I've been using MS Windows since Windows 2.0 back in the late 1980s.
Office has always been a pig. Whether it is Word, Outlook or Excel. Even up to Windows NT 4.0, notepad.exe was the single most used application on Windows. notepad.exe is one of the few fast applications on Windows precisely because it only contains features one uses, as opposed to Word which tries to be everything to everybody.
Microsoft has *always* been slow, under engineered and buggy because Microsoft has always been business first, computing second.
Computer languages, unlike human languages, are 100% regular and therefore one should be able to learn a language on a as-needed basis, a few days time after you have enough languages under your belt.
You should be able to program in any language.
The right question is to ask what systems you should be learning? What problem solving techniques should you be studying? What software engineering technique is approriate to use?
You should be able to pick up any language on the fly. Languages are a dime a dozen. Systems such as database systems, operating systems and graphic systems are dramatically different. What language you use to access them is immaterial or should be. If you understand the internal workings of a database you'll be far better served when developing database applications then spending time studying the intricacies of a language. Use what you need. It's silly to become familiar with all aspects of a language when you are only called upon to use 10% or 20% within the scope of a project.
The cost of employing one chemist or engineer in the United States is equal to about five chemists in China and 11 engineers in India.
So? This has always been true.
What's changed?
There was an empowerment management move in the 1980s. Industry leaders were, in effect, mining employees for talent above and beyond the job description and management level.
What's ironic is that Intel was a prime example where they had empowerment programs.
Inteal had a robust open door policy whereby if your boss isn't listening to your idea you can go to some other manager.
Intel also had a program whereby for one year a person could rotate through various job positions over a period of one year to better fine tune your career.
In my opinion, business has sold out the employee and are now treating employees as a commodity and not people. So, in the post-empowerment era it is ok to fire people and lay them off, create a incessant, hostile work environment were layoffs happen every day, expect no loyalty from employees and return none.
Treating people like cattle is a short-sighted perspective. For sure there are short tem gains to be had. In some respect this is understandable after the bubble pop of 2000.
In the end, it won't be the case that American companies like Intel fail becuase of a shortage of scientists and engineers in this country.
In the end it will be Craig Barrett's and other executive management's short-sighted policy of treating employees like crap the brings down corporations. And it is truly ironic that this short-sighted, short-term gain policy comes on the heels of an era in the 1980s and early 1990s when companies had learned to mine employees and get awesome value that created the wealth and a future view of irrational exuberent optimism in the 1990s.
Executive managers lost courage and vision; they have become the timeless, nincompoop, ineffective, unable to compete "lump of coal" Scrooge we are all familiar with in the Christmas Story. Failure or fear of failure after the dot com bust scared them and they lost faith. They should all be shipped to India and other places they have sold us out too, to live out the rest of their natural lives with only the salaries they are now paying to their offshore employees.
In fact, I'd wager that 99% of Linux applictions on any of the major distros are written in C or C++ but don't use custom malloc implementations.
Well, I actually don't dispute anything you say. Obviously malloc is fast enough for most people 99% of the time or someone would've fixed it by now. I personally don't work on desktop applications but server software.
But, here is the ironic thing, in all the years I've been doing benchmarking malloc has yet to be the big problem except in really performance intensive server applications like databases.
I think it is Amdahls law which states optimizing 50% of 1% of your peformance problem is not optimizing 50%, but 0.5%. I find disk IO is far more the frequent performance problem than machine memory.
My claim is that in those instances where malloc actually is a known bottleneck in C/C++, like a database server, then it is time to roll your own.
Try rolling your own memory allocation routine in Java. Can't be done.
Certainly, for the really high-speed parts of the code and for specialized purposes I too would still recommend to use C++, but for 95% of all code there is no reason not to write it in Java. And it is fairly simple to integrate C++ code in Java.
Certainly much of the Enterprise business world I've interacted with is under the same impression as this statement so you are in good company. Except that last part "And it is fairly simple to integrate C++ code in Java." . I'm curious if you could speak to your experience on how is it fairly simply to integrate Java with any other code. The JNI interface is very error prone and can have huge impacts on performance. When I consult for people wanting to interoperate Java with some other language the best solution is to go through some known interface protocol like SOAP or HTTP.
