Yes, you need to be interoperable with platforms you're not using right now, for much the same way it makes sense for Windows to be interoperable with Linux even though most... existing Windows shops don't use Linux.
Your point about that Windows not interoperating with Linux now is irrelevant. I never said it did. I just said it would be a good thing if it did.
Or what you meant to say.
Yes. To make the point that Linux cross distro interoperability is so poor they may as well be considered seperate Operating Systems. Whjich you seem to agree on.
As I stated, they are different operating systems. If they weren't, we'd all be using the same product doing everything the same way and stuck with a monoculture like Windows. Package installation methods are unimportant since Linux distros can share the same source code and install directly. You can't do that between Linux and Windows, even with the so-called cross-platform languages and toolkits. You can't make a valid comparison of three different versions of the same Windows operating system and three different Linux operating systems. If you do, it's nothing more than a usability issue for Windows users.
Most businesses aren't corporates.
So? Corporations have more desktops.
Most desktop users can and will install their own software.
If that's true (which it isn't in large businesses), then they can use their own distro. Again, no problem.
That sounds like an insult to just about every Linux SA who tries his hand at another distro and finds it difficult. Also, in line with your previous statement (which I agree with), since these are so different they can be classified as diffferent Operating Systems, do you think moving between different Operating Systems is a trivial thing?
I don't have any problem moving between Red Hat and Mandrake, and I'm no SA. The SAs at work don't seem to have any problem - several use different distros at home. Perhaps you're insulting competent SAs. I don't have much problem moving between Linux and Windows either. Really, It seems you're trying to brew a tempest in a teapot over a non-issue.
Do you think its unreasonable for me to conclude you're someone who just wants to start a fight with anyone defending something said by Bill Gates?
Yes. I don't care if you are Bill Gates. I disagreed with your comment, and I still disagree with it. This is starting to sound a lot like the old Grand-Unified-Installer argument which I've done several times already on Slashdot. If you want it, you write it, and you use it, because I don't need it. This is point where you tell me that I have been trolled, right? Have a nice life anyway.
Yes, you need to be interoperable with platforms you're not using right now, for much the same way it makes sense for Windows to be interoperable with Linux even though most
Since that's not a complete sentence, I'm unsure what you're trying to say. Windows is most definitely not interoperable with Linux except at the widely-used protocol level, tcp/ip, http, etc.
Er, I was actually saying portability of methods used to install software was one of many measures of interoperability.
I think you should go read your OP. Either I completely missed your point, or you failed to make it. You tried to compare software installation methods between various different Linux operating systems to those between various versions of the same Microsoft operating system. That looks a lot more like a usability issue than an interoperability issue. As I pointed out, in the corporate world, it's a system admin problem, not something the users have to deal with, and any competent Linux SA won't have problems. I know ours often take stuff from a different, unamed distro and install it on our Red Hat machines.
Your anger towards me, and your assumptions, are amusing.
Your assumption that I'm angry is amusing. That's the danger of written communication - people often read in things that aren't there. Questioning your statements is not a personal attack, and I haven't called you any names. Your claim was baffling to me, and I replied. Your responses haven't really made things much clearer for me. Try to imagine this being written by someone who just finished dinner and a drink checking messages before watching the superbowl, and try not to read any emotion into it because it just isn't there.:)
You relied on a single feature for backup and did not do what any sane long term MS Office user does: Close down your document and backup the file manually every 1-2 hours of work.
Of course. Any right-minded computer user should be using the MS CYA protocol. How could anyone be so stupid as to expect the program and OS to behave as advertised?
But man I've tried open office and its just as damned buggy and not nearly as feature rich. It certainly won't open up MS Office documents with sane formatting
Neither will different versions of Word. That's feature rich.
I don't know what people are using their office software for that they could think Open Office is suitable.
Perhaps it's people who want to write documents rather than Microsoft documents. Ya think?
