England is more friendly with the US than some of the other countries in Europe, however.
Not that any of them are ready to go to *war* with us or anything, but politically there are some countries in Europe that just sort of don't look our way with much favor, if you know what I'm saying.
> I can't see them persuading anyone except maybe France of the need to invade America.
You've got it backwards. France doesn't invade other countries. France gets invaded *by* other countries. Though, when the US invaded France, it was in cooperation with the French, so I'm not sure that really counts.
I use a new source of names every couple of years, so then I can remember how old individual systems are based on their names. For instance, I know that gloin was manufactured in 2005, because that's when we bought six computers to use as PACs and named them after dwarves from Tolkein. We aren't still using gloin as a PAC; it has changed roles. But because it kept its name, I still know that it was purchased as part of that batch, in 2005.
Other naming schemes I've used include cities in Australia, protagonists who died in the Dragonbone Chair series, types of dinosaurs (e.g., trex, diplodocus), rooms (e.g., narthex is the gateway to the outside world on my home network), and, recently, Shakespearean characters.
Ones I might use in the future include baroque composers, US Presidents, prefectures of Japan, adverbs that don't end in ly, kings of Israel and/or Judah, noun cases, famous assassins and serial killers, Star Trek starship classes, large islands, colors, desserts, birds of prey, named swords (excalibur, brightnail, indreju, kvalnir, glamdring, sting,...), or, quite frankly, whatever.
It doesn't actually matter very much *WHAT* the scheme is. The point is that each chunk of hardware needs a name that sticks to it unambiguously even after you repurpose it three times. Frankly I'm tempted to start naming monitors, as well as computers.
> We decided it would be cool to [re]name them all after simpsons characters. 3 Days later...
Wait, you renamed all your computers AT THE SAME TIME? That's just dumb. You *deserved* to get woken up in the middle of the night.
You give each computer a name when it first enters the organization, and ideally it keeps that name until it dies completely, leaves the organization, or has sufficient hardware and software changes made to it all at once that it is effectively not the same computer any more. *Maybe* you occasionally rename a computer when it changes roles, but you try to avoid that. What you *CERTAINLY* don't do is rename them all at once.
> Personally, I like MrDomainController, MrNameServer, MrFileServer, etc.
Sure, and then some of the machines change (or gain, or lose) roles, and somewhere down the line you end up with a webserver named MrFTPServer and a firewall named JrNameServer and a secondary mail server named LittleMissWorkstationXIV.
Either that or you rename your machines every time they change roles, and you end up with inventory-tracking notes along the lines of "MsPrintServer (formerly MrFileServer (previously MrNFSServer (and before that it was MrCEOWorkstation))) had its hard drive die in 2007, so now it has the one from JrFTPServer (not the current JrFTPServer, but the previous one (which before that was MrSMTPServer))."
Madness. There's a reason we give computers names, and giving them names like that defeats the purpose.
China is politically significant, worldwide. They have a large population. They control a lot of land. They have a history of being a significant factor in major world conflicts (e.g., both World Wars). They have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and the veto power that implies. Spock famously mentions China in STVI:TUU. Most Americans have had cuisine that they believe is Chinese in origin. We study China in elementary school. If you ask random people off the street to name something invented in China, or a famous Chinese historical figure, or an era or dynasty in Chinese history, some people would actually be able to name one. Chinese locations and characters occur with some regularity in western television and movies.
Thailand is significant regionally, perhaps, but once you're an ocean or two away, it just doesn't matter. People are vaguely aware that it's a country, and *maybe* they can even find it on a map, or name the capital, but beyond that...
(The people who think we invaded Iraq to get its oil are delusional. The US, as the largest market *and* one of the largest producers, has more influence over the commodity price of crude petroleum than Iraq and Iran combined. The only individual country with more influence on oil prices than the USA is Saudi Arabia.)
> If CNN had refused to report on Iraq or any other such nation, they would be harshly criticized.
