Vista, in my opinion anyway, is rather like Windows ME of the past - a bit of an abortion from Microsoft - they have quite obviously released Vista FAR too early - it's an unfinished product, rushed out of the factory, because it perceived its competitor's products (Linux-based, OSX-based for example) being released with certain innovations which it wanted to claim for itself as its own innovations, and now because of that is paying the price of that rush. People percieve Vista to be what it is - a rushed out Operating System with many bugs, failed claims, and as a - to be extremely kind - beta quality product at the very most. Which is kind of funny when you think about it, they started working on Vista (or Longhorn as it was known back then in 2001), they dropped a whole pile of features and Vista still gives the impression of being an unfinished product. If I compare Vista's state to that of a major OS.X release, for one thing I don't feel Im going to get anything form Vista that OS X 10.4.10 does not already have and certainly nothing 10.5.X wont have. Not that there aren't any problems with a new major OS X release, you always have some problems with major OS X releases. All sorts of OS components and apps have bugs and Samba in particular seems to prone to getting broken but by and large Apple manages to put out a more finished product than Vista is. And Apple usually adds selection of new features to each major release that (IMHO) make the purchase of a major OS X release worth while if you can spare the cash. Since I'm not a Windows user I can't judge accurately how appealing Vista's features are but the increase in hardware requirements alone would make me hesitate. I'd still not recommend using a new major variant of OS.X (i.e. 10.X.0) right off the bat until either the first minor version of it is released (i.e. 10.X.1) or the first reports on any major bugs are out. The same pretty much goes for Windows, wait until the worst bugs have been weeded out which in the case of Vista probably means waiting until service pack 1.
If it makes you feel any better, I just had a Quantum Fireball 1GB drive from that era (1996?) fail on me two weeks ago. It had been in continuous use since 1999 when I bought it second hand.
I was actually working in cheap PC retail back then. Do you remember the disk series that failed? 'cause I sure don't remember anything like that kind of failure rate. I'd have to wonder if the PC vendor didn't have a shipping accident. (I've seen stuff that would make you lose your lunch) That could actually be the case. I don't remember any more than the drives were in the 3-4 GB range. Either way, I simply concluded that it was best to stay away from Quantum after this happened. The way the problem manifested it self was that the drive simply stopped spinning. The funny thing was that if you gave it a slight knock with a blunt object you could sometimes get one working long enough to salvage the data. Once you shut the computer down again the drive usually wouldn't start up again so you had to work fast. This outbreak of disk failures ruined quite a few people's semester. I also stopped buying IBM drives after the second Deskstar failed on me. Actually the Deskstar didn't fail catastrophically, it just started developing more and more dead sectors until I got tired of the hassle and threw the thing away. I assumed the drive had simply been damaged when I knocked my mini-tower while over while cleaning so I bought a second one. It was only then that I found out these drives had a design flaw. I replaced it with a Western Digital disk which I have still got in a shelf somewhere, AFAIK it still works.
You young un's may not have heard of this, or seen it, as the hardware/software conspires to hide it from you now-a-days. Like the IBM Desk Star series (I lost two of them back when a 10Gb HD was a big drive) or the notorious Quantum disks that used to ship with low price, no-name computers? At the start of the first year half the mechanical engineers in my first year at Uni bought cheap computers from the same store, all with Quantum drives installed. Almost every one suffered a data loss disaster within days of each other close to the end of the second term, just before exams. The loss was paticularly keenfly felt by these guys since they were working with huge (for the time) Autocad files that they couldn't easily back up at very short intervals, unlike the rest of us whose project reports and other school related data would usually fit on a few floppy disks. CD-R media was impractical for frequent backups, CD recorders and Zip drives were expensive and purpose designed backup devices like tape drives and external hard drives were even more expensive back then.
Otherwise, no. of Linux distros would soon exceed no. of Linux users!
Do something! Calm down..... there is no reason to get worried until the number of Linux forks exceeds the number of malware products available for Windows.
