Why because they have a balanced life? Why does software have to be "inspired," it just has to function. Zealots can spend too much time including nice-to-have features than accomplishing the main objectives on schedule. You don't need to think about computers 24/7 to do a good job.
This is a terrible comment. Please don't tar people who are good at their job and have a passion for what they do by calling them zealots. If I were interviewing you for a position at my company, and you said, "Why does software have to be 'inspired,' it just has to function," I would stop, kindly thank you for your time, and ask you to leave. An attitude like that means you're just phoning it in; that your life begins at 5; that you don't understand the passion driving the co-workers around you.
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against having other interests. But having other interests and writing inspired software are hardly mutually exclusive.
Great companies foster cultures that draw employees who are looking for inspiration. Take Google, for example: "Google engineers all have '20 percent time' in which they're free to pursue projects they're passionate about." And it's worked for them: "This freedom has already produced Google News, Google Suggest, AdSense for Content, and Orkut - products which might otherwise have taken an entire start-up to launch."
Ironically enough, since this article is related to Fog Creek Software, Joel Spolsky has written very well on this subject already. I suggest you read it. Slowly. Then go back and read it again.
Really great programmers, the kind who want software to be "inspired," are worth their weight in gold. Good management identifies them early, pays them a ton of money, and makes sure they're always happy. If they lose them, they tend to throw chairs around the room. That's how valuable they are. The rest tend to plod along in the IT development of, say, General Motors, writing crappy Perl CGI scripts to automate HR tasks (poorly).
The Civil War, for example, is not on that list. At no time was a declaration of war issued from the Congress regarding the little unpleasantness between 1861 and 1865.
As far as the Federal Government is concerned, there was no war; there was only the suppression of unlawful an rebellion. The Government never acknowledged the existence of the Confederate States of America, because those States never legally left the Union. The Federal Government could not possibly wage war with a fictional entity, so it could not possibly have been at war. The Government was simply having trouble enforcing the laws in the South.
Of course, like anything, people differ on this point, and there are inconsistencies in the Government's position. For example, the U.S. Navy blockaded Southern ports, even though it has been long established in international law that blockades are considered acts of war between two sovereign nations (hence the use of the term "quarantine" instead of "blockade" during the Cuban Missile Crisis). The blockade, though militarily necessary, undermined the Government's claim that the Confederacy was not a belligerent (why would a nation blockade its own ports?). When the war was going badly for the North, and as cotton prices rose in Western Europe, European governments considered using the Northern blockades as legal justification for recognizing the Confederacy as a belligerent and entering the war on their side.
That nastiness on the Korean peninsula that started in 1950? Also conspicuously absent.
Similar legal arguments can be made about how the Korean and Vietnam wars were not "wars" as far as the U.S. Government was concerned, at least in legal terms.
Please define the differences, practical, ethical, or moral, between, for example, the Spanish-American War and the Civil War.
The problem is that your definition of war is not useful in any meaningful way beyond the rhetorical. As I am sure you are aware, the U.S. Government is legally considered to be in a state of war only when Congress passes a formal declaration to that affect. While the Government may be rhetorically waging a "war on terror," and while waging that "war" successfully may require the deployment of resources, including military resources, the Government is not in a legal state of war.
This distinction is important because when the Government is legally at war it is given legal latitude it is not given in peacetime. This is less of a problem for a non-war like, say, Vietnam, which is still a visible armed conflict with a semi-distinct beginning and end. It is more of a problem, however, if the Government is allowed to claim it is in a perpetual and loosely defined "war" against a common noun, and then attempts to acquire the legal latitude being at war requires, I'm sure you can understand how that makes people nervous, even if you believe that latitude should be granted. Like any good conservative (please excuse me if you take issue with that characterization), I'm sure concentrations of power make you nervous, and I'm sure that sentiment also helps you understand how the Government's attempts to increase its power because its protestations that is it at "war" can make people nervous. America is a nation born in revolution, and Americans are historically very skeptical of power. People who question the Government's attempts to claim more power now are exemplifying the most time-honored of American political traditions.
For all of these reasons I'm sure you can understand the legal differences between the Spanish-American War and the Civil War, between World War II and Vietnam. If you concede this point, it does not then follow that you must "surrender to terrorism" or become and "appeaser." It just means you understand the subtleties of the law, which, after all, are only an attempt to reflect the subtleties of real life.
Minorities are just that. A democracy is based on the will of the majority being forced on the minority. Minorities lose. That's the way it is.
This is not a good justification for policy. What would slaves before 1865 think of this argument? Or what about blacks in the South (and the North) after 1865, who, until the 1960s, were routinely marginalized by gerrymandered districts and racist election laws. What about blacks today, who are organized into "majority-minority" districts (districts that are over 50% minority in composition) to control their influence. (Go back and read the article -- there is an interesting discussion of how the "majority-minority" phenomenon came about.)
I also can't help but wonder if you would be making the same point as above if you were part of that minority having the majority's policies "forced" on you, to use your word.
I beg to differ. The only applications on Windows I fail to grasp at a glance are almost exclusively ported over from other (unix/linux) platforms. Windows application in general have a very consistent look and feel, mostly because there is only a single set of widgets (controls/dialogs/toolbars) used by all of them.
The opposite is true. Microsoft's own tools don't help you follow those guidelines, which they do publish, and even Microsoft doesn't follow them. First, you can see that Microsoft distributes their own custom widget toolset for their major products, like Office and Visual Studio.NET. To easily see this, open a project in Visual Studio.NET on Windows XP with one of their colored themes enabled. Notice that the scrollbar in the Solution Explorer or Class View on the right is a standard, skinned scrollbar, while the one in the editor window is an old-style Windows 2000 grey scrollbar. Someone is using custom drawing code there. Notice that in Office XP and VS.NET, the toolbars and menus are different than the standard operating system ones other applications pick up by default. In Office 2003, the menus and toolbars have again been changed to an ugly pastel blue, which again is in contrast to the rest of the OS.
