I would have thought it would be much cheaper than other video-game-based-movies. Aren't there only three or four sets and one hallway in the whole Halo game? One costume for a faceless actor? Don't all the CG models for the creatues already exist?
Plus, they could just ask Valve to perk up the script, since most of the main ideas came from Half Life anyway...
is a synonym for "someone we haven't figured out how to screw out of their VAR market share yet."
The list of companies that added value to Microsoft OS products, then watched as Microsoft bundled those products into their offerings (often at no cost to the customer), goes back to MS-DOS. Quicken is the only product I've seen Microsoft take a bead at and not knock them into irrelevence. OS/2, Netware, Lotus 123, WordPerfect, AOL, Borland, several desktop database vendors, DEC, FAX drivers, scanner/OCR software, screen savers, and many others made some cash and then faded into the recycle bin. Now Microsoft is stretching into enterprise applications with their piles of money.
I'd give you mod points if I had 'em. I didn't realize the "girl gamer" crowd had a market research arm. "Analyst Evermore" was a funny way of pumping up the site that provides a link to their "candy bitches".
This isn't just a matter of whether it's a good idea to use electronic voting machines; it's a matter of a seasoned politician trying to exploit the political machine a matter of weeks before an election.
This is a political machine that completely failed during the primary election. This is a political machine that was changing election rules requiring a judge to point out that the new rules violated the state constitution just a few weeks before the primary. The "overruled veto" was thrown out as the manipulation of rules it was intended to be.
On top of this - all the usual things about how Deibold voting doesn't feel like voting. You push a bunch of buttons without any feedback that the vote goes anywhere. Assuming they remembered to bring the supplies needed to operate the machines to the precincts. Or enough "provisional" ballots. However, watching our local election boards justify this fiasco has been entertaining...
Here's the list of what is supported in "Crossover":
* Microsoft Outlook
* Microsoft Project
* Microsoft Visio
* Half-Life 2
* Quicken
Not a giant list of supported apps in the end (although many may work without "support"...). One would think the choices are about filling gaps with missing OS X apps that are popular or loved on the Windows platform, but its a funny list:
Outlook is a funny choice, since "Entourage" exists from Microsoft for the same purpose (I don't use it, but those I know who do like it more than Outlook on Windows).
Project does or used to exist in a native Mac port. This is a real cash cow for Microsoft - there is no competitor of note at that price point, and they sell a ton of this to businesses that use it so that people can look at the Gantt chart but don't really do project planning. Much like other Microsoft apps, this one is bought on inertia with little to justify the cost and little enhancement/investment done by the vendor over the years.
Visio is similar. It's a great program (bought by Microsoft), although overpriced for what it does or not sold with a compelling "plug in" story for the real specialty uses it has. Few Mac equivalents exist that get recognition by purchasing departments, and real import/export issues with the non-Microsoft versions when trying to share Visio files.
Half-Life is an incredibly interesting item for them to pick off. I wish there was an equivalent OS X version (since Half Life is the best game ever, IMHO). While there are some good OS X games (or ports of other games) I'm tempted to try this just to get to see Half Life 2. I'd love to hear more about the business justification for this title with the rest.
Quicken is another funny choice, since there is a native OS X port of this one too - although one of the worst looking OS X apps I've seen.
So, for all that development effort they officially support a handful of titles, most of which have an OS X version.
In the DC/Baltimore region, there's WTOP [wtopnews.com] on 103.5FM and 820AM for news traffic and weather (traffic is every 10mins on the 8's).
The problem with radio traffic reports in the DC area is that they spend their 30 seconds telling you about the same main roads (beltway, I-66, I-270, and I-95), which are always in the same state of congestion and the people that use them all know this. They spend no time telling you about the arteries where there are alternate routes that have random activity that blocks them and that you would take an alternate route if possible. The CHART system is also only deployed on the same roads.
I'd love to use Google Maps/Traffic if I could tell it my start and end point and it would inform me of problems at least 15 minutes before I got there. It might. I wouldn't know since they don't support Palm OS...