Why does everything always have to be some Orwellian plot against the masses? Why can't this just be... Remote control warplanes. Why *wouldn't* you want pilots to be able to fly warplanes from a safe place? Jesus. But nooooo, it's got to be the government taking more control from you. It's a fucking remote control plane! It's not "roboticized military that can be controlled from the Pentagon and White House", it's a remote control plane. Plus, where do you think that the non-roboticized military controlled? (Um...the Pentagon and the White House) I don't put much stock in these drones. There have been all sorts of arguments for drones with some people even predicting they will cause the extinction of manned combat aircraft within a couple of decades. The whole thing kind of reminds one of the predictions form the 60's and 70's that aircraft guns, being completely useless anyway, could be replaced by missiles and that missiles had rendered the tank obsolete. Well they put guns back into aircraft and as far as I know tank design is still a flourishing industry. You get arguments in favor of drones like: 'they are available at throw away prices', which is true for something like a predator but once you move up the capability scale that's pretty much bullshit. A drone with the capabilities of a JFS is likely to cost as much to develop and manufacture as a manned JFS so it's not as if you can think nothing of losing a squadron of state-of-the-art drones, and we haven't even begun to talk about the costs of AI development. Another argument is that there will be zero (human) losses since these vehicles are remotely controlled. Well that's very nice, until your opponent's interceptors switch on their EW/jamming pods and scramble the remote control link (or better yet shoot down the satellites you are using to relay the control signals) thus bumping your drone down to it's crappy built in AI and lets face it even state-of-the-art modern AI pretty much sucks. Once this happens your drone losses will go way up. Which brings us to the holy grail in combat drone development, AI. We can't even create a robot(a true autonomous robot, not a crappy remote controlled one) smart enough outwit a cockroach. Until we can produce AI capable of competing with, say, small mammals, drones will be a very limited asset. Drones will only replace human pilots completely once we have AI capable of allowing them to consistently survive an encounter with human manned interceptors and better yet carry out entire missions, ground attack missions where they have to _reliably_ sort civilians from combatants on-the-fly, completely autonomously in a way that rivals the standards achieved by human pilots. At the moment I wouldn't give much for the drone's odds, when faced by something like an F-22 or a Typhoon especially if they are remote controlled. IMHO drones are at the moment nice for high risk missions and operations in environments where you are likely to meet few hostile EW assets but the moment you find your self dealing with a competent enemy with real EW capabilities, remote controlled drones will be in trouble.
Uhh, no, it has to do with being called "Feisty Fawn". I mean, what's hotter than Bambi being naughty?;-) Who knows, maybe the good folks at Ubuntu will name a future distribution: "Horny Heifer"?
Blog posts are pretty much editorials or opinions.
In depth articles contain more research than a few links to wikipedia or other similar minded blogs.
That's the difference. I don't think their briefness makes blog posts less valuable since while they are limited in scope they tend to be very focused on one or two issues. I have found the answers/fixes to some really vexing programming questions/problems/bugs in blog posts that would never have been addressed in an in-depth article. Both blogs and in-depth articles have their uses and comparing the two is IMHO rather futile.
Even if 80 characters were enough in the 80's, it isn't today. One of the results of increased code complexity, tool-sets and higher-level languages, is that ambiguity and terseness must be avoided. When you're dealing with 3-4 different API's with thousands of functions, 8 letter function names would lead to insanity. Lets not forget that these days there are people who write functions/methods/constructors with 20+ parameters and manage to create lines of code running into 350+ characters. I know that sounds insane but I actually saw a piece of code recently where a developer was passing the same set of over a dozen parameters all over the place and this is not even the worst I have seen. Back in the stone age when I was learning C++ they used to tell us that if you find yourself regularly having to pass around the same set of, say... 4 or more variables you write a struct or a class to encapsulate them and pass that container. Judging from some of the code I get to see these days that seems to have gone out of fashion. I write OO code in multiple languages including Java and C++ and I know lines of code can get longer than they used to in golden oldie languages like C but it's still not that hard to keep your line length reasonably short. It also helps with readability. That being said when I write code in terminal windows I find 80 characters somewhat restricting. Having 100-120 characters to work with per line is what I'd like, more than 200 is IMHO to much.
I would like the get rid of the tin foil... Well... If this stuff has similar qualities to packaging materials like polymer plastic film you should be able to get your self shrink-wrapped.
