The problem is not updates. The problem is being forced to do updates;
the 100+ updates mentioned above fix security bugs only.
The biggest problem is that Microsoft makes it difficult to do the
updates, instead of easy; it is the adversarial behavior that is disgusting.
When a computer running Microsoft Windows is infected, it cannot be
connected to a network of other computers, because it may infect them, also.
And many computers are stand-alone; they are not connected to Microsoft's
expensive server.
This is important enough to say it again: Many of Microsoft's actions
are against the interests of the customer, like releasing unfinished software,
such as Windows Vista.
A good indication of how Microsoft treats its customers is the fact that it has been more than 3 years since SP2 was released on 8/10/2004.
Here is a quote from Paul Thurrott, who is over-the-top pro-Microsoft, and who often apologizes for Microsoft's abusiveness in a way that tries to make abusive behavior sound less destructive:... the 100+ updates that Microsoft has shipped since SP2 can be a nightmare to deploy.
For those who use Linux, I will explain: Windows often becomes infected with malware. It sometimes becomes unstable on its own, too; Microsoft releases sloppy, unfinished software. So, it is often necessary to re-load Windows XP SP2. Once you have done that, it is at present necessary to re-load perhaps 100 Megabytes of bug fixes that have been released since SP2. That's why delaying Service Pack 3 for Windows XP has been so damaging to customers; customers have paid millions of dollars extra because of the tedious time-consuming task of loading the 100+ updates since SP2, one at a time.
Microsoft shut down Autopatcher, which was created by volunteers. Autopatcher was a method of making installing the patches semi-automatic. I think that shows the true situation: Volunteers have to do needed work. Microsoft, which could have delivered updates using the same method, avoided making it easier and cheaper to use Windows XP.
Why buy a new product from someone who has frequently abused you in the past?
This is the overall issue, in my opinion: Microsoft somehow established, during the DOS days, that it could charge the full product price for what are actually quite minor updates. (Many people are still using Windows 2000.) So the company makes a huge amount of money each time it brings out what is actually a new version of Windows 2000 with a new name. But things have changed. Users tend to be more technically knowledgeable now. They see no reason to change if what they have now is adequate, if somewhat annoying and expensive to maintain.
Windows 98 was an abuser's dream: It had an unstable file system, insuring that everyone would want to upgrade. Abusive company managers try to delay delivering a stable system, since most people don't want anything more from an operating system than stability.
It took Microsoft 3 years to make Windows XP stable and usable with less pain -- there were 3 years from the first release of XP until SP2 was released. Three years of pain, and since then only three years of relative stability? Is that acceptable, 50% pain? Why start the pain again, with Vista?
Microsoft needs the computer builders to advertise its new update of Windows 2000, called Windows Vista. Computer builders want to sell new computers. That's why Vista uses more resources. Vista is partly an attempt to make the present hardware obsolete.
However, people are beginning to understand better, and they are more difficult to manipulate now.
It seems sensible to me to wait to use Windows Vista until Vista SP2 or SP3 is released, and then a few months after that, to learn if the service pack works well.
Quote from Slashdot's story: "Microsoft also issued a new build of
Windows XP SP3 this week, but it's getting next to no publicity out of
Redmond..." Maybe so, but I can't find it. I found only an 12/10/2007 SP3, a release candidate, which is supposed to be an advanced beta version.
It is well known that libraries that freely loan books caused the book
publishing business to collapse..... Wait, that's not right.
We need a better theoretical model of intellectual property. Somehow
the generally accepted ideas have been shown again and again to be wildly
wrong. It is really stupid that most people don't seem to notice that they
have to change their thinking.
Practically everything Microsoft does contains some aspect that is
adversarial toward customers. That extremely adversarial corporate culture was
designed by Bill Gates.
Is Bill Gates a new man now? Has Bill Gates somehow become a person
who cares about other people? If he has, why doesn't he stop Microsoft from
releasing sloppy, unfinished software? Is the "new" Bill Gates like
the "new" Richard Nixon?
Everything I've seen indicates that Bill Gates is a poor writer. Who
wrote his speech then?
It seems to me that Bill Gates is one of the most disliked people in
the world. Is his new interest in other people a public relations attempt?
Is he using public relations to try to get approval, like Nancy Reagan's
interest in drug abuse prevention or Pamela Anderson's interested in
vegetarian eating and breast size?
