Oddly a lot of your statements really aren't very valid.
Lets look at each one:
When you install a new Linux box, you usually take the latest version (because it's (almost) free), while a lot of people tend to stick to outdated (and therefore security-prone) Windows-versions.
When most install a new box they get a new OS. This is even the case for most whiteboxes (and almost all HPs, Dells, IBMs, etc...).
You don't need to upgrade any other programs either. Simple. Easy. Not so on Windows.
Service packs are OS releases that are an accumulation of many smaller patches. You can often get all of the smaller patches seperately (not always, and this changed most drastically in SP2).
Microsoft offers money to get virus authors after the damage has been done
Who wouldn't do this? Of course you want to proactive before the damage, but you also need to play hardball when the damage is done. I'd hope that Mozilla does the same thing.
Apache always run more websites than IIS at any time, still IIS was infected more ofen at any time. MS SQL only has 12% of the market, yet it was the only SQL-database being mass-infected so far (even MS itself got infected
Have you seen the data on IIS? It's pretty darn rock-solid. Is it perfect? No, but there has been tremendous strides in security. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_howard/archive/2004/ 04/01/105297.aspx
Most of the SQL exploits were on MSDE, not the actual SQL Server installation. There's a lot more copies of MSDE out there than SQL-Server, Oracle, DB2, and MySQL combined.
Working on a system crash dump is a lot easier than fixing a weird behavioral tweak that some user has seen that you can't repro with any consistency on your box. Of course if the issue in an isolated easy section of code, it makes it magnitudes easier, although it's still probably not extremely easy.
For example, on AIX, it seems that every once in a while the scheduler underschedules one of my high-priority jobs. It usually works correctly, but once a month, randomly the scheduler acts weird. Fix it.;-) And this should be an easy one as the scheduler really is close to a standalone piece of code.
You misinterpreted "backfire". I'm not saying that the gun always shoots at the originator, but rather that the gun always backfires on the current holder. Your definition of "non-free" is substantially than that of most of the people on the planet. For example I can't safely even simply read GPL code and then work on a commercial product, as there is fear of inadvertant taint. I can't contribute GPL code in a BSD program w/o contaminating it, nor use ideas from a GPL project in a class MIT license project (again w/o being sufficiently isolated, and exactly that means is not clear w/o being tested in court).
You (and most in the GPL camp) seem to believe tha commercial use of my idea without direct payment towards myself constitutes my code being used against me. This is absurd, and completely irrational, bordering on psychosis.
At the end of the day, you can continue to write GPL code, and I'll continue to avoid it. I guess that's the best that we can do.
That's actually a good description. A social contract that I usually want no part of.
But how would you feel if you spent 5 years writing a really great piece of software and then some company took it, added a few things, made it proprietary, and made millions freeloading on your work and not giving a penny back?
Honestly, if I spent five years working on something I wouldn't make it public... at least not immediately. Although after a few years, and when there was no big money to be made, I'd release it for free. Real free. Where other people working on their five-year project can look at my code, copy chunks of it, and then sell their program for profit when they're done. I have no problem with that.
When you get down to it, it is pretty unreasonable to do any significant amount free software development and not be re-imbursed in some fashion.
People get re-imbursed in many different ways. I spent a bit of time in academia and there are many who are content with enough money to live (grant money) and prestige. Do you think Knuth makes any real money off of his ACP books? He's effectively giving away his knowledge for free (and if you think he is simply regurgitating known facts, take a good deep look at the sections he is releasing).
With BSD, you are just a puny individual developer with no financial resources. A-squisha squisha..
In the end this seems to come down to money to you. To me it's about extending human knowledge. There are MANY people who refuse to even look at GPL code (and many are among the most brilliant minds I've ever met). Considering that the GPL has never been tested in court, many don't want to be potentially tainted for the rest of their software careers because they looked at GPL code. Frankly I don't see how anyone who cares about truly advancing software can write GPL code, but I can understand that there is difference of opinion... and considering that it is your code, you can do what you want with it.
