The point that Ray Ozzie is trying to make is that, at some point, Microsoft needs to stop following the industry and become the one the industry follows again.
This will never happen. Ever. Microsoft simply has too much dead weight in their workforce, and isn't attractive enough to convince the early adopter types to come back and work for them. It's the natural lifecycle of businesses. Once you have a certain number of products that need to be maintained, rather than developed fresh, you're forced to start hiring from the second tier, and it's the beginning of the end.
Ah yes, so when I loaned my copy of The Cathedral and the Bazaar to a friend of mine, what I really should have done was hand him my entire bookshelf full of books -- you know, because we are supposed to be replacing our bookshelves with our Kindles.
While I don't entirely disagree, I would point out that, unlike a regular book, if you loan out your Kindle hardware and your friend loses it, you can deregister it through the website and still retain access to your entire library. Same goes for if you have a fire, or a flood, or any other massive catastrophe that would have destroyed all your hardcopy books.
Yes, loaning a single book is now the same as loaning your entire library, except you can still read the same library on your PC WHILE it's lent out, and there are a couple other benefits that you have over hardcopy to balance it out.
I don't get the Firefox memory issue. I've been running it for about 24 hours now, and it's sitting on 140mb in Vista64 (4gb installed, about 1.5gb used total ATM). I do get other issues with Firefox, such as the unable to close (even empty) tabs bug... but memory usage is not one of the problems.
I was in the same camp until I upgraded to Windows 7. I installed a subset of the extensions I had installed on the old system, where Firefox used to run just fine. Only now I can hit over a gig of memory in less than a day of relatively heavy browsing, and this is more than enough to slow the browser down a whole hell of a lot. Something is obviously wrong. Not wrong enough that I'm going to switch browsers, but wrong enough that I'm a little pissed they won't take some time to dig into it and fix it.
Because that's how we collectively provide services such as the roads you drive on, the testing that ensures the food you eat isn't contaminated, the schools that educated you and the people around you, and the military that protects you.
Just look at how long it took Apple to gain traction, and they still have what, 10% of the market?
Yeah, but Apple also requires custom hardware. Custom hardware which is often more expensive than the equivalent which runs Windows/Linux/Whatever.
I'm of the opinion that "Linux vs Windows on the desktop" has become a nonsensical argument, though. Five years ago, sure, there's competition. You had to decide which one to boot, and it took a couple minutes to switch. Now anyone with a halfway decent machine can install VirtualBox and run both at once. It's no longer "do you use Linux or Windows". I have Windows on the hardware because I play games, and I use Ubuntu in a VM for coding, running servers, and other things that it does better than Windows. I browse in Windows just because it's faster to be closer to the metal, but I could easily use the VM for that without much hassle.
The argument is that laws are currently made with the idea that they will not be enforced 100% of the time. Because currently it takes an actual law officer to cite someone for an infraction. This means that they can apply their judgment instead of mindlessly sticking to the letter of the law despite any mitigating circumstances.
If you're going to move to a 100% automated, letter-of-the-law system, you HAVE to revisit any law that such a system is going to enforce and rewrite it. Because that's absolutely not what was intended when the laws were originally written.
Yeah, we lost so many top-notch entrepreneurs during the 40s-70s when we actually HAD a 90% top-tier tax bracket. Your argument is entirely based in historical fact.
If the first guy's income tax is increased to 90%, then he can't create those new businesses. Now you have a man who USED to make 1 million but had to close-up shop because the heavy taxation made it impossible to survive
Only if he was dumb enough to not claim the money he invested in the company as a write-off. See, the money he would use to pay those fictional employees is NOT taxed at 90%, even in your scenario. In fact it's taxed relatively little, likely just the half of Medicare and Social Security tax that corporations pay on employee compensation. And the portion of it he spends on physical or service related costs of his business isn't taxed at all. The only way he's going to suddenly be out 900k is if he was taking that much in personal income one year, then turning around the next year and putting his personal assets back into the business.