Public relations is just a normal purchase for people who have a lot
of money, and in the case of most of them, completely cynical.
Do you realize that the comment to which you linked is in a story about another huge Microsoft abuse titled, "PC Magazine Editor Throws in the Towel on Vista"?
That was not a very effective way to argue that Microsoft is not abusive.
There's a difference between making mistakes and having a corporate culture that deliberately pursues policies that are adversarial toward users. One of those policies, deliberately not following standards, is what started this discussion.
So many people think Microsoft is a software company. Actually Microsoft is an abuse company. Sloppy software is just one method Microsoft uses to deliver abuse.
If you want software, choose some other company. If you want abuse, Microsoft is one of the world's larger suppliers of time wasting hassles for technically knowledgeable people.
Billionaires don't need more money. Many billionaires believe they need people to abuse; they want people they think are socially below them. That was the reason for slavery, too; just rich people wanting to feel that they are superior.
"The [VMWare] documentation is awful. Just.... Awful. There's tons of it to be sure, but it's contradictory, badly written, confusing and downright wrong in places."
I haven't looked at them for a year, but in the past the VMWare Virtual Appliances were more likely to hurt VMWare's reputation than help it, in my opinion.
I really, really hope so. However, can you name one thing Bill Gates has done that was purely good? Everything that he has done, apparently, has had the hidden intention of being adversarial toward the user. Bill Gates has been VERY self- and other-destructive.
Companies like Microsoft and Coca-Cola have found that pretending to be charitable is a very good way to get people to ignore their extremely predatory business practices, in my opinion.
I think your skepticism about such things is justified. After the recent crash in Brazil, it seemed to me that by far the biggest and strongest response was that officials tried to manipulate public thinking. (Click on "more" under "About This Video".)
In that case, it was difficult to control perceptions because too many people knew that the runway had just been re-surfaced, and had been put back in service before the non-skid grooves had been cut.
Too often, the "news" is not an honest attempt to understand and communicate the truth. I hope U.S. taxpayers will think about that as those with power in the U.S. government, who have investments in oil and weapons, try to involve the bankrupt U.S. government in a war with Iran. What are the facts? Maybe the average person has no way of knowing.
From the New York Times September 3, 1995 article Running on the Fastest Track: "Gates, suddenly reassured, interrupted, 'So they have finite greed.' " Finite greed, it seems, is a term of derision in the Gates vernacular.
It seems that Bill Gates is admired for only one thing, being the richest person. I have never heard of anyone admiring Bill Gates for anything else. Apparently people don't want to be him.
"For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by
longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with
many griefs." -- New American Standard Bible
"For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil: which some
reaching after have been led astray from the faith, and have pierced
themselves through with many sorrows." -- American Standard
Version
But most of the other translations leave out "all kinds of" and say
"all".
It says the author is Paul of Tarsus. The source we have of the
writing is from the Peschito Syriac of the second century. -- Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary
Judging from one example, Bill Gates, the idea is supported. Bill
Gates is said to suffer from depression. Depression is certainly a "sorrow".
You made an excellent point that definitely applies sometimes, I think.
Also, there is another issue, usually even stronger. Programmers like
to write code. They like the feeling of invention.
They DON'T like working with someone else's code. It's frustrating to
let someone else be the leader, particularly when the other person's code is
not easily readable. So, programmers often have a very serious case of NIHM,
Not Invented Here and by Me.
Another problem is that programmers often live in a fantasy world
concerning how long it will take to re-write working code. They often
underestimate the amount of work by a factor of 10. They like to paint the
broad strokes; they don't like to do the tedious work of making a program
perfect; they don't like to write clear documentation. In business
applications, those two are usually more than 80% of the work.
Which Nuance product are you using? Is it a special medical version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking? Those are much more expensive, and I've never tried them. They also use special dictionaries provided by Nuance.
I've heard about success with that use. Partly the success seems to be due to the fact that there is never confusion about what you said, so that mistakes are easily corrected. Another reason is that technical words are much more easily recognized.
Speech recognition software checks the grammar to see if the use of a word is plausible.
Here are a few Firefox flaws. The list was made quickly; it is not extensive.
Hundreds of articles have been written about Firefox problems; the articles
mentioned here are just some I found during a quick search. The overall
impression I get is that Firefox development is very badly managed.
