What I wonder is how anyone could burn them fast enough that $0.40 is going to matter? It usually takes 5-10 minutes to set up a burn, then 15 minutes or more (on a 4X burner) to burn the disk. If you do this more than one or two times a day, you need a life...
"Obvious" depends on what court you get the matter in front of. If you have documentary evidence that someone else thought of it first, it's a slamdunk.
Very interesting. In the article, it said this guy in NYC has a patent on the process of converting pneumatic tubes to fiber-optic. The Italian plan would seem to be prior art.
There are short-distance tube systems for drive-thru lanes at banks, drug stores, etc. I know some of the engineers designing these things, and they tell me they tried to design a system for fast food. Trouble is, it's extremely difficult to route the tube so the capsule will stay same side up for the whole trip, so drinks get spilled. (In most bank drive-thrus, the capsule goes up, turns 90 degrees, goes out, turns another 90, and arrives upside down.) When they got a working prototype, it looked more like a Lionel train set than anything. 8-) Forget about pizza -- quite aside from spillage, the bigger the tube, the harder it is to make the bends.
I've also got to write user manuals -- they need pictures, and Word is very nice for pasting in pictures and screenshots. (With the DOS word processor I used to use, I'd have to leave blank space and physically paste them into the printout...) But my main use for Word is to read the memos, specifications, etc., that people send me. I agree, Wordpad is good enough for the writing done by most engineers and programmers.
On re-reading this, noticed I skipped right past Office 2000. The MIS drones apparently learned something from the 95 and 97 upgrades -- they "just said no". And, since MS didn't randomly change file formats, we were able to make that stick.
Where I work, the headquarters always gets the upgrades first, then they gradually trickle out to the other plants. So when Office 95 came out, we started receiving.doc's and.xls's that we couldn't read. There apparently are two kinds of users at HQ -- the ones that knew how to save it as Word 6.0 but forgot every time so all communications slowed to half-speed as you had to email them to convert it and re-send, and the ones that you had get on the phone and guide through Save As, file type,... Customers were even worse.
Office 97, same thing, with one small difference for Word only. The Office 97 disk had a not-easy-to-find utility that converted 97.doc's to 95 -- so the 97 user who was too damned lazy to save as 95 could send this little.exe to others and they could (with twice as much work) convert it so it was readable...
And it's quite true, no features added since Word 6.0 have been worth the hassle -- and I don't remember any added features that inherently could not have been added without breaking file compatibility. And for XP, the only true improvement I've heard about is a feature reduction, the paperclip is off by default. So if they made the upgrade 100% hassle-free, it still wouldn't be worth the money.
That is one badly written article. The Kompogas website was so badly slashdotted it took me a couple of hours to look at 3 pages -- but it's quite clear this car does not carry fermenting compost. (You couldn't get anything to ferment fast enough to handle the autobahn.) Kompogas collects the methane from big compost tanks at fixed sites and compress it at 250 bar. (I didn't find anything about how or whether they filter out the other gases produced -- most of these gases would burn too, and if your fuel doesn't leak, you won't care whether it smells like garbage.)
The bulk of the compost winds up as fertilizer. Methane is sort of a byproduct. It's certainly better than filling up landfills and letting the methane burp into the atmosphere. However, Kompogas's web site is so perky and technical specification-free that it pretty much qualifies as fertilizer to begin with...
I think the turbines were considerably less fuel-efficient than a well-tuned piston engine. The one place where they were used for a while was in race cars, because they did have a great power to weight ratio. As I recall, in the early 70's the Indy 500 imposed a limit on how much fuel you could burn in a race, and none of the turbine cars could qualify. (This was a combination of oil-embargo-inspired political correctness, and the feeling that with overpowered engines and upside down wings to improve traction & cornering, the race was getting too fast for safety.)
"with almost no moving parts, they had no good reason to break down." Jet aircraft engines are high-maintenance, and they are just a turbine which leaves part of the energy in the exhaust. I don't know if auto companies could re-engineer them for low maintenance costs.
