Why you haven't been labeled a troll, I don't understand. Please explain to be why pointing out the underlying problem, and suggesting that this solution doesn't solve the underlying problem is saying "they should just stop trying".
Well, you're wrong on several points. One, it's not just the CIA/NSA/DIA that restrict camera phones. It's a LOT of govt IT shops, and even some non IT areas.
You misunderstand. I'm simply saying that anyone outside of the intelligence community is simply being paranoid.
It's obvious that you don't have any respect for the R&D efforts of various companies. Companies spend billions to create new methods to produce better, faster and cheaper results, and need to protect themselves from the competition.
No, I just don't buy the argument that you can walk away with some huge secret that you can get with a cell phone camera, or even if you could that this policy is going to stop that. If the information is that sensitive, why the hell are you allowing access to the place where it's kept anyway? Do you really think someone who's really doing corporate espionage isn't going to just get a device with a camera in it that doesn't look like it has a camera in it?
Policies like this are really more about a CYA approach to the problem, rather than actual security. Third, There is legal precedence that if you selectively enforce a rule, you lose the power to enforce it at all
Right. That's why speeding, drug possession, shoplifting and just about every law are un-enforceable because they're enforced selectively. This is demonstratively false given anyones day-to-day experience.
If I want to protect my property, I have that right.
I think you've really missed the point here. The OP isn't saying people don't have rights to "protect my property", he's saying that barring people from carrying in "recording equipment" is becoming increasingly impractical. You'll also note that the poster was referring to a freaking movie theater, not the damn CIA.
If movie theaters are really going to stop people from carring in a cell phone for fear the studios will lose money because someone is going to watch the movie on a crappy cell-phone shot video, they deserve to go out of business. Theaters have the right to do incredibly stupid things. That doesn't mean they should actually DO those incredibly stupid things.
As far as the larger picture, it's just plain ridiculous. If you really think someone can walk in somewhere other than the CIA/NSA/etc and cary away some big secret on their phone, you've gone insane. Companies that have these restrictions are just full of themselves and think everything they do is some big secret.
How are they to decide who's going to upload movies and who is "recording a 20 second clip to get their little brother excited"?
I dunno, maybe actually observe the person and see if they're recording the whole movie, or a 20 second clip?
The only alternative is to make it all legal, and that doesn't make any sense either.
No, the alternative is to act like a sane person and only enforce the law selectively. (Just like every other law outside of rape and murder). Your mistake is thinking law enforcement is black and white, that the law is a series of rules to be obeyed. The law actually has a goal in mind. Keeping that goal in mind is what separates the sane people in the world from the rule followers who ignore the larger picture.
Why should the theater decide between "good and bad stealing"?
Because people in any authority position do this ALL THE TIME. If people called the cops any time there's a minor infraction of the law, the court system would be even more hopelessly clogged than it is now, not to mention the harm that would occur to people who've made trivial infractions of the law.
It's clear this is a trivial matter that should have gotten this woman thrown out of the theater, not a call to the cops. All your arguments about who owns the content, what's legal, etc are just garbage. This incident never should have gotten to the legal system in the first place as it's a waste of everyones time and a huge amount of bad publicity for the theater. Instead we've got some over-zealous person in authority that calls up the cops hoping he/she has "got themselves a pirate!" Then the rest of the system takes over with prosecution, judges, etc, and of course people like you who seem to view the law as a series of rules rather than the larger picture of the actual goals of the laws. What an idiotic waste.
But Vista was released 5y3m after 2000, so it's a totally different scenario.
Why? Have business needs changed that much in 5 years? What does the age of the software (in isolation from everything else as you seem to be suggesting) have to do with why people need to upgrade?
It's been like that with every Windows release actually. This isn't news; it is normal.
I tend to agree, and this was my first thought on reading this article.
I remember way back after Windows 95 came out there were many businesses that just refused to switch, despite 95 being a million times more stable, better UI, etc than the (IMO embarrassingly bad) Windows 3.1. Microsoft was still selling Windows 3.1 licenses as late as perhaps 1998 due to corporate pressure.
Now this isn't quite like that transition. I'm of the opinion that XP wasn't really an improvement over 2000, and 2000 was at the 'good enough" stage.
The standard narrative of schizophrenia that we've all internalized is that it's somehow a weakness of an individual.