CPU hogging: I've typed every comment in this thread under the
same conditions: Firefox is taking 30-40% of the CPU. This has been reported
many, many times, by many, many people. Leaving Firefox open for days, as when
doing extended research, especially when the computer has been put into
hibernation, causes Firefox to hog the CPU. Firefox actually corrupts Windows
XP so that it is necessary to reboot the computer, not just Firefox.
The CPU hogging bug affects the most heavy users of Firefox.
Here is one of the many stories about Firefox CPU hogging, the
February 08, 2007 PCWorld staff blog: Help! Firefox is Sucking the Life From My Processor!. Quote: "...
Windows Task Manager shows that Firefox is bogarting 90 percent or more of my
processing power. The problem happens pretty consistently on three different
Windows machines I use."
Abuse by the developers of those who report bugs: Apparently
developers have refused to start numerous windows and tabs so that they could
see the CPU bug for themselves. That's been the response to the CPU hogging
bug reports I've seen.
Firefox developers seem to be involved in work avoidance schemes. They
don't seem to want to work on bugs that require extended troubleshooting.
Firefox cannot be made portable. Bad choices have been made in
how Firefox handles its files. Running a portable version of Firefox is
impossible if a version started from a hard drive is running.
Firefox will not allow multiple instances. If something goes wrong
with one Firefox window and tabs, it affects all the windows and tabs that are
running.
Firefox session restore is not reliable. If there happen to be
delays in restoring a tab, possibly because other tabs were loading, Firefox throws away the URL, rather than simply displaying it in the tab with a blank window.
Firefox hogs memory. See the ComputerWorld article, Hands on: A look at Firefox's memory issues. Quote:
"It's clear to me that there are pandemic memory problems in Firefox, and
also that Mozilla has not responded adequately to them." Since that
article was published, Firefox developers have fixed numerous memory
management bugs, while continuing to deny that any exist.
Firefox advertises extensions, then blames them for problems. A
common topic of articles about Firefox is some variation of "How to make
Firefox work the way it should".
Often Firefox developers blame Firefox extensions advertised on the
Mozilla web site.
World Trade Center bombing on 9/11/2001: It is completely impossible for a very strong concrete and steel building with extremely large steel center columns to fall symmetrically into dust and small pieces by itself, after only being damaged near the top.
That has never happened before, in the entire history of humankind, and it has never happened since.
As the movie shows, numerous TV news reporters said the collapse looked like a controlled demolition. The people who made the movie are not the only ones who said that; it was the consensus of TV reporters at the time.
Anyone wanting to have a general sense of how the world is presently seeing
the bad side of religion can watch Part 1 of the excellent free movie Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist
Movie is valuable but far from perfect; it needs heavy editing. For example,
some of the comparisons of traditional Christian religious belief with belief
in ancient pagan gods have been found to be exaggerated by the sources the
makers of the Zeitgeist Movie used. Also, it is a preposterous exaggeration to
suggest that Jesus Christ did not exist; if he didn't exist, someone
originated the ideas; Jesus Christ is simply the name used for the originator.
The need for editing is understandable considering the enormous expense of
making a movie, which the makers of the Zeitgeist Movie are giving away free.
Another resource is the book, The God
Delusion. That book also has theories that could use considerable
improvement.
The best point of both is that what people call "religion" has done
some harm as well as good. The movie and the book simply express something of
the present quality of thinking surrounding that very old idea. Even some
officials of the Catholic Church agree that Catholics killing Jews during the
Spanish Inquisition, Catholics killing Muslims during the Crusades, and the
U.S. government killing Iraqis now are evidence that what people call religion
is sometimes not good but mixed with evil.
George W. Bush could not have been
elected without support from those U.S. voters who call themselves
"Christian Evangelists", who sometimes feel that their
ideas are so superior that they should decide who to kill, even if it is
people who live in places many of the "Christian" Evangelists could not find
on a map of the world. George W. Bush was elected because Karl Rove's research
discovered that if Bush claimed he was a Christian, he would get strong
support from people who wanted to believe that an alcoholic magically became a
loving person because of religion.
This software's history includes jail terms.
Speech recognition has gotten an extremely bad reputation for being worthless
garbage, maybe because it is worthless garbage.
Even a 0.5 percent recognition failure rate is enough to make speech
recognition software worse than worthless. The reason is that speech
recognition software never makes a spelling mistake. Instead, the mistakes are
often extremely difficult to recognize, and sometimes change the meaning in
subtle ways. That's partly because when the software is confused it tries to
select something that is grammatically plausible.
