They've recently found that judges in Australia, unlike the US, won't let them claim someone is a terrorist without actually showing what their evidence is. As such they've been looking like a bunch of idiots lately because they appear to be either letting Terrorists go or harrassing innocent people.
This is basically a last ditch attempt by the police to try and get the cushy situation their compatriots have in the US where all it takes is a gut feeling and cries of national security to toss someone in Guantanamo Bay. The judges aren't letting them do that here, and the public is getting royally pissed off(the Haneef and APEC failures were a part, if only a small part, of getting the previous government kicked out of office).
Even if our FOI laws aren't the greatest they're not actually going to censor this sort of thing.
He also donates a rather substantial portion of his wealth to charity. And generally speaking does quite a large number of good works.
Microsoft gets a lot of bad wrap because they play the game they play relatively well(and because complex systems which support third party vendors are buggy), but Microsoft for the most part plays soft ball.
To the best of my knowledge Microsoft has never killed anyone. Bill Gates has never walked off with millions before his company crashed into the ground leaving investors and employees destitute. On the scale of polluters they're pretty decent. They don't screw their employees over any more than anyone else does.
All Microsoft ever did was create a software monopoly, and fail to meet the development quality expectations of people most of whom have never tried to do any real development of complex systems. Most of the people Microsoft shut down to maintain their monopoly were bought out, usually at a price which was far more than they'd ordinarily have made.
They're not saints, but in the grand scheme of free market capitalism, if you compare them to the likes of Enron, Nike, James Hardy, etc they're not even on the map. I really wish folks would get a sense of perspective here, Bill Gates is a very rich man, he, like all very rich men has had his success come at the cost of others failure. Sometimes he's behaved in a fashion which isn't as ethical as it could be, and the products his company makes aren't perfect. He is also a hug contributer to charity, the owner of a company which is good to its employees, and probably as close to being a saint as any CEO of any publicly traded company is every likely to get. Does that make him Mother Theresa no, but he's not Hitler either.
A) is stupid because that's not how versioning works. If you replace the rendering engine of a browser it's not the same version of the browser anymore. Despite Microsofts rather silly attempts to tie browser verions to OS versions(though mind you 2k needed to go), IE 7 is just the next version of IE 6 just as FF 2 was the next version of FF 1, if you took the rendering engine out of Firefox 2 or 3 and put it into 1, then it wouldn't be 1 anymore, it might not be 3 either but it wouldn't be 1. For the sake of compatibility alone this would be a terrible idea. Internet Explorer 6 should be internet explorer 6, not sometimes 6 and sometimes something else, that's why we have version numbers in the first place so we know what we're dealing with.
As for B Microsoft isn't going to go back and support windows 2000, and they shouldn't have to. Linux doesn't support software for ancient versions of its libraries, neither does Mac, and Windows 2000, while a decent OS was the bastard child of Windows 98 and Windows NT, with neither the security of NT, nor the usability of 98. XP is basically the completed version of Windows 2000, they just gave it a new name. If things keep going the way they are now with all the Vista hating and whatnot, they're going to release IE 8 on XP simply because they'll need to.
This isn't a good solution either because IE 6 and to a lesser extent IE 7 aren't yet standards compliant. If IE 6 stays in the wild it will mean that web developers have to keep developing for it which no one wants to do.
What they need to do, is create a new version of IE(8) which supports the old crap, but also supports standards compliant code, so that intranets and the like still work and people upgrade, but standards compliant code works too and people can start developing that way in future(which as I said before is in their best interest because it's easier to write standards compliant code than to make things work in all the different browsers. According to what I've read about IE 8 this is exactly what they're going to do.
It is extremely unlikely in this day and age that management is going to come to you and say "we have an opening in management would you like it?". Just as it's extremely unlikely that they're going to promote you without you asking for anything.
If you want a job, be it management, support, development, or pole dancing. The best way to get it is to ask for it. Talk to the folks in charge about upcoming opportunities. Let them know you're interested in becoming a manager. If there aren't any upcoming opportunities apply for a management position elsewhere. You don't ask you don't get.
Apple is Las Vegas, Microsoft is Atlantic City. In both cities you wake up with a hangover and an empty wallet most of the time, but Las Vegas is a lot prettier so you feel better about it.
Microsoft can't break old sites. They can't, it would break the internet. Most sites that do compatibility checks don't check for IE 6 they check for IE, that's why most of these problems occur. A page can run fine in firefox, fine in IE 6, but crap itself in IE7 for these very reasons.
