OK, let's say that I, for instance, who sells nothing on Ebay, was to make an application to join this particular pool. From the standpoint of the insurance company, I would simply be another premium payer assigned to the rates of this particular pool. I would be no less nor more of a pay out potential than any other people in the pool who were $1K-a-month Ebay merchants. But I would be prohibited from joining the pool because I wasn't an Ebay merchant. Therefore, the only reason to deny me coverage from the standpoint of the insurance company would be that Ebay was paying a large percentage of the premiums for each of its merchants, and therefore would not subsidize my premium because I wasn't an Ebay merchant. So how big a premium slice is Ebay actually paying out of its own pocket for each of its merchants?
Parenthetically, if a pool as small as the Ebay merchants pool can get "reduced" rates from a carrier (reduced from what a self-employed individual would have to pay), why can't the entire nation be considered a "pool" and therefore subject to rates far reduced over their current levels? If members of a pool get reduced rates compared to non members, it has to ultimately be deduced that the non-pool premium payers are subsidizing the premium payers who belong to the pool. And that stinks, I think. Costs ought to be divided equally with no policy holder getting special economic treatment from an insurance carrier simply because he's involved with a pool somewhere.
If I used nothing but my OS and two or three software pieces I could probably go "Windependence," too. But I buy a lot of software, and a lot of games which I enjoy, and so I need to be "Windependent" about like a hole in the head...:)
I don't value my computers for the OS's they run, but I value my OS's for the software they support.
Kind of ironic that you label a recordable device as "low end" but put a playback-only device in a "high-end" position.
Years ago the "laser disc" was introduced, which was very similar to current DVD in that it was a playback-only device but offered much higher playback quality than VHS at the time (although Laser Discs were as large as record albums and housed in similar jackets.) The Laser Disc was a huge flop, primarily because it could not record--which is a function I think you'll find is very important to a lot of people.
I'll buy DVD when it becomes both recordable, reliable, and relatively inexpensive.
Basically, I don't buy my media. I rent it, or I watch it directly from satellite or digital cable. But I don't buy it, period.
My local video store, indeed all of the local video stores in my area, are 5% DVD and 95% VHS. I have a couple of SVHS, Hi-Fi, Hi-Quality VCRs which I bought a couple of years ago at Best Buys for the unbelievably low price of $130 each. Playback and sound quality is excellent.
Mainly, it's my opinion that DVD won't really catch on until the units become recordable and can essentially match the function of current VCR technology--which, because they are not recording devices, the current crop of DVD playback machines does not match.
It's nice to be able to record on reusable media. I honestly thought DVD would have reached that point by now, but suffice it to say that if CC really intends to drop VHS/SVHS machines, the company ownership is exceedingly stupid...:)
DVD makes a better playback platform, no question. But it's nowhere near as functional as it can't yet record on cheap, reusable media.
The tapes will be smaller than normal VHS tapes, as CC will be introducing P&S squared, or Pan in Scan in Pan in Scan, where all the annoying extra scenery is removed, leaving only the direct center of the screen. Average viewers have noted that "the image looks bigger" when played on entry-level tv's.
What on earth are you talking about?...:)
"Annoying extra scenery"....???? Good grief, are you saying they'll be cropping the image on the sides and the top/bottom to exclude the visual information in the original? That's horrible, if that's what you're saying.
And who on earth wants "performance that degrades over time"...?
These people probably are trying to raise research money.
Personally, I think I'll get excited when they figure out how to take an individual's cells and clone an organ directly from them. Seems as if "stem-cell" created organs will suffer all of the rejection problems of a transplant, and it would be such a pity to receive a spanking new thymus only to contract and die from viral pnuemonia as the result of the drugs you must take to beat down your immune system so that the alien tissue won't be rejected/absorbed by your body.
...of any sort of "centralization" of information on American citizens of any type. I don't like.net for this reason and have no plans to join it, and on a smaller scale M$'s Product Activation is the sole element of WinXP which I think is so blatently bad that it mars the otherwise excellent work the company has done with the XP version of the OS.
Let me also add that with the aid of Zone Alarm Pro I am also seeing a wide variety M$ software attempting access the Internet with no rhyme or reason--such as, most recently, I've noticed that if I attempt to block M$ Backup from accessing the 'net prior to doing a back up--the program will freeze and I am unable to complete my local backup. Why is my XP BACKUP program trying to access the 'net? Hopefully, someone here will know and can relieve me with an innocuous explanation. It may simply be trying to access my LAN for some reason--but it's hard to say using ZA Pro 3.x. This sort of thing is bewildering. It seems there are many more programs within XP that routinely seek 'net access for some reason or another--for instance, I can understand why "Help" and so on accesses the Internet as it conveniently compiles an on-line database of help topics from the M$ knowledge base--I really like that feature! But the rest obviously go far beyond Product Activation, and I'd like to know why. Wouldn't you?
I loathe PA, and have already had to call in more than once when installing to my own home machines for reasons that were inexplicable to me, and at certain times when I expected to have to call in (such as the time I replaced motherboard and cpu) I was puzzled by the fact that I did not have to call--nor even to repeat PA over the 'net automatically! Go figure.
But I do have to admit in my honest bones: isn't this just the type of information gathering computers are well suited for? Of course it is. That's my dilemma--the hobby and profession I've enjoyed so much for the past decade and seven years has within it the seeds for some very ugly things like this to begin flowering at some point. And when it does--will my professional and personal activities be considered a part of the problem--or a part of the cure?
No kidding--this really bothers me sometimes. It reminds me of the nuclear scientists so wrapped up in the "interesting" minutiae of physics and so forth that they completely lost track of the ultimate use to which their work could be put when it was completed. Of course, the fact that there was a war going on is certainly mitigating. But still, after their work had borne its "fruit" it seemed that all their efforts to derail a nuclear arms race after it had begun were in vain.
Is that what's happening to us? Are we contributing to a monster's creation--a creation which when completed we will be utterly helpless to stop? I wish I knew because it really bothers me--at times.
Palm and all palm-like things. Current Palm CPUs are, I think, inferior even to Netwon ones when CPU functionality is concerned. Also a lot of embedded systems remain with slow CPUs or even become slow.
So, to investigate this twisted logic, I've got to think that Palm software is worse than Newton software merely because, in your opinion, the Newton had a "better" cpu? And what on earth have embedded cpus got to do with anything? The "software" for embedded use is the simplest because it has to be. Of course, neither of these opinions address the relative quality of software, other than to junk everything together under broad categories sorted by cpu "betterness."
You have yet to explain why better software can't be written for better cpus, and that's where your argument (I'm being charitable) disintegrates. In fact, the whole concept behind building better cpus is that of writing better software.
Surely, positively, you cannot believe that MS-DOS 3.2 is "better software" than Win2K or WinXP??? Surely, not. MS-DOS sucked in all its forms, and oh, how I loathed it. AmigaDOS, for instance, was far better, but Commodore didn't have enough sense to clone its hardware (like Apple) and so that's why software as rotten as MS-DOS won out in the end. No big mystery there at all--no unscrupulous business practices required.
None of those CPUs types even constitute separate market, such as x86 CPUs/Wintel.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with your argument--that better cpus were and are designed specifically to allow for worse software. Man, it must be tough to be so biased that you can come up with concepts like this....:) So *now* you're saying--what you really intended to say all along--is that your better cpu = worse software rule only applies to x86/Microsoft. Whew.
Sun probably loses money on Solaris and Java and only recovers them through hardware sales. And yes, Java is a great example of shitty software that is necessary to justify wide use of overblown CPUs.
I think you should take a look at SUN's ledger. If they lose money on Solaris and Java but "recover it" through hardware sales, that's all well and good, but without Solaris just how much hardware would SUN sell? I can't believe we agree on Java. Not only is SUN's Java truly shitty, but SUN's licensing provisions for it are, ironically, far more restrictive than any of M$'s, as far as I can see. But as far as Solaris goes, a fair number of people must not agree with you that it's crummy, because they keep buying it year after year to run on SUN's cpus which, according to SUN, get better year after year. Is SUN also guilty of "forcing shitty software on the public," too?
The existence of cheap overblown CPUs is a positive result of consumers being fed shitty software. So what?
Your logic is simply impenetrable. There's no "so what?" to talk about. Software developers holler year after year for better hardware, and as the technology is available, the hardware companies oblige to the extent they can. Also, they *compete* among each other to build better hardware, so as to give them a marketing edge. Then the software developers make use of that hardware. The pattern has been the same for as long as I can remember. Where you're getting the idea that this equates to "shitty software" is absolutely beyond me. The software I'm running today is a darn sight better than what I was running 15 years ago, and I certainly am not going to object to economies of scale making hardware (and software) much less expensive today than it was 15 years ago. I think I'd have to be a moron to object.
The existence of Unix is a positive result of the AT&T monopoly, and a result of existence of UCB, what is the result of existence of California as a state within US, what is the result of bloody wars, and, earlier in the history, a result of extermination of native population. Good justification for those things, too?
The existence of UNIX, California, etc., might well be the result of the things you mention above (very argumentative, though), but the *continuation* of all of those things surely is not. UNIX, California, and the rest have long outlived what you deem as their causes. Sorry, but neither you nor anyone else is going to put me on a silly guilt trip about history I had no part in writing.
Your logic, again, is incredibly twisted. In WWII we lost millions of men--would it have been preferable to have saved those lives so that the Third Reich would now own Europe, and Japan the Asian-Pacific? Oh, forget it--this is too twisted a path for me. BTW, AT&T was a government-protected, government-sanctioned monopoly against which it was illegal to form a competing company. That bears no resemblance whatever to M$ (which I assume is your intended parallel.)
Why would a company have to be indebted to anyone? Especially at the extent of forcing a blatant perjury by its CEO?
First, please elaborate on whom it was, in your opinion, committed "blatant perjury." I recall no perjury charges ever coming up during the course of these events, let alone anyone being found guilty of committing perjury. What are you talking about?
Secondly, what sort of world do you imagine we inhabit? I hate to be the one to break it to you, but we don't live in a fantasy-utopia where events are ordered by someone's idea of perfection--even someone's *twisted* idea of perfection...:)
Steve Jobs went to M$, hat in hand, and humbly begged for money to save his beloved Apple--is he, also, to be condemned? What do you mean by "why would a company be indebted to anyone"...? Have you no idea at all of how the wheels that feed you turn in our society?
The point I was making was a very simply one: M$ has supported AMD right out of the starting gate. Sometimes, whether we like it or not, companies wind up helping each other. Oh, it's not altruistic, by any means. It's merely the old "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" axiom come to life. Like I said, nobody else has helped to speed along AMD's acceptance in the marketplace like M$--and AMD (Sanders) is not so stupid that he doesn't know it. M$ wasn't forced to do this--AMD didn't pay M$ to do it--M$ chose to do it at its own expense. And the result is that we now have some real competition in the marketplace instead of the monopoly that Intel *was* spoon-feeding us hardware all too slowly and at outrageous prices. Rant all you want about "cheap, bloated cpus" but you will find yourself in small company, indeed.
"Saying a lie with a lot of venom doesn't make it true.
???? Saying a lie with little venom doesn't make it true, either. The facts are very plain to see: unless Jackson had first declared M$ a "monopoly"--labeled the company as such legally--there would have been *no* penalty phase as we see happening now--because nothing M$ had done was outside the scope of the normal business activities that Apple and SUN and Coke and Pepsi and every large corporation--including Disney, for crying out loud--engage in routinely--LEGAL business practices, if you didn't know. Things like volume discounts and exclusive deals are completely and 100% LEGAL for companies and they engage in these practices on a daily basis with impunity--Apple does it, for God's sake. The only difference in M$'s case is the superficial legal tag of "monopoly" that Jackson's court attached to M$.
