Unless America falls apart first. Things are bad here, too. I abhor the Chinese government (but not the Chinese people), but the standard of living in the U.S. is also declining. Real wages have stagnated for over a decade. http://www.epi.org/publication/bp195/ We went from a single income household to a two income household without significant gains in middle-class wealth. Now we're saddling a generation of kids with unpayable student loans in a market with zero jobs. I'd say if there's going to be revolution anywhere, it's the U.S.
Well, smaller components are more expensive because they are produced in lower volumes. laptops are still outselling tablets 10 to 1.
When you want to have your Device (tm) manufactured in China or whereever, you approach a factory. That factory is also making laptops and stuff for lots of other computer brands. So they are making standard parts in the configuration you outline. Its super cheap because they have all their equipment set up to make common parts.
Once you bring in a custom display (that needs to be touch-sensitive), custom connector, custom battery, custom chip... then the factory is going to charge you quite a bit more. They may have to source a battery that is more dense than the standard n-cell battery that is sold in most laptops. They may have to re-tool their molding/milling machines for whatever shape or connectors you are developing.
Once the tablet market is sufficiently saturated and the components are more standard you'll see cheaper prices.
The reason that Netflix can get buy on $9 a month is because they have low debt, and low overhead. Larger margins.
Companies like Blockbuster loaded up on debt and rapidly expanded during the good times. Of course, debt is easy to carry during the good times.
If Blockbuster had kept its leverage low it could have used this time where corporate valuations are lower to get out of leases, buy a subsidiary that could compete w/ Netflix in the streaming space, or kept fees low. But because it has close to 1 Billion dollars in debt to service, and tons of long-term leases to pay for, they are inflexible.
Sure, Netflix saw that DVDs by mail and DVD streaming was the way to go, but it was only a part of it that lead to Blockbuster's demise. Most of it can be traced back to poor business decisions unrelated to technology. Plenty of companies are smart enough to make a transition between dying business models and thriving ones. Blockbuster couldn't because they tied their hands with financial obligations.
Its a violation of the law to commit fraud. Most, if not all, of the major banks engaged in fraudulent accounting, at the very least. They used this fraudulent accounting to show excess paper profits, and used those profits as a justification to pay very large bonuses. Then, when the winds turned, none of these banks had enough cash on hand to weather the storm.
There should be a Pecora Commission, and a perp walk, to say the least. These banks did exactly what Enron did. Enron saw its comeuppance, so should these banks.
>It's not the same thing in practice, though. The actions of a corporation with a near monopoly on the market have different repurcussions than the same actions performed by a minority player
That's kind of a horseshit argument. That's like saying that if a poor minority smokes crack, its worse because he makes less money and it has a larger impact on his family; but if a rich white guy does it, it's less of a big deal since he's rich and he's not influencing his neighbors and setting a bad example.
Shouldn't the law be blind to the status of the offender? Shouldn't the action itself be the only arbiter of what is a crime, and not the action biased by WHO is committing it? I think it is a terrible precedent to have two sets of laws, one for the 'little guy' and one for the 'big guy'. Then it becomes a less objective 'which guy am I', not 'what actions can I perform'.
Come on, admit it. This one touches a nerve because computer programmers take ownership and pride in their software; they recognize the inherent value because they know how much time and mental effort goes into making software, scripts, and tools. However, those same individuals cannot ascribe the same value to a music file; they either blame the companies the artists work for (artists don't get more than a penny per download!), or that they aren't hurting anyone because music is just a digital file nowadays. All excuses, software making and music making are the same thing, and yet the attitudes towards 'sharing' are significantly different.
Do you have evidence that the flaws that caused large numbers (I've heard estimates that its 1/3rd of all consoles that have had to be RMA'd) of xbox to go bad are due to corners cut? MS has been mum about what specifically causes the 360's to fail. Couldn't it just be that MS ordered a part from a factory/supplier and a flaw in the production process, or a flaw in design of the item, caused failures that weren't apparent in short term testing?