The Microsoft development tools don't help you to write conforming UIs for their own platform, as they should. Creating buttons in VB, for example, does not make them a standard size; you must drag a box on the screen to be whatever size you want. Spacing between controls is not enforced, or even suggested, in VS C++ or VB. This leads to the well-known problem of options screens that are tremendously cluttered, with spacing between controls limited, group boxes are singleton controls, unclear relationship between options, and so forth. Furthermore, Microsoft pursues its tabbed-based options screen in Office, options screens with categories in a left tree-view in VS, and third parties to fend for themselves. In addition, MS now puts options screens under Tools->Options, while some developers put it under View->Options or View->Preferences (which MS used to do), and Netscape still uses the ancient Edit->Preferences. MS does not give developers a hint by, say, creating a default Options menu item under the Tools menu when you create a desktop application.
Contrast this with the Mac platform. The free development tools they distribute set up applications by default with all the standard options in their standard places. Options screens are standard (with a small number of violators, notably Microsoft, here and there), toolbars are standard, etc. The Interface Builder tool, which is a WYSIWYG application for building application screens and dialog windows, similar to that embedded within VS, brings up guides to help with control placement and spacing, and the culture of the development community is very much focused on UI consistency and usability, which, despite what you say, is not true of other platforms, which includes Microsoft. The only thing MS developers seem to agree on is the necessity of overly-cluttered toolbars filled with indistinguishable tiny little 24x24 icons, the majority of which are never used by most users.
Actually I prefer Conf files to the registry. The registry is cool in SOME respects, but it also has weaknesses that make it a vulnerability. Windows rot comes to mind. The older your install of Windows gets, the slower it gets. It's hard to imagine it working that way with.Conf files.
I personally think the registry is awful. It's opaque, it's confusing, and it leads to a host of problems on Windows that don't occur on other platforms. The "Windows rot" you mention is one of them. Another is that it makes it very easy for the authors of spyware and adware to bury their little parasite deep into your system, and it's almost impossible for you to clean it out. You can not fully uninstall many applications because of the detritus it leaves in the registry. For example, Office leaves all kinds of stuff behind in the registry when you uninstall. Some of it is a convenience, like your settings in case you install again, but some of it is not. In any event, you the user do not have manual control to force it to remove everything. Because of this, you can not fully remove something from your computer, which is what you are trying to do. Worse, if you're having a problem with your installation and need to reinstall, and the culprit is a registry corruption, it is possible the offending key will not be overwritten by the installation because it was not removed by the uninstaller. The registry also makes it such that you can not replace your Windows installation with a new one without having to reinstall all of your applications. On OS X, for example, there is an install option where it will put down a fresh copy of all OS files, but installed applications and user's home directories remain, because all of their files are localized to their own "sandboxes," and there is no dependency on data contained in an OS provided database that is replaced when the OS is reinstalled. This does not even begin to get into the problems it causes with COM object conflicts and other programming issues.
No matter how good the original idea was (which itself is debatable -- the most complex systems in the world had been getting on fine with config files for decades, and it remains to be seen how Windows is better off by not using them), the registry has turned into a horrible mess (remember the size limit in early Windows NT and 9x distributions?), and I think Microsoft knows this, and from what I've heard they're moving away from it.
My biggest beef with conf files isn't the files themselves, it's that the apps I've played with don't come with a handy little UI to help you make choices. Seems like that'd be the polite thing to do. Wouldn't it be slick if programmers were in the habit of providing a little UI (Graphic or otherwise) to muck with the.conf file, then offer to restart a service if necessary?
In any case, I prefer conf files to the registry. I just worry about being overly dependent on them for configuration.
I don't understand this last sentence. You worry about being overly dependent on your configuration files for configuration? Huh? That's what they're there for.
That minor nitpick aside, I think your broader point above may be a bit unrealistic on your part. The UI you're looking for that lets you muck with configurations, either in the registry or in config files, is the preferences UI provided within the application (leaving aside command line and daemon apps for the moment). If an option is not provided there, it is usually because you are not supposed to be playing around with that value. You can't expect developers to spend time writing an extra app to give you access to something they don't want you to see. Again, though, if you know what you're doing and want to play around with things, configuration files provide all of the options that are available in one easy, human readable place. In the registry, it is far from obvious where things live. Also, again using Mac OS X as an example, they have devised a standard configur
Well, in fairness, we are talking about Fox News viewers.
Which, BTW, outnumber CNN or MSNBC viewers. FNC must be doing something right by not putting a liberal spin on selective topics.
Let's try to be "fair and balanced" here about a few things. First, one of the primary reasons Fox News has higher ratings than any of the other networks is because it has become the de facto standard news channel for conservatives. Especially during the prime time hours, when the highly rated Bill O'Reilly and Hannity & Colmes shows are on (and I believe one of the crawls on that Simpsons episode promoted Hannity & Colmes by calling it "Hannity & Some Other Guy"), conservatives know they can tune in to see a conservative host "take it to the liberals." Everyone else is splintered between the rest of the networks. Thus you have one very concentrated group of viewers watching one channel, and everyone else divided among who's left.
The other key difference researchers have discovered is the length of time Fox News viewers remain tuned in, which tends to be much longer than viewers of other networks (I don't have a link offhand, but it was mentinoed in an Atlantic Monthly article about News Corp. a few months ago). I have a lot of conservatives in my family, and in a very unscientific way I have witnessed the same thing. My family members turn on Fox News when they get home from work and leave it on until they go to bed, by and large.
The reason they do this is basically because they agree with the comment you made above. For example, my father is conservative, but not reactionary, and is no moron. He knows Fox News is not "fair and balanced," but he doesn't care because he thinks the other networks are liberal, but try to pretend they're not. Anyone who knows anything about conservatives knows how much they resent the "elite media," and know what the slogans "fair and balanced," and, "we report, you decide," really mean: they're not part of the "liberal establishment," and will present the conservative viewpoint.
You also can not deny that Fox News is biased toward conservatives. Often, they seem like little better than a mouth piece for the administration. For example, during a news broadcast (a real news broadcast, not an opinion-based talk show), I saw them identify a "suicide bomber" as a "homicide bomber." No one on this planet besides the Bush administration uses the term "homicide bomber." It's a Bush spin term, plain and simple. That's fine, that is what all politicians do, and Bush should not be blamed for it. It is irresponsible, however, for Fox News to parrot it like it's the truth, and it's hard to take the rest of their news seriously when they do.