The ignorance surrounding this issue is appalling. Only because M$ had the ill-fortune to be decalared a "monopoly" (when it's so easy to point out the competition M$ has that companies like Standard Oil and AT&T *never* had) by a prejudiced judge in a kangaroo court (and the Appellate court agreed that Jackson was rogue, therefore throwing out his proposed remedies--a harsher condemnation Jackson could not have received at their hands for his prejudiced conduct--I believe their personal renunciation of Jackson comprised several pages of their order.) I fail to see how a judge can be prejudiced and yet have his "findings of fact" upheld, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. Just another lesson that life isn't always what any of us think it "should" be.
Anyway, the *fact* is that unless the government labels you a monopoly, nothing M$ did, or was accused of doing, would be illegal for you. M$'s illegalities were proclaimed *after* the government informed M$ that it was a "monopoly" and therefore could not do business like everybody else. The question of how M$ was supposed to know it was a monopoly before being declared one by the government has never been addressed--and never will be, IMHO.
Is that "fair"? Of course not. But that's life.
"Like, demanding hardware companies to abandon ISA bus when all PCI modems were inferior Windows-only models? Demanding ACPI to be enabled even though it's still buggy?
Excuse me--demanding???? My cable modem's a hardware modem, and before that I owned external US Robotics modems--never used a software modem in my life--and never will. The abundance of hardware modems easily available seems to convince me that M$'s "demand" in this case went over like a lead balloon. More proof of M$'s impotence in direct opposition to this "monopoly" finding by a court full of lawyers who couldn't intelligently explain the difference between a floppy disk and a ram disk??? It would appear so--but then I never heard that M$ "demanded" Win modems in the first place. (Of course, they pushed them because M$ is, after all, a software company primarily.) But if they "demanded" them, apparently those demands fell on the deaf ears of the market, then.
As far as abandoning the ISA bus--I happen to think that's a good idea.
That doesn't even parse without errors, leave alone making sense.
I think it makes perfect sense (and parses OK, too.) The point there was that "open-source" advocates are like the horse behind the carrot. The horse is ever running toward the carrot held before him by extension of his harness, yet he never gets it, but he runs all the same. They believe in this vague, nebulous ideal of "open source" which, when pressed, they confess to not being able to understand all that well themselves. That's because "open-source" is a myth--a legend--almost a religion, to some. How and why "open source" is "better" than private development these advocates cannot say. But they like the idea behind open source which is so seductive--the idea of a random bunch of programmers "freely" cooperating with each other to produce masterpieces of code. Great idea, but where's the code to prove it? Surely, not to be found in Netscape's current browsers. And Linux, under the mantle of open source, is so fragmented that the majority of the public still doesn't know what it is, and the majority of people who run Linux usually do so in a dual-boot configuration so that they can run Windows to have some selection of software to choose from.
It seems to me that advocates of open source are chasing the ideal with no more real thought about it than the horse expends in thinking about the carrot he'll never get to eat.
Well, goh-lee, I guess *all* software is getting "worse" since...OK, you tell me--which current hardware company today--not dependent on M$--is shipping "better software with worse cpus"...??? Come...on...let it out! I wanna' know! Whose cpus are worse today than they were a decade ago???
Like it or not, there is an x86 hardware market which began long ago. There were and are also several other computer hardware markets that began around the same period--SUN, Apple, etc. ad infinitum. They are ALL making better cpus today than they used to make. Am I supposed to think that this means they are ALL writing worse software? Man, that's got to be the weirdest attempt at a correlation I've ever heard.
Am I supposed to think I have *more freedom* under the SUN (sic) than I have running Windows? Puh-lease....no possible way on earth that's true. Same with Apple...ditto on down the line. Where's the FREEDOM in those camps? I can't see it!
SUN has been as altruistic as SCROOGE with its "open-platform" java initiatives. Did you know that one Java licensee doesn't know what the other Java licensee is paying SUN for the privilege? Oh--Paradise! Did you know that SUN arbitrarily decides which of its Java licensees are "towing the line" and which aren't--based on a fluctuating, ever-changing scale that SUN adopts as needed to suit SUN's immediate political--if not financial--goals? (Maybe behind the Iron Curtain of old this would be freedom--one candidate, one party, but you get to vote--I dunno. Sheeesh.)
The hypocrisy of people is utterly unbelievable. They'll stick with x86 hardware because they have by far the best choices in hardware available, not to mention the best prices, not to mention more software--and yet...and yet...they still manage to convince themselves that the house that M$ built is the least free of them all. That standardization sucks. You think so? Go SUN, then and learn. Go Apple and be reborn! I'm gonna' puke.
Heh-Heh....got one word for you--MAC! Yea, run out and buy a Mac and check out all the "freedom" and "choices" and so forth that you'll get on that side of the fence. Or, here's one--run out and buy a Java license from SUN--and let Freedom ring, baby!
Some of you guys haven't a clue.
And as far as "undue influence" goes...seems to me it wasn't Gates who hired Bork and Dole to go to Washington to lobby Congress--seems to me that it was McNealy and Barksdale who emptied their respective companies' coffers of millions of $$$ trying to Influence Peddle in Washington (right before Barksdale engorged Netscape's coffers with $4 billion AOL bucks--AFTER the company had been "so crippled" it could no longer "compete," or so Barksdale informed the Congress with a straight face.)
And you want to talk about "unjustified influence outside its industry"...???? Nope--Gates is definitely the runner up in that category--and that's not a defense of Gates, btw. That's what you call an impartial view of the facts as they happened.
Is AMD indebted to M$--you BETCHA'! To whom else might AMD BE indebted? Got a port done by Apple at Apple's own expense that runs OSX on Athlon platforms? Where's SUN's software compiled for x86 and AMD that's really given AMD a shot in the arm? I don't SEE 'UM.....
Some of you guys live in a pure-tee fantasy land. Some of you guys think--I mean, you REALLY THINK, that M$ is "out for itself" while "everybody else" is willing to give away the farm to support this cockeyed idea of "Open Source"--of which right now, IMHO, Linux derivatives and Netscape are the highest expression.
But I guess, in the narrow-minded little world of "Let's Kill M$" psychology, there's just no ROOM, is there, to consider the behavior of M$ as compared to its competitors SUN, IBM, APPLE, and all the rest--and how these companies treat THEIR markets????
"Turned around," indeed. What needs to be "turned around" in this whole pitiful circus is the idea that M$ is "doing things" it's competitors aren't--indeed, that M$ is even *matching* the sort of closed-shop hardware & software envrironment its competitors are running. Which only brings us full circle to the reasons WHY most people choose x86/Windows/Linux, whatever--to anything Apple or SUN ever produced. But hell, who cares about being open-minded so long as we can have the carrot of "open-source" dangled in front of us? A horse-and-carrot story this truly is.
We've already got tons of laws on the books, at both the state and Federal levels, prohibiting child pornography. This attempt at yet another law is sad for a couple of reasons:
(1) It's representative of an ever-growing faction in our society which is both ignorant of the laws we already have, and under the delusion that passing more/similar/broader laws will somehow enhance their protection so that it surpasses the protections they already enjoy under current statutes.
(2) It's politically motivated, as we see in the fact that both the Bush and Clinton administrations favored it, even though the legal teams in both administrations could've guessed at its ultimate failure. Afraid to be portrayed as "pro-child pornography," it's the type of law any Administration would back regardless of how poor the law itself as written actually is.
What happens is that child pornography is rightfully considered a scourge which requires action by all thinking adults, and so superfluous laws like this are crafted providing a section of the populace with the feeling that "something is being done" about child pornography. Sadly, all that was "being done" about it in this case is the crafting of a bad law. A law that failed muster in the end precisely because it was a bad law, and for no other reason.
The saddest part of all are the individuals who will no doubt feel that because this law was struck down that nothing whatever is "being done" about child pornography. A review of all of the current law in effect concerning child pornography should easily disabuse even the most hardened skeptic of that notion.
The problem with this law as it seems to me is that it makes no distinction between fantasy and reality. There is a distinct difference between fictional child pornography (which does not involve actual children) and real child pornography (which does.) If we start imprisoning people because of what they think as opposed to what they do, that will be the saddest day of all.
Certainly, a rational argument can be made that no depiction of child pornography, whether fictional or real, is of any worth to society, or could not conceivably harm a predisposed individual. But that is hardly the point. We cannot imprison people merely because of their imaginations, regardless of how scandalous we may deem those imaginations, and that is precisely the point. It's only when child pornography passes the realm of imagination and blunders into acts involving real children that people should face imprisonment. And there are already plenty of laws on the books to deal with that.
What the patent office should only be doing anyway, IMHO, is patenting specifics. Here's what I mean:
Instead of granting patents this way:
"A device which does this sort of thing and that sort of thing...."
a true patent should consist of:
"The following schematic for [said] device is hereby patented."
This would allow companies to share equally among general ideas, restricting their "ownership" of the idea itself to the bounds of the actual and particular engineering schematics by which the device is manufactured. Ergo, as many companies as would like can make a wheel, whereas the companies themselves may make ownership claims only to wheels of a specific type, wheels which correspond *exactly* to the design schematics enclosed with the patents.
The patenting of general concepts, regardless of how "technical" and specific they may sound to the layman, has always been a very poor idea, and could only have been thought up by the forerunner of today's "modern" patent lawyer.
While we're at it, we can also do the same with SUN, Apple, Intel, IBM, and--you name it! Golly, if all of us get together we can invalidate the patent system even moreso than it already is!
[not]
The problem with all of this, which must have M$'s competitors chuckling with absolute glee, is that the things M$ is being accused of here--volume selling discounts, special promotional deals, etc., are being done routinely by every single major company in the US of A.
Most people are just plain ignorant of how large-scale business deals are done, and so all of this stuff sounds very sinister and leaves the quite false impression that M$ is doing something unusual and harsh in its business dealings with its customers, when the fact is that M$ is doing what SUN, AOL, IBM, Intel, Dell, Disney, etc. do every single day. The difference is that these companies aren't having it all scrutinized in a court room by a judge who also doesn't understand the way business is done on this level in the US. Lots of people are just plain ignorant of these facts, and it's really too bad.
What's really amzing to me is the "monopolist" findings in the first place. What competition did Standard Oil or AT&T have at the time they were declared monopolies and broken up? None, and that's why it's laughable to see M$, which competes with IBM, for instance, a company that every year grosses 5-6x the revenue M$ hauls in--yet IBM remains tucked away in the background never to be considered. How about the competition M$ engages in continuoulsy with SUN, a multi-billion-dollar-a-year hardware and software business which often competes directly with Microsoft. What about AOL? Even in the X-Box arena, the only hardware M$ really makes and sells as a "system", competition simply abounds out of the yin-yang against several powerful system vendors like Sony. So where does this nonsense come from that Microsoft has no competition? It's ridiculous, M$ competes furiously every day.
But, see, now that M$ has been officially declared a "monopolist" (regardless of how spurious the grounds), the rules change and suddenly the government can actively discriminate against M$ and give it substandard treatment among all the other officially non-monopolist companies M$ competes with daily.
Basically, the monopolistic finding is merely a pretense to allow government to regulate the company, an action brought about by years of intense and expensive political lobbyists paid for by M$'s competitors who simply were unable to keep up with Microsoft in the marketplace.
So far, the government has set itself up as quite the dupe of these other companies and special interest groups, and seemingly has no idea of the extent it's being used. that such a thing could happen is remarkable, I think, an indicates just how sub-par our judicial system has become. Was Karl Marx right after all--is a capatilist government merely a reflection of economic interests in the society after all?
The last point to me is the most telling. Gateway is complaining that M$ penalizes it by cutting off promotional funds if OEMs don't agree to exclusively sell Windows on all of their PC's. Gateway says it's a loss of $10 a box, which I agree can add up to a lot of money. But there's another side of the coin here too--does anyone really think Gateway would lose sales because it would add back in that $10 it supposedly lost from M$ to the price of its Windows systems? I mean, does anyone seriously believe that a $10 price-hike on Gatway systems will send the company to the poor house? Geez, that's ludicrous. Nobody--and I mean nobody, is going to refrain from buying a Gateway because of a $10 price hike on an entire PC! If they refuse Gateway, it will be for other reasons besides paying an extra $10 per system, I assure you. So to me that whole line of reasoning is ludicrous and hypocritical. Gatway could add $10 bucks to price of each system it sells and nullify the M$ advantage at the same time.