From a western news agency's perspective, stuff that happens in the middle east is often front-page news, because the middle east has been politically important for at least three millennia. Almost half the wars in the history of Europe involved the middle east to a greater or lesser extent, and the US also has major interests in the region...
Stuff that happens in Thailand more likely belongs on page six of the international section anyhow, so leaving it out doesn't upset very many readers very badly. There are exceptions (e.g., when resorts frequented by rich western tourists got hit by a tsunami), but on the whole, Thailand isn't newsworthy over here. Quite frankly, they could have a violent bloody civil war lasting a decade and costing the lives of over 30% of the population, and most of the western world wouldn't notice. (Lest you think I'm exaggerating, Cambodia *did* have approximately that, right next-door to Thailand, fairly recently, and most of the western world *didn't* notice.)
> not having a [Sharing/Security] tab on folders is actually crippling. I pay money for that shit
You can always use getfacl/setfacl. I mean, the GUI makes it easier, but that functionality *is* there in the home version, if you know what you're doing. The word "crippling" to me suggests a more severe scenario of complete unusability. Needing to do things on the command line may be *annoying*, but it's not crippling.
One thing that really does make the home versions completely worthless in some settings is that you can't join them to a domain. (The word "domain" in this context refers to a shared authentication environment that has nothing to do with DNS.) If you need to run software that requires all the computers to be joined to a domain, you can't use the home versions.
> Having multiple versions with artificial limitations is the single things that is currently pushing me most > towards Linux everywhere (I already develop for it and use it at work, but the next home upgrade will be it).
Oh, I've been using free software at home for years. (Various Linux distributions at various times, FreeBSD for a while, currently Debian stable.) My workstation at work also runs Debian. But because I'm in charge of maintaining all of my employer's computer systems, I have to work with more than just my own computer, so there are Windows systems that I have to maintain.
> I have other users in the office who will constantly reopen internet explorer > or firefox to look something up after having closed it not minutes before.
I'll go you one better: I know several different users, in both work and family contexts, whose standard method for navigating to the Google main page, from any other page on the internet, is to first close the browser, then start the browser up again, and *then* click on the Google bookmark on the bookmarks toolbar. As best I can determine, the thinking goes like this: Okay, I'm done with this thing I've been looking at, so I want to get rid of it. [Click the close button on the title bar.] Okay, now I want to go to find [something], so I guess I'll go to Google...
> I've never seen pirated software being sold in Japan or Taiwan. > Or Singapore come to think of it, but I only spent a day or so there.
No, you wouldn't. Those are Berne-compliant countries with actual enforcement.
But people in those countries can afford Home Basic if they want it, so they're really beside the point.
> There was one street stand in Korea that sold probably pirated DVDs.
I don't know exactly where Korea stands, though I have the distinct impression that South Korea is in a different place now (economically) from where it was thirty years ago.
> Pretty much everything in China was pirated. Thailand had a big mall with shops that sold pirated software
Right, those are the "emerging markets" that Started Edition was *theoretically* supposed to be for, but selling a cut-rate version in those countries is pointless.
> My guess is that in a country that has no indigenous software houses, it's in > everyone's interest to ignore piracy of imported software. However as domestic > software houses start up they lobby for enforcement of IP law.
That may be a factor, but it's not the whole deal. Fundamentally, messing around with enforcing something as abstract as copyright law only even makes sense if you can achieve enough basic order in your society to first enforce the basics (e.g., physical property laws) in a more-or-less even-handed and consistent fashion. It's about priorities. For an "emerging market" country like Nigeria, for instance, enforcing copyright law is just not one of the big-ticket issues. They've got more important fish to fry.
China is only just now starting to approach a point where it would potentially be worth their time to address the issue in any significant way, and frankly, they've got more important issues to deal with as well, not least figuring out how to convert most of their agrarian poor into a workforce. (They've been working on this... gradually. But they're very much not done with it yet.) And if Thailand has reached the point where they have nothing more important to address, they've only got there fairly recently.
