With all due respect, you should be smarter than this.
Clearly SP2 won't work on every PC. There's yet to be a piece of software that will work flawlessly on all PCs given the vast number of configurations and permutations out there, especially ones that seem to have been having existing "issues."
However, from generalize from your sample of one to conclude that "SP2 is risky" ranks right down there with those people who see Jesus in tortillas. get some perspective, man! Of course there are always bugs to squash, but your sample of one is hardly conclusive of anything at all.
I am an advertiser on google ($2500 / month) and Overture ($600 / month) and when I typed my search into MSN's beta search my ads came up as "sponsored links." I have no idea from where I am paying for them through. Anybody have any ideas? Are they overture links?
Of course scale matters for comparison in absolute terms, but if one wishes to compare "globalisation" between eras then one MUST pick a relative measure.
So much bullshit, let me count the ways.
You ignore the tiny issue that your definition of globalization doesn't seem to match everybody else's. Instead, your apologetics point to "a globalization metric." Sorry, ain't buying it.
You continue to arbitrarily decide that the UK is the world and that this is a question of "relative" globalization. Your attempt to redefine the original question isn't working.
You confuse the "goals of the champions of globalization" with globzlizatation itself. Globalization isn't about whether there the degree of regulation is high or not. It's about the amount of connectedness despite any regulation. I obviously am not an idiot (and neither are you, though you are barkarking up a dead end, so to speak), so please stop treating me as one with your stupid word games, hoping I wouldn't notice.
If you redefine "globalization" into "some arbitrary nonsense" then of course you can make it fit whatever thesis you want. Unfortunately for you and the invisible goat who brings you your mittens, globalization has real, commonly accepted definitions, and you've touched on none of them.
I'm tired of this nonsense. If you've got a point to make that doesn't twist definitions, then make it. Otherwise, go back to your studies. There is very little chance that you are not now a masters or undergraduate student or were not recently one.
Direct investment as a percentage of GDP is your convenient cherrypicked statistic to justify some shite masters thesis, it sounds like.
Problems with your idea:
No common definition of globalization seems to take this arbitrary strict economic view. Google "definiton of globalization" and the definition is almost universally defined in terms of movement of goods, services, and (especially) increased interconnectedness. To claim that the world was more interconnected in 1914 than it is today is absolute bollocks and you know it.
"Percentage of GDP" fundamental problem. In the time of Abraham and Isaac, there was no GDP because there was no measurable economic activity--all there was was UNCOUNTED economic activity like housework and subsistnece farming. If in the first transaction abraham sold his cow to isaac, and abraham is to be considered of one nation and isaac of another, then by your definiton this was the world highlight of globalization since the entire 100% of GDP was direct investment. Anyboy with a brain can see why you need to be shouted at: SCALE MATTERS. I don't doubt at all that there was significant FDI (I think you meant FDI, not DI) at the turn of the century and that the british empire was in some ways revolutionary in terms of its economic liberalization, but you have to consider NOT THE PERCENTAGE, but the SUM of connectedness, international trade, information, capital, and personnel flows, and the role of global corporatios as a whole. In such, your argument is completely and totally indefensible. The British East India Company may have been a megalith of its time - so much so, that it may have affected up to as many as.. I don't know.. pick a generous number.. 25% of the world inhabitants in a given year at the height of its power. Coca cola alone probably reaches that number in a typical week. In the smallest indonesian island, you will find women washing their hair today with small packets of a PandG product.
Good luck with that masters thesis. It's an interesting one and if you squint your eyes just right, you might be able to fool yourself into actually believeing it. It also is a good reminder to the world that the global economy is not new and that people who lived before us had smart and interesting lives. But then to somehow try to twist this into saying that world globalization was higher back then crosses several lines into pure fantasy.
were incidently, the British empire was the largest economic entity, and thus a fair proxy for the global economy THEN
You continue to lack the capacity to read the original premise. His claim was that the WORLD was more globalized. Your claim is that the BRITISH EMPIRE was more globalized.
Despite Britain's commitment to trade liberalism during the period, I strongly doubt this per the usual definition of "globalization", but nevertheless this is more or less an irrelevancy.
