So, let me see if I have this straight: Microsoft was not just going after somebody who had violated their trademark because they wanted to flex their muscles, but because they actually wanted to use the name that they appeared to be legally entitled to? What bastards!
What's next? Can we expect to see Slashdot "editors" parroting the anti-science witchcraft nonsense that is used to promote such ideas as "condoms cause AIDS" becaus bill gates has donated a ton of money to combat AIDS in africa?
You probably think of yourself as a person capable of logic, right?
Then how come you make such a blatant logical error?
His argument was that highly trained / experience professionals would lead to less likelihood of errors happening or something to that extent.
My point was that the list counter-evidences this theory, as in that case highly experieced programmers also created catastrophic mistakes - even if we accept your dodgy ("poor oversight and testing", according to you, has nothing to do with the skill/experience of those involved) count of 1 or 2 out of ten, my basic point still stands, since for my point to be valid, i dont have to show that all ten were caused by experienced software people, but rather simply that some were. if you showed me a list of the 100 worst software mistakes of all time and it turns out that 99 were caused by junior programmers, then you might have a point. but as is, you don't.
I am sure you are a smart person, but consider taking a course in basic logic. Try http://www.philosophypages.com/lg/, especially the section marked "Quantification Theory."
This is fair enough, but if the claimed "insightfulness" is so much at odds with what has just been so clearly demonstrated via serious examples in the article, then in my book a little more than blatant assertion is needed to qualify as "insightful."
How about the "theft" it not "piracy" is not "intellectual property rights infringement" crowd, instead of modding the parent as "insightful"/"interesting" instead put this guy straight:
when, exactly, did you "purchase" any movie / software / music? Probably never. in all cases, you obtained some license to the material. for example, when you go to bestBuy and purchase a CD, all would agree that legally you have gotten a license to play the music privately - you have not, for example, been licenced to take that CD and its contents and use it in the car commercial your company has filming. You have also not gotten a license to make copies of the music and sell it on.
Your "renting vs owning" view is doubtlessly some shorthand for two generic types of licenses. However, while that was probably more or less sufficient in 1987, it's clearly not a good shorthand now, where new devices and different licensing schemes require far more subtlety and understanding to define.
Some of you marked the parent comment "insightful" because it doubtlessly seemed like commonsense, reasonable analysis.
However, you have been fooled. The parent comment is competely at odds with the article.
The article shows largely a series of examples where you DID have HIGHLY PAID and HIGHLY trained professionals with plenty of experience and oversight, but nevertheless very significant bugs occurred. So, the real lesson from this article is not "you get what you pay for," but rather that "software development is very hard" and perhaps that "by nature of its hardness, we can expect critical flaws to pop up from time to time, even when highly trained, experienced, and monitored programmers are involved."
When theory and reality disagree... reality wins.
on
Mandriva Linux 2006 Review
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It explains why the nature of Free Software leads to a more userfriendly software installation setup for Linux distributions in general, as compared to proprietary systems such as the current desktop market leader.
When theory and reality disagree, reality wins. Windows software is, in general, at this moment in time easier to install than Linux software. If you disagree with this statement, you are at best guilty of wishful thinking.
That said, there seems to be an unhealthy fixation in the Linux world with the "ease of OS installation" or "the ease of application installation." While these of course are important things, of course they represent only a relatively small portion of the whole "usability score" for a given OS/work environment. While most linux vendors have made admirable strides in the realm of OS installation (I'd argue, despite the likely claims of many here, that application installation still has a ways to go) to the point where the installation is now within the realm of 60% of computer users (compared to, I'd say, 70% for windows and 10% or less for linux 6 years ago), larger problems remain, such as the lack of true credible alternatives in many key software areas (gimp, for example, is a lousy photoshop clone) and a lack of true interoperability (like the fact that I can cut and paste items from powerpoint to photoshop to my email to into an MS-Access cell to... relatively seamlessly).
