Before you conclude that the Representative Democracy of the U.S. is at fault, also consider that the U.S. is far from the same country it was even twenty years ago.
One thing I wonder about is whether the overall exponential growth of successful economies, such as the U.S., would overwhelm any government system. The same number of decision-makers in government have to deal with an ever increasing barrage of issues, concerning technology, population growth, increased expectations for standards of living, etc. How long until they just can't keep up? Remember, the difficulty in managing a complex system does not increase linearly with the growth of the system--it increases exponentially (so, the government's responsibility may be increasing doubly exponentially; try keeping up with that!).
Anyway, please consider a wider range of causes before making a simple dismissal of Republican system.
...failure to enforce a law does not invalidate the law...
If it did, there would be no traffic laws. I would bet that traffic laws for speeding, turning without a signal, etc., are enforced perhaps 1% of the time (at least in the U.S.). For example, I was ticketed for speeding once, even though I was blatantly the slowest car on the road (why? hint: I was an easier target).
...it will be the end of freedom as we have come to know it.
I think it is more accurate to think it will be the end of the convenient freedom we have become used to. If the Internet disappears, we can still send hand-written letters, subscribe to newsletters, stand on a soapbox in front of the courthouse, read the paper books of our choice, etc. The First Amendment will remain intact, but there will be fewer media in which we can exercise it.
The logical conclusion to DRM and Palladium is that the technological golden age we seem to be in will diminish, the U.S.'s dominance in computing technology will vanish, and the only real growth industries in the U.S. will be the old stand-bys, such as retail stores, services, and some manufacturing. It will be like living in the pre-computer era again, when sophisticated mechanical and traditional electronic devices were booming. In a way, it is sort of romantic (whether the reality of it is desirable is another matter, however).
Well, since I am actually a department store mannequin, I see some retarded browsers, who faithfully listen to salesmen, and some not-so-retarded browsers, who reflexively say "I'm just looking". Anyway, I'm glad that they put me near the PC sales rack, so I can post to Slashdot when no one is looking;)
Re:Why is this on slashdot?
on
Qt vs MFC
·
· Score: 1
...the wizard will generate all the glue code...
Qt doesn't need wizards, because the API really is quite clean. A person who has never programmed a graphical interface but knows C++ is good to go. The only real impurity in Qt is that the moc preprocessor needs to run as an extra step in the build. However, moc enables the rather simple signal and slot mechanism, which is intuitive and serves its purpose very well.
Yes, it is also now the main processor on their XVR-1000 graphics card. It seems that a VLIW CPU is very appropriate for graphics, where parallelism is trivially found. It is somewhat odd that the 'J' in MAJC is "Java"; I guess they originally envisioned different applications for it.
I have yet to see competitive comparisons between the XVR-1000 and other cards, but I suppose it does fairly well with two 500MHz CPUs on board.
x86 still scales surprisingly effortlessly, at least from a MHz point of view.
Sure, it is easy for you to buy a newer faster CPU, but do you realize just how much money and sweat Intel puts into stretching x86 to its limits? x86 does not scale effortlessly from any point of view.
Now, look at the RISC ISA specifications. The differences between SPARC v8 (32-bit) and SPARC v9 (64-bit), for example, are actually pretty uneventful. Sun just didn't need to go through obscene contortionism like Intel to evolve the SPARC architecture, yet they still were able to maintain binary compatibility even after transitioning to 64-bit.
RISC is very simple and practical, and it is much more stable over time, safer, and more reliable. There are rewards to an architecture far beyond SPECint2000. That's why I prefer RISC architectures when I can get them.
Re:What services?
on
.NET for Apache
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
One aspect of the vapor surrounding "web services" is that the tools and standards for them are infantile. Look at how young the XML standard is (1998), and, then, realize that all of the current web services buzzwords are younger than that. No wonder there really aren't any good tools and no one really knows what they are talking about. Most people are still trying to figure out what that HTTP thing is and why Java and JavaScript aren't the same thing.
How long did it take for the Internet to evolve before the rapid growth of the 90's made it central to so many people's work? Other technologies, slightly older than XML, still haven't reached any visionary's goals. Where are the VRML immersive environments and the Internet videophones, for example?
If web services really are what people claim, we will know it in a few years when we can't remember an Internet without them. Otherwise, they will just be another great idea that dissappears into obscurity.
C# and other key parts of.NET have been submitted to standards bodies, so yes, there is an open forum for people to have input.
