Silverlight was not released just to watch movies and animations. Just because that's what Flash has devolved into over the years, doesn't mean that that's what Microsoft(or anyone else) wants to do with Silverlight(or JavaFX if it still exists).
Silverlight is aimed at creating Rich Internet Applications. It's more of an alternative to AJAX than to Flash because, while Flash can be used to create RIAs, no one does.
Unfortunately, the demo RIA for everyone of these platforms is a video player, mostly because it's dead simple, looks flashy and is something you can't do in Javascript, so everyone forgets that.
I really don't think that HTML5 and/or SVG taking over the animation or video playing market share is going to make any dent in Silverlight, because that's not what it was designed for.
The problem with standards is that they're generally designed more by the losers than by the winners.
The argument could be made that, given that at the time they were being devised IE had almost 90% of the market share, that at least some of the IE way ought to have been the standard. After all, Netscape was as guilty of changing and polluting the web standards as anyone else back in those days.
While there are certainly some things in IE which are just strange(the way it handles the z-axis for instance isn't even internally consistent) and stuff like ActiveX should never be included into a standard, there's no real reason why the W3C box model is superior to the model used by IE. Nor is there anything particularly wrong with some of the Microsoft only javascript methods, aside from the fact that they aren't used by everyone.
While none of this excuses the fact that IE6 remained the latest version of IE for the better part of 10 years, especially a 10 years which saw leaps and bounds in the development of the web as a medium, it does at least somewhat excuse the fact that IE6 wasn't standards compliant to begin with.
Microsoft's sins with internet explorer are more that they let the application rot, than the fact that IE6 was implemented the way that it was.
I think I may not have been clear in my meaning. I didn't mean that deaf people are in some kind of gang or think they're better than anyone else.
What I meant was that a disability such as deafness can have a profound impact on someone's life and can become part of someone's internal identity. Being deaf is part of what makes them who they are. As previously stated I think that defining yourself this way is as silly as letting other people define you that way, but that doesn't change the fact that people do it.
When you start talking about curing things that define a person, especially things which a person uses to define themselves, you start treading into a certain amount of ethical gray area.
In changing that identifying feature, you change the person, you in a sense eliminate the person who was and replace them with an entirely new individual. A rather vocal portion of people with certain kinds of disabilities seem to hold this view. I don't particularly agree with it, but it's the core of a lot of these "ethical questions" and "normalizing the population" arguments.
My overall point was that colour blindness doesn't seem to be of sufficient impact on peoples lives that they define themselves internally with respect to it and so there's likely very few ethical problems with it and mostly of the "slippery slope" variety.
There's a little more gray area with deaf people. For better or worse, being deaf is part of what defines who they are and how they see and experience the world. It could be argued that changing the fact that they are deaf would change who they are as people, which can seem a little bit scary. Now personally I think that defining yourself by a disability is as mind bogglingly short sighted and stupid as defining someone else by their disability which is a form of prejudice, but people none the less do it.
OTOH none of the people I know who are colour blind seem to define themselves that way. They don't seem to split the world into people like them and people like me, at least not on the colour blindness axis, so there's probably little risk of large personality shifts.
Well, if you're saying goodbye to nVidia you're saying good bye to functional 3d support on Linux, and the the only company I've ever encountered to provide drivers or software for every kernel release for the last 10 years(just my personal experience) paid for out of their own pocket. nVidia may not be open source, but I wouldn't say they're not open source friendly, providing real 3d on Linux is a key step to moving forward and they're the only people to have done that that I've ever seen.
The issue with that statement is that you're not looking for Linux users as the multiplier, you're looking for open source zealots.
The nVidia drivers on linux are miles ahead of anything else on the platform in terms of quality vs features supported. For the most part, and excluding the brief periods after the kernel devs get frisky and change the driver APIs again, they just work, as well or better than any other Linux video driver and they provide a greater depth of features than any competing card or driver. This has been the case for more than 10 years now.
ATI has equally good cards, but god awful proprietary drivers and no 3d support in the open source onces. Intel has full support in their drivers, but their cards are a joke. The only way in which either of these companies beats nVidia's performance on Linux is that nVidia's drivers are not open source.
So your "Linux Users" has to be culled to "Linux Users who care more about ideology than functionality", not an insignificant group, but not as large as the first. Then you take into account that most normal people largely ignore the opinions of wide eyed zealots no matter their stripe, and the effect is limited again.
