Oh, sure... Innocent parties just spring for tens of millions of dollars out of the goodness of their hearts, right?
When it's cheaper than a protracted court battle, frequently. I doubt it's so much the goodness in their hearts, rather the accountant in their office, however.
I read the complaint that Be filed, and MS apparently found it damning enough to cut a deal. Guess what: it really is illegal to threaten your OEM customers to keep them from offering a competitor's product in addition to your own.
Probably it is, but trying to place the blame for wide commercial disinterest in a beta-quality platform with very poor hardware and 3rd-party software solely - or even mostly IMHO - on Microsoft is just a teensy bit disingenuous.
To give a counter-example, if Apple were to suddenly go crazy and license OS X out to PC OEMs, I doubt Microsoft would have much success in "convincing" those OEMs not to have it as an alternative (assuming the OS X pricing was reasoanble).
I'm talking about the Horse->Carriage->Train-->Car-->Plane process while you are talking about the Volkswagen Passat 2003->Volkswagen Passat 2004.
But your criticism of Vista was of the Windows 2003 -> Windows 2007 nature, not the DOS -> Windows -> OS/2 -> NT -> Vista nature.
You appear to be moving the goalposts.
And I still don't think software development increases at an exponential rate. As I said, I'm not aware of any mature software project that advances as fast as it did when younger, nor any software project whose releases became more frequent or changes more significant over time. The complete opposite appears to be true, with changes becoming far more incremental over time (eg: Microsoft Office).
Now, this is only an applicapable observation to individual software projects, but as your criticism was of an individual software project (Windows), and not the industry as a whole, it seems the only reasonable context for the discussion to bein.
Software development today lacks this and requires humans to go through the painful complexities of a system. If Microsoft with all its resources can't handle it, then it's a very good sign that a paradigm shift is needed.
I think it has more to do with Software Development still being a very young discipline, with tools, processes and "raw materials" still very immature. Realistically, the vast bulk of programmers are nothing more than the computer equivalent of bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers, and the like.
We humans use the same original code base as the first single-celled organisms were based on. We've just got some cool features added to that code base over the years.;)
Kinda true. But, for example, humans can't exist on the same diet as most other species (to a certain degree), nor can we reproduce with non-humans. So, mostly, we're "incompatible" and the "technology" that we have evolved from is no longer present.
You are free to not use them, but you are not free to:
a) Uninstall them.
b) Not be counted as having them as a windows user.
Which is of roughly zero relevance to 99% of users. Having app A installed does not stop me using app B that happens to do mostly the same thing.
This lets web developers or media companies assume that 90% of the world have the capability of rendering an IE only page, or playing a wmv file legally, so they can default to microsoft products and not be losing over 10% of their audiance.
Yes, just like they can only write software for Windows and be assured it will work on most computers.
But this is anti-competetive.
No, it's a business decision. Criticise the people writing the web pages/software/media/whatever, if they're not writing it the way you'd prefer.
This is a format war, if it was about customer experience, they would ship all the codecs with wmp (like divX) instead of making you search to download it. (And obviously they have the money to pay any license fee, or pass the cost on to me.
No, they'd ship commonly used codecs (which they do). Divx - outside of DVD ripping - is *not* a commonly used codec.
In conclusion, let microsoft bundle anything they want (I would expect a web browser with my OS for example), just give people the choice to _not_ have it on their system if they are not using them.
At which point you destroy most of the reason for having it there in the first place - common code reuse.
I beg your pardon but what constitutes pornography is abslolutely relevant to the creation of a domain whose purpose is to segregate pornographic material.
No, it's only relevant to deciding whether or not some site should actually be hosted in that domain, not the existence of the domain itself. For example, the definition of a "company" has no bearing on whether or not a site is hosted at www.somewebsite.com.
And whether or not something should be hosted in that domain is up to the owner of the content or, for more oppressive areas, the legal classification of the content physically hosted from that area.
The creation of a domain for pornographic material does nothing more than define a location for pornographic material to be hosted. Whether or not pornographic material is *actually* hosted there is up to the owners of the content and/or local laws.
Don't be ridiculous. With Linux, there's no one forcing me to "upgrade" to the latest version just so they can increase their revenue.
