The book of Mozilla has changed for each product released. There's a Wikipedia page that gives the history here. An official page containing all the passages to date can be found here. And in case you're too lazy to click, here they are by browser:
Netscape:
And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.
from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10
Mozilla:
And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble.
from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31 (Red Letter Edition)
Firefox:
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
"Microsoft still wants to get it out as soon as possible, but slipping from January to March is nowhere near as bad as slipping from shipping before the holidays to after the holidays," a group of Gartner analysts wrote in the report.
What is this, a game console? What does Microsoft care if it slips for the Holiday season? If anyone gets a computer for Christmas, they're still likely to get it with Microsoft products. If not (i.e. they buy an Apple), I don't see that having Vista out will help that much.
And of course, as soon as I add traces, problems disappear... Don't panic! Calm down and take a deep breathe...
...and get yourself a technology designed for multi-threaded programming. Java will give each thread its own cache of variables to prevent deadlocking on concurrent modifications. If you need to do something that requires more than one statement (thus creating a race condition), then you need to create yourself a semaphore-based lock:
Of course, such synchronizations can carry a huge penalty on multi-CPU systems. i.e. If you manage to stop every CPU, you could be wasting MASSIVE amounts of CPU time. As a result, you should always strive to push locks down as far in the code as possible. They must execute extremely quickly, and should only be called when absolutely necessary. Follow those guidelines and you'll find it fairly easy to write multi-threaded code.
Oh wait. I was supposed to praise the NPTL tool, wasn't I. Um... well... it's very nice. And they've got... um... penguins on the homepage. Oh, and look! It's GPLed! Wow. Just... um... wow. Hey, did you know that the author of Minix wrote a book on OS Design? Really. It even covers the basics of multi-threading. It's pretty cool, you should... um... check it out. Yeah, that's the ticket!
Sure, but how and why was the voice synth connected to his modem/terminal program?
Well, at home he explicitly connected it to show off for his girlfriend. As for the government computers, have you seen their accessability requirements?:-P
Breaking launch codes a single digit at a time was one thing they got glaringly wrong
Will people please stop complaining about this? If you've read Tanenbaum's book on Operating System Design, you'd know that this was a very real hack. In the system he describes (Tandem Computer, I think?), users could attach a listener to the page fault handler to know when a page fault happened. The system also checked passwords one character at a time.
A common method of breaking the super-user password was to align the password with the page boundary. If a page fault occurred, the hacker would know that the correct letter or digit had been found. The hacker would then move the password one character back in memory so that the next digit would be over the page boundary. This process was repeated until all the characters were found.
As a result, these computers were actually capable of being hacked "one character at a time" like you see in movies. Hollywood was just slow to update to the latest methods used.
Often overlooked that complaint is the fact that they bothered to introduce [a voice synth] as a device at all.
And yet it was still surprisingly realistic. The Intellivoice module (a voice synthesizer with its own built-in speaker) was released for the Intellivision console in 1982, and the Macintosh "introduced" itself in 1984. It received a standing ovation from the crowd. And that's just what the public saw. The actual research into Voice Synthesis goes back to the 1930's!
So it was perfectly reasonable to include voice synthesis in WarGames, even if its purpose was to allow the viewer to read less text.
You forgot BASIC. Microsoft dominated the BASIC market all throughout the 80's. How that will help them in 2006 is anybody's guess, but they did dominate BASIC.
According to recent rumors, Bill Gates is purchasing a Bradley Fighting Machine. He believes that it will provide Microsoft a leg-up in their war with Google. When asked about the situation, Larry Page responded with "we don't make forward looking statements." He was standing in front of an M-5 tank.
In other news, Google has announced the release of the F-22 Raptor Beta(TM) program which allows for anyone with an internet account to remotely control an F-22 fighter. Anti-war groups have expressed a fear that teenagers remotely flying armed warplanes could pose a threat to world peace. Google responded by stating that the weapons systems are locked out except when over the testing range at Latitude 47.6 by Longitude -122.1.