The article doesn't make it clear, but if you look at the kompogas web site, you'll see that you don't have to tow the compost heap along with you. (Someone previously gave the URL; they seem to be slashdotted, but after 1/2 hour I got through.) Kompogas facilities capture and bottle the methane. You just have to put a big, heavy tank for compressed methane in the car. (And of course, there are a lot of engine tweaks required to run off methane -- a gas -- instead of liquid fuel.) It's really a byproduct of the process for turning organic waste into fertilizer, but far better they capture the methane and use it as fuel than vent it to the atmosphere.
Incidentally, I think those WWII tow-behind gas generators were not producing methane by fermentation, but either wood alcohol (methanol) by distillation of organic refuse, or hydrogen/carbon monoxide mix by a process of partial burning of coal and reaction with steam (C + H20 + heat = CO + H2). Fermentation (bacterial action) is too slow for a mobile process.
since the Drug Czar is working so well at stamping out illegal drug use, that there should be a Technology Czar working on doing the same thing Does that mean the TC is working on stamping out technology? Or just that that's the likely effect of appointing a "technology czar".
Wasn't the Czar a corrupt and ineffective hereditary dictator? Maybe they should look just a little higher -- the Presidency is coming pretty damn close to fitting that, on all counts...
When Joe's Flange Factory goes out of business, is there usually a row about those who used model GD47-j and are now left in the lurch?
Yes, there is often a problem. It depends on how unique model GD47-j was and how foresighted you were. First rule is, you don't specify single-sourced parts unless there is simply nothing else that works as well. Second rule is, if you have to break rule 1, before you even put your product into full production, you have a plan to handle the problems which may occur -- an alternate design that uses other parts, or a contract giving you the blueprints and the license to have GD47-j produced elsewhere. There is still going to be considerable disruption if the supply stops -- even when _you_ designed GD47-j and own all rights, if the plant that's making it for you folds it's going to take months for a different plant to tool up and start cranking them out in quantity while maintaining good quality.
One of the worst cases is when the part was designed for you by a company with specialized expertise, that you don't have in-house. You own the blueprints, but that doesn't mean it's going to be easy for anyone else to develop the expertise to make it. Better hope you have other products you can sell for six months or so... Or else, you could buy insurance by splitting the orders between two manufacturers -- it will increase the cost to the manufacturer, but if you buy 75% from the low bidder and 25% from the next lowest, you always have two sources, and when you get them bidding against each other you might wind up paying less.
ASP's are a similar case to the custom part you had designed and built out of house, except that I don't see a practical way to keep a second-source on-line. They have expertise you don't plan to keep among your own employees. They also develop a knowledge of your business that other outside experts (or people you hire) won't have, and will take considerable time to learn. So you'd better have some real confidence in the ASP if you are going to use them for your core operations -- or else be able to start to replace them six months before they fold. (There are obvious problems with that strategy -- you probably can't start the replacement plan without letting them know about it, and that's a pretty good signal to their owners to close it down _now_ while some money is left...)
Re:ASP's will fill small specific roles.
on
When ASPs Go Under
·
· Score: 2
I also consider electronic record
translation services to fall under the ASP model. I think the ASP model involves continuous use of the service, including mission-critical applications. Record translation is (at least when I've been involved) a one-time deal -- I'd think if you have to send records out to be translated continually, there is something wrong.
As for Ebay, the customer-Ebay relationship is transitory, not in the ASP model. Or were you saying that Ebay contracts with an ASP to run it's servers? (I don't know, or care, about that.)
My impression is that ASP's provide a mixture of prepackaged and customized applications. That is, an ASP might run database and e-mail servers, write database code to fit your business, and also rent out MS Office. Obviously, you should be getting copies of all the custom-written source code, backup tapes of the databases, and information on all system settings -- and this is easily provided. I don't think you can get source code escrow for MS Office or Windows (and if the bloated, unreliable binaries reflect the condition of the source code, it wouldn't be a lot of help anyhow), but you can pretty well count on MS staying around.