What was underdeveloped about.NET?.NET is a great sandbox for rapidly developing web and windows apps. It certainly not the be-all, end-all tool, and not every part of the Windows API is exposed to.NET yet, but its getting there. And you can get unmanaged Windows API calls if you care to write your own wrappers. (IntPtr is your friend!)
If you ask me,.NET was a win when MS needed it. All its other development platforms were always sort of a mystery, never really had a good roadmap, and never really made it quick and easy to get started. Plus ASP as a web framework was sorely lacking just as PHP was emerging..NET I felt was a great thing to release; Certainely better than the Cocoa or Objective-C efforts on Mac and easier to learn than C++ programming on *nix
Are you kidding me? The video game industry was always proprietary. When's the last time you loaded the data from a Sega Master System 'Mega Cartridge' into your computer?
If anything, PlayStation was the first successful common-media console (3DO doesn't count), using CDs. At the same time, there was a huge increase in video games sales during this time period. Companies like Sega and Microsoft simply took advantage of the existing economies of scale with optical media because they were literally selling ten times the amount of video games that the market had sold before.
If anything, MS's formats for data storage have been pretty standards-based. Unlike Sony, with its MiniDisc, MagicGate, and now Blu-Ray. In fact, Blu-Ray is Sony's first 'win' in this department. But asking, less than a month after Blu-Ray has 'won', for MS to do a major shift in its media storage, is premature. I think 50% of software is still released on CD and not even DVD yet.
"... the rules CHANGE when you have a monopoly. What are perfectly acceptable business practices in a competitive market are abusive and illegal in a monopoly...."
The difference between Mac OS and Windows is that Windows has been found to be a monopoly; and Microsoft has been convicted of abusing that monopoly. Mac OS isn't, and Apple hasn't.
What kind of vague shitty standard is this to live and work by? Somehow activity A is okay one minute but not okay the next? At what moment in time did their business become a monopoly? when were they supposed to stop activity A? AFTER they've been convicted? Well, how were they even supposed to know they were becoming a monopoly in the first place, to avoid the conviction? I guess you know AFTER you're arrested that you were committing a crime. I guess you're supposed to look at your company every day and 'guess' whether you're going to be convicted, and whether you should change your business practices.
No business could possibly function under such subjective terms. Ever try to change a marketing plan or business practice at a large company? It takes a long time to re-formulate and re-evaluate actions and then bring them into a plan and then execute them company wide. Any rules that change as you go along are antithetical to running a company successfully. Essentially what you're describing is that for a certain period of time, companies should take action to increase their business, until such time that their business becomes 'a monopoly' ( a definition which is amorphous. when I was in high school it meant 'sole control over an entire industry', and that def. no longer applies since MS is a monopoly apparently despite apple's existence / success), then when they're business is a monopoly, they must work AGAINST the principles that bring them success.
You'd think so, but there are parts of MS that appreciate humor. MS's game library SDK (essentially a framework of managed code [.NET] libs on top of DirectX) is called XNA. The XNA stands for XNA's not Acronymed. DirectX itself wasn't even the original name for the product that we know today as DirectX. It was originally Windows Game something-or-other, but since all the function calls were called like 'Direct'y, such as DirectShow, DirectPlay, DirectInput, etc, a journalist referred to it as DirectX. MS liked the name and ran with it.
Why not in Washington DC, where there are more likely to be interested parties? You mean, Lobbyists.
All of the companies you mention have offices is Massachusetts.
As much as I'm going to get modded down for this, Comcast has been royally fucked in Massachusetts. Comcast is required to license their business with every town / city before delivering cable to them. This means that each city can set the terms of their cable service, including such pain in the ass things as 'even though you set aside channel x for our local access, we demand local access on channel 7. I don't care that major networks use this channel, its what our town wants!' and 'we demand you share your lines with other telcos, even though you spent all this money to run a fiber-optic ring and they didn't'.
