I HAD satellite internet. It's not really that broadband (400k[lowercase-b]bps), though it downloads faster than dialup and ISDN, as long as you don't get more than 400 megs in a time span of 24 hours or something like that. They have ungodly fair access policies that make it so that you cannot download more than half a gig in 24 hours, or something like 4 gigs in a month. It's ridiculous, and defeats the purpose of having broadband. Also the latency is a HUGE issue, it takes half a second for your request to go up, and half a second for the response stream to start. I ran some numbers way back and I determined that it was a light speed limitation. The satellites are in geostationary orbit which means it's some serious distance, and you have to cross that distance at least 4 times to get a stream started, then there is the overhead of you not being the only one connected. Sure FAP is reasonable given the state of satellite technology, but they just aren't practical for more than your casual web browsing and email using. Even chat programs are lagged to hell, and forget about gaming or even reasonable VPN (another nice way to FAP yourself quicker than a flash is to synch outlook several times a day when people are dumb enough to send you huge attachments. Yes it's dumb of them to send you the attachments, but I don't care as much on DSL or cable.) If you even want to download a linux distro, you basically can't, halfway through the download, you get swapped to 50k download speed, and it will time out at some point or if you connection is briefly interrupted when youre trying to let it run overnight or something, just give up. It's god awful. Just say HELL NO to satellite unless you're only an end user who likes to surf myspace and email people. For those things you can just use dialup anyway and it's a lot less messy and expensive.
I suppose you might be right, especially when the word Microsoft is involved. It will be like a trump card that manager's play as if there were some wisdom in it. I am trying to talk our team OUT of renewing the EA we have with MS because the opportunity cost is too high: even if we still want to use microsoft products. For example, the office and windows come as a bundle, and the server cals are included, and that's cheaper, but each copy of Project is $900 for three years, and Visio is over a grand. The terms of the license agreement say that the EA supercedes all other independantly purchased licenses, so for example if you buy a boxed copy of project for $200, you still have to buck up for the EA, but you can be refunded the $200 bucks. It's insane. So I think you might be right about people not being sensitive to quality and choice.
I don't think the DCMA applies because no copyright is infringed. The reason this is a big deal is that Apple has some agreement of exclusivity with AT&T and they probably get a pretty penny for it. If Apple doesn't ensure that the agreement is followed then they may be in breach of some contract, so they want to lock it down. That being said, I don't know that Apple can be held liable for what the customers do with the phones any more than smith & wesson can for someone getting shot.
I don't think you're right. I mean, if they already collected your money up front, as far as they are concerned you are lucky to get fixes for free, because some other companies charge for everything service related. However, if it's software as a service, their whole bottom line is at stake with a bug in the open, so they had better fix it or lose all of their customers overnight. (ok not LITERALLY over night, but theoretically that could happen in some cases.) It's always relying on your ability to have your best face forward, or lose you customers to the next best face in the industry, so fix fix fix, uptime uptime uptime. that will have to be the way it's done or those companies will die.
If a manager is reading your post on slashdot, he/she/it is possibly already smart enough to know that you can't measure admin productivity the same way you can a factory floor worker. Admins are dollar savers, whereas floor workers and business development types are money makers. Trying to determine how much money you saved is only about as fruitful as valuing various cases of disaster scenario, which undoubtedly have too many variables.
A coherent strategy for talking about productivity is to break out the services provided by IT into categories, and compare to what you consider to be 'efficient' or successful companies invest as a median on these same services per unit (into the number of employees, maybe also compared to geographic distribution, weighting for cost of living in the areas of employment.)
