How about we push all the code execution back onto the server where it belongs?
That approach doesn't scale. You need massive server resources to generate all page layout on the server as you scale up the complexity of web applications. Telling people to push things to the server is telling them to not move past the complexity of web 1.0 applications.
Use a perl (or some other language that handles everything manually*) script to receive the upload submission and write it to disk in a known location with a known name*. A second script can then compare the file size as it's uploading. Somewhat ugly
* PHP won't work since file uploading is handled behind the scenes.
No, it really isn't better for usability. But this is why UI design is art, not science. You're welcome to believe otherwise, of course.
Usability is influenced by prior experience. This is why even though it's a science, it is mostly an academic one, since the definition of "usable" changes based on people's earlier computing experiences.
For novice users the single menu-bar at the top model is much more usable. For people whose perceptions of usability have been bent by other systems, the menu bar only makes sense on the windows. What can't be denied is that it is faster to select menu items from the menu bar the edge of the screen, since this is an experiment anyone can easily run for themselves.
Flex (flash for app dev) is a much nicer toolkit than swing, and it allows you to create smoothly interactive attractive applications with low footprint, compared to java gui apps, which inevitably are dogs.
Actionscript 3 is also not that bad a language. It's pretty much java without threads.
Flash would be much better suited to the iphone than java imho. We're not going to see either however. Desktop flash and java are too heavy for the iphone. We're only going to get J2ME and/or Flash Lite. Neither of these are particularly appealing stacked up against objective c and cocoa touch.
Your assumption seems to be that it is possible to reduce the size of government. I disagree with this notion. If you reduce the size of democratic government a non-democratic government will arise to replace it. Your example of communist russia is an excellent one. After the collapse of the communist government private enterprise filled up the power vacuum that was left, and focused more on profit than on people. The end result was that people actually overall had it noticeably worse under the weak government model that came after than under the all-encompassing communist model of old.
I might also mention that no country in the EU has abandoned sovereignty because countries can leave the EU at any time without approval from the other EU member states. The EU is a treaty, not a country. This makes the EU very fragile. If it became a harm to its member countries instead of a benefit, it would dissolve rapidly.
And by the way, the EU has been very good for my country. Without the EU we would have more pollution, unhealthier food, higher unemployment, severe trade and budget deficits, a devalued coin, higher unemployment, and software patents.
I think Apple is gonna miss out on small companies(where the most innovation lies) which cannot afford the 30% overhead for their software sales.
The overhead for small companies distributing to other platforms is as high or higher. For several reasons: - Apple hosts and markets your app for you. This means that once a product is developed and put in the app store there is no marginal cost associated with each sale (other than support, if you provide it). Most mobile platforms require the developer to either self-host (which can cost quite a bit), or to partner with an online software vendor, which also takes a cut. - Developing for the iphone and ipod means you only need to develop a single product one time, test it on one platform, and it will run on the devices of every iphone and ipod touch user in the world. This kind of write-once run-anywhere is pretty unique. Reaching more potential customers with less effort means less overall cost. - Your initial cost to get going is limited to a mac, an iphone/ipod and 99 usd. This is a much lower startup-cost for development than most mobile platforms. It means you can start a range of products in your spare time, on your own money, and if it takes off gradually make it your primary source of income. - Admittedly this is a subjective point, but the development toolchain looks to be better than other mobile development toolchains, with faster development cycles. This again leads to lower costs.
I think overall the iphone is a more interesting platform for small developers, and you're going to see them moving over to the iphone in droves, because with the same effort (in time and money) they'll be able to reach more potential customers with better products.
Seriously, though, it said "commercially supported form of PHP". Be sure to take a big mental note of that. Commercial == fee's.
Zend Core is free. Zend Core in essence is what a linux distro is to the linux kernel. It provides a certified single-installer toolchain (web server + php + db layer + zend framework).
What you can buy from them is a support package for Zend Core, to help you with installation, updating and bug resolving. Being able to pay someone else to deal with PHP performance and reliability issues at a customer's site is a must for any serious commercial deployment.