I've never heard this narrative, nor of anyone really advocating it until now. Who would really believe that hearing voices would be a "weakness" (i.e. something that could be changed if the person were "strong")? Maybe you're thinking of eating disorders, or gambling or something like that.
A more common bias against someone with schizophrenia is they're scary, dangerous killers. I don't know exactly how true that is, though it's obviously not true for all (or probably a large majority).
Hawley has been saying it's based on "scientific findings" like a broken record. But he has yet to show these "scientific findings".
That's because most of the public will just blindly accept anything that claims to be based on "science, or research". They might be a little suspicious, but people haven't been taught to think critically about how science is done. (Or on the other hand have to accept the conclusions of well done science even when it challenges what they believe). Science is too often presented as the finished product printed in textbooks, and not a process at arriving at the product.
Anyone familiar with how actual science is produced will look at this statement by the TSA and immediately question it for lack of any evidence (or even ANY details).
The link is just spin on spin, which I find totally worthless. There's very few definitive statements being discussed here, more like "Microsoft is great, rah rah rah!". What can be said if that other than "Microsoft isn't great, rah rah rah!"
Polite: That's an interesting idea, but doesn't quite fit with the approach we're taking. Thank you for your input, though.
I'd personally hate that response. To me it sounds about 100 times ruder than "this code sucks". It sounds like the polite rudeness that's become popular from customer service people lately . I'd rather just have the blunt "this sucks" response. At least approach isn't trying to couch dislike inside a sugary outer coating.
I'd rather find out WHY the person who thinks it sucks thinks it sucks, and an honest reply sounds like I might actually get an honest answer to that question. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but the "interesting, but it doesn't fit with what we want to do" sounds like a lame attempt at hiding true feelings.
This is also commonly referred to as "tact".
It can also be referred to as smarm, or false earnestness. You may think you're being tactful, while the listening party just thinks you're a douchebag.
but guess what - that is what the kids will see in the corporate world by the time they graduate from college.
I really don't understand this argument in the least. We should be teaching kids (well, anyone in fact) how to learn new software packages, because they'll spend a lifetime doing it. If these kids are all bone stupid and can't learn something as simple as a word processor or spreadsheet after having used a different word processor or spreadsheet, I'd agree with you.
Honestly, is Office 2007 that much different from Open Office than Office 20007 is from Office XP? The "I can't use Microsoft Office because I used Open Office", or vice-versa argument just doesn't hold water. A word processor is a word processor, and if you can't translate your skills from one to another, you're useless as software interfaces (especially GUI ones) change all the time.
Having lurked on http://www.lkml.org/ for several years, I find Linus to be rather rude.
I think you mistake brutal honesty for rudeness. The post referenced is a bit harsh, but it's honest and to the point about how he feels. Politeness can often get in the way of expressing a point. That's not to say politeness isn't a valueable skill at all, it certainly is for a salesman or customer service person. I can be for many jobs, but being to the point is often more valueable in science and technology.
I don't read lkml very often, but from what I've read I think Linus is just strong willed about the things he has strong feelings for. Politeness has the potential to spill over into letting "bad" code into the kernel. Politeness can also hide peoples true intentions, which for anyone that just wants to understand the value system used to judge an idea can be maddening.
Imagine a scenario where there's a pushy person who overwhelms a person with a polite instinct. The polite person might just eventually give in instead of stating harsh realities defending what they believe to be the best idea. The pushy person might never learn why the polite person won't just accept what they think is right. It's not the best option for an honest discussion.
Anyway, I think you need to look at the situation as a discussion about what the best code is, and who does the best job at producing that code. Falling in love with your code (or anything you produce really) is a bad idea. It seems the kernel maintainer of the SD scheduler did just that, and Linus is only pointing that out.
See my comment earlier about fuel injection versus carburetors.
This is an analogy and means nothing.
Because you're clinging to legacy technology that's clearly being obsoleted?
So basically you're advocating the "chase the new technology because it's new" argument. I reject this out of hand. So you're going to compromise a several hundreds (or thousands) dollar purchase to accomodate a $30 peripheral and an old keyboard?
A 4 port USB kvm switch is around $65, and may or may not work as advertised. Replacing the keyboard with a decent quality one would run about $30, the mouse another $10-$15. My KVM switch works perfectly right now. So please tell me the advantage of spending $105 on a USB keyboard/mouse solution? (other than chasing technology that's no better).