This is an unfair place to ask this question. You are basically asking here "what is the convenience cost of having a safe and known reasonable quality download for a price vs. the cost of just getting it off P2P." That's nonsense, just like it's nonsense to suggest that best buy should have to compete on price with house burglers selling TVs out of the back of a car.
The correct answer is: arrest the house burglers, and allow best buy to compete with other forms of entertinment and other retailers to set the price for TVs, and also (and I'm sure this is going to be a really popular opinion here), crack down hard on illegal P2P transferers and allow the movie studios to set their prices in a free market way. If you dont like the cost of the movie, read a book, or make your own movie. That's how the market works. There is no possible reason that you *NEED* to see the latest movie.
You're right about Nestle, but, well, at least it's not Cadbury. The "venerable" british chocolatier sells chocolate flavoured wax aggregate, occasionally with crushed economy nut sweepings. It's absolute rubbish. Nestle, while a giant corporation who basically tries to sell you less for more, at least has legitimate researchers or whatever making a kit-kat or whatever taste reasonable. Cadbury is just plain shite.
I dont eat much chocolate, but when I am over in the USA, I make sure that I get some hersheys products. They are quite tasty. Kisses and Peanut Butter cups, especially.
I think your comment is absolute nonsense. Well, at least for most publications.
You should NOT be able to obtain material for the purposes of personal entertainment that is out of print but nevertheless covered by copyright. Why? because there is a compelling public interest to encourage the creation of novel works. To put things into persepctive: EA (I thin) made LHX attack chopper, a PC game that is virtually impossible to find these days. It can still theoretically provide entertainment, however, it is out of print. Should you be able to pirate this abandonware because it is "part of your culture?" Absolutely not. I think the value to society of having companies advance the state of the art by producing new works far outweighs the fact that you'd rather play an old game for free rather than pay money for the numerous new games out there. After all, in the case of virtually ALL abandonware that i have seen, a copy is available out there on ebay to be purchased legitimately, and, where there is not - that is to say, where legitimate demand exceeds supply of existing licenses, companies can often be called upon to sell the rights for further sale (for example, that classic game "Empire Deluxe") or companies can find compelling reasons to themselves donate the item into the public domain (Sierra's "Red Baron"). Imagine if all game software written before, say, 5 years ago was "free". The net result would be a watering down of the current software market, and a net loss in choice for society as fewer companies would enter the market, and those that would enter would create fewer titles as the overall economic pie would be smaller - in other words, a net loss to society.
That said, you SHOULD be able to obtain out of print material for the purposes of genuine academic research. Still, there is rarely, if ever, a reason why you would have to resort to piracy to obtain such material as far as books are concerned. An example of this would be if you were doing legitimate research on, say, Disney's racist past. There is a complelling public interest to have acadmic researchers be able to do what they need to do in order to locate material that companies have tried to abandon for non-economic reasons.
The point is, if we DONT let companies securely turn material into abandonware, then their incentive to produce goes down. This is basic economics and it makes good policy sense as well.
That also said, this entire issue will be fairly moot in a few years or decades, as old stuff is digitized and the cost of maintaining old catalogues drops to near nil.
We get about 10 calls a week from UK telemarketers. The UK needs this badly, but there seems to be limited popular concensus about this. When I mention this to my friends, they bring up tired free speech and other long-debunked-elsewhere arguments.
I spend about $15k / month on Google, and about $5k / month on Yahoo.
Yahoo costs about a third, but generates significantly less than a third the number of clicks.
In our 'where did you hear of our product' feedback from our customers, the split between google and yahoo is about 90% google, 10% yahoo. even if some percentage of people dont know the difference between yahoo and google, and even if some people just click on google because it's easy to do (the feedback switches between a type-in-your-answer and a drop down enable us to do quality of data checks, and the order of items in the drop-down, when presented, is constantly randomized).
Yahoo's miminum cost per click is an unreasonably high $10, while google's, if i understand it, has just come down in price.