You don't need a generic driver format. For one thing it wouldn't work since drivers have to talk to the bare metal and can't run in an interpreted mode the way something like Java does. For another the drivers aren't actually the problem.
The problem is the way in which the OS(specifically the kernel) interacts with the drivers. If we had a standard interface between kernels and drivers we could probably have cross platform drivers with little more than a recompile to put in appropriate linking structures, the drivers themselves are just a mix of C code and assembly after all, and aside from config utilities(which should really be offered by the OS anyway) don't actually have to talk directly to any part of the OS other than kernel interface.
Of course the odds of getting MacOS, Windows, Linux, and BSD to agree to a standard published driver API even for something as simple as a printer is probably slightly lower than a snowball's chance in hell(getting the Linux kernel devs to restrict themselves by publishing a long term supported driver API of their own has so far proved impossible), so that's probably not going to happen.
Well, let's see. If I download an RC game, I've committed copyright infringement and can be prosecuted, if I buy it oversees and import it then I am breaking the law and can be prosecuted, if someone else imports it and sells or gives it to me they can be prosecuted. About the only way to legally obtain an RC game is to write it yourself, so yes it's a ban.
It's mostly because what he's trying to do and what's actually doing are two very different things.
Here in Australia, anything which is Refused Classification(RC) is, in effect, banned. If/When the new internet filter gets put in then apparently even websites talking about RC games or other material will be blocked in part or whole. Since there is no R rating, anything which would receive one is instead RC.
This has a number of negative effects of course. For the purposes of this guy one of the most important is that the ratings board which is of course "at arms length from the political process" which is supposed to mean unaffected by politics, but really means unaccountable to voters, despite their generally rather stodgy views do not particularly like banning things. They perhaps feel that banning things is a really rather serious action to take.
This means that a lot of material which should probably be in the lower end of the R rating band gets pushed down into the MA15+ band, because while it's not exactly appropriate it's not exactly ban worthy either. This means that the upper end of MA15+ is full of a lot of stuff which really isn't necessarily appropriate for someone who is 15 years old to be able to buy on their own without mum and dad being vaguely aware that it's being bought.
Personally I dislike games like manhunt and the other over the top gore games and wouldn't be at all sad if they had never been made at all, but I also feel that Fallout 3, while I personally loved it, is probably a bit borderline for some younger players. Under the current law games like that get pushed into the MA15+ rating zone when they would probably be more comfortable in the R region(and of course the drug animations could have remained in all copies of the game rather than being cut because of this very reason).
Atkinson's position is counterproductive to what he actually wants to accomplish.
Those older Netware versions are written so closely to the hardware that they cannot even be run as virtual machines, they just will not run without direct access to the hardware. That's one of the primary reasons they ditched Netware for OES(which is pretty much what you asked for, Netware systems running on Linux).
The real problem they face is that You cannot upgrade from Netware to OES in situ, you have to create an entirely new instance and, since Novell's products don't modify well in place, export everything out of your old instance and into the new instance. This is a huge amount of work and expense, and most importantly about the same amount of work and expense it takes to migrate your organization to AD and Exchange which I can tell you after working with Novell for the better part of 10 years has reached a point where it is a vastly superior product in every way. Since at the present time the core Novell products(eDirectory and Groupwise) aren't even open source(even if OES runs with a linux core) they don't even have that philosophical advantage.
Novells core products(not their new middleware products which are fairly good) are gigantic proprietary pieces of crap and realistically if you're going to use a giant piece of proprietary software to run your network you'd get a lot better bang for your buck using Microsoft because it works better and they treat their customers better than Novell treats theirs(which should give you a pretty good idea of just how god awful Novell has treated their customers over the last 10 years or so).
Novell are not the good guys. They might be the "getting better" guys, they've moved towards open source, they've moved towards treating their customers better, and they've moved towards making products which integrate with anything at all, but they've got a long way to go, and if they fail along the way it won't be for lack of trying.
The Novell board has rejected this offer, but it'll be interesting to see if their shareholders agree when this goes to them, that bid was well over market valuation and one way or another Novell is extremely unlikely to survive the current recession, if I owned stock I'd be seriously tempted to take cash even for a company with a much better future than Novell.
It's HTML5 basically. HTML5 brings a whole bunch of things which were once the domain of things like plugins and external code into the base specification. This means the web browser needs to be more powerful than it needs to be today(and most browsers are already insufficiently powerful for the next generation of RIAs which will be coming in the next few years.