But this is just a start: If one morning they padlock the doors at your ASP, you will need servers, you will need licenses to the software they use, and you will need someone who understands all that stuff. The first two problems could be handled with a little foresight, but if you had that "someone", you wouldn't have needed the ASP in the first place.
Is the age of a language proportional to the number of jokes that people have invented about it? I don't remember any jokes about FORTRAN, and it's older than LISP. LISP is just funny. Or in quasi-LISP:
(not (remember I (about jokes FORTRAN)))
(is LISP (funny just))
I remember those LISP scripts in autocad. You could do amazing things with them, if you didn't mind that it was about as fast as a 3-legged turtle. But Autocad on a 286 was barely fast enough to be usable anyhow (redrawing the screen was time for a short coffee break). And Autocad was originally written for 8088's...
In some ways, LISP was a natural language for CAD. A CAD (vector graphics) data file is a list of objects such as lines, circles, etc., so the program has to handle lists of objects of various types, and figure out what the type of each object is on the fly. Well, that's what LISP does. And in the early 80's when the first version was written, there weren't that many languages to choose from that did run-time binding. Of course, from performance considerations they had to write most of AutoCAD in C or assembly, including somehow faking the run-time binding, but my guess is the designers prototyped and thought in LISP, then hand-translated to lower-level languages.
Neither list processing nor run-time binding is very special anymore. See Python, for example. And think I'd rather work in Python, although I haven't yet. It seems to me to be a little less error-prone in a couple of respects: grouping of statements is quite visible, while in LISP all grouping is controlled just by parentheses, and in Python you have the option whether or not to specify the types of objects, while in LISP you have no choice but to hope that it gets it right when it looks at the data at runtime.
LISP's other special characteristic is that it has exceptionally good support for programs that write programs. Most of the time, writing a program that changes code is some sort of horrible mistake. But the web-site generating program described in the article needs to write code, so LISP was a natural match. And I can't think of any other language that would do that so well. (Partly because of those insane silly parentheses; this method of structuring the program is much friendlier to code than to coders...)
I don't agree with "A Windows box, which takes very little time to learn to use and administer." True, the Windows PC comes out of the box more or less ready to run -- but then you've got to get it hooked into the corporate network, load applications, and download updates to Windows and the applications. And there seem to be many different ways to cause a program to start itself up, so if the computer vendor or a stupid user gets something undesirable launching itself, it can be quite a job tracking it down and eliminating it. So it takes 2-4 hours to bring a new box up to the corporate standard here -- except now and then something weird happens and it takes days.
But you aren't done! Windows systems mutate themselves. Sometimes users are to blame, but I have seen my own system repeatedly go from one set of network drivers installed to three, without me ever telling it to load anything more. Then there are the really strange bugs that make permanent settings changes so well hidden that even MS tech support often can't figure out how to restore them. And those lovely MS undocumented features... For instance, every few months Outlook freezes here. It hits one person at a time, but eventually gets everyone. First couple of times, tech support told us to reformat and reinstall. Finally, someone discovered that you could fix it by logging on to each box as administrator, opening each address book in Outlook, and scrolling through them from top to bottom. This includes both locally stored personal address books and the corporate address book on the server. WTF?
So, at best Windows requires re-installs twice a year, or 4-8 hours a year per box. That's with the best users, who don't ask stupid questions, don't change system settings or install strange software on their own, and don't open executable attachments until they are sure about the source. And not too many users fit into that category -- engineers have to install all sorts of CAD and image-processing software, which often conflict with each other, while the salesmen somehow repeatedly put viruses into the e-mail system in spite of the best virus checkers. I don't see how I could get a virus in if I _wanted_ to, but these idiots do it every few weeks...