Finally, it is also undeniable that most news organizations are liberally biased, at least socially (economic and foreign policy opinions tend to be more diverse). It would be difficult to go to The New York Times news desk and find someone who identifies himself (or herself) as pro-life, or anti-gun control, or whatever, and that bias has to seep out into their reporting, if for no other reason than they're human beings, and all human beings see the "truth" through a certain lens. The difference between The New York Times and Fox News, however, is how unapologetic the bias is. (Also remember to distinguish between the Times' editorial page, which leans left, and its reporting, which, at the very least, tries not to. The Wall Street Journal has a very conservative editorial page, for example, but employs honest journalists who try to do impartial reporting.) Part of this is because of how much the modern conservative movement hates liberals. That hatred spews forth in some of the most shocking vitriole by talk show hosts on Fox. It used to be that that kind of conservative hatred was reserved for the Rush Limbaugh show, or the pages of the The American Spectator, or other overtly partisan sources. Fox News has brought it to the mainstream, and, in my opinion, has seriously detracted fr
iTunes uses IE as its browser no matter what browser you choose. Maybe it's because the functionality of iTMS requires IE or Safari, as other browsers are not supported.
First, the browser used to display the iTunes Music Store is embedded in the iTunes application itself; it doesn't launch a separate browser process like the Microsoft "My Music" link does.
Second, if iTunes is using the embedded IE rendering control to display the Music Store (and others are claiming it doesn't), what does that violate? Lots of Windows applications, from both MS and third parties, use the HTML rendering control -- it's a system service, and a useful one (Apple copied it with WebKit, which is Safari's underlying engine). For example, Outlook Express, which comes with Windows, uses the IE rendering control to display the content of e-mail messages (as does Outlook, as does the entire Windows help system, etc.), but that is not a violation of anything because it's not forcing you to use the Internet Explorer application proper.
Third, and by far most importantly, Apple does not make Windows, so Apple cannot possibly be guilty of violating an anti-trust agreement Microsoft entered into.
1- He complains that Windows Update doesn't tell him what it is doing. This is absolute crap- a lie. You have the option to see information about every patch it is applying, you can remove patches, there are direct links to very informative security bulletins telling you what the patch is all about. If the author considers himself technically minded, but didn't actually READ what was on the screen, that was his problem. But- he succeeded in installing the patches- and that is what is important. See- it's set up so even morons like him can do it.
Admittedly he wasn't really clear on this point, but I don't think he was talking about Windows Update, but rather the "Critical Update Wizard" thing that pops up when you first install Windows and runs in the background. The way I remember it is that it nags you to turn it on before it will actually do anything in the form of downloading and installing updates, but I could be wrong. Like I said, he should have been clearer, but I don't think he was talking about Windows Update.
2- He couldn't figure out how to add icons in the 'bottom panel' (Taskbar) in Windows. Well, if he had tried to drag and drop, wonderful things would have happened. But, instead he sat there like a slack-jawed idiot, looking for problems. It takes about 2 seconds to add something to the taskbar, or the start menu.
You have already said you realized the Quick Launch bar was not turned on by default, so no further comment is required here. I agree with your broader point though that it's somewhat disingenuous for a tech-savvy Linux user to pretend like he's too incurious to explore the various options and menus available in a new OS. I find it hard to believe he hasn't explored every nook and cranny of the Linux desktop and doesn't have every single application customized to the extreme. He would do the same in Windows, and would soon discover the Quick Launch bar. But in all probability he already knew it was there, since it's been around since the Windows 95 shell update that came with Internet Explorer 4.0.
3- Once again, feigning (or proving) total ignorance, he didn't understand what these 'pop-up' ads are all about- and why can't IE get rid of them? True- IE out of the box will display pop-ups, but when you add the Google Toolbar (free) not only will it block pop-ups, but it will give you some awesome IE/Windows only tools right in your browser. The Google Toolbar is better than any similar thing I have seen in other browsers. The answer is out there. And it's free, and it's good.
He was feigning ignorance. He was trying to convey the notion that he didn't know what pop-up ads were because he doesn't have to deal with them in Mozilla. He complained about having to pay for pop-up blocking software, which is a bit of a misrepresentation since you correctly observed that the Google toolbar will do it for you for free, and has some other cool features to boot, but that is not his point. He's trying to say that you don't have to seek out and install any extra software to get it done if you use the "standard" browser that comes with Linux (and pop-up blocking is a feature that is orthogonal to searching, so it may not be obvious to some that the Google toolbar is the tool to download if pop-up blocking is what you're looking for).
All in all, not the best written article I've ever read.
Listen, I'm no apologist for the Bush administration, but are you serious? Leave Iraq aside for a minute. What was illegal about the invasion of Afghanistan? Since Osama bin Laden settled in Afghanistan and the Taliban controlled most of the country, how many attacks were there on US interests around the world? Embassy bombings, the USS Cole, etc. Finally, after 3,000 people were slaughtered on US soil, action against Afghanistan was authorized by NATO, the UN Security Council, and the US Congress. What law was broken, international or otherwise? Sorry if you didn't like it, but that doesn't make it illegal.
Keep your eyes on the ball, people. I understand you hate Bush, but at least try and think through these things.
From here you can do your own research into which international laws the US is bound by. Or am I being overly optimistic?
Yeah, but what does this dump of acronyms prove exactly? Did the World Health Organization, just to pick one, pass some kind of resolution that said the US could not invade Iraq? You have to understand the specific international laws relevant to Iraq, and have at least a loose understanding of how law works generally. Simply citing that the US is a member of ASEAN does not make your case. For example, the US argued with some merit (regardless of whether you agree with it) that Iraq stood in violation of some 12 or 13 UN resolutions requiring it to "disarm," including the most recent resolution 1441 passed unanimously by the Security Council last February (if memory serves). That resolution warned of "serious consequences" if Iraq did not disarm, and at the time of the invasion, the US government was making the case that Iraq had not disarmed and therefore "serious consequences" would ensue.