PHP on IIS5/6 had to run as a CGI application... IIS7 introduced FastCGI...
Not true. For years there's been an unofficial FastCGI library for IIS (by Shane Caraveo), that you could use with PHP4 and PHP5. We've been deploying on windows using this library, and it ran stable and at acceptable performance levels.
The new microsoft FastCGI library is simply an officially supported form of FastCGI. It ships with IIS7 by default, and is available as an add-on install for IIS6. It works fine with PHP4 and PHP5, but PHP5 has been optimized for it.
PHP's issues with ISAPI are due to it not being thread-safe. We've tried to deploy PHP as ISAPI on windows, and things run fine until the customer starts using an application module that uses GD, or some other non-thread-safe extension, and then you get sporadic crashes that come more often as the load increases (which is obviously the worst time for a server crash).
FastCGI's benefit is that every FastCGI handler is still a separate process, so you don't run into threading issues, while at the same time not invoking the cost of constant process creation (which on windows is expensive), because the processes are reused.
And how many of these applications are being deployed on Windows?
My company's PHP based software runs over 95 percent on IIS servers. We have a single customer that uses linux for their web server platform (a university). We're talking about big customers here, like Siemens and ISS (one of the world's largest cleaning firms), with dozens of servers each running our platform, all of them Windows servers.
We've been deploying PHP on fastcgi the whole time. ISAPI has never been stable, and CGI has always been too slow.
Tthe situation changes for non-intranet web apps. Those tend to be linux-hosted because people tend to outsource their hosting. But for in-house hosted software, most of the time you have to fall back on the existing network team, who is usually specialized in windows, so they tend to prefer windows-based web servers, even if it's just for the sake of uniformity.
The people (whom I'd like to shoot) that pull over to the passing lane and then drive the same speed as the car to their right cause rolling road-blocks. When faster-moving traffic inevitably catches up to them, it can't pass, so it builds up into a massive pack of slow-moving crap. Then, sooner or later, someone taps his brakes, and then the one behind him does it just a bit longer, and so on and so forth, until there's a stop for no reason.
Actually, they're reducing traffic jams by doing that. What causes the traffic jam is not a lower speed, it is variation in speed, as this article points out. Slamming on the breaks creates the traffic jam. The person doing a constant 50 is not the cause of the traffic jam, the person behind them that drives faster right up to the point where they're going to hit their rear end, and then slams on the breaks, that is the cause of the traffic jam. Or the person who moves to the right lane to pass the left-lane driver, forcing traffic in the right lane to break, they are also the cause of the traffic jam. If everyone simply aped the 50 mph single-lane driving, there would be far fewer traffic jams, and people would get to their destinations faster. It's been thoroughly demonstrated in simulations that tailgating and passing cars whenever possible actually reduces road throughput and mean time to destination (even if it improves your own road performance slightly).
This is why in my country during peak traffic the police forces people to "block drive", where they line up police motorcycles across every lane of the highway driving at 50 mph, and force all the cars on the road behind them to drive at that same 50 mph. This reduces the risk of traffic jams, and improves overall throughput of the road system.
The people who mess it up for everyone else are the people who drive fast, not the people who drive slowly.
Now, is the cheap neighbor doing anything wrong by continuing to drive on that road once it's paved? I say no. The people who paid chose to pay, and the pavers chose to do the work, knowing full well that it's impractical to prevent other people from driving on the road once the work is done. (Preventing copyrighted work from being shared is even less practical.)
So, your argument is then that pirates are not immoral, but instead are like SUV drivers, selfish and sort of a dick? Not a great defense there, fyi.
I wouldn't. He's trespassing against the theater owner, because the space inside the theater is a limited resource. But he isn't committing any harm against the actors themselves; they're working exactly as hard no matter how many people are watching them. You're right that the legal term in that scenario isn't "theft of service" - because the service (the actors' labor) isn't what's taken.
If nobody was watching the movies (and paying for them), those actors would be out of business pretty fast, so it does matter a lot to the actors whether people actually pay for seeing the movie.