Only for those components. Are these components of any real consequence relative to the much larger body of APIs and tools in.NET?
More, in fact, than their is for Java, which Sun have refused to submit to standards bodies.
Sun maintains their own standards process for evolving the Java platform. Some of Sun's biggest competitors are a part of that process, which helps give some assurance that Sun isn't out to screw everyone. Sun's standardization process also works on a much broader scale than any of Microsoft's standardization efforts in.NET.
The biggest difference between Microsoft and Sun is motive. Both companies are out to make money, of course, but Sun, at least, acknowleges that monopolies are not good for the technology industry. Microsoft, on the other hand, wants to earn money by dominating the technology industry and controlling it with methods similar to organized crime.
Gee, thinking about.NET just leaves me all warm and fuzzy feeling. Maybe I'll just run out and buy VS.NET right now...or not.
Ummm, what's so wrong about being a communist or un-american (or anti-american even), that makes you people foam?
In the U.S., Microsoft can say anything they want, due to their Constitutional rights. However, popular culture in the U.S. is decidedly anti-communist and, by definition, American, so Microsoft's comments about Open Source and the GPL have served only to alienate them from Open Source enthusiasts and advocates in the U.S. As Open Source software proliferates, Microsoft will tend to find themselves separated from larger and larger portions of the U.S. economy, compounding their difficulty as a growth-oriented company. If Microsoft's sentiments and business model do not adapt, then they will quickly become one the has-been companies of computing history, and it will be entirely their own fault.
Please post evidence for your claims, as I've generally found Sun amiable, in general, and, at worst, perhaps a little bureaucratic. They are certainly no worse than any other company I've worked with.
What the fuck good would a Flash plugin be that, by default, doesn't play Flash?
Well, it would be good for not consuming every resource on my computer, good for not booming unsolicited sound throughout my office, and good for increasing the overall reliability of my browser (Flash ain't bug-free!).
However, it would also be good for manually allowing those few Flash animations that actually add value to a web site. The key word, here, is "few".
An opt-in Play button would be an excellent feature for Flash. Without it, I am much more inclined to simply leave the Flash plugin sitting by itself and unloved in a subdirectory called "disabled".
If only there was an alternative to Flash to escape this.
Have you heard of building a website using HTML? Used thoughtfully, it works really well, loads quickly, and is usable on nearly every modern computer. Leaving out JavaScript, Flash, and big images might even allow people to enjoy your website driving up sales tremendously. Try it today!
...big business needs to learn to evolve to the consumer's wishes, or it needs to die.
Yes, absolutely. When the legislative branch of the U.S. government begins thinking about how to artifically prop up a failing industry, that means something is so fundamentally wrong with that industry that legislation is almost always the worst solution to the problem. Whenever someone like the MPAA or RIAA begins begging for quick fixes from Congress, every single person in the House and Senate should have little alarms going off in their minds. Let's hope cynicism prevails and the media industry is sent home with a bruised ego.
Re:I'll tell you why Spam doesn't work.
on
Spam Doesn't Work?
·
· Score: 1
If you think that such pictures are sutable for display whenever and wherever it pops up regardless of who's in the room, then I'm not the one with "pretty much warped values" now am I?
So, you are implying your values are not warped?
This is the same logic employed by right-wing book burners who also happen to be citizens of the U.S.A. Imagine the irony of demonstrations against free speech which are themselves protected by the same law that allowed those nasty books to exist in the first place: The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In some other countries, these same demonstrators would be carted off to prison without trial, because someone else throught they were "warped". Or, if these demonstrators ruled the government, imagine what everyone would be missing due to censorship of "warped" material. If you are a citizen of the U.S., at least be thankful for the founding document that lets you condemn everyone else freely and openly without fear of persecution and let everyone else be thankful for the founding document that lets them freely ignore everything you say.
So why should we be suprised about any problems? Lack of time and/or budget for development are among the top causes for software failing in actual use.
While the F-22 is a beautiful and amazing aircraft, has the software industry matured enough to really handle its complexity?
Re:Why is this on slashdot?
on
Qt vs MFC
·
· Score: 2
Qt is far better than MFC. You'll produce better programs with less hassle.
Very true. Literally within an hour or two, by following TrollTech's tutorial, a person can write and understand working GUI applications. One of Qt's strengths (and a tribute to its design) is how its learning curve is really quite low.
Re:Why would you use Qt?
on
Qt vs MFC
·
· Score: 2
.. when MFC is much faster...