If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost And how many soviet recon aircraft flew over US territory? (This is a serious question, I never heard about such incidents.) That depends on what type of recon asset you are talking about. There was frequent probing and prodding of US and NATO borders by all sorts of patrol aircraft like the Tu-95 and Tu-16 etc as well as faster recon aircraft based on jet fighters such as the MiG-25. The actual overflights however were usually conducted by much less spectacular aircraft that remarkably enough seem to have gone mostly unnoticed by the public in the US and Europe. This strategic recon force was known as Aeroflot. It seems Soviet airliners frequently made the most illogical flights simply in order to fly as close to as possible to sensitive sites or even right over them if they thought they could get away with it. They were even known to fake mechanical problems simply to be able to land in restricted areas. Later on the Soviets much preferred a combination of space based and human intelligence gathering but I don't think they ever stopped using the Aeroflot fleet for intelligence purposes. It was a much more elegant way of doing it than the U-2 and SR-71 flights were and as long the scheme remained undiscovered by the public in the west it was a far less provocative way of gathering intel. I was born well before the cold war ended and I can only recall one minor stink being raised when some journalist photographed an Aeroflot machine equipped with what looked like camera gear (presumably this aircraft had an extensive suite of well camouflaged ELINT equipment as well). Of course western intelligence services knew all about this but the public was for the most part blissfully unaware. Of course the USA and the Europeans did the exact same thing if possibly on a smaller scale.
My own personal experience with being bullied in school made me bitter and hateful, with a tendency to lash out both physically and emotionally.
During this time period I did basically two things which gained the respect of my peers - for a moment, anyway. The first time was the first time I got into a real fight with someone determined to beat me up. He was another unpopular kid. He ended up with two black eyes and a bloody dot on his forehead. I ended up with an expulsion..... Bullying is not a good thing. And the failure of most people (including yourself) to imagine that there might be a superior alternative is frankly pathetic. You are helping to maintain the culture of violence, and that is simply a bad thing. In some ways groups of humans work the same as packs of wolves or hyaenas. You get picked on and if you don't defend your self eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth you will get trampled. I was bullied in school, there was a bigger kid a year older than me who, whenever he saw me, would punch me square in the face to amuse his friends. For a while I did what my parents told me to do and tried to stay out of his way.... unsurprisingly that did not work. I suppose I could have tried to impress him and his crowd by bullying somebody else which is what one of my childhood friends did (successfully I might add) but I considered that beneath me even when I was 13 years old. Finally, after a lot of vacillating, I used the bully's own tactics against him except I didn't punch him I kicked him in the nuts and punched him afterwards. Not very gentlemanly but then again he was a jock and somewhat bigger than me. I got sent to the headmasters office, he sent me a psychologist who showed me inkblot charts and had a talk with with my parents. I got grounded for a while but I could not possibly have cared less because after that a bit of aggressive posturing was enough to ensure that the other hyaenas in the schoolyard left me alone.
Now... I'm not saying one should solve all one's problems with violence but sometimes one does not have a choice. I generally avoid confrontation unless I am provoked but there simply are some people who try to get through life with bullying and impudence. They will only leave you alone when you show them that if they knock you down you will not crawl into a corer, cower and whine like a whipped dog but rather that you will rise up and hurt them right back... punch for a punch, kick for a kick and that you don't not care how much damage you take while doing it as long the fight ends with them taking more damage than you.
The single worst thing you can do to your child is teach it to stay out of a bullies way and to endure the abuse. Children should have to have enough of a sense of honor instilled in them by their parents that they don't go and bully others but they must also learn to stand up for them selves and (others for that matter) when necessary even if it means they might get hurt. The psychological damage done by allowing your child to get bullied and not doing anything about it is worse than any bruise, black eye or bloody nose because it is takes a lot longer to heal and often it never heals completely.
Sure, if EVERY action you do prompts a "You are clicking your mouse, cancel or allow", or some other message, sure that is security, but then you are left with a crappy user experience. I think Linux and Mac have got a better balance between allowing actions in user mode without authorization and actions requiring authorization. I see you have come to a sad realization....