So let me just be clear. I have no problem with making money from software. I've made my fair share, but I also believe that giving away software for FREE is not GPL. The GPL is a selfish license, disguised as freedom (although no rational person would ever use the term free to describe... leave it to RMS to find some good in it).
You're 100% wrong. How has some of my code become non-free? Is hello.c gone? This is as absurd as saying allowing gay marriages harms the institution. My marriage isn't affected. If XYZ Company make sells hello.c for $100, it doesn't change the fact that hello.c is still free, which was my intent.
If I don't want people to have complete access to code I write, I don't put it in the public domain.
Now how is my code being in the public domain voluntary poverty? That's as stupid as saying that Donald Knuth has given away all of his ideas for pennies. I put the code in the domain because I was GIVING IT AWAY. It was FREE.
But this really does cut to the crux of things. The GPL really isn't about giving anything away or real freedom. It is about some clever attempt to make things look free, but in reality, give nothing away. If I wanted to play that game, I'd write my own obscure legal contract.
And you're right, I give away software that one can use to build better software than I could. To me that's part of the competitive spirit. Whereas the gun you give away backfires on the holder. Who would want such a gun... except to give to their enemies.
That's incorrect. With the BSD license your code NEVER becomes non-free. There may be implementations that USE your code which are non-free, but your code is always free.
You're right... BSD is about giving away software and letting community build itself, iff the community wants to build itself.
GPL is about forcing a community to exist, whether it wants to or not.
I've given away code under no license and my belief was that the world benefits through use of my code, and some others will use my code and redist through GPL, BSD, proprietary, MIT, or no license. At the end the choice is up to them. And my code lives on to this as a free product...
"As soon as someone gives away a good enough solution, there are price pressures on everyone else. They have to prove they're worth the money somehow. How do you compete in a market that suddenly has an infinite supply, though?"
That's a good question. I think you have to let vendors innovate. Obviously if you tie the hands of the market leaders they won't be able to prove they're worth the money.
Admittedly I don't buy into this notion of a "monopoly". There is no finite resource of OSes that one can corner the market on. There is no government controlled OS market (like wireless bandwidth). Monopolies defined purely on customer choice seems a tad fake to me.
With that said, I do think price pressure is a good thing for everyone.
"It looks basically the same, but the government has decided that its in the publics interest to pay more for cars that are safer, with or without your approval."
And you don't think OSes and databases aren't much different than they were in the seventies or eighties? Compare Windows Server 2003 to DOS1.0 (if one existed).
In the same way a car is a commodity: drives you from point A to point B, uses gas, has a steering wheel, etc... an OS is a commodity (it provides a file system, command line, access to devices). Both have made drastic changes (try to browse slashdot on an old CP/M machine or drive a new NVidia video card with it).
My point... OSes are more different/advanced in 2004 compared to 1980 than cars are. Yet OSes are called the commodity and not cars.
My question is when is my car going to become cheaper? My car costs me more money every year, yet it's fundamentally the same thing sold in the sixties.
Airplanes are another example, and airplanes cost millions. Another old solution, old technology, yet expensive.
Your customers may not care about programming languages, but somebody better or you'll be left with gcc quality perf instead of icc or VC. If you think databasese are a commodity how do you explain the difference between Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server. There are vast technological differences that only a neophyte in database technology would not understand.
So I ask, why do you spend $20,000 for a car, which is old technology for a solution to a very old problem? I heard today that Lance Armstrong model of Trek bikes are going for $7,000, yet where is the outrage there (for that matter where are the FREE road bikes... I've yet to see any of those). Additionally both the biking and auto industry are also extremely patent heavy.
Even books are more expensive now than they used to be, and in terms of cost of reproduction more closely mimic software than most goods.
My question is why does everyone think that software should become free (without a driving market force), yet virutally everything else goes up in price?
If you end up thinking about every little thing like "strings" in C programs -- you're either writing your first C program, never heard of libraries|abstraction|reuse, or are just a ridiculously bad programmer.
There are some things that C++ makes easier through the use of certain idioms, but I think studies have not shown any real advantage in using C++ over C (or Java over C for that matter).