Let's make this exercise with piracy. Suppose piracy was legalized, and nobody had to pay to watch any movie. How many people would choose not to pay? Half, more than half? How many movies would that mean couldn't make it into the black and therefore weren't produced? Put a spin on it however you want, the fact remains that if piracy happens at scale, it damages the breadth and quality of produced movies.
If your client has a bandwidth chart, watch it scroll by and enjoy the thrill as your upstream bandwidth surges to heights like you have never seen before.
Nobody should ever enjoy a bandwidth chart to the degree you are enjoying it. I don't know whether to be scared or awed.
Hotmail went way downhill after their acquisition, not just because they switched their servers from FreeBSD to Windows server, but the spam filtering got really weak and they added plenty of their own spam.
Hotmail's spam filters back in the day got worse because spammers got smarter. Hotmail these days has excellent spam filtering. It would be really weird if they bought yahoo mail and made its spam filters worse than hotmail on purpose, thereby decreasing the value of their purchase.
I buy macs for one reason only: no fuss. They just work. The style takes a second place to that. Sure, they look nice, but you can find wintel machines that look just as nice or nicer for less money.
What does help is that they pay attention to stuff most vendors don't really, like the sound characteristics of a machine. My mini is so quiet that I can't hear it running over the normal background noises (cars in the street). Since it's in my living room, that's a really nice bonus.
You'd think they'd be _thrilled_ to see the younger generation apply the same kind of capitalism all the way. I mean, surely, if cut-throat capitalism is good for us all, then people using the same principles in their job hunt are, well, nothing short of _patriotic_, right?
This is an evolution in general that's happening throughout western society as far as I can see it. People are catching on that you're naive if you expect any corporation to act in your best interest, and it's led to a generation of "asshole customers" who have no loyalty to their employer, bank, phone company, utilities company, shops, and so on... I get a better deal at my bank if I walk in there and pretend I'm not a customer than if I remind them that I've been a profit-generating customer for over a decade. Since my bank doesn't care about customer loyalty, I feel no obligation to provide loyalty in return, so I'm in the process of transitioning my savings to another bank.
The lesson here is that the free market cuts both ways. If you treat your employees and customers as commodities, then they in turn will treat you as a commodity. Well, boo hoo to that. You reap what you sow.
Re:06-12-17 status of mobile os market share
on
Origin of the iPhone
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· Score: 1
So it runs an OS, has more sophisticated features than you might expect in a typical phone, and 3rd party applications are available. Which part of your definition of SmartPhone does it not meet?
Every phone runs an OS, so that by itself does not make a device a smartphone.
It has some sophisticated features, but it's lacking some basic features, like 3g, mms, non-purchased ringtones, java mobile, video recording,... All in all it's "sophisticatedness" is a mixed bag.
And finally, 3rd party applications are NOT available. The only way to get 3rd party apps onto the iphone is if they are web apps or if you hack your phone (and if you look at the 3rd party web apps, they're a joke in comparison to the 3rd party apps for symbian or windows mobile).
I've always qualified smartphones as two features: internet aware, and open to 3rd party software. The iphone fails on the second requirement.
A small company you may have heard of called IBM made personal computers in around 1984. They're very much in business.
IBM is no longer a personal computer maker, so in that sense they are out of business.
I think the statement is right. Apple is the only personal computer maker from the early 80's that's still in the same business pretty much in the same form they were then (only bigger).
And any bank and its imbecile staff that allows you to pretend to be someone you aren't because they can't be arsed to properly check[1] should be liable for the loss themselves.
Oh please, like you can expect every bank teller everywhere to do a full background check for everyone that comes to make a withdrawal. Be realistic.
This is just the downside of opposing national id cards. People always think national id cards are something that only benefits the government, but this is not the case. National id cards offer a clear and simple way for you to prove who you are, and they make it easy to dramatically reduce identity theft. In my country identity theft is almost unheard of because we've had national id cards for ages.
Now, REALISTICALLY, how much hardcore gaming are you going to do on EITHER of these systems?
How about non-hardcode gaming? Just because this is a home system instead of a dedicated gaming box doesn't mean it shouldn't be able to play some games.
