2B worth of art.
You see, the Canadian Art Gallery has a piece that they paid $5M for, consisting of a red stripe down the center of an otherwise white canvas. I am sending a CD with a similar piece of art that I produced and a license to duplicate it 400 times, thus totalling $2B dollars in value.
Now, of course we realize that even the artist who did produce this work (I don't have a link to it, but it made the all the Canadian papers a few years back) wouldn't be donating $2B in value, just on paper.
They're sending software to people who wouldn't have bought it anyways. Total cost to them, $.50 per CD, maybe. (Less if they send a few disks and a permissive license.) They don't lose a potential sale because not many people in a country with an average yearly wage of a USD1000 are going to buy a USD500 software package. (Just to invent numbers, but the idea should be clear.)
Free copies of software aren't a bad thing, so kudos on that. The issue is lying. They want to make it look like they care, but really they're sending a few plastic disks and pumping it for everything it's worth.
You can say that they're doing more than me, but I see it as them trying to milk the plight of a bunch of poor people for all it's worth. Slimy.
If you need to recoup $100 over 10 copies of a program you need to sell them for $10 each, plus markup. This doesn't change even if you press a thousand more copies and dump them in a landfill, microwave them, or give them out to people who aren't in your market (thus not cutting into the 10 copies to be sold.)
Microsoft can press CDs for the cost of the plastic and is claiming full retail price for the value. Very deceitful.
It's pretty obviously true and I think your eagerness to flame someone blinded you. Michael's only mistake is calling it wholesale value, which implies it's the retail side which does the 1000-1 markup, not Microsoft.
Sure, they do need to recoup their losses, so that copy of MS Server 2003 might have cost 1/3 of its sticker price, all told. The 1-1000 comes in when they create CDs that will never be sold. Obviously, 98%+ of their costs are in R&D and such, very little is the little plastic disks and pieces of paper.
If they made 1M disks and then discovered a typo on the label and junked them their costs be 1M * $0.5, not 1M * $250 (or whatever)?
Similarly, if they make a million disks and store them in a warehouse, or give them out to poor Africans who never would have spent the money on the software, it doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't cut into an existing market, it doesn't require more R&D, it's just as simple as pressing disks.
And for that huge gift, software to people who probably can't afford the computers to run it on, and who would have just used free software if they didn't get MS stuff, they want to claim generosity on the order of $1B dollars... Um, not.