NOW PAY ATTENTION HERE:
For you see, when you make a claim about the GLOBAL economy, you have to talk about ALL COUNTRIES AND STATES; cherrypicking one particular outlier example to be a "fair proxy for the global economy" is dishonest and wrong. Full stop.
Damn.. I wrote a nice long reply to you, but it acceidentally deleted.
The short version: read the original poster's words. Note to patronizing twat (you): the "global economy" != "the british economy."
The longer short version: a deconstruction of each item of my breakfast showing how, while britain was a world-beating place at the turn of the century, it was nothing compared to today's england where a ferry, airliner, or eurostar arrives about every 23 seconds.
I also took you to task for claiming trying to equivocate "capital outflow as a percentage of GDP" with "globalization." I apologize for not being able to recreate this in my limited time.
Your idea that england was more globalized then is a cocktail party myth. Dressed up with a few carefully chosen facts you might be able to convince a literature reader somewhere, but that's about it.
The global economy was more globalized during the days of the British empire than it is today.
And you accuse somebody else of spouting bunk? References or statistics, please, for your assertion that, umm, "most people would find highly dubious."
During the "days of the British empire", most people lived isoliated agrarian lives. This includes the people in the British Empire itself. The percentage of commerce that involved trade beyond a regional scale was probably far less than 5 or even 1% when viewed over the population of the earth as a whole.
This morning I had cheese made in Holland and France, an orange grown in Spain, some orange juice from Florida, and some crackers from Norway for breakfast on bowl made in China. I'd have to have been an aristocrat to achieve this at the height of the British Empire.
There are a dozen cities in Asia (yes I know Australia is not Asia) globablly more important than Sydney ("the gateway to Woomera"). Sydney is a great place to (begin a) holiday, but except for the fact that it has a somewhat unique location, it is unexceptional from a business standpoint.
You might raise the same objection about Miami, but given how much south / central american money passes through there, I can see a reasonable case being made for Miami. Sydney is not defensible as a top global business city unless you use the criterion "best of each continent", in which case they forgot McMurdo station off that list.
I find it odd that people cite the MPAA figures for lost revenue.
The MPAA is not suing to recover possibly lost income. They are suing to discourage future lost revenue by dismissing the notion that illegal movie distribution will go unpunished. They want to discourage illegal behaviour and they have the force of the law behind them.
Whether or not they have record profits this year, whether you think all movies are formulaic hollywood dreck, whether you think movies contribute to the decay of society, whether you personally are poor, whether you personally don't like lawyers or the MPAA, is irrelevant.
If you are complaining because it's a big evil corporation suing defenseless individuals then I ask you to propose a sensible alternative. Most of you, I am sure, would detest if the police were sent after same. "Embracing the new media" is one thing - but no business should have to just sit there and accept illegal competition. P2P has obsoleted the DVD about as much as guns have obsoleted banks.. which is to say, not at all. The MPAA rightsholders have the right to sell via the internet when they feel it is the time to do so. If not, and there is demand, then the consumer will spend his entertainment dollar elsewhere.
Those who disagree with the law should either work to have the law changed or boycott the movie industry entirely.
This argument assumes that OSS is at least as time efficient as MS alternatives.
This is at best speculative and at worst wrong.
MS has spent tens of millions of dollars on software usability to ensure that the software is easy to use and relatively intuitive. OSS equivalents haven't spend a hundredth of the effort on true usability analysis. And, while MS stuff certainly has its annoyances, to claim that OSS equivalents dont would be false.
You have to remember the greater cost still - if it takes your secretary even one minute longer per hour to do her work because her word processing software is less user-friendly and intuitive, then the acquisition cost of the software quickly becomes meaningless compared to the productivity / wage loss.
at the very very least, please don't claim that OSS is better at such productivity than MS is. You have no proof of this. In fact, what few studies there have been tend to suggest otherwise.
Number of true usability engineers on sourceforge: very very few.
Of those, the number that actually have the resources required to do the sort of testing that true usability design requires: virtually none (this is no sleight on them - true usability testing requires access to a good deal of users and a lot of patience with clipboards and video cameras and stopwatches and surveys and the like).