It's not easy, and you pretty much have to be an actuary to do it. Like for example, break down into File/Print/Email/Teleconferencing/Internet Bandwidth/Spam Filtering/Account maintence... Number of help calls, downtime, etc are all relative to the type of service provided as well as the industry as a whole. It's certainly not solely an internally measurable number.
actually I do know that. But I didn't say I'd explain the entire macro model of capitalism in one post, I was just citing the fact that folks dream of banks as high security shoeboxes where they put their money, and for some reason get interest for it.
you don't have a 'right to a job' you have to right to apply for a job. if nobody wants to pay your for your services, learn some new services. nobody 'took our jobs away' they simply outperformed us for a lower price. I'm not talking about quality necessarily, that's another issue, and it varies as well. People go to work and get paid because someone feels the need for their services, and that it's worth forking out the cash for said service instead of, for example, doing it themselves. You don't get a paycheck because someone wants to give you a job, you get a paycheck because you can do something someone feels is worth paying you for. If someone else does it for a lower price, then quit your bitching and do one of two things: find another job doing the same thing somewhere else, or, learn to do something else and do that. Like I said, industries, especially in particular geographical areas, but eventually as a whole, go completely out of business eventually when we have machines or other products to replace them. So, in accepting the fact that we don't live in a stagnant society, and that nobody is going to just walk up and start paying you for producing nothing (services included), you should really quit bitching about 'poor people who don't have jobs,' and start thinking of 'how can we find useful services for these folks to perform.' Notice that's not the same thing as forcing someone (or the government) to pay them to do what they feel like doing, it's repurposing some good resources -- the people who need the jobs. If all of the sudden computers could write all of their own code, I'd be fucked too, but I'm well aware of that, and I'm ready to accept the risk, so I seek employment as a programmer. You're not going to ever find something that's just right and sit on it for enternity, it'll just keep moving, like the rest of the planet.
when the feds "inject money into the economy," that doesn't mean they 'print money for them to use' they in fact loan them money from the federal reserve at a lower rate. Of course, who wouldn't take that loan at a low rate? printing press indeed. You know, I'll bet that just about less than 10% of the folks you meet on the street even know how the economy actually is working. I'll bet that less than 20% know when you put money in a bank they lend it out to someone else. From what I've seen people saying here, it's pretty evident that a lot of people really have no idea, even those who are in the tech sector and rely on this system heavily to work... I'm amazed.
actually no, that doesn't happen. If that were the case then eventually everyone becomes a jack of all trades, we will lose specialization, and you cannot maintain quality with people producing everything locally. Besides resources are not unlimited locally either, there are some places that just have better raw materials, and all sorts of other things, like a more ready supply of workers. You might be right about 1 or 2 companies diving it to take advantage of the market, but it won't go so far as to actually make anyone competitive. They will still be a local oligopoly and will have near zero incentive to even respond to consumer demands, especially in necessity goods. Competition, particularly international competition is the quickest and most efficient way to drive prices down and standard of living up. Yes some people lose, but overall, the system is solvent indefinitely. The industries involved may fluctuate, nobody makes horse buggy's anymore, for example, but that's the way life is. You can't continuously have the government exhert more and more control, by passing more and more laws, more and more regulations, for one because it encourages a black market, and two, because it's just not enforcible unless you want to start giving those out of a job factory workers new jobs as 'trade police.'
Hah, so american companies have enough to produce stuff locally and virtually be no further off because we'll spiral into an endless cycle of local inflation, but we'll be able to afford it (thus staying the same in your perfect model.) Should we just forbid people from traveling too? How about shut off the internet? There isn't, never was, and never will be a benefit to buying only american. You don't have to agree with me, the market will back me up on this one.
so you're saying that if someone loses their high paying manufacturing job, then they can't go do something else ever? not even 20 years from now? It's a local hiccup to lose a local industry to foreign competition, it doesn't make the next generation (next 4 year class of college students even) of workers immune to finding jobs. It's those high paying jobs anyway that make American companies unable to compete with foreign companies who don't pay them as much. So you're basically saying that we should somehow tell the other countries that they have to be fair and pay them as much as we'd like to make, because.. it's only fair that way... right? I don't think they'll buy it. And you will be left behind whining about how life isn't fair, while the people who adapt will be moving on buying more plasma screen tv's they shouldn't be able to afford.
