I also think it's interesting that the press didn't cover badnarik as much as they did nader. For instance, you rarely saw a poll listing him. Considering he pulled nearly the same numbers as Nader, i think it would have been interesting to see what the results would have been if he were included in the polls everyone saw every day.
Here are some numbers to see how close badnarik and nader were. For two candidates, they hit close numbers. While both were "fringe", the "Nader Factor" seemed to be covered more than the "Badnarik Factor"...
Candidates Votes %
George W. Bush * (R) 51% (58,602,581)
John F. Kerry (D) 48% (55,072,628)
Ralph Nader (I) 0% (391,812)
Michael Badnarik (Lib.) 0% (374,654)
Michael A. Peroutka (CST) 128,865 0%
"Reprinted from Communication of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8, August 1984, pp. 761-763. Copyright (C) 1984, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Also appears in ACM Turing Award Lectures: The First Twenty Years 1965-1985 Copyright (C) 1987 by the ACM press and Computers Under Attack: Intruders, Worms, and Viruses Copyright (C) 1990 by the ACM press."
Actually, they already do this. If you go to Sears, or Hecht's or almost anywhere these days, if you sign up for THEIR credit card, they'll give you 10% off. Of course, they then send you mail, call you endlessly, etc. so is it really worth it?
You are incredibly naive if you don't think Oracle did the exact same optimization you're accusing MS . Would any sane CEO set up a challenge like this if he hadn't already tweaked everything on his software to make it as hard to beat as possible?
A much better line of criticism is the fact that it runs on (unstable) NT server.
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I also think it's interesting that the press didn't cover badnarik as much as they did nader. For instance, you rarely saw a poll listing him. Considering he pulled nearly the same numbers as Nader, i think it would have been interesting to see what the results would have been if he were included in the polls everyone saw every day.
Here are some numbers to see how close badnarik and nader were. For two candidates, they hit close numbers. While both were "fringe", the "Nader Factor" seemed to be covered more than the "Badnarik Factor"...
Candidates Votes %
George W. Bush * (R) 51% (58,602,581)
John F. Kerry (D) 48% (55,072,628)
Ralph Nader (I) 0% (391,812)
Michael Badnarik (Lib.) 0% (374,654)
Michael A. Peroutka (CST) 128,865 0%
Courtesy the washington post.
Nitpick. It's a reprint...
"Reprinted from Communication of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8, August 1984, pp. 761-763. Copyright (C) 1984, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Also appears in ACM Turing Award Lectures: The First Twenty Years 1965-1985 Copyright (C) 1987 by the ACM press and Computers Under Attack: Intruders, Worms, and Viruses Copyright (C) 1990 by the ACM press."
Almost 20 years seems classic...
Actually, they already do this. If you go to Sears, or Hecht's or almost anywhere these days, if you sign up for THEIR credit card, they'll give you 10% off. Of course, they then send you mail, call you endlessly, etc. so is it really worth it?
I think Microsoft's comment would be that for the same price, you could probably have duplicate fall over servers waiting...
You are incredibly naive if you don't think Oracle did the exact same optimization you're accusing MS . Would any sane CEO set up a challenge like this if he hadn't already tweaked everything on his software to make it as hard to beat as possible?
A much better line of criticism is the fact that it runs on (unstable) NT server.