The content of that article does not support its title. Perhaps if the title were "Price gouging saves rich people's lives" it might be accurate, (albeit still little more than sophistry).
There's also this gem in the conclusion:
"Price gouging" is nothing more than charging what the market will bear. If that's immoral, then all market adjustment to changing circumstances is "immoral," and markets per se are immoral. But that is not the case.
He's half right - market's aren't immoral, they're amoral. They're simply a tool that can be used for moral or immoral activities - and price-gouging in the face of natural disasters is most certain an immoral activity.
for instance, in a free market, there would be no monopolies-- because the only way monopolies can exist is when government creates them.
In a free market, if someone got monopoly power, they would quickly lose it because their prices would be above market rates.
Er, no.
In The Real World companies would join together to form massive conglomerates, take control of the resources and simply make entering any market impossible.
The logical conclusion of an unrestricted free market is a small number of massive corporations - if not a single one - monopolising every conceivable good and service. Entry into any market on anything more than an insignificant scale by a potential competitor would be dealt with by either a buyout or predatory below-cost selling to drive them out of business.
Currently, global corporations are well on the way to this goal, and government regulation is probably the only thing slowing them down.
Libertarians believe in capitalism which, unlike the communism you seem to espouse, DOES WORK in the real world.
Both "capitalism" and "communism" work in the real world, in moderation. Neither work as absolutes because both fall victim to people's greed.
Libertarians in the area would be in New Orleans right now sellign food at cost and water at cost and getting people fed and hydrated [...]
I'm not quite sure why you think they'd be selling these things "at cost", but I can't see anyone with a profit motive doing so - and out of "capitalism" and "communism", the latter is the one that doesn't have profit as a fundamental tenet.
I don't imagine this would be an especially effective means of encouraging compliance either... "we'll tell you what to do for the low, low price of $250!!"
Out of the costs involved in setting up a data centre, $250 wouldn't even qualify as a rounding error.
otherwise, even on dry asphalt, let alone on slick surfaces, ABS shortens stopping distance.
That's not entirely true. A (highly) skilled driver should be able to outbrake an ABS system on asphalt in good conditions. However, they won't be able to do it if any significant surface irregularities are introduced (eg: two wheels on the fringe, two wheels on the road).
That said, I personally believe ABS should be made compulsory on all new vehicles (in preference to airbags) and anyone who claims to be able to consistently or on-demand outbrake an ABS system - all else being equal - is having a lend of themselves.
this largely has to do with the coefficient of static friction being higher than the coefficient of sliding friction.
You appear to be comparing ABS to a set of locked wheels. That hardly seems fair.
Somehow, I don't think anyone told the teenagers who are busy turning efficient Civics into inefficient turbo'd ricers with high volume exhaust systems.
A turbo improves performance - ricers don't use mods that improve performance.
I like the service idea, but if someone wants to sell their music as a heavily restrict product then that's their prerogative. No-one apart from the copyright holder has a right to see, hear or otherwise use a copyrighted work.
What I am opposed to however is copyright holders manipulating the legal system to prop up a failing business model. Laws designed for physical property cannot and should not be applied to noncorporeal works.
You seem to be contradicting yourself. On the one hand, you're saying copyright is good and actually is a "right" (rather than a legal privilege), but on the other you say people actually using copyright as it is meant to be used is wrong.
*Copyright* is the broken model. You can't have any business model that relies on copyright not result in "copyright holders manipulating the legal system to prop [it] up".
Laws designed for physical property cannot and should not be applied to noncorporeal works.
The whole point of copyright is to try and force a physical-property-like model onto "noncorporeal works" and create artificial scarcity (as scarcity is the fundamental base of deriving value). The only reason it hasn't fallen apart earlier is because it's only relatively recently that separating the "noncorporeal" part from the physical part has become so accessible (ie: digital copying).
I like your idea and see where you're coming from; however I cannot support forcing content producers to behave in a certain way. No matter how desirable that may be.
A service model wouldn't force them to do anything - it would merely remove the ridiculously unbalanced advantages copyright holders have.
WinFS is not a separate filesystem. It uses NTFS as the filesystem, but then stores metadata on top of that (the same way other filesystems like HFS+ have for years).
HFS[+] and "other filesystems" store metadata in the filesystem, not "on top of it".
NTFS is also capable of storing arbitrary metadata in the filesystem like, say, BeFS does, but this capability has never seen any real usage.
You don't need to reform to WinFS, it's not a filesystem, but a relational database that carries metadata about existing files on an NTFS partition.
You are correct here, WinFS is just a DB layer sitting on top of the filesystem. However, this is *not* the same thing as HFS[+], BeFS, etc metadata.