services and intellectual property. it's called a post industrial society. there are a number of such countries on the planet. it's not bad, and we're not running out of wealth.
england seems to be doing alright. what do they export? deficit doesn't mean 'debt' in case those of you hadn't caught on yet. All it means is we import more than we export. It is not a disaster. It's not even necessarily bad.
you're an idiot. If we only bought american goods, then we'd inflate our local prices, and foreign companies would kick the crap out of us abroad, and we wouldn't have anyone able to compete. Then instead of losing SOME money to them, we'd have whole companies go out of business. You weren't paying attention in economics class where you. It might sound nice to say 'buy american' but if we really did that, and boycott foreign stuff, you'd drive the price on american shit up so much there would be no way in hell anyone but americans would buy american, and foreign business is what keeps a LOT of companies afloat.
you can reliably block spam from a pessimisitic network, ie one that says 'no unless you're on the whitelist' which means that the whitelist would be of course china's sites and any that they allow you to see. Obviously there is such a list or else they wouldn't be able to get google to go along with only showing results on this list. The reason we can't do it in the free world is because we aren't starting in a cage, we're starting in an open field where everything is allowed to come in unless shown to be bad. Not so in china, they own everything, and can stop everything but what they send out.
I think you're right, I mean, perhaps they ban any and everything (only chinese ranges/subnets allowed, etc) they don't already know about, then proxies are good for jack shit... I mean you can make rules for ipaddress ranges and subnets, or even coming from/to specific hosts, so it's simple enough for them just to
A) stop your spam from coming in.
2) Filter out attempts to connect to proxies
D) Kill the people trying to do it in the name of the Republic.
My tongue-in-cheekness aside I think the OP is quite possibly chasing his own tail up a red herrings ass on this one. Kinda like one might when they've been smoking a little too much pot....
They can't make companies that consume financial information responsible for it 100%, because the big huge wide open hole is the consumer themselves. They can type their password into a fake website faster than you can say 'anbesol' and what fault of the bank's is that? None. Consumers need to be smarter, BUT banks or merchants SHOULD be liable for any data exposure due to negligence. Which is something else entirely. If it's bad security practice on behalf of the institution, or someone accidentally left the firewall open, then they should eat the cost of cleaning up their spill. But, if someone misuses a login because you were dumb enough to phish out your password, or you got keylogged, sucks to be you.
Don't worry this isn't like hollywood where they can track your every move. First of all these satellites are only a couple of hundred miles up, so they aren't stationary. They can barely make out anything at the person sized level, and the images are in black and white. If you specifically are a target, and they invest the energy in tracking you directly, they still can only get 4 minutes worth of sparse STILL (not video) images of you every 90 - 120 minutes. It's not like they're reading the radio dial or anything, or nosing in the books you're reading. Honestly with today's satellite technology, the only real thing they can do is compare what something looks like this week with what it looked like last week. It also doesn't capture images unless they specifically target the images. They can specifically target general areas and see for example, if a large contingent of troops are moving in a warzone, or if there is a blockage to an escape route after an earthquake. They cannot watch you in realtime and video tape your sexual exploits with that hooker you've been trying to hide in your car. Haha.
Although that is how it is now, but I suppose it's possible that a next generation of satellites could possibly do those things, at least in small bursts, so it's important to make sure the law keeps up with the technology, but right now, there isn't much in the 'offensive' that satellites can give the government, just mostly information that can be used for post-facto defensive strategy or in near-term decision making, like choosing evacuation routes after say.. a terrorist drops a nuke on someone.
Because the grass is always greener, funny that's almost a pun seeing as how we're on this environmental kick lately around this planet. Perhaps all of the other civilizations are out at pan-galactic parties getting all sorts of kicks we'll never understand now, while we're back on earth fixing up our taped nerd glasses wondering why we can't perform enough calculations to land an intergalactic phone number.