Nor with Windows. That Windows 95 PC I keep around to run old games does just as good a job running them now as it did then. So does the old DOS PC, come to think of it.
If I want to upgrade, I can just download it for free. This is true for most distributions.
So as usual the problem isn't the upgrading, its the having to pay for stuff.
If this statement were true, then linux should have a much worse problem of backward compatibility.
Why ? Backwards compatibility in Linux is atrocious. It's one of the reasons commercial software developers are so reluctant to develop for it.
After all, it implements the POSIX standard, which dates from the early 1980s. That's a lot more "backward" than anything that Gates and Ballmer have to worry about.
Ah, I see, you're being asinine. My mistake, I thought you were serious.
Those pesky customers, who want to do things like run their old games with decent performance.
Astounding as it might seem to you, Microsoft actually *are* interested in keeping their customers happy and have a long history of going out of their way to do so.
Yes, but I'm not talking about Netscape's death. I'm talking about MSIE's artificial domination of the market [...]
IE's domination of the market was in no way artificial. It's most explosive growth period came with the version, and during the time, when it *wasn't* bundled with Windows. People weren't using IE4 "because it was there", they were using IE4 because they'd gone out and deliberately downloaded it.
Netscape plugins worked JUST FINE, and they didn't give viruses to your computer.
What stopped them ? Certainly, today, Firefox plugins can trash your machine if you let them.
Microsoft's rendering engine was a great achievement, but they had to screw up with their proprietary ActiveX controls.
How was ActiveX more proprietry than Netscape's plugins ?
And since they were a monopoly, they didn't have to worry about Netscape getting in the way.
They didn't have to worry about Netscape getting in the way because Netscape made such a clusterfuck out of Navigator 4 and its successors. Up until that point (and for a while subsequently), they were *very* worried about Netscape.
It is part of the operating system (as odd as it may seem to someone familiar with the theories behind good system design).
It's not odd in the slightest. Code reuse and modularity are considered hallmarks of good system design.
There's a reason why KDE, GNOME and OS X have gone on to reimplement the same sort of functionality - *because it was a good idea*.
For all the problems shared software components can cause, they are generally considered to offer an overall benefit. Which is why every contemporary OS has so many of them.
So part of their dominant position stems from the question "Why should I install another browser if I can't get rid of the other one anyway?"
No, because "getting rid of the other one" is completely irrelevant. The real question is "why should I install another browser when this one works fine". The answer - as people are discovering - is that in many cases IE *doesn't* "work fine", which is why Firefox is becoming more popular.
Stop projecting your idealistic nerdiness onto everyone else. Normal people have no interest in the philosophies of OSS and the religion of hating Microsoft, they just want to get a job done. Give them better tools to do what they want to do, make them aware of those tools, and they will use them.
Or, to put it succintly, build it and they will come.
And, most importantly, you can choose which pieces you want to install, and only have the ones you want.
Well, that's debatable. Installing your average Linux distro without, say, glibc would be practically impossible.
There is a difference between saying "here is your OS, and by the way, we've included scads of optional stuff you can install or not as you wish" and the Microsoft position of "here is your OS, we've also given your our media player, conveniently given you links to drive you to MSN and Passport, and given you no way to choose not to install them".
You do, however, remain free not to use them - which is the important part.
If users had to always find and install the apps they needed ( or at least choose them ), [...]
Ah yes, I remember the days of when "find it and install it yourself" was common, and I have no interest in going back to the era where I *have* to chase up my own text editor, networking stack, FTP client, web browser even shell just so I can make my computer useful.
You want to waste your time (and maybe money) doing that sort of thing ? Knock yourself out. Microsoft won't stop you. But don't tell *me* that I should have to suffer through the same process.
I totally agree you should be able to buy a Windows operating system without getting the implied Microsoft bundled applications, which keep causing secutiry issues for people who don't otherwise know better.
Who gets to decide the difference between the "operating system" and "bundled applications" ? Will these definitions be applied consistently to all platforms, or would you force some customers to spend time and/or money getting a relatively basic level of functionality just because they happened to buy Windows ?
You want to impose *your belief* of what constitutes an OS and what doesn't on me ? Get fucked.