The result is that it has become difficult to sell speech recognition
software. A high enough percentage of people in the U.S. culture know that it
isn't actually useful. The orginal owners of Dragon NaturallySpeaking sold the
product to a company that sold it to the company that became Nuance, maybe
because they felt the product was damaging the credibility of their
trademarks.
"In 1993 two executives from Kurzweill Applied Intelligence (which
pioneered SR for the medical market) went to prison for faking sales. That
firm was sold in 1997 to a Belgium SR firm, Lernout and Hauspie (L&H), which
was reporting phenomenal sales growth at the time. Dragon Systems, which
originated DNS that year, was reporting only anemic growth, and L&H had no
trouble acquiring Dragon Systems in early 2000 in a stock deal. Within a year
a series of accounting frauds came to light and L&H collapsed into bankruptcy.
Its SR technology was sold in late 2001 to ScanSoft Inc., which kept the DNS
line going. (It was then at Version 6.0.) ScanSoft later acquired Nuance and
adopted its name.
"Thereafter, "It was with the launch of Version 8.0 (in November
2004) that the market became reinvigorated and took off," said Chris
Strammiello, director of product management at Nuance. "We crossed an
invisible line with Version 8.0, where the software actually delivered on its
promises and offered real utility for the users. Sales have been growing at a
rate of 30% yearly since then, except that we expect it to do better than 30%
this year."
Read that again: "... the software actually delivered on its
promises and offered real utility..." I called Nuance and was told that
version 8 did not have a new recognition engine, but only had improvements in
the user interface. A friend who owns and tested version 8 told me he could
see no difference in accuracy between that and version 7.
So, in my opinion, Nuance has done common deceitful things that
are called "Marketing":
1) Bring out new versions. Previously, when there has been a "new
version" of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I call Nuance technical support and ask
if there is a new recognition engine. I didn't call for version 9, but for the
last two versions they have said no. So, nothing is changed; the software is
still worse than useless to me, in spite of the fact that they advertise that the
software is now more accurate.
How is it possible that the software is more accurate, if the
recognition engine did not change? Maybe it isn't true. Or maybe the company
improved the guesses the software makes when the software really has no clue
what the user said. As I mentioned, those guesses have become so sophisticated that you can
become confused about what you actually said, and you have to spend time
re-creating your ideas. If you are saying simple things about a simple
subject, this is not as much of problem as when you are writing about contract
negotiations, for example.
In the words of a Slashdot reader: "The opinions expressed here may be
those of my speech recognition so
The U.S. government has often used its "cooperation" with the governments of
other countries to corrupt those governments. See, for example, Coups
Arranged or Backed by the USA. Most or all of that corruption happened for profit, such as
kickbacks of U.S. government foreign aid. When the governments of Israel or Pakistan buy
weapons from U.S. manufacturers using money from "foreign aid", that is embezzlement of
taxpayer money.
The poorly edited but very interesting free movie Zeitgeist explains in three
parts that 1) People who believe in myths are easily manipulated. 2) It is
common that people are manipulated through fear. 3) The U.S. monetary system
is controlled for the profit of a few individuals. (Also see The Creature from Jekyll Island, an excellent but not
perfect book about financial corruption.)
The U.S. government has killed directly or indirectly caused the death of an estimated 11,000,000 people since the end of the Second World war, partly by invading or bombing 25 countries.
Wikipedia says "Each frame consists of a total of 525 scanlines, of which 486 make up the visible raster."
So, you are right, the maximum resolution of the U.S. standard, NTSC is 486, apparently. However, I read somewhere that actual TV does not deliver a real resolution of 486, partly because the interlacing is not perfectly accurate.
NTSC delivers 243 lines of vertical resolution, then goes back and delivers another 243 lines interlaced (interspersed) with the first lines.
Slashdot Mirror
Good, but isn't it too soon to hassle with Vista?.
I think you are missing the point.
The problem is not updates. The problem is being forced to do updates; the 100+ updates mentioned above fix security bugs only.
The biggest problem is that Microsoft makes it difficult to do the updates, instead of easy; it is the adversarial behavior that is disgusting.
When a computer running Microsoft Windows is infected, it cannot be connected to a network of other computers, because it may infect them, also. And many computers are stand-alone; they are not connected to Microsoft's expensive server.