I'm not sure what you mean by "out of your way", but most motherboards of any quality have still have PS/2 ports on them.
a common port for all peripherals rather than a distinct port for each type of connection.
And what does this gain me, other than some kind of Adrian Monk like symmetry? If you want to get pedantic, another advantage is the fact you can use a USB keyboard that functions as a hub and connect your digital camera, mouse, etc. right on your desktop.
I don't have a digital camera, and if I did I'd either connect it to the front panel of the computer, or read the media directly through a SD->USB interface instead of through the camera. The mouse cord stretches just fine with the PS/2 cable. Now what are the advantages of the PC mentality of grasping on to legacy technology until it's a decade past its best-before date?
You seem to have a very strange attitude towards technology. Perhaps you don't know this, but it's actually a tool to accomplish a goal, not a race to pursue the "latest and greatest" just for the sake of pursuing it. USB is great for anything involving getting mass amounts of data out of or onto a computer, auto-configuration, etc. But it offers nothing for replacing a keyboard and mouse. Next you're going to be telling me that I need to get a mouse that supports USB 2.0 full speed because that USB 1.1 mouse is just old "legacy technology".
For the simple reason that if they try to prioritize some application traffic over another, application developers (and perhaps router developers) will just make their traffic look like the "prioritized" traffic. Thus starting an arms race which the traffic prioritizers are bound to lose. Also think of the fact that ever-sophisticated packet inspection takes more and more computing power.
Bandwidth is cheap, and continues to get cheaper. Why treat it as a precious resource when there's more of it every day?
However maintaining legacy technology adds unnecessary overhead and can lead to unstable products and is therefore bad.
I think that statement is over-generalized, and has hidden implications. I don't see any evidence that motherboards that have a PS/2 port are less stable than ones that don't. "legacy" in this context simply means technology that's been replaced with different, but not necessarily any better technology. In this theoretical, why isn't it the new technology making the system unstable? Blame can work both ways. Use a bootable CD for flashing your BIOS and most driver disks nowadays come on floppy disks.
Some do, some don't. If you're putting together a $15,000 server are you really going to skip the floppy option and save $15 on the risk that some component of your solution requires a floppy drive to flash the bios/recover the server/whatever? So buy a new KVM switch?
Why? The old one works just fine. If you chase technology just because "it's newer", you'll just wind up wasting a lot of money for nothing. I look for advantages in new technology, and I see none for PS/2 keyboards and mice.
ISA ports, serial/paralell ports, PS/2 ports, floppy drives, PATA; it's all old technology. Let it go already
Old doesn't mean inferior, that's a new (and often incorrect) idea.
There's plenty of devices that require a serial port to plug into. Also, how are USB keyboards/mice better than the PS/2 versions? I've got a KVM switch that uses PS/2 ports, not USB, so I simply wouldn't buy a computer without it.
I don't have much use for PATA, a floppy drive, or a parallel port. For a server I wouldn't buy one without a floppy drive (BIOS flashing, driver disks).
True virtualisation will cause the opposite effect - people will buy less hardware.
I think people will buy less SERVERS, but the same or more amount of processors. Intel doesn't sell servers, it sells processors (and hardware to support said processors).
The thing is, virtual machines are excellent for a multi-core machine, and with Intel saying we'll have 40 core processors in a few years they need to figure out what to do with all those cores. Running multiple virtual machines is a good answer to that.
You point out many examples of industries that are more highly regulated than the casino industry. I'll take your word for it that your example industries are more highly regulated. I don't think any of this matters however.
The thing is, the statement wasn't that the casino industry is one of the most highly regulated industries. The statement was that casinos do NOT operate under "minimal government regulation". So to prove this statement correct or incorrect, we'd need to compare the level of regulation of the casino industry to one that people would agree has "minimal government regulation". I'd probably look at industries like the restaraunt, retail, or grocery industry. Restaraunts have health inspections, need licenses to sell alchohol, etc. The retail industry might require a business licence or something along those lines (I'm admittedly not an expert). By that comparison the Casino industry is far more regulated than those industries.
In any case, I think it's that your argument doesn't hold any water as you're not comparing the Casino industry to the category in dispute. It really makes no difference if Casino's are more, or less regulated than highly regulated industries, as that isn't the topic of debate.