> Actually the implication that people in Singapore don't understand IP is pretty offensive.
Singapore should not have been given as an example. It's basically a first-world country, economically. (Some people would define "first world" in a way that implies a representative government, which AFAIK Singapore does not have. But their economic system is essentially Western-style capitalism.) The other poster probably just named a random country in southern Asia, which on average probably *would* have yielded a reasonably good example most of the time (as would almost any country in Africa or Latin America), but in this case he picked the wrong one. Taiwan would also be a counterexample.
> I know that most slashdotters don't consider piracy to be immoral, but has it > really gotten to the point where you can't even fathom why or that people would?
The problem with conceiving this is that the Starter Edition was intended for "emerging markets", such as China and Africa, where the concept of copyright is, culturally speaking, pretty much entirely non-existent. It's not like in the US and other developed countries, where a lot of people figure taking a copy for yourself is okay but pretty much everyone understands that making and selling thousands of copies of somebody else's copyrighted work would be unfair to the creator, and of course illegal, and the expectation would be that you would probably get caught. In the "emerging markets", the general expectation is that if the author wants to charge $5 per copy for his book, other businesses *will* undercut him by selling exact copies of it for less, and if some high-minded government official gets it in his head to challenge this, they'll either buy him off with a percentage of the profits or, if it's more convenient, bribe his superiors to get rid of him.
There is absolutely no point of producing a crippled low-cost version of Windows (or any software) for emerging markets. Nobody's going to use it there. They can get any software they want for slightly more than the cost of blank media, and they consider it to be no more immoral than bribing a government official (which is pretty much a basic survival skill in most of the southern hemisphere). Now if they could get some hardware with good enough specs to actually *run* Vista...
> Wow. I don't know what planet you came from but US culture is not inherently right-wing.
I can probably guess what planet he comes from: Europe. Europe is so off-the-charts liberal, pretty much the entire rest of the world is right-wing to them.
> Hardware and software are two completely different things. > It doesn't take more R&D to turn on features that already exist.
By that logic, it also doesn't take more R&D to license the software to fifty million more computers. And yet, somehow, if Dell wants to pre-install Windows on the computers they sell, Microsoft expects to collect money from Dell for that. Yeah, okay, they get less _per copy_ than for retail boxed copies, but they *do* get money for it, even though it technically doesn't saddle Microsoft with more development costs just because Dell distributes the software. After all, they had to develop the software anyway so that they could sell retail copies, right?
Microsoft has a *number* of business practices that I strongly disagree with, but charging more money for a more featureful version of the software isn't one of them.
Though, I do think seven different versions, or whatever they're up to now, is unnecessarily many and confusing for consumers. But that's a practical issue.
>>> that you can whack your head hundreds of times in your life and knock yourself out and get up and be fine > This was a legitimate idea that people actually believed?
Well, there are athletes who believe it, but bear in mind these are some of the same people who believe that wearing the same underwear they had on last time they won will help them win again, especially if they don't wash it in between times.
There are probably also sports fans who believe it, but if there's a class of people less intelligent than the athletes, it's probably the fans.
> Synaptic is great for 95% of the software on my system, but the > apps that I use often I want to always be on the latest version.
Yeah, I also find that there are a small number of applications I like to actually keep up to date, but for *most* of the software on my system, I'm not interested in updates (until I eventually replace my whole computer after several years).
> And don't even get me started on the PITA it is to try out a Firefox beta or nightly on Ubuntu...
Yeah? Try it on Debian stable. Even if you are already familiar with the Mozilla build process, you run into a nightmare of dependency issues. Oh, you thought Firefox was a cross-platform application? Hahaha. No. A cross-platform application would not rely on hyper-recent versions of libraries, especially libraries like GTK that themselves have umpteen bazillion dependencies.
Did I mention that I'm still using version 2, and getting *really* tired of hearing the Mozilla people whine about how people aren't upgrading to version 3 on their timetable? Maybe if it were, you know, *available*, then we might *consider* it.