In fact, sometimes the best way to interoperate distinct Java programs is to isolate them within different JVMs on different machines. Companies like EBay implement what they call "use case" machines where hardware isolates Java software release and performance problems.
Java runs best as a SUSA environment, single user, single application. Java's JVM doesn't do well at all as MUMA, multi-user, multi-application environment unless you have a highly customzied environment as with web application servers. Web application servers are really a misnomer. They are not application servers. They are JVM environments that allow Java to scale to MUSA, multi user single application. The raw JVM assumes one application, one user in my opinion when one is considering performance.
Java programmers design code to comply with object models and software engineering design standards so as to optimize human development and maintenance time. The money question is does the human time savings in writing code in a homogeneous environment unduly sacrifice too much computer performance? Java as a homogeneous language can never compete with a versital, swiss army knife party animal like C. C was designed to allow unfettered access to anything and everything with imposing minimal software engineering restrictions. Java imposes infinitely more software engineering restrictions and constraints to optimize human time whem compared to C. Things like array bounds checking means more work means more time which means Java will always be slower than C.
Java, as Larry Wall stated, is one of those "stay-at-home" competitive language that works best in a pure environment. As opposed to say Perl which is a regular party animal and plays well with everything. Although, I have to say, I've never had the occasion to invoke Java from Perl.
Java programmers design code to object oriented methodology and do not design primarily for performance. Java is not a systems programming language. Java is a software engineering language designed to optimize human time and not computer time.
From the Social Engineering chapter in the Perl camel book reference guide:
Languages have different personalities. You can classify computer languages by how introverted or extroverted they are; for instance, Icon and Lisp are stay-at-home languages, while Tcl and the various shells are party animals. Self-sufficient languages prefer to compete with other languages, while social languages prefer to cooperate with other languages. As usual, Perl tries to do both.
So this chapter is about relationships. Until now we've looked inward at the competitive nature of Perl, but now we need to look outward and see the cooperative nature of Perl. If we really mean what we say about Perl being a glue language, then we can't just talk about glue; we have to talk about the various kinds of things you can glue together. A glob of glue by itself isn't very interesting.
Perl doesn't just glue together other computer languages. It also glues together command line interpreters, operating systems, processes, machines, devices, networks, databases, institutions, cultures, Web pages, GUIs, peers, servers, and clients, not to mention people like system administrators, users, and of course, hackers, both naughty and nice. In fact, Perl is rather competitive about being cooperative.
If one is going to start a project with performance as the top priority, one would not design it in Java because most assuredly one is not going to have the luxury of a homogeneous environment but will need to play well with others using a language like C/C++. Case in point are databases. Java's interface to MySQL is still slower than C/C++ or Perl.
The question is how best to balance human performance time with the software engineering design philosophies that optimize human time in languages like Java with that of computer performance time and systems that lie out side of the Java native spectrum and defeat the "stay-at-home" homogeneous design requirement of not playing with other languages like C/C++, COBOL, etc.
If a performance project requires heavy integration and interaction with multiple systems outside of Java one would not choose Java, but one could choose C/C++.
It is interesting that the benchmark was done against the standard malloc when I've found that most high performance systems software implement their own malloc and other systems code based upon workload characteristics.
Which is the point.
Systems programmers write systems code. There is no one size fits all. There is no silver bullet. Comparing out-of-the-box C/C++ to out-of-the-box Java is a non-starter in my opinion because I've never used out-of-the-box C/C++ for large scale performance applications. What Google did in writing custom systems software is something that cannot happen with Java and is the accepted practice for C/C++.
Java programmers write applications in a "one-size-fits-all" performance environment. Comparing Java to C/C++ is like comparing apples to oranges.
Serious C/C++ systems programmers write their own malloc and systems software.
"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
--Herbert Simon, economist
"I'd say in all of these cases, we are really dealing with information underload, we still want a lot of information."
How is it that we've gone from Ronald "Personal Responsibility" Reagan to George "Not my fault" Bush in only 20 years? It's like reading a bad Family Circus cartoon.
Dissent, who is talking dissent? I'm talking derison.
Derision != Dissent.
Name calling != Dissent.
Denigrading != Dissent.
Mocking != Dissent.
Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the Fox News gang can't go 5 minutes without calling someone an idiot, stupid etc. That is not dissent. That is hate.