I think you'll find Europe and Asia are becoming a hell of a lot more like the US, than the US is becoming like Europe and Asia (and neither of them like it one bit, from what I can tell - understandably so, too).
Of course not. The porn marketers have absolutely no desire to continue to make their sales to the nearly 36% of their market (at their best estimate) that is comprised of children with daddy and mommy's credit cards. That makes sense, to me.
36% ? That number doesn't even pass the laugh test.
Write it as "the nearly 36% of their market (at their best estimate) that is comprised of people reporting their purchases of pornography as their children using their credit cards" and you might have something a little closer to reality. But if you seriously think that 36% of pornography purchases are from the tiny demographic of "those old enough to be interested in pornography but still under the age of majority, who don't have their own credit card", you're delusional.
And everyone knows, the best thing you can do for your business is make it easier to block access to your business.
When the alternative is potentially having it shut down, then allowing a the people who aren't really interested in your product at all to block it is certainly "the best thing".
Clearly the porn industry isn't all that concerned with their opponents, since their opponents haven't gotten rid of them yet.
I imagine the porn industry is quite concerned with their opponents, who are continually trying to have them - effectively - shut down. Or are you just ignoring the regular attempts to have things like "adult content filters" made mandatory ?
But wait! The porn industry is winning the battle, let's all congregate in one place so that the puritans can lob one "safe search" grenade and destroy access to all of them at once.
Except the only people whose access to them is "destroyed" are the people who aren't interested in them in the first place. There's way too much interest in porn - even (especially, IME) from the people who pretend to find it abhorrent - for it to be outlawed completely (or, more accurately, if it ever does happen, there will probably be much more important things to worry about).
Local laws? So my township could pass a law regarding the internet, and that would be okay with you?
Since it's not my township, yes. Fight your own battles.
Sure it is, they'll sacrifice their existing multi-million dollar domain name and have to re-earn traffic again under the.xxx tld because that's better for them.
That's why the transition would take several years.
On the linux box (I am going to choose Debian as I'm familiar with it). Fire up synaptic from the gnome menu. Search for barcode. Two results returned.
Of course it won't - it will (for the equivalent progress) be far quicker.
You seem to be changing the rules here. Now you're talking about the measurement from no compiler to the 6th revision of one, and saying that progession is exponential, whereas your criticism of Vista appears to be its *relative* progression from the previous version (which is still significant).
I am saying that the 6th revision of any software product, will have taken a lot longer to get to market, or have relatively smaller changes, than, say, the second or third revision. You seem to be arguing that releases will become more frequent or have increasingly larger changes. I cannot think of any software product which has exhibited such a pattern.
This might not agree with your maths, but it certainly reflects reality;). As software matures, its release cycles become longer or the changes between releases become relatively less and less significant.
I'm not entirely clear we're talking about measuring the same things here.
The only time when a bell curve can be seen if the development of a certain technology has become obsolete and a paradigm shift is needed.
I disagree. From my observations, most software development projects follow the pattern of:
* a long initial development period, leading up to the first release.
* a series of increasingly rapid releases with major changes; leading to
* a series of decreasingly frequent releases
* project is EOLed and/or largely redone again from scratch, at which point the cycle starts again.
Complexity of the code base as an argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Do you really think that computer hardware doesn't get more complex over time?
Yes it does, but the new technology *replaces* the older technology, it doesn't come into place alongside it like software code does. There's still code from Windows 3.1 kicking around inside Windows Vista (albeit well contained into compatibility layers and modules). I'd expect the materials, tools and processes used in making todays hard disks and CPUs are quite different from those used in 1990. And while, say, a P4 is still compatible on an instruction-set level with a 386, there's little to no similarly in their respective implementations.
Hardware's "backwards compatibility" requirements are generally a lot simpler than software's, with a lot fewer corner cases specifically taken into account and a lot less effort put into it overall (how many CPU slots/sockets can you remember in the last 15 years ?).
How about the natural evolution, don't you think that organisms grew in complexity as they evolved?
Yes, but again the old "technology" is (often) discarded. Indeed, the very definition of a speciation is when the "new technology" is no longer compatible with the "old";). For another example, humans no longer have tails (as a rule, there is still the odd mutation).