If anything, raising personal income tax would be an incentive to invest more. If the choice is between taking an extra million in personal income of which 90% goes to taxes, or rolling that million back into tax-free investment in the company, the company is a much better option. Today you can take that million in extra income and pay only 30% in taxes, so it's a lot more appealing.
Basically, your argument is ridiculous, based only in fiction, and you appear to have such a loose grasp on the American tax code that I suspect you are overdue for an audit.
The problem with a non-neutral network is that it quickly becomes a tool to increase lock-in. If youtube and hulu start paying major ISPs to prioritize their traffic, then the barrier to entry becomes that much higher for the next product which, on a level playing field, could have competed with them.
Mind you, there's another aspect to this as well, which is the whole "double dipping" problem. Because what I, you, and every other ISP subscriber out there are paying for is (at least used to be) a connection that would deliver whatever we requested at the speed we paid for. We're still doing that, but the providers are trying to take a cut from the people on the other side of the connection as well, and that's where we get into problems. See, if I want to go to "watchingpaintdry.com" and stream it 24 hours a day, I should be able to use just as much bandwidth as if I were watching Hulu. Because I paid for it. Because it's good for competition. Because if my ISP limits watchingpaintdry.com to a lower bandwidth in an attempt to extort them into paying them off, they degrade the utility and quality of the service I paid for.
Like Lessig said, the beauty of the platform is its openness. All the ISPs have to do is route bits to your home at the rate you paid for. And because those bits can come from anybody, the platform is incredibly useful as a multi-purpose tool. Except if all they're doing is routing bits, they lose all those money-making goodies like advertisements and service add-ons, and they don't want that. It's greed, pure and simple.
There's people who may not know about those things, yes, or may not care enough to take the time to painstakingly set up filters for every type of thing they get.
Hell, I use filters to add labels to my messages, and I still prefer using them as folders to searches. Gmail's partial-word match is non-existant, and even when it does work, it's surprisingly hard to remember a specific word in an email you want to find sometimes. I have much better luck with remembering generally what category a thing is and where I "put" it than remembering keywords to search by.
That's good for people who want to set up a lot of manual labels (I'm one of them). However, there are a lot of people who don't, and even I find myself not taking the time to set up a filter for some of the smaller sources of "nice to have but unimportant" emails that I get. This does it automatically based on your behavior of how you interact with the stuff that makes it through the filter. Seems like a good idea to me.
There's a reason why the US government of today dwarfs the US government of only 50, let alone 100 years ago, both in revenue and power over the people -- and it's not because the elite at the top don't know exactly how to expand their business.
Because our population is larger, travel and thus effect from neighboring countries is easier, and the modern world is generally much more complicated with more things to keep track of?
Oh shit, I accidentally made sense all over your delusional rambling. Sorry about that.
My go to example is this: Mac OSX can't copy more than 1GB from a remote share without locking up and needing a hard restart. I can repro this 100% of the time. That's not a high quality product.
In general, yes, their new stuff looks more polished. That doesn't necessarily mean it's higher quality under the hood. And further, that polish comes at the expense of some flexibility, which is more important to some people than others.
I don't know if you've tried to use a mac within a larger ecosystem of non-mac, but I've found it to be a truly terrible experience. If you have all mac stuff and do everything the Apple way, it works perfectly. As soon as you start mixing things up, you feel the pain.
Maybe interoperability was the wrong word, but that type of "Apple universe" feel is the equivalent of exactly what they bitched about Microsoft doing back in the 90s, as far as I can tell.
I understand that's possible, and honestly their PC hardware is easily the best thing they make (it's VERY nice hardware). But that's not the majority of what Apple represents these days. It's much more the iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Steve's smirk as he tells you "just don't hold the phone that way". The fact that you can wipe the OS on their PC hardware is great, but Apple is not just a hardware company, and they strongly resist attempts to relegate them to that space.