What Microsoft needs to do is ensure that standards compliant code runs properly in their browser, then anything new can be developed compliant with the standards(this is in the best interest of web developers because it's easier than doing it 3 different ways), and all the old stuff still works. Eventually the old stuff will either get redeveloped or become so out of date that it doesn't matter at which point Microsoft can stop supporting its old legacy crap. But if the next version of IE all of a sudden supported compliant code and only compliant code then half the web(including a lot of the stuff that's actually written in a compliant way) would stop working in IE. No one except the linux zealots wants that.
IE6 is crap, it's been crap for a long time. It's almost a decade old and from a time when no one worried about web security much. When CSS was barely used, and things like AJAX didn't even exist yet. Fixing it would involve rewriting the rendering engine and basically creating, guess what, IE 7. You can whinge about Genuine Advantage all you want, and you've got a case, you can whinge about how your core app requires IE6 crap in order to work, but the only way we're ever going to get rid of IE6 bug fixes is to get rid of IE 6 and that means forcing every schlub who is being a recalcitrant tool for no good reason to upgrade.
IE6 should have died years ago, if it had we wouldn't be in the mess we're in(though we might also not have firefox), and now getting rid of it is going to be painful, but it needs to be done and the web isn't going to get better until it's gone.
Well there are a few ways to make this work. You can set up something like terminal services, or a web portal structure so that all you're transmitting is presentation layer stuff, which can be run on less bandwidth. You can make sure the pipes going out to your remote offices is as fast as a LAN would be. There are also some things that can be done with some of the fancier network hardware you can buy from folks like Cisco.
That said unless your remote offices barely use the LAN, you already have a really fast WAN, or really high end equipment plus the in house resources to manage it, none of which appear to be true, all these options are going to be expensive.
Limited server consolidation can be a good thing, and large companies with really fat network pipes can actually centralize even file servers, and sometimes they even save money doing it(at least if they needed the network pipes anyway), but if you were with one of those companies you wouldn't be asking for a solution.
Your only real solution is to fire your outsourcing company, whichever meat head manager on your side thought it was a good idea, and anyone in a network or server role who didn't have the balls to say this was a terrible idea. If you're one of the above start by resigning. Then use the money you were going to spend on them to hire a few competent people and put servers back where they belong.
Well the thing is that they don't directly correlate. First aid is about learning what to do. Shooting someone is about learning how to do.
Not everyone knows what you're supposed to do in an accident, but once you know, even if you're not very good at doing it is likely to make a difference.
This doesn't apply to how to do. Everyone and their monther knows that the what to do for firing a gun is point and pull the trigger. Bullet flies out of gun and into target causing potential death or dismemberment, and on the small scale(one person, short range, opponent isn't fighting back) pretty much everyone who can control the movement of their hands can already do this.
The tricky part about shooting people is the whole aiming, reloading, mechanical reflex sort of thing, and swinging a mouse or joystick around doesn't train this reflex, no matter how you might. You might learn to duck around buildings as opposed to walking out into the line of fire, but you still don't learn how to physically do that without getting yourself shot.
The idea of any ordinary game as a murder simulator is pretty specious at best(that's not to say you couldn't create a murder simulator using special realistic gun input devices and some sort of motion sensing, but you can do the same thing playing paintball or target shooting and no one really complains about that).
The big question about violent video games(at least if you're not a complete and total loon), is whether playing violent video games increases the odds of you commiting a violent act or solving your problems in a violent manner.
Personally I'd say that based on the fact that the number of cases even tenuously linked to video game violence is very small, and that to the best of my knowledge the number of cases involving adults who were exposed to said violence is pretty much non existent, added to the fact that in general murder rates around the world are going down not up(at least as a percentage of population) it's pretty safe to presume that any increase in violence caused by exposure to video games is statistically insignificant and can probably be more readily attributed to other factors.
Spending all your time alone in the dark and not developing social skills needed for non violent solutions to problems is more likely to be a cause than video games in and of themselves.
That said, I have nothing against limiting the amount of violence young children are exposed to, or with changing the rather absurd manner in which American society normalizes violence and represses anything even remotely sexual, but I've seen nothing whatever that proves that even in this statistically insignificant sample(people who blame their acts of violence on video games) their is any substantial cause effect relationship.