Still another way to view the situation is that Gateway would then be free to offer Linux and other systems--even systems without an OS at all, and their $10 surcharge would eliminate the so-called penalties M$ wants to levy. Gateway might just be suprised if deamnd for OS-less systems climbed way up, or Linux systems increased--and the upshot is that Gateway might actually come out BETTER financially to tell M$ to stick it's $10 where the sun doesn't shine!
But that's all a matter of individual choices Gateway has to make as a company, isn't it? They can either let Microsoft dictate policy to them, or they can tell M$ what they'll buy and what they won't buy, and set their own prices and standards. This is all a matter of Gateway looking for "easy money" which M$ is all too willing to provide--and Gateway is a taker. M$ *does* offer them other options--but it's entirely Gateway's responsibility if it chooses to try and get every dime it can squeeze out of M$ instead of to offset M$'s contributions through tiny system-price hikes, and the opneing up of choice in its product base for customers.
Now, the only thing I thoroughly dislike about M$'s policies is the threat of terminating an OEM's license to sell its software if the OEM doesn't "play ball." I would favor some regulation there--most definitely. IMHO, the *only* legitimate excuse M$ ought to be able to use to cut off an OEM is non-payment for product. And that's it--there ought to be no more exceptions, period.
Last, take a look at Dell, the most successfull of the sytem vendors out there. Wouldn't it be so much fun to examine the exclusive deals Intel has made with Dell to EXCLUDE AMD systems for Dell? Is this not the same thing, exactly that M$ is being accused of doing? I daresay Dell has preferential treatment from Intel in a number of areas in return for going 100% Intel. Is that any different at all from the preferential treatment M$ gives OEMs for going 100% M$? I can't see how it's a bit different at all. That's probably why Dell has so little comment on these issues, they'd really hate it if their preferntial deals with Intel were brought to light!
But, you know, that's free-market competition in our economy, and all the players have choices--don't let Dell for one minute try and foist the scam that M$ effectively removes its options because of the $10 thing--I've already spelled out what they could do to solve that "problem" handily. Problem is, Gateway wants the easy money, and is simply scared to go another route. But the choice is still there. Dell may be a big company--maybe the biggest of its type--but there's no telling how many sales its lost because of its Intel-only policy. AMD popularity in the mainstream is growing by leaps and bounds, but Dell shrewdly plays that card to win concession after concession from Intel and so continues to exclude AMD choices for its customers. But that's Dell's choice--completely. Just as it is Gateway's choice to sell nothing but M$ oS's to get that $10 per machine. The idea that these multi-billion-dollar-ayear companies are being "boxed in" by M$ is no more sound that the idea that Dell is "boxed in" by Intel. The choices are there--but companies like Gateway are loathe to admit it.
It's too bad, but the scientific case for creation is just as strong and viable as the scientific case for evolution. It's *all* in how you interpret the evidence.
Evolution is purely inductive reasoning, first there was the theory, then came the search for the evidence to prove it. Creation is also inductive. The differences between the two are purely a matter of how the evidence is interpreted.
For instance, how do we know that the fossil record we discover of the dinosaurs is not the evidential remains of the Creator's various stages of experimentation in creating human life (and otherwise) in all of antiquity? It's speculated that an asteroid caused most if not all major extinctions of life in that period. An asteroid or planetoid striking the earth is itself an extraterrestrial event. Is it so farfetched to imagine that a power and intelligence capapble of creating biology on the scale that we see around us deliberately caused that extinction in that manner--so as to proceed to "phase II", if you will, of the Creator's plan for human life on earth?
Personally, I see nothing in the fossil record, or otherwise, which contradicts direct creation of life on this planet by a superior intelligence and power. Others view the same exact evidence and see it as direct contradiction to Creationism. Again, it's all in how you interpret the record and the evidence--NOT in the record or the evidence itself.
I heard this once and have never forgotten it (as it isn't original to me):
"How likely in your mind is it that you could turn your back on a junkyard and walk away, only to return four billion years later to find a fully fueled 747 jet aircraft sitting on a runway, it's engines throttled up and ready for take off?"
This pretty much exactly explains the theory of chance evolution--that "time" does all things, including the creation of human life out of inert and dead materials. The amazing thing is is that one human being is infinitely more complex than a 747 (which is actually fairly crude by comparison) yet the same scientists who "believe" in the chance evolution of human life would scoff at the notion of an evolved 747.
So what I really think is this: the scientist who rejects the idea of intelligent creation is simply trying to create his own religion in which he himself is God. A truely objective agnostic will say: "The evidence can be interpreted either way." A man of faith will say: "The record for Creation is as clear as a bell."
Reminds me of an amusing anecdote I heard from a personal acquaintence a few years ago...
Son-in-law and daughter were going to chip in and buy mom a "real" computer for Christmas that they profusely promised mom was "real easy to use." Mom wasn't initially receptive to the idea because mom only used a computer for one thing--she fired up a simple accounting program once a day and kept the machine powered down otherwise, and was having no diificulties at all and had become used to a routine. But mom relented since her sweet kids were so insistent and so convinced she'd benefit so much by the new computer.
So son-in-law and daughter brought mom a Mac for Christmas thinking they had done her a world of good and suggested that she could donate her 386 DOS box to charity for a tax write off. Mom accepted the gift graciously and set out on the road to "ease of use" in computerdom.
Well, in less than two weeks mom was literally in tears and howling to her sweet kids to come and get their Mac and get their money back. She had studied the owner's manual and gotten Mac guide books and spent hour after hour after hour trying to decipher the Mac GUI and learn things like what a folder was and how it corresponded to her programs and files and so on. Basically, after less than two weeks she was tearing her hair out and miserable with her Mac experience.
To paraphrase what she told her kids:
"All I had to do before was to hit the power button to turn the computer and monitor on, I'd get a C:> prompt on the screen, I'd type in the program name, and my program would run and I could do what I needed to do, hit the save button, and then turn it off until next time. It was as simple as pie.
Now with this horrible Mac I've got all of this gobbledegook on the screen--little pictures of all sorts of things about which I have no earthly idea, strings and strings of menus and submenus to wade through, layers of windows which open for no reason that I can see, and I'll tell you it's been the most frustrating experience of my life! I went back to what I was used to and am extremely content to stay that way and I only hope my kids can get their money back or THEY can donate this Mac to charity! I'm keeping what I've got!"
So when you say computing has gotten progressively easier to use over the past decade, I think you may be forgetting that people like you and me grew up with the technology over the past 15 years or so and have had the changes in GUI and organizational logic fed to us incrementally. I like using computers and so obviously do you, and we like learning newer approaches and have even learned enough to suggest positive changes that have been implemented over the years.
But the lady in this story is typical of so many others, isn't she? She uses a computer for one or two specific tasks and afterwards has no more use for it. She learned how to type in program names at a DOS prompt and found that was as far as she needed or wanted to go in learning about them. Think how she felt then to go from that incredibly simplistic command environment to a GUI like the Mac's (Windows wouldn't have been any different for her) which has developed slowly over the last couple of decades--a GUI like that just dumped on her in one fell swoop! Think about all of the things she'd have to learn just to navigate the GUI simply to run a program!
Windows XP seems very easy to me, but when I think of what it must be like to take home your first computer as a current Power Mac or a Windows box, I sincerely feel sorry for the learning curve these people will have to endure before they get productive with the hardware. There's just SO MUCH people have to learn about how the visual organizational structure of a GUI relates to the hardware they're using and the software they're running before current machines become useful to people. It's really mind-boggling if you think about it.
So have computers REALLY become "easier to use" over the last ten years? I think the answer depends entirely on an individual's prior experience with computers with a variety OS's before that question might be answered in the affirmative. For the lady who's the subject of this anedotal story--again, which is entirely true--of course the answer is that computers have become much more DIFFICULT to use--from her individual perspective.
Ease of use is definitely in the eye of the beholder, I think. As computers grow exponentially in capability and power, a simple GUI is a must for using them productively, no doubt about it. But if you're a person who doesn't need all of that capability and power, and needs only to run one or two software applications, powerful GUI's are overkill and are far too complex for the situation, IMHO.
So this is where I think a market for "appliances" will develop--devices hard-programmed to perform one or two simple specific applications--and do nothing else whatever. I see the development of the "computer" as we know about it remaining to proceed on its own developmental track, which, it seems to me, will definitely always be far more complex than an appliance simply because the increased power and flexibility of an open-ended computer device will demand the additional control complexity, regardless of the specific GUI used.
I guess you mean "sings the praises of Gates" instead of "sings the praises of Jobs" as I happened to note that both Gates and Jobs were mentioned in the article. But I suppose an article which says anything non-critical about Gates is merely propaganda.
And of course, Apple employees as we all know are completely free to speak their minds whenever they wish and would never be guilty of criticizing their own company--but that tendency is merely heartfelt, certainly nothing to do with their employment by Apple. Far be it from Apple to expect support from its employees. No, this nefarious behavior could only exist within the sinister halls of Microsoft, right?
I, too, have been in the industry for decades, but I must say that I actually have heard people speak *gasp* some nice things about Microsoft from time to time. And of course it makes perfect sense to suppose that the group most opposed to Microsoft are Microsoft product users, the very ones which year after year keep buying Microsoft software--just so they can complain about it, probably. Maybe they're just habitual complainers who choose Microsoft software over Apple because they realize they'd be so happy with Apple and therefore have nothing to complain about and therefore lose their reason for existence. Yea, that's got to be it.
Yep, those nefarious monopolies are really something aren't they? Just think, if Microsoft didn't have a monopoly people would actually be free to buy Apple products and software whenever they wanted to! But of course no one's free to do that, are they, since Microsoft is a monopoly and everyone *must* buy Microsoft, like it or not. Gosh, kind of makes you wonder who it is who actually buys Apple, doesn't it? But wait--if Microsoft's a monopoly that means people have to buy Microsoft because there are no other choices--but wait--what about Apple? It's all so confusing. You're right--it would take a vast intelligence to unravel that enigma...:)
I think products like the ILamp--um,iMac, rather, are really doing Apple some serious harm in the general markets. By declaring that a computer is "cool" based on the fact that it seems to be a successful blend between a reading lamp and a personal computer, isn't Apple fuzzing its image as a computer maker? Will people think of Apple as a "furniture maker who integrates pc components into room furnishings with a stylish approach"...?
Will it be Apple who receives contracts from Red Roof Inns of America to furnish its suites with iMacs which just so happen to resemble stylish and modernistic room lamps? It just seems to me that with every move toward superficial "coolness" Apple makes its image as a serious player in the personal computer electronics market seem more remote and out of sync.
Perhaps Steve Jobs is being just a tad too literal in his quest to bring the computer "into the living rooms of America"...? I can't help but think that with each similar move Apple diminishes itself as a serious player in the computer market and is elevating itself almost as a novelty manufacturer. I'd hate to see Apple reduced to the status of the "Sharp" catalogue in the future, wouldn't you?
I don't get it. We want the capabilities of computers to leap ahead exponentially--we want nation-wide networking and videoconferencing, realisitic 3D games, photo-realistic imaging, voice activated and controlled interfaces, psychiatric AI routines to mimick human feedback, etc., and etc., ad infinitum. Each and every year our expectations for technology surpass all previous expectations. MHz is no longer "enough" unless it's GHz. Megabytes become gigabytes become terrabytes. You know what I'm getting at.
And yet buried in all of this enormous and ever intensifying complexity we express this wish--desire--daydream--whatever--for "simplicity."
How is it that we can reason that more complexity and capability should ever equal increased simplicity? If "simple" is what we want then why not return to the abacus? If easy to use is what we want then why not return to realm of print journalism and read newspapers? If ease is what we desire then why not return to the era of passive television voyuerism where we all pleasantly vegetate as couch potatos?