I was a rabid defender of the Mac back when it was OS 8.5 against Windows 95. Sure, the hardware was a little pricey, but the quality was high, and you could hack around in it like crazy. Now their prices are still high, but the quality has slipped. And none of their systems seem to be geared toward modification or creation, just passive consumption.
They also used to be all about interoperability, and complained like crazy whenever Microsoft made it harder to migrate off their system. Now they exploit vendor lock-in across their family of products way more than Microsoft ever has or will, and expect you to smile about it.
Call me a social reject if you want, but I'm going to continue to not do business with companies that over-hype, under-perform, and lie to you with a condescending smirk on their face while they do it.
Because of the "I want to work in games" factor, sure. If you just want to be a programmer, there's plenty of opportunity that doesn't involve sacrificing your personal time or putting up with insane people in the workplace.
Employed at a Fortune 100 entirely on my own merits, actually. But nice try.
I also do technical interviews, and I know for a fact that skilled programmers are in high demand, and that there is absolutely no reason they should settle for the kind of stuff the parents are describing. If you're good at a technical discipline, you can always find work that doesn't suck.
A dictatorship that controls the flow of information, doesn't skim too much off the top and cracks down on corruption in the lower ranks is a quite efficient way of governing a nation.
I know a couple Chinese expats who would disagree with you. They left China for the US because corruption at the local level of government has become institutionalized to a ridiculous extent in the current Chinese culture. If you want to play within the system and become one of the people who benefit from corruption, sure, it's a pretty sweet gig. If you want to live somewhere that acts as something close to a true meritocracy, where corruption in business and government is actually seen as a problem and occasionally fixed, you're going to have to look somewhere else (for example, the US).
Have there been any problems with photographers damaging the booms or causing breaches?
It's pretty unlikely, given that not a single foot of the gulf is actually boomed properly. See, actual booming requires that the booming be in the water, deployed in a zig-zag fashion with the high points leading to collection equipment. It also requires nearly round-the-clock hand maintenance to deal with changing tides, wind, waves, etc. Laying down a straight line of boom in the water, then leaving it to sit does fuck-all to contain oil, and less than fuck-all when it gets wadded up on the beach a couple hours later.
So no, I doubt that there's a serious problem with photographers damaging booms. And yes, this is almost certainly about spin control, rather than actual disaster control.
Slashdot Mirror
This will never happen. Ever. Microsoft simply has too much dead weight in their workforce, and isn't attractive enough to convince the early adopter types to come back and work for them. It's the natural lifecycle of businesses. Once you have a certain number of products that need to be maintained, rather than developed fresh, you're forced to start hiring from the second tier, and it's the beginning of the end.
Which I'm pretty sure is in Firefox 4. I saw it mentioned as an upcoming feature a couple months back, anyway...
While I don't entirely disagree, I would point out that, unlike a regular book, if you loan out your Kindle hardware and your friend loses it, you can deregister it through the website and still retain access to your entire library. Same goes for if you have a fire, or a flood, or any other massive catastrophe that would have destroyed all your hardcopy books.
Yes, loaning a single book is now the same as loaning your entire library, except you can still read the same library on your PC WHILE it's lent out, and there are a couple other benefits that you have over hardcopy to balance it out.
I was in the same camp until I upgraded to Windows 7. I installed a subset of the extensions I had installed on the old system, where Firefox used to run just fine. Only now I can hit over a gig of memory in less than a day of relatively heavy browsing, and this is more than enough to slow the browser down a whole hell of a lot. Something is obviously wrong. Not wrong enough that I'm going to switch browsers, but wrong enough that I'm a little pissed they won't take some time to dig into it and fix it.
Because that's how we collectively provide services such as the roads you drive on, the testing that ensures the food you eat isn't contaminated, the schools that educated you and the people around you, and the military that protects you.