However, this isn't a permanent situation, there will probably come a time when the level of realism possible in virtual environments(games) reaches a level so close to that of actual reality that we have to revisit this issue and I think that when that time comes we may have a problem. That time isn't now nor is the current technology sufficient.
In my house the other day room temperature was about 42, this was not the first time this year that this has happened, nor will it be the last. Room temperatures of the high 20's during summer(air conditioning not withstanding) are far from unusual here.
I just love people who talk about legislating from the bench. Personally, I think that one of the biggest problems with the American legal system is that it's become too much about the letter of the law and not enough about the intent of the law. If I had my way, instead of a bunch of legalese that only lawyers can navigate that's full of loop holes and which tends to become totally out of step with reality when any of it's major presumptions change, laws would basically revolve around a statement of intent.
Then when we had court cases instead of a bunch of lawyers talking about loopholes and out of date assumptions, we'd have a simple decision, does the intent of this law cover this and is the intent something we believe in.
Unfortunately we don't have that and so we need judges to interpret the intent of the law to cover things that the people who wrote it didn't know or were wrong about. Perhaps in your "repeal or enforce" system you'd keep laws more up to date and this wouldn't be as necessary, but applying the ideals of people who didn't know about electricity, computers, or even automobiles, thought women and minorities shouldn't be able to vote, and lived in a totally different society than the one we live in today requires a certain degree of interpretation.
Was thinking more in line with phones where the data connections are proprietary, but as has been mentioned further down it's more the "I need to transfer data, and I don't want to turn on blue tooth, and I Don't have my cable with me"
Well there's always the fact that transferring via cable requires tedious, usually expensive, and proprietary cables, whereas low range wireless would give you all the same benefits without requiring a physical cable.
That said, sony have pissed away decades of credability and company integrity in the last couple of years for little or no gain, so who knows what they're thinking.
Sony owns the rights to movies, Toshiba doesn't. So long as Sony didn't give up on their own format there were always going to be movies that you couldn't get on any format other than Blu-Ray, and since none of the other media companies have a vested interest in one technology or the other they were going to swap over eventually. The only way that Toshiba could have one this is to convince Sony that the money they were going to lose holding onto their old format was greater than the money they could potentially win if they got control of the technology and that wasn't likely to happen unless HD DVD got massive market share and consumers would rather have scrapped HD all together than buy a Blu-Ray box.
What I mean by that is that so long as people view IT as something different and scary(which if you ask anyone in support they still do), there will always be "those people" that IT gets given to. They might be a contracting agency, they might be at a data centre, and non IT employees may never physically meet them, but there will always be an IT department so long as there is IT.
Personally I didn't switch to IE till 5, but I was stubborn.
Either way it's all a big ugly mess at the moment, and it may end up all falling down in a heap or going back to being a paid license product before the end.
I know it's market speak, but it's really the only appropriate phrase. The browser needs to be developed, but it needs to fund itself somehow too. You can't charge for a web browser(well not outside specific arenas at least), you can't even charge for support of a web browser(at least no one has really managed too so far).
That really leaves only advertising(the route of opera and to a lesser extent Mozilla(a lot of firefox's funding comes from google who must be making some money out of default searche and the like) or subsidization the way that IE and again to a lesser extent Mozilla work.
The general problem being is that large companies don't like to sink lots of money into subsidized products(less leaders yes, but pure ought and ought losers no), and in the new browser war the old lock in stuff isn't going to be a viable option(there being a difference between lock in and innovative new features mind you).
Microsoft is perfectly capable of building a cutting edge browser, IE was one once, but they lack the motivation to do so because they, at least at the moment, can't work out how to make any money out of it. At the same time web developers need Microsoft to step up their game because for better or worse a lot of people still use IE and so IE has to be a useable relatively standards compliant modern browser.
The whole not using silverlight is really a rather immaterial threat as no one wants to go back to the old days of "best viewed with _____", and so unless silverlight is readable with other browsers no one is going to write with it..Net mostly suffers from the fact that IIS is still a pretty shitty web browser and the way Microsoft does licensing means that using windows servers in general tends to be somewhat unpleasant.
Microsoft has always tended to give their technologies away for free and use them to tie in Operating System and IDE sales. The problem being that the world of the Web has to deal with customers who might run Linux on the Desktop, or have Macs that need to connect to a site, or be public and have to accept connections from Firefox or Safari or Opera. It also has to deal with places where CAL's aren't already a part of life and the TCO of your ASP or.NET product might include a few hundred grand worth of Microsoft licenses they don't otherwise need.