It's quite good from dabbling with it. Definitely better than VS2003. Apparently you don't even need to compile your application to get it to work, which is weird, but cool. I need to play with this more to understand how this works.
I've also tried some templated code I have, and that works well. We need to get some Boost type of people to try with their code and comment. Thus far I'm impressed, although admittedly I like Visual Studio since VS6.
I think the problem is that most definitions of freedom don't have these obligations tied into them. For example, the second definition of free from dictionary.com is "Not controlled by obligation or the will of another" (the first being about imprisonment).
Thus the GPL really is not free. By accepting GPL code I am now OBLIGATED to make my sources also GPL. By definition GPL is not free, and even worse it MAKES my code non-free.
I've never understood how RMS could make the argument that GPL implies free. Free is when you give me the code and I have absolutely no obligation upon use.
You argue that there is no reasonable definition of freedom that does not include responsibility, and I disagree. Any definition that does include responsibility is incorrect. Now maybe for a functioning system then freedoms must be TEMPERED with responsibility, but to confuse them as the same thing is either naivety or brainwashing at its finest.
The true agent of change is the hardware? How is that so?
IBM has billions upon billions of dollars. They could not fund a single piece of decent software over tha past 10 years because of Microsoft? The open source community has not yet been able to put together a single compelling app in 20 years... why? Is this also because Microsoft keeps open source developers from thinking?
Do you honestly think software would be that much different if Microsoft didn't exist? We'd all be using Macs right now, running OS9, and B/W displays, while the Linux community worked on ways to copy that interface.
You say "we need the competition"... the only way to bring about competition is to fine Microsoft?
Of course they have their interests at heart. So does GE, Intel, Walmart, Boeing, IBM, Red Hat, EA, Ford, Del Monte, General Mills, etc...
And if they do make horrible software, apparently people like it. I made a rational decision to migrate from Netscape to IE5 some years ago. My software experience improved dramatically from that point forward. If Microsoft made bad software, I'm not sure what to call Netscape. Stare Office and OpenOffice have consistently been worse for me than MS Office. Eclipse is not in the same league as Visual Studio. SQL Server is just as good as Oracle for what I need to do (small shop type of databases) -- and less buggy!
I guess I just like horrible software.
Absolutely. I loved games like Spelunker and Gorf as a kid. Recently at a party I went there and there were a bunch of about 8 kids around a TV playing some football game that was extremely exaggerated, and then later Halo. One of the kids exclaimed that this is his favorite game ever (he was like six years old).
I'm sure for these kids, this is the golden era.
Re:Use an NP-hard problem
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 1
The reason you don't want to do something like any dense linear-algebra is that you don't want both ends of the message (sender and receiver) having to deal with a lot of data.
The great thing about about NP-Complete problems is that the input is small... the time to compute is big.
It's easy to find problems where the time to compute scales directly with the input size (or even some polynomial, but that's still not as interesting, in this case, as exponential).
Re:Use an NP-hard problem
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The NP complete statement is simply wrong. There are NO computers in existence (except quantum and DNA computers) that can efficiently compute NP-Complete problems (at least that we know of, since NP != P is still open). What this means is that for any sized computer (even one bigger and faster than Deep Blue), it's easy to construct an NP-Complete that is tough to solve, but easy to verify. That's pretty much complexity 101.
Your point about scalability is odd. It's correct, but meaningless. There are no class of problems that you can't compute faster when the computer is faster. But saying a computer is faster is a vague statement since computers almost never uniformly get faster. CPUs get faster (even then there are tradeoffs with things like pipeline depth), memory gets faster, buses get faster, disks get faster, etc... The reason why problem scalability is an issue is because usually there is a bottleneck along one of the resources.
Now it is true that computers which are 10 years apart in age will have a different level of compute available. I imagine the amount of time it would take to construct the solution would be on the order of 1/10 second for a fast computer, and say 1-2 seconds for an old 486 (estimates). Sure not great for the 486, but how fast are you sending email with the 486? The point is that now the spammer who sends a million emails now must wait 1000000/10 seconds.
