It's rather sweet that you hold all of science in so high a regard. I used to. These days I see Scientists pretty much in the same was as I see politicians: I always want to follow the money.
Why is it that you only want to follow the money of the scientists. The last time we discussed this, you completely disregarded the financial interests of industry as a motive for taking sides in this debate while coming up with complicated backstories to justify financial (and political) interest being a motive for the scientific community. Why don't hold you hold scientists, politicians and industry executives to the same standards?
Why do you consider scientists to be more political than politicians and more financially motivated than industry executives? If they really are like that, then maybe they should be running the country! By your accounts, they would be more qualified to do so.
You must be new here..... You post a summary on Slashdot, you get 30 more biased sources within 30 min.
The worst part is that it is 30 biased and uninformed sources. At least Zuckerberg knows whether what he is saying is the truth or not. All the people here who post definitively that he was only in it to make money are just giving their gut feeling and they cannot possibly be basing it on fact. There is a 50% chance that they might be right, but they really can't say for sure.
It doesn't stop them from being modded as Insightful though.
Your argument, attempting as it does to attribute motive, is entirely bogus.
Really? Let's have a look at that. You have to construct an elaborate scenario to show climate scientist have an ulterior motive. The climate scientist has a political interest? How many scientists do you see in politics?
The academic institutions have a financial interest? I know people who are researching ethnicity in the arts, which is not going to earn their institution wads of cash. So why is it that when it comes to climate science that the great universities of the world suddenly are assumed to be greedy? They study the climate because they study everything.
Finally, you guess that the scientists have a consultancy to give them a scientific motive. How many scientists do you know who have a consultancy. Exactly who is paying them, and is it based on them coming up with a particular answer in their work? Doesn't it seem quite likely that they might also get a consultancy with someone else if they disputed the majority view? For example, Ian Plimer is a geologist who disputes climate change. He is on the board of three mining companies, as well as being associated with right-wing think tanks.
Now let's see how hard is it to claim a motive for the businessman. He has one job, to make money for his shareholders. If his company is forced to stop polluting the world (or even limit selling their product in the case of mining companies) then the company stand to lose millions, if not billions of dollars. There is no ambiguity there with the financial motive to wanting to sweep climate change under the carpet. I don't have to guess at extensive scenarios to explain away the motives of the businessman.
It seems quite bizarre how you can make up a twisted web of intrigue to show a financial motive for climate scientists and then claim that it is entirely bogus to attribute motive to somehow who has a direct financial relationship to keeping the status quo.
Hey, thanks for replying. I know when the trolls come out to play that I must be doing something right! I'm afraid that most of my friends are outside the tech community, so I don't have anyone to call on to mod me up. I can give you some tips on how to get modded up.
Log in to post. People respect you more if they can put a name to your posts.
Be specific. Don't just post general claims like "global warming is wrong". Make a specific claim. If that claim gets refuted, then you may need to adjust your ideas. If you keep posting the same claims after being shown that they are wrong, then it is you who are peddling the propaganda.
Cite your sources. The reason my post was modded up, when the grandparent that made the opposite claim to me wasn't, was that I posted evidence of my position. Once again, if your sources are shown to be posting unfounded propaganda, then you should find some new sources to quote. Don't just limit yourself to like-minded websites. You really should look at what the other side says. You never know, some of it may make sense.
Be wary of giving advice that you should really follow yourself. You say I read a little history because it is repeating itself. You should read up on the politically motivated backlash against the scientific community on smoking, passive smoking, vaccinations, asbestos and evolution. The strategies that we see today against climate change are carbon copies of what we saw in the past on those other topics.
You don't deal with many non-profits do you? Even middle-management at many non-profits earn a very healthy income, easily on par with anything the corporate world offers.
Let's see, the CEO of the WWF (the authors of the report) earns a whopping $465,427. Now have a look at this list of CEO compensation by industry type. Can you see any under $1,000,000? How many over $10,000,000? They are certainly not on par with the WWF salaries.