This is important enough to say it again: Many of Microsoft's actions are against the interests of the customer, like releasing unfinished software, such as Windows Vista.
I don't know why you bother with Windows Vista SP1. Windows XP didn't work fairly well until SP2. Why not let the early adopters have the grief?
... the 100+ updates that Microsoft has shipped since SP2 can be a nightmare to deploy.
Sure, that's only my opinion, but I'm not the only one who thinks that way. For example, see Why all Vista users should upgrade to Windows XP.
A good indication of how Microsoft treats its customers is the fact that it has been more than 3 years since SP2 was released on 8/10/2004. Here is a quote from Paul Thurrott, who is over-the-top pro-Microsoft, and who often apologizes for Microsoft's abusiveness in a way that tries to make abusive behavior sound less destructive:
For those who use Linux, I will explain: Windows often becomes infected with malware. It sometimes becomes unstable on its own, too; Microsoft releases sloppy, unfinished software. So, it is often necessary to re-load Windows XP SP2. Once you have done that, it is at present necessary to re-load perhaps 100 Megabytes of bug fixes that have been released since SP2. That's why delaying Service Pack 3 for Windows XP has been so damaging to customers; customers have paid millions of dollars extra because of the tedious time-consuming task of loading the 100+ updates since SP2, one at a time.
Microsoft shut down Autopatcher, which was created by volunteers. Autopatcher was a method of making installing the patches semi-automatic. I think that shows the true situation: Volunteers have to do needed work. Microsoft, which could have delivered updates using the same method, avoided making it easier and cheaper to use Windows XP.
Why buy a new product from someone who has frequently abused you in the past?
This is the overall issue, in my opinion: Microsoft somehow established, during the DOS days, that it could charge the full product price for what are actually quite minor updates. (Many people are still using Windows 2000.) So the company makes a huge amount of money each time it brings out what is actually a new version of Windows 2000 with a new name. But things have changed. Users tend to be more technically knowledgeable now. They see no reason to change if what they have now is adequate, if somewhat annoying and expensive to maintain.
Windows 98 was an abuser's dream: It had an unstable file system, insuring that everyone would want to upgrade. Abusive company managers try to delay delivering a stable system, since most people don't want anything more from an operating system than stability.
It took Microsoft 3 years to make Windows XP stable and usable with less pain -- there were 3 years from the first release of XP until SP2 was released. Three years of pain, and since then only three years of relative stability? Is that acceptable, 50% pain? Why start the pain again, with Vista?
Microsoft needs the computer builders to advertise its new update of Windows 2000, called Windows Vista. Computer builders want to sell new computers. That's why Vista uses more resources. Vista is partly an attempt to make the present hardware obsolete.
However, people are beginning to understand better, and they are more difficult to manipulate now.
It seems sensible to me to wait to use Windows Vista until Vista SP2 or SP3 is released, and then a few months after that, to learn if the service pack works well.
Quote from Slashdot's story: "Microsoft also issued a new build of Windows XP SP3 this week, but it's getting next to no publicity out of Redmond..." Maybe so, but I can't find it. I found only an 12/10/2007 SP3, a release candidate, which is supposed to be an advanced beta version.
It is well known that libraries that freely loan books caused the book publishing business to collapse. .... Wait, that's not right.
We need a better theoretical model of intellectual property. Somehow the generally accepted ideas have been shown again and again to be wildly wrong. It is really stupid that most people don't seem to notice that they have to change their thinking.
Practically everything Microsoft does contains some aspect that is adversarial toward customers. That extremely adversarial corporate culture was designed by Bill Gates.
Is Bill Gates a new man now? Has Bill Gates somehow become a person who cares about other people? If he has, why doesn't he stop Microsoft from releasing sloppy, unfinished software? Is the "new" Bill Gates like the "new" Richard Nixon?
Everything I've seen indicates that Bill Gates is a poor writer. Who wrote his speech then?
It seems to me that Bill Gates is one of the most disliked people in the world. Is his new interest in other people a public relations attempt? Is he using public relations to try to get approval, like Nancy Reagan's interest in drug abuse prevention or Pamela Anderson's interested in vegetarian eating and breast size?
Public relations is just a normal purchase for people who have a lot of money, and in the case of most of them, completely cynical.
Do you realize that the comment to which you linked is in a story about another huge Microsoft abuse titled, "PC Magazine Editor Throws in the Towel on Vista"?