If a fresh Windows install didn't have IE, what would you use to download Firefox? You'd end up having to use another computer to download the browser. Hope you've got a USB mass storage device with some free space on it!
Don't get me wrong, I think Microsoft has in the past done some improper things with IE, e.g., integrating it with the file manager, making it preload when the OS started, making Windows Update only work with IE, that sort of thing. I'd be glad to see regulatory bodies tell them they can't pull those sorts of schenanighans.
But I think the era when an operating system that does not include a web browser out of the box is a good idea is pretty well gone. The web browser is the primary tool that you use to retrieve and install software, including third party software. So there really needs to be one included out of the box, so that you can do that. Otherwise you've got a chicken-and-egg problem.
Why do you think CPAN.pm is included with the standard Perl distribution, even though there are various alternatives, some of which are widely considered better? I mean, do I really need CPAN.pm if I want to use CPANPLUS instead? Oh, wait, I actually kind of do, because I would use CPAN.pm to retrieve and install CPANPLUS initially.
(Yes, I know, you could theoretically order Firefox on a CD or, if you know what you're doing, use the extremely limited command-line ftp client that, last I checked, still comes with Windows. But these are not the usual approach. The usual approach is to use the bundled web browser, until you download a different one.)
> This mode *ignores* order of operations by design, because that's what cheap non-scientific calculators do!.
In the seventies it was, but these days even really cheap ones can handle adding and multiplying at the same time. You can't get through junior high any more, much less graduate from high school (at least around here), without studying order of operations, so I don't think it's at all reasonable to restrict correct operation to the "scientific" view only.
Umm, that's not "standard" by any definition of standard that I've ever heard. And while I've seen a handheld calculator that behaved in that way, said calculator ran on a nine-volt battery, which should give you some idea when it was manufactured. A modern calculator, even one of those extremely cheap solar jobbies you get as a free giveaway from vendors, will give you the correct answer, which is 12. (I'm assuming we're operating in base 10, but if you were operating in any other base you would know.)
An *adding machine* (one of those things with the roll of receipt paper attached) will do what you say, but that's not the same thing as a calculator.
> [Reagan spent] enormous quantities of money on militarization, > possibly in hopes of bankrupting the federal government
Reagan underestimated the impact of the federal debt on the US economy. It does hurt us, more than he realized, because it undermines the public's confidence in the government and, perhaps more importantly, the currency.
Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure his *goal* was to bankrupt the Soviet economy, by forcing them to spend so much on military stuff, in order to keep up with us, that their economy would not be able to handle it. And that did happen. Their GDP was a fraction of ours, so the impact of all that military spending was far more disastrous for them than it was for us. It was hard on our economy, yes, but it wiped theirs out completely. We won that war without sending a lot of soldiers to their death.
Of course, given what we know now, it almost certainly wasn't necessary. Without all that military spending in the eighties, the curtain probably would have taken a few more years to come down, but it eventually *would* have come down. Even without the military buildup of the cold war, Soviet-style communism is simply not long-term sustainable.
But we didn't know that during the Reagan administration, because almost all of the data were unavailable. At the time, we supposed that the East-European economy was in significantly better condition than was actually the case. We believed capitalism and representative government were better, but we didn't realize how *much* better. As recently as the mid-eighties, a lot of Americans were still worried that communism might continue spread until someone in Moscow would be telling us in Ohio where we were allowed to live, what kind of work we should do, what line to stand in to buy bread, and whether we'd be allowed to visit our relatives in the town down the road on the weekends. By 1990, it had become totally obvious that that was never going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
> I consider myself a member of the English left.
England is more friendly with the US than some of the other countries in Europe, however.
Not that any of them are ready to go to *war* with us or anything, but politically there are some countries in Europe that just sort of don't look our way with much favor, if you know what I'm saying.
> I can't see them persuading anyone except maybe France of the need to invade America.
You've got it backwards. France doesn't invade other countries. France gets invaded *by* other countries. Though, when the US invaded France, it was in cooperation with the French, so I'm not sure that really counts.