Verizon's FiOS service isn't required to reach agreements / licensing with each town. Heck, FiOS isn't even required to bring service to all customers. That's why FiOS is rolled out here in select communities; those communities are wealthy and are more likely to require service, meaning they don't have to waste money deploying to towns that are less likely to buy. Also, wealthy customers spend more and are more attractive to local advertisers, so FiOS makes money that way too. (Both Verizon and Comcast sell advertising on top of the network signals they reproduce). I'm not saying things should be done one way or another, but that the rules for both should be the same... its hard to compete when your competitor has to jump through way less government hoops.
And you fuckwit, Massachusetts has a huge tech industry. the 128 belt was/is silicon valley east. Oracle, Sun, MS all have buildings on 128 you can see from the highway. If you live in Massachusetts and have a Computer Science degree, you're probably screening calls from recruiters these days.
Probably a terrible precendent, actually. Imagine some off-brand European retailer selling 'Windows XP' that they've compiled and pressed to disk. People would think they're getting A Microsoft Product but actually its someone else who made it. Then Microsoft's reputation would be tarnished if the copy is bad.
If I built soapbox racers in my garage at home and branded them BMW, then someone lost a head in a collision in my not-quite-safe car, don't you think that BMW would be less than thrilled?
Well, the Taliban recently converted to a new cult; This time, its the cult of Apple. Having bought hook, line and sinker into that stinking fetish, the Taliban all got themselves a new iPhone. However, little did they know that iPhone's contain no user servicable battery, so essentially there's no way to remove their battery, and thus no way to prevent being tracked. Yet another example of religion ruining everything.
Slashdot is located on the internet. China censors its citizens access to the internet. Therefore, it is only natural that Slashdot users would be contemptuous of China.
The Tesla Roadster has a liquid cooled radiator. They tried making the car air-cooled, but the motor and batteries would heat up too much.
Cooling is going to be required on most electric vehicles that meet national highway safety standards, because those standards require cars to be so crash resistant that they usually weigh quite a bit. hauling that extra weight means needing more power / energy, which requires cooling.
Why does three or more *have* to be deliberate? To say its not a coincidence, you'd have to be an authority on it in some form. Data that would help us understand the nature of 5 cables being cut would be: How many cables are cut yearly? How many cables are there worldwide?
Then, if it appears unlikely that this many cables could go dark based on past experience, then you ask harder questions: How deep are the cables where the cut happens? Are the cuts in high-traffic boating areas?
A specific number of events of a certain type does not automatically make something 'deliberate'. Like any investigation, facts should be gathered and analyzed. Saying 'deliberate, who did it' is jumping the gun. Imagine this same philosophy with science, medicine or technology. "I've dropped three packets today. It must be deliberate!".
Its exactly this sort of thinking that drives crazy conspiracy thinkers. Instead of investigating facts and probability, they immediately turn to 'who benefits', instead of 'what caused'.
And, we can do away with all the things taxes pay for: the education system that trains Microsoft's employees, the roads that allow the employees to get to work, the police that help protect Microsoft from the roving bands of rabid cats, the standing militia that protects Washington from invasion by Canada. (Those bastards covet Washington, and are just *waiting* to invade.)
Your reducto-ad-absurbum argument implies that the services you list cannot be provided any other way than through taxation
Education systems can and are private in places. I went to a Catholic high school, which costs at the time (94-98) $4500 per year.
Roads can and are private. Tolls and other highway systems could be devised to allow non-governmental ownership of roads.
As far as police and the military, yes, this is a concept that should be government-run. That's what the government is for, to allow us to live our lives without others threatening to take our lives or our stuff. And courts to enforce more subtle breaches of those rights (contracts, etc). But why does this need to be a tax system? People have been turning to forced taxation for years to run the government. One, because the government as its currently constituted requires massive amounts of money. Two, because its the only way they know. But there are other, voluntary ways to fund a government, one that is smaller and more efficient. One such way is a Lottery, which is voluntary in participation. there are other ways, but no one is bothering to think of them because the massive size of government precludes thinking any other way.