Now consider: if you move to Linux, and train staff on Linux, you're moving to Red Hat, or SuSE, or Debian, etc. The people and their processes won;t necessarily interoperate with another Linux distro (Operating System).
The point is, our company, like any other will force all users to use a single Linux distro: the approved one. There is no issue of interoperability (is that a real word?) between distros for a company. And the differences between actually moving from one distro to another is nothing for users - it's only the SAs that would have to worry about providing the same desktop.
Er, I didn't. Was this directed by me?
You're the one claiming that installing software is the measure of OS usability.
I'm an American as well and, yes, interpretations of facts are all "opinions," including yours. Quelle suprise.
I assumed you were American from your usage. You were claiming some higher viewpoint from your supposed foreign visit. What surprise? I took French also, but it's pretty rusty. Facts are facts. Interpretations of facts are not the same thing. You still have offered nothing in support of your opinion, while I have presented supporting links. Why do you continue this? Do you think repetition will somehow validate your view or make me agree? If so, you are doubly mistaken.
You should know to continually backup your work on your own. Didn't you know MSOffice would not help much, if data was lost, while you were doing a days work?
What? You mean that's not one of Microsoft's rich features, and all those people in the TV commercial went sliding down the hall in a slow-motion group hug only because the OS luckily didn't crash while they were doing their MS stuff? Wow. I suppose the next thing you're going to tell me is that Microsoft doesn't really stand in awe of me and is not really inspired to create buggy software because of it. That really hurts.
My previous company had a mixture of Office 97, Office 2K, and Office XP running all at once. There weren't any interoperability problems.
So nobody in the company used Word, the most often used app in the suite? You can't transfer tables or many macros between the various versions, and that is why we were all forced to upgrade to the latest version at work. There were also problems with Excel. What did you do in your previous company, play solitaire and use notepad?
I hate to defend this guy, but there's other things you should be attacking him over. From a user point of view. Different Open Source distros are really like different Operating Systems.
Well, they are. The only thing they share in common may be a version of the kernel and the user tools.
How do you install software in Red Hat? Debian? Windows 95? Windows XP?
If you want to make an apples-to-apples comparison, then compare Mandrake 7.2 to Mandrake 10.1 versus Win98 to WinXP. Software installation is essentially the same accross the board except that Mandrake won't install something just because you put a CD in the drive.
I must have missed it when the law of computer usability was written. Who said everything had to work according to the Microsoft way? I guess that OO should break the document format with every new release if that's the standard.
It was doomed from the beginning. Having been to the former USSR, lived there, studied there, I can certainly say that the view is quite different beyond the armchair and your ideas are not entirely shared on the ground.
I already said my viewpoint was an American one. As for the rest, I see no need to repeat myself. We are all doomed, doomed, yes doomed (sorry, couldn't help myself) from the beginning, and you make no point other than you don't like my opinion or the opinion of others. Okay, consider it noted and filed in the proper place: C10H14N2 believes we should wait for entropy to solve all our problems.
In Reagan's words:
"The Soviet economy was being held together by baling wire. In Poland and other Eastern-bloc
countries, the economies were also a mess, and there were rumblings of nationalist fevor within
the captive Soviet empire. If they didn't make some changes, it seemed clear to me that in time
that Communism would collapse of its own weight, and I wondered how we as a nation could use
these cracks in the Soviet system to accelerate the process of collapse."
Historically, it's obvious that Reagan saw an opportunity to bring down the Soviet Union and worked towards that end. My point was and is that Reagan toppled the house of cards. You have offered nothing except your repeated personal opinion. My attention span has been reached - you know how old folks are.
Actually, the 1 to 2 year sentence was way
too light, IMO. Something more along the
line of a public (televised) hanging or
draw-and-quartering (or perhaps more toward
your tastes, impalement.)
While I really dislike spam, since people who murder children (no it's not about abortion) often get no prison time, it really seems a little severe. Is spamming 100 million people worse than murdering one child? Is that the Slashdot ethos?