It does not matter whether or not you agree with this interpretation. What matters is that the language was sufficiently vague to allow for this interpretation. The language was also sufficiently vague for countries that opposed the war to plausibly argue that the US needed more explicit authorization from the Security Council before resorting to force. But given the "serious consequences" mentioned in 1441, and given the previous 12 years of UN resolutions demanding certain action by Iraq (which no one in a position of authority in any country seriously believes they ever obeyed), the US would probably be acquitted if brought before an international court, assuming standards of proof similar to those in US courts (beyond a reasonable doubt). But you have to understand that in February, when 1441 was passed, the US knew it was going to invade Iraq almost regardless of what they did to disarm. Therefore why would the US write a resolution (and it wrote 1441 itself) that it knew it was going to probably break in a few months? No, instead it gave itself enough flexibility in the language to do what it wanted to do "within the law." Such is the nature of international relations, and such is the way it will probably always be.
The article also said that maybe that's the only way of keeping this form of an Iraq together - something the British found out, something Saddam did, but something which seems to have been missed by much of the media chattering - quite possibly because they don't want to bring up the subject of Churchill.
I can't speak for what was in the news in the UK, but I can say that in the US there was much discussion of whether or not Iraq was governable in its current form without an iron fist enforcing order. The British experience was also discussed, but I don't remember Churchill's specific role ever coming up. I think this had more to do with the fact that it's relatively tangential to the central point (we're talking about the British experience in Iraq as an empire, not Churchill as an individual), rather than a concerted effort, intentional or otherwise, to maintain "silence" on the issue. But I don't live in the UK, so I can't really speak fairly about the specific treatment of this issue over there.
What gets me is how we go on about how Saddam gassed the Kurds etc, but hear little mention of how Churchill, in the 1920's also used poisoned gas to kill these peoples.
Would you prefer that every condemnation of Saddam's use of chemical weapons is qualified with an acknowledgement that Churchill once also used chemical weapons? Do you wish for Churchill's reputation to be sullied such that he and Saddam are viewed as moral equivalents? It should be relatively obvious to any impartial judge of history (if such a thing exists) that Churchill, warts and all, was an immeasurably more worthy leader for the British than Saddam Hussein was for the Iraqis. I would image that fundamental truth has some bearing on how they are each portrayed in the media.
Please do explain yourself. Just because Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and has been known to engage in predatory business practices does not automatically require that everything they do to be monopolistic. I can't see how they are leveraging their operating system monopoly to obtain a monopoly in instant messaging, or how a change in protocol is at all related. Now, if they were changing the next release of Windows so that it would only work with MSN Messenger (or whatever they call it these days), that would be different.
You missed the point entirely. Did Microsoft have to prevent Netscape from operating on Windows in order to leverage their OS monopoly to gain a browser monopoly? No. Simply "integrating" it with the OS was enough. Similarly, "integrating" MSN Messenger (or is it Windows Messenger?.NET Messenger?) with the OS will help to make MSN Messenger a monopoly. The same tactics are being used with Windows Media Player for audio and video. And so on and so forth.
Since you seem to accept that, "Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and has been known to engage in predatory business practices," you should think very hard about what they are doing with other products that are being "integrated" into the OS.
as a professional developer, even $2499 is recovered in a few days when you're tracking an extremely nasty bug.
Then write better code:)
Seriously, though, I am also both a C++ Win32 and Apple developer. I agree that PB is not as good as Visual Studio, but that's not the point. It's like saying that iMovie is not good enough because Final Cut Pro is better. Well, you pay $1000 for Final Cut Pro, so it should be better. Similarly, you pay an arm and a leg for Visual Studio, which gives Microsoft the resources to invest in adding more features and making it a richer development environment. You get what you pay for. That's life. And while there are some things about PB that drive me nuts, for free development tools I think PB and IB are pretty good (IMHO, IB spanks VC++ for UI design -- can't speak for VB or "C#" though), and I'm looking forward to XCode.
Please keep in mind when complaining about PB and XCode that while PB is free, and XCode will at a minimum come free with Panther, Visual Studio.NET can cost you anywhere from $549 to $2,499, depending on the package you choose.
Copyright ionfringement is creating a new copy of something which you are not allowed to do. That is, you gained something you should ne have been allowed to gain.
Theft has an additional part, which is that not only did you gain something, the one you stole from lost his copy of it (since there was not any copying involved creating a second copy).
Traditionally, theft involves taking something from another person without their permission. In short, you deprive that person of their property and they can no longer enjoy its use. Some have argued, particularly in the context of online or digital piracy, that infringement or misappropriation really doesn't deprive the victim of their product because it is merely being copied, so infringement or misappropriation is not truly theft.
As criminal prosecutors, we focus on the conduct, regardless of the label that might be applied. That said, in the cases we prosecute, we believe that using the term theft is not misleading. While there may be technical differences between certain types of infringing activity, conduct that triggers the criminal statutes is analogous to theft.
In some instances, piracy can actually be more damaging than traditional theft. Unlike traditional theft, where a person steals a specific number of tangible objects, one product in digital format can alone be used to generate hundreds of thousands of near-perfect digital copies within hours. In the case of software piracy, for example, the developer has not been deprived of his product in the traditional sense it has merely been copied. Yet, he faces the grim reality that his product is now available around the world, often for free, to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. In very real terms, even though he retains his property, the digital victim is in a much worse position than the victim of a more traditional theft. To him, the theft is clear and the harm couldn t be more real.
We should immediately get the NEA, AFL-CIO, NOW, ACLU, Trial Lawyers Assocation, AARP, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, GALA, and Citizens United for the American Way to immediately contribute to the Democrat cause of showing how the Republicans are in the pockets of the special interest groups.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. What I meant by, "it will help the Democrats to paint Bush as being in the pockets of special interests," was not that the Democrats are not beholden to their own special interests, but that the Democrats will be able to portray Bush as such. And not only special interests generally, but corporate interests in particular, which is perceived as worse by most people. The Democrats have used this strategy successfully before, portraying Republicans as being controlled by certain "boogeymen" of the right, like the NRA or the Christian Coalition, or unpopular corporate interests like the pharmaceutical or oil industries.