And not portable. Remember, it is becoming more practical to take off the blinders and support other operating systems. Writing a new application to support both UNIX and Windows, for example, not only results in a better application architecture (abstracted for portability) but also distributes risk (so what if either Microsoft or Apple or Linux falls by the wayside; I'm covered).
...and has been industry proven.
...to be a kludge.
So, to fight a troll with a troll:
Why use MFC...when Qt provides better risk mitigation and has been industry proven.
Cringley also has an article [pbs.org] on the consequences of Palladium not working.
It's interesting that people are already devising their methods of attack, even before the technology is really available. If I recall correctly, the same happend with.NET a while ago, where someone devised a.NET virus or worm before.NET was released.
I think most humans are chronically short-sighted yet enthusiastic and optimistic, but a few other humans are mischievous, cynical, and smarter than the rest. This is why Palladium will not live up to its promises (i.e., Microsoft is among the optimists, and, thus, already blind to their errors).
Freedom on the Internet, where copyright has its place but isn't enforced blindly by technology, is the only way to ensure the continuing success of the Internet. Freedom is what fuels much of our enthusiasm for learning. Freedom also fuels integrity, because politicians and executives fear the spread of knowledge. Microsoft threatens both learning and integrity.
I really enjoyed this from the DRM workshop story: "...it was the job of content producers and the tech industry to offer consumers something 'better than free.'" Even when faced with Freedom, Linux distributers started selling usefully packaged distributions and services. Many companies sell bottled water, which in some countries can save your life. One doesn't have to go far to find pre-cut firewood on sale nor very far to have gravel delivered for a driveway. Somehow, lots of people have figured out ways to sell something that is otherwise free.
The lesson is that content providers, so far, just haven't been thinking very hard. If their content is so valuable, then they should be able to package it in some manner thay entices some people to buy it. They just have to accept that only a subset of consumers will actually buy it (as with Linux or firewood) but be savvy enough to get a lot of people to buy it. This is all they need to stay in business.
I think a fan dying would actually be just as if not more likely and really the damage done by this could be just as bad, only less sensational I suppose
Better computers have no fans on the CPUs and use redundant chassis flow-through fans to mitigate the risk. For on-chip fans, better motherboards monitor the fan speed and can react before big-time damage is done. I suppose they could have put coolant sensors in the laptop to detect leaks, but I don't know if they did.
My concern would be planes though, the pressure changes in commmercial jets seem to be powerful enough to make just about anything spring a leak.
Don't forget that airplanes do leak. They are actively pressurized, so that any small leaks don't matter. All large structures have cracks and gaps; it's just not likely that they'll become a problem (given proper inspection and maintenance, of course).
...in reality a commercial water cooling system this just doesn't happen.
Springing a leak with this system would be about as likely as your new air conditioner sprining a coolant leak. It simpley won't happen within the normal life span,...
??? Air conditioners, cars, toilets, any hydraulic systems...they spring leaks all the time. Usually, the leaks are small, and people put up with them by adding antifreeze to the resevior, hiring an HVAC technician to add refrigerant each year, etc. There is no reason to believe that a laptop would be any more immune to microcracks or bad gaskets than any other hydraulic system.
Amazon.com (rightly) assumes that if you're going to their store, you're going to buy something.
But they wrongly assume that I somehow haven't already figured out what I want and don't know exactly how much I can spend. When I go into a store, I have a purpose--often a specific item--in mind. If I don't find it, I leave. Salespeople, targeted advertisements, and customized product lists serve only to annoy and make my shopping less productive.
I guess I'm part of a small minority of shoppers who actually research big purchases, think critically about not-so-big purchases, and view most advertising as obtrusive and unneccessary noise.
How about the government fixing the problems and charging Microsoft for the cost?
Because that would bankrupt Microsoft (perhaps not so bad, but humor me).
There are tens upon tens of millions of lines of code in Microsoft software ranging from Win 2K to IIS to IE to whatever else they bought and rebranded.
I believe very strongly that software complexity increases exponentially with the size of the software. Now, given that Microsoft harbors perhaps the most complex system on the planet, auditing it in OpenBSD fashion would make that $40 billion evaporate so fast Microsoft would almost think they were just in a dream for all these years.
Complexity--unmananged complexity--spawns risk and cost that Microsoft's marketing department is masterful in covering up. Fortunately, I saw through all this and switched to OpenBSD, for simplicity, and Solaris or Linux, for relative simplicity, for all of my tasks.