All that said, the yahoo ads are still profitable for us. However, should that margin begin to thin, you can guess who is on the chopping block first. All the moreso if microsoft finally unveils a credible online ad program.
Incidentally: if you ever wanted to see an example of ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE UI design on the web, try google's overture service (or whatever the heck it's called now - i have the terms mixed up). it's not just "baseline bad", it's "textbook example of bad, bad". I use yahoo's web interface about every 3-4 weeks, and have to constantly read the instructions for basic operations, since it is never really quite clear what is going on. That's right - i have to re-read instructions that i read 3 weeks ago because the interface is really that lousy. I've never looked at a single instuction with Google.
Tell me again what value yahoo provides? For the life of me, I can't figure it out. They are what--a link index of out of date links? Free email? While I like that they send me clicks, I can not understand why they can generate such traffic to be a major internet site.
take your comment, print it out, and store it in a safe place. 20 years later, open it up and read it and realize what kind of knee-jerk dumbass you were when you were young. if that doesn't happen, shoot yourself.
1. Windows tries to manage programs that you install, but does a really terrible job at it, expecting the program to know how to uninstall itself, instead of keeping track of what the program installed so it can actually get rid of it when you want to, and tell you about anything else that depends on this program to work.
Wrong. Uninstallation is a complex process and applications have specific requirements with regards to uninstallation. It makes the most sense for each app to know about its own un-installation, since this way the programmer of the app can write the appropriate custom uninstall. In the simplest example, an uninstall of a word processor will know not to delete the files users have created with it, but a game might prompt people for whether to delete the associated save-games or not. To the OS, the files otherwise look the same.
2. Installing windows XP asks you some questions too. Stuff like timezone is very important to set right, otherwise the time server will set your computer to the wrong time. Most people don't know what time zone they are in. Also, once installed, windows does very little, doesn't even have drivers for most of my hardware, and can't connect to the internet to download them, because my NIC doesn't have drivers either.
Absolute bullshiat. I dont know what place you live in ("Strawman city" perhaps?) where people dont know what time zone it is, but it ain't anywhere I've ever been. Also: the claim that windows doesnt have drivers for most of the hardware is ambiguous and meaningless. Windows is the EASIEST environment out there to set up a variety of hardware on. Mac supports less and linux is still a nightmare for certain relatively easy devices. You'd be hard pressed, for example, to find a network card or modem that isnt auto-detected by windows these days. Your comment was barely true around 1995.
3. I'd much better go with the windows model, of lump everything together and let programs put stuff where ever they wish. Also, let the users put their files whereever they want to. Also, ensure that all the settings for both the operating system and the programs are in one big, easily corruptable file, so that if some program wants to wipe out the registry, then it can.
Corruptible? There are multiple copies of the registry and no app is required to use it. In practice, the registry is highly secure. Your statement is just myth. About the beginning part of your rant: windows has a place where it SUGGESTS that users place personal files (My Documents), but, because as we all know it would be evil for an operating system to produce policy, it gives users options. At any rate, you can hardly defend the "consistent" linux world in this, with every distribution having some variation on a theme.
4. Nobody knows how to configure a windows computer either. The fact that you have to use a GUI for it means that all the useful settings are hidden in the registry, and the stuff that's in the GUI is just the minimal that it thinks people can understand, 80% of which they can't.
Apparently you live in a country of morons. Check the drinking water. The rest of the world is not like that.
5. I don't ever recall my linux box treating me like a moron. It always asks lots of questions to make sure its doing what its supposed to be doing. Presenting the user with no options, and just doing a bunch of stuff you assume they want to do is a bad thing.
Linux asks lots of questions? rm -rf *. Run that from root and see how many questions you are asked.
6. The user should always know when something goes wrong. To a certain point at least. Assuming the user has no idea what the error means, and therefore not tell them about it is just a bad idea. Sometimes computer errors require the use of computer terms to explain what went wrong. Also, I thought #5 just said linux treats people like morons. Now we are saying it is too complicated, and
Your comment is an absolute comedy. Still, you appear to be serious about it, which is all the more troubling.