I work in a hospital, and ER docs like to swap stories. The worst I've heard is of a woman who was kidnapped, beaten, repeatedly raped, and thrown into a ditch to die. She didn't die, but she did land on a fire ant mound, where she stayed until someone found her, which was not enough time for her to die. Tragedy happens, crime happens, but sometimes you just have to think "that's not fair. That story, assuming that it isn't an urban legend, makes me think it's an excellent argument case for the death penalty. Rapists in general are one of the lowest types of human scum.
All this assumes that users - and support teams - are jumping for joy at the chance to maintain multiple operating systems, software libraries, and skill sets. To anyone but a Geek this can seem sadomasochistic. And you assume that corporate decisions about which desktop operating system to use are governed only by support costs. Unfortunately for lovers of the concept of simplicity through monotony, in some situations, it actually makes sense to operate non MS desktop operating systems and the benefits of doing so outweigh the extra costs of maintaining multiple skill sets. Hidden virtualization might even increase the popularity of non-MS desktop operating systems to the point where they become serious competitors to Windows thus forcing MS to significantly improve Windows way beyond what they did with Vista. Of course the reality is that Microsoft will probably succeed in mostly squashing any trends that threaten to increase the popularity of competing desktop operating systems which in turn means that they can continue to screw consumers and corporations as they have always done and it also means that you can breathe a sight of relief since you probably won't have to expand your skill-set.:-D
Stalked the plains of Peru ?? WTF ? Penguins ? Hunting what ? Wilder beasts ? At least the article says that they just 'roamed' the deserts. I think you should keep in mind that the category this story was filed under is: 'Slashdot:: Entertainment:: It's funny. Laugh.' before you get to excited.
So what're they heating the water with? Electricity? In which case it's an electrically powered car. Actually, the guys at the Steam Car Club have discovered that the best source of heat is an Member of Parliament for New Labour so at the moment they aren't quite sure whether to call it human/weasel hybrid powered, bullshit powered or just plain old 'hot-air powered'.
It may look very slick, but technologically speaking it probably won't be earth-shattering. Neither was the iPod and to add insult to injury it even had fewer features than the competition which is exactly why watching it become a phenomenon annoyed the sh*t out of all of Apple's competitors.
With its pretty high price tag, lack of 3G, and very few third party apps (compared with BB, Windows Mobile, and Palm), I highly doubt that it will spark a "revolution" in web browsing. Having been around long enough to remember people saying the same about the iPod and that it wouldn't do a thing to change the music business beacuse it was a niche product that was way to expensive and would only become popular with Apple fanbois I'll take that prediction with a grain of salt.:-D
Mobile browsing is nothing new - Most major sites that people would frequently access from a mobile device (ie webmail, news/homepages, search engines, etc) already have mobile versions of their sites that work reasonably well. Actually many of them don't and those that do often have bad support and the same goes for client apps making use of web based services. It seems to me everybody is to busy trying to sell me video and TV streaming to my mobile handset over 3G to register that the kind of stuff which is really useful to a run-of-the-mill consumer is stuff like Google Maps Mobile on his/her phone. I still have not managed to get Google Maps or similar services to work on my own mobile which IMHO sucks since it, or a similar service, would have been very useful for navigating the last time I was in London. If the iPone becomes anything like the success the iPod is, even if it gains only a quarter as of the iPod's popularity, it will raise the bar on what people expect from a mobile phone. In that case I think we can expect *some* changes in the amount of attention developers and handset manufacturers pay to the needs and wants of the mobile browsing public. I won't expect a revolution any more than you do but significant changes might happen.
nd I've never heard blook or folksonomy -- must be a UK thing. Actually neither has anything to do with the UK or the internet; I don't know how those words even made that list?!? Folksonomy was the name of the town the town in Finland where Linus Torvalds was born, of course that was before they changed it to Linuxsonomisalmi in his honor (btw. you Americans always get the spelling wrong, in Finnish it's: Folksonomisalmi) . The place is a Mecca for Linux users everywhere. Blook, however, is a Swedish delicacy made from herring, pickled in vodka with reindeer lichen added for flavor. Cracking open a barrel of Blook is also an excellent way of fumigating your house since Blook emits strong alcoholic vapors laced with lichen essence for the first half hour or so after you open the barrel. Just don't light any matches or operate electric equipment while the fumes are dissipating due to the danger of triggering an explosion.