Its simply a good idea gameplay wise not to have to deal with computer controlled bullies.
I would imagine the human controlled bullies will ruin gameplay as much as the computer controlled ones could.
I looked through the articles and movies. Neat look to it, but it seems more like work than play. And having to wait several thousand millenium for evolution seems boring too. It will be interesting to see if you can create the truly humorous genetic manipulations, too. ("poops twice as much as it eats, and likes to eat poop", or "roars so loud it causes nuclear fission of all atoms").
IIRC when the movie was first being shopped around it was mentioned that Bungie had put together a 'Halo Bible' of sorts to provide clarity and guidance on the storyline......Stay true to what Bungie created and you're guaranteed almost the entire Halo playing audience without much effort.
Thou Shall Have Every Other Scene be an Interior Room of Identical Size and Decor
Thoust Must Spent Several Hours in the same "library", with endless streams of enemies coming from side halls without plot
Remember the Ewoks, and Keep them Holy for Comic Relief
Thy Strongest of Vehicles Must be Kept Contained in Tiny Areas, and Not Used to Explore
Makest thou "Swarm" faster than headcrabs, to remove all comparisons to Half-Life ripoffs
During the Most Interesting Moments, Create an Out of Body Experience to Remove the Enjoyment of the Action by the Player
Makest Sure the Light Saber, the Strongest of All Weapons, Disappears Whence Dropped
Then why is Google switching to image-based ads on 3rd party sites?
Because they now dominate the search related and text based on-line advertising market. They next want to dominate the image/animation based advertising market. It's not a sign of impending doom, its a sign of growth and increasing revenue.
This was debated post-HIPAA enactment when they needed to identify who had enforcement authority for this new set of laws. HHS is not a branch of government one identifies with prosecution, although they do understand investigation. Justice is identified with prosecution, although they have little experience with healthcare.
No one is happy with the end result, although they are adapting.
Name _are_ protected health information. Associating a name with a facility can coorelate to personal health experience depending on the type of facility.
Here's the official list:
The following identifiers of the individual or of relatives, employers, or household members of the individual must be removed to achieve the "safe harbor" method of de-identification:
(A) Names;
(B) All geographic subdivisions smaller than a State, including street address, city, county, precinct, zip code, and their equivalent geocodes, except for the initial three digits of a zip code if, according to the current publicly available data from the Bureau of Census (1) the geographic units formed by combining all zip codes with the same three initial digits contains more than 20,000 people; and (2) the initial three digits of a zip code for all such geographic units containing 20,000 or fewer people is changed to 000;
(C) All elements of dates (except year) for dates directly related to the individual, including birth date, admission date, discharge date, date of death; and all ages over 89 and all elements of dates (including year) indicative of such age, except that such ages and elements may be aggregated into a single category of age 90 or older;
(D) Telephone numbers;
(E) Fax numbers;
(F) Electronic mail addresses:
(G) Social security numbers;
(H) Medical record numbers;
(I) Health plan beneficiary numbers;
(J) Account numbers;
(K) Certificate/license numbers;
(L) Vehicle identifiers and serial numbers, including license plate numbers;
(M) Device identifiers and serial numbers;
(N) Web Universal Resource Locators (URLs);
(O) Internet Protocol (IP) address numbers;
(P) Biometric identifiers, including finger and voice prints;
(Q) Full face photographic images and any comparable images; and ® any other unique identifying number, characteristic, or code, except as permitted for re-identification purposes provided certain conditions are met.
In addition to the removal of the above-stated identifiers, the covered entity may not have actual knowledge that the remaining information could be used alone or in combination with any other information to identify an individual who is subject of the information. 45 C.F.R. 164.514(b).
I don't think Radio Shack was about "building computers" as it was about "building radios". I don't remember motherboards and related parts in there, but coax cable, crimping tools, and bare electronic parts for hobbying and the ham radio crowd.