I expect you're now going to define the "technology" as all the stuff encoded in DNA;).
Hmm, I seem to remember Win95 pre Active Desktop. That's a significant change.
No it wasn't. The most noticable differences were the ability to drag & drop onto the Start Menu and the presence of the Quick Launch toolbar, neither of which are major changes (and the former of which 90% of people would never have noticed anyway).
And since I work with W2k on a daily basis, the first thing I had to do was change my XP laptop to Classic desktop, because XP moved a lot of applications on the menus.
Shuffling the locations of a few things around inside a menu isn't a major change. Fundamentally, the Start Menu still operates in the same fashion today as it did in Windows 95. The changes are almost all cosmetic, and even the functional changes (eg: drag & drop) are really only noticable if you know to look for them.
Ever compared a w2k control panel to XP?
Yes. It looks different. But it still performs the same basic function, in largely the same way, just with a different layout.
Apple has changed the layout and behaviour of the System Prefernces tool a few times since its release, but I wouldn't call any of those changes major. In principle, it's still the same tool and still behaves in the same basic way.
And how about early versions of XP and later versions, where the whole start menu was re-arranged?
AFAIK the XP Start Menu has never been changed. Unless you're talking about betas, which are hardly relevant.
Then of course there is the Outlook on my primary desktop, and the newer version on our terminal servers that defaults to Word for the editor and the send button is in a different location.
The Office team have *always* played rather fast and loose with the Windows UI guidelines, but Office != Windows, Office != Microsoft and Windows != Microsoft. Most of the subdivisions in Microsoft (like Office) might as well be separate companies.
Or is your idea of consistency the fact that so little changes between service packs?
My idea of consistency is that very little has changed in terms of "first principles" when using Windows, particularly since Windows 3.x. The same applies to MacOS [X].
If you're on a software upgrade treadmill, 10 years might seem like a long time. But really it's not.
10 years is a *very* long time in just about every aspect of computing.
Change isn't a bad thing, but you shouldn't have to retrain your workforce everytime you upgrade your OS.
And if they're taught properly (which, granted, most of them aren't - but that's not a Windows problem), they shouldn't need to.
Believe it or not, but the majority of computer users probably don't even know what a shortcut key is.
I've no doubt. That does not change the fact that they have remained largely consistent in Windows (and MacOS) for a very, very long time.
You can't argue Windows isn't consistent just because people aren't taught what the rules are. Similarly, you can't argue Microsoft aren't consistent in general, based on the example of one specific application.
Standards on porn/obscenity differ by locality. If something is considered art in one area, and porn in another, what happens when someone hosts that content in the first area, and doesn't use.xxx? Under his standards, he's fine, but under area b's standards, it's a crime.
And since his server is in area (a), then he's fine (admittedly this assumes a sane legal system where someone viewing a web page in area (b) cannot successfully argue he was "forced" to view it).
The problem governments have with the.xxx domain is that, while it may make reguilation of porn easier (doubtful, by setting aside a domain for pornography, it _legitimatizes_ it. The govt would be in the uncomfortable position of saying that obscenity/pornography is bad, but here's a government approved place for it.
How is this any different from having the 'X' rating for films/videos (or whatever your local equivalent might be) ?
Define porn. Any definition will have to involve questions of artistic merit, like they deal with in other cases.
I'm not quite sure why people think this is important. It's completely irrelevant to the technical implementation of a TLD, and in the only place it could possibly be relevant (determining whether or not an arbitrary website should be required to use the.xxx TLD) there are going to be existing laws defining what "porn" is in that locality.
Who would be responsible for determining which domain sites would belong to? Would it be up to the sites themselves?
In a sane system, yes.
It doesn't seem like such an opt-in approach would do much to segregate pornography away from less potentially objectionable content.
But it would. Difficult as this is for anti-porn crusaders to comprehend, the people selling porn really have no interest in aiming their products at a) adults that aren't interested in looking at porn (small as a such a group is) and b) children.
I would expect porn sites to exodus to a.xxx (or equivalent) domain en masse, were it to become available (although obviously this process would take several years). Mainly because then the people trying to filter porn out would have a much easier job, and their biggest opponents would, largely, not have a leg to stand on.