Slashdot Mirror
Its based on the number of applications they expect to sell.
Expected sales always match real sales, right?
In that case, my flying car and moon realestate businesses are the future! Invest now! Send one dollar for your free investor kit to...
Before you conclude that the Representative Democracy of the U.S. is at fault, also consider that the U.S. is far from the same country it was even twenty years ago.
One thing I wonder about is whether the overall exponential growth of successful economies, such as the U.S., would overwhelm any government system. The same number of decision-makers in government have to deal with an ever increasing barrage of issues, concerning technology, population growth, increased expectations for standards of living, etc. How long until they just can't keep up? Remember, the difficulty in managing a complex system does not increase linearly with the growth of the system--it increases exponentially (so, the government's responsibility may be increasing doubly exponentially; try keeping up with that!).
Anyway, please consider a wider range of causes before making a simple dismissal of Republican system.
...failure to enforce a law does not invalidate the law...
If it did, there would be no traffic laws. I would bet that traffic laws for speeding, turning without a signal, etc., are enforced perhaps 1% of the time (at least in the U.S.). For example, I was ticketed for speeding once, even though I was blatantly the slowest car on the road (why? hint: I was an easier target).
...it will be the end of freedom as we have come to know it.
I think it is more accurate to think it will be the end of the convenient freedom we have become used to. If the Internet disappears, we can still send hand-written letters, subscribe to newsletters, stand on a soapbox in front of the courthouse, read the paper books of our choice, etc. The First Amendment will remain intact, but there will be fewer media in which we can exercise it.
The logical conclusion to DRM and Palladium is that the technological golden age we seem to be in will diminish, the U.S.'s dominance in computing technology will vanish, and the only real growth industries in the U.S. will be the old stand-bys, such as retail stores, services, and some manufacturing. It will be like living in the pre-computer era again, when sophisticated mechanical and traditional electronic devices were booming. In a way, it is sort of romantic (whether the reality of it is desirable is another matter, however).
Well, since I am actually a department store mannequin, I see some retarded browsers, who faithfully listen to salesmen, and some not-so-retarded browsers, who reflexively say "I'm just looking". Anyway, I'm glad that they put me near the PC sales rack, so I can post to Slashdot when no one is looking ;)
...the wizard will generate all the glue code...
Qt doesn't need wizards, because the API really is quite clean. A person who has never programmed a graphical interface but knows C++ is good to go. The only real impurity in Qt is that the moc preprocessor needs to run as an extra step in the build. However, moc enables the rather simple signal and slot mechanism, which is intuitive and serves its purpose very well.
Yes, it is also now the main processor on their XVR-1000 graphics card. It seems that a VLIW CPU is very appropriate for graphics, where parallelism is trivially found. It is somewhat odd that the 'J' in MAJC is "Java"; I guess they originally envisioned different applications for it.
I have yet to see competitive comparisons between the XVR-1000 and other cards, but I suppose it does fairly well with two 500MHz CPUs on board.
x86 still scales surprisingly effortlessly, at least from a MHz point of view.
Sure, it is easy for you to buy a newer faster CPU, but do you realize just how much money and sweat Intel puts into stretching x86 to its limits? x86 does not scale effortlessly from any point of view.
Now, look at the RISC ISA specifications. The differences between SPARC v8 (32-bit) and SPARC v9 (64-bit), for example, are actually pretty uneventful. Sun just didn't need to go through obscene contortionism like Intel to evolve the SPARC architecture, yet they still were able to maintain binary compatibility even after transitioning to 64-bit.
RISC is very simple and practical, and it is much more stable over time, safer, and more reliable. There are rewards to an architecture far beyond SPECint2000. That's why I prefer RISC architectures when I can get them.
One aspect of the vapor surrounding "web services" is that the tools and standards for them are infantile. Look at how young the XML standard is (1998), and, then, realize that all of the current web services buzzwords are younger than that. No wonder there really aren't any good tools and no one really knows what they are talking about. Most people are still trying to figure out what that HTTP thing is and why Java and JavaScript aren't the same thing.
How long did it take for the Internet to evolve before the rapid growth of the 90's made it central to so many people's work? Other technologies, slightly older than XML, still haven't reached any visionary's goals. Where are the VRML immersive environments and the Internet videophones, for example?
If web services really are what people claim, we will know it in a few years when we can't remember an Internet without them. Otherwise, they will just be another great idea that dissappears into obscurity.