That was not a very effective way to argue that Microsoft is not abusive.
I haven't repeated myself nearly as much as Microsoft has developed and pursued abusive policies.
There's a difference between making mistakes and having a corporate culture that deliberately pursues policies that are adversarial toward users. One of those policies, deliberately not following standards, is what started this discussion.
Please name one thing that Microsoft has ever done that was completely free of abusive elements.
Remember Microsoft Basic? It came with a very poor manual that didn't document serious quirks of the language.
Remember Microsoft Assembler? It sometimes didn't create accurate code.
It's been like that since the beginning, and it is like that now. Windows Vista is sloppy, unfinished code that causes users a lot of grief.
So many people think Microsoft is a software company. Actually Microsoft is an abuse company. Sloppy software is just one method Microsoft uses to deliver abuse.
If you want software, choose some other company. If you want abuse, Microsoft is one of the world's larger suppliers of time wasting hassles for technically knowledgeable people.
Billionaires don't need more money. Many billionaires believe they need people to abuse; they want people they think are socially below them. That was the reason for slavery, too; just rich people wanting to feel that they are superior.
My opinion, but in my experience not far wrong.
"The [VMWare] documentation is awful. Just.... Awful. There's tons of it to be sure, but it's contradictory, badly written, confusing and downright wrong in places."
I haven't looked at them for a year, but in the past the VMWare Virtual Appliances were more likely to hurt VMWare's reputation than help it, in my opinion.
I really, really hope so. However, can you name one thing Bill Gates has done that was purely good? Everything that he has done, apparently, has had the hidden intention of being adversarial toward the user. Bill Gates has been VERY self- and other-destructive.
Companies like Microsoft and Coca-Cola have found that pretending to be charitable is a very good way to get people to ignore their extremely predatory business practices, in my opinion.
I think your skepticism about such things is justified. After the recent crash in Brazil, it seemed to me that by far the biggest and strongest response was that officials tried to manipulate public thinking. (Click on "more" under "About This Video".)
In that case, it was difficult to control perceptions because too many people knew that the runway had just been re-surfaced, and had been put back in service before the non-skid grooves had been cut.
Too often, the "news" is not an honest attempt to understand and communicate the truth. I hope U.S. taxpayers will think about that as those with power in the U.S. government, who have investments in oil and weapons, try to involve the bankrupt U.S. government in a war with Iran. What are the facts? Maybe the average person has no way of knowing.
From the New York Times September 3, 1995 article Running on the Fastest Track: "Gates, suddenly reassured, interrupted, 'So they have finite greed.' " Finite greed, it seems, is a term of derision in the Gates vernacular.
It seems that Bill Gates is admired for only one thing, being the richest person. I have never heard of anyone admiring Bill Gates for anything else. Apparently people don't want to be him.
Parallel Translations of 1 Timothy 6-10:
"For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs." -- New American Standard Bible
"For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil: which some reaching after have been led astray from the faith, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows." -- American Standard Version
But most of the other translations leave out "all kinds of" and say "all".
It says the author is Paul of Tarsus. The source we have of the writing is from the Peschito Syriac of the second century. -- Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary
Judging from one example, Bill Gates, the idea is supported. Bill Gates is said to suffer from depression. Depression is certainly a "sorrow".
Quote from the Fortune article: "This is a great example of why Google is the leader ... and Microsoft is not..."
Microsoft: Do evil if evil makes money? Or, Microsoft: Evil is our most important product, making money is secondary?
You made an excellent point that definitely applies sometimes, I think.
Also, there is another issue, usually even stronger. Programmers like to write code. They like the feeling of invention.
They DON'T like working with someone else's code. It's frustrating to let someone else be the leader, particularly when the other person's code is not easily readable. So, programmers often have a very serious case of NIHM, Not Invented Here and by Me.
Another problem is that programmers often live in a fantasy world concerning how long it will take to re-write working code. They often underestimate the amount of work by a factor of 10. They like to paint the broad strokes; they don't like to do the tedious work of making a program perfect; they don't like to write clear documentation. In business applications, those two are usually more than 80% of the work.
"... uses a Nuance product..."
Which Nuance product are you using? Is it a special medical version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking? Those are much more expensive, and I've never tried them. They also use special dictionaries provided by Nuance.
