So basically you are saying that Microsoft is perpetually behind everybody else when it comes to computers.
You then make an unfounded assumption that it is because open source people are upgrading more.
The truth is that generally Microsoft is putting in features in their 2005 version that were already available in both Apple and Open Source 2004. Yes they occasionally put in "features" that Apple/Open Source do not have, but the Apple and Open Source people do not seem to complain that they do not have those "features" as much as the MS users complain.
Your argument needs some real life examples before you start claiming that it is an "upgrade" problem not a "Behind the Times" problem. You could give an example of how MS fixed a "problem/feature request" before the open source people did.
You are misunderstanding one of SEVERAL definitions of profit.
That definition of profit includes a base "pay me for doing the work of running the company" in their costs. Afterall, if you did not do that you would have to pay someone else to. So using your defenition of "Profit", a company can continue to exist, give you a nice salary, make no "profit", and you would slowly get rich.
That definition is NOT appropriate for this discussion, unless you make it clear that the people running the company are getting rich while the company has "no profit".
1) You are incorrect about "The result is that in a perfect market, prices will stabilise at a level at which nobody makes any profit."
You ignore the fact that even in a perfect market different producers have different costs. As such in a perfect market prices stabilise at a level where only the lowest cost producer, at each desirable quality level, makes any profit.
2) This means you can also make money as the lowest cost producer at a desirable quality level instead of being a monoplist/unethical company.
3) Your interpretatino of commoditty businesses is ass-backwards. You do NOT need mass quantites. Instead what happens is the company that is the lowest cost producer at a given quality level drives everyone out of business, because only they can profit at that price. So they quickly GROW to be huge. Later on they take advantage of some scaling advantages, but that is secondary, not primary. Only companies in small markets (i.e. specialist markets that you excluded.in your example) can not grow that big because their pond is so small. If you personally come up with a better, cheaper business model then Dell, then you could start up a lower cost producer that will within 5 years be bigger then Dell. That is after all what Dell did against the big boys that had all the "economies of scale" advantage.
4) Music is ALREADY a commodity market. The RIAA wishes it isn't, but their wishes are meaningless. They have tried to use laws to block the free market from treating it that way but their efforst are doomed to failure. Songs are worth less than $1 / song, and the market will eventually force the RIAA to realize this.
5) The RIAA is not a producer of consumer goods. They USED to be a producer of retail consumer goods (stored music), and as such they abused their serfs (musicians). They are now a producer of commercial services for their freed serfs(advertising, legal rights, etc. etc.) . They are scrambling to try to provide more and better services for their workers, but have a history of abusing them, so are having a tough time making the transistion. Worse their profits as a producer of retail consumer goods was huge and they are being babies about accepting the much lower profit margins they deserve as commerical services companies.
There are two types of Coal.
Dirty Coal and clean Coal.
In a modern plant, the cleaner coal is the cleanest and safest of the polluting energy sources. It is FAR better (pollution wise) to burn the clean coal to create electricity to run your car then it is too burn gasoline (especially using an engine that has NOT been optimized to minimize pollution) to run your car.
Actually, if I were you I would consider that theft your good deed for the year
Logically the only reason to do what they did is because they were naked.
And frankly the kind of people that need to steel cloathing are either extremely poor and ugly, superheroes, or time travelling cyborgs bent on murder.
Actually it is the other wayy around. Truckers like computers.
Trucks now a days are very high tech. They almost all have GPS responders that reveal where they are, what speed they are doing etc. And truckers are lonely, so they often have internet connections for use while they are parked for the night.
I have found many truckers to be computer geeks at heart.
Re:Gasoline is not a source, it is a pipe.
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
Say for example the Sun puts out 100,000,000 solarWatts. units of power each year.
Say 1/10,000 of that hits the planet earth in the form of sunshine/heat/radiation, etc. etc. That
That is 1,000 solarWatts.
My original sentence is saying that we use less than mankind uses less than 1,000 solarWatts. each year.
Which means that theoretically it would be possible to capture those 1,000 solar watts and power all our energy needs.
The truth is that mankind's power usage is so incredibally tiny compared to what the sun puts out and what arrives at earth, that the fact that we are using up the high potency reserves called gasoline is practically irrelevant.
Re:Gasoline is not a source, it is a pipe.
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
True, but it is not neccesarily created by OUR sun, it could have been created by another nearby sun.