I don't know much about Linux, but I'm pretty sure you can get the setup correct and then lock the system down so neither naive users nor malfunctioning software is going to do lasting damage. And Linux can be hit by viruses, but Windows and Outlook seem to have been designed to multiply the possible entry points...
As for training, I don't know how hard it is to train Linux users, but if you've got a good, stable GUI and set of applications installed, how much harder can it be to teach that than explaining to a 55 year old clerk that you click Start to stop? Windows looks intuitive only to those that have been using it for so long they forgot what it took to learn the ropes in the first place.
The degreed people got in because of the paper and maybe because they know what they're up to, while the nondegreed people can't get in if they don't know what's what. Quite often true, although the self-educated may have large gaps in their knowledge of fundamental principles -- in my experience with degreed and non-degreed engineers, the non-degreed are very good on the knowledge we use every day, but run into trouble when doing something really different. But then, less than 1/3 of the students starting on a BSEE completed the program, at least at the school I attended. Most university programs have much lower standards, with a correspondingly greater chance of letting people slip through without learning much. Consider that GW Bush and Gore were both graduates of Ivy League colleges, and it's hard to tell which one is stupider...
As for careers, there are three obstacles in the path of those who know their stuff but don't have the "right" certificates. One is employers that don't know how to tell if you know the job or not; without the certificate, it can be difficult to get in the door and get the opportunity to demonstrate by doing. Second, large corporations are often so bound up in red tape that even if the manager knows you are the best man for the job, he can't hire you for it -- or so idiotically managed that they don't know who is doing a good job. Smaller companies are much more flexible, but also the pay scales are usually much lower. And finally, the 4-year college degree is used by American businessmen in much the way knighthood and orders of nobility were used in medieval societies -- a quick way to distinguish the gentlemen from the riffraff.
The big risk with proprietary software is that your accumulated data will lock you in to one vendor. After a few years, the vendor might triple the price -- and you'll pay it because converting data would cost far more and much of it wouldn't convert. Of course you could stick with the old version -- but the old version isn't sold any more, so if your organization grows you've got to buy the new version. And then you have to upgrade all the existing seats to stay compatible. Or if you are unlucky, the vendor will go under or lose control of their software development process and start shipping stuff that's so buggy it's unusable; I actually had this happen when one CAD vendor tried to convert to Windows a few years ago. And from what I've heard of Windows Me, MS may be close to losing all ability to ship working programs...
Note that the proposed law apparently does NOT require open source software -- it just requires a vendor willing to share source code with customers. This isn't all that uncommon with large contracts.
I don't know in general. We build a customized motherboard, made to fit inside of a particular machine, with special ports to read a keypad and to control the machine, but it still has the standard stuff too. In the 233MHZ version, two on-board regulators are required; one of them provides a particular voltage for the Intel CPU core, the other 3.3V for the CPU I/O circuits and the chipset. But this design was contracted out to a company that had expertise in PC motherboards; we usually do this for anything over 10MHz, which still leaves a lot of low to medium power embedded controller work for us.
A good explanation of what's wrong with the "evidence" in the Fox show is here.
Of course, anyone with a lick of sense who lived in that era already knows it couldn't have been a hoax. See S20451's message for the long version. Short version: 10,000 contractors would have had to have been in on it. Many amateur astronomers were able to see the capsules with their telescopes, and many ham radio operators could pick up the telemetry. The Russians would definitely have noticed if we were cheating, and they weren't friendly. Even the French would have spotted it, and making fun of Americans whenever possible was official French policy at the time.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html
Don't organize a protest, it will just make you look like wackoes infuriated because your channels for stealing music are being restricted. Protests did not work in the 60's and they won't now. What you should do is find some independent musicians (not signed with any RIAA member) and get them to go down there and demand to be heard -- make it quite clear that one effect of the RIAA's demands is to make distribution of _competing_ music more difficult, and the court should not allow itself to become an instrument of monopoly...