Your fire department example is nonsense. To the first approximation, the cost of providing fire protection is linear in the number of houses. Add 1000 houses, say, and you have to add one fire station. Add 5000 houses, and you need to add 5, and so on.
This is not the case with drugs, where the marginal manufacturing cost is near zero. Consider rich country U and poor country A. The drug company can sell to citizens of U at some price: while this price may not be as cheap as tic-tacs, this price is also not $100,000 per dose. Why? Because at that price few people would buy. The drug company is forced by market forces to sell at a price that maximizes their revenue, say, $100/dose. If you think that providing universal access to such drugs is a role of government, then the fair agreement is for government to subsidize the difference between the revenue maximizing price and the amount that poor people can afford.
Most reasonable people can agree that that's how the situation should work in country U: but here's the real glory of it-that's exactly the same way it should work in country A! Let's say the revenue maximizing price in country A is $1/dose..well... that's exactly what the drug companies can and do charge.
Your claims about NIH and government R&D is absolute clownshoes. First, your proposals basically have one government subsidizing the R&D for other countries. Why should switzerland do any research at all if, after all, France and the USA will do it? Second, the fact is that market forces have proven to be a very effective...
... oh what's the point.. I'm tired of writing at this point.
Shifting all drug control resource allocation to the NIH (or a parallel body structured along the same lines) - would not only make better decisions than corporate power centers,
The thing is, corporate power centers have incentives ($) to make good decisions.
Explain to me again under your scheme the motivation for a company to create a drug for, say, Bird Flu v2.0 if there exists a precendent that they will not get paid for it? Your view is shortsighted.
I what proactive MBA envisioned the synergies that would allow flock to become a knowledge portal center of excellence for podcasting core competencies of leveraging mindshare and paradigm shifts to achieve superlinear ROI.
I am not having a serious discussion with you because you are an idiot who is repeating old and busted economic models that analysis, practical experience, and common sense have shown DO NOT WORK.
The fundamental problem with your model, as has been gone over 1000000000 times before on slashdot, is that customers have ZERO incentive to "pitch in", as whatever you produce would effectively be in the public domain, anyway. And then there's the bleedin' obvious problem that you can't contract a song, even if your assinine proposal that somebody needs to canvass friends and coworkers to write a song were feasible.
In short, you are an idiot not worthy of a real discussion.
Piracy justifiers like to have it both ways:
First, they claim that IP models like selling CDs and so forth are "outdated." Then, they try to tell you that piracy HELPS sales because look at the record profits companies that sell bits in a box made last year. Which is it gonna be, today guys?
But only a skilled human being can write a program or a song, so it makes sense to pay him for his labor, not the number of copies he can sell.
Fine. I just wrote a song. It took me 100 hours. I calculate my rate at $100/hr. Please pay me $10000. Yes, you personally, "Mr2001". Please pay me $10000, because in your fantasyland, the market has no role. I should just be paid fot the hours I put in. Where the money actually comes from doesn't actually seem to enter into your equation.
Our software is not technically terribly innovative. I mean, it does a good job, and is user friendly, but its value is in that we as a company gather experts who put together specialist material and then we present it in a useful fashion (I dont really want to give away who we are or what we do, but maybe let's say we create specialty training materials). Releasing of our source code will do ZERO - if somebody really wanted to, they could probably make a pretty good duplicate of our code, but our real value is in the material we present and the way we present it. There are no real bugs in our software for users to kill, and because most of our users are individuals (because of the nature of the market we are in), there is no consultancy to be had.
Look, I'm really happy for you that you have this imaginary idea of how the software market should be. and, maybe there are a few small areas where a company could legitimately succeed the way you suggest (for example, MySQL). However, in this case, your suggestion has no bearing. We do NOT have an out-of-date model, and the vast majority of our customers are honest people who see the value of what we do and have no problems paying our modest fees. In fact, we are often held up in our trade press as an example of excellent value for money.