So, the founder passed on, the new public company thought it was all a bunch of nerdy junk and wanted to rub shoulders with Microsoft and Verizon, while refusing to notice that Best Buy going up across the street. All the Hams, non-cable-TV-people, kids interested in electronics, and people adding electronics to their cars went on to the Internet or gave up on the hobby.
Radio Shack could survive, but the market transitions to cell phones, cable TV, and integrated automobile electronics makes it unlikely it would be more than a niche vendor - like the places that sell musical instruments, billiards equipment, and other focused hobby retailers.
I wouldn't hold my breath for Verizon to remove the "no server" clause from their contract. At least not until every single one of their T1 lines no longer produces revenue for them.
To be clear, the Verizon FIOS agreement says no fixed IPs, no serving, residential use only (which seems to preclude home office professional use). Plus "Microsoft Windows required and MSN Premium", whatever that means. Plus you must switch your voice lines to FIOS and keep at least one voice line in the agreement.
If you discuss any of these feature needs with them the price quickly becomes $129 a month and up.
I was waiting for FIOS too. But I'll probably wait until their pricing reflects someone using the service besides kids websurfing on a Microsoft box.
Your rephrase is correct. Any performance is supposed to pay royalties, but small clubs, private weddings, and similar things are not worth the enforcement. High schools advertise they are doing a specific musical and need to make sure they purchase scripts and scores from the holder of the copyrights. Local cover bands playing in a dive get away with it unless the local musician's union wants to rat someone out. A wedding band never has to worry unless the daughter of an RIAA big shot is getting hitched.
The musician's union hates DJs. They've reduced the demand for local musicians, and they're using copyrighted material without paying royalties (usually).
Another problem is that while the system to collect, store, and distribute the information can be done and maintained open source, there's an implied accountability to the source of the data and a need to hold someone's feet to the fire when something's wrong or incomplete. I'm thinking of projects like "Gas Price Watch . Com" (http://www.gaspricewatch.com/ which is a great idea, but there's holes in the database and you can't make someone fill it in. Not such a big issue for them, but for being a source of comprehensive sales tax information its a pretty big challenge.
The technical problems are solvable by open source. I'm not sure the customer service ones are. Good idea, though.
I'll risk eternal damnation and state I like Dvorak's columns.
To me, its a guilty pleasure. He's kind of the Andy Rooney of the tech world - he's been ranting in this space so long that he's one of the few commentators with a historical perspective. I'll take his crackpot rantings for entertainment value over the people commenting in this space that can only remember back to Windows 98. For every silly opinion about what the next big thing is, there's a nice frank blast of some stupid product from a company that should no better.
So, a prediction from Dvorak about Microsoft's Mac agenda is the equivalent of Rooney spouting off for the 10th time about how they used to put more coffee in a can of coffee. Might have a funny line or two, and easily avoided if its dumb.
Hell, if you got started so long ago that you're 60+ and programming now, then you started off with punchcards and manual switches.
You didn't need to be that old. I started 1980 punching cards for Fortran programming like all the engineering students. I don't think they changed this until 82. Rebooting from manual switches was still common on mini-computers around then until 1986 I think (PDP 11s, DG Eclipse).
Of course, around 1982 you could plunk down $3000 for one of those totally cool IBM PCs. Although I think my Commodore 64 was around $200 and had better graphics and sound anyway.
Oh, and it wasn't that hard to leap from Fortran to Pascal to newer things. I'm pretty sure Intel still sells a Fortran compiler for serious number crunching.
Berkeley (and MIT and CM and others) probably aren't the best examples, since this is where a lot of the original work took place. Running through catalogs of the average state college might give a better perspective? The programs back then just weren't that big, not many professors and the students weren't that many. I was in college 1980-84, and CS was still getting kicked around between the College of Engineering and the College of Science and had the crappiest space on campus.
In the 90's, there were lots of programs, they were full of people, community colleges had programs, and all these alternate computer training programs sprung up. A lot more people were pumped through these channels than in the 70s, that's for sure.