Yeah, but Apple also requires custom hardware. Custom hardware which is often more expensive than the equivalent which runs Windows/Linux/Whatever.
I'm of the opinion that "Linux vs Windows on the desktop" has become a nonsensical argument, though. Five years ago, sure, there's competition. You had to decide which one to boot, and it took a couple minutes to switch. Now anyone with a halfway decent machine can install VirtualBox and run both at once. It's no longer "do you use Linux or Windows". I have Windows on the hardware because I play games, and I use Ubuntu in a VM for coding, running servers, and other things that it does better than Windows. I browse in Windows just because it's faster to be closer to the metal, but I could easily use the VM for that without much hassle.
The argument is that laws are currently made with the idea that they will not be enforced 100% of the time. Because currently it takes an actual law officer to cite someone for an infraction. This means that they can apply their judgment instead of mindlessly sticking to the letter of the law despite any mitigating circumstances.
If you're going to move to a 100% automated, letter-of-the-law system, you HAVE to revisit any law that such a system is going to enforce and rewrite it. Because that's absolutely not what was intended when the laws were originally written.
Yeah, we lost so many top-notch entrepreneurs during the 40s-70s when we actually HAD a 90% top-tier tax bracket. Your argument is entirely based in historical fact.
Only if he was dumb enough to not claim the money he invested in the company as a write-off. See, the money he would use to pay those fictional employees is NOT taxed at 90%, even in your scenario. In fact it's taxed relatively little, likely just the half of Medicare and Social Security tax that corporations pay on employee compensation. And the portion of it he spends on physical or service related costs of his business isn't taxed at all. The only way he's going to suddenly be out 900k is if he was taking that much in personal income one year, then turning around the next year and putting his personal assets back into the business.
If anything, raising personal income tax would be an incentive to invest more. If the choice is between taking an extra million in personal income of which 90% goes to taxes, or rolling that million back into tax-free investment in the company, the company is a much better option. Today you can take that million in extra income and pay only 30% in taxes, so it's a lot more appealing.
Basically, your argument is ridiculous, based only in fiction, and you appear to have such a loose grasp on the American tax code that I suspect you are overdue for an audit.
The problem with a non-neutral network is that it quickly becomes a tool to increase lock-in. If youtube and hulu start paying major ISPs to prioritize their traffic, then the barrier to entry becomes that much higher for the next product which, on a level playing field, could have competed with them.
Mind you, there's another aspect to this as well, which is the whole "double dipping" problem. Because what I, you, and every other ISP subscriber out there are paying for is (at least used to be) a connection that would deliver whatever we requested at the speed we paid for. We're still doing that, but the providers are trying to take a cut from the people on the other side of the connection as well, and that's where we get into problems. See, if I want to go to "watchingpaintdry.com" and stream it 24 hours a day, I should be able to use just as much bandwidth as if I were watching Hulu. Because I paid for it. Because it's good for competition. Because if my ISP limits watchingpaintdry.com to a lower bandwidth in an attempt to extort them into paying them off, they degrade the utility and quality of the service I paid for.
Like Lessig said, the beauty of the platform is its openness. All the ISPs have to do is route bits to your home at the rate you paid for. And because those bits can come from anybody, the platform is incredibly useful as a multi-purpose tool. Except if all they're doing is routing bits, they lose all those money-making goodies like advertisements and service add-ons, and they don't want that. It's greed, pure and simple.
I've got bad news for you... most of us don't care at all, and will take immediate delivery over resolution any day.
There's people who may not know about those things, yes, or may not care enough to take the time to painstakingly set up filters for every type of thing they get. Hell, I use filters to add labels to my messages, and I still prefer using them as folders to searches. Gmail's partial-word match is non-existant, and even when it does work, it's surprisingly hard to remember a specific word in an email you want to find sometimes. I have much better luck with remembering generally what category a thing is and where I "put" it than remembering keywords to search by.
Um... I think this is for people who may NOT be quite as tech-savvy as you...