Actually NT has existed on PowerPC for a few years short of a decade. MS certainly didn't need Apple's help to port -- but that's not to say they didn't have it.
That argument is stupid. That says nothing about Windows. I can write a Linux email client that takes executables when you receive them and run them without the user ever reading them.
Likewise I can make a Windows client that changes the access rights for all mail such that you must type in a password and take a test before reading them.
Why are Windows apps the way they are? Because they are meant to be used by everyone. Not someone who knows what chmod 644 means. Linux clearly is not the answer, at least not the way it looks now.
That's one of the most absurd articles ever. Here's a snippet of it's brilliance:
" he's spending an itsy-bitsy part of his monopoly profits (the $6 billion spent by Gates' foundation is less than 2% of his net worth) to buy some drugs for a fraction of the dying. "
First $6 billion is about 10% of his net worth. Second name "1" other billionaire to donate 1/6 that amount to a Africa in any form. Third, of course he can only save a fraction. Name me a single person in the history of the world who has saved a complete continent from a major plague and/or disease through financial contribution?
Next statement in the article:
" Gates' game is given away by the fact that his Foundation has invested $200 million in the very drug companies stopping the shipment of low-cost AIDS drugs to Africa. "
If they have any investment of the foundations billions they will naturally have large chunks of money in pharma. And what better way to attempt to influence them but by having some money invested in them. This being evidence is extremely weakminded. That's supposed to give his game away?
"Gates says his plan is to reach one million people with medicine by the end of the decade. Another way to read it: he's locking in a trade system that will effectively block the delivery of medicine to over 20 million. "
That's so stupid it's hard to believe someone would write it. His plan is to reach 1 million. If he said he'd reach 19,999,999 people you'd start an article saying "Bill Gates kills an African!"
Anyways, you prove my point. Bill gives billions to fight a disease and people complain of conspiracy.
Then again most of these people will be feebleminded followers of intellectual lightweights like RMS.
SPEC is not a pure CPU benchmark. It is a "system benchmark". Of course you use the best compiler. SPEC tests everything. It tests the OS paging algorithm, it tests the compilers codegen, it tests the CPU, it tests the speed of various levels of cache, it tests the memory bus, it tests the implementation of transcendentals.
Now if you really want a test that tests the G5 vs the P4 only, then make sure you control for everything else. Make sure pow() is implemented with the exact same generated code, make sure that the system bus is exactly the same (this will take some work), make sure the off-chip caches are the same, make sure the OS is identical (you probaby need an OS built for running benchmarks so that they execute virtually the exact same instruction stream, given the ISA).
If you think you can assume that the compiler makes no difference, and gcc neutralizes all platforms, you've never used an Itanium. ISAs are designed assuming the existence of a compiler -- and most likely a good one.
While your argument may be beginning to hold some weight now, I find your position wrong for most of the history of computers.
Historical Microsoft has been on the low-end of the price scale. In fact this is why they are scrambling against Linux, because they've usually been able to beat competitors by undercutting them in price (often destroying markets at the same time).
I think you can argue that Microsoft has stifled innovation, but I don't think you can argue that they charge unreasonably high prices.
Furthermore, outside of the OS, most other pieces of software are easy to migrate away from. If Microsoft's prices were "unreasonably" high, don't you think someone else would have taken over the Office Suite market by now?
Slashdot Mirror
Which API was this? I'd never heard this before.
Lets look at each one:
When you install a new Linux box, you usually take the latest version (because it's (almost) free), while a lot of people tend to stick to outdated (and therefore security-prone) Windows-versions.
When most install a new box they get a new OS. This is even the case for most whiteboxes (and almost all HPs, Dells, IBMs, etc...).
You don't need to upgrade any other programs either. Simple. Easy. Not so on Windows.
Service packs are OS releases that are an accumulation of many smaller patches. You can often get all of the smaller patches seperately (not always, and this changed most drastically in SP2).
Microsoft offers money to get virus authors after the damage has been done
Who wouldn't do this? Of course you want to proactive before the damage, but you also need to play hardball when the damage is done. I'd hope that Mozilla does the same thing.