In short, whoever decided that computers should accomplish enormously complex goals with the simplistic ease of a kindergarten primer? Are such expectations wishful thinking, and aren't they fundamentally irrational?
Computers require us to interact with them and by extension with each other on a variety of levels. IE, to use a computer is to execute the opposite of passivity. Is there some sense that computers "ought" to do our thinking for us, thereby becoming much "simpler" to use? I hope not, because that's frightening for me.
Me, I think that if we ever reach the level where the average Joe can network his office with little to no level of understanding as to what he's doing then we'll have actually left the age of "computers" behind us and will have entered the age of programmed appliances, in which every device will have three or less functions and we learn only how to button push with no understanding as to what we're pushing the buttons for.
As much as I can sympathize with the sentiment, I don't think computers will become simpler, and I think we need to encourage the average Joe to master his computer environment--otherwise it will surely master him.
Any billionaire who's a decent and honest billionaire, and who hasn't totally forgotten that at one time in his life he was utterly helpless to do anything for himself, will quickly tell you that "self-made billionaires" simply don't exist.
But maybe I'm just missing some things here. Was Jobs the only employee at Apple and NeXT? Apparently so, but how then did I think there were so many other people working alongside him in these companies to create the products they made? Were all of the other people working at Apple through the years merely illusions spun off by Jobs' indomitable personality and force of will? Or were these thousands of people actually real human beings who helped Jobs become a billionaire at every single step along the way?
I can see Jobs as a public lightning rod for companies like Apple, sure, but "self-made?" Absolutely not. Even Frankenstein would have been nowhere without Victor...:)
And that's really the question in my own mind. I don't really know who "made" Gates and don't particularly care, but I'd guess if Gates was asked that question he might just ascribe things turning out as they did to being at the right place at the right time and leave it at that. But in Jobs' case--in all sincerity--I have to wonder if it wasn't actually Gates who created Jobs--really, that's a joke. But thinking back on all of the mileage Jobs has gotten on the specter of Gates, it certainly makes you wonder. Is Jobs the "Anti-Gates" or not? I guess that's the "real" question! *chuckle*
Re:Alienate the companies that they depend on!
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"Yay Microsoft! Of the thousands of software and hardware companies out there, in almost every market, there are probably only a few dozen which haven't been completely alienated by their predatory tactics."
You do realize, don't you, what an incredible contradiction you've managed above? You say, "of the thousands of hardware and software companies out there"....and so on, the upshot being that Microsoft's "predatory practices" have "completely alienated" most of them.
Aren't you aware that hundreds of companies worldwide, both software and hardware companies, have become incredible success stories simply because they chose to suport Microsoft standards at some point in their corporate strategy? These companies aren't owned by Microsoft. Rather they are software and hardware companies making huge sums by peddling their wares to the vast x86 WinXP/9x/NT market Microsoft has created. This is a market that these developers sell into that was not created by SUN, not Created by Apple and for the most part not created by IBM, or Intel, even.
There are several, actually, multi-billion $$$ corporations, fully independent of Microsoft, which make the lion's share of their money by selling into markets that Microsoft--not they--created. And these are markets that Microsoft--not they--spends billions of dollars a year to maintain and grow!
That's what I find so incredibly amazing about the near-sightedness with which Microsoft is often viewed. What M$ has accomplished for the consumer in the last 5 years of the last century, insofar as keeping hardware prices down for the benefit of the CONSUMER, is nothing short of incredible. I don't give a rat's behind if SUN doesn't like it because M$ makes it ever-so-much-harder for SUN to GOUGE the daylights out of its customers by selling them way overpriced hardware. Too bad for poor little SUN--sniff-bohoo. Or what about poor little Netscape which thought it owned the Internet browser software distribution market by DIVINE RIGHT, and HOW DARE Microsoft make a better browser? How DARE them? (And that is why Netscape failed, btw. IE *never* surpassed Communicator in market share until the vast majority of people using BOTH browsers reached the conclusion that after years of work IE was simply a BETTER Internet browser. On the other hand, Netscape's own original founders have gone on public record after the sale of the company to AOL with THEIR explanations of Netscape's fall.)
And guess what?? Unlike the infamous Jim Barksdale testimony before the US Congress in which Barksdale characterized the shoddy performance of Netscape in one word ("Microsoft," of course), the Netscape founders related a tale of rotten management paralyzed like deer in headlights by the competition Microsoft (alone) was giving it. Simply put, outside of a monopoly situation, Barksdale's Netscape was simply unable to function. Netscape's founders lamented this paralysis of management by vividly describing how committees were created to make the simplest decisions, the bottom line being that the very thing Netscape needed to do to maintain its LEAD over Microsoft's browsers the company found itself incapable of doing due to a tragic lack of leadership: and what Netscape most definitely needed to do was to ship product, ship product, ship product.
Instead of concentrating on Netscape's customer base and its needs and desires, Barksdale and company were so intimidated by the competition Microsoft was presenting them (Microsoft actually being the only company large enough to COMPETE with Netscape at the time in the browser wars)that the ENTIRE CORPORATE STRATEGY of the company was reduced to knee-jerk reacting to Microsoft. The real reason Netscape lost its position? Top management forgot what made Netscape the defacto standard in the first place--meeting the needs of its customers--and instead became obsessed with everything Microsoft did. Some have commented that with IE 5, Barksdale and pals threw in the towel. What I find ironically satisfying here is that in the early days Netscape execs boasted long and hard about how their multi-platform browser software was simply going to render PC operating systems such as Microsoft's Windows obsolete. Instead, Netscape was rendered obsolete.
You know, I guess if Microsoft as a company had simply abandoned its stockholders at that time and said to them, "Look, Netscape says it doesn't think it's fair that we compete with them in the marketplace so we aren't going to do that," the original Netscape dream might have come true (provided Netscape was allowed to continue its Internet Browser monopoly). But does anyone really think such sentiment on the part of Microsoft is reasonable? I surely don't. Why is it that everyone else in the industry is deemed to have the right to compete for markets in the spirit of "all's fair in love and war," everyone except Microsoft, that is. Nope, when Microsoft does *anything* to protect its business interests the company is labled as "predatory," when SUN or Apple or Netscape do WORSE things than Microsoft they are greeted with cheers. Something's not right with this picture.
Simply, Microsoft has somehow managed to succeed in market areas where EACH of the larger M$ competitors (SUN, Apple, Netscape, IBM, etc.) have FAILED, and failed more than once. Egos being what they are with all of us, it's not surprising to see people like Scott McNealy of SUN attempting to explain M$'s successes by comparing the company to North Korea. McNealy simply doesn't--or may be congentially unable to--understand why his policies failed and Microsoft's succeeded in certain business arenas--AND SO--M$ "has" to be either crooked or else a company of ruthless communistic slave drivers akin to the popular *political* perception of North Korea--at least as Scott McNealy judges these things.
The simple truth is that apart from being in the right place at the right time in the early days, M$ has made a lot of decisions which ran completely counter to those of other large computer companies--and history has proven M$'s decisions the superior ones thus far. IBM, SUN, Apple, dead companies such as Commodore, and other notables of the '80's and 90's were and are companies which focused primarily on HARDWARE sales--whereas M$ has *always* been about software, with Microsoft only joining the hardware club with its X-Box console gaming platform very recently. Dell is hardware--HP & Compaq are primarily hardware companies. In short, M$ went the software route the other guys went the hardware route and look where they all are today. Companies like Dell in no uncertain terms owe their very inception and existence to M$'s supporting OS's.
So when you look at the state of the industry in that light, it's not suprising that companies like Apple and SUN feel very threatened by the success of the M$ business model compared to their own--which is not to say that either SUN or Apple have poor business plans--just that they're not in the same league as the one M$ has been pursuing for a couple of decades. Where they've been more of short-term, high-per-unit profit hardware companies, Microsoft has concentrated on building an entire market which is much, much larger in scope. We saw the first real payoff in the M$ strategy after the Win95 release in '95. Since then M$ has managed to take the whole screwy x86 mess and infuse it with hardware and software standards which, prior to Win95, pretty much didn't exist. SUN sure wasn't interested in the consumer x86 market prior to 1995, and gosh knows Apple wasn't. But M$ was, had a plan for it, and has so far done a good job of executing it.
In truth, I don't think Jobs is unaware of the points I've raised. He's acknowledged that none other than Gates himself advised him to allow the cloning of Apple hardware long ago, in response to a question Jobs asked him about increasing the Mac's mainstream USA market share--something that bothered Jobs even way back when. I've heard Jobs admit being tragically wrong in not following that advice and actually stating that it was his very serious mangerial mistake--and his alone. Of course, today, Jobs is still finding reasons to keep Apple primarily a hardware company--and he's justified to himself at least--killing off the Apple clones that were being made when the Apple board paid him $500 million to take Apple back. Like Netscape, I guess, Apple is one of those companies which can survive only by dominating a niche market--and I guess Jobs feels that even with Apple calling all the shots the Apple clone companies would still be smart enough to beat them at their own game of making and marketing computers running the Mac OS. As long as Jobs feels this way I don't see how Apple can be compared to M$ as the latter's a software company and the former's a hardware company.
And it's the same with SUN, really--which is why McNealy's comments never cease to baffle me. I mean, I know on one level that it's natural for SUN to loathe the success of M$'s business plan which, after all, is so different from SUN's. I guess Scott feels himself naked and wrong at the same time since he's declared M$ so full of fruit loops so often in the past only to have his breakfast eaten later by M$. That's entirely human--you can only take making a dufus out of yourself just so often. What I think lies behind McNealy's vitriol is good, old-fashioned fear. Scott doesn't believe he can perceive the future quite as well as Billy "the nerd" Gates, and he's just plum rattled by it. Of course McNealy would rather die than admit anything of the sort, so he simply stoops to lame attempts to convince some (Scott feels) not too bright Washington politicians that Bill Gates is actually a North Korean dictator wanna'-be in disguise in the fond hopes that they'll string BG up in a panic and thus negate any possibility of SM ever having to actually match wits with BG in the public business arena. I mean, you don't think that McNealy actually believes that Bill Gates is really a North Korean citizen, do you?
Anyhoo...I had no intention of writing a diatribe like this! Oh my gosh!...:) I just guess I get really, really tired of the kind of anti-Microsoft drivel that seems all the rage these days--usually spouted by people who been actively reading computer trade mags for two years or less and believe they've got a handle on things.
Don't be so alarmed and try to be patient...:)
I'm reminded of an old Mark Twain quote which I hope I have attributed correctly (paraphrased):
"When I was 16 I was amazed at my father's ignorance. When I turned 21 I was amazed by how much he'd learned."
Generally speaking, there's a giant, yawning gulf between textbook theory and practical experience. Just out of college, many young people simply know a great deal about the former and nothing about the latter. Older people, however, have lived through the transition long enough to discern the difference.
As a young person many things may seem to you entirely logical and brimming with merit, making you scratch your head in genuine bafflement as to why what seems so transparent to you is completely hidden from these other, older people.
In fact, these older people have simply lived long enough to have had the same ideas you do, tried them, and for one reason or another watched them fail. That's where the "experience" factor comes into play. Rather than enter into long-winded debates with you as to why things which seem so "logical" simply don't work too well in practicality, these people may simply think you've some growing to do and some experience to accrue, so they'll put you somewhere they feel you can begin to develop so as to understand the answers to your questions before you ask them.:)
Naturally, this makes you feel "discriminated" against--when in reality they are placing you there to help you obtain some pieces of the puzzle they feel you may not presently appreciate.
However, there's a chance your employers could be real jerks, too...:) In that case, I'd start hunting for another job. But if you feel these are otherwise "great" people who are making strange decisions (decisions you can't understand with regard to your placement), then I'd hang in there as it may pay BIG dividends down the road. Good luck!