Sometimes the Republicans do the same, like accusing Democrats of being puppets of trial lawyers. Typically, though, the Democrats have been more successful at it because, like it or not, the Republicans tend to have wealthier patrons than Democrats, and that wealth creates suspicion. With Bush accused of favoring wealthy individuals over average individuals with the income tax cuts, wealthy investors over average investors with the dividend tax cuts, corporate interests over public interests in the environment, corporate interests over public interests with tort reform (though many average people support tort reform), corporate interests over public interests with Medicare and Social Security reform, they can now throw another log on the fire. While some of these issues resonate with the public more than others, vetoing a rollback of the FCC ruling will very much resonate with the public, and thus I would be very surprised if he followed through on his threat. A similar situation arose with campaign finance reform, which he did not veto despite being strongly ideologically opposed to it, because it would be an effective issue for Democrats to use against him. That is an issue that resonates with the public, and even though the Democrats weren't too excited about cleaning up the system either, they would have been very excited to slam Bush as being in the pocket of multinational corporations and "extremist" interest groups like the Christian Coalition. Bush won't veto this bill, either. Karl Rove won't let him (and he would be right, politically speaking).
Anyway, the point is that what I was trying to emphasize was the tactics, not the merits of any particular claim. Sorry if that got lost in the translation.
Of course the whole election won't turn on this one issue, but it will help the Democrats to paint Bush as being in the pockets of special interests.
You also underestimate the amount of public outcry from the FCC ruling. From an article in the Wall Street Journal today:
In the months before the FCC voted June 2 to relax the television cap and other media-ownership rules, more than a million wrote the agency in opposition; more than a million others have written since. Groups ranging from the National Rifle Association to the National Organization of Women joined media executives such as Barry Diller and Ted Turner in urging the commission to retain the existing rules.
It's still a long way from here to a veto override, but a veto would clearly demonstrate that Bush does not care what large numbers of his own party, influential conservatives like William Safire (who correctly fear the concentration of power whatever its form, public or private, like conservatives or supposed to), or the public thinks -- not to mention liberals and Democrats -- if it conflicts with the narrow interests of massive corporations that just happen to also be his financial benefactors.
Apple restricts their service to 5%~ of all computerdom, and it's a 'cool service'.
Your oversimplification obscures the point. Apple's service is considered "cool" not because it is Mac-only (though a Windows version is due out by the end of the year), but because of the fact that its relatively liberal DRM constituted a major step forward in finding a proper balance between consumer and producer rights. For any song you buy, you can burn it onto as many CDs as you want (with marginal restrictions), copy it onto as many iPods as you want, and share it with 3 computers. Not complete freedom, but it definitely beats having your music disappear from your computer when you decide to stop paying subscription fees.
From reading the AP story, it seems that some songs have stricter licensing terms than others. So some can be burned onto a CD, copied to another computer, or played on an mp3 player, but others can't. Does that mean consumers have to read the fine print for every song, or is it easy to discern which is which? What will happen to customers who are rudely surprised when they find they can't burn their song onto a CD? Will they keep shopping at the store and be more careful, or abandon it altogether? Only time will tell.
The interesting part will be to see how it compares with Apple's Windows version of its store. It sounds like the buy.com store still has some restrictions that could end up being deal breakers, but competition between the two is probably a good thing. If nothing else, it will hopefully put some downward pressure on prices.
Boromir son of Faram is a good troll. Read his comments -- it's quite amusing. Most people fall for it, but some people figure it out. Even his name is a troll. I am not into the Lord of the Rings, but apparently Boromir is not the son of Faram, but a brother or something.
I don't have time to get into this with you, but the hostage crisis was certainly not Regan's fault. The hostages were taken when Carter was president and released on Reagan's inauguration day, partly (but not totally) because they were afraid of his hard line stance. See, sad as it is in this world, people with guns only seem to respect people with bigger guns. I'm no arch-conservative, nor am I a Reagan fanatic, and I disagree with a lot of his policies, but Carter's sad handling of the hostage crisis is one of the contributers to the "malaise" of the late 70's you hear so much about. Indeed, one of Reagan's most important contributions to this country, in my opinion, was his effort to change that: "Morning in America".
You're right, the submitter of the article took a little shot at Microsoft, and the editor didn't have to choose that story submission, but it's not as if the comment is completely without merit. The article states, "The rogue program does not affect the Apple Macintosh line of computers or computers running variants of the Unix operating system." That pretty much leaves...Windows. And the submitter's comment was right that the Windows monopoly makes these types of abuses more likely, and the poor design of Windows makes them harder to stop, track, and remove.
For example, I went home to visit my parents one weekend, and my mom asked me to take a look at her computer because she was getting dialog box advertisements on her screen. I took a look, and when we got to her computer she had 5 to 10 queued up formatted advertisements on her screen sent to her using "net send". So I shut down the messenger service and turned on the firewall in XP. Problem solved. But why, on the "home edition" of Windows, is the messenger service running in the first place? Why is there this open port on someone's home machine accepting random text messages from the outside world? It's poor design, and the fact that Windows is a monopoly exaggerates the problem and creates an issue for almost every home computer user in the world.
And don't forget the countless other MS-specific issues. Consider ActiveX controls. A user installs something like Comet Cursor on their machine and ends up polluting their OS with adware and spyware. Do users of non-MS browsers have this issue? No. True, the user clicked Yes, but most people are not in the habit of clicking No to every ActiveX control that tries to install itself. Most are benign (as Comet Cursor would appear to be at first glance), and some are useful or necessary (like Windows Update). But you make a bad decision once, and you pay for it effectively until you get a new machine or re-install the OS. There are tools to remove spyware, but sometimes they don't find everything, and that misses the point anyway. The question is why do I have to solve this problem in the first place? Why can't you, the user, transparently remove software from your machine? Because Windows is designed to be so opaque that it's impossible for anyone to know where everything is and how everything works together.
And of course the vast majority of e-mail worms and viruses only affect users of Windows, and more specifically users of Microsoft mail clients on Windows machines. Users of Outlook Express or Entourage on the Mac are safe.
I find this to be a huge issue in the home PC market. Most people are completely unaware that they should not be dealing with these frustrations, and that there is a better way, simply because Windows is all they know. So in that sense, I think it was fair for the submitter to take a shot at Microsoft for this, and fair for michael to allow it to go through.