This is clearly Microsoft suffering a managerial battle of the wills. One half wants to bow down to pressure to reverse the EULA ban on virtulization, while the other half is strong opposed to relenting. So each half is doing a non atomic operation and since each party is working independently of the other and they are constantly interrupting each others non atomic decision making process schizophrenic statements ensue. Correct me if I am wrong but that's a type of race condition isn't it?
He's just one US citizen. If he wants to have influence on Congress he can vote like the rest of us. The fact that he can't get personal meetings with them should be surprising or distressing, regardless of his net worth, given how difficult it would be for everyone else. I'm sure I'll be punished for this with lots of negative modding but it's just to much fun to mutate some dusty Marxist theory beyond all recognition:
Why would the fact that people can't get personal meetings with members of Congress unless they have a high net monetary worth be distressing? In a pure capitalist meritocracy human worth is measured in money and access to the people's elected representatives is also prioritized according to the wealth of the citizen in question. Come to think of it in a pure capitalist meritocracy the country (assuming that concept would even exist in such a world) would actually not be governed by elected representatives but rather by the most wealthy citizens (who by definition would be the most worthy) wouldn't it? In practice pure capitalist meritocracies don't exist since, at least in the western world, quaint and annoying traditions like democracy tend to get in the way. But even if one only achieves a partial capitalist meritocracy it still is more or less true that the wealthier a citizen is the greater his/her de facto human worth and the more and better his/her access to elected representatives and the better, speedier, more merciful and generally favorable the treatment he/she gets from the courts. Even if you get arrested and sentenced to jail for some crime a regular, less worthy, citizen gets sent to a normal jail where he/she will be subjected to all the brutal horrors a modern penal system has to offer while a wealthy citizen goes to a special protected detention facility where time is served in relative comfort, things like getting raped in the showers is something they don't have to worry about and generous reductions in the time that has to be served are easy to obtain. What this boils down to is that each country and it's people have to make up their collective mind about whether they want to be a capitalist meritocracy first and a democracy second or vice versa. Each choice has it's drawbacks and expecting to get the best of both worlds will lead to disappointment.
I hate Exchange, but in fairness it can be made to speak POP3 and IMAP with very little effort. Even secure POP3 and IMAP if you can be bothered to generate certificates. It's synchronization with the calendar, to-do lists, and information directory etc... that's the problem not so much the E-mail. On that score you are right though. I have fewer problems establishing an E-mail connection to Exchange than a typical Lotus Domino server. Mobile support for Lotus in general sucks ass big-time. From my point of view the biggest plus of the iPhone and smart-phones in general is that they are finally becoming powerful enough to run more or less full blown versions of mainstream browsers that in turn are capable of correctly displaying the web based rich e-mail clients for monstrosities like Lotus and Exchange. This will hopefully eventually eliminate much of the need for a native client although being able to somehow sync the iPhone's/smart-phone's calendar with Exchange/Lotus so that the phone can remind me of events is from my perspective a complete must and the web based E-mail clients that ship with Exchange/Lotus just don't solve that problem adequately yet. Nor do they solve the problem of automatic logouts which are all to often mandatory no matter where from you access the web client. It would be nice to be able to be able to skip the auto-logout rule for certain trusted workstations. This options is probably available but I have never seen it used. I'd skip native E-mail clients completely and work exclusively with the web-based ones if they just integrated as well into the OS as a native clients are. From my POW native E-mail clients are becoming an annoyance.
Seriously, an IT department should support a set list of systems, not everything a user brings to work and wants to use - thats how costs spiral out of control (as noted in the FA) and also how IT eventually gets blamed for the cost overruns et al. You can only limit people's individualism up to a point before you star to seriously annoy your employees. My employer tried to ban the use of Macs and Linux machines for support-cost and security reasons. The Graphics and Web design departments immediately rebelled and were quickly followed by several developers and sysadmins who used their own Linux or Apple laptops in preference to the cheap Win+Dell combination the company mandated and being practically married to their computers like many nerds are they didn't fancy hauling two laptops about all day. What eventually happened was that the company went ahead, mandated the use of Win+Dell and turned a reluctant blind eye to the power-users which is pretty stupid since some of the work done on these systems is of real value to the company and could not easily be done on a Win+Dell box. GSM phones are even worse in this respect since it's not only a limited number of employees you are pissing of by limiting them to, say, 3 basic company mandated models. It has been my experience that surprisingly many regular cell phone users diverge widely in the type of GSM handsets they prefer, some want ultra simple preferably with a B&W LCD while others want compact with a color display and yet others will rather shell out for a smart-phone than use the crap mandated by the company. One thing they all have in common is that being forced to use a handset they don't like by the company they work for, especially if they also use that GSM handset privately, annoys them enormously so it pays to allow them some latitude.
