Better to lose one $8 book than a $400 reader and every book on it.
And agree about the interface preference. Books are just comforting. Reading is supposed to be something you do to get AWAY from the ever-present electronics. Something simple and entertaining you can take with you anywhere, sit on or drop down a flight of stairs without damage, and loan to friends. It's not something you need to design a digital "experience" around.
Ah, see, there's your difference. I don't own a tv, much less an HD with a surround setup. You've made an investment there. Have you factored in that cost? Assuming you sunk about 5 grand into your home setup, you'd have to watch 345 movies before you break even, and that's JUST comparing tickets for two to movie rental plus hardware.
You don't really need popcorn or soda, so I don't see why you keep factoring that in. But "paying to sit in a dark room and not talk to anyone" is ignoring the communal aspects, which can actually be fun. Seeing a really funny movie with a bunch of people who appreciate it is a group experience, and it's not one you can get at home (to the same scale, anyway). Seeing a really moving film seems just a little more satisfying when you're part of an audience that bursts into applause at the end. It's a cultural experience, and that's not completely valueless. And if you're going for indie flicks, those usually apply, as well as the fact that finding dvds is a lot harder, if not impossible. I doubt they're going to release the Oscar-nominated shorts as a collection, but I got to see them in the theater for $6 last weekend.
The difference is, in a private company the owner is the guy that started the entire thing in his garage, and poured 15 years of his life into it. He's interested in keeping it strong and stable so he can pass it on to his kids when he's gone, and because he has pride in it. With shareholders, the "owner" is some dude halfway across the country who thinks he can make a quick buck. Like someone said elsewhere under this story, Ford right now has two options: make great cars that customers want to buy, or liquidate physical assets to get some quick cash. Guess which ones shareholders looking for quick stock price gains prefer?
Yes, there are certainly original writers left. I'd like to point you towards Charlie Kaufman, for one... Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind were all massively creative, and well-acted to boot; hell, even Human Nature was better than the average comedy.
Another: Aaron Sorkin, wrote A Few Good Men, and The American President before diverting to TV to do Sports Night and the first 4 seasons of West Wing (and he's working on a new series now).
Even some adaptations are so drastically re-worked as to bear only a passing resemblance to the original. The new Battlestar series is quite well written, and shares only a couple of proper nouns with the original series.
And don't forget, people are still writing new books. Because movies cost a lot, studios aren't as eager to take risks on them; there's more red tape to wade through, and people who just want to tell stories without having to fight quite so damn hard to make their vision come out the way they want it, frequently turn to publishing. Stories that are light years beyond any movie in terms of creativity are routinely completed as novels. Dan Simmons, Gene Wolfe, Salman Rushdie, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge and hundreds more, are publishing new books that put all but the best movies to shame. None of them are recycled, and in fact, many of them make me wonder just exactly what the author was smoking to be able to come up with something so original.
Yeah, there's a lot of rehashed crap as well, but that's because people will pay to see it. I guess a lot of folks don't want to have to think too hard when they look for entertainment, and the safety of something they already understand is appealing. But that doesn't mean something better isn't out there if you look for it. You just won't find it in the big-budget action or comedy films.
Seattle rocks for indie theaters. There are 3 within a five minute drive of my apartment, two of which have gigantic screens, and the other has 3, so it can play a ton of different films. At least five more over on the other side of the lake too. Hell, though, even in the middle of nowhere in the midwest, you can usually find an indie theater or two...
Well, that, or they can get sued by irate shareholders, for not keeping their interests first in their plans. It's happened before, and it will definitely happen again (although not necessarily to Google).
This is basically an argument against companies going public, isn't it? Unless the government instituted minimum times to hold stock before you can sell it again, which they aren't going to do, there's no way to stop traders from descending on a stock, voting to pump as much perceived value into it in a short period as possible, and then ditching. As long as you allow publicly traded ownership in a company, the result is going to be an attention to the short term rather than long term.
you do realize, I hope, that the Fed can't just print itself as much money as it wants, because that would lead to massive inflation and the collapse of the US economy. The concept of money only works when used as a representation of labor/production.
Right, but IPv4 can be TREATED as a subset of IPv6 and it works. I.E. 129.186.0.1 becomes 00:00:00:00:81:BA:00:01, or whatever their weird format is. All you have to do is treat those two the same, and bam, instant interoperability. And this isn't just a theory, people are running networks using this already.