As for why it's not optional, that's pretty simple really. Making it optional would be more work and result in more bugs and complexity than not making it optional and since the latest Microsoft OS that doesn't have the capability is XP which is 10 years old and which Microsoft is done developing for they have no real motivation to take on that extra cost and complexity.
XP is on the way out. It'll be gone within the next couple of years, and there's a simple reason for this. Aside from all the rather nifty features which Vista and 7 have which personally I'd say provide compelling reasons to upgrade, Vista and 7 have one killer feature which XP does not have and will never have, a 64 bit version that doesn't blow.
You're always forced to upgrade software eventually if you want to continue to use new features, that's no different on Linux. You'd have a hell of a time getting Compiz on the 3.0 release of Xfree86 as well. I suppose you could do it if you really really wanted to, but what you'd end up with would resemble the new version an awful lot more than it did the old version.
Re:This bill has nothing to do with health care.
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I didn't say that, I said that the current government cannot magically fix the massive unemployment currently affecting the US tomorrow. Even if there were any money to do it, you cannot magically make an office worker into a structural engineer overnight. Most of the people who can be rehired by temporary government infrastructure programs already have been.
The reality of the situation is that in all likelihood Obama will not be president when the US economy returns to where it was before the crash. Not because he's incompetent, but because he's got less than 7 years left even if he wins the election. The best thing he or any other president could do right now is to try and mitigate the pain somewhat and try to fix the core problems which led to this situation in the first place.
I only know what the DBAs quote me, I'm not a DBA and I have pretty much zero interest in being one. I do some database design for my application development role, and I can do basic administration for SQL server, but actually setting up Oracle is black magic as far as I'm concerned.
Why because Oracle canned a crappy Single Sign on Product which pretty much only integrated with Sun's other equally shitty server products?
I love Java and I love the standards which Sun developed to create it, but Sun's implementations of their own standards are pretty shocking. That's a lot of the reason they tanked in the first place.
Well the issue is that Oracle doesn't scale down very well. All that power and all those features come at a pretty hefty price tag in terms of disk space, memory and CPU. According to the DBA guys, setting up a new Oracle instance at work takes about 10 GB of SAN space without even adding any data to it. Not the kind of thing you'd do lightly if you didn't need any of that power, even discounting cost.
Re:This bill has nothing to do with health care.
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That would be nice unfortunately your plan presumes those millions of unemployed all have the skills for those projects which they don't and that people with those skills are available fo my specified 40k which they aren't and forgets that as expensive as Iraq is it will end whereas those people will need employment for a long time.
The American economy is in serious trouble and it's not going to recover without a lot of pain a lot of time and a lot if systemic change.
The US spends approximately twice as much of their GDP on health care as compared to any other western nation. For this they leave over 10% of their population uninsured and have poorer health outcomes for their population at large. So the US pays more, for less, sounds like pretty good evidence that they're doing something wrong.
Re:This bill has nothing to do with health care.
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I have Australian and American citizenship, I have lived in both countries and experienced both health care systems.
The US bill is not single payer public health insurance, it would be better for the American people if it was, but the reality of the situation is that such a system cannot pass in the US as things stand. The Republicans are against anything the Democrats do, more than half the Democrats are in the pockets of big corporations and the Libertarians are always up in arms about anything at all which costs them money no matter how large a benefit it might provide society at large. That's not even taking into account the Tea Party and all the crazies that have come out of the woodwork because Dick Cheney proved to the American people that the government was out to get them and made every right wing conspiracy theorist and Militia member seem sane.
That's not even counting the Americans of all political persuasions who are irate because Obama can't magic more than 11 million jobs out of his ass to fix unemployment. I mean presuming an average salary of 40k a year that'd involve finding 440 billion dollars a year somewhere, but never mind.
Single payer health insurance cannot pass in that environment it's too radical, too different, too much like the government actually doing something useful with the tax dollars. Never mind the fact that the US pays almost twice as much in terms of percentage of GDP than any other western nation, has poorer health outcomes, and leaves more than 10% of its population uninsured, it just won't pass.
As such this bill, which is very much imperfect is the best the American people can really hope for. Yes it leaves the insurance companies intact, yes it's full of corruption, pork, and special interest anti-abortion clauses, and yes it will probably mean that individuals who believe that they can cover the couple of grand a night for a hospital bed if they get sick might have to take on some of the burden of minimizing the insurance risk pool to keep down costs.