Your argument is that you believe that Walmart employs PR Ninjas with Psychology training, and that based on that belief you believe that Walmart is paying individuals to edit the Wikipedia page. Your basis for this belief is that fact that you have an MBA and that it seems reasonable.
Nowhere in there is a single shred of evidence suggesting what you say is true. Your argument is based entirely on your beliefs, making it more religion than fact. That is why your argument falls apart. If you want a serious discussion, try presenting something more tangible than your bias. Until then, you have no argument. Period, end of story.
Clearly the people on Walmart's side have a solid understanding of these psychological principles, which doesn't surprise me from a company that employs "greeters" to make themselves feel more friendly.
Oh yes, that explains everything. Rather than a best attempt being made by Wikipedians to present an article free from POV problems, the true explanation is the highly paid, Wal-mart Psychology Ninjas. By George, I think you've solved it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have William of Ockham coming over for a visit.
The people at Wikipedia obviously are missing the point if they think NPOV means "just presenting facts".
Did it occur to you that Wikipedia might have sterilized the article in direct response to the Walmart haters. For example, this edit removed heavily biased text that was placed smack in the middle of the introduction. If people would stop trying to do damage to the article, a much better rewrite might be able to be done. Until then, however, the shear number of edits are going to cause a power struggle that will result in nothing but sterile facts.
The Walmart article is definitely NPOV. It presents the cold facts with practically no commentary or spin. If I had any complaint about it, it would be that it's poorly written. The topics jump around, the facts are presented suddenly and without order, and the grammar is atrocious. What it needs is a good rewrite.
His point concerning the number of edits fails to prove anything. If you look at the History for the Rain Forest article, you'll find a similar number of edits. 99% of them are vandalism.
All in all, I can't find any hard evidence to support his claims, and the remaining evidence he presents seems to be nothing more than, "I think this page should be more critical of Wal-Mart, therefore there must be lobbists at work!" While that's a nice sentiment, it doesn't make for a smoking gun.
The people who work for the likes of EA don't create wealth. The people who work extremely hard because they want to create wealth. So much wealth, that new businesses pop up every day, giving people jobs they enjoy. And if you invest right, you can find yourself in a situation of managing wealth instead of creating it. i.e. Your wealth can literally maintain your income through its mere existence. This is what most people strive toward. Granted, most don't know how to get there, but a rather large percentage of the population does. Once you're in a position to where your wealth provides your income, you don't actually need to work anymore. Some people do just because they want to, but there's certainly no requirement.
How do you think all those folks tour America in their million-dollar, custom-built RVs? It isn't by living from city to city, I'll tell you that.
I mean, if you want no vacation time a year, go ahead. I'd much rather have a couple months of paid vacation to work on my hobbies and ideas.
I think you're confused. A lack of money is usually the prohibiting factor for vacations, not a lack of time. Last year my family and I stayed in the Opryland hotel in Nashville. It was a wonderful experience with the Hotel itself being a huge attraction. (Imagine indoor forests, rivers, shops, restaurants, etc. all set to wonderful music.) We also saw many of the areas attractions, including taking the kids to a childrens science museum and a zoo where they learned all kinds of stuff. (My son still asks where we're going to go back.) While we managed to keep the cost of the vacation within our budget, it still took money. If you want to go to Disney World with your family, it takes money. If you want to travel internationally, it takes money. Without it, the best you can do is head to the beach. Perhaps setup camp in a National Park. (Assuming you have enough for a tent, gear, food, car, etc.)
Money isn't evil. (Remember that Paul said, "The love of money is the root of all evil.") It's useful for all kinds of things, including the promotion of happiness. Working long hours at a job you love to create a better life for yourself and your family isn't evil, either. What is evil is pursuing money at the expense of other people. If your family is suffering, if your happiness is suffering, or if you're making other people suffer, then that money has only materialistic value. But to earn an honest dollar doing honest work so you can live a more rich and full life, what is wrong with that?
The webserver has already been commoditized. ...because many companies needed it so they banded together and produced a commodity solution. Ergo, Apache.