I prefer my version of that joke, which is more in line with the thread:
This clueless person's computer won't start, so they call in some to fix it at 4:50 PM on a Friday before a 3-day weekend. The annoyed computer person comes over, looks at the PC, pushes the electric plug firmly into the back of the computer, then turns it on.
Hands them a bill for $100. Owner asks for the itemised bill. Computer Repair men writes note:
Pushing plug back in - $5.
Knowing to check for loose plug: $5.
Not "Plugging" (Slang for hitting them) the clueless owner for wasting their time: $90.
Gasoline is not a source, it is a pipe.
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 4, Insightful
All Energy except Nuclear we currently use is merely some form of solar energy.
Gasoline is solar energy converted to hydrocarbons by plants, then processed by time and pressure.
But the real source of Energy is the Sun. Mankind's total energy useage per year is still MUCH less than the Sun's total output per year, and is even less than the amount of energy the sun delivers to the planet earth in a year.
It should be obvious that we might be forced to find other ways of converting that energy into useable forms, but that we have no need to worry about running out of energy.
I strongly agree with everything you said. There is no need to bully if you just want to protect your rights, you can give the polite letter you mentioned.
In many ways he is correct - with so many choices it takes a lot of work to figure out what is worth what.
The problem is made worse by the rapid improvement. Rules that apply last year do not apply this year.
But on the other side of that if the manufactures were not scum, that problem can easily be dealt with.
All it takes is a classification system, similar to what we do with cars.
People know what you mean when you say:
Compact
mini-van
jeep
SUV
sports-car
station waggon
What we need are some similar terms for the newer technologies to become more common.
We need categories like: game-system (high end video/audio), word-system (low-end MS word,Excel,presentationsm with low memory, low speed etc.), net-server (designed to host a web site or other network), etc. etc. to be come common terms that everyone knows and uses.
It is not too risky, nor is it too expensive.
It is too scary and has concentrated risk/cost
Compare the cost and risk factor over time with the cost and risk factors of the Nevada plan.
Sending it into space costs less and has less risk over the long term than the Nevada plan. But the Nevada plan spreads the risk and cost over hundreds of years so it LOOKS prettier.
If the car is smart enough to tell on you, it should be smart enough to stop you from doing it.
"Dear, the car wont't start."
"Put on your seatbelt honey."
"But the seatbelt is broken!!!"
OK, if it is already so easy to find out whos machines have been zombiefied, can't we:
Write a spam killing virus as follows:
Virus identifies machine that is sending out spam. Goes to it takes over and looks for another spam machine. When it finds a new host it copies itself to the new host and sets the previous host to do a D.O.S. attack on itself.
Thus the spam machine goes down until some bright boy fixes it so it stops sending out spam.
1) People are legally allowed to transfer a phone number to another person. Verizon admits that. They do it all the time.
2)People are legally allowed to require money be transfered as a condition of said transfer. Verizon admits that also - they do it all the time.
So Verizon is insisting they do not use the word "sale"/"sold".
Unless you change Point 1 or Point 2, Verizon's belief makes no sense.
I can't sell something I don't own, but I sure can accept a fee to vacate an apartment earlier than my lease. Even though I don't own the apartment, I have rights with respect to that apartment and those rights can be sold. Similarly I now have rights to my phone number, and unless a law states otherwise, Verizon is going to have to admit that I can therefore sell my rights to my phone number.
So the more you use it, the less fertile it becomes. (I.E. Dustbowl, and crop rotation.)
But one of the reasons why city land is so fertile is that it has been a city for so long. If we used moved and used the old city as farm land for 10 years, it would suddenly stop being the most fertile land and the new city we built would become the most fertile land.
Has he no knowledge of the numerous papers that have pretty much torn apart the concept he proposed? Or did he think he invented the idea of Security by Obscurity???
Yes, not letting people see the holes in your software does make it harder to break into them.
But it also makes it impossible for white hats (good guys/hackers) to find and correct them.
Open source has pretty much demonstrated that the number of white hats examining their software is greater than the number of black hats (criminals/crackers) and that the white hats tend to have more experience, creativity, and skill that then black hats.
Finally, when your stuff DOES get cracked open, the open source nature means it is far easier to figure out how it happened, to fix it, and to publicize the fix preventing additional break ins.
Q.E.D. Open Source is more secure than Close source.
Don't do that. There are lots of free ways to verify that someone is a real person rather than a spammer bot. Just don't use the SAME system that everyone else does. Use some creativity.