The original topic is a funny one - it sure does seem like they fade away at 40 (I'm 43 now, and in management). I wonder what this same comment would be if "programmers" was replaced with any other college major other than "medicine", "law", or "business"?
Somewhere, in an underground fortress in Washington state, someone is stroking a white cat in his stainless steel command chair and chuckling as the outline of India is changing color to blue...
I can't, with any sense of responsibility to young people in the US, encourage them to study IT.
The jobs are going overseas, as investors are mandating it either for cost reasons or because they now have a stake in some offshore concern. The jobs are emotionally frustuating because management expects programming to work on time and on budget like other engineering disciplines, but in practice its still an academic exercise with little thought to design and expectations. And, increasingly the vendors have turned the jobs into a vocational trade and not the creative and intellectual exercise it used to be.
There are still good jobs out there, but you'll have to make them yourself and hope you hang in there long enough to run the company and outsource the work to someone else. Otherwise, your a network support guy or sitting at a help desk in some cubicle waiting for the phone to ring for a question from an idiot in Finance.
For me, I don't want Linux to copy Windows. Aisde from the funny technical issues around copying that architecture, I'm completely happy with Linux being a UNIX centric experience and not a Windows centric experience. I don't want the word processors to integrate with Email and I don't want the browser integrated deeply in the OS.
This is not a money issue. While no doubt some people are attracted to Linux because they want to save money, I don't think this drives most consumer level purchases, particularly since Windows comes with a lot of the machines out there. My decisions were based on having more choices for tools and apps, having to spend less time patching and virus scanning, and having an ability to debug and monitor the system with more granularity. Not financial drivers.
Although I think the rest of your analogy may be flawed. When you purchase Windows, its not $120, but most likely $120+$400 (office) + $2000 for VS.NET. You can do better as a student, and you do much worse as a company when all this is on the annual subscription they call a license. Your annualized $60 probably isn't the whole picture.
More importantly, your comparing something that (for many) is an annoyance and something of decreasing value (Windows) with something that is increasing in value (real estate) and purchased for far different reasons. People decide to live somewhere because of jobs, family, lifestyle, etc. An OS is much more easily replaced.
As to the coffee comparison, one person's overpriced coffee is another person's gourmet coffee + cream + indulgence (comparing a Twinkie with a gourmet cake).:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I would have thought it would be much cheaper than other video-game-based-movies. Aren't there only three or four sets and one hallway in the whole Halo game? One costume for a faceless actor? Don't all the CG models for the creatues already exist?
Plus, they could just ask Valve to perk up the script, since most of the main ideas came from Half Life anyway...
is a synonym for "someone we haven't figured out how to screw out of their VAR market share yet."
The list of companies that added value to Microsoft OS products, then watched as Microsoft bundled those products into their offerings (often at no cost to the customer), goes back to MS-DOS. Quicken is the only product I've seen Microsoft take a bead at and not knock them into irrelevence. OS/2, Netware, Lotus 123, WordPerfect, AOL, Borland, several desktop database vendors, DEC, FAX drivers, scanner/OCR software, screen savers, and many others made some cash and then faded into the recycle bin. Now Microsoft is stretching into enterprise applications with their piles of money.
Tough business to be in.
I'd give you mod points if I had 'em. I didn't realize the "girl gamer" crowd had a market research arm. "Analyst Evermore" was a funny way of pumping up the site that provides a link to their "candy bitches".
This is a political machine that completely failed during the primary election. This is a political machine that was changing election rules requiring a judge to point out that the new rules violated the state constitution just a few weeks before the primary. The "overruled veto" was thrown out as the manipulation of rules it was intended to be.
On top of this - all the usual things about how Deibold voting doesn't feel like voting. You push a bunch of buttons without any feedback that the vote goes anywhere. Assuming they remembered to bring the supplies needed to operate the machines to the precincts. Or enough "provisional" ballots. However, watching our local election boards justify this fiasco has been entertaining...