Patents dont generate a lot of money for curing or preventing disease; they generate the maximum level of revenue when they set the price so high that they _deny_ a certain subset of customers access
I guess I don't understand why denying a certain subset of people makes the patent holder any more money. Patents deny anyone else the ability to produce the drug. That obviously does keep prices higher, but that's by design as pharamaceutical companies have to (at the very least) cover costs incurred to develop the drug. A competing pharma obviously wouldn't have those costs. (And please, dont give me the 'but they need the money to research' crap; the money is largely wasted on marketing, administration and inefficient production
I agree that pharmaceutical companies waste FAR to much money on marketing, and administration. Don't know about inefficient production. But that doesn't deny the fact that it takes research dollars to produce drugs. How are pharmaceutical companies going to re-coop research costs without some level of protection from a competing company that's in the business of just copying drugs and pumping them out as cheaply as possible?
I think there certainly are some easy fixes that could alleviate the problems. The most obvious is ban all marketing of drugs directly to consumers, and limit marketing of drugs to doctors. Provide a 3rd party "consumer reports" of drugs that rates effectiveness of different drugs and make that information available to doctors. Basically level the playing field so all the pharmaceutical companies don't have to fight a war amongst themselves to make the public believe that Prozac is better than Wellbutrin (or whatever). We need to create an environment where money isn't wasted on idiotic marketing, and where information about effectiveness is easily available so "good" drugs win, and "bad" drugs fail.
I'm unsure of what the solution you're proposing is, but if it's eliminating patents alltogether I think you'd do far more harm than good.
Now that the definition of AIDS has been modified, do these people no longer have Aquired Immonodeficiency Syndromes? They're all healthy and OK now?
I think you have some basic misunderstandings about how language works and evolves. The term AIDS was coined around 1981-1982 to refer to a newly emerging disease we now know is caused by HIV. There may have been a some confusion about other causes of a compromised immune system that got thrown into the mix of the AIDS crisis in the early 80s, but it was really a misnomer and never really widely associated with the term AIDS.
Furthermore, if that's all AIDS means anymore, why do we even need the term?
Because that's the word people use to refer to a compromised immune system due to HIV. You seem to think that word usage follows from the most logical definition. That's simply innacurate. Word definitions are a common agreement among the users of a language. AIDS is no longer a "syndrome", but since 99.9% of the population uses that term, it's stuck. No amount of shouting "but it's not perfectly accurate!!" will change that.
I bought one at target a couple months ago. Look for the Sunday ads, they'll have them in stock when they advertise. I went fairly early in the morning (9am maybe) to get one, but I did notice they still had several of them available at perhaps 2pm the same day, so you don't have to be one of those insane people that lines up outside the store at 5am.
and it will be wash rinse and repeat as people actually see it and realize it is Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows Vista
So it'll be progressively better operating systems (with the possible exclusion of XP over 2000 IMO) that aren't "perfect"? That sounds fine to me.
If your metric in measuring any product is if it lives up to the marketing departments hype, then ALL products are miserable failures in that regard. We all know products never live up to the hype, so I don't quite understand the criticism here.
Of course that's not to say I'm defending everything Microsoft has done, far from it. The problem I have with this announcement is the continued long lag times between releases. Vista wasn't originally planned at 5 years, but more like 2 or 3 years. Microsoft SAYS they've changed as far as release schedules go, but it sounds like same-old-same-old to me.
IMO software develops best with a mix of frequent releases of incremental change, and major releases that re-architect everything. Microsoft has done the major architectural changes on a regular basis, but has failed to produce very many good incremental releases.
For instance, Windows 95 was a pretty good product, while Windows 98 wasn't really much more than adding USB support. ME was of course utter crap. 2000 was the best product I've seen from Microsoft (and the best major release they've done). XP was useless IMO and added little to nothing to the OS. Vista is the buggiest Microsoft OS I've run so far, and doesn't live up to many of the claims (less reboots my ass). I _really_ like the menu search feature though, but wish the sleep feature worked a lot better (extremely buggy in my experience). Despite this I won't be going back to Windows 2000, though I might just go Ubuntu on my workstation. That would make me Microsoft free for the first time in 12 years. Everything else including my work machine is some variant of Linux.
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Good point...they should just stop trying.
Why you haven't been labeled a troll, I don't understand. Please explain to be why pointing out the underlying problem, and suggesting that this solution doesn't solve the underlying problem is saying "they should just stop trying".