This is a fundamental problem of open source software as it is now practiced.
Anybody who counters with "yes, but programmers can do design too" - yes - but not as well. Usability engineers that every for-profit software company in the world hires are not art school guys lucky to have jobs - arguably, they mean as much if not more to successful desktop software programs than the programmers do.
One of Singapore's main historic sites is a series of command bunkers called the "Battle Box." from which the british conducted the "defense" of the city against the Japanese invasion. Being a bit of a World War 2 buff, I paid for the tour. The Battle Box tour was high tech augmented reality - a series of high tech CG stuff and less high tech animatronic whatnots turned what might otherwise be seen as a dull series of bunkers into a living experience.
It was a great idea done at a high budget level. Unfortunately, the underlying story of the defense of Singapore as far as the battle box is concerned is dull ("they've captured our water supply.. hmm.. maybe we should have defended it.. oh well, we're hosed.. i concur.. let's surrender"), but the experience really opened my eyes to the possibilities of this sort of thing.
Does this, coupled with china's runaway economic success in recent years plus their still abhorrent human rights record mean that the US can stop giving China aid money yet? Please?
Try the "Osama's still on the loose and you're wasting your time with me?" argument when you get pulled over for speeding. Regardless of whether or not this particular case was goofy, just because there are terrorists out there doesn't mean that ordinary law and order goes out the window.
"Fair Use" is NOT a cast-in-stone definition of how many pages it is ok to photocopy or that you can share your Mp3s with your sister but not your aunt. Rather, the idea is a set of INTERPRETED principles intended to balance the interests of varying members of society as a whole, including content producers and content users.
When idiots like these guys at MIT go about making devices built on the misconception that fair use is a cast in stone notion and that are aimed at circumventing the letter rather than the spirit of that imaginary cast-in-stone law, the results are predictable: rightsholders take legal action petitioning that such actions are so clearly contrary to the spirit of the law, the law has no choice but to come down hard, and, long story short, more often than not in the end fair use is eroded.
Nonsense. It's about a bunch of artists (and their handlers), ever conscious of their image, seeing a cheap and easy way to be seen by hip pseudo-intellectuals as "getting it" and "walking the walk."
Investors like short-term results. Try telling your VC's that they should invest $150M in a search engine project that replicates something already in existance, and won't be a moneymaker for at least 5 years. Think they'll bite?
Sure they would. Five years is only unreasonable for such aproject if you have a dot-com mentality. Five years is perfectly normal.
But the real question is whether you could convince them to invest into making a market competitive. In this case, I think they would, since google's exaggerated numnbers show that there's plenty of room for at least two players.
Even if we accept your $150m number, this is still a far cry from the billions that is google's valuation. So, let's double your number to $300m. A lot of money, yes, but I think most investors can see that spending $300 to get something that is valued at $1m + is not much of a stretch.
Notice also how from an investor's standpoint it's a pretty safe bet since there is a natural alternative - companies that do someting innovative with search tend to be bought be google or yahoo and a well funded company would be particularly buyable since with all that cash any threat to enter the market as another search engine would be credible.
But it starts with that you have to hire (or hire away) top quality computer scientists and the like.. not A+ Net+ certified technicians.
Explain to me again why we should be cheering for them? Yes, it's a useful service. But MS stuff is likewise useful (despite what many of you think). So what if it's free for you to use? They still have a business model.
The best thing I can say about google is that it is unsustainable. Consider if the company is worth X billion dollars now. Well, even the most armchair businessman here will tell you that it wouldn't take a billion dollars to build a duplicate google system. It wouldn't even take a twentieth of that. And, while google is nice and popular now, if a better search engine came along with slightly fewer ads or whatever else perceived benefit, it would seriously erode google's traffic and cause actualy *gasp* competition and choice for advertisers.
and no, Yahoo and its overture systems are not an alternative.. they are a different service that targets different markets.
What I am suggesting is that google is selling a very generic, easily duplicatable service if somebody just got the funding to hire the right engineers. Google knows this.. that's why they are trying very hard to build all sorts of peripheral stuff like gmail and so forth, but the fundamental (99%+) business is still the search engine.