On the other hand it will give 30 million Americans insurance, require insurance companies to insure people with preexisting illnesses, and remove the bonds forcing people to keep a job at any cost to keep their insurance when they need it. It would also save the insurance companies from their current death spirals by bringing healthy people back into the risk pool which would in turn reduce over all costs. It would do this while, at least according to projections, actually lowering the deficit.
This is an ugly bill, and there are things about it which will need to be fixed, sections which are almost unconscionable. It will also require tort reform, medical practice reform, and educational reform to along with it to give it its greatest potential. Despite all that it is miles ahead of the current situation, and the best we can hope for. If Republicans had been more willing to vote yes, or there was more cost to minority filibusters we might have had a better one, with less pork, lower costs, and better results, but that's not the reality of the situation. This bill is the best the American people are likely to get under the current circumstances, and while it doesn't affect me personally I have a lot of family and friends who would be helped out tremendously by its passage.
To begin with, having lived in a country with an appalling semi-privatized used to be government run telecom(Australia and Telstra) and having lived in a country with an appalling fully privatized telecom(USA and SBC) I can't say I've noticed a huge amount of difference. Large telecom companies are pretty universally appalling in my experience be they state run, private run, or somewhere in between, apparently in order to run or work for a large telecom you have to sell your soul, at least for the duration of the working day. They're just not pleasant enterprises. I suppose you could argue that there's no such thing as a small government telecom whereas some small private telecoms do exist, but that's sort of thin.
Secondly, while governments do a pretty bloody awful job at running telecoms(like private industry), having anyone but governments pay for building telecom infrastructure ends up being a gigantic disaster with redundant infrastructure, high costs, and poor coverage. Infrastructure is expensive and private companies don't share voluntarily. That means no small telecoms and generally speaking two or three mediocre fibre roll outs instead of one good one.
As for the Broadband is a right thing, I don't think it is, however studies seem to indicate that it provides some rather amazing social and economic benefits and doing expensive things that have huge economic and social benefits over the long term, but which don't turn short term profits are kind of what we have governments for because lord knows no one else will do them.
Health Care on the other hand is a bit different. Without health care, people tend to die or become financially ruined and dependent on the state and/or charity for survival. Those are some pretty damned serious consequences and at least border on being basic rights. The above arguments regarding long term or intangible payoffs and the inability of private enterprise to adequately realize them also comes into play. Health Care would be a lot cheaper if we didn't have to try and turn it into a short term profit generator.
Thought that was the name, didn't know it was the origination of Webkit though, didn't really start using Webkit till Chrome. Been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix and while I've stopped at home, it's still my primary development browser, man Firebug rules.
To be honest, there are currently only 4 rendering engines worth talking about, I believe their used to be five(I think that Konqueror used to have it's own rendering engine though I was never a KDE man, so I may be wrong) so looking at a list of 12 you're going to see a fair amount of overlap. Add in the fact that to the best of my knowledge only Opera uses Presto and the overlap becomes even more extreme.
IE has caused me huge amounts of dramas and still continues to do so, it is probably the one thing I will never forgive Microsoft for, but what else would you have put in the other 7 slots(8 if you want to make sure that a rendering engine is only represented once). Once you've put in the big 5 and a few of the moderately tolerable gecko ports what have you got left. Especially since they have to run on Windows. I suppose one of those slots could have gone to seamonkey, but as a browser it's identical to firefox so there's not much point. I don't know who decided that the number had to be 12, but with that large a number you're really bound to have some pretty awful stuff in there. Rendering engines are complex beasts, which is why there are really only 4 of them. Javascript engines are even more complex which is why there are only 4 of them(I know that Safari and Chrome have different Javascript engines even though they have the same rendering engine and I'm counting those, but IE's is so godawful it doesn't count). It takes a large team of programmers years to come up with something halfway decent, and that requires serious amounts of money or trying to snag open source developers when most of the people with the right skill set are already likely to be working on Gecko or Webkit.
Personally I never really bothered with the sticker as it doesn't really mean anything. The ultimate decision in the US(and here in Australia) lies with your family, unless you don't have next of kin, whether or not you have the sticker really means a whole lot of nothing, your family can overrule your decision either way.
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I've said this before, and I'll say it again.