Apache always run more websites than IIS at any time, still IIS was infected more ofen at any time. MS SQL only has 12% of the market, yet it was the only SQL-database being mass-infected so far (even MS itself got infected
Have you seen the data on IIS? It's pretty darn rock-solid. Is it perfect? No, but there has been tremendous strides in security. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_howard/archive/2004/ 04/01/105297.aspx
Most of the SQL exploits were on MSDE, not the actual SQL Server installation. There's a lot more copies of MSDE out there than SQL-Server, Oracle, DB2, and MySQL combined.
Working on a system crash dump is a lot easier than fixing a weird behavioral tweak that some user has seen that you can't repro with any consistency on your box. Of course if the issue in an isolated easy section of code, it makes it magnitudes easier, although it's still probably not extremely easy. For example, on AIX, it seems that every once in a while the scheduler underschedules one of my high-priority jobs. It usually works correctly, but once a month, randomly the scheduler acts weird. Fix it. ;-) And this should be an easy one as the scheduler really is close to a standalone piece of code.
You (and most in the GPL camp) seem to believe tha commercial use of my idea without direct payment towards myself constitutes my code being used against me. This is absurd, and completely irrational, bordering on psychosis.
At the end of the day, you can continue to write GPL code, and I'll continue to avoid it. I guess that's the best that we can do.
That's actually a good description. A social contract that I usually want no part of.
But how would you feel if you spent 5 years writing a really great piece of software and then some company took it, added a few things, made it proprietary, and made millions freeloading on your work and not giving a penny back?
Honestly, if I spent five years working on something I wouldn't make it public... at least not immediately. Although after a few years, and when there was no big money to be made, I'd release it for free. Real free. Where other people working on their five-year project can look at my code, copy chunks of it, and then sell their program for profit when they're done. I have no problem with that.
When you get down to it, it is pretty unreasonable to do any significant amount free software development and not be re-imbursed in some fashion. People get re-imbursed in many different ways. I spent a bit of time in academia and there are many who are content with enough money to live (grant money) and prestige. Do you think Knuth makes any real money off of his ACP books? He's effectively giving away his knowledge for free (and if you think he is simply regurgitating known facts, take a good deep look at the sections he is releasing).
With BSD, you are just a puny individual developer with no financial resources. A-squisha squisha.. In the end this seems to come down to money to you. To me it's about extending human knowledge. There are MANY people who refuse to even look at GPL code (and many are among the most brilliant minds I've ever met). Considering that the GPL has never been tested in court, many don't want to be potentially tainted for the rest of their software careers because they looked at GPL code. Frankly I don't see how anyone who cares about truly advancing software can write GPL code, but I can understand that there is difference of opinion... and considering that it is your code, you can do what you want with it.
So let me just be clear. I have no problem with making money from software. I've made my fair share, but I also believe that giving away software for FREE is not GPL. The GPL is a selfish license, disguised as freedom (although no rational person would ever use the term free to describe... leave it to RMS to find some good in it).
If I don't want people to have complete access to code I write, I don't put it in the public domain.
Now how is my code being in the public domain voluntary poverty? That's as stupid as saying that Donald Knuth has given away all of his ideas for pennies. I put the code in the domain because I was GIVING IT AWAY. It was FREE.
But this really does cut to the crux of things. The GPL really isn't about giving anything away or real freedom. It is about some clever attempt to make things look free, but in reality, give nothing away. If I wanted to play that game, I'd write my own obscure legal contract.
And you're right, I give away software that one can use to build better software than I could. To me that's part of the competitive spirit. Whereas the gun you give away backfires on the holder. Who would want such a gun... except to give to their enemies.
You're right... BSD is about giving away software and letting community build itself, iff the community wants to build itself.
GPL is about forcing a community to exist, whether it wants to or not.
I've given away code under no license and my belief was that the world benefits through use of my code, and some others will use my code and redist through GPL, BSD, proprietary, MIT, or no license. At the end the choice is up to them. And my code lives on to this as a free product...
Now that's freedom.