No. That's not even appropriate. For people like Kenneth Lay, who preached ethics while robbing little old ladies and millions of others, okay. But he won't ever wind up in prison, and if he did, no Bubba would want him.
That's funny, because I don't remember that at all. Truman brought the war to the end, but FDR, Churchill and Stalin get credit for winning the war.
Then I'd guess you're not an American. Truman dropped the bomb and gained credit for the quick end to hostilities and ending the war (as well as the eternal blame for using atomic weapons). As a post-war baby, I grew up with it. Churchill was considered a useful (if needy) ally, while Stalin was already viewed with contempt as an opportunistic, land-grabbing dictator.
The amount of money spent on the military by Gorbechev was less than his predessors, and the simple existance of more successful societies put a lot of stress on the system.
There may be some truth in that, since the military was unhappy because they were getting whacked in Afghanistan. The question then becomes whether it was the constant pressure from the U.S. that caused the problems. While searching for some support for your claim, I came across this , which somewhat agrees in the second paragraph. However, the first paragraph points to the cause. Cause and effect.
At first, I was laughing, then I realized you could be right. If they position the internal rear-view mirror correctly, they could use it as a periscope. Another mystery explained.
So if you're shot by a dozen people in an alley, we should blame the cat that walked across your chest and pushed you over the edge? Or the guy who fired the last bullet and shot you in the toe?
Lincoln/Grant got credit for winning the Civil War. Truman got credit for WWII (at least in the U.S.), so yeah, it seems to work that way, especially when the last guy is in charge of the hit on you and toe-caps your sorry carcass. (See all the Godfather movies for details.)
In any case, why Reagan? He was hardly the only person to pushing on the Soviet Union when it fell; in fact, the biggest push was by the military coup. If we have to ascribe all credit to the immediate proximate cause, I don't think Reagan should get any at all; it was the coup leaders that collapsed the government.
I'm not the one looking at the "immediate proximate cause". If I were, I'd be giving credit to the bullet in the toe. My view is a little wider than that.
Who was the USSR's self-admitted enemy, and who were they defending against? It wasn't the Belgians (no offense to any Belgians who happen to be reading old Slashdot archives). The Russian rhetoric about Reagan being a dangerous cowboy was a good indicator. There weren't many other people spending billions of dollars arming people who were engaging and beating the Soviet military. Without the constant pressure from without, how would any coup have succeeded against a successful politburo? Who was it that applied the most pressure on that house of cards?
I was going to use my other account to respond for the humor factor, but why bother?:)
In my experience, old people don't really drive like they are drunk, just like their car is governed at 35.
Which is just fine on city streets, where kids doing 55 in broken-down wrecks are a bit dangerous. There have been a few times when I've gotten upset with older drivers and then checked the speedometer only to find they were following the speed limit. The ones that scare me are the ones who can't see over the dash. All you can see is two hands on the steering wheel and maybe a bit of blue-rinsed hair. How do they do it?
My point is that those who claim that Reagan was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union conveniently ignore decades of work done by others, both American and otherwise.
Not really. Truman pulled the trigger and gets the credit/blame for ending the war in the Japanese theater although FDR started the A-weapons program and led the country through almost all of the war.
By 1981, the damage had been done. Reagan could have done nothing and the Soviet Union would today still be nothing more than an article of history.
By early 1945, the damage had been done, and even the Japanese were looking for a way to surrender with terms less restrictive than unconditional. Truman could have done nothing, but then the Soviet Union might still be around and be bordering the English Channel. Or Truman could have given Patton his wishes and let him try to roll back our Soviet "allies" to their borders. Perhaps the USSR would have collapsed much sooner. Playing what-if games doesn't prove anything.
You might as well claim that Louis XVI was responsible for the downfall of the British Empire in America...
