From the article: Microsoft last financial year generated $9.6bn of its total $28bn of revenues from desktop software.
Anyone know the breakdown of where the other $18.4 billion came from? I can't even begin to hazard a guess, but I had thought, perhaps naively, that desktop software was a bigger percentage than that.
This also raises another problem for MS: at least with Word 2000 (the only Word I have access to), the import filters for Wordperfect files are old (latest is WP 6!) and horrid, while the Wordperfect import filters for Word are recent and quite good. If this catches on, MS will be in deep kaka on the file-compatability scene. I suppose they could just throw more of their monke^H^H^H^H^Hprogrammers at the problem, but they'd have to at least wait until the next version to roll it out.
(Oh wait, what am I talking about? MS Office is part of the Operating System!)
The problem with some of these faith based programs (the ones where you are forced to live on-site) is they REQUIRE you to partake in religious activities more often then not.
Yes, but you don't have to listen. (Isn't that what everyone is always saying about the 1st Amendment? You have the right to speak, but I have the right to ignore?) And if it solves this following problem...
Then let's say you got arrested for drunken & disorderly.
...then what does it matter? I thought we were supposed to fund organizations based on how effective they are. If an organization is very good at, say, alcoholic rehab, why should it be denied funding because it also happens to be faith-based? The state isn't funding a religion, it's funding a charitable organization. How is this any different from the state funding scientific research? Or art? Or hospitals? Or street-cleaners? Or even granting scholarships to people who hold a given religious belief, or any kind of belief? He/she/it does what it does well, and so they receive money so they can do it better and so that the gov't knows it isn't wasting its money. Don't corporate investors do the same thing (dot-com frenzy aside)? Who cares about anything else?
(Of course, many argue somewhat plausibly that the constitution says nothing about denying government support even to religions, just that it would guarantee religious freedom, in contrast to what was happening in England at that time and before. But I'm not here to argue that.)
If one who is an atheist (to use your example) is bothered by being in a "faith-based" organization, perhaps that person's own faith in atheism (contradiction?) is weak. He should be able to remain firm without trouble, I would think, as many others have in the past, even to the point of being killed over it. (Ancient Rome, anyone? Modern China, anyone?)
Remember also that many hospitals are religiously-affiliated. In times past, especially in Catholic hospitals, a very large percentage of the staff would actually be comprised of priests and nuns. I don't think anyone was ever shocked and horrified by that, so why should this small-time stuff bother you now?
I say this: if the gov't is to be involved in maintaining quality of life in any capacity, it should act like a corporate investor, funding charitable organizations ("companies") that give a good return on investment, not ones that are cash sinkholes and don't benefit anyone. Who should care about ideology if the job gets done?
The only other possibilities I see are (A) the gov't doesn't concern itself with quality of life at all (unreasonable), (B) the gov't funds everybody regardless (a huge waste of money), (C) the gov't does everything itself (bloat and corruption) or (D) the gov't only funds "ideologically pure" organizations.
Of course, since it's impossible for an organization to be ideologically pure (everyone has an ideology), "purity" becomes defined simply on the basis of whatever the regime in power says it is, which sounds to me like a much more tyrannical and arbitrary exercise of gov't power than any of the above. The gov't should be non-descriminatory, and denying funding solely because an organization is a religious one, regardless of its merits, doesn't sound like non-discriminatory behavior to me.
So if someone opens a Jedi alchoholic rehab center, and they do have a good rehab rate, what do I even care whether "Jedi" is a real religion or not?
Minow said this in 1961 (according to the article). Dude, have you, like, ever watched any of the tv from that era? The only quibble I'd have with his statement is the word "vast". After all, there weren't that many channels.
"New" Age cults are as old as Homer (the Greek, not Simpson), if not older. Ever heard of the mystery cults? Although, granted, some of them were not outright scams, but neither are all of these sorts of things today. Some people are just plain crazy, or, if not, are attracted to madness, for whatever reason.
So, this so-called "new age" scam is not new at all. It's just making a comeback after a long 1500-year hiatus. It is an already-proven business plan, so to speak. Implement it on the web, and it just works better than it did before.
Welcome to the web, where everything old is new again. There's nothing new under the sun.
Except Linux. Linux is new. (Kidding! You uppity BSD/*nix folks...)
In fact, in general, the web indeed seems to "tug on the bell curve," so to speak: poor business plans in meatspace--which would have merely meant another failed small business for the SBA to chalk up--become truly atrocious disasters on the web, because of the ludicrous amount of capital they are (or were?) granted and the much larger exposure they receive. Just so, solid meatspace businesses usually thrive when they expand into the web, for the same reasons that bad businesses fail.
So of course many of the existing retail businesses would do even better when they moved to the web: if they were existing retail businesses in the first place, and they had the capital and the base from which to expand to the web, they had already demonstrated their business competence. The web only magnifies this. On the other hand, these dot-com wonders--most of which were conjured out of vapor--had done no such thing. Thus, they failed. It's just that because they were web businesses, they failed really big, and they got more press coverage. But think of how many ordinary retail businesses fail all the time--its just that they don't fail as big and they don't get ink spilled over them. So in the end, it's a wash anyway.