if so, why don't we seen businesses demanding open standards used when they make the buying decisions ? is this uninformed people being in charge or what ? incompatibilities are biting businesses for awfully long time, but we still have.doc floating around, proprietary communications protocols (like for syncing) and whatnot...
That's a myth. There are certainly dedicated Microsoft vassals who stick to the all Microsoft strategy quite deliberately for cost reasons and it probably works for them although the lock in also has some severe downsides. There is however, also quite a large group of businesses who deliberately distance them selves from Microsoft or whom Microsoft never succeeded in assimilating for the very practical reason that in the 'server' systems (using the term loosely here) market, unlike the Desktop computer market, the world is not Microsoft. In the Telco industry for example multiple platforms are forced upon you even if your inner self is crying out for a harmonic landscape of Microsoft logos and interoperability and open standards are a major issue. Ericsson typically demands SUN systems, their newest switches use Windows for one of their sub-systems, various newer vendors and startups typically use Linux for the same purposes (and not necessarily for ideological reasons, there are no license fees and they have complete access to even the kernel source which makes it easy and most important of all **cheap** to integrate their hardware) and a few vendors actually specify HPUX and AIX. On top of that there are also vendors who use Windows, typically Win2003 server but I have seen equipment running anything down to Windows 95. Going all Microsoft with the accompanying cross-platform problems and the near complete inability to switch vendors just isn't an option for many businesses. Microsoft products are still used but most of the movement towards FOSS is on the server end of the spectrum, office suites and their.doc format are small-fry compared to the high end 'server' grade systems and communication systems that either a play large part in a businesses core revenue generation or are the them selves the primary source of revenue as they are for Google for example or for a Telco. Then of course there are big software vendors like Oracle, Apple, Nokia, Sun etc.. who repackage or make partial use of FOSS software or libraries. Oracle Application Server and Apple's Safari and OS X are good examples. It's companies like those that represent the major businesses driving FOSS; unfortunately backing OOo as a much needed MS Office competitor simply isn't at the top of their list even if some of us (myself included) wish it was.
Slashdot Mirror
I was actually working in cheap PC retail back then. Do you remember the disk series that failed? 'cause I sure don't remember anything like that kind of failure rate. I'd have to wonder if the PC vendor didn't have a shipping accident. (I've seen stuff that would make you lose your lunch) That could actually be the case. I don't remember any more than the drives were in the 3-4 GB range. Either way, I simply concluded that it was best to stay away from Quantum after this happened. The way the problem manifested it self was that the drive simply stopped spinning. The funny thing was that if you gave it a slight knock with a blunt object you could sometimes get one working long enough to salvage the data. Once you shut the computer down again the drive usually wouldn't start up again so you had to work fast. This outbreak of disk failures ruined quite a few people's semester. I also stopped buying IBM drives after the second Deskstar failed on me. Actually the Deskstar didn't fail catastrophically, it just started developing more and more dead sectors until I got tired of the hassle and threw the thing away. I assumed the drive had simply been damaged when I knocked my mini-tower while over while cleaning so I bought a second one. It was only then that I found out these drives had a design flaw. I replaced it with a Western Digital disk which I have still got in a shelf somewhere, AFAIK it still works.
See.... you aren't the only graybeard here
Do something! Calm down..... there is no reason to get worried until the number of Linux forks exceeds the number of malware products available for Windows.
...washed down with a glass of wine... or something like that. Wine? Cool aid! And you forgot to mention the Microsoft brand chocolate FUD.In depth articles contain more research than a few links to wikipedia or other similar minded blogs.