However, nevertheless, this doesn't stop some people from pirating it. There is ZERO justification for this - those people are criminals.
I'd also mention that due to the area we work in, EVERYBODY who uses our software is not poor and can easily afford it. We are not talking about word processors or web browsers here that has applicability to "up and coming" peoples of the world. Think (and this is just a silly example, but nevertheless) as if we were selling Yacht maintenance software that requires specialist understanding of yachts to put together efficiently and is of value to yacht owners only.
I run a small software company. The keyword here a is "small." Genuine small business with genuine employees making honest wages. After being tipped off by a customer, I looked at eMule and found that some of our software, which we sell for about 50% the price of our billion-dollar competitor, was being "shared" by 35 users.
Explain to me again where the "unjust" part of the law is.
If you don't know what is on your network, the chances are someone else handles your network admin. Therefore you should look at how much it costs to employ or pay for that persons services.
100% correct.
Generally Windows servers need more attention.
100% back of the envelope, likely wishful thinking, unsubstantiated guess.
Slashdot Mirror
What's next? Can we expect to see Slashdot "editors" parroting the anti-science witchcraft nonsense that is used to promote such ideas as "condoms cause AIDS" becaus bill gates has donated a ton of money to combat AIDS in africa?
Then how come you make such a blatant logical error?
His argument was that highly trained / experience professionals would lead to less likelihood of errors happening or something to that extent.
My point was that the list counter-evidences this theory, as in that case highly experieced programmers also created catastrophic mistakes - even if we accept your dodgy ("poor oversight and testing", according to you, has nothing to do with the skill/experience of those involved) count of 1 or 2 out of ten, my basic point still stands, since for my point to be valid, i dont have to show that all ten were caused by experienced software people, but rather simply that some were. if you showed me a list of the 100 worst software mistakes of all time and it turns out that 99 were caused by junior programmers, then you might have a point. but as is, you don't.
I am sure you are a smart person, but consider taking a course in basic logic. Try http://www.philosophypages.com/lg/, especially the section marked "Quantification Theory."
This is fair enough, but if the claimed "insightfulness" is so much at odds with what has just been so clearly demonstrated via serious examples in the article, then in my book a little more than blatant assertion is needed to qualify as "insightful."
when, exactly, did you "purchase" any movie / software / music? Probably never. in all cases, you obtained some license to the material. for example, when you go to bestBuy and purchase a CD, all would agree that legally you have gotten a license to play the music privately - you have not, for example, been licenced to take that CD and its contents and use it in the car commercial your company has filming. You have also not gotten a license to make copies of the music and sell it on.
Your "renting vs owning" view is doubtlessly some shorthand for two generic types of licenses. However, while that was probably more or less sufficient in 1987, it's clearly not a good shorthand now, where new devices and different licensing schemes require far more subtlety and understanding to define.
However, you have been fooled. The parent comment is competely at odds with the article.
The article shows largely a series of examples where you DID have HIGHLY PAID and HIGHLY trained professionals with plenty of experience and oversight, but nevertheless very significant bugs occurred. So, the real lesson from this article is not "you get what you pay for," but rather that "software development is very hard" and perhaps that "by nature of its hardness, we can expect critical flaws to pop up from time to time, even when highly trained, experienced, and monitored programmers are involved."
When theory and reality disagree, reality wins. Windows software is, in general, at this moment in time easier to install than Linux software. If you disagree with this statement, you are at best guilty of wishful thinking.
That said, there seems to be an unhealthy fixation in the Linux world with the "ease of OS installation" or "the ease of application installation." While these of course are important things, of course they represent only a relatively small portion of the whole "usability score" for a given OS/work environment. While most linux vendors have made admirable strides in the realm of OS installation (I'd argue, despite the likely claims of many here, that application installation still has a ways to go) to the point where the installation is now within the realm of 60% of computer users (compared to, I'd say, 70% for windows and 10% or less for linux 6 years ago), larger problems remain, such as the lack of true credible alternatives in many key software areas (gimp, for example, is a lousy photoshop clone) and a lack of true interoperability (like the fact that I can cut and paste items from powerpoint to photoshop to my email to into an MS-Access cell to ... relatively seamlessly).