I use a new source of names every couple of years, so then I can remember how old individual systems are based on their names. For instance, I know that gloin was manufactured in 2005, because that's when we bought six computers to use as PACs and named them after dwarves from Tolkein. We aren't still using gloin as a PAC; it has changed roles. But because it kept its name, I still know that it was purchased as part of that batch, in 2005.
...), or, quite frankly, whatever.
Other naming schemes I've used include cities in Australia, protagonists who died in the Dragonbone Chair series, types of dinosaurs (e.g., trex, diplodocus), rooms (e.g., narthex is the gateway to the outside world on my home network), and, recently, Shakespearean characters.
Ones I might use in the future include baroque composers, US Presidents, prefectures of Japan, adverbs that don't end in ly, kings of Israel and/or Judah, noun cases, famous assassins and serial killers, Star Trek starship classes, large islands, colors, desserts, birds of prey, named swords (excalibur, brightnail, indreju, kvalnir, glamdring, sting,
It doesn't actually matter very much *WHAT* the scheme is. The point is that each chunk of hardware needs a name that sticks to it unambiguously even after you repurpose it three times. Frankly I'm tempted to start naming monitors, as well as computers.
If you have a hundred servers, you keep a list.
> We decided it would be cool to [re]name them all after simpsons characters. 3 Days later...
Wait, you renamed all your computers AT THE SAME TIME? That's just dumb. You *deserved* to get woken up in the middle of the night.
You give each computer a name when it first enters the organization, and ideally it keeps that name until it dies completely, leaves the organization, or has sufficient hardware and software changes made to it all at once that it is effectively not the same computer any more. *Maybe* you occasionally rename a computer when it changes roles, but you try to avoid that. What you *CERTAINLY* don't do is rename them all at once.
> Personally, I like MrDomainController, MrNameServer, MrFileServer, etc.
Sure, and then some of the machines change (or gain, or lose) roles, and somewhere down the line you end up with a webserver named MrFTPServer and a firewall named JrNameServer and a secondary mail server named LittleMissWorkstationXIV.
Either that or you rename your machines every time they change roles, and you end up with inventory-tracking notes along the lines of "MsPrintServer (formerly MrFileServer (previously MrNFSServer (and before that it was MrCEOWorkstation))) had its hard drive die in 2007, so now it has the one from JrFTPServer (not the current JrFTPServer, but the previous one (which before that was MrSMTPServer))."
Madness. There's a reason we give computers names, and giving them names like that defeats the purpose.
> My trust just went right down the toilet.
Trust? Dude, this is Microsoft we're talking about.
> Compare to, say, Chinese censorship
China is politically significant, worldwide. They have a large population. They control a lot of land. They have a history of being a significant factor in major world conflicts (e.g., both World Wars). They have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and the veto power that implies. Spock famously mentions China in STVI:TUU. Most Americans have had cuisine that they believe is Chinese in origin. We study China in elementary school. If you ask random people off the street to name something invented in China, or a famous Chinese historical figure, or an era or dynasty in Chinese history, some people would actually be able to name one. Chinese locations and characters occur with some regularity in western television and movies.
Thailand is significant regionally, perhaps, but once you're an ocean or two away, it just doesn't matter. People are vaguely aware that it's a country, and *maybe* they can even find it on a map, or name the capital, but beyond that...
> Thailand has oil
Venezuela has more. So what?
(The people who think we invaded Iraq to get its oil are delusional. The US, as the largest market *and* one of the largest producers, has more influence over the commodity price of crude petroleum than Iraq and Iran combined. The only individual country with more influence on oil prices than the USA is Saudi Arabia.)
> If CNN had refused to report on Iraq or any other such nation, they would be harshly criticized.
From a western news agency's perspective, stuff that happens in the middle east is often front-page news, because the middle east has been politically important for at least three millennia. Almost half the wars in the history of Europe involved the middle east to a greater or lesser extent, and the US also has major interests in the region...