Where do you draw the line? What about sexual education/health web sites?
You make the system voluntary. 99% of porn sites would take advantage of that, because its better for them as well as everyone else.
More formally, local laws *could* be implemeted saying the "porn sites" must be in.xxx, depending on whatever their local definition of "pornography" was. Personally I would have no problem with that.
Slashdot Mirror
When it's cheaper than a protracted court battle, frequently. I doubt it's so much the goodness in their hearts, rather the accountant in their office, however.
I read the complaint that Be filed, and MS apparently found it damning enough to cut a deal. Guess what: it really is illegal to threaten your OEM customers to keep them from offering a competitor's product in addition to your own.
Probably it is, but trying to place the blame for wide commercial disinterest in a beta-quality platform with very poor hardware and 3rd-party software solely - or even mostly IMHO - on Microsoft is just a teensy bit disingenuous.
To give a counter-example, if Apple were to suddenly go crazy and license OS X out to PC OEMs, I doubt Microsoft would have much success in "convincing" those OEMs not to have it as an alternative (assuming the OS X pricing was reasoanble).
But your criticism of Vista was of the Windows 2003 -> Windows 2007 nature, not the DOS -> Windows -> OS/2 -> NT -> Vista nature.
You appear to be moving the goalposts.
And I still don't think software development increases at an exponential rate. As I said, I'm not aware of any mature software project that advances as fast as it did when younger, nor any software project whose releases became more frequent or changes more significant over time. The complete opposite appears to be true, with changes becoming far more incremental over time (eg: Microsoft Office).
Now, this is only an applicapable observation to individual software projects, but as your criticism was of an individual software project (Windows), and not the industry as a whole, it seems the only reasonable context for the discussion to bein.
Software development today lacks this and requires humans to go through the painful complexities of a system. If Microsoft with all its resources can't handle it, then it's a very good sign that a paradigm shift is needed.
I think it has more to do with Software Development still being a very young discipline, with tools, processes and "raw materials" still very immature. Realistically, the vast bulk of programmers are nothing more than the computer equivalent of bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers, and the like.
We humans use the same original code base as the first single-celled organisms were based on. We've just got some cool features added to that code base over the years. ;)
Kinda true. But, for example, humans can't exist on the same diet as most other species (to a certain degree), nor can we reproduce with non-humans. So, mostly, we're "incompatible" and the "technology" that we have evolved from is no longer present.
For websites with pornographic material.
a) Uninstall them.
b) Not be counted as having them as a windows user.
Which is of roughly zero relevance to 99% of users. Having app A installed does not stop me using app B that happens to do mostly the same thing.
This lets web developers or media companies assume that 90% of the world have the capability of rendering an IE only page, or playing a wmv file legally, so they can default to microsoft products and not be losing over 10% of their audiance.
Yes, just like they can only write software for Windows and be assured it will work on most computers.
But this is anti-competetive.
No, it's a business decision. Criticise the people writing the web pages/software/media/whatever, if they're not writing it the way you'd prefer.
This is a format war, if it was about customer experience, they would ship all the codecs with wmp (like divX) instead of making you search to download it. (And obviously they have the money to pay any license fee, or pass the cost on to me.
No, they'd ship commonly used codecs (which they do). Divx - outside of DVD ripping - is *not* a commonly used codec.
In conclusion, let microsoft bundle anything they want (I would expect a web browser with my OS for example), just give people the choice to _not_ have it on their system if they are not using them.
At which point you destroy most of the reason for having it there in the first place - common code reuse.
No, it's only relevant to deciding whether or not some site should actually be hosted in that domain, not the existence of the domain itself. For example, the definition of a "company" has no bearing on whether or not a site is hosted at www.somewebsite.com.
And whether or not something should be hosted in that domain is up to the owner of the content or, for more oppressive areas, the legal classification of the content physically hosted from that area.
The creation of a domain for pornographic material does nothing more than define a location for pornographic material to be hosted. Whether or not pornographic material is *actually* hosted there is up to the owners of the content and/or local laws.
They did it already. What do you think Windows NT is ?