I think that's the case regardless, if we're not the first, we're likely not the last civilization... someone has to be first, but in a vast space like we're in, how likely is it? I don't know, I don't claim to be an expert. Just using logic to say that if you're a civilization less advanced than us, then of course we'd suffice as an advanced civilization to discover. of course.
At present.NET seems to be gaining ground as a platform. I know that apache supports some version of it, but if companies are looking to take advantage of all of the benefits of.net and the new WCF (like IIS hosted WCF services, which are as easy to set up as a config file,) then they probably go with something they can phone up support and get covered on. Also, with using Microsoft for.net there is no waiting for the Mono to get feature X covered. I think between ASP.NET ajax, and.NET 3.0, a lot of folks are looking at IIS as a viable option. Not that there aren't better things offered by apache, but if I were guessing, and I am, I'd guess this is the reason you'll see an upsurge. Sharepoint 2007 hosting may also have some contribution to this set of numbers as well. I don't think people really know what's good for them most of the time, which is why you see everyone always taking the path that's of least resistance (today,) and at the moment, for asp.net apps, that's IIS.
The article makes a few good points, and indeed I think they can all co-exist; however, it's painfully obvious that the author just learned the term 'non-zero sum' and wants to show how masterful of the idea he has become by repeating it 25 times in slightly varied context throughout the short span of the article. We're all very impressed.
Well, I can at least testify that HEAT is the most awful thing I have ever seen. They have all sorts of plugins and features, but each costs more $$, and even simple things like Emailing (Called the Business Rule Monitor) are ridiculous and die all the time. The web front end? No problem, as long as you shell out for the up to date system, and sign an agreement saying you have never seen a SQL database table before, ever, and if you have that you promise never to do it again. Their motto is 'simply powerful.' It's simply 'something' already, but not powerful.
I don't think the poster was implying garbage collection, but rather the implicit calling of destructors, which does happen indeed. But the poster was failing to understand the the issue is with another object referring to the address of one that has been possibly destructed or otherwise become invalid. So you're right, just not addressing the concern of the GP.
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haha i was just thinking the same thing.. I don't understand how he can possibly say that and believe it at the same time. Likely he doesn't.
I HAD satellite internet. It's not really that broadband (400k[lowercase-b]bps), though it downloads faster than dialup and ISDN, as long as you don't get more than 400 megs in a time span of 24 hours or something like that. They have ungodly fair access policies that make it so that you cannot download more than half a gig in 24 hours, or something like 4 gigs in a month. It's ridiculous, and defeats the purpose of having broadband. Also the latency is a HUGE issue, it takes half a second for your request to go up, and half a second for the response stream to start. I ran some numbers way back and I determined that it was a light speed limitation. The satellites are in geostationary orbit which means it's some serious distance, and you have to cross that distance at least 4 times to get a stream started, then there is the overhead of you not being the only one connected. Sure FAP is reasonable given the state of satellite technology, but they just aren't practical for more than your casual web browsing and email using. Even chat programs are lagged to hell, and forget about gaming or even reasonable VPN (another nice way to FAP yourself quicker than a flash is to synch outlook several times a day when people are dumb enough to send you huge attachments. Yes it's dumb of them to send you the attachments, but I don't care as much on DSL or cable.) If you even want to download a linux distro, you basically can't, halfway through the download, you get swapped to 50k download speed, and it will time out at some point or if you connection is briefly interrupted when youre trying to let it run overnight or something, just give up. It's god awful. Just say HELL NO to satellite unless you're only an end user who likes to surf myspace and email people. For those things you can just use dialup anyway and it's a lot less messy and expensive.
I suppose you might be right, especially when the word Microsoft is involved. It will be like a trump card that manager's play as if there were some wisdom in it. I am trying to talk our team OUT of renewing the EA we have with MS because the opportunity cost is too high: even if we still want to use microsoft products. For example, the office and windows come as a bundle, and the server cals are included, and that's cheaper, but each copy of Project is $900 for three years, and Visio is over a grand. The terms of the license agreement say that the EA supercedes all other independantly purchased licenses, so for example if you buy a boxed copy of project for $200, you still have to buck up for the EA, but you can be refunded the $200 bucks. It's insane. So I think you might be right about people not being sensitive to quality and choice.