I've heard about success with that use. Partly the success seems to be due to the fact that there is never confusion about what you said, so that mistakes are easily corrected. Another reason is that technical words are much more easily recognized.
Speech recognition software checks the grammar to see if the use of a word is plausible.
Here are a few Firefox flaws. The list was made quickly; it is not extensive. Hundreds of articles have been written about Firefox problems; the articles mentioned here are just some I found during a quick search. The overall impression I get is that Firefox development is very badly managed.
CPU hogging: I've typed every comment in this thread under the same conditions: Firefox is taking 30-40% of the CPU. This has been reported many, many times, by many, many people. Leaving Firefox open for days, as when doing extended research, especially when the computer has been put into hibernation, causes Firefox to hog the CPU. Firefox actually corrupts Windows XP so that it is necessary to reboot the computer, not just Firefox.
The CPU hogging bug affects the most heavy users of Firefox.
Here is one of the many stories about Firefox CPU hogging, the February 08, 2007 PCWorld staff blog: Help! Firefox is Sucking the Life From My Processor!. Quote: "... Windows Task Manager shows that Firefox is bogarting 90 percent or more of my processing power. The problem happens pretty consistently on three different Windows machines I use."
Abuse by the developers of those who report bugs: Apparently developers have refused to start numerous windows and tabs so that they could see the CPU bug for themselves. That's been the response to the CPU hogging bug reports I've seen.
Firefox developers seem to be involved in work avoidance schemes. They don't seem to want to work on bugs that require extended troubleshooting.
Firefox cannot be made portable. Bad choices have been made in how Firefox handles its files. Running a portable version of Firefox is impossible if a version started from a hard drive is running.
Firefox will not allow multiple instances. If something goes wrong with one Firefox window and tabs, it affects all the windows and tabs that are running.
Firefox session restore is not reliable. If there happen to be delays in restoring a tab, possibly because other tabs were loading, Firefox throws away the URL, rather than simply displaying it in the tab with a blank window.
Firefox hogs memory. See the ComputerWorld article, Hands on: A look at Firefox's memory issues. Quote: "It's clear to me that there are pandemic memory problems in Firefox, and also that Mozilla has not responded adequately to them." Since that article was published, Firefox developers have fixed numerous memory management bugs, while continuing to deny that any exist.
Firefox advertises extensions, then blames them for problems. A common topic of articles about Firefox is some variation of "How to make Firefox work the way it should".
Often Firefox developers blame Firefox extensions advertised on the Mozilla web site.
Note that I am merely summarizing what is in the Zeitgeist Movie, and several other movies.
World Trade Center bombing on 9/11/2001: It is completely impossible for a very strong concrete and steel building with extremely large steel center columns to fall symmetrically into dust and small pieces by itself, after only being damaged near the top.
That has never happened before, in the entire history of humankind, and it has never happened since.
As the movie shows, numerous TV news reporters said the collapse looked like a controlled demolition. The people who made the movie are not the only ones who said that; it was the consensus of TV reporters at the time.
Anyone wanting to have a general sense of how the world is presently seeing the bad side of religion can watch Part 1 of the excellent free movie Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist Movie is valuable but far from perfect; it needs heavy editing. For example, some of the comparisons of traditional Christian religious belief with belief in ancient pagan gods have been found to be exaggerated by the sources the makers of the Zeitgeist Movie used. Also, it is a preposterous exaggeration to suggest that Jesus Christ did not exist; if he didn't exist, someone originated the ideas; Jesus Christ is simply the name used for the originator. The need for editing is understandable considering the enormous expense of making a movie, which the makers of the Zeitgeist Movie are giving away free.
Another resource is the book, The God Delusion. That book also has theories that could use considerable improvement.
The best point of both is that what people call "religion" has done some harm as well as good. The movie and the book simply express something of the present quality of thinking surrounding that very old idea. Even some officials of the Catholic Church agree that Catholics killing Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, Catholics killing Muslims during the Crusades, and the U.S. government killing Iraqis now are evidence that what people call religion is sometimes not good but mixed with evil.
George W. Bush could not have been elected without support from those U.S. voters who call themselves "Christian Evangelists", who sometimes feel that their ideas are so superior that they should decide who to kill, even if it is people who live in places many of the "Christian" Evangelists could not find on a map of the world. George W. Bush was elected because Karl Rove's research discovered that if Bush claimed he was a Christian, he would get strong support from people who wanted to believe that an alcoholic magically became a loving person because of religion.