Nor with Windows. That Windows 95 PC I keep around to run old games does just as good a job running them now as it did then. So does the old DOS PC, come to think of it.
If I want to upgrade, I can just download it for free. This is true for most distributions.
So as usual the problem isn't the upgrading, its the having to pay for stuff.
More complex than what?
Not having it.
If this statement were true, then linux should have a much worse problem of backward compatibility.
Why ? Backwards compatibility in Linux is atrocious. It's one of the reasons commercial software developers are so reluctant to develop for it.
After all, it implements the POSIX standard, which dates from the early 1980s. That's a lot more "backward" than anything that Gates and Ballmer have to worry about.
Ah, I see, you're being asinine. My mistake, I thought you were serious.
Those pesky customers, who want to do things like run their old games with decent performance.
Astounding as it might seem to you, Microsoft actually *are* interested in keeping their customers happy and have a long history of going out of their way to do so.
IE's domination of the market was in no way artificial. It's most explosive growth period came with the version, and during the time, when it *wasn't* bundled with Windows. People weren't using IE4 "because it was there", they were using IE4 because they'd gone out and deliberately downloaded it.
Netscape plugins worked JUST FINE, and they didn't give viruses to your computer.
What stopped them ? Certainly, today, Firefox plugins can trash your machine if you let them.
Microsoft's rendering engine was a great achievement, but they had to screw up with their proprietary ActiveX controls.
How was ActiveX more proprietry than Netscape's plugins ?
And since they were a monopoly, they didn't have to worry about Netscape getting in the way.
They didn't have to worry about Netscape getting in the way because Netscape made such a clusterfuck out of Navigator 4 and its successors. Up until that point (and for a while subsequently), they were *very* worried about Netscape.
It's not odd in the slightest. Code reuse and modularity are considered hallmarks of good system design.
There's a reason why KDE, GNOME and OS X have gone on to reimplement the same sort of functionality - *because it was a good idea*.
For all the problems shared software components can cause, they are generally considered to offer an overall benefit. Which is why every contemporary OS has so many of them.
So part of their dominant position stems from the question "Why should I install another browser if I can't get rid of the other one anyway?"
No, because "getting rid of the other one" is completely irrelevant. The real question is "why should I install another browser when this one works fine". The answer - as people are discovering - is that in many cases IE *doesn't* "work fine", which is why Firefox is becoming more popular.
Stop projecting your idealistic nerdiness onto everyone else. Normal people have no interest in the philosophies of OSS and the religion of hating Microsoft, they just want to get a job done. Give them better tools to do what they want to do, make them aware of those tools, and they will use them.
Or, to put it succintly, build it and they will come.
Well, that's debatable. Installing your average Linux distro without, say, glibc would be practically impossible.
There is a difference between saying "here is your OS, and by the way, we've included scads of optional stuff you can install or not as you wish" and the Microsoft position of "here is your OS, we've also given your our media player, conveniently given you links to drive you to MSN and Passport, and given you no way to choose not to install them".
You do, however, remain free not to use them - which is the important part.
If users had to always find and install the apps they needed ( or at least choose them ), [...]
Ah yes, I remember the days of when "find it and install it yourself" was common, and I have no interest in going back to the era where I *have* to chase up my own text editor, networking stack, FTP client, web browser even shell just so I can make my computer useful.
You want to waste your time (and maybe money) doing that sort of thing ? Knock yourself out. Microsoft won't stop you. But don't tell *me* that I should have to suffer through the same process.
I totally agree you should be able to buy a Windows operating system without getting the implied Microsoft bundled applications, which keep causing secutiry issues for people who don't otherwise know better.
Who gets to decide the difference between the "operating system" and "bundled applications" ? Will these definitions be applied consistently to all platforms, or would you force some customers to spend time and/or money getting a relatively basic level of functionality just because they happened to buy Windows ?
You want to impose *your belief* of what constitutes an OS and what doesn't on me ? Get fucked.
I think you'll find Europe and Asia are becoming a hell of a lot more like the US, than the US is becoming like Europe and Asia (and neither of them like it one bit, from what I can tell - understandably so, too).
36% ? That number doesn't even pass the laugh test.