I have a retail store that uses software (that I wrote) that lets us put all of our inventory online, in real-time, straight from our POS system. New items get added instantly, and the inventory is always correct, and it's all processed in the same system. That software puts us waaaaay ahead of most of our competition in the industry. THAT software most definitely gives us a competitive advantage which would be eliminated if I gave it away in the hopes that somebody will fix a bug or two, or just to get some non-existent "We use OSS" PR. THAT kind of thing is what this article is about.
That may be what the article is on about (though I'm not sure I agree with your analysis, but I'll get to that in a moment), but that is certainly not what I'm talking about. I'll repeat myself for the third and FINAL time: If a given piece of software gives you an advantage over your competitors, then it's worth maintaining in-house. Otherwise you're wasting resources. Common examples of saving resources have been projects like FreeBSD/Linux, Apache, and MySQL/PostgreSQL. These projects fill a need that would be rediculous for most companies to replicate.
Now, the reason why I disagree with your analysis of the article is that I feel you're projecting your business on the banking industry. Your business is online retail, a market that generally is all about providing the goods faster and cheaper. Thus your retail software gives you a competitive advantage. In the banking industry, however, everything is standardized and they often need to communicate between each other. As a result, maintaining their own software for those pieces is a huge, costly burden that produces very little return. In many cases, their custom software can mean that they're falling behind in the industry. Thus is makes sense to use *someone else* as their source. Open Source is an inexpensive way of doing that, while simultaneously guaranteeing that each banks needs are met. In addition, it is perfectly feasible for each company to extend the software to add the proprietary bits they need.
To put that into retail terms, imagine if you had the choice between personally creating a backend system to communicate with suppliers over SOAP, or using an OSS component to communicate with your backend suppliers over SOAP. As long as it meets your needs, the latter probably makes more sense. However, it's still decoupled from your inventory management system, which DOES give you an advantage. (Just look at Walmart for an example of that.)
Do you use an OSS webserver? How about your database? Perhaps you're using commercial software like IIS. (In which case you're getting the same benefits, only you're paying for it.) Why do you use Open Source or any software you didn't write if using a custom version would supposedly give you a competitive advantage?
Your argument is a total non-argument. You've completely agreed with me, only you're ignoring the areas where you use cooperative software because it isn't part of your core business. And that is the core point:
If it isn't part of your core business, it isn't worth developing in-house.
I'd be interested in reading that article if you can remember where you saw it
It was on Sun's website a few years back. Unfortunately, it may not exist anymore. Sun has a habit of replacing their pages with newer and "better" ones whenever they feel like it. I tried Googling their site, but I couldn't find anything more recent than 2006.:-(
It's really too bad. It was a pretty good article, and I have to say that I agreed with it. You can still hear echos of it in McNealy's more recent "Don't build a custom jalopy" statement.
Re:Ingrained Behaviour
on
EA Spouse Outed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I found my effective personal income and purchasing power was greatly increased by the sorry state of the Dollar compared with the Euro.
Putting aside the remark about the "sorry state" of the dollar (it's only a 1.2:1 ratio for the Euro, yeash), the lower value of the dollar is intended for exactly what you're using it for: Encouraging US production and foreign purchases. Thus your money is going into US pockets instead of European pockets. Which is good for the US at the moment, and very, very bad for the EU countries currently experiencing a recession.
The dollar gets adjusted above foreign currency when wealth creation gets out of hand. This shifts the equation more towards the US becoming a world consumer and the rest of the world becomes producers. In short, money fluctuatations are what keep countries economically strong, and not a very good indicator of general health.
This is true in many, many industries. Working on a common code base for the good of all helps companies leverage each other's abilities to get more work done on fewer resources. Many developers don't realize it, but that's what projects like Apache are all about. Thousands of companies may need web servers or Office Document libraries, but these programs are beyond the resources of any one company to maintain.
I can't find it anymore, but Scott McNealy wrote a very good piece on Open Sourcing and industry collaboration. His key point was that anything that does not give your company a competitive advantage is not worth maintaining individually. The only time you should waste the resources on solely developing a technology is when it puts you ahead of your competitors. To use the banking industry as an example, there's no need for everyone to write their own accounting packages. There's very little you're going to gain over your competitors. However, a market analysis package that contains proprietary formulas for market predictions and benchmarking is most certainly worth keeping private. The information contained in the software can give you a huge advantage over your competitors.