You may as well claim Monty was responsible for the fall of the Germans. To reiterate, a house of cards can stand forever until someone pushes it over. The credit goes to the person who pushes. If you don't like Reagan, just say so, and leave it at that.
and one of the reasons companies don't make all their best employees millionaires is because once you have financial independence you are less likely to stick around (ie. you're not as dependent)
I suppose it depends on how you define "best employees", but if our company is any example, there is little reason to fear that google will lose its smartest people, and that is because the award recipients will chosen by management. Google is getting pretty big, and they will be afflicted by management if they aren't already.
In our company, management knows which projects have the largest budgets and therefore, by management logic, have the best people. When award nominations are judged, the line managers (not the work managers) sit around a table and vote up or down on each nomination. It is really amazing that the people on certain well-funded projects always get the awards. I've put people in for really deserving efforts on a smaller project, and the biggest award was a dept-wide email nod from a manager.
We have one project that is not particularly complicated but has the highest staffing in the software department. The project lead can't write code, but he knows how to make his team spend most of their time writing useless (and downright incorrect) documentation. The slipping schedules demand constantly increased staff, a bigger budget, and more awards. His team has received monetary awards for finding the bugs that they created which delayed a release for weeks. We could lose 95% (management accidentally approved a few worthy nominees) of the people who received an award in the last three years and have a better, more effective department as a result.
Last I heard, MS had stopped giving stock options as awards since the stock wasn't moving. They were giving stock grants instead. Now there's an idea I wish my company would adopt from MS, although our options are a bit above water - a stock grant is a real award.
Digging through the archives looking for SCO news, eh?:)
This is true, but I do not believe SCOX to be a viable candidate for Chapter 11. One of the most important requirements of a Chapter 11 plan is that the unsecured creditors must receive more under the plan than they would in a Chapter 7 (liquidation) bankruptcy. Since SCOX has nothing (Unixware?... oh come now) that will generate enough of a revenue stream to provide this $ > 0 amont of money I seriously doubt they could get a Chapter 11 plan approved by the court.
That makes sense. Thanks for the info. I suppose if Canopy were motivated, they could make the board dump the lawyers and the "new" management (and most of the old management) and continue to sell their two products at a small profit. Although it's probably not worth the effort for a sinking ship.
True... it's just that it wasn't Reagan who knocked it down. If you were to argue Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, okay, maybe, but Reagan? They didn't increase military spending a single ruble during Reagan's term.
Really? That sounds a bit revisionist to me, but what do I know - I voted for Reagan (and Nixon). Do you happen to have something mainstream that backs that up? You're saying the billions Reagan gave to the Afghani mujahedeen to rip the Soviets a new orifice, and which they did, had no effect?
The flawed nuclear plant design that the Soviets were allowed to "steal" had no effect? The increased missle design research on the Soviet's part as a result of "Star Wars" was just a figment of the CIA's imagination? I'm shocked.
He simply used American fervor to his own political advantage.
Funny, I don't recall any fervor wrt the USSR. The cold war had been going on for over thirty years, and people were used to it. It was the age of detente, and the American people accepted it, even if Reagan thought it was Soviet ploy. I don't recall any fervor at all until the Berlin Wall came down. People were stunned. I remember the Berlin airlifts. The wall had always been there for many of us, and we never expected to see it open. You seem to remember a far different time than I do.
Except that the Soviet Union had had major economic problems for at least a decade before Reagan came on the scene. He can't be credited for years of mismanagement and stagnation that happened before he even got into the White House.
I'm not saying he should. However, under a President like Carter, who would not have worried the USSR, it likely would have held together a little longer. As stated, Reagan was the tap on that house of cards. To the winner go the laurels.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not then have a comment versioning system ?
I assume that was a joke, but Slashdot already has that; it's called replying to your own comment.
Yes, you need to be interoperable with platforms you're not using right now, for much the same way it makes sense for Windows to be interoperable with Linux even though most ... existing Windows shops don't use Linux.