I don't think the DCMA applies because no copyright is infringed. The reason this is a big deal is that Apple has some agreement of exclusivity with AT&T and they probably get a pretty penny for it. If Apple doesn't ensure that the agreement is followed then they may be in breach of some contract, so they want to lock it down. That being said, I don't know that Apple can be held liable for what the customers do with the phones any more than smith & wesson can for someone getting shot.
I don't think you're right. I mean, if they already collected your money up front, as far as they are concerned you are lucky to get fixes for free, because some other companies charge for everything service related. However, if it's software as a service, their whole bottom line is at stake with a bug in the open, so they had better fix it or lose all of their customers overnight. (ok not LITERALLY over night, but theoretically that could happen in some cases.) It's always relying on your ability to have your best face forward, or lose you customers to the next best face in the industry, so fix fix fix, uptime uptime uptime. that will have to be the way it's done or those companies will die.
If a manager is reading your post on slashdot, he/she/it is possibly already smart enough to know that you can't measure admin productivity the same way you can a factory floor worker. Admins are dollar savers, whereas floor workers and business development types are money makers. Trying to determine how much money you saved is only about as fruitful as valuing various cases of disaster scenario, which undoubtedly have too many variables.
A coherent strategy for talking about productivity is to break out the services provided by IT into categories, and compare to what you consider to be 'efficient' or successful companies invest as a median on these same services per unit (into the number of employees, maybe also compared to geographic distribution, weighting for cost of living in the areas of employment.) It's not easy, and you pretty much have to be an actuary to do it. Like for example, break down into File/Print/Email/Teleconferencing/Internet Bandwidth/Spam Filtering/Account maintence... Number of help calls, downtime, etc are all relative to the type of service provided as well as the industry as a whole. It's certainly not solely an internally measurable number.
actually I do know that. But I didn't say I'd explain the entire macro model of capitalism in one post, I was just citing the fact that folks dream of banks as high security shoeboxes where they put their money, and for some reason get interest for it.
you don't have a 'right to a job' you have to right to apply for a job. if nobody wants to pay your for your services, learn some new services. nobody 'took our jobs away' they simply outperformed us for a lower price. I'm not talking about quality necessarily, that's another issue, and it varies as well. People go to work and get paid because someone feels the need for their services, and that it's worth forking out the cash for said service instead of, for example, doing it themselves. You don't get a paycheck because someone wants to give you a job, you get a paycheck because you can do something someone feels is worth paying you for. If someone else does it for a lower price, then quit your bitching and do one of two things: find another job doing the same thing somewhere else, or, learn to do something else and do that. Like I said, industries, especially in particular geographical areas, but eventually as a whole, go completely out of business eventually when we have machines or other products to replace them. So, in accepting the fact that we don't live in a stagnant society, and that nobody is going to just walk up and start paying you for producing nothing (services included), you should really quit bitching about 'poor people who don't have jobs,' and start thinking of 'how can we find useful services for these folks to perform.' Notice that's not the same thing as forcing someone (or the government) to pay them to do what they feel like doing, it's repurposing some good resources -- the people who need the jobs. If all of the sudden computers could write all of their own code, I'd be fucked too, but I'm well aware of that, and I'm ready to accept the risk, so I seek employment as a programmer. You're not going to ever find something that's just right and sit on it for enternity, it'll just keep moving, like the rest of the planet.
when the feds "inject money into the economy," that doesn't mean they 'print money for them to use' they in fact loan them money from the federal reserve at a lower rate. Of course, who wouldn't take that loan at a low rate? printing press indeed. You know, I'll bet that just about less than 10% of the folks you meet on the street even know how the economy actually is working. I'll bet that less than 20% know when you put money in a bank they lend it out to someone else. From what I've seen people saying here, it's pretty evident that a lot of people really have no idea, even those who are in the tech sector and rely on this system heavily to work... I'm amazed.