Slashdot Mirror
What I wonder is how anyone could burn them fast enough that $0.40 is going to matter? It usually takes 5-10 minutes to set up a burn, then 15 minutes or more (on a 4X burner) to burn the disk. If you do this more than one or two times a day, you need a life...
"Obvious" depends on what court you get the matter in front of. If you have documentary evidence that someone else thought of it first, it's a slamdunk.
That's true for the states (except possibly very rural areas), but what is the situation in Australia?
Very interesting. In the article, it said this guy in NYC has a patent on the process of converting pneumatic tubes to fiber-optic. The Italian plan would seem to be prior art.
There are short-distance tube systems for drive-thru lanes at banks, drug stores, etc. I know some of the engineers designing these things, and they tell me they tried to design a system for fast food. Trouble is, it's extremely difficult to route the tube so the capsule will stay same side up for the whole trip, so drinks get spilled. (In most bank drive-thrus, the capsule goes up, turns 90 degrees, goes out, turns another 90, and arrives upside down.) When they got a working prototype, it looked more like a Lionel train set than anything. 8-) Forget about pizza -- quite aside from spillage, the bigger the tube, the harder it is to make the bends.
I've also got to write user manuals -- they need pictures, and Word is very nice for pasting in pictures and screenshots. (With the DOS word processor I used to use, I'd have to leave blank space and physically paste them into the printout...) But my main use for Word is to read the memos, specifications, etc., that people send me. I agree, Wordpad is good enough for the writing done by most engineers and programmers.
On re-reading this, noticed I skipped right past Office 2000. The MIS drones apparently learned something from the 95 and 97 upgrades -- they "just said no". And, since MS didn't randomly change file formats, we were able to make that stick.
Where I work, the headquarters always gets the upgrades first, then they gradually trickle out to the other plants. So when Office 95 came out, we started receiving .doc's and .xls's that we couldn't read. There apparently are two kinds of users at HQ -- the ones that knew how to save it as Word 6.0 but forgot every time so all communications slowed to half-speed as you had to email them to convert it and re-send, and the ones that you had get on the phone and guide through Save As, file type, ... Customers were even worse.
.doc's to 95 -- so the 97 user who was too damned lazy to save as 95 could send this little .exe to others and they could (with twice as much work) convert it so it was readable...
Office 97, same thing, with one small difference for Word only. The Office 97 disk had a not-easy-to-find utility that converted 97
And it's quite true, no features added since Word 6.0 have been worth the hassle -- and I don't remember any added features that inherently could not have been added without breaking file compatibility. And for XP, the only true improvement I've heard about is a feature reduction, the paperclip is off by default. So if they made the upgrade 100% hassle-free, it still wouldn't be worth the money.
That is one badly written article. The Kompogas website was so badly slashdotted it took me a couple of hours to look at 3 pages -- but it's quite clear this car does not carry fermenting compost. (You couldn't get anything to ferment fast enough to handle the autobahn.) Kompogas collects the methane from big compost tanks at fixed sites and compress it at 250 bar. (I didn't find anything about how or whether they filter out the other gases produced -- most of these gases would burn too, and if your fuel doesn't leak, you won't care whether it smells like garbage.)
The bulk of the compost winds up as fertilizer. Methane is sort of a byproduct. It's certainly better than filling up landfills and letting the methane burp into the atmosphere. However, Kompogas's web site is so perky and technical specification-free that it pretty much qualifies as fertilizer to begin with...
I think the turbines were considerably less fuel-efficient than a well-tuned piston engine. The one place where they were used for a while was in race cars, because they did have a great power to weight ratio. As I recall, in the early 70's the Indy 500 imposed a limit on how much fuel you could burn in a race, and none of the turbine cars could qualify. (This was a combination of oil-embargo-inspired political correctness, and the feeling that with overpowered engines and upside down wings to improve traction & cornering, the race was getting too fast for safety.)