So in short, it's all about spending your resources wisely. Open Source and Industry Standards just happen to be tools that help companies do that.
Re:Ingrained Behaviour
on
EA Spouse Outed
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So it will be awhile before we're like the Europeans.
We don't want to be like the Europeans. Generally speaking, the US produces far more and creates much more wealth than most European countries. This is not only good for the economy as a whole, but it's also a good way to increase personal income and purchasing power. Europe knows this, and thus countries like France are starting to repeal some of their Draconian employee protection laws.
The problem in the US is that some employers abuse the strong work ethic. They only see graphs that say More Work == More Profit without properly understanding how things like employee exhaustion and low morale impact their bottom line. They also fail to understand that far more work can be produced by improving working conditions and morale rather than demanding slave hours. Unfortunately, many employees are reticent to change jobs during times of economic uncertainty, and they're also cautious about bringing suits against their employer. Thus some (not all) employers get away with it for a time. However, it can't last, and employers end up shooting themselves in the foot long-term.
Really? That's not very much. When you consider that China has a mainland population of 1.3 billion (compared to the US's 300 million), $2.1 billion dollars pales in comparison to the $6 billion dollar industry that the US has become. Or to put that into ratios:
China - 63:39 States - 780:39
I'd say that China still has a long way to go when it comes to developing a game industry. Sure, the hard cash number of $2.1 billion does sound impressive, but that does have to be balanaced against the amount of money that must be spent to reach that level of market penetration. If the gaming public is spread across China (and not centered in a specific area like Shanghai), the costs of reaching that market could well whittle away those profits. Greater market penetration might result in much higher returns.
Why so serious? It's a joke that plays on the obvious irony of Apple's 1984 commercial. It's supposed to make you laugh, not act as a serious commentary about the potential perils of such technology.
Personally, I see the advantages of this technology quite clearly. It can allow video conferencing where you actually LOOK at the person you're talking to. This is a big difference from today where you tend to be looking off-center of the camera at the screen. If a sensor can be placed behind every pixel, it also means that the resolution of video conferencing cameras can be increased substantially. Last but not least, the focal point can be set to infinity, as there's no need for polar optics. Doing this with a regular sensor would get you a very high resolution capture of about an inch of space.
While I agree that there is a lot of potential for future use, this technology will be used TODAY to help break down the communications barriers of telecommuting and inter-office meetings.
So, what you're telling me is that Apple is NOT really the enemy of Big Brother, but Big Brother in disguise? I'm so confused. How can there be so many truths? The Ministry is supposed to protect us against such confusion by telling us ONLY the truth! If you'll excuse me, I think I need to go watch my telescreen now. Perhaps the truth is there.
Slashdot Mirror
P.S. Look at the source code on the Mozilla Page for some interesting comments on each verse.
Netscape:
Mozilla:
Firefox:
"Microsoft still wants to get it out as soon as possible, but slipping from January to March is nowhere near as bad as slipping from shipping before the holidays to after the holidays," a group of Gartner analysts wrote in the report.
What is this, a game console? What does Microsoft care if it slips for the Holiday season? If anyone gets a computer for Christmas, they're still likely to get it with Microsoft products. If not (i.e. they buy an Apple), I don't see that having Vista out will help that much.
If you want to take the easy road in life, it costs money.
Right, so you get what you pay for. Glad we cleared that up.
Oh wait. I was supposed to praise the NPTL tool, wasn't I. Um... well... it's very nice. And they've got... um... penguins on the homepage. Oh, and look! It's GPLed! Wow. Just... um... wow. Hey, did you know that the author of Minix wrote a book on OS Design? Really. It even covers the basics of multi-threading. It's pretty cool, you should... um... check it out. Yeah, that's the ticket!
Ease = money. Cheap or free = work a little. Always has been, always will be.
So what you're saying is: You get what you pay for?
Sure, but how and why was the voice synth connected to his modem/terminal program?