That said, some of those executives you describe are directly responsible for the existence of non-profits. The money has to come from somewhere.
No, not the ones we are talking about. Do you really think that the mining industries are funding the climate advocate groups? No, I don't think so. Sure they have their own industry groups and think-tanks, but none of those could be called "tree huggers".
It's probably making them money in the form of reduced taxes.
This license is automatic, meaning NGOs and journalists don't have to do anything to be covered by the free license. How would they come up with a figure to write off on their taxes without some paperwork from their clients. The amount of money involved here so probably so miniscule that it would not make much of a dent in their tax bill.
Microsoft have plenty of other ways of avoiding their tax responsibility!
I hate to tell you this, but itworld.com is not an official Microsoft outlet. What Microsoft actually said was:
One challenge, however, is that some NGOs in a number of countries, including Russia, are unaware of our program or do not know how to navigate its logistical processes, which involves ordering the donated software through a Microsoft partner. We'll solve this problem by providing a unilateral NGO Software License that runs automatically from Microsoft to NGOs and covers the software already installed on their PCs. We'll make this new, non-transferable license applicable to NGOs in a number of countries, including in Russia.
So they started in a few (mostly unnamed) countries and now they have expanded it.
The large scale operations that I have known have all had enterprise licenses with Microsoft, so they can just install Windows and Office without having to deal with individual product licenses for each one. I don't know the number of systems where this becomes cost effective.
Uh oh, another "non-profit" group must need money to supplement their jet's and expensive dinners.
That is a stupid argument. Imagine you see someone disemabarking from a private jet, wearing a suit that costs more than the salaries of you and I combined, just so that they can attend an expensive dinner in another city. Which is more likely?
They are a climate scientist (or member of a tree-hugging, non-profit group).
They are a mining executive.
Which side of this argument has the most financial interest in arguing either for or against limiting our use of Earth's resources? Let's face it, you don't get super rich by becoming a climate scientist.
It reminds me of when the three CEOs of the car industry all took private planes to lobby Washington for a taxpayer handout. But no, I am sure that you are right that it is the tree-huggers who are the ones trying to greedily screw us all for money.
.. and we've run out of ipv4 addresses "in about a year" for the last decade or so..
The report doesn't say that we will run out of resources by 2030. It states that we will use our resources at double the rate than the Earth can replenish. It is unfortunate to have stated it in terms of requiring two Earths, because that won't change the minds of anyone who wasn't already convinced of the need to change our ways. All it does is give the naysayers something to focus on so they can ignore the real issues raised by the report.
It's a sink... and some water coming out of the faucet. There is no mystery here and it isn't related to a black hole.
Why would you say this? If they had said that the movement of large amounts of water in a dam or lake shares the same physical properties as a black hole, would you so flippantly dismiss the study? Similarly, if they had compared it to a stream of atoms, would you have said "that's interesting" or would you have claimed that there can be no relation between atoms and black holes?
I suspect that it is the mundane familiarity of the common sink that makes you dismiss this without having studied the concepts at all.
But do you believe that this safety feature would harm more lives than it saves? The number of people who doze off at the wheel will always be larger than the number of exceptionally stupid people who doze off at the wheel. And even then, a proportion of those stupid people will still be saved by this facility.
It makes more sense to have the feature than to toss it out because a very small minority of people will abuse it.
The grandparent was claiming that it would increase the number of crashes by having this alarm. As you say, being tired can impair your judgement about whether you are tired. But that will not change whether you have an alarm fitted or not. If you are too tired to know you are tired, then you won't be consciously thinking that you can rely on the alarm.
The alarm going off could be the necessary shock to which you referred to get the driver to pull over. So the number of crashes will go down.
So rather than 10 crashes because people fell asleep... We have 20 crashes because rather than stopping for a coffee and a rest people relied on this and crashed when the alarm went off
I really don't think that people are so stupid that they will think that they are not tired because a car alarm hasn't gone off. Do you also think that people won't use brakes because they can stop by driving into a wall and have the airbags protect them?