"with almost no moving parts, they had no good reason to break down." Jet aircraft engines are high-maintenance, and they are just a turbine which leaves part of the energy in the exhaust. I don't know if auto companies could re-engineer them for low maintenance costs.
The article doesn't make it clear, but if you look at the kompogas web site, you'll see that you don't have to tow the compost heap along with you. (Someone previously gave the URL; they seem to be slashdotted, but after 1/2 hour I got through.) Kompogas facilities capture and bottle the methane. You just have to put a big, heavy tank for compressed methane in the car. (And of course, there are a lot of engine tweaks required to run off methane -- a gas -- instead of liquid fuel.) It's really a byproduct of the process for turning organic waste into fertilizer, but far better they capture the methane and use it as fuel than vent it to the atmosphere.
Incidentally, I think those WWII tow-behind gas generators were not producing methane by fermentation, but either wood alcohol (methanol) by distillation of organic refuse, or hydrogen/carbon monoxide mix by a process of partial burning of coal and reaction with steam (C + H20 + heat = CO + H2). Fermentation (bacterial action) is too slow for a mobile process.
since the Drug Czar is working so well at stamping out illegal drug use, that there should be a Technology Czar working on doing the same thing Does that mean the TC is working on stamping out technology? Or just that that's the likely effect of appointing a "technology czar".
Wasn't the Czar a corrupt and ineffective hereditary dictator? Maybe they should look just a little higher -- the Presidency is coming pretty damn close to fitting that, on all counts...
When Joe's Flange Factory goes out of business, is there usually a row about those who used model GD47-j and are now left in the lurch?
Yes, there is often a problem. It depends on how unique model GD47-j was and how foresighted you were. First rule is, you don't specify single-sourced parts unless there is simply nothing else that works as well. Second rule is, if you have to break rule 1, before you even put your product into full production, you have a plan to handle the problems which may occur -- an alternate design that uses other parts, or a contract giving you the blueprints and the license to have GD47-j produced elsewhere. There is still going to be considerable disruption if the supply stops -- even when _you_ designed GD47-j and own all rights, if the plant that's making it for you folds it's going to take months for a different plant to tool up and start cranking them out in quantity while maintaining good quality.
One of the worst cases is when the part was designed for you by a company with specialized expertise, that you don't have in-house. You own the blueprints, but that doesn't mean it's going to be easy for anyone else to develop the expertise to make it. Better hope you have other products you can sell for six months or so... Or else, you could buy insurance by splitting the orders between two manufacturers -- it will increase the cost to the manufacturer, but if you buy 75% from the low bidder and 25% from the next lowest, you always have two sources, and when you get them bidding against each other you might wind up paying less.
ASP's are a similar case to the custom part you had designed and built out of house, except that I don't see a practical way to keep a second-source on-line. They have expertise you don't plan to keep among your own employees. They also develop a knowledge of your business that other outside experts (or people you hire) won't have, and will take considerable time to learn. So you'd better have some real confidence in the ASP if you are going to use them for your core operations -- or else be able to start to replace them six months before they fold. (There are obvious problems with that strategy -- you probably can't start the replacement plan without letting them know about it, and that's a pretty good signal to their owners to close it down _now_ while some money is left...)
I also consider electronic record translation services to fall under the ASP model. I think the ASP model involves continuous use of the service, including mission-critical applications. Record translation is (at least when I've been involved) a one-time deal -- I'd think if you have to send records out to be translated continually, there is something wrong.
As for Ebay, the customer-Ebay relationship is transitory, not in the ASP model. Or were you saying that Ebay contracts with an ASP to run it's servers? (I don't know, or care, about that.)
My impression is that ASP's provide a mixture of prepackaged and customized applications. That is, an ASP might run database and e-mail servers, write database code to fit your business, and also rent out MS Office. Obviously, you should be getting copies of all the custom-written source code, backup tapes of the databases, and information on all system settings -- and this is easily provided. I don't think you can get source code escrow for MS Office or Windows (and if the bloated, unreliable binaries reflect the condition of the source code, it wouldn't be a lot of help anyhow), but you can pretty well count on MS staying around.