:-P
Well, at home he explicitly connected it to show off for his girlfriend. As for the government computers, have you seen their accessability requirements?
Breaking launch codes a single digit at a time was one thing they got glaringly wrong
Will people please stop complaining about this? If you've read Tanenbaum's book on Operating System Design, you'd know that this was a very real hack. In the system he describes (Tandem Computer, I think?), users could attach a listener to the page fault handler to know when a page fault happened. The system also checked passwords one character at a time.
A common method of breaking the super-user password was to align the password with the page boundary. If a page fault occurred, the hacker would know that the correct letter or digit had been found. The hacker would then move the password one character back in memory so that the next digit would be over the page boundary. This process was repeated until all the characters were found.
As a result, these computers were actually capable of being hacked "one character at a time" like you see in movies. Hollywood was just slow to update to the latest methods used.
Often overlooked that complaint is the fact that they bothered to introduce [a voice synth] as a device at all.
And yet it was still surprisingly realistic. The Intellivoice module (a voice synthesizer with its own built-in speaker) was released for the Intellivision console in 1982, and the Macintosh "introduced" itself in 1984. It received a standing ovation from the crowd. And that's just what the public saw. The actual research into Voice Synthesis goes back to the 1930's!
So it was perfectly reasonable to include voice synthesis in WarGames, even if its purpose was to allow the viewer to read less text.
You forgot BASIC. Microsoft dominated the BASIC market all throughout the 80's. How that will help them in 2006 is anybody's guess, but they did dominate BASIC.
According to recent rumors, Bill Gates is purchasing a Bradley Fighting Machine. He believes that it will provide Microsoft a leg-up in their war with Google. When asked about the situation, Larry Page responded with "we don't make forward looking statements." He was standing in front of an M-5 tank.
In other news, Google has announced the release of the F-22 Raptor Beta(TM) program which allows for anyone with an internet account to remotely control an F-22 fighter. Anti-war groups have expressed a fear that teenagers remotely flying armed warplanes could pose a threat to world peace. Google responded by stating that the weapons systems are locked out except when over the testing range at Latitude 47.6 by Longitude -122.1.
Your argument is that you believe that Walmart employs PR Ninjas with Psychology training, and that based on that belief you believe that Walmart is paying individuals to edit the Wikipedia page. Your basis for this belief is that fact that you have an MBA and that it seems reasonable.
Nowhere in there is a single shred of evidence suggesting what you say is true. Your argument is based entirely on your beliefs, making it more religion than fact. That is why your argument falls apart. If you want a serious discussion, try presenting something more tangible than your bias. Until then, you have no argument. Period, end of story.
Clearly the people on Walmart's side have a solid understanding of these psychological principles, which doesn't surprise me from a company that employs "greeters" to make themselves feel more friendly.
Oh yes, that explains everything. Rather than a best attempt being made by Wikipedians to present an article free from POV problems, the true explanation is the highly paid, Wal-mart Psychology Ninjas. By George, I think you've solved it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have William of Ockham coming over for a visit.
The people at Wikipedia obviously are missing the point if they think NPOV means "just presenting facts".
Did it occur to you that Wikipedia might have sterilized the article in direct response to the Walmart haters. For example, this edit removed heavily biased text that was placed smack in the middle of the introduction. If people would stop trying to do damage to the article, a much better rewrite might be able to be done. Until then, however, the shear number of edits are going to cause a power struggle that will result in nothing but sterile facts.
All in all, I can't find any hard evidence to support his claims, and the remaining evidence he presents seems to be nothing more than, "I think this page should be more critical of Wal-Mart, therefore there must be lobbists at work!" While that's a nice sentiment, it doesn't make for a smoking gun.
The people who work for the likes of EA don't create wealth. The people who work extremely hard because they want to create wealth. So much wealth, that new businesses pop up every day, giving people jobs they enjoy. And if you invest right, you can find yourself in a situation of managing wealth instead of creating it. i.e. Your wealth can literally maintain your income through its mere existence. This is what most people strive toward. Granted, most don't know how to get there, but a rather large percentage of the population does. Once you're in a position to where your wealth provides your income, you don't actually need to work anymore. Some people do just because they want to, but there's certainly no requirement.