Besides, is their a huge advantage to centralizing on only one email app?
Well, many large enterprises standardize on Outlook because they use Exchange as their mail server. They do this so that they can use extra mail features that Exchange provides, like marking messages for follow-up or recalling messages. Admins at my former employer used follow-up flags to remind us that, say, we had to fill out an HR form by a certain date. The e-mail would be flagged for follow-up by such-and-such a date, an appointment would be added to the calendar (if memory serves), and the admin can configure a reminder to pop-up on my screen if I don't clear the follow-up flag by a certain amount of time before the deadline.
The real biggie is the ability to see everyone else's calendar and schedule meetings based on that. You can also do things like marking individual attendees as optional or required; setting up a uniform reminder time that will appear on all attendees' screens; replying to a meeting request as confirmed, tentative, or decline the invitation; proposing a new meeting time; etc. It's actually pretty powerful, and works well in large, beauracratic organizations. You can do similar things with tasks and the journal.
However, I have recently jumped ship to a small company, and much to my delight they are getting off of Outlook and onto Mozilla Mail because the "desktop engineering team" (two guys) are big into OSS:). But, for the time being at least, we are still using Exchange for the mail server. I use Moz Mail to interface with Exchange strictly via IMAP, but there are still some here who use Outlook and interface "natively" with Exchange.
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This is a terrible comment. Please don't tar people who are good at their job and have a passion for what they do by calling them zealots. If I were interviewing you for a position at my company, and you said, "Why does software have to be 'inspired,' it just has to function," I would stop, kindly thank you for your time, and ask you to leave. An attitude like that means you're just phoning it in; that your life begins at 5; that you don't understand the passion driving the co-workers around you.
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against having other interests. But having other interests and writing inspired software are hardly mutually exclusive.
Great companies foster cultures that draw employees who are looking for inspiration. Take Google, for example: "Google engineers all have '20 percent time' in which they're free to pursue projects they're passionate about." And it's worked for them: "This freedom has already produced Google News, Google Suggest, AdSense for Content, and Orkut - products which might otherwise have taken an entire start-up to launch."
Ironically enough, since this article is related to Fog Creek Software, Joel Spolsky has written very well on this subject already. I suggest you read it. Slowly. Then go back and read it again.
Really great programmers, the kind who want software to be "inspired," are worth their weight in gold. Good management identifies them early, pays them a ton of money, and makes sure they're always happy. If they lose them, they tend to throw chairs around the room. That's how valuable they are. The rest tend to plod along in the IT development of, say, General Motors, writing crappy Perl CGI scripts to automate HR tasks (poorly).
The Civil War, for example, is not on that list. At no time was a declaration of war issued from the Congress regarding the little unpleasantness between 1861 and 1865.
As far as the Federal Government is concerned, there was no war; there was only the suppression of unlawful an rebellion. The Government never acknowledged the existence of the Confederate States of America, because those States never legally left the Union. The Federal Government could not possibly wage war with a fictional entity, so it could not possibly have been at war. The Government was simply having trouble enforcing the laws in the South.
Of course, like anything, people differ on this point, and there are inconsistencies in the Government's position. For example, the U.S. Navy blockaded Southern ports, even though it has been long established in international law that blockades are considered acts of war between two sovereign nations (hence the use of the term "quarantine" instead of "blockade" during the Cuban Missile Crisis). The blockade, though militarily necessary, undermined the Government's claim that the Confederacy was not a belligerent (why would a nation blockade its own ports?). When the war was going badly for the North, and as cotton prices rose in Western Europe, European governments considered using the Northern blockades as legal justification for recognizing the Confederacy as a belligerent and entering the war on their side.
That nastiness on the Korean peninsula that started in 1950? Also conspicuously absent.
Similar legal arguments can be made about how the Korean and Vietnam wars were not "wars" as far as the U.S. Government was concerned, at least in legal terms.
Please define the differences, practical, ethical, or moral, between, for example, the Spanish-American War and the Civil War.
The problem is that your definition of war is not useful in any meaningful way beyond the rhetorical. As I am sure you are aware, the U.S. Government is legally considered to be in a state of war only when Congress passes a formal declaration to that affect. While the Government may be rhetorically waging a "war on terror," and while waging that "war" successfully may require the deployment of resources, including military resources, the Government is not in a legal state of war.
This distinction is important because when the Government is legally at war it is given legal latitude it is not given in peacetime. This is less of a problem for a non-war like, say, Vietnam, which is still a visible armed conflict with a semi-distinct beginning and end. It is more of a problem, however, if the Government is allowed to claim it is in a perpetual and loosely defined "war" against a common noun, and then attempts to acquire the legal latitude being at war requires, I'm sure you can understand how that makes people nervous, even if you believe that latitude should be granted. Like any good conservative (please excuse me if you take issue with that characterization), I'm sure concentrations of power make you nervous, and I'm sure that sentiment also helps you understand how the Government's attempts to increase its power because its protestations that is it at "war" can make people nervous. America is a nation born in revolution, and Americans are historically very skeptical of power. People who question the Government's attempts to claim more power now are exemplifying the most time-honored of American political traditions.
For all of these reasons I'm sure you can understand the legal differences between the Spanish-American War and the Civil War, between World War II and Vietnam. If you concede this point, it does not then follow that you must "surrender to terrorism" or become and "appeaser." It just means you understand the subtleties of the law, which, after all, are only an attempt to reflect the subtleties of real life.
Who care what people of the past would think. We are not there anymore. We've learned and progressed since then.
[snip]
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"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
I was going to rebut your post, but it looks like you've saved me some time and taken care of that yourself.
Minorities are just that. A democracy is based on the will of the majority being forced on the minority. Minorities lose. That's the way it is.
This is not a good justification for policy. What would slaves before 1865 think of this argument? Or what about blacks in the South (and the North) after 1865, who, until the 1960s, were routinely marginalized by gerrymandered districts and racist election laws. What about blacks today, who are organized into "majority-minority" districts (districts that are over 50% minority in composition) to control their influence. (Go back and read the article -- there is an interesting discussion of how the "majority-minority" phenomenon came about.)
I also can't help but wonder if you would be making the same point as above if you were part of that minority having the majority's policies "forced" on you, to use your word.