The correct answer is: arrest the house burglers, and allow best buy to compete with other forms of entertinment and other retailers to set the price for TVs, and also (and I'm sure this is going to be a really popular opinion here), crack down hard on illegal P2P transferers and allow the movie studios to set their prices in a free market way. If you dont like the cost of the movie, read a book, or make your own movie. That's how the market works. There is no possible reason that you *NEED* to see the latest movie.
I dont eat much chocolate, but when I am over in the USA, I make sure that I get some hersheys products. They are quite tasty. Kisses and Peanut Butter cups, especially.
You should NOT be able to obtain material for the purposes of personal entertainment that is out of print but nevertheless covered by copyright. Why? because there is a compelling public interest to encourage the creation of novel works. To put things into persepctive: EA (I thin) made LHX attack chopper, a PC game that is virtually impossible to find these days. It can still theoretically provide entertainment, however, it is out of print. Should you be able to pirate this abandonware because it is "part of your culture?" Absolutely not. I think the value to society of having companies advance the state of the art by producing new works far outweighs the fact that you'd rather play an old game for free rather than pay money for the numerous new games out there. After all, in the case of virtually ALL abandonware that i have seen, a copy is available out there on ebay to be purchased legitimately, and, where there is not - that is to say, where legitimate demand exceeds supply of existing licenses, companies can often be called upon to sell the rights for further sale (for example, that classic game "Empire Deluxe") or companies can find compelling reasons to themselves donate the item into the public domain (Sierra's "Red Baron"). Imagine if all game software written before, say, 5 years ago was "free". The net result would be a watering down of the current software market, and a net loss in choice for society as fewer companies would enter the market, and those that would enter would create fewer titles as the overall economic pie would be smaller - in other words, a net loss to society.
That said, you SHOULD be able to obtain out of print material for the purposes of genuine academic research. Still, there is rarely, if ever, a reason why you would have to resort to piracy to obtain such material as far as books are concerned. An example of this would be if you were doing legitimate research on, say, Disney's racist past. There is a complelling public interest to have acadmic researchers be able to do what they need to do in order to locate material that companies have tried to abandon for non-economic reasons.
The point is, if we DONT let companies securely turn material into abandonware, then their incentive to produce goes down. This is basic economics and it makes good policy sense as well.
That also said, this entire issue will be fairly moot in a few years or decades, as old stuff is digitized and the cost of maintaining old catalogues drops to near nil.
Insurance is about tranferrance of risk. You pay the insurance company to assume the risk for you.
Now that that's covered, tomorrow, we'll learn "how to tie your shoes" and "eating with a spoon."
We get about 10 calls a week from UK telemarketers. The UK needs this badly, but there seems to be limited popular concensus about this. When I mention this to my friends, they bring up tired free speech and other long-debunked-elsewhere arguments.
Yahoo costs about a third, but generates significantly less than a third the number of clicks.
In our 'where did you hear of our product' feedback from our customers, the split between google and yahoo is about 90% google, 10% yahoo. even if some percentage of people dont know the difference between yahoo and google, and even if some people just click on google because it's easy to do (the feedback switches between a type-in-your-answer and a drop down enable us to do quality of data checks, and the order of items in the drop-down, when presented, is constantly randomized).
Yahoo's miminum cost per click is an unreasonably high $10, while google's, if i understand it, has just come down in price.
All that said, the yahoo ads are still profitable for us. However, should that margin begin to thin, you can guess who is on the chopping block first. All the moreso if microsoft finally unveils a credible online ad program.