Stuff that happens in Thailand more likely belongs on page six of the international section anyhow, so leaving it out doesn't upset very many readers very badly. There are exceptions (e.g., when resorts frequented by rich western tourists got hit by a tsunami), but on the whole, Thailand isn't newsworthy over here. Quite frankly, they could have a violent bloody civil war lasting a decade and costing the lives of over 30% of the population, and most of the western world wouldn't notice. (Lest you think I'm exaggerating, Cambodia *did* have approximately that, right next-door to Thailand, fairly recently, and most of the western world *didn't* notice.)
> not having a [Sharing/Security] tab on folders is actually crippling. I pay money for that shit
You can always use getfacl/setfacl. I mean, the GUI makes it easier, but that functionality *is* there in the home version, if you know what you're doing. The word "crippling" to me suggests a more severe scenario of complete unusability. Needing to do things on the command line may be *annoying*, but it's not crippling.
One thing that really does make the home versions completely worthless in some settings is that you can't join them to a domain. (The word "domain" in this context refers to a shared authentication environment that has nothing to do with DNS.) If you need to run software that requires all the computers to be joined to a domain, you can't use the home versions.
> Having multiple versions with artificial limitations is the single things that is currently pushing me most
> towards Linux everywhere (I already develop for it and use it at work, but the next home upgrade will be it).
Oh, I've been using free software at home for years. (Various Linux distributions at various times, FreeBSD for a while, currently Debian stable.) My workstation at work also runs Debian. But because I'm in charge of maintaining all of my employer's computer systems, I have to work with more than just my own computer, so there are Windows systems that I have to maintain.
> I have other users in the office who will constantly reopen internet explorer
> or firefox to look something up after having closed it not minutes before.
I'll go you one better: I know several different users, in both work and family contexts, whose standard method for navigating to the Google main page, from any other page on the internet, is to first close the browser, then start the browser up again, and *then* click on the Google bookmark on the bookmarks toolbar. As best I can determine, the thinking goes like this: Okay, I'm done with this thing I've been looking at, so I want to get rid of it. [Click the close button on the title bar.] Okay, now I want to go to find [something], so I guess I'll go to Google...
> I've never seen pirated software being sold in Japan or Taiwan.
> Or Singapore come to think of it, but I only spent a day or so there.
No, you wouldn't. Those are Berne-compliant countries with actual enforcement.
But people in those countries can afford Home Basic if they want it, so they're really beside the point.
> There was one street stand in Korea that sold probably pirated DVDs.
I don't know exactly where Korea stands, though I have the distinct impression that South Korea is in a different place now (economically) from where it was thirty years ago.
> Pretty much everything in China was pirated. Thailand had a big mall with shops that sold pirated software
Right, those are the "emerging markets" that Started Edition was *theoretically* supposed to be for, but selling a cut-rate version in those countries is pointless.
> My guess is that in a country that has no indigenous software houses, it's in
> everyone's interest to ignore piracy of imported software. However as domestic
> software houses start up they lobby for enforcement of IP law.
That may be a factor, but it's not the whole deal. Fundamentally, messing around with enforcing something as abstract as copyright law only even makes sense if you can achieve enough basic order in your society to first enforce the basics (e.g., physical property laws) in a more-or-less even-handed and consistent fashion. It's about priorities. For an "emerging market" country like Nigeria, for instance, enforcing copyright law is just not one of the big-ticket issues. They've got more important fish to fry.
China is only just now starting to approach a point where it would potentially be worth their time to address the issue in any significant way, and frankly, they've got more important issues to deal with as well, not least figuring out how to convert most of their agrarian poor into a workforce. (They've been working on this... gradually. But they're very much not done with it yet.) And if Thailand has reached the point where they have nothing more important to address, they've only got there fairly recently.
> Actually the implication that people in Singapore don't understand IP is pretty offensive.