Well except Windows runs on other platforms as well... including Alpha, PowerPC, and Itanium.
That's a good question. I think you have to let vendors innovate. Obviously if you tie the hands of the market leaders they won't be able to prove they're worth the money.
Admittedly I don't buy into this notion of a "monopoly". There is no finite resource of OSes that one can corner the market on. There is no government controlled OS market (like wireless bandwidth). Monopolies defined purely on customer choice seems a tad fake to me.
With that said, I do think price pressure is a good thing for everyone.
And you don't think OSes and databases aren't much different than they were in the seventies or eighties? Compare Windows Server 2003 to DOS1.0 (if one existed).
In the same way a car is a commodity: drives you from point A to point B, uses gas, has a steering wheel, etc... an OS is a commodity (it provides a file system, command line, access to devices). Both have made drastic changes (try to browse slashdot on an old CP/M machine or drive a new NVidia video card with it).
My point... OSes are more different/advanced in 2004 compared to 1980 than cars are. Yet OSes are called the commodity and not cars.
Airplanes are another example, and airplanes cost millions. Another old solution, old technology, yet expensive.
Your customers may not care about programming languages, but somebody better or you'll be left with gcc quality perf instead of icc or VC. If you think databasese are a commodity how do you explain the difference between Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server. There are vast technological differences that only a neophyte in database technology would not understand.
So I ask, why do you spend $20,000 for a car, which is old technology for a solution to a very old problem? I heard today that Lance Armstrong model of Trek bikes are going for $7,000, yet where is the outrage there (for that matter where are the FREE road bikes... I've yet to see any of those). Additionally both the biking and auto industry are also extremely patent heavy.
Even books are more expensive now than they used to be, and in terms of cost of reproduction more closely mimic software than most goods.
My question is why does everyone think that software should become free (without a driving market force), yet virutally everything else goes up in price?
There are some things that C++ makes easier through the use of certain idioms, but I think studies have not shown any real advantage in using C++ over C (or Java over C for that matter).
I've also tried some templated code I have, and that works well. We need to get some Boost type of people to try with their code and comment. Thus far I'm impressed, although admittedly I like Visual Studio since VS6.
Thus the GPL really is not free. By accepting GPL code I am now OBLIGATED to make my sources also GPL. By definition GPL is not free, and even worse it MAKES my code non-free.
I've never understood how RMS could make the argument that GPL implies free. Free is when you give me the code and I have absolutely no obligation upon use.
You argue that there is no reasonable definition of freedom that does not include responsibility, and I disagree. Any definition that does include responsibility is incorrect. Now maybe for a functioning system then freedoms must be TEMPERED with responsibility, but to confuse them as the same thing is either naivety or brainwashing at its finest.
IBM has billions upon billions of dollars. They could not fund a single piece of decent software over tha past 10 years because of Microsoft? The open source community has not yet been able to put together a single compelling app in 20 years... why? Is this also because Microsoft keeps open source developers from thinking?
Do you honestly think software would be that much different if Microsoft didn't exist? We'd all be using Macs right now, running OS9, and B/W displays, while the Linux community worked on ways to copy that interface.
You say "we need the competition"... the only way to bring about competition is to fine Microsoft? Of course they have their interests at heart. So does GE, Intel, Walmart, Boeing, IBM, Red Hat, EA, Ford, Del Monte, General Mills, etc... And if they do make horrible software, apparently people like it. I made a rational decision to migrate from Netscape to IE5 some years ago. My software experience improved dramatically from that point forward. If Microsoft made bad software, I'm not sure what to call Netscape. Stare Office and OpenOffice have consistently been worse for me than MS Office. Eclipse is not in the same league as Visual Studio. SQL Server is just as good as Oracle for what I need to do (small shop type of databases) -- and less buggy! I guess I just like horrible software.
Absolutely. I loved games like Spelunker and Gorf as a kid. Recently at a party I went there and there were a bunch of about 8 kids around a TV playing some football game that was extremely exaggerated, and then later Halo. One of the kids exclaimed that this is his favorite game ever (he was like six years old). I'm sure for these kids, this is the golden era.