One other possible method: Joke Analysis. Get a list of 100 jokes.
Rip out one meaningfull word from the punchline and have the emailer be required to put it in.
Example:
A blonde and a lawyer sit next to each other on a plane. The lawyer asks her to play a game. If he asked her a question that she didn't know the answer to, she would have to pay him five dollars; And every time the blonde asked the lawyer a question that he didn't know the answer to, the lawyer had to pay the blonde 50 dollars. So the lawyer asked the blonde his first question, "What is the distance between the Earth and the nearest star?" Without a word the blonde pays the lawyer five dollars. The blonde then asks him, "What goes up a hill with four legs and down a hill with three?" The lawyer thinks about it, but finally gives up and pays the blonde 50 dollars. Then the lawyer asked her what the answer was and without a word the blonde gave the lawyer five ________.
1. CBS aired the opposition's add in favor of the White House.
2. They are using Public Air-waves, given them by the government without paying for them in exchange for certain concessions such as education and public expression. They are NOT any media, and as they have accepted the airwaves free of charge, they are contractually tied to the government which has a right to yank those air waves if they misuse them.
The combination of these two things means that it IS censorship.
Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.
on
Superbowling
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· Score: 1
No.
CBS uses public broadcast waves. It got them for free, in exchange for concessions such as educational TV and other things.
They have an ethical and contractual right to NOT just show their own opinions. If they did not show the White House Ads, then you would have a valid argument.
But as they show the President's ads, and are using public air-waves without paying for them, they are ethically required to show the opposition.
You have no idea what my definition of luck was. You keep looking at the parts that I declare to be perspiration and thinking "he thinks that is luck? what a fool".
For the last time, read my response. Yes I thought you had already "knew" it, but you do not appear to pay any attention to. It does NOT prove your point at all.
Since you seem to be incapable of basic logic, here is a full explanation of what happened, assigning descriptions so you will not be an idiot and think "luck" when I am saying Persipiration."
Starting situation: IBM created a killer app for their desktop by letting other people make the hardware and them selling the software (DOS).
Government Regulation rule 9%: The courts said, no, that is a monoply, you must let another company sell the hardware.
30% Financing: I did not mention this, but he found the money.
30% Hard work: Gates starts up microsoft, Boom Microsoft was born. They took IBM's Dos, turned it into MSDOS and began their climb to monoply that the courts said IBM was not allowed to have.
30% Luck: IBM failed to see the huge value of what they were giving away and did not take proper precautions (such as a 30% stake in the company, or breaking it up to multiple companies, or even puting any free-bes for IB In this case the luck was mostly what other people did not do. Or are you going to say that Bill Gates hard work was responsible for all of that?
Bill Gates had a lot of luck - nothing went wrong for him that goes wrong for so many other businesses. What if Apple had purchased his little company early? He would have sold out for less than 10 million easy.
Slashdot Mirror
You then make an unfounded assumption that it is because open source people are upgrading more.
The truth is that generally Microsoft is putting in features in their 2005 version that were already available in both Apple and Open Source 2004. Yes they occasionally put in "features" that Apple/Open Source do not have, but the Apple and Open Source people do not seem to complain that they do not have those "features" as much as the MS users complain.
Your argument needs some real life examples before you start claiming that it is an "upgrade" problem not a "Behind the Times" problem. You could give an example of how MS fixed a "problem/feature request" before the open source people did.
That definition is NOT appropriate for this discussion, unless you make it clear that the people running the company are getting rich while the company has "no profit".
2) This means you can also make money as the lowest cost producer at a desirable quality level instead of being a monoplist/unethical company.
3) Your interpretatino of commoditty businesses is ass-backwards. You do NOT need mass quantites. Instead what happens is the company that is the lowest cost producer at a given quality level drives everyone out of business, because only they can profit at that price. So they quickly GROW to be huge. Later on they take advantage of some scaling advantages, but that is secondary, not primary. Only companies in small markets (i.e. specialist markets that you excluded.in your example) can not grow that big because their pond is so small. If you personally come up with a better, cheaper business model then Dell, then you could start up a lower cost producer that will within 5 years be bigger then Dell. That is after all what Dell did against the big boys that had all the "economies of scale" advantage.
4) Music is ALREADY a commodity market. The RIAA wishes it isn't, but their wishes are meaningless. They have tried to use laws to block the free market from treating it that way but their efforst are doomed to failure. Songs are worth less than $1 / song, and the market will eventually force the RIAA to realize this.