So, the web is a tool. Tools extend and enhance basic abilities that we already possess (e.g. anyone can add, but a computer can do it better. anyone can dig, but a shovel will do it better. etc.) If you have two people (one competent and one incompetent) and a nail, the former will drive it well and the latter will not (I suppose with their foreheads or something). But give those guys a hammer, and the competent one will drive it very well, and the incompetent will put a hole in the wall. (Cheezy example, I know.)
(most of the time the machine that crashes is my circa 1996 Dell Laptop which doesn't support boot CD).
You know, I had this same problem. I was trying to install Linux on an ancient HP Omnibook laptop, and of course its floppy drive had long since bit the dust. Proprietary laptop floppy drives, if you haven't noticed, are very expensive, even on eBay, even for 5+ year old models.
At first I just boot-strapped my way up to Linux from dos, which worked until I managed to get the computer into an unbootable state. Then I bought those laptop-ide to normal-ide adaptors (whatever they're called) and plugged the old hard drive into my desktop when necessary.
But alas, at long last, I found Smart BootManager: a flexible bootloader that allows you to boot from floppy, cdrom, and hd, regardless of your BIOS. This thing is perfect for old PCs. Heck, it will even adjust the year on your bios, for those stupid Award bioses that turn anything from 2000 up into 1994 (i.e., my old 486).
I found out about this from Debian (yay Debian!) which includes it on their install cdrom.
There may be better solutions out there, but this works perfectly for me. Also, the site doesn't seem to have been updated since Feb 2001, so it's probably a dead project.
Anyway, you dd it to your MBR (or use the install program?), make sure your lilo/grub/whatever is installed to the boot block of your root partition (instead of the MBR), and you're set. Boot from a cdrom on a 486!
Hm, it suddenly strikes me that this is probably off topic...
Why does electronic voting have to be such a complex proposition? I would think that it'd simply be a matter of distributing sealed, plug-in-and-go boxes to voting locations, hooking them up to touchscreens ("voting booths"), and having a printer keep a written record of votes as they are entered (date/time stamp and candidate chosen). Of course, you'd secure things as much as possible inside and out, but you certainly wouldn't be taking PCs running Windows and connecting them to lans!
No connecting things to networks, no fancy gui operating system, no general purpose computers: just a replacement for punch cards.
Perhaps we're too ambitious? What are we really trying to do here with electronic voting? I thought we were just trying to get more reliable counts. Some people seem to think the goal is to have faster counts, or pretty-looking voting screens, or whatever.
Further, what software or hardware security concerns could possibly exist with a closed box? Of course, there are still concerns of physical security, or just old-fashioned fraud, but we have those now already.
Surely there is some consideration I'm missing here? Right? It can't be as simple as I think, otherwise someone would have already done it.
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Um, there's still ambiguity: big endin or little endin? What charset?
Hmm, perhaps I should have been more clear: what's the breakdown by percentage?
From the article:
Microsoft last financial year generated $9.6bn of its total $28bn of revenues from desktop software.
Anyone know the breakdown of where the other $18.4 billion came from? I can't even begin to hazard a guess, but I had thought, perhaps naively, that desktop software was a bigger percentage than that.
This also raises another problem for MS: at least with Word 2000 (the only Word I have access to), the import filters for Wordperfect files are old (latest is WP 6!) and horrid, while the Wordperfect import filters for Word are recent and quite good. If this catches on, MS will be in deep kaka on the file-compatability scene. I suppose they could just throw more of their monke^H^H^H^H^Hprogrammers at the problem, but they'd have to at least wait until the next version to roll it out.
(Oh wait, what am I talking about? MS Office is part of the Operating System!)
Yes, but you don't have to listen. (Isn't that what everyone is always saying about the 1st Amendment? You have the right to speak, but I have the right to ignore?) And if it solves this following problem...
Then let's say you got arrested for drunken & disorderly.
(Of course, many argue somewhat plausibly that the constitution says nothing about denying government support even to religions, just that it would guarantee religious freedom, in contrast to what was happening in England at that time and before. But I'm not here to argue that.)
If one who is an atheist (to use your example) is bothered by being in a "faith-based" organization, perhaps that person's own faith in atheism (contradiction?) is weak. He should be able to remain firm without trouble, I would think, as many others have in the past, even to the point of being killed over it. (Ancient Rome, anyone? Modern China, anyone?)
Remember also that many hospitals are religiously-affiliated. In times past, especially in Catholic hospitals, a very large percentage of the staff would actually be comprised of priests and nuns. I don't think anyone was ever shocked and horrified by that, so why should this small-time stuff bother you now?
I say this: if the gov't is to be involved in maintaining quality of life in any capacity, it should act like a corporate investor, funding charitable organizations ("companies") that give a good return on investment, not ones that are cash sinkholes and don't benefit anyone. Who should care about ideology if the job gets done?
The only other possibilities I see are (A) the gov't doesn't concern itself with quality of life at all (unreasonable), (B) the gov't funds everybody regardless (a huge waste of money), (C) the gov't does everything itself (bloat and corruption) or (D) the gov't only funds "ideologically pure" organizations.