The reason you don't want to do something like any dense linear-algebra is that you don't want both ends of the message (sender and receiver) having to deal with a lot of data. The great thing about about NP-Complete problems is that the input is small... the time to compute is big. It's easy to find problems where the time to compute scales directly with the input size (or even some polynomial, but that's still not as interesting, in this case, as exponential).
Your point about scalability is odd. It's correct, but meaningless. There are no class of problems that you can't compute faster when the computer is faster. But saying a computer is faster is a vague statement since computers almost never uniformly get faster. CPUs get faster (even then there are tradeoffs with things like pipeline depth), memory gets faster, buses get faster, disks get faster, etc... The reason why problem scalability is an issue is because usually there is a bottleneck along one of the resources.
Now it is true that computers which are 10 years apart in age will have a different level of compute available. I imagine the amount of time it would take to construct the solution would be on the order of 1/10 second for a fast computer, and say 1-2 seconds for an old 486 (estimates). Sure not great for the 486, but how fast are you sending email with the 486? The point is that now the spammer who sends a million emails now must wait 1000000/10 seconds.
Actually NT has existed on PowerPC for a few years short of a decade. MS certainly didn't need Apple's help to port -- but that's not to say they didn't have it.
Likewise I can make a Windows client that changes the access rights for all mail such that you must type in a password and take a test before reading them.
Why are Windows apps the way they are? Because they are meant to be used by everyone. Not someone who knows what chmod 644 means. Linux clearly is not the answer, at least not the way it looks now.
First $6 billion is about 10% of his net worth. Second name "1" other billionaire to donate 1/6 that amount to a Africa in any form. Third, of course he can only save a fraction. Name me a single person in the history of the world who has saved a complete continent from a major plague and/or disease through financial contribution?
Next statement in the article: " Gates' game is given away by the fact that his Foundation has invested $200 million in the very drug companies stopping the shipment of low-cost AIDS drugs to Africa. " If they have any investment of the foundations billions they will naturally have large chunks of money in pharma. And what better way to attempt to influence them but by having some money invested in them. This being evidence is extremely weakminded. That's supposed to give his game away?
"Gates says his plan is to reach one million people with medicine by the end of the decade. Another way to read it: he's locking in a trade system that will effectively block the delivery of medicine to over 20 million. "
That's so stupid it's hard to believe someone would write it. His plan is to reach 1 million. If he said he'd reach 19,999,999 people you'd start an article saying "Bill Gates kills an African!"
Anyways, you prove my point. Bill gives billions to fight a disease and people complain of conspiracy.
Then again most of these people will be feebleminded followers of intellectual lightweights like RMS.
It does not matter what Microsoft does, most people here will simply say it is no good.
SPEC is not a pure CPU benchmark. It is a "system benchmark". Of course you use the best compiler. SPEC tests everything. It tests the OS paging algorithm, it tests the compilers codegen, it tests the CPU, it tests the speed of various levels of cache, it tests the memory bus, it tests the implementation of transcendentals.
Now if you really want a test that tests the G5 vs the P4 only, then make sure you control for everything else. Make sure pow() is implemented with the exact same generated code, make sure that the system bus is exactly the same (this will take some work), make sure the off-chip caches are the same, make sure the OS is identical (you probaby need an OS built for running benchmarks so that they execute virtually the exact same instruction stream, given the ISA).
If you think you can assume that the compiler makes no difference, and gcc neutralizes all platforms, you've never used an Itanium. ISAs are designed assuming the existence of a compiler -- and most likely a good one.
While your argument may be beginning to hold some weight now, I find your position wrong for most of the history of computers. Historical Microsoft has been on the low-end of the price scale. In fact this is why they are scrambling against Linux, because they've usually been able to beat competitors by undercutting them in price (often destroying markets at the same time). I think you can argue that Microsoft has stifled innovation, but I don't think you can argue that they charge unreasonably high prices. Furthermore, outside of the OS, most other pieces of software are easy to migrate away from. If Microsoft's prices were "unreasonably" high, don't you think someone else would have taken over the Office Suite market by now?