That's the difference. I don't think their briefness makes blog posts less valuable since while they are limited in scope they tend to be very focused on one or two issues. I have found the answers/fixes to some really vexing programming questions/problems/bugs in blog posts that would never have been addressed in an in-depth article. Both blogs and in-depth articles have their uses and comparing the two is IMHO rather futile.
During this time period I did basically two things which gained the respect of my peers - for a moment, anyway. The first time was the first time I got into a real fight with someone determined to beat me up. He was another unpopular kid. He ended up with two black eyes and a bloody dot on his forehead. I ended up with an expulsion
Now... I'm not saying one should solve all one's problems with violence but sometimes one does not have a choice. I generally avoid confrontation unless I am provoked but there simply are some people who try to get through life with bullying and impudence. They will only leave you alone when you show them that if they knock you down you will not crawl into a corer, cower and whine like a whipped dog but rather that you will rise up and hurt them right back... punch for a punch, kick for a kick and that you don't not care how much damage you take while doing it as long the fight ends with them taking more damage than you.
The single worst thing you can do to your child is teach it to stay out of a bullies way and to endure the abuse. Children should have to have enough of a sense of honor instilled in them by their parents that they don't go and bully others but they must also learn to stand up for them selves and (others for that matter) when necessary even if it means they might get hurt. The psychological damage done by allowing your child to get bullied and not doing anything about it is worse than any bruise, black eye or bloody nose because it is takes a lot longer to heal and often it never heals completely.
Why would the fact that people can't get personal meetings with members of Congress unless they have a high net monetary worth be distressing? In a pure capitalist meritocracy human worth is measured in money and access to the people's elected representatives is also prioritized according to the wealth of the citizen in question. Come to think of it in a pure capitalist meritocracy the country (assuming that concept would even exist in such a world) would actually not be governed by elected representatives but rather by the most wealthy citizens (who by definition would be the most worthy) wouldn't it? In practice pure capitalist meritocracies don't exist since, at least in the western world, quaint and annoying traditions like democracy tend to get in the way. But even if one only achieves a partial capitalist meritocracy it still is more or less true that the wealthier a citizen is the greater his/her de facto human worth and the more and better his/her access to elected representatives and the better, speedier, more merciful and generally favorable the treatment he/she gets from the courts. Even if you get arrested and sentenced to jail for some crime a regular, less worthy, citizen gets sent to a normal jail where he/she will be subjected to all the brutal horrors a modern penal system has to offer while a wealthy citizen goes to a special protected detention facility where time is served in relative comfort, things like getting raped in the showers is something they don't have to worry about and generous reductions in the time that has to be served are easy to obtain. What this boils down to is that each country and it's people have to make up their collective mind about whether they want to be a capitalist meritocracy first and a democracy second or vice versa. Each choice has it's drawbacks and expecting to get the best of both worlds will lead to disappointment.
incompatibilities are biting businesses for awfully long time, but we still have
That's a myth. There are certainly dedicated Microsoft vassals who stick to the all Microsoft strategy quite deliberately for cost reasons and it probably works for them although the lock in also has some severe downsides. There is however, also quite a large group of businesses who deliberately distance them selves from Microsoft or whom Microsoft never succeeded in assimilating for the very practical reason that in the 'server' systems (using the term loosely here) market, unlike the Desktop computer market, the world is not Microsoft. In the Telco industry for example multiple platforms are forced upon you even if your inner self is crying out for a harmonic landscape of Microsoft logos and interoperability and open standards are a major issue. Ericsson typically demands SUN systems, their newest switches use Windows for one of their sub-systems, various newer vendors and startups typically use Linux for the same purposes (and not necessarily for ideological reasons, there are no license fees and they have complete access to even the kernel source which makes it easy and most important of all **cheap** to integrate their hardware) and a few vendors actually specify HPUX and AIX. On top of that there are also vendors who use Windows, typically Win2003 server but I have seen equipment running anything down to Windows 95. Going all Microsoft with the accompanying cross-platform problems and the near complete inability to switch vendors just isn't an option for many businesses. Microsoft products are still used but most of the movement towards FOSS is on the server end of the spectrum, office suites and their