Your point about that Windows not interoperating with Linux now is irrelevant. I never said it did. I just said it would be a good thing if it did.
Or what you meant to say.
Yes. To make the point that Linux cross distro interoperability is so poor they may as well be considered seperate Operating Systems. Whjich you seem to agree on.
As I stated, they are different operating systems. If they weren't, we'd all be using the same product doing everything the same way and stuck with a monoculture like Windows. Package installation methods are unimportant since Linux distros can share the same source code and install directly. You can't do that between Linux and Windows, even with the so-called cross-platform languages and toolkits. You can't make a valid comparison of three different versions of the same Windows operating system and three different Linux operating systems. If you do, it's nothing more than a usability issue for Windows users.
Most businesses aren't corporates.
So? Corporations have more desktops.
Most desktop users can and will install their own software.
If that's true (which it isn't in large businesses), then they can use their own distro. Again, no problem.
That sounds like an insult to just about every Linux SA who tries his hand at another distro and finds it difficult. Also, in line with your previous statement (which I agree with), since these are so different they can be classified as diffferent Operating Systems, do you think moving between different Operating Systems is a trivial thing?
I don't have any problem moving between Red Hat and Mandrake, and I'm no SA. The SAs at work don't seem to have any problem - several use different distros at home. Perhaps you're insulting competent SAs. I don't have much problem moving between Linux and Windows either. Really, It seems you're trying to brew a tempest in a teapot over a non-issue.
Do you think its unreasonable for me to conclude you're someone who just wants to start a fight with anyone defending something said by Bill Gates?
Yes. I don't care if you are Bill Gates. I disagreed with your comment, and I still disagree with it. This is starting to sound a lot like the old Grand-Unified-Installer argument which I've done several times already on Slashdot. If you want it, you write it, and you use it, because I don't need it. This is point where you tell me that I have been trolled, right? Have a nice life anyway.
~3% of adult males being spies would be indeed ridiculous.
Not to say you're incorrect, but why do spies/agents have to be male or adult? I don't think that has been a requirement for many decades - if ever.
I scanned the article and now wish in this 21st century the editors WOULD ALLOW US TO EDIT OUR COMMENTS . . .
Allowing users to edit comments once others have read them and replied is a Very Bad Idea (TM). E.g., "What? I never said that. Go reread my comment."
Yes, you need to be interoperable with platforms you're not using right now, for much the same way it makes sense for Windows to be interoperable with Linux even though most
Since that's not a complete sentence, I'm unsure what you're trying to say. Windows is most definitely not interoperable with Linux except at the widely-used protocol level, tcp/ip, http, etc.
Er, I was actually saying portability of methods used to install software was one of many measures of interoperability.
I think you should go read your OP. Either I completely missed your point, or you failed to make it. You tried to compare software installation methods between various different Linux operating systems to those between various versions of the same Microsoft operating system. That looks a lot more like a usability issue than an interoperability issue. As I pointed out, in the corporate world, it's a system admin problem, not something the users have to deal with, and any competent Linux SA won't have problems. I know ours often take stuff from a different, unamed distro and install it on our Red Hat machines.
Your anger towards me, and your assumptions, are amusing.
Your assumption that I'm angry is amusing. That's the danger of written communication - people often read in things that aren't there. Questioning your statements is not a personal attack, and I haven't called you any names. Your claim was baffling to me, and I replied. Your responses haven't really made things much clearer for me. Try to imagine this being written by someone who just finished dinner and a drink checking messages before watching the superbowl, and try not to read any emotion into it because it just isn't there. :)
You relied on a single feature for backup and did not do what any sane long term MS Office user does: Close down your document and backup the file manually every 1-2 hours of work.
Of course. Any right-minded computer user should be using the MS CYA protocol. How could anyone be so stupid as to expect the program and OS to behave as advertised?