I beg to differ. The only applications on Windows I fail to grasp at a glance are almost exclusively ported over from other (unix/linux) platforms. Windows application in general have a very consistent look and feel, mostly because there is only a single set of widgets (controls/dialogs/toolbars) used by all of them.
The opposite is true. Microsoft's own tools don't help you follow those guidelines, which they do publish, and even Microsoft doesn't follow them. First, you can see that Microsoft distributes their own custom widget toolset for their major products, like Office and Visual Studio .NET. To easily see this, open a project in Visual Studio .NET on Windows XP with one of their colored themes enabled. Notice that the scrollbar in the Solution Explorer or Class View on the right is a standard, skinned scrollbar, while the one in the editor window is an old-style Windows 2000 grey scrollbar. Someone is using custom drawing code there. Notice that in Office XP and VS.NET, the toolbars and menus are different than the standard operating system ones other applications pick up by default. In Office 2003, the menus and toolbars have again been changed to an ugly pastel blue, which again is in contrast to the rest of the OS.
The Microsoft development tools don't help you to write conforming UIs for their own platform, as they should. Creating buttons in VB, for example, does not make them a standard size; you must drag a box on the screen to be whatever size you want. Spacing between controls is not enforced, or even suggested, in VS C++ or VB. This leads to the well-known problem of options screens that are tremendously cluttered, with spacing between controls limited, group boxes are singleton controls, unclear relationship between options, and so forth. Furthermore, Microsoft pursues its tabbed-based options screen in Office, options screens with categories in a left tree-view in VS, and third parties to fend for themselves. In addition, MS now puts options screens under Tools->Options, while some developers put it under View->Options or View->Preferences (which MS used to do), and Netscape still uses the ancient Edit->Preferences. MS does not give developers a hint by, say, creating a default Options menu item under the Tools menu when you create a desktop application.
Contrast this with the Mac platform. The free development tools they distribute set up applications by default with all the standard options in their standard places. Options screens are standard (with a small number of violators, notably Microsoft, here and there), toolbars are standard, etc. The Interface Builder tool, which is a WYSIWYG application for building application screens and dialog windows, similar to that embedded within VS, brings up guides to help with control placement and spacing, and the culture of the development community is very much focused on UI consistency and usability, which, despite what you say, is not true of other platforms, which includes Microsoft. The only thing MS developers seem to agree on is the necessity of overly-cluttered toolbars filled with indistinguishable tiny little 24x24 icons, the majority of which are never used by most users.
Actually I prefer Conf files to the registry. The registry is cool in SOME respects, but it also has weaknesses that make it a vulnerability. Windows rot comes to mind. The older your install of Windows gets, the slower it gets. It's hard to imagine it working that way with .Conf files.
I personally think the registry is awful. It's opaque, it's confusing, and it leads to a host of problems on Windows that don't occur on other platforms. The "Windows rot" you mention is one of them. Another is that it makes it very easy for the authors of spyware and adware to bury their little parasite deep into your system, and it's almost impossible for you to clean it out. You can not fully uninstall many applications because of the detritus it leaves in the registry. For example, Office leaves all kinds of stuff behind in the registry when you uninstall. Some of it is a convenience, like your settings in case you install again, but some of it is not. In any event, you the user do not have manual control to force it to remove everything. Because of this, you can not fully remove something from your computer, which is what you are trying to do. Worse, if you're having a problem with your installation and need to reinstall, and the culprit is a registry corruption, it is possible the offending key will not be overwritten by the installation because it was not removed by the uninstaller. The registry also makes it such that you can not replace your Windows installation with a new one without having to reinstall all of your applications. On OS X, for example, there is an install option where it will put down a fresh copy of all OS files, but installed applications and user's home directories remain, because all of their files are localized to their own "sandboxes," and there is no dependency on data contained in an OS provided database that is replaced when the OS is reinstalled. This does not even begin to get into the problems it causes with COM object conflicts and other programming issues.
No matter how good the original idea was (which itself is debatable -- the most complex systems in the world had been getting on fine with config files for decades, and it remains to be seen how Windows is better off by not using them), the registry has turned into a horrible mess (remember the size limit in early Windows NT and 9x distributions?), and I think Microsoft knows this, and from what I've heard they're moving away from it.
My biggest beef with conf files isn't the files themselves, it's that the apps I've played with don't come with a handy little UI to help you make choices. Seems like that'd be the polite thing to do. Wouldn't it be slick if programmers were in the habit of providing a little UI (Graphic or otherwise) to muck with the .conf file, then offer to restart a service if necessary?
In any case, I prefer conf files to the registry. I just worry about being overly dependent on them for configuration.
I don't understand this last sentence. You worry about being overly dependent on your configuration files for configuration? Huh? That's what they're there for.
That minor nitpick aside, I think your broader point above may be a bit unrealistic on your part. The UI you're looking for that lets you muck with configurations, either in the registry or in config files, is the preferences UI provided within the application (leaving aside command line and daemon apps for the moment). If an option is not provided there, it is usually because you are not supposed to be playing around with that value. You can't expect developers to spend time writing an extra app to give you access to something they don't want you to see. Again, though, if you know what you're doing and want to play around with things, configuration files provide all of the options that are available in one easy, human readable place. In the registry, it is far from obvious where things live. Also, again using Mac OS X as an example, they have devised a standard configur
Well, in fairness, we are talking about Fox News viewers.
Which, BTW, outnumber CNN or MSNBC viewers. FNC must be doing something right by not putting a liberal spin on selective topics.
Let's try to be "fair and balanced" here about a few things. First, one of the primary reasons Fox News has higher ratings than any of the other networks is because it has become the de facto standard news channel for conservatives. Especially during the prime time hours, when the highly rated Bill O'Reilly and Hannity & Colmes shows are on (and I believe one of the crawls on that Simpsons episode promoted Hannity & Colmes by calling it "Hannity & Some Other Guy"), conservatives know they can tune in to see a conservative host "take it to the liberals." Everyone else is splintered between the rest of the networks. Thus you have one very concentrated group of viewers watching one channel, and everyone else divided among who's left.