Alternatively, they can create a new doctype specifically for the new "more better" rendering. This way, the millions of existing pages that are already designed to render in the exiting style will continue to do so, and anyone looking to use a closer to the standards rendering has the option to.
Well, MS can't introduce a new doctype. That would mean that FireFox and Safari would also have to be on board with the new doctype, and make their browsers comply. IIRC, you can only serve one doctype, and providing an unknown or bad doctype will cause most browsers to render in the least-standards-based, most fugly way. (Quirks Mode, I believe is the term).
The META tag they're proposing is the most risk averse path for them. It will break the least amount of apps and pages, and other browsers will ignore it and render as they previously did.
This is kind of a bummer, since it means that companies and individuals won't have any impetus to change to standards based code. People were mad when MS drove the industry in a certain direction with its browser. Now that standards exist, I think its okay for them to drive it again, as long as the direction is standards-based.
I'm not sure why anyone thinks it's a good idea to use IE as an application platform.
Because if you're a salesman who wants to sell said application, its easier to pitch JUST the application. If you decide to standarize your app to a platform that only 20% of the browsing public is using, your sales team not only has to sell the merits of the application, but also they must sell the potential client on switching their IT infrastructure, in part. That is a hidden cost that companies often don't want to bear.
What does it matter if the effect kills someone or not? Effectively, you're killing the other employees by forcing them into emergency mode. You're also jeopardizing the company by forcing its financial assets into paying for costly recovery, overtime, etc.
If I spent 5 years building a business, poured my heart and soul into it, and one of my employees destroys the information infrastructure that I used to help build the business, doesn't he owe me for my efforts, which have now been destroyed? 2.5 years sounds right; It may have taken that long to build that medical system. They may have spent 2.5 man-years recovering from the bomb.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless America falls apart first. Things are bad here, too. I abhor the Chinese government (but not the Chinese people), but the standard of living in the U.S. is also declining. Real wages have stagnated for over a decade. http://www.epi.org/publication/bp195/ We went from a single income household to a two income household without significant gains in middle-class wealth. Now we're saddling a generation of kids with unpayable student loans in a market with zero jobs. I'd say if there's going to be revolution anywhere, it's the U.S.
Well, smaller components are more expensive because they are produced in lower volumes. laptops are still outselling tablets 10 to 1.
When you want to have your Device (tm) manufactured in China or whereever, you approach a factory. That factory is also making laptops and stuff for lots of other computer brands. So they are making standard parts in the configuration you outline. Its super cheap because they have all their equipment set up to make common parts.
Once you bring in a custom display (that needs to be touch-sensitive), custom connector, custom battery, custom chip... then the factory is going to charge you quite a bit more. They may have to source a battery that is more dense than the standard n-cell battery that is sold in most laptops. They may have to re-tool their molding/milling machines for whatever shape or connectors you are developing.
Once the tablet market is sufficiently saturated and the components are more standard you'll see cheaper prices.
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-the-ipad-2-2011-3
The reason that Netflix can get buy on $9 a month is because they have low debt, and low overhead. Larger margins.
Companies like Blockbuster loaded up on debt and rapidly expanded during the good times. Of course, debt is easy to carry during the good times.
If Blockbuster had kept its leverage low it could have used this time where corporate valuations are lower to get out of leases, buy a subsidiary that could compete w/ Netflix in the streaming space, or kept fees low. But because it has close to 1 Billion dollars in debt to service, and tons of long-term leases to pay for, they are inflexible.
Sure, Netflix saw that DVDs by mail and DVD streaming was the way to go, but it was only a part of it that lead to Blockbuster's demise. Most of it can be traced back to poor business decisions unrelated to technology. Plenty of companies are smart enough to make a transition between dying business models and thriving ones. Blockbuster couldn't because they tied their hands with financial obligations.
>Wall street "quants" have changed the financial game without knowing finance
Great example. Look where the Wall Street quants drove the economy to...