But man I've tried open office and its just as damned buggy and not nearly as feature rich. It certainly won't open up MS Office documents with sane formatting
Neither will different versions of Word. That's feature rich.
I don't know what people are using their office software for that they could think Open Office is suitable.
Perhaps it's people who want to write documents rather than Microsoft documents. Ya think?
Now consider: if you move to Linux, and train staff on Linux, you're moving to Red Hat, or SuSE, or Debian, etc. The people and their processes won;t necessarily interoperate with another Linux distro (Operating System).
The point is, our company, like any other will force all users to use a single Linux distro: the approved one. There is no issue of interoperability (is that a real word?) between distros for a company. And the differences between actually moving from one distro to another is nothing for users - it's only the SAs that would have to worry about providing the same desktop.
Er, I didn't. Was this directed by me?
You're the one claiming that installing software is the measure of OS usability.
I'm an American as well and, yes, interpretations of facts are all "opinions," including yours. Quelle suprise.
I assumed you were American from your usage. You were claiming some higher viewpoint from your supposed foreign visit. What surprise? I took French also, but it's pretty rusty. Facts are facts. Interpretations of facts are not the same thing. You still have offered nothing in support of your opinion, while I have presented supporting links. Why do you continue this? Do you think repetition will somehow validate your view or make me agree? If so, you are doubly mistaken.
You should know to continually backup your work on your own. Didn't you know MSOffice would not help much, if data was lost, while you were doing a days work?
What? You mean that's not one of Microsoft's rich features, and all those people in the TV commercial went sliding down the hall in a slow-motion group hug only because the OS luckily didn't crash while they were doing their MS stuff? Wow. I suppose the next thing you're going to tell me is that Microsoft doesn't really stand in awe of me and is not really inspired to create buggy software because of it. That really hurts.
My previous company had a mixture of Office 97, Office 2K, and Office XP running all at once. There weren't any interoperability problems.
So nobody in the company used Word, the most often used app in the suite? You can't transfer tables or many macros between the various versions, and that is why we were all forced to upgrade to the latest version at work. There were also problems with Excel. What did you do in your previous company, play solitaire and use notepad?
I hate to defend this guy, but there's other things you should be attacking him over. From a user point of view. Different Open Source distros are really like different Operating Systems.
Well, they are. The only thing they share in common may be a version of the kernel and the user tools.
How do you install software in Red Hat? Debian? Windows 95? Windows XP?
If you want to make an apples-to-apples comparison, then compare Mandrake 7.2 to Mandrake 10.1 versus Win98 to WinXP. Software installation is essentially the same accross the board except that Mandrake won't install something just because you put a CD in the drive.
I must have missed it when the law of computer usability was written. Who said everything had to work according to the Microsoft way? I guess that OO should break the document format with every new release if that's the standard.
It was doomed from the beginning. Having been to the former USSR, lived there, studied there, I can certainly say that the view is quite different beyond the armchair and your ideas are not entirely shared on the ground.
I already said my viewpoint was an American one. As for the rest, I see no need to repeat myself. We are all doomed, doomed, yes doomed (sorry, couldn't help myself) from the beginning, and you make no point other than you don't like my opinion or the opinion of others. Okay, consider it noted and filed in the proper place: C10H14N2 believes we should wait for entropy to solve all our problems.
In Reagan's words:
Historically, it's obvious that Reagan saw an opportunity to bring down the Soviet Union and worked towards that end. My point was and is that Reagan toppled the house of cards. You have offered nothing except your repeated personal opinion. My attention span has been reached - you know how old folks are.
Actually, the 1 to 2 year sentence was way too light, IMO. Something more along the line of a public (televised) hanging or draw-and-quartering (or perhaps more toward your tastes, impalement.)
While I really dislike spam, since people who murder children (no it's not about abortion) often get no prison time, it really seems a little severe. Is spamming 100 million people worse than murdering one child? Is that the Slashdot ethos?