Write it as "the nearly 36% of their market (at their best estimate) that is comprised of people reporting their purchases of pornography as their children using their credit cards" and you might have something a little closer to reality. But if you seriously think that 36% of pornography purchases are from the tiny demographic of "those old enough to be interested in pornography but still under the age of majority, who don't have their own credit card", you're delusional.
And everyone knows, the best thing you can do for your business is make it easier to block access to your business.
When the alternative is potentially having it shut down, then allowing a the people who aren't really interested in your product at all to block it is certainly "the best thing".
Clearly the porn industry isn't all that concerned with their opponents, since their opponents haven't gotten rid of them yet.
I imagine the porn industry is quite concerned with their opponents, who are continually trying to have them - effectively - shut down. Or are you just ignoring the regular attempts to have things like "adult content filters" made mandatory ?
But wait! The porn industry is winning the battle, let's all congregate in one place so that the puritans can lob one "safe search" grenade and destroy access to all of them at once.
Except the only people whose access to them is "destroyed" are the people who aren't interested in them in the first place. There's way too much interest in porn - even (especially, IME) from the people who pretend to find it abhorrent - for it to be outlawed completely (or, more accurately, if it ever does happen, there will probably be much more important things to worry about).
Local laws? So my township could pass a law regarding the internet, and that would be okay with you?
Since it's not my township, yes. Fight your own battles.
Sure it is, they'll sacrifice their existing multi-million dollar domain name and have to re-earn traffic again under the .xxx tld because that's better for them.
That's why the transition would take several years.
Most cultures I'm aware of have a concept of "pornography".
What exactly *consistutes* pornography certain varies from place to place - but that's irrelevant to this.
Funny, looks to me like there was just a settlement, with no mention of "damages" or even "wrongdoing".
It wasn't finished. That doesn't change the fact that MS killed it.
Well, it does, because the "fact" is not that Microsoft "killed it", it's that it died.
And if no results are returned ?
Your problem was trusting the user to have made an appropriate diagnosis of the problem :).
Your first question should always be "what are you trying to do ?" not "what is wrong ?".
You seem to be changing the rules here. Now you're talking about the measurement from no compiler to the 6th revision of one, and saying that progession is exponential, whereas your criticism of Vista appears to be its *relative* progression from the previous version (which is still significant).
I am saying that the 6th revision of any software product, will have taken a lot longer to get to market, or have relatively smaller changes, than, say, the second or third revision. You seem to be arguing that releases will become more frequent or have increasingly larger changes. I cannot think of any software product which has exhibited such a pattern.
This might not agree with your maths, but it certainly reflects reality ;). As software matures, its release cycles become longer or the changes between releases become relatively less and less significant.
I'm not entirely clear we're talking about measuring the same things here.
The only time when a bell curve can be seen if the development of a certain technology has become obsolete and a paradigm shift is needed.
I disagree. From my observations, most software development projects follow the pattern of:
* a long initial development period, leading up to the first release.
* a series of increasingly rapid releases with major changes; leading to
* a series of decreasingly frequent releases
* project is EOLed and/or largely redone again from scratch, at which point the cycle starts again.
Complexity of the code base as an argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Do you really think that computer hardware doesn't get more complex over time?
Yes it does, but the new technology *replaces* the older technology, it doesn't come into place alongside it like software code does. There's still code from Windows 3.1 kicking around inside Windows Vista (albeit well contained into compatibility layers and modules). I'd expect the materials, tools and processes used in making todays hard disks and CPUs are quite different from those used in 1990. And while, say, a P4 is still compatible on an instruction-set level with a 386, there's little to no similarly in their respective implementations.
Hardware's "backwards compatibility" requirements are generally a lot simpler than software's, with a lot fewer corner cases specifically taken into account and a lot less effort put into it overall (how many CPU slots/sockets can you remember in the last 15 years ?).
How about the natural evolution, don't you think that organisms grew in complexity as they evolved?
Yes, but again the old "technology" is (often) discarded. Indeed, the very definition of a speciation is when the "new technology" is no longer compatible with the "old" ;). For another example, humans no longer have tails (as a rule, there is still the odd mutation).
I expect you're now going to define the "technology" as all the stuff encoded in DNA ;).