Singapore should not have been given as an example. It's basically a first-world country, economically. (Some people would define "first world" in a way that implies a representative government, which AFAIK Singapore does not have. But their economic system is essentially Western-style capitalism.) The other poster probably just named a random country in southern Asia, which on average probably *would* have yielded a reasonably good example most of the time (as would almost any country in Africa or Latin America), but in this case he picked the wrong one. Taiwan would also be a counterexample.
> I know that most slashdotters don't consider piracy to be immoral, but has it
> really gotten to the point where you can't even fathom why or that people would?
The problem with conceiving this is that the Starter Edition was intended for "emerging markets", such as China and Africa, where the concept of copyright is, culturally speaking, pretty much entirely non-existent. It's not like in the US and other developed countries, where a lot of people figure taking a copy for yourself is okay but pretty much everyone understands that making and selling thousands of copies of somebody else's copyrighted work would be unfair to the creator, and of course illegal, and the expectation would be that you would probably get caught. In the "emerging markets", the general expectation is that if the author wants to charge $5 per copy for his book, other businesses *will* undercut him by selling exact copies of it for less, and if some high-minded government official gets it in his head to challenge this, they'll either buy him off with a percentage of the profits or, if it's more convenient, bribe his superiors to get rid of him.
There is absolutely no point of producing a crippled low-cost version of Windows (or any software) for emerging markets. Nobody's going to use it there. They can get any software they want for slightly more than the cost of blank media, and they consider it to be no more immoral than bribing a government official (which is pretty much a basic survival skill in most of the southern hemisphere). Now if they could get some hardware with good enough specs to actually *run* Vista...
> "I've got the Uber-Premium, Ultimate, Kick-Ass, Expensive version of Windows on *MY* machine! What's on yours?"
;-)
Debian stable. I'm sorry, you lose
> Wow. I don't know what planet you came from but US culture is not inherently right-wing.
I can probably guess what planet he comes from: Europe. Europe is so off-the-charts liberal, pretty much the entire rest of the world is right-wing to them.
> Hardware and software are two completely different things.
> It doesn't take more R&D to turn on features that already exist.
By that logic, it also doesn't take more R&D to license the software to fifty million more computers. And yet, somehow, if Dell wants to pre-install Windows on the computers they sell, Microsoft expects to collect money from Dell for that. Yeah, okay, they get less _per copy_ than for retail boxed copies, but they *do* get money for it, even though it technically doesn't saddle Microsoft with more development costs just because Dell distributes the software. After all, they had to develop the software anyway so that they could sell retail copies, right?
Microsoft has a *number* of business practices that I strongly disagree with, but charging more money for a more featureful version of the software isn't one of them.
Though, I do think seven different versions, or whatever they're up to now, is unnecessarily many and confusing for consumers. But that's a practical issue.
>>> that you can whack your head hundreds of times in your life and knock yourself out and get up and be fine
> This was a legitimate idea that people actually believed?
Well, there are athletes who believe it, but bear in mind these are some of the same people who believe that wearing the same underwear they had on last time they won will help them win again, especially if they don't wash it in between times.
There are probably also sports fans who believe it, but if there's a class of people less intelligent than the athletes, it's probably the fans.
Melbourne... Isn't that in Australia, and isn't it summertime there at the moment?
:-)
No thanks, I'll keep the weather we've got here. I'm hoping for at least another foot of snow over the next month or so before it starts melting
That's it! I'm moving to... oh, wait. Nevermind.
> Synaptic is great for 95% of the software on my system, but the
> apps that I use often I want to always be on the latest version.
Yeah, I also find that there are a small number of applications I like to actually keep up to date, but for *most* of the software on my system, I'm not interested in updates (until I eventually replace my whole computer after several years).
> And don't even get me started on the PITA it is to try out a Firefox beta or nightly on Ubuntu...
Yeah? Try it on Debian stable. Even if you are already familiar with the Mozilla build process, you run into a nightmare of dependency issues. Oh, you thought Firefox was a cross-platform application? Hahaha. No. A cross-platform application would not rely on hyper-recent versions of libraries, especially libraries like GTK that themselves have umpteen bazillion dependencies.