Silverlight was not released just to watch movies and animations. Just because that's what Flash has devolved into over the years, doesn't mean that that's what Microsoft(or anyone else) wants to do with Silverlight(or JavaFX if it still exists).
Silverlight is aimed at creating Rich Internet Applications. It's more of an alternative to AJAX than to Flash because, while Flash can be used to create RIAs, no one does.
Unfortunately, the demo RIA for everyone of these platforms is a video player, mostly because it's dead simple, looks flashy and is something you can't do in Javascript, so everyone forgets that.
I really don't think that HTML5 and/or SVG taking over the animation or video playing market share is going to make any dent in Silverlight, because that's not what it was designed for.
The problem with standards is that they're generally designed more by the losers than by the winners.
The argument could be made that, given that at the time they were being devised IE had almost 90% of the market share, that at least some of the IE way ought to have been the standard. After all, Netscape was as guilty of changing and polluting the web standards as anyone else back in those days.
While there are certainly some things in IE which are just strange(the way it handles the z-axis for instance isn't even internally consistent) and stuff like ActiveX should never be included into a standard, there's no real reason why the W3C box model is superior to the model used by IE. Nor is there anything particularly wrong with some of the Microsoft only javascript methods, aside from the fact that they aren't used by everyone.
While none of this excuses the fact that IE6 remained the latest version of IE for the better part of 10 years, especially a 10 years which saw leaps and bounds in the development of the web as a medium, it does at least somewhat excuse the fact that IE6 wasn't standards compliant to begin with.
Microsoft's sins with internet explorer are more that they let the application rot, than the fact that IE6 was implemented the way that it was.
Hadn't heard of that. Point being it didn't work, and some sore of generic driver code wouldn't be possible.
I think I may not have been clear in my meaning. I didn't mean that deaf people are in some kind of gang or think they're better than anyone else.
What I meant was that a disability such as deafness can have a profound impact on someone's life and can become part of someone's internal identity. Being deaf is part of what makes them who they are. As previously stated I think that defining yourself this way is as silly as letting other people define you that way, but that doesn't change the fact that people do it.
When you start talking about curing things that define a person, especially things which a person uses to define themselves, you start treading into a certain amount of ethical gray area.
In changing that identifying feature, you change the person, you in a sense eliminate the person who was and replace them with an entirely new individual. A rather vocal portion of people with certain kinds of disabilities seem to hold this view. I don't particularly agree with it, but it's the core of a lot of these "ethical questions" and "normalizing the population" arguments.
My overall point was that colour blindness doesn't seem to be of sufficient impact on peoples lives that they define themselves internally with respect to it and so there's likely very few ethical problems with it and mostly of the "slippery slope" variety.
It's only a bubble if it's hollow.
There's a little more gray area with deaf people. For better or worse, being deaf is part of what defines who they are and how they see and experience the world. It could be argued that changing the fact that they are deaf would change who they are as people, which can seem a little bit scary. Now personally I think that defining yourself by a disability is as mind bogglingly short sighted and stupid as defining someone else by their disability which is a form of prejudice, but people none the less do it.
OTOH none of the people I know who are colour blind seem to define themselves that way. They don't seem to split the world into people like them and people like me, at least not on the colour blindness axis, so there's probably little risk of large personality shifts.
Well, if you're saying goodbye to nVidia you're saying good bye to functional 3d support on Linux, and the the only company I've ever encountered to provide drivers or software for every kernel release for the last 10 years(just my personal experience) paid for out of their own pocket. nVidia may not be open source, but I wouldn't say they're not open source friendly, providing real 3d on Linux is a key step to moving forward and they're the only people to have done that that I've ever seen.
The issue with that statement is that you're not looking for Linux users as the multiplier, you're looking for open source zealots.
The nVidia drivers on linux are miles ahead of anything else on the platform in terms of quality vs features supported. For the most part, and excluding the brief periods after the kernel devs get frisky and change the driver APIs again, they just work, as well or better than any other Linux video driver and they provide a greater depth of features than any competing card or driver. This has been the case for more than 10 years now.
ATI has equally good cards, but god awful proprietary drivers and no 3d support in the open source onces. Intel has full support in their drivers, but their cards are a joke. The only way in which either of these companies beats nVidia's performance on Linux is that nVidia's drivers are not open source.