NPR may have a liberal bias but they do not go around as a matter of course name calling and deriding conservatives. They have a perspective bias. There is a night and day difference between hate and disagreement. I have no problem with George Will for example. I use to watch David Brinkley and enjoyed watching George as the conservative. It is no coincident that respectful conservatives like George Will no longer have a voice in the Republican party.
Air America is definitely a case of two wrongs don't make a right.
However, NPR has been around for over 30 years.
Name one conservative outlet that is anywhere near as respectfull as NPR on the conservative end? There is none. Because the Republican movement is all about derision and derision is not dissent. It is hate.
I keep telling people it doesn't matter who Bush nominates as the U.S. top U.N. diplomat. You might as well approve John Bolton because Bolton's style is what Bush uses already. If Bolton doesn't get approved Bush will probably appoint Ann Coulter or some other more devisive figure. Let's be seriuos, this is the same "uniter" who re-nominated the 10 justices the Democrats thought were to conservative. Bush loves to give people the finger.
The world hates George Bush and the Republicans because
The Republicans and George Bush hate and have no respect for the rest of the world. The Republicans have such friendly ideas as to disband the U.N.; have the U.S. completely withdraw from the U.N.; move the U.N. headquarters out of NYC;
make the U.N. a U.S.A. puppet (John Bolton is for the latter).
As the sayin goes, with friends like these who needs enemies?
You just have to look at how George Bush treats fellow Americans called Democrats to understand the level of contempt and hate that exists for the outside world as well. As an American, if you want to go to a George Bush Town Hall meeting you have to sign a paper of loyalty. You have to ask yourself why that is?
In my opinion the bigger story here was how the U.S. handled diplomacy. Obviously the answer is poorly, arrogantly and with a strong middle finger salute to the Italians. This is no different then the diplomacy of Fox News, AM Hate Radio, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Laura Ingram and all the rest of the right wing giving their fellow Americans called Democrats the finger 24 hours/day, 7 days/week. Ultimately all the hatred and contempt the right heaps on the left will end in violence.
Whoever Bush appoints to the U.N. will be expected to behave similarly; waive arrogantly a strong John Bolton middle finger salute to the rest of the world as well.
You may be underestimating the wage difference between China and the US. It is VERY big. Currently the wage for a qualified software developer in China is ~US$5000/year. Do you honestly expect the Chinese Renminbi to appreciate 1000% or the US$ to depreciate 90%? That is the stuff of financial meltdown and wage parity between tech workers in the US and China due to exchange rate changes is really unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future, if at all.
Unfortunately I think your arrogance is all too common and shared by the Wall Street Gang. It's exactly this kind of arrogance that leads to collapse.
No one foresaw the depression in the 1930's would happen. As humans we blind ourselves to any potential catastrophe that may occur.
Even though everyone knew the tech stock market was a bubble people acted as if it were not and thus the NASDAQ's great decline even in the face of a known bubble. Who predicted the NASDAQ would fall as far as it did when the bubble burst? Name one person?
To suggest that a more conservative mindset is somehow less educated in support of your argument pretty much ruins any point you were trying to make.
Which only goes to show you are totally void in critical thinking skills.
It is not rational to say that an invalid A also invalidates B when the two are unrelated.
I was using sarcasm and trying to show how stupid your statment was by juxtapositioning with an equally stupid statement but from the liberal side.
The notion that campaign contributions implies capability is unstubstantiated. Nowhere is has that argument ever been made scientifically proven. In fact, Bush's own position that campaign contributions correlate to like minded thinking is also unsubstantiated and not worthy of real consideration. It should be immediately rejected by any and all as total poppycock. Althought, given the current political environment it is not too difficult to jump to the conclusion all Republicans think 100% alike given their unthinking and unrelenting support of everything Bush says.
Howeve,r I was using a similar ridiculous argument to show you how ridiculous your argument was using an equally silly statement but one you would find objectionable.
Notice the use of "some people" and not "I believe".
Your argument is weak.
"When you want to bring about change, you must select those capable of getting the job done."
So how is a political contribution in anyway linked to capability? That's really weak.
Some people would argue that the more educated mind is the more liberal mind. Thus all universities in this country are bastions of liberalism. If anything Bush should be only going for Kerry supporters.