Besides, vista and OS X both use the hardware 3D engine to render the desktop, so 3D performance and dedicated video memory do in fact translate into desktop performance.
Faster processor
Largely irrelevant. The difference between a 2.2 and 2.0 processor is only seen in benchmarks. The CPU is the part of a system that least affects real-world performance for home systems.
More ram
I'll grant you that one, even though vista needs the extra ram to run well, whereas OS X's sweet spot for home use is 1 GB.
There is no need for such laws - people can "vote" with their wallets. Purchase alternative lighting if you feel the need, but don't assume you have any right to force others to do so.
The problem is that incadescent bulbs cost less to the individual than their real cost to society, especially when you make an objective calculation, instead of the biased-through-time calculation that human purchasers make (near cost is considered more expensive than delayed cost, even if the delayed cost is in fact higher).
Personally I'm in favor of taxing polluting products in such a way that it offsets their pollution. If incandescent bulbs are bad for the environment, tax them with money used to plant forests. That way prices reflect the true cost, and people still have choices.
What doesn't work is the current situation where we pretend there isn't a commons that's being used up.
A free market protects the consumer indirectly by allowing/supporting competition.
Exactly. The problem is formed by barriers to entry as a new competitor. Take the cell phone market. If you want to become a cell service provider, you need to provide nationwide (or at least state-wide) coverage. This means either leasing room on an existing network, or building or buying an entire network, which is too costly to imagine. Since the cost to entry in the market is so incredibly high, the existing players can incur quite a high cost on the customers before that cost starts to weigh heavily enough for it to be profitable to build out a new network.
In short, without legislation to ensure that new cell service providers can use the existing networks, you won't get much in the way of competition outside of the existing players. This allows the existing players to form an oligopoly and abuse their position.
Slashdot Mirror
How about we push all the code execution back onto the server where it belongs?
That approach doesn't scale. You need massive server resources to generate all page layout on the server as you scale up the complexity of web applications. Telling people to push things to the server is telling them to not move past the complexity of web 1.0 applications.
Use a perl (or some other language that handles everything manually*) script to receive the upload submission and write it to disk in a known location with a known name*. A second script can then compare the file size as it's uploading. Somewhat ugly
* PHP won't work since file uploading is handled behind the scenes.
PHP 5.2 and up allows you to track file uploading using much the same approach as perl (two scripts).
See http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-php-v525/index.html
No, it really isn't better for usability. But this is why UI design is art, not science. You're welcome to believe otherwise, of course.
Usability is influenced by prior experience. This is why even though it's a science, it is mostly an academic one, since the definition of "usable" changes based on people's earlier computing experiences.
For novice users the single menu-bar at the top model is much more usable. For people whose perceptions of usability have been bent by other systems, the menu bar only makes sense on the windows. What can't be denied is that it is faster to select menu items from the menu bar the edge of the screen, since this is an experiment anyone can easily run for themselves.
Agreed that Java is preferred to Flash.
Flex (flash for app dev) is a much nicer toolkit than swing, and it allows you to create smoothly interactive attractive applications with low footprint, compared to java gui apps, which inevitably are dogs.
Actionscript 3 is also not that bad a language. It's pretty much java without threads.
Flash would be much better suited to the iphone than java imho. We're not going to see either however. Desktop flash and java are too heavy for the iphone. We're only going to get J2ME and/or Flash Lite. Neither of these are particularly appealing stacked up against objective c and cocoa touch.
Your assumption seems to be that it is possible to reduce the size of government. I disagree with this notion. If you reduce the size of democratic government a non-democratic government will arise to replace it. Your example of communist russia is an excellent one. After the collapse of the communist government private enterprise filled up the power vacuum that was left, and focused more on profit than on people. The end result was that people actually overall had it noticeably worse under the weak government model that came after than under the all-encompassing communist model of old.
I might also mention that no country in the EU has abandoned sovereignty because countries can leave the EU at any time without approval from the other EU member states. The EU is a treaty, not a country. This makes the EU very fragile. If it became a harm to its member countries instead of a benefit, it would dissolve rapidly.