But this is just a start: If one morning they padlock the doors at your ASP, you will need servers, you will need licenses to the software they use, and you will need someone who understands all that stuff. The first two problems could be handled with a little foresight, but if you had that "someone", you wouldn't have needed the ASP in the first place.
Try Forth.
Is the age of a language proportional to the number of jokes that people have invented about it? I don't remember any jokes about FORTRAN, and it's older than LISP. LISP is just funny. Or in quasi-LISP:
(not (remember I (about jokes FORTRAN)))
(is LISP (funny just))
Now do you see why people laugh?
I remember those LISP scripts in autocad. You could do amazing things with them, if you didn't mind that it was about as fast as a 3-legged turtle. But Autocad on a 286 was barely fast enough to be usable anyhow (redrawing the screen was time for a short coffee break). And Autocad was originally written for 8088's...
In some ways, LISP was a natural language for CAD. A CAD (vector graphics) data file is a list of objects such as lines, circles, etc., so the program has to handle lists of objects of various types, and figure out what the type of each object is on the fly. Well, that's what LISP does. And in the early 80's when the first version was written, there weren't that many languages to choose from that did run-time binding. Of course, from performance considerations they had to write most of AutoCAD in C or assembly, including somehow faking the run-time binding, but my guess is the designers prototyped and thought in LISP, then hand-translated to lower-level languages.
Neither list processing nor run-time binding is very special anymore. See Python, for example. And think I'd rather work in Python, although I haven't yet. It seems to me to be a little less error-prone in a couple of respects: grouping of statements is quite visible, while in LISP all grouping is controlled just by parentheses, and in Python you have the option whether or not to specify the types of objects, while in LISP you have no choice but to hope that it gets it right when it looks at the data at runtime.
LISP's other special characteristic is that it has exceptionally good support for programs that write programs. Most of the time, writing a program that changes code is some sort of horrible mistake. But the web-site generating program described in the article needs to write code, so LISP was a natural match. And I can't think of any other language that would do that so well. (Partly because of those insane silly parentheses; this method of structuring the program is much friendlier to code than to coders...)
I don't agree with "A Windows box, which takes very little time to learn to use and administer." True, the Windows PC comes out of the box more or less ready to run -- but then you've got to get it hooked into the corporate network, load applications, and download updates to Windows and the applications. And there seem to be many different ways to cause a program to start itself up, so if the computer vendor or a stupid user gets something undesirable launching itself, it can be quite a job tracking it down and eliminating it. So it takes 2-4 hours to bring a new box up to the corporate standard here -- except now and then something weird happens and it takes days.
But you aren't done! Windows systems mutate themselves. Sometimes users are to blame, but I have seen my own system repeatedly go from one set of network drivers installed to three, without me ever telling it to load anything more. Then there are the really strange bugs that make permanent settings changes so well hidden that even MS tech support often can't figure out how to restore them. And those lovely MS undocumented features... For instance, every few months Outlook freezes here. It hits one person at a time, but eventually gets everyone. First couple of times, tech support told us to reformat and reinstall. Finally, someone discovered that you could fix it by logging on to each box as administrator, opening each address book in Outlook, and scrolling through them from top to bottom. This includes both locally stored personal address books and the corporate address book on the server. WTF?
So, at best Windows requires re-installs twice a year, or 4-8 hours a year per box. That's with the best users, who don't ask stupid questions, don't change system settings or install strange software on their own, and don't open executable attachments until they are sure about the source. And not too many users fit into that category -- engineers have to install all sorts of CAD and image-processing software, which often conflict with each other, while the salesmen somehow repeatedly put viruses into the e-mail system in spite of the best virus checkers. I don't see how I could get a virus in if I _wanted_ to, but these idiots do it every few weeks...