If the car starts beeping to wake you up then you have long gone past the time that you should have stopped for a rest. While you might not actually close your eyes, extreme tiredness slows the reflexes to the same level as driving while intoxicated.
What really killed C++ for me was when a student created a situation like this:
std::string somefunction(){}
After all that discussion about whether it really is a problem with the language specification, I have to say that this example is the lamest reason to damn an entire programming language. It is like damning staplers because they shoot staples into your face when you hold it backwards. Here's a tip: don't do that.
Microsoft can be really proud of XBbx. It is a real success. But everything else they are doing is crumbling like a sinkhole under them.
Microsoft can't assume that everything that they do will beat their competitors, but I don't think it is anywhere near as bad as you say.
Sure the Mac has just reached 10% market share in the US, but it is something less than 5.3% worldwide. That isn't much different than they were 15 years ago at the time Windows 95 was released. I think it was around 5 to 6% then. The period between Win95 and OS X was a bit painful for Apple, but they have bounced back now. Good news for Apple, but not really bad new for Microsoft. MS needs to have Apple so that they can say there don't have a monopoly (even at 90% market share).
As an aside I do wonder what those Apple stats would be if they counted iPad sales too. It seems only fair to include the iPad because the Windows sales include netbooks.
Internet Explorer is now losing ground like crazy to Firefox, not to mention Safari and Chrome
But those alternate browsers are still mostly being run on Windows. The more IE supports standards, the less it makes much difference to Microsoft which free browser you choose.
Then there are things like iWork for the iPad which costs $10 per app. MS doesn't even comprehend that space
Of course they do. They had Microsoft Works (at $10 for OEMs), but they have since replaced that with Office 2010 Starter Edition ($2 for OEMs). I am sure that this is more to dissuade OEMs from including a free package rather than competing with iWork.
Windows phones and tablets: Well, they're just coming out with these, so its hard to draw conclusions yet, but... they're just coming out with these??
No, they have been doing Windows phones since 2000, and tablets since the early 90s.
IIS: Still nothing compared to Apache.
Seems a bit rich to crow about 10% share for the Mac while deriding the 25% share for IIS.
Exchange server
Yes, that is definitely a product that I would like to see toppled from its perch. I would love to have an OSS integrated solution that was a drop in replacement for the Exchange/Outlook combination. There are some companies out there doing some systems, but they often cost nearly as much as the Microsoft solution.
I can see where you were coming from with your comments, but I don't think that the writing is on the wall yet for Microsoft. We will be discussing how Microsoft is dying for as long as we have been discussing how Apple is dying.
Yeah, because under 200 some jobs is worth the...how much are you guys investing in this again?
$43 billion. But what makes you think that the only benefit will be 200 jobs? This is a massive undertaking, which will have massive consequences.
And isn't this the same country that had a lone ISP that ran your internet for years? Or was it DNS, I forget. Then you had some sorry ass links to the outside world because of this...
You might be thinking of Melbourne IT, which was responsible for the.com.au addresses. One person handled the entire registration process for the entire country. This was much more complicated than getting a.com address because you had to provide documentation to prove you had the company name to match the address. Back in the 90s it ended up with a massive backlog. But this didn't affect the ability to connect to the Internet.
You might also be thinking of Telstra. It is true that Telstra resells their ADSL as a wholesaler, which was quite proper. However, they also are a public ISP and this creates a conflict of interest. The big problem that we had with Telstra in this respect was that it was privatised at about the time the Internet was becoming popular. It should have been broken up before privatisation so that they would not be in competition with their own resellers. Even worse, they were in competition with themselves. I remember many years ago when we wanted to use Internet access over mobile phones (long before 3G). We could get a cheaper price at Telstra if we asked at a different department. It was way too massive.