And by the way, the EU has been very good for my country. Without the EU we would have more pollution, unhealthier food, higher unemployment, severe trade and budget deficits, a devalued coin, higher unemployment, and software patents.
I think Apple is gonna miss out on small companies(where the most innovation lies) which cannot afford the 30% overhead for their software sales.
The overhead for small companies distributing to other platforms is as high or higher. For several reasons:
- Apple hosts and markets your app for you. This means that once a product is developed and put in the app store there is no marginal cost associated with each sale (other than support, if you provide it). Most mobile platforms require the developer to either self-host (which can cost quite a bit), or to partner with an online software vendor, which also takes a cut.
- Developing for the iphone and ipod means you only need to develop a single product one time, test it on one platform, and it will run on the devices of every iphone and ipod touch user in the world. This kind of write-once run-anywhere is pretty unique. Reaching more potential customers with less effort means less overall cost.
- Your initial cost to get going is limited to a mac, an iphone/ipod and 99 usd. This is a much lower startup-cost for development than most mobile platforms. It means you can start a range of products in your spare time, on your own money, and if it takes off gradually make it your primary source of income.
- Admittedly this is a subjective point, but the development toolchain looks to be better than other mobile development toolchains, with faster development cycles. This again leads to lower costs.
I think overall the iphone is a more interesting platform for small developers, and you're going to see them moving over to the iphone in droves, because with the same effort (in time and money) they'll be able to reach more potential customers with better products.
Because anyone using UNIX has already moved on to Ruby, or Python, or any other language better suited to web application development.
Could you describe what features of Ruby and Python you think make them better suited for web development?
Seriously, though, it said "commercially supported form of PHP". Be sure to take a big mental note of that.
Commercial == fee's.
Zend Core is free. Zend Core in essence is what a linux distro is to the linux kernel. It provides a certified single-installer toolchain (web server + php + db layer + zend framework).
What you can buy from them is a support package for Zend Core, to help you with installation, updating and bug resolving. Being able to pay someone else to deal with PHP performance and reliability issues at a customer's site is a must for any serious commercial deployment.
PHP on IIS5/6 had to run as a CGI application... IIS7 introduced FastCGI...
Not true. For years there's been an unofficial FastCGI library for IIS (by Shane Caraveo), that you could use with PHP4 and PHP5. We've been deploying on windows using this library, and it ran stable and at acceptable performance levels.
The new microsoft FastCGI library is simply an officially supported form of FastCGI. It ships with IIS7 by default, and is available as an add-on install for IIS6. It works fine with PHP4 and PHP5, but PHP5 has been optimized for it.
PHP's issues with ISAPI are due to it not being thread-safe. We've tried to deploy PHP as ISAPI on windows, and things run fine until the customer starts using an application module that uses GD, or some other non-thread-safe extension, and then you get sporadic crashes that come more often as the load increases (which is obviously the worst time for a server crash).
FastCGI's benefit is that every FastCGI handler is still a separate process, so you don't run into threading issues, while at the same time not invoking the cost of constant process creation (which on windows is expensive), because the processes are reused.
And how many of these applications are being deployed on Windows?
My company's PHP based software runs over 95 percent on IIS servers. We have a single customer that uses linux for their web server platform (a university). We're talking about big customers here, like Siemens and ISS (one of the world's largest cleaning firms), with dozens of servers each running our platform, all of them Windows servers.
We've been deploying PHP on fastcgi the whole time. ISAPI has never been stable, and CGI has always been too slow.
Tthe situation changes for non-intranet web apps. Those tend to be linux-hosted because people tend to outsource their hosting. But for in-house hosted software, most of the time you have to fall back on the existing network team, who is usually specialized in windows, so they tend to prefer windows-based web servers, even if it's just for the sake of uniformity.
The people (whom I'd like to shoot) that pull over to the passing lane and then drive the same speed as the car to their right cause rolling road-blocks. When faster-moving traffic inevitably catches up to them, it can't pass, so it builds up into a massive pack of slow-moving crap. Then, sooner or later, someone taps his brakes, and then the one behind him does it just a bit longer, and so on and so forth, until there's a stop for no reason.