Here's the list of what is supported in "Crossover":
* Microsoft Outlook
* Microsoft Project
* Microsoft Visio
* Half-Life 2
* Quicken
Not a giant list of supported apps in the end (although many may work without "support"...). One would think the choices are about filling gaps with missing OS X apps that are popular or loved on the Windows platform, but its a funny list:
Outlook is a funny choice, since "Entourage" exists from Microsoft for the same purpose (I don't use it, but those I know who do like it more than Outlook on Windows).
Project does or used to exist in a native Mac port. This is a real cash cow for Microsoft - there is no competitor of note at that price point, and they sell a ton of this to businesses that use it so that people can look at the Gantt chart but don't really do project planning. Much like other Microsoft apps, this one is bought on inertia with little to justify the cost and little enhancement/investment done by the vendor over the years.
Visio is similar. It's a great program (bought by Microsoft), although overpriced for what it does or not sold with a compelling "plug in" story for the real specialty uses it has. Few Mac equivalents exist that get recognition by purchasing departments, and real import/export issues with the non-Microsoft versions when trying to share Visio files.
Half-Life is an incredibly interesting item for them to pick off. I wish there was an equivalent OS X version (since Half Life is the best game ever, IMHO). While there are some good OS X games (or ports of other games) I'm tempted to try this just to get to see Half Life 2. I'd love to hear more about the business justification for this title with the rest.
Quicken is another funny choice, since there is a native OS X port of this one too - although one of the worst looking OS X apps I've seen.
So, for all that development effort they officially support a handful of titles, most of which have an OS X version.
The problem with radio traffic reports in the DC area is that they spend their 30 seconds telling you about the same main roads (beltway, I-66, I-270, and I-95), which are always in the same state of congestion and the people that use them all know this. They spend no time telling you about the arteries where there are alternate routes that have random activity that blocks them and that you would take an alternate route if possible. The CHART system is also only deployed on the same roads.
I'd love to use Google Maps/Traffic if I could tell it my start and end point and it would inform me of problems at least 15 minutes before I got there. It might. I wouldn't know since they don't support Palm OS...
I would imagine the human controlled bullies will ruin gameplay as much as the computer controlled ones could.
I looked through the articles and movies. Neat look to it, but it seems more like work than play. And having to wait several thousand millenium for evolution seems boring too. It will be interesting to see if you can create the truly humorous genetic manipulations, too. ("poops twice as much as it eats, and likes to eat poop", or "roars so loud it causes nuclear fission of all atoms").
Thou Shall Have Every Other Scene be an Interior Room of Identical Size and Decor
Thoust Must Spent Several Hours in the same "library", with endless streams of enemies coming from side halls without plot
Remember the Ewoks, and Keep them Holy for Comic Relief
Thy Strongest of Vehicles Must be Kept Contained in Tiny Areas, and Not Used to Explore
Makest thou "Swarm" faster than headcrabs, to remove all comparisons to Half-Life ripoffs
During the Most Interesting Moments, Create an Out of Body Experience to Remove the Enjoyment of the Action by the Player
Makest Sure the Light Saber, the Strongest of All Weapons, Disappears Whence Dropped
Because they now dominate the search related and text based on-line advertising market. They next want to dominate the image/animation based advertising market. It's not a sign of impending doom, its a sign of growth and increasing revenue.
Hardly a unique property of the Bush administration.
This was debated post-HIPAA enactment when they needed to identify who had enforcement authority for this new set of laws. HHS is not a branch of government one identifies with prosecution, although they do understand investigation. Justice is identified with prosecution, although they have little experience with healthcare.
No one is happy with the end result, although they are adapting.
Name _are_ protected health information. Associating a name with a facility can coorelate to personal health experience depending on the type of facility.