That's good for people who want to set up a lot of manual labels (I'm one of them). However, there are a lot of people who don't, and even I find myself not taking the time to set up a filter for some of the smaller sources of "nice to have but unimportant" emails that I get. This does it automatically based on your behavior of how you interact with the stuff that makes it through the filter. Seems like a good idea to me.
Because our population is larger, travel and thus effect from neighboring countries is easier, and the modern world is generally much more complicated with more things to keep track of?
Oh shit, I accidentally made sense all over your delusional rambling. Sorry about that.
Fair enough. To be accurate, I'm going to avoid the worst examples of this behavior, of which Apple is one.
My go to example is this: Mac OSX can't copy more than 1GB from a remote share without locking up and needing a hard restart. I can repro this 100% of the time. That's not a high quality product.
In general, yes, their new stuff looks more polished. That doesn't necessarily mean it's higher quality under the hood. And further, that polish comes at the expense of some flexibility, which is more important to some people than others.
I don't know if you've tried to use a mac within a larger ecosystem of non-mac, but I've found it to be a truly terrible experience. If you have all mac stuff and do everything the Apple way, it works perfectly. As soon as you start mixing things up, you feel the pain.
Maybe interoperability was the wrong word, but that type of "Apple universe" feel is the equivalent of exactly what they bitched about Microsoft doing back in the 90s, as far as I can tell.
I understand that's possible, and honestly their PC hardware is easily the best thing they make (it's VERY nice hardware). But that's not the majority of what Apple represents these days. It's much more the iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Steve's smirk as he tells you "just don't hold the phone that way". The fact that you can wipe the OS on their PC hardware is great, but Apple is not just a hardware company, and they strongly resist attempts to relegate them to that space.
I was a rabid defender of the Mac back when it was OS 8.5 against Windows 95. Sure, the hardware was a little pricey, but the quality was high, and you could hack around in it like crazy. Now their prices are still high, but the quality has slipped. And none of their systems seem to be geared toward modification or creation, just passive consumption.
They also used to be all about interoperability, and complained like crazy whenever Microsoft made it harder to migrate off their system. Now they exploit vendor lock-in across their family of products way more than Microsoft ever has or will, and expect you to smile about it.
Call me a social reject if you want, but I'm going to continue to not do business with companies that over-hype, under-perform, and lie to you with a condescending smirk on their face while they do it.
Because of the "I want to work in games" factor, sure. If you just want to be a programmer, there's plenty of opportunity that doesn't involve sacrificing your personal time or putting up with insane people in the workplace.
Employed at a Fortune 100 entirely on my own merits, actually. But nice try.
I also do technical interviews, and I know for a fact that skilled programmers are in high demand, and that there is absolutely no reason they should settle for the kind of stuff the parents are describing. If you're good at a technical discipline, you can always find work that doesn't suck.
Only for unskilled labor. For skilled labor, there's no reason to settle for that BS.
I know a couple Chinese expats who would disagree with you. They left China for the US because corruption at the local level of government has become institutionalized to a ridiculous extent in the current Chinese culture. If you want to play within the system and become one of the people who benefit from corruption, sure, it's a pretty sweet gig. If you want to live somewhere that acts as something close to a true meritocracy, where corruption in business and government is actually seen as a problem and occasionally fixed, you're going to have to look somewhere else (for example, the US).
It's pretty unlikely, given that not a single foot of the gulf is actually boomed properly. See, actual booming requires that the booming be in the water, deployed in a zig-zag fashion with the high points leading to collection equipment. It also requires nearly round-the-clock hand maintenance to deal with changing tides, wind, waves, etc. Laying down a straight line of boom in the water, then leaving it to sit does fuck-all to contain oil, and less than fuck-all when it gets wadded up on the beach a couple hours later.
So no, I doubt that there's a serious problem with photographers damaging booms. And yes, this is almost certainly about spin control, rather than actual disaster control.