Many companies won't pay engineers to write documentation, i.e. give engineers documentation time. However, the PHB will have a requirement that engineers must provide documentation all the while looking over their shoulder to make sure they are writing code.
Too often documenation is only given the appearance and lip service as to the importance of the documentation all the while asking engineers if they can meet deadlines. Even if someone other than the engineer is writing the documenation often times the engineer is tasked with starting development before the design document is completed or yeah even started.
Happy Tuesday! Just a quick question. Are you considering letting Google use its own domain, like wikipedia.google.org?
One problem I can see is link confusion where web sites start linking to wikipedia.google.org and not wikipedia.org for citations. If that is the case and also the common case that citations on the web refer to google then Dvorak may have a point.
Something to think about is making a position statement that any host would always be under the wikipedia domain so that citations are always linked to wikipedia.org. Any company like Google providing hosting would be opaque and under the hood. If Google or some hosting provider pulled up stakes then worst case is a performance hit.
Happy Sunday! Things are more complicated than I summarized here. My point of the posting was to point out that:
It is possible to surf the web safely today without any spyware or antivirus ware with a limited privileged account on Windows.
Windows doesn't encourage in anyway that people understand the security provided by Windows.
With Unix its possible to change the window name of any program. I do this in mixed mode. Any window owned by root has ROOT in the title.
Windows doesn't easily afford creating short cuts with "Run As". It's possible but a lot of work. Then if something like Windows Media Player does run as a Guest User, it's not apparent when its running because unlike with Unix you can't change the window title to have GUEST in it.
My point was that Microsoft should default to a secure account and only require root or admin privileges when needed. This is the UNIX model and has been since 1970. The fact that Microsoft defaults all users to admin privileges is uncalled for in my opinion and deliberate malfeasance that they should be fined billions of dollars for. The simple solution of running as a secure account by default is such an trivial solution that Microsoft should be held accountable for solution that is over 30 years old.
But in regards to Firefox, the answer is yes. I do encourage people to use Firefox. My post was a merely summary and not the whole story. If you really are interested in a discussion about MS safe surfing, feel free to email me directly. My slashdot handle is my real name and is also my email address at datarebels.com.
It is trivial to run Microsoft without anit-virus software or anti-adware software safely.
Let's call this safe surfing.
The answer is to surf the web as user "Guest".
There are a lot of things to be said about this but the most important is that Microsoft doesn't care about security because they don't educate this or default to this.
As a computer consultant every day I get asked about safe computing. My answer on windows is this:
Don't use Microsoft Express or Outlook at home. Instead use web email clients like Yahoo.
Don't click on email links. Instead, cut-copy-paste the text of the displayed link into a new browser window.
Log out as your account and log in as Guest whenever you 1.) use Windows Media Player or 2.) or 2.) surf unfamiliar web sites.
People squawk about having to log out and log in as a different user. I tell them safe computing is no different than safe sex. You need to take responsibility. You need to decide how important being safe is to you.
By enabling the Guest account and suring the web as guest, virus and adware can't install software, touch the registry, or write to anywhere on the disk other than the account folder for Guest.
If the Guest account ever gets corrupted just delete it and create a new one.
However, unlike with Unix, Windows is a hostile environment for mixing users.
On Unix its easy. Just enable "sudo". Your default security mode is one of no access, user mode. You have to make a conscience choice to run with sudo.
It is very unsatisying to run as "Guest" in Windows and then "Run As" a secure user and hardly anyone does it. It's almost futile to install software as an user on Windows other than someone with admin privileges. Almost every major software vendor's install willl fail unless admin privileges are used. By contrast, no such barrier exists in Unix. The "--prefix" option to most software will allow you to run from your home directory. And it's not always just the big things, but little things too. Unix uses the "~/username" shortcut to easily afford copying files between accounts.
It is possible even in today's Microsoft environment to guarantee yourself the impact of a virus or adware can be contained to a sandbox, Guest user account.
The fact that Microsoft doesn't make "RunAs Guest" the default security model as does Unix is something that Microsoft should be held accountable for.
But the reality is Microsoft just doesn't care about security. The only care enough to give it lip service.
You have to realize that a lot of bugs and security problems are found in the OS due to bad code in the apps that people have written.