For people who work for AOL? You betcha.
No. That's not even appropriate. For people like Kenneth Lay, who preached ethics while robbing little old ladies and millions of others, okay. But he won't ever wind up in prison, and if he did, no Bubba would want him.
Anyone who has taken PSYC101 will tell you that punishment only works when it is temporally near the behavior that it is trying to change.
That only holds true for lab rats and freshmen. Other people are able to understand the consequences of their actions once they have been taught.
That's funny, because I don't remember that at all. Truman brought the war to the end, but FDR, Churchill and Stalin get credit for winning the war.
Then I'd guess you're not an American. Truman dropped the bomb and gained credit for the quick end to hostilities and ending the war (as well as the eternal blame for using atomic weapons). As a post-war baby, I grew up with it. Churchill was considered a useful (if needy) ally, while Stalin was already viewed with contempt as an opportunistic, land-grabbing dictator.
The amount of money spent on the military by Gorbechev was less than his predessors, and the simple existance of more successful societies put a lot of stress on the system.
There may be some truth in that, since the military was unhappy because they were getting whacked in Afghanistan. The question then becomes whether it was the constant pressure from the U.S. that caused the problems. While searching for some support for your claim, I came across this , which somewhat agrees in the second paragraph. However, the first paragraph points to the cause. Cause and effect.
At first, I was laughing, then I realized you could be right. If they position the internal rear-view mirror correctly, they could use it as a periscope. Another mystery explained.
So if you're shot by a dozen people in an alley, we should blame the cat that walked across your chest and pushed you over the edge? Or the guy who fired the last bullet and shot you in the toe?
Lincoln/Grant got credit for winning the Civil War. Truman got credit for WWII (at least in the U.S.), so yeah, it seems to work that way, especially when the last guy is in charge of the hit on you and toe-caps your sorry carcass. (See all the Godfather movies for details.)
In any case, why Reagan? He was hardly the only person to pushing on the Soviet Union when it fell; in fact, the biggest push was by the military coup. If we have to ascribe all credit to the immediate proximate cause, I don't think Reagan should get any at all; it was the coup leaders that collapsed the government.
I'm not the one looking at the "immediate proximate cause". If I were, I'd be giving credit to the bullet in the toe. My view is a little wider than that.
Who was the USSR's self-admitted enemy, and who were they defending against? It wasn't the Belgians (no offense to any Belgians who happen to be reading old Slashdot archives). The Russian rhetoric about Reagan being a dangerous cowboy was a good indicator. There weren't many other people spending billions of dollars arming people who were engaging and beating the Soviet military. Without the constant pressure from without, how would any coup have succeeded against a successful politburo? Who was it that applied the most pressure on that house of cards?
I was going to use my other account to respond for the humor factor, but why bother? :)
In my experience, old people don't really drive like they are drunk, just like their car is governed at 35.
Which is just fine on city streets, where kids doing 55 in broken-down wrecks are a bit dangerous. There have been a few times when I've gotten upset with older drivers and then checked the speedometer only to find they were following the speed limit. The ones that scare me are the ones who can't see over the dash. All you can see is two hands on the steering wheel and maybe a bit of blue-rinsed hair. How do they do it?
My point is that those who claim that Reagan was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union conveniently ignore decades of work done by others, both American and otherwise.
Not really. Truman pulled the trigger and gets the credit/blame for ending the war in the Japanese theater although FDR started the A-weapons program and led the country through almost all of the war.
By 1981, the damage had been done. Reagan could have done nothing and the Soviet Union would today still be nothing more than an article of history.
By early 1945, the damage had been done, and even the Japanese were looking for a way to surrender with terms less restrictive than unconditional. Truman could have done nothing, but then the Soviet Union might still be around and be bordering the English Channel. Or Truman could have given Patton his wishes and let him try to roll back our Soviet "allies" to their borders. Perhaps the USSR would have collapsed much sooner. Playing what-if games doesn't prove anything.