Linux allows the user to have a far greater degree of confidence for a relatively small expenditure of effort. For example: It is possible to understand your firewall's operation and to validate that there are no vendor supplied backdoors and that there are no port knocking exploits other that those you may choose to define yourself. That is not so easy under Windows.
Whilst your sentiment has merit, your example is atrocious. Verifying that there weren't any "vendor supplied backdoors" in an arbitrary Linux distribution would require - at a minimum - a deep understanding of the code and principles involved in implementing firewalling, both in general and specific to the Linux kernel. I feel quite confident in saying that acquiring sufficient knowledge and reviewing the relevant code is well and truly beyond a "relatively small expenditure of effort".
Another example: on windows, it is difficult to avoid internet explorer. Even if you use (say) firefox, the filer windows still use IE dlls and sooner or later one of the IE security holes will make itself manifest. This is far easier to avoid on Linux.
If you're using, say, KDE, it's pretty hard to avoid khtml. This doesn't seem to bother a lot of people, because they accept such depndencies are part and parcel of the whole package.
Simple fact is, if you're not a hardcore coder, you have to put the same amount of trust in your Linux vendor as you do your Windows vendor. Ie: for the _vast_ majority of end users, at some level they have to trust the people they acquire Linux from as much as they trust the people they acquire Windows from.
Seriously, if you're to beat the Linux drum, "vendor trust" is a long way down the list of things you should be bringing up.
We all are based on Thinkpad Laptops with 17" secondary LCDs and docking stations.
Do you really need laptops ? I ask because when I started at my current job, they offered to get me a laptop (with an external LCD) "like everyone else". Since the job didn't require any on-the-road work, I asked why "everyone" had laptops. "The just do" was the response. Now, having been there a few months and not seeing a single laptop ever leave it's docking station in that time, I just wonder why "everyone" wants laptops.
Since then, I've not once regretted getting the dual-CPU PC with SCSI RAID, 2GB RAM and dual 21" LCDs instead:).
Win32 was released under Windows For Workgroups (You remember the 32bit disk/network access don't you). Standard (real) mode was dropped in this version of Windows.
Actually WfW had Win32s, which was a stripped-down version of the Win32 API. You can't run Win32 apps on Windows for Workgroups.
The original poster is correct - Windows 95 was the first "consumer" OS that used Win32 (Win32 first appeared in Windows NT 3.1).
If you had 16mb of RAM, Win95 was noticably bitchy compared to Win3.1. You needed at least 32mb of RAM, and at least a Pentium 120 to really have it go decently. That was a top-of-the-line computer until fall 1996.
Oh, bullshit. Windows 95 + Office was usable on 386s and 486s with 8MB of RAM (a fairly common machine in 1995).
Pentium 120s with 32MB ? That's a comfortable *NT4* machine - Windows 95 would be blazingly fast on such hardware.
I think it was 92 or 93 when I was running beta releases of NT (I was not even a teenager, so the memory is a bit fuzzy) I got from my father. They were not so stable, but I was impressed with their performance over 3.11.
That must have been a pretty impressive machine for 1992/93 if NT was faster than Windows 3.x:).
Come again? On my work Windows XP desktop there is a Start Menu / Explorer duality, in terms of UI anyway.
The difference is that the Start Menu is just another view of the filesystem, whereas Program Manager is not.
Or, to put it another way, the Start Menu (and Desktop) is just a special instantiation of Explorer, whereas in Windows 3.x, Program Manager and File Manager are completely separate programs. You can see an example of this in action by how they interact - you can drag & drop stuff between the Start Menu, Desktop and any Explorer window - but you can't do the same between Windows 3.x's File Manager and Program Manager.
Then came 3.0. This was a huge step, and was the first real usable version of Windows. They changed the programming language and the structure with 3.1 and 3.11 (The predecessors of Windows 95 and NT, respectively).
Windows 3.11 was not a predecessor to Windows NT. It was an (relatively major) update to Windows 3.1.
Windows 3.x would run on systems with 386/486 processors, a 20 MB hard drive and 4 MB of ram.
You could actually run Windows 3.0 on a 286 with only 640k. 3.1 and up required a 386 with 1MB (or maybe 2, but definitely less than 4, because I was running it on a 2MB 386SX for a while). Indeed, my 2MB 386 with 40MB hard disk was quite a usable Windows 3.11 system (although I struggled to fit the massive 20MB of Wing Commander 2 on it with anything else).
Windows 95 was very major. It coincided with public use of the Internet, required at least a 128 MB hard drive, and 32 MB of memory.
Windows 95 required a 386 with 4MB, and was even somewhat usable on that hardware. One of Windows 95 primary requirements was that it offer comparable performance to Windows 3.11 on the same hardware (which it mostly delivered).