This software's history includes jail terms. Speech recognition has gotten an extremely bad reputation for being worthless garbage, maybe because it is worthless garbage.
Even a 0.5 percent recognition failure rate is enough to make speech recognition software worse than worthless. The reason is that speech recognition software never makes a spelling mistake. Instead, the mistakes are often extremely difficult to recognize, and sometimes change the meaning in subtle ways. That's partly because when the software is confused it tries to select something that is grammatically plausible.
The result is that it has become difficult to sell speech recognition software. A high enough percentage of people in the U.S. culture know that it isn't actually useful. The orginal owners of Dragon NaturallySpeaking sold the product to a company that sold it to the company that became Nuance, maybe because they felt the product was damaging the credibility of their trademarks.
Here is a quote from the ComputerWorld story linked in the earlier Slashdot story, Is Speech Recognition Finally 'Good Enough'?:
"In 1993 two executives from Kurzweill Applied Intelligence (which pioneered SR for the medical market) went to prison for faking sales. That firm was sold in 1997 to a Belgium SR firm, Lernout and Hauspie (L&H), which was reporting phenomenal sales growth at the time. Dragon Systems, which originated DNS that year, was reporting only anemic growth, and L&H had no trouble acquiring Dragon Systems in early 2000 in a stock deal. Within a year a series of accounting frauds came to light and L&H collapsed into bankruptcy. Its SR technology was sold in late 2001 to ScanSoft Inc., which kept the DNS line going. (It was then at Version 6.0.) ScanSoft later acquired Nuance and adopted its name.
"Thereafter, "It was with the launch of Version 8.0 (in November 2004) that the market became reinvigorated and took off," said Chris Strammiello, director of product management at Nuance. "We crossed an invisible line with Version 8.0, where the software actually delivered on its promises and offered real utility for the users. Sales have been growing at a rate of 30% yearly since then, except that we expect it to do better than 30% this year."
Read that again: "... the software actually delivered on its promises and offered real utility..." I called Nuance and was told that version 8 did not have a new recognition engine, but only had improvements in the user interface. A friend who owns and tested version 8 told me he could see no difference in accuracy between that and version 7.
So, in my opinion, Nuance has done common deceitful things that are called "Marketing":
1) Bring out new versions. Previously, when there has been a "new version" of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I call Nuance technical support and ask if there is a new recognition engine. I didn't call for version 9, but for the last two versions they have said no. So, nothing is changed; the software is still worse than useless to me, in spite of the fact that they advertise that the software is now more accurate.
How is it possible that the software is more accurate, if the recognition engine did not change? Maybe it isn't true. Or maybe the company improved the guesses the software makes when the software really has no clue what the user said. As I mentioned, those guesses have become so sophisticated that you can become confused about what you actually said, and you have to spend time re-creating your ideas. If you are saying simple things about a simple subject, this is not as much of problem as when you are writing about contract negotiations, for example.
In the words of a Slashdot reader: "The opinions expressed here may be those of my speech recognition so
The U.S. government has often used its "cooperation" with the governments of other countries to corrupt those governments. See, for example, Coups Arranged or Backed by the USA. Most or all of that corruption happened for profit, such as kickbacks of U.S. government foreign aid. When the governments of Israel or Pakistan buy weapons from U.S. manufacturers using money from "foreign aid", that is embezzlement of taxpayer money.
The Cooperative Research History Commons is very valuable for those wanting to do their own research.
The poorly edited but very interesting free movie Zeitgeist explains in three parts that 1) People who believe in myths are easily manipulated. 2) It is common that people are manipulated through fear. 3) The U.S. monetary system is controlled for the profit of a few individuals. (Also see The Creature from Jekyll Island, an excellent but not perfect book about financial corruption.)
The U.S. government has killed directly or indirectly caused the death of an estimated 11,000,000 people since the end of the Second World war, partly by invading or bombing 25 countries.
Wikipedia says "Each frame consists of a total of 525 scanlines, of which 486 make up the visible raster."
So, you are right, the maximum resolution of the U.S. standard, NTSC is 486, apparently. However, I read somewhere that actual TV does not deliver a real resolution of 486, partly because the interlacing is not perfectly accurate.
NTSC delivers 243 lines of vertical resolution, then goes back and delivers another 243 lines interlaced (interspersed) with the first lines.