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OK, let's say that I, for instance, who sells nothing on Ebay, was to make an application to join this particular pool. From the standpoint of the insurance company, I would simply be another premium payer assigned to the rates of this particular pool. I would be no less nor more of a pay out potential than any other people in the pool who were $1K-a-month Ebay merchants. But I would be prohibited from joining the pool because I wasn't an Ebay merchant. Therefore, the only reason to deny me coverage from the standpoint of the insurance company would be that Ebay was paying a large percentage of the premiums for each of its merchants, and therefore would not subsidize my premium because I wasn't an Ebay merchant. So how big a premium slice is Ebay actually paying out of its own pocket for each of its merchants?
Parenthetically, if a pool as small as the Ebay merchants pool can get "reduced" rates from a carrier (reduced from what a self-employed individual would have to pay), why can't the entire nation be considered a "pool" and therefore subject to rates far reduced over their current levels? If members of a pool get reduced rates compared to non members, it has to ultimately be deduced that the non-pool premium payers are subsidizing the premium payers who belong to the pool. And that stinks, I think. Costs ought to be divided equally with no policy holder getting special economic treatment from an insurance carrier simply because he's involved with a pool somewhere.
If I used nothing but my OS and two or three software pieces I could probably go "Windependence," too. But I buy a lot of software, and a lot of games which I enjoy, and so I need to be "Windependent" about like a hole in the head...:)
I don't value my computers for the OS's they run, but I value my OS's for the software they support.
Kind of ironic that you label a recordable device as "low end" but put a playback-only device in a "high-end" position. Years ago the "laser disc" was introduced, which was very similar to current DVD in that it was a playback-only device but offered much higher playback quality than VHS at the time (although Laser Discs were as large as record albums and housed in similar jackets.) The Laser Disc was a huge flop, primarily because it could not record--which is a function I think you'll find is very important to a lot of people.
I'll buy DVD when it becomes both recordable, reliable, and relatively inexpensive. Basically, I don't buy my media. I rent it, or I watch it directly from satellite or digital cable. But I don't buy it, period. My local video store, indeed all of the local video stores in my area, are 5% DVD and 95% VHS. I have a couple of SVHS, Hi-Fi, Hi-Quality VCRs which I bought a couple of years ago at Best Buys for the unbelievably low price of $130 each. Playback and sound quality is excellent. Mainly, it's my opinion that DVD won't really catch on until the units become recordable and can essentially match the function of current VCR technology--which, because they are not recording devices, the current crop of DVD playback machines does not match. It's nice to be able to record on reusable media. I honestly thought DVD would have reached that point by now, but suffice it to say that if CC really intends to drop VHS/SVHS machines, the company ownership is exceedingly stupid...:) DVD makes a better playback platform, no question. But it's nowhere near as functional as it can't yet record on cheap, reusable media.
The tapes will be smaller than normal VHS tapes, as CC will be introducing P&S squared, or Pan in Scan in Pan in Scan, where all the annoying extra scenery is removed, leaving only the direct center of the screen. Average viewers have noted that "the image looks bigger" when played on entry-level tv's.
What on earth are you talking about?...:)
"Annoying extra scenery"....???? Good grief, are you saying they'll be cropping the image on the sides and the top/bottom to exclude the visual information in the original? That's horrible, if that's what you're saying.
And who on earth wants "performance that degrades over time"...?
Don't tell me, you're kidding!...:)
These people probably are trying to raise research money. Personally, I think I'll get excited when they figure out how to take an individual's cells and clone an organ directly from them. Seems as if "stem-cell" created organs will suffer all of the rejection problems of a transplant, and it would be such a pity to receive a spanking new thymus only to contract and die from viral pnuemonia as the result of the drugs you must take to beat down your immune system so that the alien tissue won't be rejected/absorbed by your body.
...of any sort of "centralization" of information on American citizens of any type. I don't like .net for this reason and have no plans to join it, and on a smaller scale M$'s Product Activation is the sole element of WinXP which I think is so blatently bad that it mars the otherwise excellent work the company has done with the XP version of the OS.
Let me also add that with the aid of Zone Alarm Pro I am also seeing a wide variety M$ software attempting access the Internet with no rhyme or reason--such as, most recently, I've noticed that if I attempt to block M$ Backup from accessing the 'net prior to doing a back up--the program will freeze and I am unable to complete my local backup. Why is my XP BACKUP program trying to access the 'net? Hopefully, someone here will know and can relieve me with an innocuous explanation. It may simply be trying to access my LAN for some reason--but it's hard to say using ZA Pro 3.x. This sort of thing is bewildering. It seems there are many more programs within XP that routinely seek 'net access for some reason or another--for instance, I can understand why "Help" and so on accesses the Internet as it conveniently compiles an on-line database of help topics from the M$ knowledge base--I really like that feature! But the rest obviously go far beyond Product Activation, and I'd like to know why. Wouldn't you?
I loathe PA, and have already had to call in more than once when installing to my own home machines for reasons that were inexplicable to me, and at certain times when I expected to have to call in (such as the time I replaced motherboard and cpu) I was puzzled by the fact that I did not have to call--nor even to repeat PA over the 'net automatically! Go figure.
But I do have to admit in my honest bones: isn't this just the type of information gathering computers are well suited for? Of course it is. That's my dilemma--the hobby and profession I've enjoyed so much for the past decade and seven years has within it the seeds for some very ugly things like this to begin flowering at some point. And when it does--will my professional and personal activities be considered a part of the problem--or a part of the cure?
No kidding--this really bothers me sometimes. It reminds me of the nuclear scientists so wrapped up in the "interesting" minutiae of physics and so forth that they completely lost track of the ultimate use to which their work could be put when it was completed. Of course, the fact that there was a war going on is certainly mitigating. But still, after their work had borne its "fruit" it seemed that all their efforts to derail a nuclear arms race after it had begun were in vain.
Is that what's happening to us? Are we contributing to a monster's creation--a creation which when completed we will be utterly helpless to stop? I wish I knew because it really bothers me--at times.
Palm and all palm-like things. Current Palm CPUs are, I think, inferior even to Netwon ones when CPU functionality is concerned. Also a lot of embedded systems remain with slow CPUs or even become slow.
So, to investigate this twisted logic, I've got to think that Palm software is worse than Newton software merely because, in your opinion, the Newton had a "better" cpu? And what on earth have embedded cpus got to do with anything? The "software" for embedded use is the simplest because it has to be. Of course, neither of these opinions address the relative quality of software, other than to junk everything together under broad categories sorted by cpu "betterness."
You have yet to explain why better software can't be written for better cpus, and that's where your argument (I'm being charitable) disintegrates. In fact, the whole concept behind building better cpus is that of writing better software.
Surely, positively, you cannot believe that MS-DOS 3.2 is "better software" than Win2K or WinXP??? Surely, not. MS-DOS sucked in all its forms, and oh, how I loathed it. AmigaDOS, for instance, was far better, but Commodore didn't have enough sense to clone its hardware (like Apple) and so that's why software as rotten as MS-DOS won out in the end. No big mystery there at all--no unscrupulous business practices required.
None of those CPUs types even constitute separate market, such as x86 CPUs/Wintel.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with your argument--that better cpus were and are designed specifically to allow for worse software. Man, it must be tough to be so biased that you can come up with concepts like this....:) So *now* you're saying--what you really intended to say all along--is that your better cpu = worse software rule only applies to x86/Microsoft. Whew.
Sun probably loses money on Solaris and Java and only recovers them through hardware sales. And yes, Java is a great example of shitty software that is necessary to justify wide use of overblown CPUs.
I think you should take a look at SUN's ledger. If they lose money on Solaris and Java but "recover it" through hardware sales, that's all well and good, but without Solaris just how much hardware would SUN sell? I can't believe we agree on Java. Not only is SUN's Java truly shitty, but SUN's licensing provisions for it are, ironically, far more restrictive than any of M$'s, as far as I can see. But as far as Solaris goes, a fair number of people must not agree with you that it's crummy, because they keep buying it year after year to run on SUN's cpus which, according to SUN, get better year after year. Is SUN also guilty of "forcing shitty software on the public," too?
The existence of cheap overblown CPUs is a positive result of consumers being fed shitty software. So what?
Your logic is simply impenetrable. There's no "so what?" to talk about. Software developers holler year after year for better hardware, and as the technology is available, the hardware companies oblige to the extent they can. Also, they *compete* among each other to build better hardware, so as to give them a marketing edge. Then the software developers make use of that hardware. The pattern has been the same for as long as I can remember. Where you're getting the idea that this equates to "shitty software" is absolutely beyond me. The software I'm running today is a darn sight better than what I was running 15 years ago, and I certainly am not going to object to economies of scale making hardware (and software) much less expensive today than it was 15 years ago. I think I'd have to be a moron to object.
The existence of Unix is a positive result of the AT&T monopoly, and a result of existence of UCB, what is the result of existence of California as a state within US, what is the result of bloody wars, and, earlier in the history, a result of extermination of native population. Good justification for those things, too?
The existence of UNIX, California, etc., might well be the result of the things you mention above (very argumentative, though), but the *continuation* of all of those things surely is not. UNIX, California, and the rest have long outlived what you deem as their causes. Sorry, but neither you nor anyone else is going to put me on a silly guilt trip about history I had no part in writing.
Your logic, again, is incredibly twisted. In WWII we lost millions of men--would it have been preferable to have saved those lives so that the Third Reich would now own Europe, and Japan the Asian-Pacific? Oh, forget it--this is too twisted a path for me. BTW, AT&T was a government-protected, government-sanctioned monopoly against which it was illegal to form a competing company. That bears no resemblance whatever to M$ (which I assume is your intended parallel.)
Why would a company have to be indebted to anyone? Especially at the extent of forcing a blatant perjury by its CEO?
First, please elaborate on whom it was, in your opinion, committed "blatant perjury." I recall no perjury charges ever coming up during the course of these events, let alone anyone being found guilty of committing perjury. What are you talking about?
Secondly, what sort of world do you imagine we inhabit? I hate to be the one to break it to you, but we don't live in a fantasy-utopia where events are ordered by someone's idea of perfection--even someone's *twisted* idea of perfection...:)
Steve Jobs went to M$, hat in hand, and humbly begged for money to save his beloved Apple--is he, also, to be condemned? What do you mean by "why would a company be indebted to anyone"...? Have you no idea at all of how the wheels that feed you turn in our society?
The point I was making was a very simply one: M$ has supported AMD right out of the starting gate. Sometimes, whether we like it or not, companies wind up helping each other. Oh, it's not altruistic, by any means. It's merely the old "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" axiom come to life. Like I said, nobody else has helped to speed along AMD's acceptance in the marketplace like M$--and AMD (Sanders) is not so stupid that he doesn't know it. M$ wasn't forced to do this--AMD didn't pay M$ to do it--M$ chose to do it at its own expense. And the result is that we now have some real competition in the marketplace instead of the monopoly that Intel *was* spoon-feeding us hardware all too slowly and at outrageous prices. Rant all you want about "cheap, bloated cpus" but you will find yourself in small company, indeed.
"Saying a lie with a lot of venom doesn't make it true.
???? Saying a lie with little venom doesn't make it true, either. The facts are very plain to see: unless Jackson had first declared M$ a "monopoly"--labeled the company as such legally--there would have been *no* penalty phase as we see happening now--because nothing M$ had done was outside the scope of the normal business activities that Apple and SUN and Coke and Pepsi and every large corporation--including Disney, for crying out loud--engage in routinely--LEGAL business practices, if you didn't know. Things like volume discounts and exclusive deals are completely and 100% LEGAL for companies and they engage in these practices on a daily basis with impunity--Apple does it, for God's sake. The only difference in M$'s case is the superficial legal tag of "monopoly" that Jackson's court attached to M$.