Here's the official list:
The following identifiers of the individual or of relatives, employers, or household members of the individual must be removed to achieve the "safe harbor" method of de-identification:
(A) Names;
(B) All geographic subdivisions smaller than a State, including street address, city, county, precinct, zip code, and their equivalent geocodes, except for the initial three digits of a zip code if, according to the current publicly available data from the Bureau of Census (1) the geographic units formed by combining all zip codes with the same three initial digits contains more than 20,000 people; and (2) the initial three digits of a zip code for all such geographic units containing 20,000 or fewer people is changed to 000;
(C) All elements of dates (except year) for dates directly related to the individual, including birth date, admission date, discharge date, date of death; and all ages over 89 and all elements of dates (including year) indicative of such age, except that such ages and elements may be aggregated into a single category of age 90 or older;
(D) Telephone numbers;
(E) Fax numbers;
(F) Electronic mail addresses:
(G) Social security numbers;
(H) Medical record numbers;
(I) Health plan beneficiary numbers;
(J) Account numbers;
(K) Certificate/license numbers;
(L) Vehicle identifiers and serial numbers, including license plate numbers;
(M) Device identifiers and serial numbers;
(N) Web Universal Resource Locators (URLs);
(O) Internet Protocol (IP) address numbers;
(P) Biometric identifiers, including finger and voice prints;
(Q) Full face photographic images and any comparable images; and ® any other unique identifying number, characteristic, or code, except as permitted for re-identification purposes provided certain conditions are met.
In addition to the removal of the above-stated identifiers, the covered entity may not have actual knowledge that the remaining information could be used alone or in combination with any other information to identify an individual who is subject of the information. 45 C.F.R. 164.514(b).
I don't think Radio Shack was about "building computers" as it was about "building radios". I don't remember motherboards and related parts in there, but coax cable, crimping tools, and bare electronic parts for hobbying and the ham radio crowd.
So, the founder passed on, the new public company thought it was all a bunch of nerdy junk and wanted to rub shoulders with Microsoft and Verizon, while refusing to notice that Best Buy going up across the street. All the Hams, non-cable-TV-people, kids interested in electronics, and people adding electronics to their cars went on to the Internet or gave up on the hobby.
Radio Shack could survive, but the market transitions to cell phones, cable TV, and integrated automobile electronics makes it unlikely it would be more than a niche vendor - like the places that sell musical instruments, billiards equipment, and other focused hobby retailers.
I wouldn't hold my breath for Verizon to remove the "no server" clause from their contract. At least not until every single one of their T1 lines no longer produces revenue for them.
To be clear, the Verizon FIOS agreement says no fixed IPs, no serving, residential use only (which seems to preclude home office professional use). Plus "Microsoft Windows required and MSN Premium", whatever that means. Plus you must switch your voice lines to FIOS and keep at least one voice line in the agreement.
If you discuss any of these feature needs with them the price quickly becomes $129 a month and up.
I was waiting for FIOS too. But I'll probably wait until their pricing reflects someone using the service besides kids websurfing on a Microsoft box.
Your rephrase is correct. Any performance is supposed to pay royalties, but small clubs, private weddings, and similar things are not worth the enforcement. High schools advertise they are doing a specific musical and need to make sure they purchase scripts and scores from the holder of the copyrights. Local cover bands playing in a dive get away with it unless the local musician's union wants to rat someone out. A wedding band never has to worry unless the daughter of an RIAA big shot is getting hitched.
The musician's union hates DJs. They've reduced the demand for local musicians, and they're using copyrighted material without paying royalties (usually).
Another problem is that while the system to collect, store, and distribute the information can be done and maintained open source, there's an implied accountability to the source of the data and a need to hold someone's feet to the fire when something's wrong or incomplete. I'm thinking of projects like "Gas Price Watch . Com" (http://www.gaspricewatch.com/ which is a great idea, but there's holes in the database and you can't make someone fill it in. Not such a big issue for them, but for being a source of comprehensive sales tax information its a pretty big challenge.
The technical problems are solvable by open source. I'm not sure the customer service ones are. Good idea, though.
I'll risk eternal damnation and state I like Dvorak's columns.