You could comfortably run Windows 95 and a basic application set (ie: Office) with 8MB of RAM.
A lot of people seem to forget just how much less powerful machines were when Windows 95 was released. On the upside, we probably have Windows 95 to thank for the current pace of improving hardware performance and affordability.
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Not to put too fine a point on it, but things like that are said in every company about the competition.
See, it's like how the coach tells you to go an "kill" the other team just before you run out onto the field.
People say this on /. a lot, but never seem to provide any evidence to support it...
The content of that article does not support its title. Perhaps if the title were "Price gouging saves rich people's lives" it might be accurate, (albeit still little more than sophistry).
There's also this gem in the conclusion:
"Price gouging" is nothing more than charging what the market will bear. If that's immoral, then all market adjustment to changing circumstances is "immoral," and markets per se are immoral. But that is not the case.
He's half right - market's aren't immoral, they're amoral. They're simply a tool that can be used for moral or immoral activities - and price-gouging in the face of natural disasters is most certain an immoral activity.
In a free market, if someone got monopoly power, they would quickly lose it because their prices would be above market rates.
Er, no.
In The Real World companies would join together to form massive conglomerates, take control of the resources and simply make entering any market impossible.
The logical conclusion of an unrestricted free market is a small number of massive corporations - if not a single one - monopolising every conceivable good and service. Entry into any market on anything more than an insignificant scale by a potential competitor would be dealt with by either a buyout or predatory below-cost selling to drive them out of business.
Currently, global corporations are well on the way to this goal, and government regulation is probably the only thing slowing them down.
Libertarians believe in capitalism which, unlike the communism you seem to espouse, DOES WORK in the real world.
Both "capitalism" and "communism" work in the real world, in moderation. Neither work as absolutes because both fall victim to people's greed.
Libertarians in the area would be in New Orleans right now sellign food at cost and water at cost and getting people fed and hydrated [...]
I'm not quite sure why you think they'd be selling these things "at cost", but I can't see anyone with a profit motive doing so - and out of "capitalism" and "communism", the latter is the one that doesn't have profit as a fundamental tenet.
Why ? What are Microsoft doing that no-one else is doing (or hasn't done before) ?
Out of the costs involved in setting up a data centre, $250 wouldn't even qualify as a rounding error.
That's not entirely true. A (highly) skilled driver should be able to outbrake an ABS system on asphalt in good conditions. However, they won't be able to do it if any significant surface irregularities are introduced (eg: two wheels on the fringe, two wheels on the road).
That said, I personally believe ABS should be made compulsory on all new vehicles (in preference to airbags) and anyone who claims to be able to consistently or on-demand outbrake an ABS system - all else being equal - is having a lend of themselves.
this largely has to do with the coefficient of static friction being higher than the coefficient of sliding friction.
You appear to be comparing ABS to a set of locked wheels. That hardly seems fair.
A turbo improves performance - ricers don't use mods that improve performance.
SCSI drives, maybe. I don't think I've ever seen an IDE or SATA drive with one.
What I am opposed to however is copyright holders manipulating the legal system to prop up a failing business model. Laws designed for physical property cannot and should not be applied to noncorporeal works.
You seem to be contradicting yourself. On the one hand, you're saying copyright is good and actually is a "right" (rather than a legal privilege), but on the other you say people actually using copyright as it is meant to be used is wrong.
*Copyright* is the broken model. You can't have any business model that relies on copyright not result in "copyright holders manipulating the legal system to prop [it] up".
Laws designed for physical property cannot and should not be applied to noncorporeal works.
The whole point of copyright is to try and force a physical-property-like model onto "noncorporeal works" and create artificial scarcity (as scarcity is the fundamental base of deriving value). The only reason it hasn't fallen apart earlier is because it's only relatively recently that separating the "noncorporeal" part from the physical part has become so accessible (ie: digital copying).
I like your idea and see where you're coming from; however I cannot support forcing content producers to behave in a certain way. No matter how desirable that may be.
A service model wouldn't force them to do anything - it would merely remove the ridiculously unbalanced advantages copyright holders have.
I've been running Windows for over ten years, and run a virus scanner over my system at most once a year. No viruses yet.
Because it is.
Wasn't the command shell withdrawn from LongHorn bcos of the proof-of-concept virus from F-Secure?
Highly unlikely, considering you could write a "proof of concept" virus for just about anything.
The beta of LongHornn aka Vista includes an anti-virus built-in. What does this say of the product quality?
You can't prevent "viruses" on a system designed to run arbitrary code.
Will you always call Windows 95 "Chicago" as well ?
The filesystem has nothing to do with the type of search you are (apparently) talking about.
It is a good idea, something that MS should of done a long time ago, and something that can come through a (big) patch
They did. Windows has come with a file indexing service for years, and "FindFast" came with Office before that.