actually no, that doesn't happen. If that were the case then eventually everyone becomes a jack of all trades, we will lose specialization, and you cannot maintain quality with people producing everything locally. Besides resources are not unlimited locally either, there are some places that just have better raw materials, and all sorts of other things, like a more ready supply of workers. You might be right about 1 or 2 companies diving it to take advantage of the market, but it won't go so far as to actually make anyone competitive. They will still be a local oligopoly and will have near zero incentive to even respond to consumer demands, especially in necessity goods. Competition, particularly international competition is the quickest and most efficient way to drive prices down and standard of living up. Yes some people lose, but overall, the system is solvent indefinitely. The industries involved may fluctuate, nobody makes horse buggy's anymore, for example, but that's the way life is. You can't continuously have the government exhert more and more control, by passing more and more laws, more and more regulations, for one because it encourages a black market, and two, because it's just not enforcible unless you want to start giving those out of a job factory workers new jobs as 'trade police.'
Hah, so american companies have enough to produce stuff locally and virtually be no further off because we'll spiral into an endless cycle of local inflation, but we'll be able to afford it (thus staying the same in your perfect model.) Should we just forbid people from traveling too? How about shut off the internet? There isn't, never was, and never will be a benefit to buying only american. You don't have to agree with me, the market will back me up on this one.
so you're saying that if someone loses their high paying manufacturing job, then they can't go do something else ever? not even 20 years from now? It's a local hiccup to lose a local industry to foreign competition, it doesn't make the next generation (next 4 year class of college students even) of workers immune to finding jobs. It's those high paying jobs anyway that make American companies unable to compete with foreign companies who don't pay them as much. So you're basically saying that we should somehow tell the other countries that they have to be fair and pay them as much as we'd like to make, because.. it's only fair that way... right? I don't think they'll buy it. And you will be left behind whining about how life isn't fair, while the people who adapt will be moving on buying more plasma screen tv's they shouldn't be able to afford.
services and intellectual property. it's called a post industrial society. there are a number of such countries on the planet. it's not bad, and we're not running out of wealth.
england seems to be doing alright. what do they export? deficit doesn't mean 'debt' in case those of you hadn't caught on yet. All it means is we import more than we export. It is not a disaster. It's not even necessarily bad.
you're an idiot. If we only bought american goods, then we'd inflate our local prices, and foreign companies would kick the crap out of us abroad, and we wouldn't have anyone able to compete. Then instead of losing SOME money to them, we'd have whole companies go out of business. You weren't paying attention in economics class where you. It might sound nice to say 'buy american' but if we really did that, and boycott foreign stuff, you'd drive the price on american shit up so much there would be no way in hell anyone but americans would buy american, and foreign business is what keeps a LOT of companies afloat.
you can reliably block spam from a pessimisitic network, ie one that says 'no unless you're on the whitelist' which means that the whitelist would be of course china's sites and any that they allow you to see. Obviously there is such a list or else they wouldn't be able to get google to go along with only showing results on this list. The reason we can't do it in the free world is because we aren't starting in a cage, we're starting in an open field where everything is allowed to come in unless shown to be bad. Not so in china, they own everything, and can stop everything but what they send out.
I think you're right, I mean, perhaps they ban any and everything (only chinese ranges/subnets allowed, etc) they don't already know about, then proxies are good for jack shit... I mean you can make rules for ipaddress ranges and subnets, or even coming from/to specific hosts, so it's simple enough for them just to
A) stop your spam from coming in.
2) Filter out attempts to connect to proxies
D) Kill the people trying to do it in the name of the Republic.
My tongue-in-cheekness aside I think the OP is quite possibly chasing his own tail up a red herrings ass on this one. Kinda like one might when they've been smoking a little too much pot....