5) The RIAA is not a producer of consumer goods. They USED to be a producer of retail consumer goods (stored music), and as such they abused their serfs (musicians). They are now a producer of commercial services for their freed serfs(advertising, legal rights, etc. etc.) . They are scrambling to try to provide more and better services for their workers, but have a history of abusing them, so are having a tough time making the transistion. Worse their profits as a producer of retail consumer goods was huge and they are being babies about accepting the much lower profit margins they deserve as commerical services companies.
1) set everyone's wallpaper to a funny, non-sexual scene.
2) Change everyone's mouse pointers to one of windows non-stanard ones.
3) Change the login scripts to play the funeral march when they log in.
4) Send an admin message that pops up a window and says "Quit Working, it's time to go home!" at 4:59 PM.
In a modern plant, the cleaner coal is the cleanest and safest of the polluting energy sources. It is FAR better (pollution wise) to burn the clean coal to create electricity to run your car then it is too burn gasoline (especially using an engine that has NOT been optimized to minimize pollution) to run your car.
Logically the only reason to do what they did is because they were naked.
And frankly the kind of people that need to steel cloathing are either extremely poor and ugly, superheroes, or time travelling cyborgs bent on murder.
Trucks now a days are very high tech. They almost all have GPS responders that reveal where they are, what speed they are doing etc. And truckers are lonely, so they often have internet connections for use while they are parked for the night.
I have found many truckers to be computer geeks at heart.
Say 1/10,000 of that hits the planet earth in the form of sunshine/heat/radiation, etc. etc. That That is 1,000 solarWatts.
My original sentence is saying that we use less than mankind uses less than 1,000 solarWatts. each year.
Which means that theoretically it would be possible to capture those 1,000 solar watts and power all our energy needs.
The truth is that mankind's power usage is so incredibally tiny compared to what the sun puts out and what arrives at earth, that the fact that we are using up the high potency reserves called gasoline is practically irrelevant.
True, but it is not neccesarily created by OUR sun, it could have been created by another nearby sun.
This clueless person's computer won't start, so they call in some to fix it at 4:50 PM on a Friday before a 3-day weekend. The annoyed computer person comes over, looks at the PC, pushes the electric plug firmly into the back of the computer, then turns it on.
Hands them a bill for $100. Owner asks for the itemised bill. Computer Repair men writes note:
Pushing plug back in - $5.
Knowing to check for loose plug: $5.
Not "Plugging" (Slang for hitting them) the clueless owner for wasting their time: $90.
Gasoline is solar energy converted to hydrocarbons by plants, then processed by time and pressure.
But the real source of Energy is the Sun. Mankind's total energy useage per year is still MUCH less than the Sun's total output per year, and is even less than the amount of energy the sun delivers to the planet earth in a year.
It should be obvious that we might be forced to find other ways of converting that energy into useable forms, but that we have no need to worry about running out of energy.
I strongly agree with everything you said. There is no need to bully if you just want to protect your rights, you can give the polite letter you mentioned.
The problem is made worse by the rapid improvement. Rules that apply last year do not apply this year.
But on the other side of that if the manufactures were not scum, that problem can easily be dealt with.
All it takes is a classification system, similar to what we do with cars.
People know what you mean when you say:
Compact
mini-van
jeep
SUV
sports-car
station waggon
What we need are some similar terms for the newer technologies to become more common.
We need categories like: game-system (high end video/audio), word-system (low-end MS word,Excel,presentationsm with low memory, low speed etc.), net-server (designed to host a web site or other network), etc. etc. to be come common terms that everyone knows and uses.
It is not too risky, nor is it too expensive. It is too scary and has concentrated risk/cost Compare the cost and risk factor over time with the cost and risk factors of the Nevada plan. Sending it into space costs less and has less risk over the long term than the Nevada plan. But the Nevada plan spreads the risk and cost over hundreds of years so it LOOKS prettier.
Salsa, Tango, Swing
They force him to interact with the dredded females in a regulated situation. The Physical contact keeps them interested.
They can easily become addicted to dance, especially Tango.
It is physical activity that even the out of shape geek can do well.
If the car is smart enough to tell on you, it should be smart enough to stop you from doing it. "Dear, the car wont't start." "Put on your seatbelt honey." "But the seatbelt is broken!!!"
In it Mr. Jones says that Open source is dangerous because people can read the script and see the problem.