There is no such thing as "user error" in such systems. There is only "design error and failure to adequately test."
A fundamental design feature of any voting system must be that the expected "user error" rate must be well, well below the expected vote differential otherwise the system fails in its primary task of capturing the wishes of the voters.
User error can be engineered away. Not by
"genius" engineers sitting in some back room coming up with better UIs, but "average" engineers with clipboards field testing the system, watching where users make mistakes, and adjusting the system to compensate.
Maybe not 200$ less, but if they care, it should be less, should it not? If not, then don't complain about a "microsoft tax" that adds a whopping 5% to the cost of new laptops.
no, they didn't say that at all. Read it again. they specifically mentioned that they'd get involved if their own prior art could vindicate the situation and/or novell had a material interest to get involved. what they and their marketing machine hoped that you'd understand incorrectly from this (as you did) is the notion that novell suddenly became the OSS patent defense litigation fairy. it did not.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly SP2 won't work on every PC. There's yet to be a piece of software that will work flawlessly on all PCs given the vast number of configurations and permutations out there, especially ones that seem to have been having existing "issues."
However, from generalize from your sample of one to conclude that "SP2 is risky" ranks right down there with those people who see Jesus in tortillas. get some perspective, man! Of course there are always bugs to squash, but your sample of one is hardly conclusive of anything at all.
and by the way, you are going to hell for attempting to make money from your programming
I am an advertiser on google ($2500 / month) and Overture ($600 / month) and when I typed my search into MSN's beta search my ads came up as "sponsored links." I have no idea from where I am paying for them through. Anybody have any ideas? Are they overture links?
So much bullshit, let me count the ways.
Problems with your idea:
- No common definition of globalization seems to take this arbitrary strict economic view. Google "definiton of globalization" and the definition is almost universally defined in terms of movement of goods, services, and (especially) increased interconnectedness. To claim that the world was more interconnected in 1914 than it is today is absolute bollocks and you know it.
- "Percentage of GDP" fundamental problem. In the time of Abraham and Isaac, there was no GDP because there was no measurable economic activity--all there was was UNCOUNTED economic activity like housework and subsistnece farming. If in the first transaction abraham sold his cow to isaac, and abraham is to be considered of one nation and isaac of another, then by your definiton this was the world highlight of globalization since the entire 100% of GDP was direct investment. Anyboy with a brain can see why you need to be shouted at: SCALE MATTERS. I don't doubt at all that there was significant FDI (I think you meant FDI, not DI) at the turn of the century and that the british empire was in some ways revolutionary in terms of its economic liberalization, but you have to consider NOT THE PERCENTAGE, but the SUM of connectedness, international trade, information, capital, and personnel flows, and the role of global corporatios as a whole. In such, your argument is completely and totally indefensible. The British East India Company may have been a megalith of its time - so much so, that it may have affected up to as many as.. I don't know.. pick a generous number.. 25% of the world inhabitants in a given year at the height of its power. Coca cola alone probably reaches that number in a typical week. In the smallest indonesian island, you will find women washing their hair today with small packets of a PandG product.
Good luck with that masters thesis. It's an interesting one and if you squint your eyes just right, you might be able to fool yourself into actually believeing it. It also is a good reminder to the world that the global economy is not new and that people who lived before us had smart and interesting lives. But then to somehow try to twist this into saying that world globalization was higher back then crosses several lines into pure fantasy.You continue to lack the capacity to read the original premise. His claim was that the WORLD was more globalized. Your claim is that the BRITISH EMPIRE was more globalized.
Despite Britain's commitment to trade liberalism during the period, I strongly doubt this per the usual definition of "globalization", but nevertheless this is more or less an irrelevancy.
NOW PAY ATTENTION HERE:
For you see, when you make a claim about the GLOBAL economy, you have to talk about ALL COUNTRIES AND STATES; cherrypicking one particular outlier example to be a "fair proxy for the global economy" is dishonest and wrong. Full stop.
Nobody doubts that Sydney is the leading Australian city. But to list Sydney before Shanghai, Hong Kong, or Singapore is comical.
Incidentally, both cities where I have a flat are on the list.