Its a violation of the law to commit fraud. Most, if not all, of the major banks engaged in fraudulent accounting, at the very least. They used this fraudulent accounting to show excess paper profits, and used those profits as a justification to pay very large bonuses. Then, when the winds turned, none of these banks had enough cash on hand to weather the storm.
There should be a Pecora Commission, and a perp walk, to say the least. These banks did exactly what Enron did. Enron saw its comeuppance, so should these banks.
>It's not the same thing in practice, though. The actions of a corporation with a near monopoly on the market have different repurcussions than the same actions performed by a minority player
That's kind of a horseshit argument. That's like saying that if a poor minority smokes crack, its worse because he makes less money and it has a larger impact on his family; but if a rich white guy does it, it's less of a big deal since he's rich and he's not influencing his neighbors and setting a bad example.
Shouldn't the law be blind to the status of the offender? Shouldn't the action itself be the only arbiter of what is a crime, and not the action biased by WHO is committing it? I think it is a terrible precedent to have two sets of laws, one for the 'little guy' and one for the 'big guy'. Then it becomes a less objective 'which guy am I', not 'what actions can I perform'.
LOL! Code is work but music isn't!
Come on, admit it. This one touches a nerve because computer programmers take ownership and pride in their software; they recognize the inherent value because they know how much time and mental effort goes into making software, scripts, and tools. However, those same individuals cannot ascribe the same value to a music file; they either blame the companies the artists work for (artists don't get more than a penny per download!), or that they aren't hurting anyone because music is just a digital file nowadays. All excuses, software making and music making are the same thing, and yet the attitudes towards 'sharing' are significantly different.
If Apple ever gained the dominant position in the market, would you support forcing them to remove their browser in their OS?
Do you have evidence that the flaws that caused large numbers (I've heard estimates that its 1/3rd of all consoles that have had to be RMA'd) of xbox to go bad are due to corners cut? MS has been mum about what specifically causes the 360's to fail. Couldn't it just be that MS ordered a part from a factory/supplier and a flaw in the production process, or a flaw in design of the item, caused failures that weren't apparent in short term testing?
I own an iPhone. Where can I redeem my threesome?
What was underdeveloped about .NET? .NET is a great sandbox for rapidly developing web and windows apps. It certainly not the be-all, end-all tool, and not every part of the Windows API is exposed to .NET yet, but its getting there. And you can get unmanaged Windows API calls if you care to write your own wrappers. (IntPtr is your friend!)
.NET was a win when MS needed it. All its other development platforms were always sort of a mystery, never really had a good roadmap, and never really made it quick and easy to get started. Plus ASP as a web framework was sorely lacking just as PHP was emerging. .NET I felt was a great thing to release; Certainely better than the Cocoa or Objective-C efforts on Mac and easier to learn than C++ programming on *nix
If you ask me,
but its not always a one way ticket to Gitmo.
Are you telling me that 'Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanomo Bay' was fiction? I thought everything I saw in TV and the movies was true!
Like the GameCube?
Are you kidding me? The video game industry was always proprietary. When's the last time you loaded the data from a Sega Master System 'Mega Cartridge' into your computer?
If anything, PlayStation was the first successful common-media console (3DO doesn't count), using CDs. At the same time, there was a huge increase in video games sales during this time period. Companies like Sega and Microsoft simply took advantage of the existing economies of scale with optical media because they were literally selling ten times the amount of video games that the market had sold before.
If anything, MS's formats for data storage have been pretty standards-based. Unlike Sony, with its MiniDisc, MagicGate, and now Blu-Ray. In fact, Blu-Ray is Sony's first 'win' in this department. But asking, less than a month after Blu-Ray has 'won', for MS to do a major shift in its media storage, is premature. I think 50% of software is still released on CD and not even DVD yet.
"... the rules CHANGE when you have a monopoly. What are perfectly acceptable business practices in a competitive market are abusive and illegal in a monopoly...."
The difference between Mac OS and Windows is that Windows has been found to be a monopoly; and Microsoft has been convicted of abusing that monopoly. Mac OS isn't, and Apple hasn't.