Well, you're wrong on several points. One, it's not just the CIA/NSA/DIA that restrict camera phones. It's a LOT of govt IT shops, and even some non IT areas.
You misunderstand. I'm simply saying that anyone outside of the intelligence community is simply being paranoid.
It's obvious that you don't have any respect for the R&D efforts of various companies. Companies spend billions to create new methods to produce better, faster and cheaper results, and need to protect themselves from the competition.
No, I just don't buy the argument that you can walk away with some huge secret that you can get with a cell phone camera, or even if you could that this policy is going to stop that. If the information is that sensitive, why the hell are you allowing access to the place where it's kept anyway? Do you really think someone who's really doing corporate espionage isn't going to just get a device with a camera in it that doesn't look like it has a camera in it?
Policies like this are really more about a CYA approach to the problem, rather than actual security.
Third, There is legal precedence that if you selectively enforce a rule, you lose the power to enforce it at all
Right. That's why speeding, drug possession, shoplifting and just about every law are un-enforceable because they're enforced selectively. This is demonstratively false given anyones day-to-day experience.
If I want to protect my property, I have that right.
I think you've really missed the point here. The OP isn't saying people don't have rights to "protect my property", he's saying that barring people from carrying in "recording equipment" is becoming increasingly impractical. You'll also note that the poster was referring to a freaking movie theater, not the damn CIA.
If movie theaters are really going to stop people from carring in a cell phone for fear the studios will lose money because someone is going to watch the movie on a crappy cell-phone shot video, they deserve to go out of business. Theaters have the right to do incredibly stupid things. That doesn't mean they should actually DO those incredibly stupid things.
As far as the larger picture, it's just plain ridiculous. If you really think someone can walk in somewhere other than the CIA/NSA/etc and cary away some big secret on their phone, you've gone insane. Companies that have these restrictions are just full of themselves and think everything they do is some big secret.
How are they to decide who's going to upload movies and who is "recording a 20 second clip to get their little brother excited"?
I dunno, maybe actually observe the person and see if they're recording the whole movie, or a 20 second clip?
The only alternative is to make it all legal, and that doesn't make any sense either.
No, the alternative is to act like a sane person and only enforce the law selectively. (Just like every other law outside of rape and murder). Your mistake is thinking law enforcement is black and white, that the law is a series of rules to be obeyed. The law actually has a goal in mind. Keeping that goal in mind is what separates the sane people in the world from the rule followers who ignore the larger picture.
Why should the theater decide between "good and bad stealing"?
Because people in any authority position do this ALL THE TIME. If people called the cops any time there's a minor infraction of the law, the court system would be even more hopelessly clogged than it is now, not to mention the harm that would occur to people who've made trivial infractions of the law.
It's clear this is a trivial matter that should have gotten this woman thrown out of the theater, not a call to the cops. All your arguments about who owns the content, what's legal, etc are just garbage. This incident never should have gotten to the legal system in the first place as it's a waste of everyones time and a huge amount of bad publicity for the theater. Instead we've got some over-zealous person in authority that calls up the cops hoping he/she has "got themselves a pirate!" Then the rest of the system takes over with prosecution, judges, etc, and of course people like you who seem to view the law as a series of rules rather than the larger picture of the actual goals of the laws. What an idiotic waste.
But Vista was released 5y3m after 2000, so it's a totally different scenario.
Why? Have business needs changed that much in 5 years? What does the age of the software (in isolation from everything else as you seem to be suggesting) have to do with why people need to upgrade?
It's been like that with every Windows release actually. This isn't news; it is normal.
I tend to agree, and this was my first thought on reading this article.
I remember way back after Windows 95 came out there were many businesses that just refused to switch, despite 95 being a million times more stable, better UI, etc than the (IMO embarrassingly bad) Windows 3.1. Microsoft was still selling Windows 3.1 licenses as late as perhaps 1998 due to corporate pressure.
Now this isn't quite like that transition. I'm of the opinion that XP wasn't really an improvement over 2000, and 2000 was at the 'good enough" stage.
The standard narrative of schizophrenia that we've all internalized is that it's somehow a weakness of an individual.
I've never heard this narrative, nor of anyone really advocating it until now. Who would really believe that hearing voices would be a "weakness" (i.e. something that could be changed if the person were "strong")? Maybe you're thinking of eating disorders, or gambling or something like that.