The ignorance surrounding this issue is appalling. Only because M$ had the ill-fortune to be decalared a "monopoly" (when it's so easy to point out the competition M$ has that companies like Standard Oil and AT&T *never* had) by a prejudiced judge in a kangaroo court (and the Appellate court agreed that Jackson was rogue, therefore throwing out his proposed remedies--a harsher condemnation Jackson could not have received at their hands for his prejudiced conduct--I believe their personal renunciation of Jackson comprised several pages of their order.) I fail to see how a judge can be prejudiced and yet have his "findings of fact" upheld, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. Just another lesson that life isn't always what any of us think it "should" be.
Anyway, the *fact* is that unless the government labels you a monopoly, nothing M$ did, or was accused of doing, would be illegal for you. M$'s illegalities were proclaimed *after* the government informed M$ that it was a "monopoly" and therefore could not do business like everybody else. The question of how M$ was supposed to know it was a monopoly before being declared one by the government has never been addressed--and never will be, IMHO.
Is that "fair"? Of course not. But that's life.
"Like, demanding hardware companies to abandon ISA bus when all PCI modems were inferior Windows-only models? Demanding ACPI to be enabled even though it's still buggy?
Excuse me--demanding???? My cable modem's a hardware modem, and before that I owned external US Robotics modems--never used a software modem in my life--and never will. The abundance of hardware modems easily available seems to convince me that M$'s "demand" in this case went over like a lead balloon. More proof of M$'s impotence in direct opposition to this "monopoly" finding by a court full of lawyers who couldn't intelligently explain the difference between a floppy disk and a ram disk??? It would appear so--but then I never heard that M$ "demanded" Win modems in the first place. (Of course, they pushed them because M$ is, after all, a software company primarily.) But if they "demanded" them, apparently those demands fell on the deaf ears of the market, then.
As far as abandoning the ISA bus--I happen to think that's a good idea.
That doesn't even parse without errors, leave alone making sense.
I think it makes perfect sense (and parses OK, too.) The point there was that "open-source" advocates are like the horse behind the carrot. The horse is ever running toward the carrot held before him by extension of his harness, yet he never gets it, but he runs all the same. They believe in this vague, nebulous ideal of "open source" which, when pressed, they confess to not being able to understand all that well themselves. That's because "open-source" is a myth--a legend--almost a religion, to some. How and why "open source" is "better" than private development these advocates cannot say. But they like the idea behind open source which is so seductive--the idea of a random bunch of programmers "freely" cooperating with each other to produce masterpieces of code. Great idea, but where's the code to prove it? Surely, not to be found in Netscape's current browsers. And Linux, under the mantle of open source, is so fragmented that the majority of the public still doesn't know what it is, and the majority of people who run Linux usually do so in a dual-boot configuration so that they can run Windows to have some selection of software to choose from.
It seems to me that advocates of open source are chasing the ideal with no more real thought about it than the horse expends in thinking about the carrot he'll never get to eat.
...anybody ever heard of a firewall? Seems to me that this is the easiest way to deal with "licenses" of this type.
Excuse me?
"Worse software means better cpus..."?
Well, goh-lee, I guess *all* software is getting "worse" since...OK, you tell me--which current hardware company today--not dependent on M$--is shipping "better software with worse cpus"...??? Come...on...let it out! I wanna' know! Whose cpus are worse today than they were a decade ago???
Like it or not, there is an x86 hardware market which began long ago. There were and are also several other computer hardware markets that began around the same period--SUN, Apple, etc. ad infinitum. They are ALL making better cpus today than they used to make. Am I supposed to think that this means they are ALL writing worse software? Man, that's got to be the weirdest attempt at a correlation I've ever heard.
Am I supposed to think I have *more freedom* under the SUN (sic) than I have running Windows? Puh-lease....no possible way on earth that's true. Same with Apple...ditto on down the line. Where's the FREEDOM in those camps? I can't see it!
SUN has been as altruistic as SCROOGE with its "open-platform" java initiatives. Did you know that one Java licensee doesn't know what the other Java licensee is paying SUN for the privilege? Oh--Paradise! Did you know that SUN arbitrarily decides which of its Java licensees are "towing the line" and which aren't--based on a fluctuating, ever-changing scale that SUN adopts as needed to suit SUN's immediate political--if not financial--goals? (Maybe behind the Iron Curtain of old this would be freedom--one candidate, one party, but you get to vote--I dunno. Sheeesh.)
The hypocrisy of people is utterly unbelievable. They'll stick with x86 hardware because they have by far the best choices in hardware available, not to mention the best prices, not to mention more software--and yet...and yet...they still manage to convince themselves that the house that M$ built is the least free of them all. That standardization sucks. You think so? Go SUN, then and learn. Go Apple and be reborn! I'm gonna' puke.
Heh-Heh....got one word for you--MAC! Yea, run out and buy a Mac and check out all the "freedom" and "choices" and so forth that you'll get on that side of the fence. Or, here's one--run out and buy a Java license from SUN--and let Freedom ring, baby!
Some of you guys haven't a clue.
And as far as "undue influence" goes...seems to me it wasn't Gates who hired Bork and Dole to go to Washington to lobby Congress--seems to me that it was McNealy and Barksdale who emptied their respective companies' coffers of millions of $$$ trying to Influence Peddle in Washington (right before Barksdale engorged Netscape's coffers with $4 billion AOL bucks--AFTER the company had been "so crippled" it could no longer "compete," or so Barksdale informed the Congress with a straight face.)
And you want to talk about "unjustified influence outside its industry"...???? Nope--Gates is definitely the runner up in that category--and that's not a defense of Gates, btw. That's what you call an impartial view of the facts as they happened.
Is AMD indebted to M$--you BETCHA'! To whom else might AMD BE indebted? Got a port done by Apple at Apple's own expense that runs OSX on Athlon platforms? Where's SUN's software compiled for x86 and AMD that's really given AMD a shot in the arm? I don't SEE 'UM.....
Some of you guys live in a pure-tee fantasy land. Some of you guys think--I mean, you REALLY THINK, that M$ is "out for itself" while "everybody else" is willing to give away the farm to support this cockeyed idea of "Open Source"--of which right now, IMHO, Linux derivatives and Netscape are the highest expression.
But I guess, in the narrow-minded little world of "Let's Kill M$" psychology, there's just no ROOM, is there, to consider the behavior of M$ as compared to its competitors SUN, IBM, APPLE, and all the rest--and how these companies treat THEIR markets????
"Turned around," indeed. What needs to be "turned around" in this whole pitiful circus is the idea that M$ is "doing things" it's competitors aren't--indeed, that M$ is even *matching* the sort of closed-shop hardware & software envrironment its competitors are running. Which only brings us full circle to the reasons WHY most people choose x86/Windows/Linux, whatever--to anything Apple or SUN ever produced. But hell, who cares about being open-minded so long as we can have the carrot of "open-source" dangled in front of us? A horse-and-carrot story this truly is.
We've already got tons of laws on the books, at both the state and Federal levels, prohibiting child pornography. This attempt at yet another law is sad for a couple of reasons:
(1) It's representative of an ever-growing faction in our society which is both ignorant of the laws we already have, and under the delusion that passing more/similar/broader laws will somehow enhance their protection so that it surpasses the protections they already enjoy under current statutes.
(2) It's politically motivated, as we see in the fact that both the Bush and Clinton administrations favored it, even though the legal teams in both administrations could've guessed at its ultimate failure. Afraid to be portrayed as "pro-child pornography," it's the type of law any Administration would back regardless of how poor the law itself as written actually is.
What happens is that child pornography is rightfully considered a scourge which requires action by all thinking adults, and so superfluous laws like this are crafted providing a section of the populace with the feeling that "something is being done" about child pornography. Sadly, all that was "being done" about it in this case is the crafting of a bad law. A law that failed muster in the end precisely because it was a bad law, and for no other reason.
The saddest part of all are the individuals who will no doubt feel that because this law was struck down that nothing whatever is "being done" about child pornography. A review of all of the current law in effect concerning child pornography should easily disabuse even the most hardened skeptic of that notion.
The problem with this law as it seems to me is that it makes no distinction between fantasy and reality. There is a distinct difference between fictional child pornography (which does not involve actual children) and real child pornography (which does.) If we start imprisoning people because of what they think as opposed to what they do, that will be the saddest day of all.
Certainly, a rational argument can be made that no depiction of child pornography, whether fictional or real, is of any worth to society, or could not conceivably harm a predisposed individual. But that is hardly the point. We cannot imprison people merely because of their imaginations, regardless of how scandalous we may deem those imaginations, and that is precisely the point. It's only when child pornography passes the realm of imagination and blunders into acts involving real children that people should face imprisonment. And there are already plenty of laws on the books to deal with that.
What the patent office should only be doing anyway, IMHO, is patenting specifics. Here's what I mean:
Instead of granting patents this way:
"A device which does this sort of thing and that sort of thing...."
a true patent should consist of:
"The following schematic for [said] device is hereby patented."
This would allow companies to share equally among general ideas, restricting their "ownership" of the idea itself to the bounds of the actual and particular engineering schematics by which the device is manufactured. Ergo, as many companies as would like can make a wheel, whereas the companies themselves may make ownership claims only to wheels of a specific type, wheels which correspond *exactly* to the design schematics enclosed with the patents.
The patenting of general concepts, regardless of how "technical" and specific they may sound to the layman, has always been a very poor idea, and could only have been thought up by the forerunner of today's "modern" patent lawyer.
While we're at it, we can also do the same with SUN, Apple, Intel, IBM, and--you name it! Golly, if all of us get together we can invalidate the patent system even moreso than it already is! [not]
The problem with all of this, which must have M$'s competitors chuckling with absolute glee, is that the things M$ is being accused of here--volume selling discounts, special promotional deals, etc., are being done routinely by every single major company in the US of A.
Most people are just plain ignorant of how large-scale business deals are done, and so all of this stuff sounds very sinister and leaves the quite false impression that M$ is doing something unusual and harsh in its business dealings with its customers, when the fact is that M$ is doing what SUN, AOL, IBM, Intel, Dell, Disney, etc. do every single day. The difference is that these companies aren't having it all scrutinized in a court room by a judge who also doesn't understand the way business is done on this level in the US. Lots of people are just plain ignorant of these facts, and it's really too bad.
What's really amzing to me is the "monopolist" findings in the first place. What competition did Standard Oil or AT&T have at the time they were declared monopolies and broken up? None, and that's why it's laughable to see M$, which competes with IBM, for instance, a company that every year grosses 5-6x the revenue M$ hauls in--yet IBM remains tucked away in the background never to be considered. How about the competition M$ engages in continuoulsy with SUN, a multi-billion-dollar-a-year hardware and software business which often competes directly with Microsoft. What about AOL? Even in the X-Box arena, the only hardware M$ really makes and sells as a "system", competition simply abounds out of the yin-yang against several powerful system vendors like Sony. So where does this nonsense come from that Microsoft has no competition? It's ridiculous, M$ competes furiously every day.
But, see, now that M$ has been officially declared a "monopolist" (regardless of how spurious the grounds), the rules change and suddenly the government can actively discriminate against M$ and give it substandard treatment among all the other officially non-monopolist companies M$ competes with daily.
Basically, the monopolistic finding is merely a pretense to allow government to regulate the company, an action brought about by years of intense and expensive political lobbyists paid for by M$'s competitors who simply were unable to keep up with Microsoft in the marketplace.
So far, the government has set itself up as quite the dupe of these other companies and special interest groups, and seemingly has no idea of the extent it's being used. that such a thing could happen is remarkable, I think, an indicates just how sub-par our judicial system has become. Was Karl Marx right after all--is a capatilist government merely a reflection of economic interests in the society after all?
The last point to me is the most telling. Gateway is complaining that M$ penalizes it by cutting off promotional funds if OEMs don't agree to exclusively sell Windows on all of their PC's. Gateway says it's a loss of $10 a box, which I agree can add up to a lot of money. But there's another side of the coin here too--does anyone really think Gateway would lose sales because it would add back in that $10 it supposedly lost from M$ to the price of its Windows systems? I mean, does anyone seriously believe that a $10 price-hike on Gatway systems will send the company to the poor house? Geez, that's ludicrous. Nobody--and I mean nobody, is going to refrain from buying a Gateway because of a $10 price hike on an entire PC! If they refuse Gateway, it will be for other reasons besides paying an extra $10 per system, I assure you. So to me that whole line of reasoning is ludicrous and hypocritical. Gatway could add $10 bucks to price of each system it sells and nullify the M$ advantage at the same time.