Correction, almost all of the Microsoft's vulnerabilities are in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office.
Microsoft enjoys a state sanctioned 90% monopoly. This means, like the phone company which guarantees a 99.99% dial-tone availability, Microsoft has responsibilities above and beyond just whatever. Everytime someone gets a virsus, Microsoft should be fined. If that happened Microsoft would fix their crap in no short order. Instead, Microsoft is going to start selling anti-virus software. Talk about a conflict of interest...
For PC users, I believe that things will eventually get better. Alternative operating systems, such as OS X and Linux will slowly eat away M$'s lead, but I feel this may take a long time.
Alas, Microsoft didn't get to it's monopoly via superior technology, but rather mediocre technology with unfair business practices. In my opinion, Microsoft will continue this unfair business behavior. Nothing less than legal intervention will level the playing field for those companies with competing technologies to actually compete.
Thomas Jefferson would be railing against the likes of Microsoft.
If you look at all the defending arguments of Microsoft, you'll find the analogy's to the tyranny of a King uncanny.
One definition of tyranny is "a rigorous condition imposed by some outside agency or force "
It's is difficult to imagine a more rigorous tyranny than Microsoft. And to say that Microsoft's 90% market share, 40 gazillion dollar profits by unjust business practices justifies its theivery and unjust business practices is just bizarre to say the least. Microsoft is the King of business and financial tryanny.
No product, no matter how much technically better than Microsoft will every supplant it without a business war to back it up. This country had to overthrow the tyranny of Britian's unfair business practices through revolution. This country will require legal revolution to dethrone Microsoft. Technology alone will never defeat it because Microsoft's rise to power was via proven unjust business practices, not technological competition.
Overthrowing Microsoft's tyranny will never be done via better technology. To believe so is to believe a peasant too can someday be King.
I would also add that I've endlessly recommended Macs to my less tech savvy family and friends. However, even at the same *price* the PC is still cheaper because of 1.) shared software and 2.) shared advice. If everyone you know is running a PC and you buy a Mac, you are on your own. A lot of people don't want that feeling.
This article was written by the unknowing for the unknowing and it is exactly right on.
Microsoft is single handedly stifling progress and innovation because you can't innovate on a broken system.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using MS Windows since Windows 2.0 back in the late 1980s.
Office has always been a pig. Whether it is Word, Outlook or Excel. Even up to Windows NT 4.0, notepad.exe was the single most used application on Windows. notepad.exe is one of the few fast applications on Windows precisely because it only contains features one uses, as opposed to Word which tries to be everything to everybody.
Microsoft has *always* been slow, under engineered and buggy because Microsoft has always been business first, computing second.
You should be able to program in any language.
The right question is to ask what systems you should be learning? What problem solving techniques should you be studying? What software engineering technique is approriate to use?
You should be able to pick up any language on the fly. Languages are a dime a dozen. Systems such as database systems, operating systems and graphic systems are dramatically different. What language you use to access them is immaterial or should be. If you understand the internal workings of a database you'll be far better served when developing database applications then spending time studying the intricacies of a language. Use what you need. It's silly to become familiar with all aspects of a language when you are only called upon to use 10% or 20% within the scope of a project.
So? This has always been true.
What's changed?
There was an empowerment management move in the 1980s. Industry leaders were, in effect, mining employees for talent above and beyond the job description and management level.
What's ironic is that Intel was a prime example where they had empowerment programs.
Inteal had a robust open door policy whereby if your boss isn't listening to your idea you can go to some other manager.
Intel also had a program whereby for one year a person could rotate through various job positions over a period of one year to better fine tune your career.
In my opinion, business has sold out the employee and are now treating employees as a commodity and not people. So, in the post-empowerment era it is ok to fire people and lay them off, create a incessant, hostile work environment were layoffs happen every day, expect no loyalty from employees and return none.
Treating people like cattle is a short-sighted perspective. For sure there are short tem gains to be had. In some respect this is understandable after the bubble pop of 2000.
In the end, it won't be the case that American companies like Intel fail becuase of a shortage of scientists and engineers in this country.
In the end it will be Craig Barrett's and other executive management's short-sighted policy of treating employees like crap the brings down corporations. And it is truly ironic that this short-sighted, short-term gain policy comes on the heels of an era in the 1980s and early 1990s when companies had learned to mine employees and get awesome value that created the wealth and a future view of irrational exuberent optimism in the 1990s.