A more common bias against someone with schizophrenia is they're scary, dangerous killers. I don't know exactly how true that is, though it's obviously not true for all (or probably a large majority).
Hawley has been saying it's based on "scientific findings" like a broken record. But he has yet to show these "scientific findings".
That's because most of the public will just blindly accept anything that claims to be based on "science, or research". They might be a little suspicious, but people haven't been taught to think critically about how science is done. (Or on the other hand have to accept the conclusions of well done science even when it challenges what they believe). Science is too often presented as the finished product printed in textbooks, and not a process at arriving at the product.
Anyone familiar with how actual science is produced will look at this statement by the TSA and immediately question it for lack of any evidence (or even ANY details).
and since we refused to hand over extortion money to these gangsters, there was no way for us to deal with them
Extortion is a good word for it, but I'd say protection racketeering is a better one.
The link is just spin on spin, which I find totally worthless. There's very few definitive statements being discussed here, more like "Microsoft is great, rah rah rah!". What can be said if that other than "Microsoft isn't great, rah rah rah!"
Polite: That's an interesting idea, but doesn't quite fit with the approach we're taking. Thank you for your input, though.
I'd personally hate that response. To me it sounds about 100 times ruder than "this code sucks". It sounds like the polite rudeness that's become popular from customer service people lately . I'd rather just have the blunt "this sucks" response. At least approach isn't trying to couch dislike inside a sugary outer coating.
I'd rather find out WHY the person who thinks it sucks thinks it sucks, and an honest reply sounds like I might actually get an honest answer to that question. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but the "interesting, but it doesn't fit with what we want to do" sounds like a lame attempt at hiding true feelings.
This is also commonly referred to as "tact".
It can also be referred to as smarm, or false earnestness. You may think you're being tactful, while the listening party just thinks you're a douchebag.
but guess what - that is what the kids will see in the corporate world by the time they graduate from college.
I really don't understand this argument in the least. We should be teaching kids (well, anyone in fact) how to learn new software packages, because they'll spend a lifetime doing it. If these kids are all bone stupid and can't learn something as simple as a word processor or spreadsheet after having used a different word processor or spreadsheet, I'd agree with you.
Honestly, is Office 2007 that much different from Open Office than Office 20007 is from Office XP? The "I can't use Microsoft Office because I used Open Office", or vice-versa argument just doesn't hold water. A word processor is a word processor, and if you can't translate your skills from one to another, you're useless as software interfaces (especially GUI ones) change all the time.
Having lurked on http://www.lkml.org/ for several years, I find Linus to be rather rude.
I think you mistake brutal honesty for rudeness. The post referenced is a bit harsh, but it's honest and to the point about how he feels. Politeness can often get in the way of expressing a point. That's not to say politeness isn't a valueable skill at all, it certainly is for a salesman or customer service person. I can be for many jobs, but being to the point is often more valueable in science and technology.
I don't read lkml very often, but from what I've read I think Linus is just strong willed about the things he has strong feelings for. Politeness has the potential to spill over into letting "bad" code into the kernel. Politeness can also hide peoples true intentions, which for anyone that just wants to understand the value system used to judge an idea can be maddening.
Imagine a scenario where there's a pushy person who overwhelms a person with a polite instinct. The polite person might just eventually give in instead of stating harsh realities defending what they believe to be the best idea. The pushy person might never learn why the polite person won't just accept what they think is right. It's not the best option for an honest discussion.
Anyway, I think you need to look at the situation as a discussion about what the best code is, and who does the best job at producing that code. Falling in love with your code (or anything you produce really) is a bad idea. It seems the kernel maintainer of the SD scheduler did just that, and Linus is only pointing that out.
See my comment earlier about fuel injection versus carburetors.
This is an analogy and means nothing.
Because you're clinging to legacy technology that's clearly being obsoleted?
So basically you're advocating the "chase the new technology because it's new" argument. I reject this out of hand.
So you're going to compromise a several hundreds (or thousands) dollar purchase to accomodate a $30 peripheral and an old keyboard?
A 4 port USB kvm switch is around $65, and may or may not work as advertised. Replacing the keyboard with a decent quality one would run about $30, the mouse another $10-$15. My KVM switch works perfectly right now. So please tell me the advantage of spending $105 on a USB keyboard/mouse solution? (other than chasing technology that's no better).