How do you think all those folks tour America in their million-dollar, custom-built RVs? It isn't by living from city to city, I'll tell you that.
I mean, if you want no vacation time a year, go ahead. I'd much rather have a couple months of paid vacation to work on my hobbies and ideas.
I think you're confused. A lack of money is usually the prohibiting factor for vacations, not a lack of time. Last year my family and I stayed in the Opryland hotel in Nashville. It was a wonderful experience with the Hotel itself being a huge attraction. (Imagine indoor forests, rivers, shops, restaurants, etc. all set to wonderful music.) We also saw many of the areas attractions, including taking the kids to a childrens science museum and a zoo where they learned all kinds of stuff. (My son still asks where we're going to go back.) While we managed to keep the cost of the vacation within our budget, it still took money. If you want to go to Disney World with your family, it takes money. If you want to travel internationally, it takes money. Without it, the best you can do is head to the beach. Perhaps setup camp in a National Park. (Assuming you have enough for a tent, gear, food, car, etc.)
Money isn't evil. (Remember that Paul said, "The love of money is the root of all evil.") It's useful for all kinds of things, including the promotion of happiness. Working long hours at a job you love to create a better life for yourself and your family isn't evil, either. What is evil is pursuing money at the expense of other people. If your family is suffering, if your happiness is suffering, or if you're making other people suffer, then that money has only materialistic value. But to earn an honest dollar doing honest work so you can live a more rich and full life, what is wrong with that?
The webserver has already been commoditized. ...because many companies needed it so they banded together and produced a commodity solution. Ergo, Apache.
I have a retail store that uses software (that I wrote) that lets us put all of our inventory online, in real-time, straight from our POS system. New items get added instantly, and the inventory is always correct, and it's all processed in the same system. That software puts us waaaaay ahead of most of our competition in the industry. THAT software most definitely gives us a competitive advantage which would be eliminated if I gave it away in the hopes that somebody will fix a bug or two, or just to get some non-existent "We use OSS" PR. THAT kind of thing is what this article is about.
That may be what the article is on about (though I'm not sure I agree with your analysis, but I'll get to that in a moment), but that is certainly not what I'm talking about. I'll repeat myself for the third and FINAL time: If a given piece of software gives you an advantage over your competitors, then it's worth maintaining in-house. Otherwise you're wasting resources. Common examples of saving resources have been projects like FreeBSD/Linux, Apache, and MySQL/PostgreSQL. These projects fill a need that would be rediculous for most companies to replicate.
Now, the reason why I disagree with your analysis of the article is that I feel you're projecting your business on the banking industry. Your business is online retail, a market that generally is all about providing the goods faster and cheaper. Thus your retail software gives you a competitive advantage. In the banking industry, however, everything is standardized and they often need to communicate between each other. As a result, maintaining their own software for those pieces is a huge, costly burden that produces very little return. In many cases, their custom software can mean that they're falling behind in the industry. Thus is makes sense to use *someone else* as their source. Open Source is an inexpensive way of doing that, while simultaneously guaranteeing that each banks needs are met. In addition, it is perfectly feasible for each company to extend the software to add the proprietary bits they need.
To put that into retail terms, imagine if you had the choice between personally creating a backend system to communicate with suppliers over SOAP, or using an OSS component to communicate with your backend suppliers over SOAP. As long as it meets your needs, the latter probably makes more sense. However, it's still decoupled from your inventory management system, which DOES give you an advantage. (Just look at Walmart for an example of that.)
Do you use an OSS webserver? How about your database? Perhaps you're using commercial software like IIS. (In which case you're getting the same benefits, only you're paying for it.) Why do you use Open Source or any software you didn't write if using a custom version would supposedly give you a competitive advantage?
Your argument is a total non-argument. You've completely agreed with me, only you're ignoring the areas where you use cooperative software because it isn't part of your core business. And that is the core point:
If it isn't part of your core business, it isn't worth developing in-house.