Actually, they're reducing traffic jams by doing that. What causes the traffic jam is not a lower speed, it is variation in speed, as this article points out. Slamming on the breaks creates the traffic jam. The person doing a constant 50 is not the cause of the traffic jam, the person behind them that drives faster right up to the point where they're going to hit their rear end, and then slams on the breaks, that is the cause of the traffic jam. Or the person who moves to the right lane to pass the left-lane driver, forcing traffic in the right lane to break, they are also the cause of the traffic jam. If everyone simply aped the 50 mph single-lane driving, there would be far fewer traffic jams, and people would get to their destinations faster. It's been thoroughly demonstrated in simulations that tailgating and passing cars whenever possible actually reduces road throughput and mean time to destination (even if it improves your own road performance slightly).
This is why in my country during peak traffic the police forces people to "block drive", where they line up police motorcycles across every lane of the highway driving at 50 mph, and force all the cars on the road behind them to drive at that same 50 mph. This reduces the risk of traffic jams, and improves overall throughput of the road system.
The people who mess it up for everyone else are the people who drive fast, not the people who drive slowly.
Now, is the cheap neighbor doing anything wrong by continuing to drive on that road once it's paved? I say no. The people who paid chose to pay, and the pavers chose to do the work, knowing full well that it's impractical to prevent other people from driving on the road once the work is done. (Preventing copyrighted work from being shared is even less practical.)
So, your argument is then that pirates are not immoral, but instead are like SUV drivers, selfish and sort of a dick? Not a great defense there, fyi.
I wouldn't. He's trespassing against the theater owner, because the space inside the theater is a limited resource. But he isn't committing any harm against the actors themselves; they're working exactly as hard no matter how many people are watching them. You're right that the legal term in that scenario isn't "theft of service" - because the service (the actors' labor) isn't what's taken.
If nobody was watching the movies (and paying for them), those actors would be out of business pretty fast, so it does matter a lot to the actors whether people actually pay for seeing the movie.
Let's make this exercise with piracy. Suppose piracy was legalized, and nobody had to pay to watch any movie. How many people would choose not to pay? Half, more than half? How many movies would that mean couldn't make it into the black and therefore weren't produced? Put a spin on it however you want, the fact remains that if piracy happens at scale, it damages the breadth and quality of produced movies.
If your client has a bandwidth chart, watch it scroll by and enjoy the thrill as your upstream bandwidth surges to heights like you have never seen before.
Nobody should ever enjoy a bandwidth chart to the degree you are enjoying it. I don't know whether to be scared or awed.
Hotmail went way downhill after their acquisition, not just because they switched their servers from FreeBSD to Windows server, but the spam filtering got really weak and they added plenty of their own spam.
Hotmail's spam filters back in the day got worse because spammers got smarter. Hotmail these days has excellent spam filtering. It would be really weird if they bought yahoo mail and made its spam filters worse than hotmail on purpose, thereby decreasing the value of their purchase.
You're getting it for nothing and we all know that what you get for nothing is good for nothing.
So you're saying the best sex is the one you pay for?
Hotmail got acquired by MS and I was one of first to ask if there is a way to close my account ;)
Why?
Is it an irrational hatred of all things microsoft?
The current hotmail is not actually that bad. The new live ui is pretty sleek, and it works as well in firefox as IE.
I buy macs for one reason only: no fuss. They just work. The style takes a second place to that. Sure, they look nice, but you can find wintel machines that look just as nice or nicer for less money.
What does help is that they pay attention to stuff most vendors don't really, like the sound characteristics of a machine. My mini is so quiet that I can't hear it running over the normal background noises (cars in the street). Since it's in my living room, that's a really nice bonus.
You'd think they'd be _thrilled_ to see the younger generation apply the same kind of capitalism all the way. I mean, surely, if cut-throat capitalism is good for us all, then people using the same principles in their job hunt are, well, nothing short of _patriotic_, right?