The short version: read the original poster's words. Note to patronizing twat (you): the "global economy" != "the british economy."
The longer short version: a deconstruction of each item of my breakfast showing how, while britain was a world-beating place at the turn of the century, it was nothing compared to today's england where a ferry, airliner, or eurostar arrives about every 23 seconds.
I also took you to task for claiming trying to equivocate "capital outflow as a percentage of GDP" with "globalization." I apologize for not being able to recreate this in my limited time.
Your idea that england was more globalized then is a cocktail party myth. Dressed up with a few carefully chosen facts you might be able to convince a literature reader somewhere, but that's about it.
And you accuse somebody else of spouting bunk? References or statistics, please, for your assertion that, umm, "most people would find highly dubious."
During the "days of the British empire", most people lived isoliated agrarian lives. This includes the people in the British Empire itself. The percentage of commerce that involved trade beyond a regional scale was probably far less than 5 or even 1% when viewed over the population of the earth as a whole.
This morning I had cheese made in Holland and France, an orange grown in Spain, some orange juice from Florida, and some crackers from Norway for breakfast on bowl made in China. I'd have to have been an aristocrat to achieve this at the height of the British Empire.
There are a dozen cities in Asia (yes I know Australia is not Asia) globablly more important than Sydney ("the gateway to Woomera"). Sydney is a great place to (begin a) holiday, but except for the fact that it has a somewhat unique location, it is unexceptional from a business standpoint. You might raise the same objection about Miami, but given how much south / central american money passes through there, I can see a reasonable case being made for Miami. Sydney is not defensible as a top global business city unless you use the criterion "best of each continent", in which case they forgot McMurdo station off that list.
The MPAA is not suing to recover possibly lost income. They are suing to discourage future lost revenue by dismissing the notion that illegal movie distribution will go unpunished. They want to discourage illegal behaviour and they have the force of the law behind them.
Whether or not they have record profits this year, whether you think all movies are formulaic hollywood dreck, whether you think movies contribute to the decay of society, whether you personally are poor, whether you personally don't like lawyers or the MPAA, is irrelevant.
If you are complaining because it's a big evil corporation suing defenseless individuals then I ask you to propose a sensible alternative. Most of you, I am sure, would detest if the police were sent after same. "Embracing the new media" is one thing - but no business should have to just sit there and accept illegal competition. P2P has obsoleted the DVD about as much as guns have obsoleted banks.. which is to say, not at all. The MPAA rightsholders have the right to sell via the internet when they feel it is the time to do so. If not, and there is demand, then the consumer will spend his entertainment dollar elsewhere.
Those who disagree with the law should either work to have the law changed or boycott the movie industry entirely.
This is at best speculative and at worst wrong.
MS has spent tens of millions of dollars on software usability to ensure that the software is easy to use and relatively intuitive. OSS equivalents haven't spend a hundredth of the effort on true usability analysis. And, while MS stuff certainly has its annoyances, to claim that OSS equivalents dont would be false.
You have to remember the greater cost still - if it takes your secretary even one minute longer per hour to do her work because her word processing software is less user-friendly and intuitive, then the acquisition cost of the software quickly becomes meaningless compared to the productivity / wage loss.
at the very very least, please don't claim that OSS is better at such productivity than MS is. You have no proof of this. In fact, what few studies there have been tend to suggest otherwise.
Of those, the number that actually have the resources required to do the sort of testing that true usability design requires: virtually none (this is no sleight on them - true usability testing requires access to a good deal of users and a lot of patience with clipboards and video cameras and stopwatches and surveys and the like).
This is a fundamental problem of open source software as it is now practiced.
Anybody who counters with "yes, but programmers can do design too" - yes - but not as well. Usability engineers that every for-profit software company in the world hires are not art school guys lucky to have jobs - arguably, they mean as much if not more to successful desktop software programs than the programmers do.
It was a great idea done at a high budget level. Unfortunately, the underlying story of the defense of Singapore as far as the battle box is concerned is dull ("they've captured our water supply.. hmm.. maybe we should have defended it.. oh well, we're hosed.. i concur.. let's surrender"), but the experience really opened my eyes to the possibilities of this sort of thing.