I did, in fact. He complains that it does no good for companies to multi-head websites on IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, because customers won't use the IPv6 version. Unfortunately, this is bogus. I can set up my entire home network today running IPv6 behind a NAT. Since the entire IPv4 address space is a subset of IPv6, I can run a compatibility layer that maps the two. When a remote site has an IPv6 address, I use that, and when they don't, I use the mapped IPv4 address. When outside sites talk to me, they see my IP as the IPv4 address I'm assigned, but I see myself named as the IPv6 mapped version of that address. And there you go; I'm all IPv6 and can still talk to the rest of the world just fine. I don't do this personally because, well, I just don't care. I'm lazy that way. But if someone snuck into my house in the middle of the night and set it up for me (say, Microsoft, in the next monthly update) I doubt I would notice, and I know grandma wouldn't. In addition, there are plenty of people who do run this way today, and it works just fine for them.
Um... but it is backwards compatible. At least as long as you have a translation layer (Firewall, NAT, etc) between the part of the network that uses it and the part that doesn't. Comcast or some such large ISP could migrate all their customers to IPv6 tomorrow, and maintain perfect interopperability with the rest of the net.
Your original question wasn't where they actually WERE the best, but where they were TRYING to be the best, rather than just trying to be the biggest. Yeah, they don't always succeed, but neither does any company. They've made some stuff that, despite it's flaws, is usable by grandmas around the world, and that's no small feat. Don't get me wrong, I run Gentoo on my home server, and I'm perfectly happy coding with nothing but Kate and a Tcsh prompt; but you have to recognize that Microsoft is making a set of tools with a very broad user base in mind, and they're succeeding quite well at a decent amount of the stuff they're trying.
As for your other points... I've heard good things about the next version of Office, as far as interface and cutting down on feature clutter, so while more features just thrown into the interface willy-nilly are indeed a step back, a more powerful system with a streamlined interface is probably a step up. As for "forced to upgrade to interact with other users"... all versions of Word can save to Word 95 format, so there's no problem there. If someone wants you editing their doc, they can give you a copy in that format, and if you just need to read it, well, the Word Reader has always been free.
It's a sad, paranoid little world you live in, my friend. Of course they care about being the best. Even if they were the only software company on the planet, there's still the little matter that you need to improve features and interface to get people to buy the next version of Office, otherwise you sell it once and your revenue stream stops dead.
As for products where they legitimately try to be "the best"... well, the entire.NET CLR framework is pretty damn cool, as is C#. Then there's VS2005 and SQL2005, both of which are very, very good. Start.com/Live.com are better than the ripoff Google Personal Homepage, which is the only serious competitor I can think of. Do they have problems? Of course. But if you seriously think that a majority of employees there go in every day thinking "I don't care about making things that make the most sense for the user... I'm going to try to crush the competition instead so I can slack off on features"... you're being stereotypical and dense. Fight past the/. mentality.
Yes, but in a free market, people are trying to screw you over at every turn, and the average person has been conditioned to not WANT to spend the time to protect their purchases. With government intervention, we're delegating the responsibility of preventing said screwage to a small subset of the population, and their research and market direction benefits everyone.
Not to mention markets like broadband, where it's basically physically impossible to wire many places for more than one brand of access. "Yes, we've decided to charge you $30 per gallon for our premium 'non-toxic' water. But it's a free market, you have choice. What's that, you say we own the only pipes into your building, as well as the infrastructure under the streets that was originally built by the city? Well, that's okay, you still have choice... you can carry your water in by the carload. See? The free market works!"
If you honestly think that they and every other search engine developer on the planet are not trying to return the most relevant search results to the end user, you're just delusional. Yes, they'd like to be better than Google, but nobody actually thinks that they'll do that by anything but focusing on making higher quality products.
While this is true, the actual mechanism of a "grammar shift", as far as it is understood, is much more a very wide-spread sudden change, rather than people gradually becoming too lazy to remember which word is what. Also, they almost never combine two words into one (affect/effect becoming interchangeable) but rather alters the context of a word ("Bob likes Jane" 600 years ago meant what "Jane likes Bob" means today).
That's what the LGPL is for...
Conversely, if the common code is a web service, an application hooked into your own through pipes, or something else less tightly coupled than a binary library, the GPL will work just fine.
Agreed. I'd add a cautionary note: don't try using "soft masked" packages on non-mainstream hardware or with really odd system configurations, unless you feel like risking crashes and corrupt data. As I understand it, soft masking usually means that they have tested it on the more common systems, but haven't gotten full coverage yet.
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The domain was not owned by cybersquatters before this, and I'm quite sure MS payed more than $4000 for it.
Better to lose one $8 book than a $400 reader and every book on it.