HFS[+] and "other filesystems" store metadata in the filesystem, not "on top of it".
NTFS is also capable of storing arbitrary metadata in the filesystem like, say, BeFS does, but this capability has never seen any real usage.
You don't need to reform to WinFS, it's not a filesystem, but a relational database that carries metadata about existing files on an NTFS partition.
You are correct here, WinFS is just a DB layer sitting on top of the filesystem. However, this is *not* the same thing as HFS[+], BeFS, etc metadata.
It's possible, but "-1, Troll" would be more appropriate.
Whilst your sentiment has merit, your example is atrocious. Verifying that there weren't any "vendor supplied backdoors" in an arbitrary Linux distribution would require - at a minimum - a deep understanding of the code and principles involved in implementing firewalling, both in general and specific to the Linux kernel. I feel quite confident in saying that acquiring sufficient knowledge and reviewing the relevant code is well and truly beyond a "relatively small expenditure of effort".
Another example: on windows, it is difficult to avoid internet explorer. Even if you use (say) firefox, the filer windows still use IE dlls and sooner or later one of the IE security holes will make itself manifest. This is far easier to avoid on Linux.
If you're using, say, KDE, it's pretty hard to avoid khtml. This doesn't seem to bother a lot of people, because they accept such depndencies are part and parcel of the whole package.
Simple fact is, if you're not a hardcore coder, you have to put the same amount of trust in your Linux vendor as you do your Windows vendor. Ie: for the _vast_ majority of end users, at some level they have to trust the people they acquire Linux from as much as they trust the people they acquire Windows from.
Seriously, if you're to beat the Linux drum, "vendor trust" is a long way down the list of things you should be bringing up.
You're quoting *El Reg* as a "neutral" source ?
O_o
Do you really need laptops ? I ask because when I started at my current job, they offered to get me a laptop (with an external LCD) "like everyone else". Since the job didn't require any on-the-road work, I asked why "everyone" had laptops. "The just do" was the response. Now, having been there a few months and not seeing a single laptop ever leave it's docking station in that time, I just wonder why "everyone" wants laptops.
Since then, I've not once regretted getting the dual-CPU PC with SCSI RAID, 2GB RAM and dual 21" LCDs instead :).
Actually WfW had Win32s, which was a stripped-down version of the Win32 API. You can't run Win32 apps on Windows for Workgroups.
The original poster is correct - Windows 95 was the first "consumer" OS that used Win32 (Win32 first appeared in Windows NT 3.1).
DOS sessions were also pre-emptively multitasked (this capability actually appeared first in Windows 3.0).
IIRC, all win16 apps were co-operatively multitasked within a single DOS VDM that was pre-memptively multitasked with the rest of the system.
Oh, bullshit. Windows 95 + Office was usable on 386s and 486s with 8MB of RAM (a fairly common machine in 1995).
Pentium 120s with 32MB ? That's a comfortable *NT4* machine - Windows 95 would be blazingly fast on such hardware.
That must have been a pretty impressive machine for 1992/93 if NT was faster than Windows 3.x :).
The difference is that the Start Menu is just another view of the filesystem, whereas Program Manager is not.
Or, to put it another way, the Start Menu (and Desktop) is just a special instantiation of Explorer, whereas in Windows 3.x, Program Manager and File Manager are completely separate programs. You can see an example of this in action by how they interact - you can drag & drop stuff between the Start Menu, Desktop and any Explorer window - but you can't do the same between Windows 3.x's File Manager and Program Manager.
Windows 3.11 was not a predecessor to Windows NT. It was an (relatively major) update to Windows 3.1.
Windows 3.x would run on systems with 386/486 processors, a 20 MB hard drive and 4 MB of ram.
You could actually run Windows 3.0 on a 286 with only 640k. 3.1 and up required a 386 with 1MB (or maybe 2, but definitely less than 4, because I was running it on a 2MB 386SX for a while). Indeed, my 2MB 386 with 40MB hard disk was quite a usable Windows 3.11 system (although I struggled to fit the massive 20MB of Wing Commander 2 on it with anything else).
Windows 95 was very major. It coincided with public use of the Internet, required at least a 128 MB hard drive, and 32 MB of memory.
Windows 95 required a 386 with 4MB, and was even somewhat usable on that hardware. One of Windows 95 primary requirements was that it offer comparable performance to Windows 3.11 on the same hardware (which it mostly delivered).
You could comfortably run Windows 95 and a basic application set (ie: Office) with 8MB of RAM.
A lot of people seem to forget just how much less powerful machines were when Windows 95 was released. On the upside, we probably have Windows 95 to thank for the current pace of improving hardware performance and affordability.