Executive managers lost courage and vision; they have become the timeless, nincompoop, ineffective, unable to compete "lump of coal" Scrooge we are all familiar with in the Christmas Story. Failure or fear of failure after the dot com bust scared them and they lost faith. They should all be shipped to India and other places they have sold us out too, to live out the rest of their natural lives with only the salaries they are now paying to their offshore employees.
Well, I actually don't dispute anything you say. Obviously malloc is fast enough for most people 99% of the time or someone would've fixed it by now. I personally don't work on desktop applications but server software.
But, here is the ironic thing, in all the years I've been doing benchmarking malloc has yet to be the big problem except in really performance intensive server applications like databases.
I think it is Amdahls law which states optimizing 50% of 1% of your peformance problem is not optimizing 50%, but 0.5%. I find disk IO is far more the frequent performance problem than machine memory.
My claim is that in those instances where malloc actually is a known bottleneck in C/C++, like a database server, then it is time to roll your own.
Try rolling your own memory allocation routine in Java. Can't be done.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Certainly much of the Enterprise business world I've interacted with is under the same impression as this statement so you are in good company. Except that last part "And it is fairly simple to integrate C++ code in Java." . I'm curious if you could speak to your experience on how is it fairly simply to integrate Java with any other code. The JNI interface is very error prone and can have huge impacts on performance. When I consult for people wanting to interoperate Java with some other language the best solution is to go through some known interface protocol like SOAP or HTTP.
In fact, sometimes the best way to interoperate distinct Java programs is to isolate them within different JVMs on different machines. Companies like EBay implement what they call "use case" machines where hardware isolates Java software release and performance problems.
Java runs best as a SUSA environment, single user, single application. Java's JVM doesn't do well at all as MUMA, multi-user, multi-application environment unless you have a highly customzied environment as with web application servers. Web application servers are really a misnomer. They are not application servers. They are JVM environments that allow Java to scale to MUSA, multi user single application. The raw JVM assumes one application, one user in my opinion when one is considering performance.
Java, as Larry Wall stated, is one of those "stay-at-home" competitive language that works best in a pure environment. As opposed to say Perl which is a regular party animal and plays well with everything. Although, I have to say, I've never had the occasion to invoke Java from Perl.
Java programmers design code to object oriented methodology and do not design primarily for performance. Java is not a systems programming language. Java is a software engineering language designed to optimize human time and not computer time.
If one is going to start a project with performance as the top priority, one would not design it in Java because most assuredly one is not going to have the luxury of a homogeneous environment but will need to play well with others using a language like C/C++. Case in point are databases. Java's interface to MySQL is still slower than C/C++ or Perl.
The question is how best to balance human performance time with the software engineering design philosophies that optimize human time in languages like Java with that of computer performance time and systems that lie out side of the Java native spectrum and defeat the "stay-at-home" homogeneous design requirement of not playing with other languages like C/C++, COBOL, etc.
If a performance project requires heavy integration and interaction with multiple systems outside of Java one would not choose Java, but one could choose C/C++.
Which is the point.
Systems programmers write systems code. There is no one size fits all. There is no silver bullet. Comparing out-of-the-box C/C++ to out-of-the-box Java is a non-starter in my opinion because I've never used out-of-the-box C/C++ for large scale performance applications. What Google did in writing custom systems software is something that cannot happen with Java and is the accepted practice for C/C++.
Java programmers write applications in a "one-size-fits-all" performance environment. Comparing Java to C/C++ is like comparing apples to oranges.
Serious C/C++ systems programmers write their own malloc and systems software.
- Derision != Dissent.
- Name calling != Dissent.
- Denigrading != Dissent.
- Mocking != Dissent.
Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the Fox News gang can't go 5 minutes without calling someone an idiot, stupid etc. That is not dissent. That is hate.NPR may have a liberal bias but they do not go around as a matter of course name calling and deriding conservatives. They have a perspective bias. There is a night and day difference between hate and disagreement. I have no problem with George Will for example. I use to watch David Brinkley and enjoyed watching George as the conservative. It is no coincident that respectful conservatives like George Will no longer have a voice in the Republican party.