And agree about the interface preference. Books are just comforting. Reading is supposed to be something you do to get AWAY from the ever-present electronics. Something simple and entertaining you can take with you anywhere, sit on or drop down a flight of stairs without damage, and loan to friends. It's not something you need to design a digital "experience" around.
Ah, see, there's your difference. I don't own a tv, much less an HD with a surround setup. You've made an investment there. Have you factored in that cost? Assuming you sunk about 5 grand into your home setup, you'd have to watch 345 movies before you break even, and that's JUST comparing tickets for two to movie rental plus hardware.
You don't really need popcorn or soda, so I don't see why you keep factoring that in. But "paying to sit in a dark room and not talk to anyone" is ignoring the communal aspects, which can actually be fun. Seeing a really funny movie with a bunch of people who appreciate it is a group experience, and it's not one you can get at home (to the same scale, anyway). Seeing a really moving film seems just a little more satisfying when you're part of an audience that bursts into applause at the end. It's a cultural experience, and that's not completely valueless. And if you're going for indie flicks, those usually apply, as well as the fact that finding dvds is a lot harder, if not impossible. I doubt they're going to release the Oscar-nominated shorts as a collection, but I got to see them in the theater for $6 last weekend.
The difference is, in a private company the owner is the guy that started the entire thing in his garage, and poured 15 years of his life into it. He's interested in keeping it strong and stable so he can pass it on to his kids when he's gone, and because he has pride in it. With shareholders, the "owner" is some dude halfway across the country who thinks he can make a quick buck. Like someone said elsewhere under this story, Ford right now has two options: make great cars that customers want to buy, or liquidate physical assets to get some quick cash. Guess which ones shareholders looking for quick stock price gains prefer?
Yes, there are certainly original writers left. I'd like to point you towards Charlie Kaufman, for one... Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind were all massively creative, and well-acted to boot; hell, even Human Nature was better than the average comedy.
Another: Aaron Sorkin, wrote A Few Good Men, and The American President before diverting to TV to do Sports Night and the first 4 seasons of West Wing (and he's working on a new series now).
Even some adaptations are so drastically re-worked as to bear only a passing resemblance to the original. The new Battlestar series is quite well written, and shares only a couple of proper nouns with the original series.
And don't forget, people are still writing new books. Because movies cost a lot, studios aren't as eager to take risks on them; there's more red tape to wade through, and people who just want to tell stories without having to fight quite so damn hard to make their vision come out the way they want it, frequently turn to publishing. Stories that are light years beyond any movie in terms of creativity are routinely completed as novels. Dan Simmons, Gene Wolfe, Salman Rushdie, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge and hundreds more, are publishing new books that put all but the best movies to shame. None of them are recycled, and in fact, many of them make me wonder just exactly what the author was smoking to be able to come up with something so original.
Yeah, there's a lot of rehashed crap as well, but that's because people will pay to see it. I guess a lot of folks don't want to have to think too hard when they look for entertainment, and the safety of something they already understand is appealing. But that doesn't mean something better isn't out there if you look for it. You just won't find it in the big-budget action or comedy films.
Seattle rocks for indie theaters. There are 3 within a five minute drive of my apartment, two of which have gigantic screens, and the other has 3, so it can play a ton of different films. At least five more over on the other side of the lake too. Hell, though, even in the middle of nowhere in the midwest, you can usually find an indie theater or two...
not for $21 for dinner for 2 he's not... more like Wendy's or something...
Well, that, or they can get sued by irate shareholders, for not keeping their interests first in their plans. It's happened before, and it will definitely happen again (although not necessarily to Google).
This is basically an argument against companies going public, isn't it? Unless the government instituted minimum times to hold stock before you can sell it again, which they aren't going to do, there's no way to stop traders from descending on a stock, voting to pump as much perceived value into it in a short period as possible, and then ditching. As long as you allow publicly traded ownership in a company, the result is going to be an attention to the short term rather than long term.
you do realize, I hope, that the Fed can't just print itself as much money as it wants, because that would lead to massive inflation and the collapse of the US economy. The concept of money only works when used as a representation of labor/production.
Right, but IPv4 can be TREATED as a subset of IPv6 and it works. I.E. 129.186.0.1 becomes 00:00:00:00:81:BA:00:01, or whatever their weird format is. All you have to do is treat those two the same, and bam, instant interoperability. And this isn't just a theory, people are running networks using this already.
This country hasn't truly been controlled by "the people" in many, many years.
Of course. Living within your means is un-American. Did you not get the memo?