To me, its a guilty pleasure. He's kind of the Andy Rooney of the tech world - he's been ranting in this space so long that he's one of the few commentators with a historical perspective. I'll take his crackpot rantings for entertainment value over the people commenting in this space that can only remember back to Windows 98. For every silly opinion about what the next big thing is, there's a nice frank blast of some stupid product from a company that should no better.
So, a prediction from Dvorak about Microsoft's Mac agenda is the equivalent of Rooney spouting off for the 10th time about how they used to put more coffee in a can of coffee. Might have a funny line or two, and easily avoided if its dumb.
You didn't need to be that old. I started 1980 punching cards for Fortran programming like all the engineering students. I don't think they changed this until 82. Rebooting from manual switches was still common on mini-computers around then until 1986 I think (PDP 11s, DG Eclipse).
Of course, around 1982 you could plunk down $3000 for one of those totally cool IBM PCs. Although I think my Commodore 64 was around $200 and had better graphics and sound anyway.
Oh, and it wasn't that hard to leap from Fortran to Pascal to newer things. I'm pretty sure Intel still sells a Fortran compiler for serious number crunching.
Berkeley (and MIT and CM and others) probably aren't the best examples, since this is where a lot of the original work took place. Running through catalogs of the average state college might give a better perspective? The programs back then just weren't that big, not many professors and the students weren't that many. I was in college 1980-84, and CS was still getting kicked around between the College of Engineering and the College of Science and had the crappiest space on campus.
In the 90's, there were lots of programs, they were full of people, community colleges had programs, and all these alternate computer training programs sprung up. A lot more people were pumped through these channels than in the 70s, that's for sure.
The original topic is a funny one - it sure does seem like they fade away at 40 (I'm 43 now, and in management). I wonder what this same comment would be if "programmers" was replaced with any other college major other than "medicine", "law", or "business"?
Yes. A decent implementation of Robotron 2084 would not be too far behind!
Somewhere, in an underground fortress in Washington state, someone is stroking a white cat in his stainless steel command chair and chuckling as the outline of India is changing color to blue...
I can't, with any sense of responsibility to young people in the US, encourage them to study IT.
The jobs are going overseas, as investors are mandating it either for cost reasons or because they now have a stake in some offshore concern. The jobs are emotionally frustuating because management expects programming to work on time and on budget like other engineering disciplines, but in practice its still an academic exercise with little thought to design and expectations. And, increasingly the vendors have turned the jobs into a vocational trade and not the creative and intellectual exercise it used to be.
There are still good jobs out there, but you'll have to make them yourself and hope you hang in there long enough to run the company and outsource the work to someone else. Otherwise, your a network support guy or sitting at a help desk in some cubicle waiting for the phone to ring for a question from an idiot in Finance.
But I'm not bitter...
Partially support them. Outlook does not let you import an iCal file with multiple records in it.
For me, I don't want Linux to copy Windows. Aisde from the funny technical issues around copying that architecture, I'm completely happy with Linux being a UNIX centric experience and not a Windows centric experience. I don't want the word processors to integrate with Email and I don't want the browser integrated deeply in the OS.
:-)
This is not a money issue. While no doubt some people are attracted to Linux because they want to save money, I don't think this drives most consumer level purchases, particularly since Windows comes with a lot of the machines out there. My decisions were based on having more choices for tools and apps, having to spend less time patching and virus scanning, and having an ability to debug and monitor the system with more granularity. Not financial drivers.
Although I think the rest of your analogy may be flawed. When you purchase Windows, its not $120, but most likely $120+$400 (office) + $2000 for VS.NET. You can do better as a student, and you do much worse as a company when all this is on the annual subscription they call a license. Your annualized $60 probably isn't the whole picture.
More importantly, your comparing something that (for many) is an annoyance and something of decreasing value (Windows) with something that is increasing in value (real estate) and purchased for far different reasons. People decide to live somewhere because of jobs, family, lifestyle, etc. An OS is much more easily replaced.
As to the coffee comparison, one person's overpriced coffee is another person's gourmet coffee + cream + indulgence (comparing a Twinkie with a gourmet cake).