They can't make companies that consume financial information responsible for it 100%, because the big huge wide open hole is the consumer themselves. They can type their password into a fake website faster than you can say 'anbesol' and what fault of the bank's is that? None. Consumers need to be smarter, BUT banks or merchants SHOULD be liable for any data exposure due to negligence. Which is something else entirely. If it's bad security practice on behalf of the institution, or someone accidentally left the firewall open, then they should eat the cost of cleaning up their spill. But, if someone misuses a login because you were dumb enough to phish out your password, or you got keylogged, sucks to be you.
Don't worry this isn't like hollywood where they can track your every move. First of all these satellites are only a couple of hundred miles up, so they aren't stationary. They can barely make out anything at the person sized level, and the images are in black and white. If you specifically are a target, and they invest the energy in tracking you directly, they still can only get 4 minutes worth of sparse STILL (not video) images of you every 90 - 120 minutes. It's not like they're reading the radio dial or anything, or nosing in the books you're reading. Honestly with today's satellite technology, the only real thing they can do is compare what something looks like this week with what it looked like last week. It also doesn't capture images unless they specifically target the images. They can specifically target general areas and see for example, if a large contingent of troops are moving in a warzone, or if there is a blockage to an escape route after an earthquake. They cannot watch you in realtime and video tape your sexual exploits with that hooker you've been trying to hide in your car. Haha.
Although that is how it is now, but I suppose it's possible that a next generation of satellites could possibly do those things, at least in small bursts, so it's important to make sure the law keeps up with the technology, but right now, there isn't much in the 'offensive' that satellites can give the government, just mostly information that can be used for post-facto defensive strategy or in near-term decision making, like choosing evacuation routes after say.. a terrorist drops a nuke on someone.
Because the grass is always greener, funny that's almost a pun seeing as how we're on this environmental kick lately around this planet. Perhaps all of the other civilizations are out at pan-galactic parties getting all sorts of kicks we'll never understand now, while we're back on earth fixing up our taped nerd glasses wondering why we can't perform enough calculations to land an intergalactic phone number.
I think that's the case regardless, if we're not the first, we're likely not the last civilization... someone has to be first, but in a vast space like we're in, how likely is it? I don't know, I don't claim to be an expert. Just using logic to say that if you're a civilization less advanced than us, then of course we'd suffice as an advanced civilization to discover. of course.
At present .NET seems to be gaining ground as a platform. I know that apache supports some version of it, but if companies are looking to take advantage of all of the benefits of .net and the new WCF (like IIS hosted WCF services, which are as easy to set up as a config file,) then they probably go with something they can phone up support and get covered on. Also, with using Microsoft for .net there is no waiting for the Mono to get feature X covered. I think between ASP.NET ajax, and .NET 3.0, a lot of folks are looking at IIS as a viable option. Not that there aren't better things offered by apache, but if I were guessing, and I am, I'd guess this is the reason you'll see an upsurge. Sharepoint 2007 hosting may also have some contribution to this set of numbers as well. I don't think people really know what's good for them most of the time, which is why you see everyone always taking the path that's of least resistance (today,) and at the moment, for asp.net apps, that's IIS.
The article makes a few good points, and indeed I think they can all co-exist; however, it's painfully obvious that the author just learned the term 'non-zero sum' and wants to show how masterful of the idea he has become by repeating it 25 times in slightly varied context throughout the short span of the article. We're all very impressed.
Well, I can at least testify that HEAT is the most awful thing I have ever seen. They have all sorts of plugins and features, but each costs more $$, and even simple things like Emailing (Called the Business Rule Monitor) are ridiculous and die all the time. The web front end? No problem, as long as you shell out for the up to date system, and sign an agreement saying you have never seen a SQL database table before, ever, and if you have that you promise never to do it again. Their motto is 'simply powerful.' It's simply 'something' already, but not powerful.
I don't think the poster was implying garbage collection, but rather the implicit calling of destructors, which does happen indeed. But the poster was failing to understand the the issue is with another object referring to the address of one that has been possibly destructed or otherwise become invalid. So you're right, just not addressing the concern of the GP.