The ideal would have been to keep the wholesaler in government hands and sell off the retailer parts. This is exactly what the NBN is going to fix.
And nowadays, you have some ridiculous on and offline censorship. Video games.
And aren't you the folks that has a hit list, sorry, morality blacklist of unacceptable web sites, with lone government oversight, thanks to your governments and population's newfound "morality"?
No. Apart from a trial of a few ISPs (now over), it has never been implemented. And I doubt it ever will. There was always going to be too large a backlash.
So chalk up one for you with an IBM research center. Good for you. They smelled the dollars, and came running. When it runs out, they'll leave.
So what? Don't ever try anything because things might change in the future? Seriously, what is the point of your rambling?
They have had that in Victoria, Australia for about a year now. I haven't checked the other states.
In Victoria, the scheme is useless. While the power companies must offer a standard feed-in tariff for excess power, they are entitled to have different packages or terms and conditions than their usual accounts. In practice, that means that they charge more for the power consumed to offset what they pay back to the household. You don't go solar to save money in this country.
You can see why there is a trend towards voting for the Greens.
UAC is to Vista/Windows 7 what sudo is to Unix. It was a function that was a glaring omission from NT up through XP, and if you think any operating system is better without a function to temporarily elevate a limited user to admin you're nuts.
There was "Run As" capability in 2000 and XP which gave the ability to temporarily become administrator for a particular program. You could still setup programs without having to log out of the limited user. I believe there was the command line program "RunAs" that did the same thing under NT4.
the dos window still won't let you highlight-copy text without a visit to the top-left dropdown menu and over to the sub-menu two times.
I right clicked in a command prompt window in Windows 7 and got the context sensitive menu with Mark/Copy/Paste at the top of the list. It only doesn't appear when a DOS program is using the mouse itself. You can try this by running edit.com and see the context menu disappear.
NT 4.0 used to begin highlighting as soon as the left mouse button was pressed, and it was a real pain when you clicked on the window to give it focus.
They are poorly written because their roots go back to when the MS OS didnt have any concept of a limited user or a security model at all.
That isn't the answer. Windows NT introduced the idea of user permissios back in July 1993. If you wanted to be able to use the official "Written for Windows" certification (or whatever it was called at the time) then your software had to work as a limited user. If developers adhered to Microsoft's programming guidelines they would have got rid of the full-access assumption years ago.
And if developers had done this, then we would have all been running as standard users long before Vista. Even then, they only got this to work by crippling the administrator account into a semi-limited user mode.
Ever had a house fire where the fire department showed up and hosed it down? Everything in the house is basically a total loss either way. Between heat damage, smoke damage, and water damage, it all ends up on the scrap heap.
Yes, I have had that happen and no I didn't lose everything. Our fire department turns up quickly (and saved the house) because they didn't need to haggle about the price. It was free.
Our ambulance service does charge a call out fee, which is waived if you pay a yearly fee. However, they do not haggle first - they come out and do the job and THEN worry about the money. Sure there might be some people who don't pay. After all, they might be coming out to a burn victim who lost everything in a house fire. If the person ends up dying then they are out of luck. But they could factor that into rate the non-subscribers pay. The system does work.
Ever tried to squeeze blood from a turnip? Especially when that turnip just lost all it's possessions and probably has no other insurance?
The point was that he might not have lost all his possessions if they hadn't just stood around watching it all burn down.
They don't look like money hungry dicks to me.. They look like a fire department operating within a budget and providing the services they were contracted to provide to the people who contracted them to provide them!
No, they were dicks. The homeowner said that he would pay them but they refused. And the fire department paid their firefighters to stand around and watch. How much would they have been out of pocket if they had actually done something about the fire?
People respect firefighters and call them heroes because they save people and their homes. I certainly do. But those guys in the picture weren't heroes, they are just opportunistic pond scum.
Slashdot Mirror
It's rather sweet that you hold all of science in so high a regard. I used to. These days I see Scientists pretty much in the same was as I see politicians: I always want to follow the money.