Air America is definitely a case of two wrongs don't make a right.
However, NPR has been around for over 30 years.
Name one conservative outlet that is anywhere near as respectfull as NPR on the conservative end? There is none. Because the Republican movement is all about derision and derision is not dissent. It is hate.
- The world hates George Bush and the Republicans because
- The Republicans and George Bush hate and have no respect for the rest of the world. The Republicans have such friendly ideas as to disband the U.N.; have the U.S. completely withdraw from the U.N.; move the U.N. headquarters out of NYC;
make the U.N. a U.S.A. puppet (John Bolton is for the latter).
As the sayin goes, with friends like these who needs enemies?You just have to look at how George Bush treats fellow Americans called Democrats to understand the level of contempt and hate that exists for the outside world as well. As an American, if you want to go to a George Bush Town Hall meeting you have to sign a paper of loyalty. You have to ask yourself why that is?
In my opinion the bigger story here was how the U.S. handled diplomacy. Obviously the answer is poorly, arrogantly and with a strong middle finger salute to the Italians. This is no different then the diplomacy of Fox News, AM Hate Radio, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Laura Ingram and all the rest of the right wing giving their fellow Americans called Democrats the finger 24 hours/day, 7 days/week. Ultimately all the hatred and contempt the right heaps on the left will end in violence.
Whoever Bush appoints to the U.N. will be expected to behave similarly; waive arrogantly a strong John Bolton middle finger salute to the rest of the world as well.
No one foresaw the depression in the 1930's would happen. As humans we blind ourselves to any potential catastrophe that may occur.
Even though everyone knew the tech stock market was a bubble people acted as if it were not and thus the NASDAQ's great decline even in the face of a known bubble. Who predicted the NASDAQ would fall as far as it did when the bubble burst? Name one person?
Arrogance - the great civilization killer.
Which only goes to show you are totally void in critical thinking skills.
It is not rational to say that an invalid A also invalidates B when the two are unrelated.
I was using sarcasm and trying to show how stupid your statment was by juxtapositioning with an equally stupid statement but from the liberal side.
The notion that campaign contributions implies capability is unstubstantiated. Nowhere is has that argument ever been made scientifically proven. In fact, Bush's own position that campaign contributions correlate to like minded thinking is also unsubstantiated and not worthy of real consideration. It should be immediately rejected by any and all as total poppycock. Althought, given the current political environment it is not too difficult to jump to the conclusion all Republicans think 100% alike given their unthinking and unrelenting support of everything Bush says.
Howeve,r I was using a similar ridiculous argument to show you how ridiculous your argument was using an equally silly statement but one you would find objectionable.
Notice the use of "some people" and not "I believe".
Obviously you missed the point.
So how is a political contribution in anyway linked to capability? That's really weak.
Some people would argue that the more educated mind is the more liberal mind. Thus all universities in this country are bastions of liberalism. If anything Bush should be only going for Kerry supporters.
Many companies won't pay engineers to write documentation, i.e. give engineers documentation time. However, the PHB will have a requirement that engineers must provide documentation all the while looking over their shoulder to make sure they are writing code.
Too often documenation is only given the appearance and lip service as to the importance of the documentation all the while asking engineers if they can meet deadlines. Even if someone other than the engineer is writing the documenation often times the engineer is tasked with starting development before the design document is completed or yeah even started.
IBM said they are not putting them in PCs because the rest of the PC architecure isn't ready for it.
My understanding is that they are only putting these chips in network switches and things that don't rely on disk.
Happy Tuesday! Just a quick question. Are you considering letting Google use its own domain, like wikipedia.google.org?
One problem I can see is link confusion where web sites start linking to wikipedia.google.org and not wikipedia.org for citations. If that is the case and also the common case that citations on the web refer to google then Dvorak may have a point.
Something to think about is making a position statement that any host would always be under the wikipedia domain so that citations are always linked to wikipedia.org. Any company like Google providing hosting would be opaque and under the hood. If Google or some hosting provider pulled up stakes then worst case is a performance hit.
Cheers!
-Mybrid
Happy Sunday! Things are more complicated than I summarized here. My point of the posting was to point out that:
With Unix its possible to change the window name of any program. I do this in mixed mode. Any window owned by root has ROOT in the title.