What kind of vague shitty standard is this to live and work by? Somehow activity A is okay one minute but not okay the next? At what moment in time did their business become a monopoly? when were they supposed to stop activity A? AFTER they've been convicted? Well, how were they even supposed to know they were becoming a monopoly in the first place, to avoid the conviction? I guess you know AFTER you're arrested that you were committing a crime. I guess you're supposed to look at your company every day and 'guess' whether you're going to be convicted, and whether you should change your business practices.
No business could possibly function under such subjective terms. Ever try to change a marketing plan or business practice at a large company? It takes a long time to re-formulate and re-evaluate actions and then bring them into a plan and then execute them company wide. Any rules that change as you go along are antithetical to running a company successfully. Essentially what you're describing is that for a certain period of time, companies should take action to increase their business, until such time that their business becomes 'a monopoly' ( a definition which is amorphous. when I was in high school it meant 'sole control over an entire industry', and that def. no longer applies since MS is a monopoly apparently despite apple's existence / success), then when they're business is a monopoly, they must work AGAINST the principles that bring them success.
You'd think so, but there are parts of MS that appreciate humor. MS's game library SDK (essentially a framework of managed code [.NET] libs on top of DirectX) is called XNA. The XNA stands for XNA's not Acronymed. DirectX itself wasn't even the original name for the product that we know today as DirectX. It was originally Windows Game something-or-other, but since all the function calls were called like 'Direct'y, such as DirectShow, DirectPlay, DirectInput, etc, a journalist referred to it as DirectX. MS liked the name and ran with it.
Why not in Washington DC, where there are more likely to be interested parties?
You mean, Lobbyists.
All of the companies you mention have offices is Massachusetts.
As much as I'm going to get modded down for this, Comcast has been royally fucked in Massachusetts. Comcast is required to license their business with every town / city before delivering cable to them. This means that each city can set the terms of their cable service, including such pain in the ass things as 'even though you set aside channel x for our local access, we demand local access on channel 7. I don't care that major networks use this channel, its what our town wants!' and 'we demand you share your lines with other telcos, even though you spent all this money to run a fiber-optic ring and they didn't'.
Verizon's FiOS service isn't required to reach agreements / licensing with each town. Heck, FiOS isn't even required to bring service to all customers. That's why FiOS is rolled out here in select communities; those communities are wealthy and are more likely to require service, meaning they don't have to waste money deploying to towns that are less likely to buy. Also, wealthy customers spend more and are more attractive to local advertisers, so FiOS makes money that way too. (Both Verizon and Comcast sell advertising on top of the network signals they reproduce). I'm not saying things should be done one way or another, but that the rules for both should be the same... its hard to compete when your competitor has to jump through way less government hoops.
And you fuckwit, Massachusetts has a huge tech industry. the 128 belt was/is silicon valley east. Oracle, Sun, MS all have buildings on 128 you can see from the highway. If you live in Massachusetts and have a Computer Science degree, you're probably screening calls from recruiters these days.
Probably a terrible precendent, actually. Imagine some off-brand European retailer selling 'Windows XP' that they've compiled and pressed to disk. People would think they're getting A Microsoft Product but actually its someone else who made it. Then Microsoft's reputation would be tarnished if the copy is bad.
If I built soapbox racers in my garage at home and branded them BMW, then someone lost a head in a collision in my not-quite-safe car, don't you think that BMW would be less than thrilled?
Well, the Taliban recently converted to a new cult; This time, its the cult of Apple. Having bought hook, line and sinker into that stinking fetish, the Taliban all got themselves a new iPhone. However, little did they know that iPhone's contain no user servicable battery, so essentially there's no way to remove their battery, and thus no way to prevent being tracked. Yet another example of religion ruining everything.
Slashdot is located on the internet. China censors its citizens access to the internet. Therefore, it is only natural that Slashdot users would be contemptuous of China.
no radiators to leak
:)
The Tesla Roadster has a liquid cooled radiator. They tried making the car air-cooled, but the motor and batteries would heat up too much.