Why is it that you only want to follow the money of the scientists. The last time we discussed this, you completely disregarded the financial interests of industry as a motive for taking sides in this debate while coming up with complicated backstories to justify financial (and political) interest being a motive for the scientific community. Why don't hold you hold scientists, politicians and industry executives to the same standards?
Why do you consider scientists to be more political than politicians and more financially motivated than industry executives? If they really are like that, then maybe they should be running the country! By your accounts, they would be more qualified to do so.
You must be new here..... You post a summary on Slashdot, you get 30 more biased sources within 30 min.
The worst part is that it is 30 biased and uninformed sources. At least Zuckerberg knows whether what he is saying is the truth or not. All the people here who post definitively that he was only in it to make money are just giving their gut feeling and they cannot possibly be basing it on fact. There is a 50% chance that they might be right, but they really can't say for sure.
It doesn't stop them from being modded as Insightful though.
Your argument, attempting as it does to attribute motive, is entirely bogus.
Really? Let's have a look at that. You have to construct an elaborate scenario to show climate scientist have an ulterior motive. The climate scientist has a political interest? How many scientists do you see in politics?
The academic institutions have a financial interest? I know people who are researching ethnicity in the arts, which is not going to earn their institution wads of cash. So why is it that when it comes to climate science that the great universities of the world suddenly are assumed to be greedy? They study the climate because they study everything.
Finally, you guess that the scientists have a consultancy to give them a scientific motive. How many scientists do you know who have a consultancy. Exactly who is paying them, and is it based on them coming up with a particular answer in their work? Doesn't it seem quite likely that they might also get a consultancy with someone else if they disputed the majority view? For example, Ian Plimer is a geologist who disputes climate change. He is on the board of three mining companies, as well as being associated with right-wing think tanks.
Now let's see how hard is it to claim a motive for the businessman. He has one job, to make money for his shareholders. If his company is forced to stop polluting the world (or even limit selling their product in the case of mining companies) then the company stand to lose millions, if not billions of dollars. There is no ambiguity there with the financial motive to wanting to sweep climate change under the carpet. I don't have to guess at extensive scenarios to explain away the motives of the businessman.
It seems quite bizarre how you can make up a twisted web of intrigue to show a financial motive for climate scientists and then claim that it is entirely bogus to attribute motive to somehow who has a direct financial relationship to keeping the status quo.
Hey, thanks for replying. I know when the trolls come out to play that I must be doing something right! I'm afraid that most of my friends are outside the tech community, so I don't have anyone to call on to mod me up. I can give you some tips on how to get modded up.
People respect you more if they can put a name to your posts.
Don't just post general claims like "global warming is wrong". Make a specific claim. If that claim gets refuted, then you may need to adjust your ideas. If you keep posting the same claims after being shown that they are wrong, then it is you who are peddling the propaganda.
The reason my post was modded up, when the grandparent that made the opposite claim to me wasn't, was that I posted evidence of my position. Once again, if your sources are shown to be posting unfounded propaganda, then you should find some new sources to quote. Don't just limit yourself to like-minded websites. You really should look at what the other side says. You never know, some of it may make sense.
You say I read a little history because it is repeating itself. You should read up on the politically motivated backlash against the scientific community on smoking, passive smoking, vaccinations, asbestos and evolution. The strategies that we see today against climate change are carbon copies of what we saw in the past on those other topics.
You don't deal with many non-profits do you? Even middle-management at many non-profits earn a very healthy income, easily on par with anything the corporate world offers.
Let's see, the CEO of the WWF (the authors of the report) earns a whopping $465,427. Now have a look at this list of CEO compensation by industry type. Can you see any under $1,000,000? How many over $10,000,000? They are certainly not on par with the WWF salaries.
That said, some of those executives you describe are directly responsible for the existence of non-profits. The money has to come from somewhere.