Windows doesn't easily afford creating short cuts with "Run As". It's possible but a lot of work. Then if something like Windows Media Player does run as a Guest User, it's not apparent when its running because unlike with Unix you can't change the window title to have GUEST in it.
My point was that Microsoft should default to a secure account and only require root or admin privileges when needed. This is the UNIX model and has been since 1970. The fact that Microsoft defaults all users to admin privileges is uncalled for in my opinion and deliberate malfeasance that they should be fined billions of dollars for. The simple solution of running as a secure account by default is such an trivial solution that Microsoft should be held accountable for solution that is over 30 years old.
But in regards to Firefox, the answer is yes. I do encourage people to use Firefox. My post was a merely summary and not the whole story. If you really are interested in a discussion about MS safe surfing, feel free to email me directly. My slashdot handle is my real name and is also my email address at datarebels.com.
Let's call this safe surfing.
The answer is to surf the web as user "Guest".
There are a lot of things to be said about this but the most important is that Microsoft doesn't care about security because they don't educate this or default to this.
As a computer consultant every day I get asked about safe computing. My answer on windows is this:
People squawk about having to log out and log in as a different user. I tell them safe computing is no different than safe sex. You need to take responsibility. You need to decide how important being safe is to you.
By enabling the Guest account and suring the web as guest, virus and adware can't install software, touch the registry, or write to anywhere on the disk other than the account folder for Guest. If the Guest account ever gets corrupted just delete it and create a new one.
However, unlike with Unix, Windows is a hostile environment for mixing users.
On Unix its easy. Just enable "sudo". Your default security mode is one of no access, user mode. You have to make a conscience choice to run with sudo.
It is very unsatisying to run as "Guest" in Windows and then "Run As" a secure user and hardly anyone does it. It's almost futile to install software as an user on Windows other than someone with admin privileges. Almost every major software vendor's install willl fail unless admin privileges are used. By contrast, no such barrier exists in Unix. The "--prefix" option to most software will allow you to run from your home directory. And it's not always just the big things, but little things too. Unix uses the "~/username" shortcut to easily afford copying files between accounts.
It is possible even in today's Microsoft environment to guarantee yourself the impact of a virus or adware can be contained to a sandbox, Guest user account.
The fact that Microsoft doesn't make "RunAs Guest" the default security model as does Unix is something that Microsoft should be held accountable for.
But the reality is Microsoft just doesn't care about security. The only care enough to give it lip service.
In contrast millions of Windows users waste millions of hours and lose millions of dollars of data because of Microsoft vulnerabilities. To conclude:
For PC users, I believe that things will eventually get better. Alternative operating systems, such as OS X and Linux will slowly eat away M$'s lead, but I feel this may take a long time.
Alas, Microsoft didn't get to it's monopoly via superior technology, but rather mediocre technology with unfair business practices. In my opinion, Microsoft will continue this unfair business behavior. Nothing less than legal intervention will level the playing field for those companies with competing technologies to actually compete.
If you look at all the defending arguments of Microsoft, you'll find the analogy's to the tyranny of a King uncanny.
One definition of tyranny is "a rigorous condition imposed by some outside agency or force "
It's is difficult to imagine a more rigorous tyranny than Microsoft. And to say that Microsoft's 90% market share, 40 gazillion dollar profits by unjust business practices justifies its theivery and unjust business practices is just bizarre to say the least. Microsoft is the King of business and financial tryanny.
No product, no matter how much technically better than Microsoft will every supplant it without a business war to back it up. This country had to overthrow the tyranny of Britian's unfair business practices through revolution. This country will require legal revolution to dethrone Microsoft. Technology alone will never defeat it because Microsoft's rise to power was via proven unjust business practices, not technological competition.
Overthrowing Microsoft's tyranny will never be done via better technology. To believe so is to believe a peasant too can someday be King.
I would also add that I've endlessly recommended Macs to my less tech savvy family and friends. However, even at the same *price* the PC is still cheaper because of 1.) shared software and 2.) shared advice. If everyone you know is running a PC and you buy a Mac, you are on your own. A lot of people don't want that feeling.
This article was written by the unknowing for the unknowing and it is exactly right on.
Microsoft is single handedly stifling progress and innovation because you can't innovate on a broken system.