Cooling is going to be required on most electric vehicles that meet national highway safety standards, because those standards require cars to be so crash resistant that they usually weigh quite a bit. hauling that extra weight means needing more power / energy, which requires cooling.
Who killed the air-cooled car? Ralph Nader
Why does three or more *have* to be deliberate? To say its not a coincidence, you'd have to be an authority on it in some form. Data that would help us understand the nature of 5 cables being cut would be: How many cables are cut yearly? How many cables are there worldwide?
Then, if it appears unlikely that this many cables could go dark based on past experience, then you ask harder questions: How deep are the cables where the cut happens? Are the cuts in high-traffic boating areas?
A specific number of events of a certain type does not automatically make something 'deliberate'. Like any investigation, facts should be gathered and analyzed. Saying 'deliberate, who did it' is jumping the gun. Imagine this same philosophy with science, medicine or technology. "I've dropped three packets today. It must be deliberate!".
Its exactly this sort of thinking that drives crazy conspiracy thinkers. Instead of investigating facts and probability, they immediately turn to 'who benefits', instead of 'what caused'.
And, we can do away with all the things taxes pay for: the education system that trains Microsoft's employees, the roads that allow the employees to get to work, the police that help protect Microsoft from the roving bands of rabid cats, the standing militia that protects Washington from invasion by Canada. (Those bastards covet Washington, and are just *waiting* to invade.)
Your reducto-ad-absurbum argument implies that the services you list cannot be provided any other way than through taxation
Education systems can and are private in places. I went to a Catholic high school, which costs at the time (94-98) $4500 per year.
Roads can and are private. Tolls and other highway systems could be devised to allow non-governmental ownership of roads.
As far as police and the military, yes, this is a concept that should be government-run. That's what the government is for, to allow us to live our lives without others threatening to take our lives or our stuff. And courts to enforce more subtle breaches of those rights (contracts, etc). But why does this need to be a tax system? People have been turning to forced taxation for years to run the government. One, because the government as its currently constituted requires massive amounts of money. Two, because its the only way they know. But there are other, voluntary ways to fund a government, one that is smaller and more efficient. One such way is a Lottery, which is voluntary in participation. there are other ways, but no one is bothering to think of them because the massive size of government precludes thinking any other way.
Alternatively, they can create a new doctype specifically for the new "more better" rendering. This way, the millions of existing pages that are already designed to render in the exiting style will continue to do so, and anyone looking to use a closer to the standards rendering has the option to.
Well, MS can't introduce a new doctype. That would mean that FireFox and Safari would also have to be on board with the new doctype, and make their browsers comply. IIRC, you can only serve one doctype, and providing an unknown or bad doctype will cause most browsers to render in the least-standards-based, most fugly way. (Quirks Mode, I believe is the term).
The META tag they're proposing is the most risk averse path for them. It will break the least amount of apps and pages, and other browsers will ignore it and render as they previously did.
This is kind of a bummer, since it means that companies and individuals won't have any impetus to change to standards based code. People were mad when MS drove the industry in a certain direction with its browser. Now that standards exist, I think its okay for them to drive it again, as long as the direction is standards-based.
I'm not sure why anyone thinks it's a good idea to use IE as an application platform.
Because if you're a salesman who wants to sell said application, its easier to pitch JUST the application. If you decide to standarize your app to a platform that only 20% of the browsing public is using, your sales team not only has to sell the merits of the application, but also they must sell the potential client on switching their IT infrastructure, in part. That is a hidden cost that companies often don't want to bear.
What does it matter if the effect kills someone or not? Effectively, you're killing the other employees by forcing them into emergency mode. You're also jeopardizing the company by forcing its financial assets into paying for costly recovery, overtime, etc.
If I spent 5 years building a business, poured my heart and soul into it, and one of my employees destroys the information infrastructure that I used to help build the business, doesn't he owe me for my efforts, which have now been destroyed? 2.5 years sounds right; It may have taken that long to build that medical system. They may have spent 2.5 man-years recovering from the bomb.