I don't know much about Linux, but I'm pretty sure you can get the setup correct and then lock the system down so neither naive users nor malfunctioning software is going to do lasting damage. And Linux can be hit by viruses, but Windows and Outlook seem to have been designed to multiply the possible entry points...
As for training, I don't know how hard it is to train Linux users, but if you've got a good, stable GUI and set of applications installed, how much harder can it be to teach that than explaining to a 55 year old clerk that you click Start to stop? Windows looks intuitive only to those that have been using it for so long they forgot what it took to learn the ropes in the first place.
The degreed people got in because of the paper and maybe because they know what they're up to, while the nondegreed people can't get in if they don't know what's what. Quite often true, although the self-educated may have large gaps in their knowledge of fundamental principles -- in my experience with degreed and non-degreed engineers, the non-degreed are very good on the knowledge we use every day, but run into trouble when doing something really different. But then, less than 1/3 of the students starting on a BSEE completed the program, at least at the school I attended. Most university programs have much lower standards, with a correspondingly greater chance of letting people slip through without learning much. Consider that GW Bush and Gore were both graduates of Ivy League colleges, and it's hard to tell which one is stupider...
As for careers, there are three obstacles in the path of those who know their stuff but don't have the "right" certificates. One is employers that don't know how to tell if you know the job or not; without the certificate, it can be difficult to get in the door and get the opportunity to demonstrate by doing. Second, large corporations are often so bound up in red tape that even if the manager knows you are the best man for the job, he can't hire you for it -- or so idiotically managed that they don't know who is doing a good job. Smaller companies are much more flexible, but also the pay scales are usually much lower. And finally, the 4-year college degree is used by American businessmen in much the way knighthood and orders of nobility were used in medieval societies -- a quick way to distinguish the gentlemen from the riffraff.
The big risk with proprietary software is that your accumulated data will lock you in to one vendor. After a few years, the vendor might triple the price -- and you'll pay it because converting data would cost far more and much of it wouldn't convert. Of course you could stick with the old version -- but the old version isn't sold any more, so if your organization grows you've got to buy the new version. And then you have to upgrade all the existing seats to stay compatible. Or if you are unlucky, the vendor will go under or lose control of their software development process and start shipping stuff that's so buggy it's unusable; I actually had this happen when one CAD vendor tried to convert to Windows a few years ago. And from what I've heard of Windows Me, MS may be close to losing all ability to ship working programs...
Note that the proposed law apparently does NOT require open source software -- it just requires a vendor willing to share source code with customers. This isn't all that uncommon with large contracts.
I don't know in general. We build a customized motherboard, made to fit inside of a particular machine, with special ports to read a keypad and to control the machine, but it still has the standard stuff too. In the 233MHZ version, two on-board regulators are required; one of them provides a particular voltage for the Intel CPU core, the other 3.3V for the CPU I/O circuits and the chipset. But this design was contracted out to a company that had expertise in PC motherboards; we usually do this for anything over 10MHz, which still leaves a lot of low to medium power embedded controller work for us.
A good explanation of what's wrong with the "evidence" in the Fox show is here.
Of course, anyone with a lick of sense who lived in that era already knows it couldn't have been a hoax. See S20451's message for the long version. Short version: 10,000 contractors would have had to have been in on it. Many amateur astronomers were able to see the capsules with their telescopes, and many ham radio operators could pick up the telemetry. The Russians would definitely have noticed if we were cheating, and they weren't friendly. Even the French would have spotted it, and making fun of Americans whenever possible was official French policy at the time. http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html
Some fortune cookies know one thing MS Tech support doesnt: "Outlook not Good"
Don't organize a protest, it will just make you look like wackoes infuriated because your channels for stealing music are being restricted. Protests did not work in the 60's and they won't now. What you should do is find some independent musicians (not signed with any RIAA member) and get them to go down there and demand to be heard -- make it quite clear that one effect of the RIAA's demands is to make distribution of _competing_ music more difficult, and the court should not allow itself to become an instrument of monopoly...