Incidentally: if you ever wanted to see an example of ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE UI design on the web, try google's overture service (or whatever the heck it's called now - i have the terms mixed up). it's not just "baseline bad", it's "textbook example of bad, bad". I use yahoo's web interface about every 3-4 weeks, and have to constantly read the instructions for basic operations, since it is never really quite clear what is going on. That's right - i have to re-read instructions that i read 3 weeks ago because the interface is really that lousy. I've never looked at a single instuction with Google.
Tell me again what value yahoo provides? For the life of me, I can't figure it out. They are what--a link index of out of date links? Free email? While I like that they send me clicks, I can not understand why they can generate such traffic to be a major internet site.
take your comment, print it out, and store it in a safe place. 20 years later, open it up and read it and realize what kind of knee-jerk dumbass you were when you were young. if that doesn't happen, shoot yourself.
1. Windows tries to manage programs that you install, but does a really terrible job at it, expecting the program to know how to uninstall itself, instead of keeping track of what the program installed so it can actually get rid of it when you want to, and tell you about anything else that depends on this program to work.
Wrong. Uninstallation is a complex process and applications have specific requirements with regards to uninstallation. It makes the most sense for each app to know about its own un-installation, since this way the programmer of the app can write the appropriate custom uninstall. In the simplest example, an uninstall of a word processor will know not to delete the files users have created with it, but a game might prompt people for whether to delete the associated save-games or not. To the OS, the files otherwise look the same.
2. Installing windows XP asks you some questions too. Stuff like timezone is very important to set right, otherwise the time server will set your computer to the wrong time. Most people don't know what time zone they are in. Also, once installed, windows does very little, doesn't even have drivers for most of my hardware, and can't connect to the internet to download them, because my NIC doesn't have drivers either.
Absolute bullshiat. I dont know what place you live in ("Strawman city" perhaps?) where people dont know what time zone it is, but it ain't anywhere I've ever been. Also: the claim that windows doesnt have drivers for most of the hardware is ambiguous and meaningless. Windows is the EASIEST environment out there to set up a variety of hardware on. Mac supports less and linux is still a nightmare for certain relatively easy devices. You'd be hard pressed, for example, to find a network card or modem that isnt auto-detected by windows these days. Your comment was barely true around 1995.
3. I'd much better go with the windows model, of lump everything together and let programs put stuff where ever they wish. Also, let the users put their files whereever they want to. Also, ensure that all the settings for both the operating system and the programs are in one big, easily corruptable file, so that if some program wants to wipe out the registry, then it can.
Corruptible? There are multiple copies of the registry and no app is required to use it. In practice, the registry is highly secure. Your statement is just myth. About the beginning part of your rant: windows has a place where it SUGGESTS that users place personal files (My Documents), but, because as we all know it would be evil for an operating system to produce policy, it gives users options. At any rate, you can hardly defend the "consistent" linux world in this, with every distribution having some variation on a theme.
4. Nobody knows how to configure a windows computer either. The fact that you have to use a GUI for it means that all the useful settings are hidden in the registry, and the stuff that's in the GUI is just the minimal that it thinks people can understand, 80% of which they can't.
Apparently you live in a country of morons. Check the drinking water. The rest of the world is not like that.
5. I don't ever recall my linux box treating me like a moron. It always asks lots of questions to make sure its doing what its supposed to be doing. Presenting the user with no options, and just doing a bunch of stuff you assume they want to do is a bad thing.
Linux asks lots of questions? rm -rf *. Run that from root and see how many questions you are asked.
6. The user should always know when something goes wrong. To a certain point at least. Assuming the user has no idea what the error means, and therefore not tell them about it is just a bad idea. Sometimes computer errors require the use of computer terms to explain what went wrong. Also, I thought #5 just said linux treats people like morons. Now we are saying it is too complicated, and
Lame.
Your fire department example is nonsense. To the first approximation, the cost of providing fire protection is linear in the number of houses. Add 1000 houses, say, and you have to add one fire station. Add 5000 houses, and you need to add 5, and so on.