I'd be interested in reading that article if you can remember where you saw it
:-(
It was on Sun's website a few years back. Unfortunately, it may not exist anymore. Sun has a habit of replacing their pages with newer and "better" ones whenever they feel like it. I tried Googling their site, but I couldn't find anything more recent than 2006.
It's really too bad. It was a pretty good article, and I have to say that I agreed with it. You can still hear echos of it in McNealy's more recent "Don't build a custom jalopy" statement.
I found my effective personal income and purchasing power was greatly increased by the sorry state of the Dollar compared with the Euro.
Putting aside the remark about the "sorry state" of the dollar (it's only a 1.2:1 ratio for the Euro, yeash), the lower value of the dollar is intended for exactly what you're using it for: Encouraging US production and foreign purchases. Thus your money is going into US pockets instead of European pockets. Which is good for the US at the moment, and very, very bad for the EU countries currently experiencing a recession.
The dollar gets adjusted above foreign currency when wealth creation gets out of hand. This shifts the equation more towards the US becoming a world consumer and the rest of the world becomes producers. In short, money fluctuatations are what keep countries economically strong, and not a very good indicator of general health.
This is true in many, many industries. Working on a common code base for the good of all helps companies leverage each other's abilities to get more work done on fewer resources. Many developers don't realize it, but that's what projects like Apache are all about. Thousands of companies may need web servers or Office Document libraries, but these programs are beyond the resources of any one company to maintain.
I can't find it anymore, but Scott McNealy wrote a very good piece on Open Sourcing and industry collaboration. His key point was that anything that does not give your company a competitive advantage is not worth maintaining individually. The only time you should waste the resources on solely developing a technology is when it puts you ahead of your competitors. To use the banking industry as an example, there's no need for everyone to write their own accounting packages. There's very little you're going to gain over your competitors. However, a market analysis package that contains proprietary formulas for market predictions and benchmarking is most certainly worth keeping private. The information contained in the software can give you a huge advantage over your competitors.
So in short, it's all about spending your resources wisely. Open Source and Industry Standards just happen to be tools that help companies do that.
So it will be awhile before we're like the Europeans.
We don't want to be like the Europeans. Generally speaking, the US produces far more and creates much more wealth than most European countries. This is not only good for the economy as a whole, but it's also a good way to increase personal income and purchasing power. Europe knows this, and thus countries like France are starting to repeal some of their Draconian employee protection laws.
The problem in the US is that some employers abuse the strong work ethic. They only see graphs that say More Work == More Profit without properly understanding how things like employee exhaustion and low morale impact their bottom line. They also fail to understand that far more work can be produced by improving working conditions and morale rather than demanding slave hours. Unfortunately, many employees are reticent to change jobs during times of economic uncertainty, and they're also cautious about bringing suits against their employer. Thus some (not all) employers get away with it for a time. However, it can't last, and employers end up shooting themselves in the foot long-term.
Why so serious? It's a joke that plays on the obvious irony of Apple's 1984 commercial. It's supposed to make you laugh, not act as a serious commentary about the potential perils of such technology.
Personally, I see the advantages of this technology quite clearly. It can allow video conferencing where you actually LOOK at the person you're talking to. This is a big difference from today where you tend to be looking off-center of the camera at the screen. If a sensor can be placed behind every pixel, it also means that the resolution of video conferencing cameras can be increased substantially. Last but not least, the focal point can be set to infinity, as there's no need for polar optics. Doing this with a regular sensor would get you a very high resolution capture of about an inch of space.
While I agree that there is a lot of potential for future use, this technology will be used TODAY to help break down the communications barriers of telecommuting and inter-office meetings.
So, what you're telling me is that Apple is NOT really the enemy of Big Brother, but Big Brother in disguise? I'm so confused. How can there be so many truths? The Ministry is supposed to protect us against such confusion by telling us ONLY the truth! If you'll excuse me, I think I need to go watch my telescreen now. Perhaps the truth is there.
Down with Goldstein!
(For those lacking context: Commercial | 1984)
What... what did you call me? Nobody... And I mean nobody, calls me chicken!