Lock-in only benefits Microsoft and no one is really interested in it if it can be avoided.
But only a first step. Microsoft ignored developers for years, and there's a lot of bitterness in the community about that. I've only been developing professionally for a year or so now, and my organization isn't going IE7 on the desktop yet, so I haven't really tested it thoroughly, but as far as I can see IE7 is reasonably standards compliant, probably around the Firefox 1 mark for most things.
As I said, this is a good first step for Microsoft, and a good first step for moving the web into an environment where we can have development again(as opposed to the years of semi stagnantion and work arounds we've had since IE 6.
It is however, not anywhere near enough, and Microsoft has as of yet not shown any real indication that it's changing its ways and treating it's web browser division as a serious part of business.
Part of it of course is that while up to date browsers are vitally important for all sorts of future developments, they're hard to monetize, and they tend to lessen the strength of Microsofts major product.
Here's a better question? Why if you have decades of experience do you need to give 20 grand to cisco to get certifications to prove what you've been doing for decades. If a certification isn't worth anything without a level of experience that should indicate competence in the first place then it's not worth anything at all. Cisco certs are better than some(at least the higher level ones), but you still end up with the end problem. Certifications are supposed to be an instant indicater of competence (ie. Cert == knows stuff) so that folks without 20 years of experience can actually have a hope in hell of getting a job these days. The problem is they aren't and never have been, so why do we still bother with them? A+ and Network+ aren't worth the paper they're written on, they're not even worth getting as far as I'm concerned.
The flip side of this whole discussion of course is the fact that most of the nightmares of home user support come from the nature of the game as opposed to the incompetence of the people doing it. I've done home user support(usually for friends or family which made it hard to price accurately), I've done enterprise support(3 of us supporting about 500 PC's). I'd rather support a thousand properly run enterprise systems than 1 shitty unbacked up, spyware infested home PC. The 19 year olds can have it as far as I'm concerned.
Personally I don't think that Bush does anything with forethought, or any other sort of thought for that matter, I think he does what Cheney tells him to. I also think that Cheney is a slimy evil bastard..
That said, there's a difference between appointing people to the FCC and SEC with forethought and planning with the goal of selecting the best people for the job(as you invision the job to be), and appointing people who will let you get away with things you know are wrong.
Anyone with any understanding of U.S. history knows that things like wire taps without a warrant are not only likely unconstitutional but fly in the face of everything the U.S. stands(used to stand) for. That's the difference.
The GPL requires distributors to provide source code upon request. Asus released some source code which was apparently out of date, someone requested the updated source code and Asus released it.
They have no obligation to host the source code, nor to provide it for download, they merely have to provide it upon request, and they did. End of story.
My general experience tends to show not so much that teachers can't do (though there are as many clock watching time servers in teaching these days as there are anywhere else), but more that most teachers never have done.
It's not so much that your professor, teacher, TA, etc couldn't do what they're teaching, it's that for the most part they never have. Most English teachers have never written a novel, most comp sci teachers have never done computing work for a living, etc. Teachers do not lack competence, but in many cases they lack real world experience.
This in turn exacerbates the whole "out of uni into the work place" culture shock where people learn exactly how much they don't actually know and employers learn exactly how much their new employees weren't taught. This plus the general dislike of academics among certain segments of the population tends to lead to a jaded view of even the best of educators and to a populace who doesn't really realize exactly how much of what they learned in uni actually helps them in real life(since it's usually not a direct "I know how to do this because I did course x").
The only difference between the original trilogy and the new ones is the fact that none of us are ten anymore. Lucas always liked cute animal-like things, he always used the absolute most cutting edge special effects possible and he always hired really awful actors. Nor was the story every particularly original. And for all the egalitarianists floating around Luke got to be a jedi because his father was one, if anyone could become a jedi simply by being a good(or evil) person then there would have been more than 5 jedis in the entire first trilogy.
That said, Lucas did exert a lot more of his own personal control into episodes I-III and that made his always hammy scripts even hammier, but as much as I love episodes IV-VI, and as much as I hate the new ones, I know that that's because I'm not a kid anymore. I don't like the new disney movies as much as the ones when I was a kid either, but they haven't jumped the shark.
Firebug, CSSmate, a colorzilla, measureit (can you tell I'm a web developer?), I've also been using the straight up web developer add-on as well, though I find firebug more useful.