This is not the case with drugs, where the marginal manufacturing cost is near zero. Consider rich country U and poor country A. The drug company can sell to citizens of U at some price: while this price may not be as cheap as tic-tacs, this price is also not $100,000 per dose. Why? Because at that price few people would buy. The drug company is forced by market forces to sell at a price that maximizes their revenue, say, $100/dose. If you think that providing universal access to such drugs is a role of government, then the fair agreement is for government to subsidize the difference between the revenue maximizing price and the amount that poor people can afford.
Most reasonable people can agree that that's how the situation should work in country U: but here's the real glory of it-that's exactly the same way it should work in country A! Let's say the revenue maximizing price in country A is $1/dose..well... that's exactly what the drug companies can and do charge.
Your claims about NIH and government R&D is absolute clownshoes. First, your proposals basically have one government subsidizing the R&D for other countries. Why should switzerland do any research at all if, after all, France and the USA will do it? Second, the fact is that market forces have proven to be a very effective ...
Shifting all drug control resource allocation to the NIH (or a parallel body structured along the same lines) - would not only make better decisions than corporate power centers,
The thing is, corporate power centers have incentives ($) to make good decisions.
Explain to me again under your scheme the motivation for a company to create a drug for, say, Bird Flu v2.0 if there exists a precendent that they will not get paid for it? Your view is shortsighted.
I what proactive MBA envisioned the synergies that would allow flock to become a knowledge portal center of excellence for podcasting core competencies of leveraging mindshare and paradigm shifts to achieve superlinear ROI.
The fundamental problem with your model, as has been gone over 1000000000 times before on slashdot, is that customers have ZERO incentive to "pitch in", as whatever you produce would effectively be in the public domain, anyway. And then there's the bleedin' obvious problem that you can't contract a song, even if your assinine proposal that somebody needs to canvass friends and coworkers to write a song were feasible.
In short, you are an idiot not worthy of a real discussion.
Piracy justifiers like to have it both ways: First, they claim that IP models like selling CDs and so forth are "outdated." Then, they try to tell you that piracy HELPS sales because look at the record profits companies that sell bits in a box made last year. Which is it gonna be, today guys?
You will not decide what: OS I will use to run your software.
You are an idiot.
Fine. I just wrote a song. It took me 100 hours. I calculate my rate at $100/hr. Please pay me $10000. Yes, you personally, "Mr2001". Please pay me $10000, because in your fantasyland, the market has no role. I should just be paid fot the hours I put in. Where the money actually comes from doesn't actually seem to enter into your equation.
Our software is not technically terribly innovative. I mean, it does a good job, and is user friendly, but its value is in that we as a company gather experts who put together specialist material and then we present it in a useful fashion (I dont really want to give away who we are or what we do, but maybe let's say we create specialty training materials). Releasing of our source code will do ZERO - if somebody really wanted to, they could probably make a pretty good duplicate of our code, but our real value is in the material we present and the way we present it. There are no real bugs in our software for users to kill, and because most of our users are individuals (because of the nature of the market we are in), there is no consultancy to be had.
Look, I'm really happy for you that you have this imaginary idea of how the software market should be. and, maybe there are a few small areas where a company could legitimately succeed the way you suggest (for example, MySQL). However, in this case, your suggestion has no bearing. We do NOT have an out-of-date model, and the vast majority of our customers are honest people who see the value of what we do and have no problems paying our modest fees. In fact, we are often held up in our trade press as an example of excellent value for money.
However, nevertheless, this doesn't stop some people from pirating it. There is ZERO justification for this - those people are criminals.
I'd also mention that due to the area we work in, EVERYBODY who uses our software is not poor and can easily afford it. We are not talking about word processors or web browsers here that has applicability to "up and coming" peoples of the world. Think (and this is just a silly example, but nevertheless) as if we were selling Yacht maintenance software that requires specialist understanding of yachts to put together efficiently and is of value to yacht owners only.
Explain to me again where the "unjust" part of the law is.
100% correct.
Generally Windows servers need more attention.
100% back of the envelope, likely wishful thinking, unsubstantiated guess.