Does this, coupled with china's runaway economic success in recent years plus their still abhorrent human rights record mean that the US can stop giving China aid money yet? Please?
Ah yes, the slashdot tinfoil hat crowd certainly wouldn't complain about an end-all-and-be-all centralized single ID system.
/ sarcasm
Try the "Osama's still on the loose and you're wasting your time with me?" argument when you get pulled over for speeding. Regardless of whether or not this particular case was goofy, just because there are terrorists out there doesn't mean that ordinary law and order goes out the window.
"Fair Use" is NOT a cast-in-stone definition of how many pages it is ok to photocopy or that you can share your Mp3s with your sister but not your aunt. Rather, the idea is a set of INTERPRETED principles intended to balance the interests of varying members of society as a whole, including content producers and content users.
When idiots like these guys at MIT go about making devices built on the misconception that fair use is a cast in stone notion and that are aimed at circumventing the letter rather than the spirit of that imaginary cast-in-stone law, the results are predictable: rightsholders take legal action petitioning that such actions are so clearly contrary to the spirit of the law, the law has no choice but to come down hard, and, long story short, more often than not in the end fair use is eroded.
Nonsense. It's about a bunch of artists (and their handlers), ever conscious of their image, seeing a cheap and easy way to be seen by hip pseudo-intellectuals as "getting it" and "walking the walk."
Sure they would. Five years is only unreasonable for such aproject if you have a dot-com mentality. Five years is perfectly normal.
But the real question is whether you could convince them to invest into making a market competitive. In this case, I think they would, since google's exaggerated numnbers show that there's plenty of room for at least two players.
Even if we accept your $150m number, this is still a far cry from the billions that is google's valuation. So, let's double your number to $300m. A lot of money, yes, but I think most investors can see that spending $300 to get something that is valued at $1m + is not much of a stretch.
Notice also how from an investor's standpoint it's a pretty safe bet since there is a natural alternative - companies that do someting innovative with search tend to be bought be google or yahoo and a well funded company would be particularly buyable since with all that cash any threat to enter the market as another search engine would be credible.
But it starts with that you have to hire (or hire away) top quality computer scientists and the like.. not A+ Net+ certified technicians.
- Closed source
- Multi-Billion dollar corporation
- Single point of information control
- Monopolistic Practices
- Secretive
Explain to me again why we should be cheering for them? Yes, it's a useful service. But MS stuff is likewise useful (despite what many of you think). So what if it's free for you to use? They still have a business model.The best thing I can say about google is that it is unsustainable. Consider if the company is worth X billion dollars now. Well, even the most armchair businessman here will tell you that it wouldn't take a billion dollars to build a duplicate google system. It wouldn't even take a twentieth of that. And, while google is nice and popular now, if a better search engine came along with slightly fewer ads or whatever else perceived benefit, it would seriously erode google's traffic and cause actualy *gasp* competition and choice for advertisers.
and no, Yahoo and its overture systems are not an alternative.. they are a different service that targets different markets.
What I am suggesting is that google is selling a very generic, easily duplicatable service if somebody just got the funding to hire the right engineers. Google knows this.. that's why they are trying very hard to build all sorts of peripheral stuff like gmail and so forth, but the fundamental (99%+) business is still the search engine.
A fundamental design feature of any voting system must be that the expected "user error" rate must be well, well below the expected vote differential otherwise the system fails in its primary task of capturing the wishes of the voters.
User error can be engineered away. Not by "genius" engineers sitting in some back room coming up with better UIs, but "average" engineers with clipboards field testing the system, watching where users make mistakes, and adjusting the system to compensate.
i suspect that my definition of "important" seems to vary considerably from that of the submitter.
Maybe not 200$ less, but if they care, it should be less, should it not? If not, then don't complain about a "microsoft tax" that adds a whopping 5% to the cost of new laptops.
no, they didn't say that at all. Read it again. they specifically mentioned that they'd get involved if their own prior art could vindicate the situation and/or novell had a material interest to get involved. what they and their marketing machine hoped that you'd understand incorrectly from this (as you did) is the notion that novell suddenly became the OSS patent defense litigation fairy. it did not.