Yes Firefox 3 is still in beta. But beta means testing, and testing means more than just opening it, browsing to a couple of web pages and then closing it. It means doing what I do with it on a regular basis, which means being able to use my extensions.
I've tried it, it does some wierd things with importing javascript outside of the header. This works in every other browser I've ever seen but not in firefox 3. I'd try to work out what was causing it, but none of my debugging tools work in the new version, so I can't.
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This is basically a last ditch attempt by the police to try and get the cushy situation their compatriots have in the US where all it takes is a gut feeling and cries of national security to toss someone in Guantanamo Bay. The judges aren't letting them do that here, and the public is getting royally pissed off(the Haneef and APEC failures were a part, if only a small part, of getting the previous government kicked out of office).
Even if our FOI laws aren't the greatest they're not actually going to censor this sort of thing.
Microsoft gets a lot of bad wrap because they play the game they play relatively well(and because complex systems which support third party vendors are buggy), but Microsoft for the most part plays soft ball.
To the best of my knowledge Microsoft has never killed anyone. Bill Gates has never walked off with millions before his company crashed into the ground leaving investors and employees destitute. On the scale of polluters they're pretty decent. They don't screw their employees over any more than anyone else does.
All Microsoft ever did was create a software monopoly, and fail to meet the development quality expectations of people most of whom have never tried to do any real development of complex systems. Most of the people Microsoft shut down to maintain their monopoly were bought out, usually at a price which was far more than they'd ordinarily have made.
They're not saints, but in the grand scheme of free market capitalism, if you compare them to the likes of Enron, Nike, James Hardy, etc they're not even on the map. I really wish folks would get a sense of perspective here, Bill Gates is a very rich man, he, like all very rich men has had his success come at the cost of others failure. Sometimes he's behaved in a fashion which isn't as ethical as it could be, and the products his company makes aren't perfect. He is also a hug contributer to charity, the owner of a company which is good to its employees, and probably as close to being a saint as any CEO of any publicly traded company is every likely to get. Does that make him Mother Theresa no, but he's not Hitler either.
As for B Microsoft isn't going to go back and support windows 2000, and they shouldn't have to. Linux doesn't support software for ancient versions of its libraries, neither does Mac, and Windows 2000, while a decent OS was the bastard child of Windows 98 and Windows NT, with neither the security of NT, nor the usability of 98. XP is basically the completed version of Windows 2000, they just gave it a new name. If things keep going the way they are now with all the Vista hating and whatnot, they're going to release IE 8 on XP simply because they'll need to.
This isn't a good solution either because IE 6 and to a lesser extent IE 7 aren't yet standards compliant. If IE 6 stays in the wild it will mean that web developers have to keep developing for it which no one wants to do.
What they need to do, is create a new version of IE(8) which supports the old crap, but also supports standards compliant code, so that intranets and the like still work and people upgrade, but standards compliant code works too and people can start developing that way in future(which as I said before is in their best interest because it's easier to write standards compliant code than to make things work in all the different browsers. According to what I've read about IE 8 this is exactly what they're going to do.
If you want a job, be it management, support, development, or pole dancing. The best way to get it is to ask for it. Talk to the folks in charge about upcoming opportunities. Let them know you're interested in becoming a manager. If there aren't any upcoming opportunities apply for a management position elsewhere. You don't ask you don't get.
Apple is Las Vegas, Microsoft is Atlantic City. In both cities you wake up with a hangover and an empty wallet most of the time, but Las Vegas is a lot prettier so you feel better about it.
What Microsoft needs to do is ensure that standards compliant code runs properly in their browser, then anything new can be developed compliant with the standards(this is in the best interest of web developers because it's easier than doing it 3 different ways), and all the old stuff still works. Eventually the old stuff will either get redeveloped or become so out of date that it doesn't matter at which point Microsoft can stop supporting its old legacy crap. But if the next version of IE all of a sudden supported compliant code and only compliant code then half the web(including a lot of the stuff that's actually written in a compliant way) would stop working in IE. No one except the linux zealots wants that.
IE6 should have died years ago, if it had we wouldn't be in the mess we're in(though we might also not have firefox), and now getting rid of it is going to be painful, but it needs to be done and the web isn't going to get better until it's gone.
That said unless your remote offices barely use the LAN, you already have a really fast WAN, or really high end equipment plus the in house resources to manage it, none of which appear to be true, all these options are going to be expensive.