I'm not sure what you mean by "out of your way", but most motherboards of any quality have still have PS/2 ports on them.
a common port for all peripherals rather than a distinct port for each type of connection.
And what does this gain me, other than some kind of Adrian Monk like symmetry?
If you want to get pedantic, another advantage is the fact you can use a USB keyboard that functions as a hub and connect your digital camera, mouse, etc. right on your desktop.
I don't have a digital camera, and if I did I'd either connect it to the front panel of the computer, or read the media directly through a SD->USB interface instead of through the camera. The mouse cord stretches just fine with the PS/2 cable.
Now what are the advantages of the PC mentality of grasping on to legacy technology until it's a decade past its best-before date?
You seem to have a very strange attitude towards technology. Perhaps you don't know this, but it's actually a tool to accomplish a goal, not a race to pursue the "latest and greatest" just for the sake of pursuing it. USB is great for anything involving getting mass amounts of data out of or onto a computer, auto-configuration, etc. But it offers nothing for replacing a keyboard and mouse. Next you're going to be telling me that I need to get a mouse that supports USB 2.0 full speed because that USB 1.1 mouse is just old "legacy technology".
For the simple reason that if they try to prioritize some application traffic over another, application developers (and perhaps router developers) will just make their traffic look like the "prioritized" traffic. Thus starting an arms race which the traffic prioritizers are bound to lose. Also think of the fact that ever-sophisticated packet inspection takes more and more computing power.
Bandwidth is cheap, and continues to get cheaper. Why treat it as a precious resource when there's more of it every day?
However maintaining legacy technology adds unnecessary overhead and can lead to unstable products and is therefore bad.
I think that statement is over-generalized, and has hidden implications. I don't see any evidence that motherboards that have a PS/2 port are less stable than ones that don't. "legacy" in this context simply means technology that's been replaced with different, but not necessarily any better technology. In this theoretical, why isn't it the new technology making the system unstable? Blame can work both ways.
Use a bootable CD for flashing your BIOS and most driver disks nowadays come on floppy disks.
Some do, some don't. If you're putting together a $15,000 server are you really going to skip the floppy option and save $15 on the risk that some component of your solution requires a floppy drive to flash the bios/recover the server/whatever?
So buy a new KVM switch?
Why? The old one works just fine. If you chase technology just because "it's newer", you'll just wind up wasting a lot of money for nothing. I look for advantages in new technology, and I see none for PS/2 keyboards and mice.
ISA ports, serial/paralell ports, PS/2 ports, floppy drives, PATA; it's all old technology. Let it go already
Old doesn't mean inferior, that's a new (and often incorrect) idea.
There's plenty of devices that require a serial port to plug into. Also, how are USB keyboards/mice better than the PS/2 versions? I've got a KVM switch that uses PS/2 ports, not USB, so I simply wouldn't buy a computer without it.
I don't have much use for PATA, a floppy drive, or a parallel port. For a server I wouldn't buy one without a floppy drive (BIOS flashing, driver disks).
True virtualisation will cause the opposite effect - people will buy less hardware.
I think people will buy less SERVERS, but the same or more amount of processors. Intel doesn't sell servers, it sells processors (and hardware to support said processors).
The thing is, virtual machines are excellent for a multi-core machine, and with Intel saying we'll have 40 core processors in a few years they need to figure out what to do with all those cores. Running multiple virtual machines is a good answer to that.
You point out many examples of industries that are more highly regulated than the casino industry. I'll take your word for it that your example industries are more highly regulated. I don't think any of this matters however.
The thing is, the statement wasn't that the casino industry is one of the most highly regulated industries. The statement was that casinos do NOT operate under "minimal government regulation". So to prove this statement correct or incorrect, we'd need to compare the level of regulation of the casino industry to one that people would agree has "minimal government regulation". I'd probably look at industries like the restaraunt, retail, or grocery industry. Restaraunts have health inspections, need licenses to sell alchohol, etc. The retail industry might require a business licence or something along those lines (I'm admittedly not an expert). By that comparison the Casino industry is far more regulated than those industries.
In any case, I think it's that your argument doesn't hold any water as you're not comparing the Casino industry to the category in dispute. It really makes no difference if Casino's are more, or less regulated than highly regulated industries, as that isn't the topic of debate.