No, not the ones we are talking about. Do you really think that the mining industries are funding the climate advocate groups? No, I don't think so. Sure they have their own industry groups and think-tanks, but none of those could be called "tree huggers".
It's probably making them money in the form of reduced taxes.
This license is automatic, meaning NGOs and journalists don't have to do anything to be covered by the free license. How would they come up with a figure to write off on their taxes without some paperwork from their clients. The amount of money involved here so probably so miniscule that it would not make much of a dent in their tax bill.
Microsoft have plenty of other ways of avoiding their tax responsibility!
I hate to tell you this, but itworld.com is not an official Microsoft outlet. What Microsoft actually said was:
One challenge, however, is that some NGOs in a number of countries, including Russia, are unaware of our program or do not know how to navigate its logistical processes, which involves ordering the donated software through a Microsoft partner. We'll solve this problem by providing a unilateral NGO Software License that runs automatically from Microsoft to NGOs and covers the software already installed on their PCs. We'll make this new, non-transferable license applicable to NGOs in a number of countries, including in Russia.
So they started in a few (mostly unnamed) countries and now they have expanded it.
Al Gore was already a very rich man long before Climate Change got so big.
The large scale operations that I have known have all had enterprise licenses with Microsoft, so they can just install Windows and Office without having to deal with individual product licenses for each one. I don't know the number of systems where this becomes cost effective.
Uh oh, another "non-profit" group must need money to supplement their jet's and expensive dinners.
That is a stupid argument. Imagine you see someone disemabarking from a private jet, wearing a suit that costs more than the salaries of you and I combined, just so that they can attend an expensive dinner in another city. Which is more likely?
Which side of this argument has the most financial interest in arguing either for or against limiting our use of Earth's resources? Let's face it, you don't get super rich by becoming a climate scientist.
It reminds me of when the three CEOs of the car industry all took private planes to lobby Washington for a taxpayer handout. But no, I am sure that you are right that it is the tree-huggers who are the ones trying to greedily screw us all for money.
.. and we've run out of ipv4 addresses "in about a year" for the last decade or so..
The report doesn't say that we will run out of resources by 2030. It states that we will use our resources at double the rate than the Earth can replenish. It is unfortunate to have stated it in terms of requiring two Earths, because that won't change the minds of anyone who wasn't already convinced of the need to change our ways. All it does is give the naysayers something to focus on so they can ignore the real issues raised by the report.
It's a sink ... and some water coming out of the faucet. There is no mystery here and it isn't related to a black hole.
Why would you say this? If they had said that the movement of large amounts of water in a dam or lake shares the same physical properties as a black hole, would you so flippantly dismiss the study? Similarly, if they had compared it to a stream of atoms, would you have said "that's interesting" or would you have claimed that there can be no relation between atoms and black holes?
I suspect that it is the mundane familiarity of the common sink that makes you dismiss this without having studied the concepts at all.
But do you believe that this safety feature would harm more lives than it saves? The number of people who doze off at the wheel will always be larger than the number of exceptionally stupid people who doze off at the wheel. And even then, a proportion of those stupid people will still be saved by this facility.
It makes more sense to have the feature than to toss it out because a very small minority of people will abuse it.
Well, yes. Which makes this alarm a good thing.
The grandparent was claiming that it would increase the number of crashes by having this alarm. As you say, being tired can impair your judgement about whether you are tired. But that will not change whether you have an alarm fitted or not. If you are too tired to know you are tired, then you won't be consciously thinking that you can rely on the alarm.
The alarm going off could be the necessary shock to which you referred to get the driver to pull over. So the number of crashes will go down.
So rather than 10 crashes because people fell asleep...
We have 20 crashes because rather than stopping for a coffee and a rest people relied on this and crashed when the alarm went off
I really don't think that people are so stupid that they will think that they are not tired because a car alarm hasn't gone off. Do you also think that people won't use brakes because they can stop by driving into a wall and have the airbags protect them?