Limited server consolidation can be a good thing, and large companies with really fat network pipes can actually centralize even file servers, and sometimes they even save money doing it(at least if they needed the network pipes anyway), but if you were with one of those companies you wouldn't be asking for a solution.
Your only real solution is to fire your outsourcing company, whichever meat head manager on your side thought it was a good idea, and anyone in a network or server role who didn't have the balls to say this was a terrible idea. If you're one of the above start by resigning. Then use the money you were going to spend on them to hire a few competent people and put servers back where they belong.
Not everyone knows what you're supposed to do in an accident, but once you know, even if you're not very good at doing it is likely to make a difference.
This doesn't apply to how to do. Everyone and their monther knows that the what to do for firing a gun is point and pull the trigger. Bullet flies out of gun and into target causing potential death or dismemberment, and on the small scale(one person, short range, opponent isn't fighting back) pretty much everyone who can control the movement of their hands can already do this.
The tricky part about shooting people is the whole aiming, reloading, mechanical reflex sort of thing, and swinging a mouse or joystick around doesn't train this reflex, no matter how you might. You might learn to duck around buildings as opposed to walking out into the line of fire, but you still don't learn how to physically do that without getting yourself shot.
The idea of any ordinary game as a murder simulator is pretty specious at best(that's not to say you couldn't create a murder simulator using special realistic gun input devices and some sort of motion sensing, but you can do the same thing playing paintball or target shooting and no one really complains about that).
The big question about violent video games(at least if you're not a complete and total loon), is whether playing violent video games increases the odds of you commiting a violent act or solving your problems in a violent manner.
Personally I'd say that based on the fact that the number of cases even tenuously linked to video game violence is very small, and that to the best of my knowledge the number of cases involving adults who were exposed to said violence is pretty much non existent, added to the fact that in general murder rates around the world are going down not up(at least as a percentage of population) it's pretty safe to presume that any increase in violence caused by exposure to video games is statistically insignificant and can probably be more readily attributed to other factors.
Spending all your time alone in the dark and not developing social skills needed for non violent solutions to problems is more likely to be a cause than video games in and of themselves.
That said, I have nothing against limiting the amount of violence young children are exposed to, or with changing the rather absurd manner in which American society normalizes violence and represses anything even remotely sexual, but I've seen nothing whatever that proves that even in this statistically insignificant sample(people who blame their acts of violence on video games) their is any substantial cause effect relationship.
However, this isn't a permanent situation, there will probably come a time when the level of realism possible in virtual environments(games) reaches a level so close to that of actual reality that we have to revisit this issue and I think that when that time comes we may have a problem. That time isn't now nor is the current technology sufficient.
In my house the other day room temperature was about 42, this was not the first time this year that this has happened, nor will it be the last. Room temperatures of the high 20's during summer(air conditioning not withstanding) are far from unusual here.
Then when we had court cases instead of a bunch of lawyers talking about loopholes and out of date assumptions, we'd have a simple decision, does the intent of this law cover this and is the intent something we believe in.
Unfortunately we don't have that and so we need judges to interpret the intent of the law to cover things that the people who wrote it didn't know or were wrong about. Perhaps in your "repeal or enforce" system you'd keep laws more up to date and this wouldn't be as necessary, but applying the ideals of people who didn't know about electricity, computers, or even automobiles, thought women and minorities shouldn't be able to vote, and lived in a totally different society than the one we live in today requires a certain degree of interpretation.
Was thinking more in line with phones where the data connections are proprietary, but as has been mentioned further down it's more the "I need to transfer data, and I don't want to turn on blue tooth, and I Don't have my cable with me"
That said, sony have pissed away decades of credability and company integrity in the last couple of years for little or no gain, so who knows what they're thinking.
Sony owns the rights to movies, Toshiba doesn't. So long as Sony didn't give up on their own format there were always going to be movies that you couldn't get on any format other than Blu-Ray, and since none of the other media companies have a vested interest in one technology or the other they were going to swap over eventually. The only way that Toshiba could have one this is to convince Sony that the money they were going to lose holding onto their old format was greater than the money they could potentially win if they got control of the technology and that wasn't likely to happen unless HD DVD got massive market share and consumers would rather have scrapped HD all together than buy a Blu-Ray box.
What I mean by that is that so long as people view IT as something different and scary(which if you ask anyone in support they still do), there will always be "those people" that IT gets given to. They might be a contracting agency, they might be at a data centre, and non IT employees may never physically meet them, but there will always be an IT department so long as there is IT.