C# and other key parts of .NET have been submitted to standards bodies, so yes, there is an open forum for people to have input.
.NET?
.NET.
.NET just leaves me all warm and fuzzy feeling. Maybe I'll just run out and buy VS.NET right now...or not.
Only for those components. Are these components of any real consequence relative to the much larger body of APIs and tools in
More, in fact, than their is for Java, which Sun have refused to submit to standards bodies.
Sun maintains their own standards process for evolving the Java platform. Some of Sun's biggest competitors are a part of that process, which helps give some assurance that Sun isn't out to screw everyone. Sun's standardization process also works on a much broader scale than any of Microsoft's standardization efforts in
The biggest difference between Microsoft and Sun is motive. Both companies are out to make money, of course, but Sun, at least, acknowleges that monopolies are not good for the technology industry. Microsoft, on the other hand, wants to earn money by dominating the technology industry and controlling it with methods similar to organized crime.
Gee, thinking about
Ummm, what's so wrong about being a communist or un-american (or anti-american even), that makes you people foam?
In the U.S., Microsoft can say anything they want, due to their Constitutional rights. However, popular culture in the U.S. is decidedly anti-communist and, by definition, American, so Microsoft's comments about Open Source and the GPL have served only to alienate them from Open Source enthusiasts and advocates in the U.S. As Open Source software proliferates, Microsoft will tend to find themselves separated from larger and larger portions of the U.S. economy, compounding their difficulty as a growth-oriented company. If Microsoft's sentiments and business model do not adapt, then they will quickly become one the has-been companies of computing history, and it will be entirely their own fault.
Please post evidence for your claims, as I've generally found Sun amiable, in general, and, at worst, perhaps a little bureaucratic. They are certainly no worse than any other company I've worked with.
Only Windows users use proper grammar and spelling.
Yes, and only health food is sold at gas station convenience stores. Seriously, stupid people are everywhere, Windows users included.
What the fuck good would a Flash plugin be that, by default, doesn't play Flash?
Well, it would be good for not consuming every resource on my computer, good for not booming unsolicited sound throughout my office, and good for increasing the overall reliability of my browser (Flash ain't bug-free!).
However, it would also be good for manually allowing those few Flash animations that actually add value to a web site. The key word, here, is "few".
An opt-in Play button would be an excellent feature for Flash. Without it, I am much more inclined to simply leave the Flash plugin sitting by itself and unloved in a subdirectory called "disabled".
If only there was an alternative to Flash to escape this.
Have you heard of building a website using HTML? Used thoughtfully, it works really well, loads quickly, and is usable on nearly every modern computer. Leaving out JavaScript, Flash, and big images might even allow people to enjoy your website driving up sales tremendously. Try it today!
...big business needs to learn to evolve to the consumer's wishes, or it needs to die.
Yes, absolutely. When the legislative branch of the U.S. government begins thinking about how to artifically prop up a failing industry, that means something is so fundamentally wrong with that industry that legislation is almost always the worst solution to the problem. Whenever someone like the MPAA or RIAA begins begging for quick fixes from Congress, every single person in the House and Senate should have little alarms going off in their minds. Let's hope cynicism prevails and the media industry is sent home with a bruised ego.
If you think that such pictures are sutable for display whenever and wherever it pops up regardless of who's in the room, then I'm not the one with "pretty much warped values" now am I?
So, you are implying your values are not warped?
This is the same logic employed by right-wing book burners who also happen to be citizens of the U.S.A. Imagine the irony of demonstrations against free speech which are themselves protected by the same law that allowed those nasty books to exist in the first place: The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In some other countries, these same demonstrators would be carted off to prison without trial, because someone else throught they were "warped". Or, if these demonstrators ruled the government, imagine what everyone would be missing due to censorship of "warped" material. If you are a citizen of the U.S., at least be thankful for the founding document that lets you condemn everyone else freely and openly without fear of persecution and let everyone else be thankful for the founding document that lets them freely ignore everything you say.
Despite an accelerated delivery schedule...
So why should we be suprised about any problems? Lack of time and/or budget for development are among the top causes for software failing in actual use.
While the F-22 is a beautiful and amazing aircraft, has the software industry matured enough to really handle its complexity?
Qt is far better than MFC. You'll produce better programs with less hassle.
Very true. Literally within an hour or two, by following TrollTech's tutorial, a person can write and understand working GUI applications. One of Qt's strengths (and a tribute to its design) is how its learning curve is really quite low.