I did, in fact. He complains that it does no good for companies to multi-head websites on IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, because customers won't use the IPv6 version. Unfortunately, this is bogus. I can set up my entire home network today running IPv6 behind a NAT. Since the entire IPv4 address space is a subset of IPv6, I can run a compatibility layer that maps the two. When a remote site has an IPv6 address, I use that, and when they don't, I use the mapped IPv4 address. When outside sites talk to me, they see my IP as the IPv4 address I'm assigned, but I see myself named as the IPv6 mapped version of that address. And there you go; I'm all IPv6 and can still talk to the rest of the world just fine. I don't do this personally because, well, I just don't care. I'm lazy that way. But if someone snuck into my house in the middle of the night and set it up for me (say, Microsoft, in the next monthly update) I doubt I would notice, and I know grandma wouldn't. In addition, there are plenty of people who do run this way today, and it works just fine for them.
Unions have nothing to do with true socialism. They're a purely capitalist monopoly system, and they suck because all monopolies suck.
Um... but it is backwards compatible. At least as long as you have a translation layer (Firewall, NAT, etc) between the part of the network that uses it and the part that doesn't. Comcast or some such large ISP could migrate all their customers to IPv6 tomorrow, and maintain perfect interopperability with the rest of the net.
Your original question wasn't where they actually WERE the best, but where they were TRYING to be the best, rather than just trying to be the biggest. Yeah, they don't always succeed, but neither does any company. They've made some stuff that, despite it's flaws, is usable by grandmas around the world, and that's no small feat. Don't get me wrong, I run Gentoo on my home server, and I'm perfectly happy coding with nothing but Kate and a Tcsh prompt; but you have to recognize that Microsoft is making a set of tools with a very broad user base in mind, and they're succeeding quite well at a decent amount of the stuff they're trying.
As for your other points... I've heard good things about the next version of Office, as far as interface and cutting down on feature clutter, so while more features just thrown into the interface willy-nilly are indeed a step back, a more powerful system with a streamlined interface is probably a step up. As for "forced to upgrade to interact with other users"... all versions of Word can save to Word 95 format, so there's no problem there. If someone wants you editing their doc, they can give you a copy in that format, and if you just need to read it, well, the Word Reader has always been free.
It's a sad, paranoid little world you live in, my friend. Of course they care about being the best. Even if they were the only software company on the planet, there's still the little matter that you need to improve features and interface to get people to buy the next version of Office, otherwise you sell it once and your revenue stream stops dead.
.NET CLR framework is pretty damn cool, as is C#. Then there's VS2005 and SQL2005, both of which are very, very good. Start.com/Live.com are better than the ripoff Google Personal Homepage, which is the only serious competitor I can think of. Do they have problems? Of course. But if you seriously think that a majority of employees there go in every day thinking "I don't care about making things that make the most sense for the user... I'm going to try to crush the competition instead so I can slack off on features"... you're being stereotypical and dense. Fight past the /. mentality.
As for products where they legitimately try to be "the best"... well, the entire
Yes, but in a free market, people are trying to screw you over at every turn, and the average person has been conditioned to not WANT to spend the time to protect their purchases. With government intervention, we're delegating the responsibility of preventing said screwage to a small subset of the population, and their research and market direction benefits everyone.
Not to mention markets like broadband, where it's basically physically impossible to wire many places for more than one brand of access. "Yes, we've decided to charge you $30 per gallon for our premium 'non-toxic' water. But it's a free market, you have choice. What's that, you say we own the only pipes into your building, as well as the infrastructure under the streets that was originally built by the city? Well, that's okay, you still have choice... you can carry your water in by the carload. See? The free market works!"
What? If you're implying that the rest of us lose in the end, that's most definitely not true in this case.
If you honestly think that they and every other search engine developer on the planet are not trying to return the most relevant search results to the end user, you're just delusional. Yes, they'd like to be better than Google, but nobody actually thinks that they'll do that by anything but focusing on making higher quality products.
While this is true, the actual mechanism of a "grammar shift", as far as it is understood, is much more a very wide-spread sudden change, rather than people gradually becoming too lazy to remember which word is what. Also, they almost never combine two words into one (affect/effect becoming interchangeable) but rather alters the context of a word ("Bob likes Jane" 600 years ago meant what "Jane likes Bob" means today).
That's what the LGPL is for... Conversely, if the common code is a web service, an application hooked into your own through pipes, or something else less tightly coupled than a binary library, the GPL will work just fine.
Agreed. I'd add a cautionary note: don't try using "soft masked" packages on non-mainstream hardware or with really odd system configurations, unless you feel like risking crashes and corrupt data. As I understand it, soft masking usually means that they have tested it on the more common systems, but haven't gotten full coverage yet.
Except it was ALREADY legal to make copies of music for personal use. If you're talking about distributing it to friends, that's another story...