This is an evolution in general that's happening throughout western society as far as I can see it. People are catching on that you're naive if you expect any corporation to act in your best interest, and it's led to a generation of "asshole customers" who have no loyalty to their employer, bank, phone company, utilities company, shops, and so on... I get a better deal at my bank if I walk in there and pretend I'm not a customer than if I remind them that I've been a profit-generating customer for over a decade. Since my bank doesn't care about customer loyalty, I feel no obligation to provide loyalty in return, so I'm in the process of transitioning my savings to another bank.
The lesson here is that the free market cuts both ways. If you treat your employees and customers as commodities, then they in turn will treat you as a commodity. Well, boo hoo to that. You reap what you sow.
So it runs an OS, has more sophisticated features than you might expect in a typical phone, and 3rd party applications are available. Which part of your definition of SmartPhone does it not meet?
... All in all it's "sophisticatedness" is a mixed bag.
Every phone runs an OS, so that by itself does not make a device a smartphone.
It has some sophisticated features, but it's lacking some basic features, like 3g, mms, non-purchased ringtones, java mobile, video recording,
And finally, 3rd party applications are NOT available. The only way to get 3rd party apps onto the iphone is if they are web apps or if you hack your phone (and if you look at the 3rd party web apps, they're a joke in comparison to the 3rd party apps for symbian or windows mobile).
I've always qualified smartphones as two features: internet aware, and open to 3rd party software. The iphone fails on the second requirement.
A small company you may have heard of called IBM made personal computers in around 1984. They're very much in business.
IBM is no longer a personal computer maker, so in that sense they are out of business.
I think the statement is right. Apple is the only personal computer maker from the early 80's that's still in the same business pretty much in the same form they were then (only bigger).
And any bank and its imbecile staff that allows you to pretend to be someone you aren't because they can't be arsed to properly check[1] should be liable for the loss themselves.
Oh please, like you can expect every bank teller everywhere to do a full background check for everyone that comes to make a withdrawal. Be realistic.
This is just the downside of opposing national id cards. People always think national id cards are something that only benefits the government, but this is not the case. National id cards offer a clear and simple way for you to prove who you are, and they make it easy to dramatically reduce identity theft. In my country identity theft is almost unheard of because we've had national id cards for ages.
Now, REALISTICALLY, how much hardcore gaming are you going to do on EITHER of these systems?
How about non-hardcode gaming? Just because this is a home system instead of a dedicated gaming box doesn't mean it shouldn't be able to play some games.
Besides, vista and OS X both use the hardware 3D engine to render the desktop, so 3D performance and dedicated video memory do in fact translate into desktop performance.
Faster processor
Largely irrelevant. The difference between a 2.2 and 2.0 processor is only seen in benchmarks. The CPU is the part of a system that least affects real-world performance for home systems.
More ram
I'll grant you that one, even though vista needs the extra ram to run well, whereas OS X's sweet spot for home use is 1 GB.
There is no need for such laws - people can "vote" with their wallets. Purchase alternative lighting if you feel the need, but don't assume you have any right to force others to do so.
The problem is that incadescent bulbs cost less to the individual than their real cost to society, especially when you make an objective calculation, instead of the biased-through-time calculation that human purchasers make (near cost is considered more expensive than delayed cost, even if the delayed cost is in fact higher).
Personally I'm in favor of taxing polluting products in such a way that it offsets their pollution. If incandescent bulbs are bad for the environment, tax them with money used to plant forests. That way prices reflect the true cost, and people still have choices.
What doesn't work is the current situation where we pretend there isn't a commons that's being used up.
A free market protects the consumer indirectly by allowing/supporting competition.
Exactly. The problem is formed by barriers to entry as a new competitor. Take the cell phone market. If you want to become a cell service provider, you need to provide nationwide (or at least state-wide) coverage. This means either leasing room on an existing network, or building or buying an entire network, which is too costly to imagine. Since the cost to entry in the market is so incredibly high, the existing players can incur quite a high cost on the customers before that cost starts to weigh heavily enough for it to be profitable to build out a new network.
In short, without legislation to ensure that new cell service providers can use the existing networks, you won't get much in the way of competition outside of the existing players. This allows the existing players to form an oligopoly and abuse their position.