And not portable. Remember, it is becoming more practical to take off the blinders and support other operating systems. Writing a new application to support both UNIX and Windows, for example, not only results in a better application architecture (abstracted for portability) but also distributes risk (so what if either Microsoft or Apple or Linux falls by the wayside; I'm covered).
So, to fight a troll with a troll:
Why use MFC...when Qt provides better risk mitigation and has been industry proven.
Cringley also has an article [pbs.org] on the consequences of Palladium not working.
.NET a while ago, where someone devised a .NET virus or worm before .NET was released.
It's interesting that people are already devising their methods of attack, even before the technology is really available. If I recall correctly, the same happend with
I think most humans are chronically short-sighted yet enthusiastic and optimistic, but a few other humans are mischievous, cynical, and smarter than the rest. This is why Palladium will not live up to its promises (i.e., Microsoft is among the optimists, and, thus, already blind to their errors).
Freedom on the Internet, where copyright has its place but isn't enforced blindly by technology, is the only way to ensure the continuing success of the Internet. Freedom is what fuels much of our enthusiasm for learning. Freedom also fuels integrity, because politicians and executives fear the spread of knowledge. Microsoft threatens both learning and integrity.
I really enjoyed this from the DRM workshop story: "...it was the job of content producers and the tech industry to offer consumers something 'better than free.'" Even when faced with Freedom, Linux distributers started selling usefully packaged distributions and services. Many companies sell bottled water, which in some countries can save your life. One doesn't have to go far to find pre-cut firewood on sale nor very far to have gravel delivered for a driveway. Somehow, lots of people have figured out ways to sell something that is otherwise free.
The lesson is that content providers, so far, just haven't been thinking very hard. If their content is so valuable, then they should be able to package it in some manner thay entices some people to buy it. They just have to accept that only a subset of consumers will actually buy it (as with Linux or firewood) but be savvy enough to get a lot of people to buy it. This is all they need to stay in business.
I think a fan dying would actually be just as if not more likely and really the damage done by this could be just as bad, only less sensational I suppose
Better computers have no fans on the CPUs and use redundant chassis flow-through fans to mitigate the risk. For on-chip fans, better motherboards monitor the fan speed and can react before big-time damage is done. I suppose they could have put coolant sensors in the laptop to detect leaks, but I don't know if they did.
My concern would be planes though, the pressure changes in commmercial jets seem to be powerful enough to make just about anything spring a leak.
Don't forget that airplanes do leak. They are actively pressurized, so that any small leaks don't matter. All large structures have cracks and gaps; it's just not likely that they'll become a problem (given proper inspection and maintenance, of course).
...in reality a commercial water cooling system this just doesn't happen.
Springing a leak with this system would be about as likely as your new air conditioner sprining a coolant leak. It simpley won't happen within the normal life span,...
??? Air conditioners, cars, toilets, any hydraulic systems...they spring leaks all the time. Usually, the leaks are small, and people put up with them by adding antifreeze to the resevior, hiring an HVAC technician to add refrigerant each year, etc. There is no reason to believe that a laptop would be any more immune to microcracks or bad gaskets than any other hydraulic system.
Amazon.com (rightly) assumes that if you're going to their store, you're going to buy something.
But they wrongly assume that I somehow haven't already figured out what I want and don't know exactly how much I can spend. When I go into a store, I have a purpose--often a specific item--in mind. If I don't find it, I leave. Salespeople, targeted advertisements, and customized product lists serve only to annoy and make my shopping less productive.
I guess I'm part of a small minority of shoppers who actually research big purchases, think critically about not-so-big purchases, and view most advertising as obtrusive and unneccessary noise.
How about the government fixing the problems and charging Microsoft for the cost?
Because that would bankrupt Microsoft (perhaps not so bad, but humor me).
There are tens upon tens of millions of lines of code in Microsoft software ranging from Win 2K to IIS to IE to whatever else they bought and rebranded.
I believe very strongly that software complexity increases exponentially with the size of the software. Now, given that Microsoft harbors perhaps the most complex system on the planet, auditing it in OpenBSD fashion would make that $40 billion evaporate so fast Microsoft would almost think they were just in a dream for all these years.
Complexity--unmananged complexity--spawns risk and cost that Microsoft's marketing department is masterful in covering up. Fortunately, I saw through all this and switched to OpenBSD, for simplicity, and Solaris or Linux, for relative simplicity, for all of my tasks.