If the car starts beeping to wake you up then you have long gone past the time that you should have stopped for a rest. While you might not actually close your eyes, extreme tiredness slows the reflexes to the same level as driving while intoxicated.
You failed to use a car analogy so I'll fix that for you.
Actually, mine was a Simpsons reference. That is an approved alternative to a car analogy.
What really killed C++ for me was when a student created a situation like this:
std::string somefunction(){}
After all that discussion about whether it really is a problem with the language specification, I have to say that this example is the lamest reason to damn an entire programming language. It is like damning staplers because they shoot staples into your face when you hold it backwards. Here's a tip: don't do that.
Microsoft can be really proud of XBbx. It is a real success. But everything else they are doing is crumbling like a sinkhole under them.
Microsoft can't assume that everything that they do will beat their competitors, but I don't think it is anywhere near as bad as you say.
Sure the Mac has just reached 10% market share in the US, but it is something less than 5.3% worldwide. That isn't much different than they were 15 years ago at the time Windows 95 was released. I think it was around 5 to 6% then. The period between Win95 and OS X was a bit painful for Apple, but they have bounced back now. Good news for Apple, but not really bad new for Microsoft. MS needs to have Apple so that they can say there don't have a monopoly (even at 90% market share).
As an aside I do wonder what those Apple stats would be if they counted iPad sales too. It seems only fair to include the iPad because the Windows sales include netbooks.
Internet Explorer is now losing ground like crazy to Firefox, not to mention Safari and Chrome
But those alternate browsers are still mostly being run on Windows. The more IE supports standards, the less it makes much difference to Microsoft which free browser you choose.
Then there are things like iWork for the iPad which costs $10 per app. MS doesn't even comprehend that space
Of course they do. They had Microsoft Works (at $10 for OEMs), but they have since replaced that with Office 2010 Starter Edition ($2 for OEMs). I am sure that this is more to dissuade OEMs from including a free package rather than competing with iWork.
Windows phones and tablets: Well, they're just coming out with these, so its hard to draw conclusions yet, but... they're just coming out with these??
No, they have been doing Windows phones since 2000, and tablets since the early 90s.
IIS: Still nothing compared to Apache.
Seems a bit rich to crow about 10% share for the Mac while deriding the 25% share for IIS.
Exchange server
Yes, that is definitely a product that I would like to see toppled from its perch. I would love to have an OSS integrated solution that was a drop in replacement for the Exchange/Outlook combination. There are some companies out there doing some systems, but they often cost nearly as much as the Microsoft solution.
I can see where you were coming from with your comments, but I don't think that the writing is on the wall yet for Microsoft. We will be discussing how Microsoft is dying for as long as we have been discussing how Apple is dying.
Yeah, because under 200 some jobs is worth the...how much are you guys investing in this again?
$43 billion. But what makes you think that the only benefit will be 200 jobs? This is a massive undertaking, which will have massive consequences.
And isn't this the same country that had a lone ISP that ran your internet for years? Or was it DNS, I forget. Then you had some sorry ass links to the outside world because of this...
You might be thinking of Melbourne IT, which was responsible for the .com.au addresses. One person handled the entire registration process for the entire country. This was much more complicated than getting a .com address because you had to provide documentation to prove you had the company name to match the address. Back in the 90s it ended up with a massive backlog. But this didn't affect the ability to connect to the Internet.
You might also be thinking of Telstra. It is true that Telstra resells their ADSL as a wholesaler, which was quite proper. However, they also are a public ISP and this creates a conflict of interest. The big problem that we had with Telstra in this respect was that it was privatised at about the time the Internet was becoming popular. It should have been broken up before privatisation so that they would not be in competition with their own resellers. Even worse, they were in competition with themselves. I remember many years ago when we wanted to use Internet access over mobile phones (long before 3G). We could get a cheaper price at Telstra if we asked at a different department. It was way too massive.