You might as well claim that Louis XVI was responsible for the downfall of the British Empire in America...
You may as well claim Monty was responsible for the fall of the Germans. To reiterate, a house of cards can stand forever until someone pushes it over. The credit goes to the person who pushes. If you don't like Reagan, just say so, and leave it at that.
and one of the reasons companies don't make all their best employees millionaires is because once you have financial independence you are less likely to stick around (ie. you're not as dependent)
I suppose it depends on how you define "best employees", but if our company is any example, there is little reason to fear that google will lose its smartest people, and that is because the award recipients will chosen by management. Google is getting pretty big, and they will be afflicted by management if they aren't already.
In our company, management knows which projects have the largest budgets and therefore, by management logic, have the best people. When award nominations are judged, the line managers (not the work managers) sit around a table and vote up or down on each nomination. It is really amazing that the people on certain well-funded projects always get the awards. I've put people in for really deserving efforts on a smaller project, and the biggest award was a dept-wide email nod from a manager.
We have one project that is not particularly complicated but has the highest staffing in the software department. The project lead can't write code, but he knows how to make his team spend most of their time writing useless (and downright incorrect) documentation. The slipping schedules demand constantly increased staff, a bigger budget, and more awards. His team has received monetary awards for finding the bugs that they created which delayed a release for weeks. We could lose 95% (management accidentally approved a few worthy nominees) of the people who received an award in the last three years and have a better, more effective department as a result.
Yeah, just like all those idiots at Microsoft...
Last I heard, MS had stopped giving stock options as awards since the stock wasn't moving. They were giving stock grants instead. Now there's an idea I wish my company would adopt from MS, although our options are a bit above water - a stock grant is a real award.
Digging through the archives looking for SCO news, eh? :)
This is true, but I do not believe SCOX to be a viable candidate for Chapter 11. One of the most important requirements of a Chapter 11 plan is that the unsecured creditors must receive more under the plan than they would in a Chapter 7 (liquidation) bankruptcy. Since SCOX has nothing (Unixware? ... oh come now) that will generate enough of a revenue stream to provide this $ > 0 amont of money I seriously doubt they could get a Chapter 11 plan approved by the court.
That makes sense. Thanks for the info. I suppose if Canopy were motivated, they could make the board dump the lawyers and the "new" management (and most of the old management) and continue to sell their two products at a small profit. Although it's probably not worth the effort for a sinking ship.
True... it's just that it wasn't Reagan who knocked it down. If you were to argue Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, okay, maybe, but Reagan? They didn't increase military spending a single ruble during Reagan's term.
Really? That sounds a bit revisionist to me, but what do I know - I voted for Reagan (and Nixon). Do you happen to have something mainstream that backs that up? You're saying the billions Reagan gave to the Afghani mujahedeen to rip the Soviets a new orifice, and which they did, had no effect?
The flawed nuclear plant design that the Soviets were allowed to "steal" had no effect? The increased missle design research on the Soviet's part as a result of "Star Wars" was just a figment of the CIA's imagination? I'm shocked.
He simply used American fervor to his own political advantage.
Funny, I don't recall any fervor wrt the USSR. The cold war had been going on for over thirty years, and people were used to it. It was the age of detente, and the American people accepted it, even if Reagan thought it was Soviet ploy. I don't recall any fervor at all until the Berlin Wall came down. People were stunned. I remember the Berlin airlifts. The wall had always been there for many of us, and we never expected to see it open. You seem to remember a far different time than I do.
Except that the Soviet Union had had major economic problems for at least a decade before Reagan came on the scene. He can't be credited for years of mismanagement and stagnation that happened before he even got into the White House.
I'm not saying he should. However, under a President like Carter, who would not have worried the USSR, it likely would have held together a little longer. As stated, Reagan was the tap on that house of cards. To the winner go the laurels.