So your "Linux Users" has to be culled to "Linux Users who care more about ideology than functionality", not an insignificant group, but not as large as the first. Then you take into account that most normal people largely ignore the opinions of wide eyed zealots no matter their stripe, and the effect is limited again.
Because it wouldn't help.
You don't need a generic driver format. For one thing it wouldn't work since drivers have to talk to the bare metal and can't run in an interpreted mode the way something like Java does. For another the drivers aren't actually the problem.
The problem is the way in which the OS(specifically the kernel) interacts with the drivers. If we had a standard interface between kernels and drivers we could probably have cross platform drivers with little more than a recompile to put in appropriate linking structures, the drivers themselves are just a mix of C code and assembly after all, and aside from config utilities(which should really be offered by the OS anyway) don't actually have to talk directly to any part of the OS other than kernel interface.
Of course the odds of getting MacOS, Windows, Linux, and BSD to agree to a standard published driver API even for something as simple as a printer is probably slightly lower than a snowball's chance in hell(getting the Linux kernel devs to restrict themselves by publishing a long term supported driver API of their own has so far proved impossible), so that's probably not going to happen.
Well, let's see. If I download an RC game, I've committed copyright infringement and can be prosecuted, if I buy it oversees and import it then I am breaking the law and can be prosecuted, if someone else imports it and sells or gives it to me they can be prosecuted. About the only way to legally obtain an RC game is to write it yourself, so yes it's a ban.
It's mostly because what he's trying to do and what's actually doing are two very different things.
Here in Australia, anything which is Refused Classification(RC) is, in effect, banned. If/When the new internet filter gets put in then apparently even websites talking about RC games or other material will be blocked in part or whole. Since there is no R rating, anything which would receive one is instead RC.
This has a number of negative effects of course. For the purposes of this guy one of the most important is that the ratings board which is of course "at arms length from the political process" which is supposed to mean unaffected by politics, but really means unaccountable to voters, despite their generally rather stodgy views do not particularly like banning things. They perhaps feel that banning things is a really rather serious action to take.
This means that a lot of material which should probably be in the lower end of the R rating band gets pushed down into the MA15+ band, because while it's not exactly appropriate it's not exactly ban worthy either. This means that the upper end of MA15+ is full of a lot of stuff which really isn't necessarily appropriate for someone who is 15 years old to be able to buy on their own without mum and dad being vaguely aware that it's being bought.
Personally I dislike games like manhunt and the other over the top gore games and wouldn't be at all sad if they had never been made at all, but I also feel that Fallout 3, while I personally loved it, is probably a bit borderline for some younger players. Under the current law games like that get pushed into the MA15+ rating zone when they would probably be more comfortable in the R region(and of course the drug animations could have remained in all copies of the game rather than being cut because of this very reason).
Atkinson's position is counterproductive to what he actually wants to accomplish.
Because they can't.
Those older Netware versions are written so closely to the hardware that they cannot even be run as virtual machines, they just will not run without direct access to the hardware. That's one of the primary reasons they ditched Netware for OES(which is pretty much what you asked for, Netware systems running on Linux).
The real problem they face is that You cannot upgrade from Netware to OES in situ, you have to create an entirely new instance and, since Novell's products don't modify well in place, export everything out of your old instance and into the new instance. This is a huge amount of work and expense, and most importantly about the same amount of work and expense it takes to migrate your organization to AD and Exchange which I can tell you after working with Novell for the better part of 10 years has reached a point where it is a vastly superior product in every way. Since at the present time the core Novell products(eDirectory and Groupwise) aren't even open source(even if OES runs with a linux core) they don't even have that philosophical advantage.
Novells core products(not their new middleware products which are fairly good) are gigantic proprietary pieces of crap and realistically if you're going to use a giant piece of proprietary software to run your network you'd get a lot better bang for your buck using Microsoft because it works better and they treat their customers better than Novell treats theirs(which should give you a pretty good idea of just how god awful Novell has treated their customers over the last 10 years or so).
Novell are not the good guys. They might be the "getting better" guys, they've moved towards open source, they've moved towards treating their customers better, and they've moved towards making products which integrate with anything at all, but they've got a long way to go, and if they fail along the way it won't be for lack of trying.
The Novell board has rejected this offer, but it'll be interesting to see if their shareholders agree when this goes to them, that bid was well over market valuation and one way or another Novell is extremely unlikely to survive the current recession, if I owned stock I'd be seriously tempted to take cash even for a company with a much better future than Novell.