The ideal would have been to keep the wholesaler in government hands and sell off the retailer parts. This is exactly what the NBN is going to fix.
And nowadays, you have some ridiculous on and offline censorship. Video games.
I have a lot of issues with the Australian Classification Board. But I don't see how this is relevant to this topic.
And aren't you the folks that has a hit list, sorry, morality blacklist of unacceptable web sites, with lone government oversight, thanks to your governments and population's newfound "morality"?
No. Apart from a trial of a few ISPs (now over), it has never been implemented. And I doubt it ever will. There was always going to be too large a backlash.
So chalk up one for you with an IBM research center. Good for you. They smelled the dollars, and came running. When it runs out, they'll leave.
So what? Don't ever try anything because things might change in the future? Seriously, what is the point of your rambling?
They have had that in Victoria, Australia for about a year now. I haven't checked the other states.
In Victoria, the scheme is useless. While the power companies must offer a standard feed-in tariff for excess power, they are entitled to have different packages or terms and conditions than their usual accounts. In practice, that means that they charge more for the power consumed to offset what they pay back to the household. You don't go solar to save money in this country.
You can see why there is a trend towards voting for the Greens.
UAC is to Vista/Windows 7 what sudo is to Unix. It was a function that was a glaring omission from NT up through XP, and if you think any operating system is better without a function to temporarily elevate a limited user to admin you're nuts.
There was "Run As" capability in 2000 and XP which gave the ability to temporarily become administrator for a particular program. You could still setup programs without having to log out of the limited user. I believe there was the command line program "RunAs" that did the same thing under NT4.
the dos window still won't let you highlight-copy text without a visit to the top-left dropdown menu and over to the sub-menu two times.
I right clicked in a command prompt window in Windows 7 and got the context sensitive menu with Mark/Copy/Paste at the top of the list. It only doesn't appear when a DOS program is using the mouse itself. You can try this by running edit.com and see the context menu disappear.
NT 4.0 used to begin highlighting as soon as the left mouse button was pressed, and it was a real pain when you clicked on the window to give it focus.
They are poorly written because their roots go back to when the MS OS didnt have any concept of a limited user or a security model at all.
That isn't the answer. Windows NT introduced the idea of user permissios back in July 1993. If you wanted to be able to use the official "Written for Windows" certification (or whatever it was called at the time) then your software had to work as a limited user. If developers adhered to Microsoft's programming guidelines they would have got rid of the full-access assumption years ago.
And if developers had done this, then we would have all been running as standard users long before Vista. Even then, they only got this to work by crippling the administrator account into a semi-limited user mode.
Ever had a house fire where the fire department showed up and hosed it down? Everything in the house is basically a total loss either way. Between heat damage, smoke damage, and water damage, it all ends up on the scrap heap.
Yes, I have had that happen and no I didn't lose everything. Our fire department turns up quickly (and saved the house) because they didn't need to haggle about the price. It was free.
Our ambulance service does charge a call out fee, which is waived if you pay a yearly fee. However, they do not haggle first - they come out and do the job and THEN worry about the money. Sure there might be some people who don't pay. After all, they might be coming out to a burn victim who lost everything in a house fire. If the person ends up dying then they are out of luck. But they could factor that into rate the non-subscribers pay. The system does work.
Ever tried to squeeze blood from a turnip? Especially when that turnip just lost all it's possessions and probably has no other insurance?
The point was that he might not have lost all his possessions if they hadn't just stood around watching it all burn down.
They don't look like money hungry dicks to me.. They look like a fire department operating within a budget and providing the services they were contracted to provide to the people who contracted them to provide them!
No, they were dicks. The homeowner said that he would pay them but they refused. And the fire department paid their firefighters to stand around and watch. How much would they have been out of pocket if they had actually done something about the fire?
People respect firefighters and call them heroes because they save people and their homes. I certainly do. But those guys in the picture weren't heroes, they are just opportunistic pond scum.