Still another way to view the situation is that Gateway would then be free to offer Linux and other systems--even systems without an OS at all, and their $10 surcharge would eliminate the so-called penalties M$ wants to levy. Gateway might just be suprised if deamnd for OS-less systems climbed way up, or Linux systems increased--and the upshot is that Gateway might actually come out BETTER financially to tell M$ to stick it's $10 where the sun doesn't shine!
But that's all a matter of individual choices Gateway has to make as a company, isn't it? They can either let Microsoft dictate policy to them, or they can tell M$ what they'll buy and what they won't buy, and set their own prices and standards. This is all a matter of Gateway looking for "easy money" which M$ is all too willing to provide--and Gateway is a taker. M$ *does* offer them other options--but it's entirely Gateway's responsibility if it chooses to try and get every dime it can squeeze out of M$ instead of to offset M$'s contributions through tiny system-price hikes, and the opneing up of choice in its product base for customers.
Now, the only thing I thoroughly dislike about M$'s policies is the threat of terminating an OEM's license to sell its software if the OEM doesn't "play ball." I would favor some regulation there--most definitely. IMHO, the *only* legitimate excuse M$ ought to be able to use to cut off an OEM is non-payment for product. And that's it--there ought to be no more exceptions, period.
Last, take a look at Dell, the most successfull of the sytem vendors out there. Wouldn't it be so much fun to examine the exclusive deals Intel has made with Dell to EXCLUDE AMD systems for Dell? Is this not the same thing, exactly that M$ is being accused of doing? I daresay Dell has preferential treatment from Intel in a number of areas in return for going 100% Intel. Is that any different at all from the preferential treatment M$ gives OEMs for going 100% M$? I can't see how it's a bit different at all. That's probably why Dell has so little comment on these issues, they'd really hate it if their preferntial deals with Intel were brought to light!
But, you know, that's free-market competition in our economy, and all the players have choices--don't let Dell for one minute try and foist the scam that M$ effectively removes its options because of the $10 thing--I've already spelled out what they could do to solve that "problem" handily. Problem is, Gateway wants the easy money, and is simply scared to go another route. But the choice is still there. Dell may be a big company--maybe the biggest of its type--but there's no telling how many sales its lost because of its Intel-only policy. AMD popularity in the mainstream is growing by leaps and bounds, but Dell shrewdly plays that card to win concession after concession from Intel and so continues to exclude AMD choices for its customers. But that's Dell's choice--completely. Just as it is Gateway's choice to sell nothing but M$ oS's to get that $10 per machine. The idea that these multi-billion-dollar-ayear companies are being "boxed in" by M$ is no more sound that the idea that Dell is "boxed in" by Intel. The choices are there--but companies like Gateway are loathe to admit it.
It's too bad, but the scientific case for creation is just as strong and viable as the scientific case for evolution. It's *all* in how you interpret the evidence.
Evolution is purely inductive reasoning, first there was the theory, then came the search for the evidence to prove it. Creation is also inductive. The differences between the two are purely a matter of how the evidence is interpreted.
For instance, how do we know that the fossil record we discover of the dinosaurs is not the evidential remains of the Creator's various stages of experimentation in creating human life (and otherwise) in all of antiquity? It's speculated that an asteroid caused most if not all major extinctions of life in that period. An asteroid or planetoid striking the earth is itself an extraterrestrial event. Is it so farfetched to imagine that a power and intelligence capapble of creating biology on the scale that we see around us deliberately caused that extinction in that manner--so as to proceed to "phase II", if you will, of the Creator's plan for human life on earth?
Personally, I see nothing in the fossil record, or otherwise, which contradicts direct creation of life on this planet by a superior intelligence and power. Others view the same exact evidence and see it as direct contradiction to Creationism. Again, it's all in how you interpret the record and the evidence--NOT in the record or the evidence itself.
I heard this once and have never forgotten it (as it isn't original to me):
"How likely in your mind is it that you could turn your back on a junkyard and walk away, only to return four billion years later to find a fully fueled 747 jet aircraft sitting on a runway, it's engines throttled up and ready for take off?"
This pretty much exactly explains the theory of chance evolution--that "time" does all things, including the creation of human life out of inert and dead materials. The amazing thing is is that one human being is infinitely more complex than a 747 (which is actually fairly crude by comparison) yet the same scientists who "believe" in the chance evolution of human life would scoff at the notion of an evolved 747.
So what I really think is this: the scientist who rejects the idea of intelligent creation is simply trying to create his own religion in which he himself is God. A truely objective agnostic will say: "The evidence can be interpreted either way." A man of faith will say: "The record for Creation is as clear as a bell."
It's all in how you interpret the evidence.
Reminds me of an amusing anecdote I heard from a personal acquaintence a few years ago...
Son-in-law and daughter were going to chip in and buy mom a "real" computer for Christmas that they profusely promised mom was "real easy to use." Mom wasn't initially receptive to the idea because mom only used a computer for one thing--she fired up a simple accounting program once a day and kept the machine powered down otherwise, and was having no diificulties at all and had become used to a routine. But mom relented since her sweet kids were so insistent and so convinced she'd benefit so much by the new computer.
So son-in-law and daughter brought mom a Mac for Christmas thinking they had done her a world of good and suggested that she could donate her 386 DOS box to charity for a tax write off. Mom accepted the gift graciously and set out on the road to "ease of use" in computerdom.
Well, in less than two weeks mom was literally in tears and howling to her sweet kids to come and get their Mac and get their money back. She had studied the owner's manual and gotten Mac guide books and spent hour after hour after hour trying to decipher the Mac GUI and learn things like what a folder was and how it corresponded to her programs and files and so on. Basically, after less than two weeks she was tearing her hair out and miserable with her Mac experience.
To paraphrase what she told her kids:
"All I had to do before was to hit the power button to turn the computer and monitor on, I'd get a C:> prompt on the screen, I'd type in the program name, and my program would run and I could do what I needed to do, hit the save button, and then turn it off until next time. It was as simple as pie.
Now with this horrible Mac I've got all of this gobbledegook on the screen--little pictures of all sorts of things about which I have no earthly idea, strings and strings of menus and submenus to wade through, layers of windows which open for no reason that I can see, and I'll tell you it's been the most frustrating experience of my life! I went back to what I was used to and am extremely content to stay that way and I only hope my kids can get their money back or THEY can donate this Mac to charity! I'm keeping what I've got!"
So when you say computing has gotten progressively easier to use over the past decade, I think you may be forgetting that people like you and me grew up with the technology over the past 15 years or so and have had the changes in GUI and organizational logic fed to us incrementally. I like using computers and so obviously do you, and we like learning newer approaches and have even learned enough to suggest positive changes that have been implemented over the years.
But the lady in this story is typical of so many others, isn't she? She uses a computer for one or two specific tasks and afterwards has no more use for it. She learned how to type in program names at a DOS prompt and found that was as far as she needed or wanted to go in learning about them. Think how she felt then to go from that incredibly simplistic command environment to a GUI like the Mac's (Windows wouldn't have been any different for her) which has developed slowly over the last couple of decades--a GUI like that just dumped on her in one fell swoop! Think about all of the things she'd have to learn just to navigate the GUI simply to run a program!
Windows XP seems very easy to me, but when I think of what it must be like to take home your first computer as a current Power Mac or a Windows box, I sincerely feel sorry for the learning curve these people will have to endure before they get productive with the hardware. There's just SO MUCH people have to learn about how the visual organizational structure of a GUI relates to the hardware they're using and the software they're running before current machines become useful to people. It's really mind-boggling if you think about it.
So have computers REALLY become "easier to use" over the last ten years? I think the answer depends entirely on an individual's prior experience with computers with a variety OS's before that question might be answered in the affirmative. For the lady who's the subject of this anedotal story--again, which is entirely true--of course the answer is that computers have become much more DIFFICULT to use--from her individual perspective.
Ease of use is definitely in the eye of the beholder, I think. As computers grow exponentially in capability and power, a simple GUI is a must for using them productively, no doubt about it. But if you're a person who doesn't need all of that capability and power, and needs only to run one or two software applications, powerful GUI's are overkill and are far too complex for the situation, IMHO.
So this is where I think a market for "appliances" will develop--devices hard-programmed to perform one or two simple specific applications--and do nothing else whatever. I see the development of the "computer" as we know about it remaining to proceed on its own developmental track, which, it seems to me, will definitely always be far more complex than an appliance simply because the increased power and flexibility of an open-ended computer device will demand the additional control complexity, regardless of the specific GUI used.
And here I was thinking I'd scored some logic points...ah, well...:)
I guess you mean "sings the praises of Gates" instead of "sings the praises of Jobs" as I happened to note that both Gates and Jobs were mentioned in the article. But I suppose an article which says anything non-critical about Gates is merely propaganda.
And of course, Apple employees as we all know are completely free to speak their minds whenever they wish and would never be guilty of criticizing their own company--but that tendency is merely heartfelt, certainly nothing to do with their employment by Apple. Far be it from Apple to expect support from its employees. No, this nefarious behavior could only exist within the sinister halls of Microsoft, right?
I, too, have been in the industry for decades, but I must say that I actually have heard people speak *gasp* some nice things about Microsoft from time to time. And of course it makes perfect sense to suppose that the group most opposed to Microsoft are Microsoft product users, the very ones which year after year keep buying Microsoft software--just so they can complain about it, probably. Maybe they're just habitual complainers who choose Microsoft software over Apple because they realize they'd be so happy with Apple and therefore have nothing to complain about and therefore lose their reason for existence. Yea, that's got to be it.
Yep, those nefarious monopolies are really something aren't they? Just think, if Microsoft didn't have a monopoly people would actually be free to buy Apple products and software whenever they wanted to! But of course no one's free to do that, are they, since Microsoft is a monopoly and everyone *must* buy Microsoft, like it or not. Gosh, kind of makes you wonder who it is who actually buys Apple, doesn't it? But wait--if Microsoft's a monopoly that means people have to buy Microsoft because there are no other choices--but wait--what about Apple? It's all so confusing. You're right--it would take a vast intelligence to unravel that enigma...:)
I think products like the ILamp--um,iMac, rather, are really doing Apple some serious harm in the general markets. By declaring that a computer is "cool" based on the fact that it seems to be a successful blend between a reading lamp and a personal computer, isn't Apple fuzzing its image as a computer maker? Will people think of Apple as a "furniture maker who integrates pc components into room furnishings with a stylish approach"...?
Will it be Apple who receives contracts from Red Roof Inns of America to furnish its suites with iMacs which just so happen to resemble stylish and modernistic room lamps? It just seems to me that with every move toward superficial "coolness" Apple makes its image as a serious player in the personal computer electronics market seem more remote and out of sync.
Perhaps Steve Jobs is being just a tad too literal in his quest to bring the computer "into the living rooms of America"...? I can't help but think that with each similar move Apple diminishes itself as a serious player in the computer market and is elevating itself almost as a novelty manufacturer. I'd hate to see Apple reduced to the status of the "Sharp" catalogue in the future, wouldn't you?
I don't get it. We want the capabilities of computers to leap ahead exponentially--we want nation-wide networking and videoconferencing, realisitic 3D games, photo-realistic imaging, voice activated and controlled interfaces, psychiatric AI routines to mimick human feedback, etc., and etc., ad infinitum. Each and every year our expectations for technology surpass all previous expectations. MHz is no longer "enough" unless it's GHz. Megabytes become gigabytes become terrabytes. You know what I'm getting at.
And yet buried in all of this enormous and ever intensifying complexity we express this wish--desire--daydream--whatever--for "simplicity."