Either way it's all a big ugly mess at the moment, and it may end up all falling down in a heap or going back to being a paid license product before the end.
That really leaves only advertising(the route of opera and to a lesser extent Mozilla(a lot of firefox's funding comes from google who must be making some money out of default searche and the like) or subsidization the way that IE and again to a lesser extent Mozilla work.
The general problem being is that large companies don't like to sink lots of money into subsidized products(less leaders yes, but pure ought and ought losers no), and in the new browser war the old lock in stuff isn't going to be a viable option(there being a difference between lock in and innovative new features mind you).
Microsoft is perfectly capable of building a cutting edge browser, IE was one once, but they lack the motivation to do so because they, at least at the moment, can't work out how to make any money out of it. At the same time web developers need Microsoft to step up their game because for better or worse a lot of people still use IE and so IE has to be a useable relatively standards compliant modern browser.
The whole not using silverlight is really a rather immaterial threat as no one wants to go back to the old days of "best viewed with _____", and so unless silverlight is readable with other browsers no one is going to write with it. .Net mostly suffers from the fact that IIS is still a pretty shitty web browser and the way Microsoft does licensing means that using windows servers in general tends to be somewhat unpleasant.
Microsoft has always tended to give their technologies away for free and use them to tie in Operating System and IDE sales. The problem being that the world of the Web has to deal with customers who might run Linux on the Desktop, or have Macs that need to connect to a site, or be public and have to accept connections from Firefox or Safari or Opera. It also has to deal with places where CAL's aren't already a part of life and the TCO of your ASP or .NET product might include a few hundred grand worth of Microsoft licenses they don't otherwise need.
Lock-in only benefits Microsoft and no one is really interested in it if it can be avoided.
As I said, this is a good first step for Microsoft, and a good first step for moving the web into an environment where we can have development again(as opposed to the years of semi stagnantion and work arounds we've had since IE 6.
It is however, not anywhere near enough, and Microsoft has as of yet not shown any real indication that it's changing its ways and treating it's web browser division as a serious part of business.
Part of it of course is that while up to date browsers are vitally important for all sorts of future developments, they're hard to monetize, and they tend to lessen the strength of Microsofts major product.
The flip side of this whole discussion of course is the fact that most of the nightmares of home user support come from the nature of the game as opposed to the incompetence of the people doing it. I've done home user support(usually for friends or family which made it hard to price accurately), I've done enterprise support(3 of us supporting about 500 PC's). I'd rather support a thousand properly run enterprise systems than 1 shitty unbacked up, spyware infested home PC. The 19 year olds can have it as far as I'm concerned.
That said, there's a difference between appointing people to the FCC and SEC with forethought and planning with the goal of selecting the best people for the job(as you invision the job to be), and appointing people who will let you get away with things you know are wrong.
Anyone with any understanding of U.S. history knows that things like wire taps without a warrant are not only likely unconstitutional but fly in the face of everything the U.S. stands(used to stand) for. That's the difference.
They have no obligation to host the source code, nor to provide it for download, they merely have to provide it upon request, and they did. End of story.
It's not so much that your professor, teacher, TA, etc couldn't do what they're teaching, it's that for the most part they never have. Most English teachers have never written a novel, most comp sci teachers have never done computing work for a living, etc. Teachers do not lack competence, but in many cases they lack real world experience.
This in turn exacerbates the whole "out of uni into the work place" culture shock where people learn exactly how much they don't actually know and employers learn exactly how much their new employees weren't taught. This plus the general dislike of academics among certain segments of the population tends to lead to a jaded view of even the best of educators and to a populace who doesn't really realize exactly how much of what they learned in uni actually helps them in real life(since it's usually not a direct "I know how to do this because I did course x").
That said, Lucas did exert a lot more of his own personal control into episodes I-III and that made his always hammy scripts even hammier, but as much as I love episodes IV-VI, and as much as I hate the new ones, I know that that's because I'm not a kid anymore. I don't like the new disney movies as much as the ones when I was a kid either, but they haven't jumped the shark.
Firebug, CSSmate, a colorzilla, measureit (can you tell I'm a web developer?), I've also been using the straight up web developer add-on as well, though I find firebug more useful.
I've tried it, it does some wierd things with importing javascript outside of the header. This works in every other browser I've ever seen but not in firefox 3. I'd try to work out what was causing it, but none of my debugging tools work in the new version, so I can't.