Did I mention that I'm still using version 2, and getting *really* tired of hearing the Mozilla people whine about how people aren't upgrading to version 3 on their timetable? Maybe if it were, you know, *available*, then we might *consider* it.
If a fresh Windows install didn't have IE, what would you use to download Firefox? You'd end up having to use another computer to download the browser. Hope you've got a USB mass storage device with some free space on it!
Don't get me wrong, I think Microsoft has in the past done some improper things with IE, e.g., integrating it with the file manager, making it preload when the OS started, making Windows Update only work with IE, that sort of thing. I'd be glad to see regulatory bodies tell them they can't pull those sorts of schenanighans.
But I think the era when an operating system that does not include a web browser out of the box is a good idea is pretty well gone. The web browser is the primary tool that you use to retrieve and install software, including third party software. So there really needs to be one included out of the box, so that you can do that. Otherwise you've got a chicken-and-egg problem.
Why do you think CPAN.pm is included with the standard Perl distribution, even though there are various alternatives, some of which are widely considered better? I mean, do I really need CPAN.pm if I want to use CPANPLUS instead? Oh, wait, I actually kind of do, because I would use CPAN.pm to retrieve and install CPANPLUS initially.
(Yes, I know, you could theoretically order Firefox on a CD or, if you know what you're doing, use the extremely limited command-line ftp client that, last I checked, still comes with Windows. But these are not the usual approach. The usual approach is to use the bundled web browser, until you download a different one.)
> This mode *ignores* order of operations by design, because that's what cheap non-scientific calculators do!.
In the seventies it was, but these days even really cheap ones can handle adding and multiplying at the same time. You can't get through junior high any more, much less graduate from high school (at least around here), without studying order of operations, so I don't think it's at all reasonable to restrict correct operation to the "scientific" view only.
3 + 2 * 2 = 10 isn't standard. It's just plain incorrect.
> Pressing 3 + 2 * 2 ... [Standard: 10
Umm, that's not "standard" by any definition of standard that I've ever heard. And while I've seen a handheld calculator that behaved in that way, said calculator ran on a nine-volt battery, which should give you some idea when it was manufactured. A modern calculator, even one of those extremely cheap solar jobbies you get as a free giveaway from vendors, will give you the correct answer, which is 12. (I'm assuming we're operating in base 10, but if you were operating in any other base you would know.)
An *adding machine* (one of those things with the roll of receipt paper attached) will do what you say, but that's not the same thing as a calculator.
> [Reagan spent] enormous quantities of money on militarization,
> possibly in hopes of bankrupting the federal government
Reagan underestimated the impact of the federal debt on the US economy. It does hurt us, more than he realized, because it undermines the public's confidence in the government and, perhaps more importantly, the currency.
Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure his *goal* was to bankrupt the Soviet economy, by forcing them to spend so much on military stuff, in order to keep up with us, that their economy would not be able to handle it. And that did happen. Their GDP was a fraction of ours, so the impact of all that military spending was far more disastrous for them than it was for us. It was hard on our economy, yes, but it wiped theirs out completely. We won that war without sending a lot of soldiers to their death.
Of course, given what we know now, it almost certainly wasn't necessary. Without all that military spending in the eighties, the curtain probably would have taken a few more years to come down, but it eventually *would* have come down. Even without the military buildup of the cold war, Soviet-style communism is simply not long-term sustainable.
But we didn't know that during the Reagan administration, because almost all of the data were unavailable. At the time, we supposed that the East-European economy was in significantly better condition than was actually the case. We believed capitalism and representative government were better, but we didn't realize how *much* better. As recently as the mid-eighties, a lot of Americans were still worried that communism might continue spread until someone in Moscow would be telling us in Ohio where we were allowed to live, what kind of work we should do, what line to stand in to buy bread, and whether we'd be allowed to visit our relatives in the town down the road on the weekends. By 1990, it had become totally obvious that that was never going to happen.