Of course, since it's impossible for an organization to be ideologically pure (everyone has an ideology), "purity" becomes defined simply on the basis of whatever the regime in power says it is, which sounds to me like a much more tyrannical and arbitrary exercise of gov't power than any of the above. The gov't should be non-descriminatory, and denying funding solely because an organization is a religious one, regardless of its merits, doesn't sound like non-discriminatory behavior to me.
So if someone opens a Jedi alchoholic rehab center, and they do have a good rehab rate, what do I even care whether "Jedi" is a real religion or not?
Minow said this in 1961 (according to the article). Dude, have you, like, ever watched any of the tv from that era? The only quibble I'd have with his statement is the word "vast". After all, there weren't that many channels.
"New" Age cults are as old as Homer (the Greek, not Simpson), if not older. Ever heard of the mystery cults? Although, granted, some of them were not outright scams, but neither are all of these sorts of things today. Some people are just plain crazy, or, if not, are attracted to madness, for whatever reason.
So, this so-called "new age" scam is not new at all. It's just making a comeback after a long 1500-year hiatus. It is an already-proven business plan, so to speak. Implement it on the web, and it just works better than it did before.
Welcome to the web, where everything old is new again. There's nothing new under the sun.
Except Linux. Linux is new. (Kidding! You uppity BSD/*nix folks...)
In fact, in general, the web indeed seems to "tug on the bell curve," so to speak: poor business plans in meatspace--which would have merely meant another failed small business for the SBA to chalk up--become truly atrocious disasters on the web, because of the ludicrous amount of capital they are (or were?) granted and the much larger exposure they receive. Just so, solid meatspace businesses usually thrive when they expand into the web, for the same reasons that bad businesses fail.
So of course many of the existing retail businesses would do even better when they moved to the web: if they were existing retail businesses in the first place, and they had the capital and the base from which to expand to the web, they had already demonstrated their business competence. The web only magnifies this. On the other hand, these dot-com wonders--most of which were conjured out of vapor--had done no such thing. Thus, they failed. It's just that because they were web businesses, they failed really big, and they got more press coverage. But think of how many ordinary retail businesses fail all the time--its just that they don't fail as big and they don't get ink spilled over them. So in the end, it's a wash anyway.
So, the web is a tool. Tools extend and enhance basic abilities that we already possess (e.g. anyone can add, but a computer can do it better. anyone can dig, but a shovel will do it better. etc.) If you have two people (one competent and one incompetent) and a nail, the former will drive it well and the latter will not (I suppose with their foreheads or something). But give those guys a hammer, and the competent one will drive it very well, and the incompetent will put a hole in the wall. (Cheezy example, I know.)
Look at Vegas.
Um, I think you need a better example...
(most of the time the machine that crashes is my circa 1996 Dell Laptop which doesn't support boot CD).
You know, I had this same problem. I was trying to install Linux on an ancient HP Omnibook laptop, and of course its floppy drive had long since bit the dust. Proprietary laptop floppy drives, if you haven't noticed, are very expensive, even on eBay, even for 5+ year old models.
At first I just boot-strapped my way up to Linux from dos, which worked until I managed to get the computer into an unbootable state. Then I bought those laptop-ide to normal-ide adaptors (whatever they're called) and plugged the old hard drive into my desktop when necessary.
But alas, at long last, I found Smart BootManager: a flexible bootloader that allows you to boot from floppy, cdrom, and hd, regardless of your BIOS. This thing is perfect for old PCs. Heck, it will even adjust the year on your bios, for those stupid Award bioses that turn anything from 2000 up into 1994 (i.e., my old 486).
I found out about this from Debian (yay Debian!) which includes it on their install cdrom.
There may be better solutions out there, but this works perfectly for me. Also, the site doesn't seem to have been updated since Feb 2001, so it's probably a dead project.
Anyway, you dd it to your MBR (or use the install program?), make sure your lilo/grub/whatever is installed to the boot block of your root partition (instead of the MBR), and you're set. Boot from a cdrom on a 486!
Hm, it suddenly strikes me that this is probably off topic...
This is even better than what I was thinking.
But you're right, it's still too obvious. There must be something wrong with it...
Why does electronic voting have to be such a complex proposition? I would think that it'd simply be a matter of distributing sealed, plug-in-and-go boxes to voting locations, hooking them up to touchscreens ("voting booths"), and having a printer keep a written record of votes as they are entered (date/time stamp and candidate chosen). Of course, you'd secure things as much as possible inside and out, but you certainly wouldn't be taking PCs running Windows and connecting them to lans!
No connecting things to networks, no fancy gui operating system, no general purpose computers: just a replacement for punch cards.
Perhaps we're too ambitious? What are we really trying to do here with electronic voting? I thought we were just trying to get more reliable counts. Some people seem to think the goal is to have faster counts, or pretty-looking voting screens, or whatever.
Further, what software or hardware security concerns could possibly exist with a closed box? Of course, there are still concerns of physical security, or just old-fashioned fraud, but we have those now already.
Surely there is some consideration I'm missing here? Right? It can't be as simple as I think, otherwise someone would have already done it.