Of course, neither of these people seem to be smart enough to think.
OK, if it is already so easy to find out whos machines have been zombiefied, can't we: Write a spam killing virus as follows: Virus identifies machine that is sending out spam. Goes to it takes over and looks for another spam machine. When it finds a new host it copies itself to the new host and sets the previous host to do a D.O.S. attack on itself. Thus the spam machine goes down until some bright boy fixes it so it stops sending out spam.
2)People are legally allowed to require money be transfered as a condition of said transfer. Verizon admits that also - they do it all the time.
So Verizon is insisting they do not use the word "sale"/"sold".
Unless you change Point 1 or Point 2, Verizon's belief makes no sense.
I can't sell something I don't own, but I sure can accept a fee to vacate an apartment earlier than my lease. Even though I don't own the apartment, I have rights with respect to that apartment and those rights can be sold. Similarly I now have rights to my phone number, and unless a law states otherwise, Verizon is going to have to admit that I can therefore sell my rights to my phone number.
But one of the reasons why city land is so fertile is that it has been a city for so long. If we used moved and used the old city as farm land for 10 years, it would suddenly stop being the most fertile land and the new city we built would become the most fertile land.
Has he no knowledge of the numerous papers that have pretty much torn apart the concept he proposed? Or did he think he invented the idea of Security by Obscurity???
Yes, not letting people see the holes in your software does make it harder to break into them. But it also makes it impossible for white hats (good guys/hackers) to find and correct them.
Open source has pretty much demonstrated that the number of white hats examining their software is greater than the number of black hats (criminals/crackers) and that the white hats tend to have more experience, creativity, and skill that then black hats.
Finally, when your stuff DOES get cracked open, the open source nature means it is far easier to figure out how it happened, to fix it, and to publicize the fix preventing additional break ins.
Q.E.D. Open Source is more secure than Close source.
Example: A blonde and a lawyer sit next to each other on a plane. The lawyer asks her to play a game. If he asked her a question that she didn't know the answer to, she would have to pay him five dollars; And every time the blonde asked the lawyer a question that he didn't know the answer to, the lawyer had to pay the blonde 50 dollars. So the lawyer asked the blonde his first question, "What is the distance between the Earth and the nearest star?" Without a word the blonde pays the lawyer five dollars. The blonde then asks him, "What goes up a hill with four legs and down a hill with three?" The lawyer thinks about it, but finally gives up and pays the blonde 50 dollars. Then the lawyer asked her what the answer was and without a word the blonde gave the lawyer five ________.
Answer is dollars. But you knew that.
1. CBS aired the opposition's add in favor of the White House.
2. They are using Public Air-waves, given them by the government without paying for them in exchange for certain concessions such as education and public expression. They are NOT any media, and as they have accepted the airwaves free of charge, they are contractually tied to the government which has a right to yank those air waves if they misuse them.
The combination of these two things means that it IS censorship.
CBS uses public broadcast waves. It got them for free, in exchange for concessions such as educational TV and other things.
They have an ethical and contractual right to NOT just show their own opinions. If they did not show the White House Ads, then you would have a valid argument.
But as they show the President's ads, and are using public air-waves without paying for them, they are ethically required to show the opposition.
For the last time, read my response. Yes I thought you had already "knew" it, but you do not appear to pay any attention to. It does NOT prove your point at all.
Since you seem to be incapable of basic logic, here is a full explanation of what happened, assigning descriptions so you will not be an idiot and think "luck" when I am saying Persipiration."
Starting situation: IBM created a killer app for their desktop by letting other people make the hardware and them selling the software (DOS). Government Regulation rule 9%: The courts said, no, that is a monoply, you must let another company sell the hardware. 30% Financing: I did not mention this, but he found the money. 30% Hard work: Gates starts up microsoft, Boom Microsoft was born. They took IBM's Dos, turned it into MSDOS and began their climb to monoply that the courts said IBM was not allowed to have. 30% Luck: IBM failed to see the huge value of what they were giving away and did not take proper precautions (such as a 30% stake in the company, or breaking it up to multiple companies, or even puting any free-bes for IB In this case the luck was mostly what other people did not do. Or are you going to say that Bill Gates hard work was responsible for all of that?
Bill Gates had a lot of luck - nothing went wrong for him that goes wrong for so many other businesses. What if Apple had purchased his little company early? He would have sold out for less than 10 million easy.