Patents dont generate a lot of money for curing or preventing disease; they generate the maximum level of revenue when they set the price so high that they _deny_ a certain subset of customers access
I guess I don't understand why denying a certain subset of people makes the patent holder any more money. Patents deny anyone else the ability to produce the drug. That obviously does keep prices higher, but that's by design as pharamaceutical companies have to (at the very least) cover costs incurred to develop the drug. A competing pharma obviously wouldn't have those costs.
(And please, dont give me the 'but they need the money to research' crap; the money is largely wasted on marketing, administration and inefficient production
I agree that pharmaceutical companies waste FAR to much money on marketing, and administration. Don't know about inefficient production. But that doesn't deny the fact that it takes research dollars to produce drugs. How are pharmaceutical companies going to re-coop research costs without some level of protection from a competing company that's in the business of just copying drugs and pumping them out as cheaply as possible?
I think there certainly are some easy fixes that could alleviate the problems. The most obvious is ban all marketing of drugs directly to consumers, and limit marketing of drugs to doctors. Provide a 3rd party "consumer reports" of drugs that rates effectiveness of different drugs and make that information available to doctors. Basically level the playing field so all the pharmaceutical companies don't have to fight a war amongst themselves to make the public believe that Prozac is better than Wellbutrin (or whatever). We need to create an environment where money isn't wasted on idiotic marketing, and where information about effectiveness is easily available so "good" drugs win, and "bad" drugs fail.
I'm unsure of what the solution you're proposing is, but if it's eliminating patents alltogether I think you'd do far more harm than good.
Now that the definition of AIDS has been modified, do these people no longer have Aquired Immonodeficiency Syndromes? They're all healthy and OK now?
I think you have some basic misunderstandings about how language works and evolves. The term AIDS was coined around 1981-1982 to refer to a newly emerging disease we now know is caused by HIV. There may have been a some confusion about other causes of a compromised immune system that got thrown into the mix of the AIDS crisis in the early 80s, but it was really a misnomer and never really widely associated with the term AIDS.
Furthermore, if that's all AIDS means anymore, why do we even need the term?
Because that's the word people use to refer to a compromised immune system due to HIV. You seem to think that word usage follows from the most logical definition. That's simply innacurate. Word definitions are a common agreement among the users of a language. AIDS is no longer a "syndrome", but since 99.9% of the population uses that term, it's stuck. No amount of shouting "but it's not perfectly accurate!!" will change that.
I bought one at target a couple months ago. Look for the Sunday ads, they'll have them in stock when they advertise. I went fairly early in the morning (9am maybe) to get one, but I did notice they still had several of them available at perhaps 2pm the same day, so you don't have to be one of those insane people that lines up outside the store at 5am.
and it will be wash rinse and repeat as people actually see it and realize it is Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows Vista
So it'll be progressively better operating systems (with the possible exclusion of XP over 2000 IMO) that aren't "perfect"? That sounds fine to me.
If your metric in measuring any product is if it lives up to the marketing departments hype, then ALL products are miserable failures in that regard. We all know products never live up to the hype, so I don't quite understand the criticism here.
Of course that's not to say I'm defending everything Microsoft has done, far from it. The problem I have with this announcement is the continued long lag times between releases. Vista wasn't originally planned at 5 years, but more like 2 or 3 years. Microsoft SAYS they've changed as far as release schedules go, but it sounds like same-old-same-old to me.
IMO software develops best with a mix of frequent releases of incremental change, and major releases that re-architect everything. Microsoft has done the major architectural changes on a regular basis, but has failed to produce very many good incremental releases.
For instance, Windows 95 was a pretty good product, while Windows 98 wasn't really much more than adding USB support. ME was of course utter crap. 2000 was the best product I've seen from Microsoft (and the best major release they've done). XP was useless IMO and added little to nothing to the OS. Vista is the buggiest Microsoft OS I've run so far, and doesn't live up to many of the claims (less reboots my ass). I _really_ like the menu search feature though, but wish the sleep feature worked a lot better (extremely buggy in my experience). Despite this I won't be going back to Windows 2000, though I might just go Ubuntu on my workstation. That would make me Microsoft free for the first time in 12 years. Everything else including my work machine is some variant of Linux.
I guess we simply disagree then about what science is then. I don't think it's a narrowly defined process you see in textbooks.