How is it that we can reason that more complexity and capability should ever equal increased simplicity? If "simple" is what we want then why not return to the abacus? If easy to use is what we want then why not return to realm of print journalism and read newspapers? If ease is what we desire then why not return to the era of passive television voyuerism where we all pleasantly vegetate as couch potatos?
In short, whoever decided that computers should accomplish enormously complex goals with the simplistic ease of a kindergarten primer? Are such expectations wishful thinking, and aren't they fundamentally irrational?
Computers require us to interact with them and by extension with each other on a variety of levels. IE, to use a computer is to execute the opposite of passivity. Is there some sense that computers "ought" to do our thinking for us, thereby becoming much "simpler" to use? I hope not, because that's frightening for me.
Me, I think that if we ever reach the level where the average Joe can network his office with little to no level of understanding as to what he's doing then we'll have actually left the age of "computers" behind us and will have entered the age of programmed appliances, in which every device will have three or less functions and we learn only how to button push with no understanding as to what we're pushing the buttons for.
As much as I can sympathize with the sentiment, I don't think computers will become simpler, and I think we need to encourage the average Joe to master his computer environment--otherwise it will surely master him.
Any billionaire who's a decent and honest billionaire, and who hasn't totally forgotten that at one time in his life he was utterly helpless to do anything for himself, will quickly tell you that "self-made billionaires" simply don't exist.
But maybe I'm just missing some things here. Was Jobs the only employee at Apple and NeXT? Apparently so, but how then did I think there were so many other people working alongside him in these companies to create the products they made? Were all of the other people working at Apple through the years merely illusions spun off by Jobs' indomitable personality and force of will? Or were these thousands of people actually real human beings who helped Jobs become a billionaire at every single step along the way?
I can see Jobs as a public lightning rod for companies like Apple, sure, but "self-made?" Absolutely not. Even Frankenstein would have been nowhere without Victor...:)
And that's really the question in my own mind. I don't really know who "made" Gates and don't particularly care, but I'd guess if Gates was asked that question he might just ascribe things turning out as they did to being at the right place at the right time and leave it at that. But in Jobs' case--in all sincerity--I have to wonder if it wasn't actually Gates who created Jobs--really, that's a joke. But thinking back on all of the mileage Jobs has gotten on the specter of Gates, it certainly makes you wonder. Is Jobs the "Anti-Gates" or not? I guess that's the "real" question! *chuckle*
"Yay Microsoft! Of the thousands of software and hardware companies out there, in almost every market, there are probably only a few dozen which haven't been completely alienated by their predatory tactics."
You do realize, don't you, what an incredible contradiction you've managed above? You say, "of the thousands of hardware and software companies out there"....and so on, the upshot being that Microsoft's "predatory practices" have "completely alienated" most of them.
Aren't you aware that hundreds of companies worldwide, both software and hardware companies, have become incredible success stories simply because they chose to suport Microsoft standards at some point in their corporate strategy? These companies aren't owned by Microsoft. Rather they are software and hardware companies making huge sums by peddling their wares to the vast x86 WinXP/9x/NT market Microsoft has created. This is a market that these developers sell into that was not created by SUN, not Created by Apple and for the most part not created by IBM, or Intel, even.
There are several, actually, multi-billion $$$ corporations, fully independent of Microsoft, which make the lion's share of their money by selling into markets that Microsoft--not they--created. And these are markets that Microsoft--not they--spends billions of dollars a year to maintain and grow!
That's what I find so incredibly amazing about the near-sightedness with which Microsoft is often viewed. What M$ has accomplished for the consumer in the last 5 years of the last century, insofar as keeping hardware prices down for the benefit of the CONSUMER, is nothing short of incredible. I don't give a rat's behind if SUN doesn't like it because M$ makes it ever-so-much-harder for SUN to GOUGE the daylights out of its customers by selling them way overpriced hardware. Too bad for poor little SUN--sniff-bohoo. Or what about poor little Netscape which thought it owned the Internet browser software distribution market by DIVINE RIGHT, and HOW DARE Microsoft make a better browser? How DARE them? (And that is why Netscape failed, btw. IE *never* surpassed Communicator in market share until the vast majority of people using BOTH browsers reached the conclusion that after years of work IE was simply a BETTER Internet browser. On the other hand, Netscape's own original founders have gone on public record after the sale of the company to AOL with THEIR explanations of Netscape's fall.)
And guess what?? Unlike the infamous Jim Barksdale testimony before the US Congress in which Barksdale characterized the shoddy performance of Netscape in one word ("Microsoft," of course), the Netscape founders related a tale of rotten management paralyzed like deer in headlights by the competition Microsoft (alone) was giving it. Simply put, outside of a monopoly situation, Barksdale's Netscape was simply unable to function. Netscape's founders lamented this paralysis of management by vividly describing how committees were created to make the simplest decisions, the bottom line being that the very thing Netscape needed to do to maintain its LEAD over Microsoft's browsers the company found itself incapable of doing due to a tragic lack of leadership: and what Netscape most definitely needed to do was to ship product, ship product, ship product.
Instead of concentrating on Netscape's customer base and its needs and desires, Barksdale and company were so intimidated by the competition Microsoft was presenting them (Microsoft actually being the only company large enough to COMPETE with Netscape at the time in the browser wars)that the ENTIRE CORPORATE STRATEGY of the company was reduced to knee-jerk reacting to Microsoft. The real reason Netscape lost its position? Top management forgot what made Netscape the defacto standard in the first place--meeting the needs of its customers--and instead became obsessed with everything Microsoft did. Some have commented that with IE 5, Barksdale and pals threw in the towel. What I find ironically satisfying here is that in the early days Netscape execs boasted long and hard about how their multi-platform browser software was simply going to render PC operating systems such as Microsoft's Windows obsolete. Instead, Netscape was rendered obsolete.
You know, I guess if Microsoft as a company had simply abandoned its stockholders at that time and said to them, "Look, Netscape says it doesn't think it's fair that we compete with them in the marketplace so we aren't going to do that," the original Netscape dream might have come true (provided Netscape was allowed to continue its Internet Browser monopoly). But does anyone really think such sentiment on the part of Microsoft is reasonable? I surely don't. Why is it that everyone else in the industry is deemed to have the right to compete for markets in the spirit of "all's fair in love and war," everyone except Microsoft, that is. Nope, when Microsoft does *anything* to protect its business interests the company is labled as "predatory," when SUN or Apple or Netscape do WORSE things than Microsoft they are greeted with cheers. Something's not right with this picture.
Simply, Microsoft has somehow managed to succeed in market areas where EACH of the larger M$ competitors (SUN, Apple, Netscape, IBM, etc.) have FAILED, and failed more than once. Egos being what they are with all of us, it's not surprising to see people like Scott McNealy of SUN attempting to explain M$'s successes by comparing the company to North Korea. McNealy simply doesn't--or may be congentially unable to--understand why his policies failed and Microsoft's succeeded in certain business arenas--AND SO--M$ "has" to be either crooked or else a company of ruthless communistic slave drivers akin to the popular *political* perception of North Korea--at least as Scott McNealy judges these things.
The simple truth is that apart from being in the right place at the right time in the early days, M$ has made a lot of decisions which ran completely counter to those of other large computer companies--and history has proven M$'s decisions the superior ones thus far. IBM, SUN, Apple, dead companies such as Commodore, and other notables of the '80's and 90's were and are companies which focused primarily on HARDWARE sales--whereas M$ has *always* been about software, with Microsoft only joining the hardware club with its X-Box console gaming platform very recently. Dell is hardware--HP & Compaq are primarily hardware companies. In short, M$ went the software route the other guys went the hardware route and look where they all are today. Companies like Dell in no uncertain terms owe their very inception and existence to M$'s supporting OS's.
So when you look at the state of the industry in that light, it's not suprising that companies like Apple and SUN feel very threatened by the success of the M$ business model compared to their own--which is not to say that either SUN or Apple have poor business plans--just that they're not in the same league as the one M$ has been pursuing for a couple of decades. Where they've been more of short-term, high-per-unit profit hardware companies, Microsoft has concentrated on building an entire market which is much, much larger in scope. We saw the first real payoff in the M$ strategy after the Win95 release in '95. Since then M$ has managed to take the whole screwy x86 mess and infuse it with hardware and software standards which, prior to Win95, pretty much didn't exist. SUN sure wasn't interested in the consumer x86 market prior to 1995, and gosh knows Apple wasn't. But M$ was, had a plan for it, and has so far done a good job of executing it.
In truth, I don't think Jobs is unaware of the points I've raised. He's acknowledged that none other than Gates himself advised him to allow the cloning of Apple hardware long ago, in response to a question Jobs asked him about increasing the Mac's mainstream USA market share--something that bothered Jobs even way back when. I've heard Jobs admit being tragically wrong in not following that advice and actually stating that it was his very serious mangerial mistake--and his alone. Of course, today, Jobs is still finding reasons to keep Apple primarily a hardware company--and he's justified to himself at least--killing off the Apple clones that were being made when the Apple board paid him $500 million to take Apple back. Like Netscape, I guess, Apple is one of those companies which can survive only by dominating a niche market--and I guess Jobs feels that even with Apple calling all the shots the Apple clone companies would still be smart enough to beat them at their own game of making and marketing computers running the Mac OS. As long as Jobs feels this way I don't see how Apple can be compared to M$ as the latter's a software company and the former's a hardware company.
And it's the same with SUN, really--which is why McNealy's comments never cease to baffle me. I mean, I know on one level that it's natural for SUN to loathe the success of M$'s business plan which, after all, is so different from SUN's. I guess Scott feels himself naked and wrong at the same time since he's declared M$ so full of fruit loops so often in the past only to have his breakfast eaten later by M$. That's entirely human--you can only take making a dufus out of yourself just so often. What I think lies behind McNealy's vitriol is good, old-fashioned fear. Scott doesn't believe he can perceive the future quite as well as Billy "the nerd" Gates, and he's just plum rattled by it. Of course McNealy would rather die than admit anything of the sort, so he simply stoops to lame attempts to convince some (Scott feels) not too bright Washington politicians that Bill Gates is actually a North Korean dictator wanna'-be in disguise in the fond hopes that they'll string BG up in a panic and thus negate any possibility of SM ever having to actually match wits with BG in the public business arena. I mean, you don't think that McNealy actually believes that Bill Gates is really a North Korean citizen, do you?
Anyhoo...I had no intention of writing a diatribe like this! Oh my gosh!...:) I just guess I get really, really tired of the kind of anti-Microsoft drivel that seems all the rage these days--usually spouted by people who been actively reading computer trade mags for two years or less and believe they've got a handle on things.
Don't be so alarmed and try to be patient...:) I'm reminded of an old Mark Twain quote which I hope I have attributed correctly (paraphrased): "When I was 16 I was amazed at my father's ignorance. When I turned 21 I was amazed by how much he'd learned." Generally speaking, there's a giant, yawning gulf between textbook theory and practical experience. Just out of college, many young people simply know a great deal about the former and nothing about the latter. Older people, however, have lived through the transition long enough to discern the difference. As a young person many things may seem to you entirely logical and brimming with merit, making you scratch your head in genuine bafflement as to why what seems so transparent to you is completely hidden from these other, older people. In fact, these older people have simply lived long enough to have had the same ideas you do, tried them, and for one reason or another watched them fail. That's where the "experience" factor comes into play. Rather than enter into long-winded debates with you as to why things which seem so "logical" simply don't work too well in practicality, these people may simply think you've some growing to do and some experience to accrue, so they'll put you somewhere they feel you can begin to develop so as to understand the answers to your questions before you ask them. :)
Naturally, this makes you feel "discriminated" against--when in reality they are placing you there to help you obtain some pieces of the puzzle they feel you may not presently appreciate.
However, there's a chance your employers could be real jerks, too...:) In that case, I'd start hunting for another job. But if you feel these are otherwise "great" people who are making strange decisions (decisions you can't understand with regard to your placement), then I'd hang in there as it may pay BIG dividends down the road. Good luck!