It's HTML5 basically. HTML5 brings a whole bunch of things which were once the domain of things like plugins and external code into the base specification. This means the web browser needs to be more powerful than it needs to be today(and most browsers are already insufficiently powerful for the next generation of RIAs which will be coming in the next few years.
As for why it's not optional, that's pretty simple really. Making it optional would be more work and result in more bugs and complexity than not making it optional and since the latest Microsoft OS that doesn't have the capability is XP which is 10 years old and which Microsoft is done developing for they have no real motivation to take on that extra cost and complexity.
XP is on the way out. It'll be gone within the next couple of years, and there's a simple reason for this. Aside from all the rather nifty features which Vista and 7 have which personally I'd say provide compelling reasons to upgrade, Vista and 7 have one killer feature which XP does not have and will never have, a 64 bit version that doesn't blow.
You're always forced to upgrade software eventually if you want to continue to use new features, that's no different on Linux. You'd have a hell of a time getting Compiz on the 3.0 release of Xfree86 as well. I suppose you could do it if you really really wanted to, but what you'd end up with would resemble the new version an awful lot more than it did the old version.
I didn't say that, I said that the current government cannot magically fix the massive unemployment currently affecting the US tomorrow. Even if there were any money to do it, you cannot magically make an office worker into a structural engineer overnight. Most of the people who can be rehired by temporary government infrastructure programs already have been.
The reality of the situation is that in all likelihood Obama will not be president when the US economy returns to where it was before the crash. Not because he's incompetent, but because he's got less than 7 years left even if he wins the election. The best thing he or any other president could do right now is to try and mitigate the pain somewhat and try to fix the core problems which led to this situation in the first place.
I only know what the DBAs quote me, I'm not a DBA and I have pretty much zero interest in being one. I do some database design for my application development role, and I can do basic administration for SQL server, but actually setting up Oracle is black magic as far as I'm concerned.
Why because Oracle canned a crappy Single Sign on Product which pretty much only integrated with Sun's other equally shitty server products?
I love Java and I love the standards which Sun developed to create it, but Sun's implementations of their own standards are pretty shocking. That's a lot of the reason they tanked in the first place.
Well the issue is that Oracle doesn't scale down very well. All that power and all those features come at a pretty hefty price tag in terms of disk space, memory and CPU. According to the DBA guys, setting up a new Oracle instance at work takes about 10 GB of SAN space without even adding any data to it. Not the kind of thing you'd do lightly if you didn't need any of that power, even discounting cost.
That would be nice unfortunately your plan presumes those millions of unemployed all have the skills for those projects which they don't and that people with those skills are available fo my specified 40k which they aren't and forgets that as expensive as Iraq is it will end whereas those people will need employment for a long time.
The American economy is in serious trouble and it's not going to recover without a lot of pain a lot of time and a lot if systemic change.
The US spends approximately twice as much of their GDP on health care as compared to any other western nation. For this they leave over 10% of their population uninsured and have poorer health outcomes for their population at large. So the US pays more, for less, sounds like pretty good evidence that they're doing something wrong.
I have Australian and American citizenship, I have lived in both countries and experienced both health care systems.
The US bill is not single payer public health insurance, it would be better for the American people if it was, but the reality of the situation is that such a system cannot pass in the US as things stand. The Republicans are against anything the Democrats do, more than half the Democrats are in the pockets of big corporations and the Libertarians are always up in arms about anything at all which costs them money no matter how large a benefit it might provide society at large. That's not even taking into account the Tea Party and all the crazies that have come out of the woodwork because Dick Cheney proved to the American people that the government was out to get them and made every right wing conspiracy theorist and Militia member seem sane.
That's not even counting the Americans of all political persuasions who are irate because Obama can't magic more than 11 million jobs out of his ass to fix unemployment. I mean presuming an average salary of 40k a year that'd involve finding 440 billion dollars a year somewhere, but never mind.
Single payer health insurance cannot pass in that environment it's too radical, too different, too much like the government actually doing something useful with the tax dollars. Never mind the fact that the US pays almost twice as much in terms of percentage of GDP than any other western nation, has poorer health outcomes, and leaves more than 10% of its population uninsured, it just won't pass.