Hmm, I seem to remember Win95 pre Active Desktop. That's a significant change.
No it wasn't. The most noticable differences were the ability to drag & drop onto the Start Menu and the presence of the Quick Launch toolbar, neither of which are major changes (and the former of which 90% of people would never have noticed anyway).
And since I work with W2k on a daily basis, the first thing I had to do was change my XP laptop to Classic desktop, because XP moved a lot of applications on the menus.
Shuffling the locations of a few things around inside a menu isn't a major change. Fundamentally, the Start Menu still operates in the same fashion today as it did in Windows 95. The changes are almost all cosmetic, and even the functional changes (eg: drag & drop) are really only noticable if you know to look for them.
Ever compared a w2k control panel to XP?
Yes. It looks different. But it still performs the same basic function, in largely the same way, just with a different layout.
Apple has changed the layout and behaviour of the System Prefernces tool a few times since its release, but I wouldn't call any of those changes major. In principle, it's still the same tool and still behaves in the same basic way.
And how about early versions of XP and later versions, where the whole start menu was re-arranged?
AFAIK the XP Start Menu has never been changed. Unless you're talking about betas, which are hardly relevant.
Then of course there is the Outlook on my primary desktop, and the newer version on our terminal servers that defaults to Word for the editor and the send button is in a different location.
The Office team have *always* played rather fast and loose with the Windows UI guidelines, but Office != Windows, Office != Microsoft and Windows != Microsoft. Most of the subdivisions in Microsoft (like Office) might as well be separate companies.
Or is your idea of consistency the fact that so little changes between service packs?
My idea of consistency is that very little has changed in terms of "first principles" when using Windows, particularly since Windows 3.x. The same applies to MacOS [X].
If you're on a software upgrade treadmill, 10 years might seem like a long time. But really it's not.
10 years is a *very* long time in just about every aspect of computing.
Change isn't a bad thing, but you shouldn't have to retrain your workforce everytime you upgrade your OS.
And if they're taught properly (which, granted, most of them aren't - but that's not a Windows problem), they shouldn't need to.
Believe it or not, but the majority of computer users probably don't even know what a shortcut key is.
I've no doubt. That does not change the fact that they have remained largely consistent in Windows (and MacOS) for a very, very long time.
You can't argue Windows isn't consistent just because people aren't taught what the rules are. Similarly, you can't argue Microsoft aren't consistent in general, based on the example of one specific application.
Standards on porn/obscenity differ by locality. If something is considered art in one area, and porn in another, what happens when someone hosts that content in the first area, and doesn't use .xxx? Under his standards, he's fine, but under area b's standards, it's a crime.
And since his server is in area (a), then he's fine (admittedly this assumes a sane legal system where someone viewing a web page in area (b) cannot successfully argue he was "forced" to view it).
How is this any different from having the 'X' rating for films/videos (or whatever your local equivalent might be) ?
I'm not quite sure why people think this is important. It's completely irrelevant to the technical implementation of a TLD, and in the only place it could possibly be relevant (determining whether or not an arbitrary website should be required to use the .xxx TLD) there are going to be existing laws defining what "porn" is in that locality.
Who would be responsible for determining which domain sites would belong to? Would it be up to the sites themselves?
In a sane system, yes.
It doesn't seem like such an opt-in approach would do much to segregate pornography away from less potentially objectionable content.
But it would. Difficult as this is for anti-porn crusaders to comprehend, the people selling porn really have no interest in aiming their products at a) adults that aren't interested in looking at porn (small as a such a group is) and b) children.
I would expect porn sites to exodus to a .xxx (or equivalent) domain en masse, were it to become available (although obviously this process would take several years). Mainly because then the people trying to filter porn out would have a much easier job, and their biggest opponents would, largely, not have a leg to stand on.
Where do you draw the line? What about sexual education/health web sites?
You make the system voluntary. 99% of porn sites would take advantage of that, because its better for them as well as everyone else.
More formally, local laws *could* be implemeted saying the "porn sites" must be in .xxx, depending on whatever their local definition of "pornography" was. Personally I would have no problem with that.
Yes. This is why it's the best solution for *everyone*, except for those too-far-gone whackos who can't even handle acknowledging that porn exists.