As such this bill, which is very much imperfect is the best the American people can really hope for. Yes it leaves the insurance companies intact, yes it's full of corruption, pork, and special interest anti-abortion clauses, and yes it will probably mean that individuals who believe that they can cover the couple of grand a night for a hospital bed if they get sick might have to take on some of the burden of minimizing the insurance risk pool to keep down costs.
On the other hand it will give 30 million Americans insurance, require insurance companies to insure people with preexisting illnesses, and remove the bonds forcing people to keep a job at any cost to keep their insurance when they need it. It would also save the insurance companies from their current death spirals by bringing healthy people back into the risk pool which would in turn reduce over all costs. It would do this while, at least according to projections, actually lowering the deficit.
This is an ugly bill, and there are things about it which will need to be fixed, sections which are almost unconscionable. It will also require tort reform, medical practice reform, and educational reform to along with it to give it its greatest potential. Despite all that it is miles ahead of the current situation, and the best we can hope for. If Republicans had been more willing to vote yes, or there was more cost to minority filibusters we might have had a better one, with less pork, lower costs, and better results, but that's not the reality of the situation. This bill is the best the American people are likely to get under the current circumstances, and while it doesn't affect me personally I have a lot of family and friends who would be helped out tremendously by its passage.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with you.
To begin with, having lived in a country with an appalling semi-privatized used to be government run telecom(Australia and Telstra) and having lived in a country with an appalling fully privatized telecom(USA and SBC) I can't say I've noticed a huge amount of difference. Large telecom companies are pretty universally appalling in my experience be they state run, private run, or somewhere in between, apparently in order to run or work for a large telecom you have to sell your soul, at least for the duration of the working day. They're just not pleasant enterprises. I suppose you could argue that there's no such thing as a small government telecom whereas some small private telecoms do exist, but that's sort of thin.
Secondly, while governments do a pretty bloody awful job at running telecoms(like private industry), having anyone but governments pay for building telecom infrastructure ends up being a gigantic disaster with redundant infrastructure, high costs, and poor coverage. Infrastructure is expensive and private companies don't share voluntarily. That means no small telecoms and generally speaking two or three mediocre fibre roll outs instead of one good one.
As for the Broadband is a right thing, I don't think it is, however studies seem to indicate that it provides some rather amazing social and economic benefits and doing expensive things that have huge economic and social benefits over the long term, but which don't turn short term profits are kind of what we have governments for because lord knows no one else will do them.
Health Care on the other hand is a bit different. Without health care, people tend to die or become financially ruined and dependent on the state and/or charity for survival. Those are some pretty damned serious consequences and at least border on being basic rights. The above arguments regarding long term or intangible payoffs and the inability of private enterprise to adequately realize them also comes into play. Health Care would be a lot cheaper if we didn't have to try and turn it into a short term profit generator.
Thought that was the name, didn't know it was the origination of Webkit though, didn't really start using Webkit till Chrome. Been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix and while I've stopped at home, it's still my primary development browser, man Firebug rules.
To be honest, there are currently only 4 rendering engines worth talking about, I believe their used to be five(I think that Konqueror used to have it's own rendering engine though I was never a KDE man, so I may be wrong) so looking at a list of 12 you're going to see a fair amount of overlap. Add in the fact that to the best of my knowledge only Opera uses Presto and the overlap becomes even more extreme.
IE has caused me huge amounts of dramas and still continues to do so, it is probably the one thing I will never forgive Microsoft for, but what else would you have put in the other 7 slots(8 if you want to make sure that a rendering engine is only represented once). Once you've put in the big 5 and a few of the moderately tolerable gecko ports what have you got left. Especially since they have to run on Windows. I suppose one of those slots could have gone to seamonkey, but as a browser it's identical to firefox so there's not much point. I don't know who decided that the number had to be 12, but with that large a number you're really bound to have some pretty awful stuff in there. Rendering engines are complex beasts, which is why there are really only 4 of them. Javascript engines are even more complex which is why there are only 4 of them(I know that Safari and Chrome have different Javascript engines even though they have the same rendering engine and I'm counting those, but IE's is so godawful it doesn't count). It takes a large team of programmers years to come up with something halfway decent, and that requires serious amounts of money or trying to snag open source developers when most of the people with the right skill set are already likely to be working on Gecko or Webkit.
Personally I never really bothered with the sticker as it doesn't really mean anything. The ultimate decision in the US(and here in Australia) lies with your family, unless you don't have next of kin, whether or not you have the sticker really means a whole lot of nothing, your family can overrule your decision either way.