The other key difference researchers have discovered is the length of time Fox News viewers remain tuned in, which tends to be much longer than viewers of other networks (I don't have a link offhand, but it was mentinoed in an Atlantic Monthly article about News Corp. a few months ago). I have a lot of conservatives in my family, and in a very unscientific way I have witnessed the same thing. My family members turn on Fox News when they get home from work and leave it on until they go to bed, by and large.
The reason they do this is basically because they agree with the comment you made above. For example, my father is conservative, but not reactionary, and is no moron. He knows Fox News is not "fair and balanced," but he doesn't care because he thinks the other networks are liberal, but try to pretend they're not. Anyone who knows anything about conservatives knows how much they resent the "elite media," and know what the slogans "fair and balanced," and, "we report, you decide," really mean: they're not part of the "liberal establishment," and will present the conservative viewpoint.
You also can not deny that Fox News is biased toward conservatives. Often, they seem like little better than a mouth piece for the administration. For example, during a news broadcast (a real news broadcast, not an opinion-based talk show), I saw them identify a "suicide bomber" as a "homicide bomber." No one on this planet besides the Bush administration uses the term "homicide bomber." It's a Bush spin term, plain and simple. That's fine, that is what all politicians do, and Bush should not be blamed for it. It is irresponsible, however, for Fox News to parrot it like it's the truth, and it's hard to take the rest of their news seriously when they do.
Finally, it is also undeniable that most news organizations are liberally biased, at least socially (economic and foreign policy opinions tend to be more diverse). It would be difficult to go to The New York Times news desk and find someone who identifies himself (or herself) as pro-life, or anti-gun control, or whatever, and that bias has to seep out into their reporting, if for no other reason than they're human beings, and all human beings see the "truth" through a certain lens. The difference between The New York Times and Fox News, however, is how unapologetic the bias is. (Also remember to distinguish between the Times' editorial page, which leans left, and its reporting, which, at the very least, tries not to. The Wall Street Journal has a very conservative editorial page, for example, but employs honest journalists who try to do impartial reporting.) Part of this is because of how much the modern conservative movement hates liberals. That hatred spews forth in some of the most shocking vitriole by talk show hosts on Fox. It used to be that that kind of conservative hatred was reserved for the Rush Limbaugh show, or the pages of the The American Spectator, or other overtly partisan sources. Fox News has brought it to the mainstream, and, in my opinion, has seriously detracted fr
iTunes uses IE as its browser no matter what browser you choose. Maybe it's because the functionality of iTMS requires IE or Safari, as other browsers are not supported.
First, the browser used to display the iTunes Music Store is embedded in the iTunes application itself; it doesn't launch a separate browser process like the Microsoft "My Music" link does.
Second, if iTunes is using the embedded IE rendering control to display the Music Store (and others are claiming it doesn't), what does that violate? Lots of Windows applications, from both MS and third parties, use the HTML rendering control -- it's a system service, and a useful one (Apple copied it with WebKit, which is Safari's underlying engine). For example, Outlook Express, which comes with Windows, uses the IE rendering control to display the content of e-mail messages (as does Outlook, as does the entire Windows help system, etc.), but that is not a violation of anything because it's not forcing you to use the Internet Explorer application proper.
Third, and by far most importantly, Apple does not make Windows, so Apple cannot possibly be guilty of violating an anti-trust agreement Microsoft entered into.
I think you mean:
Don't worry about it. Common mistake for beginning programmers.
1- He complains that Windows Update doesn't tell him what it is doing. This is absolute crap- a lie. You have the option to see information about every patch it is applying, you can remove patches, there are direct links to very informative security bulletins telling you what the patch is all about. If the author considers himself technically minded, but didn't actually READ what was on the screen, that was his problem. But- he succeeded in installing the patches- and that is what is important. See- it's set up so even morons like him can do it.
Admittedly he wasn't really clear on this point, but I don't think he was talking about Windows Update, but rather the "Critical Update Wizard" thing that pops up when you first install Windows and runs in the background. The way I remember it is that it nags you to turn it on before it will actually do anything in the form of downloading and installing updates, but I could be wrong. Like I said, he should have been clearer, but I don't think he was talking about Windows Update.
2- He couldn't figure out how to add icons in the 'bottom panel' (Taskbar) in Windows. Well, if he had tried to drag and drop, wonderful things would have happened. But, instead he sat there like a slack-jawed idiot, looking for problems. It takes about 2 seconds to add something to the taskbar, or the start menu.
You have already said you realized the Quick Launch bar was not turned on by default, so no further comment is required here. I agree with your broader point though that it's somewhat disingenuous for a tech-savvy Linux user to pretend like he's too incurious to explore the various options and menus available in a new OS. I find it hard to believe he hasn't explored every nook and cranny of the Linux desktop and doesn't have every single application customized to the extreme. He would do the same in Windows, and would soon discover the Quick Launch bar. But in all probability he already knew it was there, since it's been around since the Windows 95 shell update that came with Internet Explorer 4.0.
3- Once again, feigning (or proving) total ignorance, he didn't understand what these 'pop-up' ads are all about- and why can't IE get rid of them? True- IE out of the box will display pop-ups, but when you add the Google Toolbar (free) not only will it block pop-ups, but it will give you some awesome IE/Windows only tools right in your browser. The Google Toolbar is better than any similar thing I have seen in other browsers. The answer is out there. And it's free, and it's good.
He was feigning ignorance. He was trying to convey the notion that he didn't know what pop-up ads were because he doesn't have to deal with them in Mozilla. He complained about having to pay for pop-up blocking software, which is a bit of a misrepresentation since you correctly observed that the Google toolbar will do it for you for free, and has some other cool features to boot, but that is not his point. He's trying to say that you don't have to seek out and install any extra software to get it done if you use the "standard" browser that comes with Linux (and pop-up blocking is a feature that is orthogonal to searching, so it may not be obvious to some that the Google toolbar is the tool to download if pop-up blocking is what you're looking for).
All in all, not the best written article I've ever read.
the illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan
Listen, I'm no apologist for the Bush administration, but are you serious? Leave Iraq aside for a minute. What was illegal about the invasion of Afghanistan? Since Osama bin Laden settled in Afghanistan and the Taliban controlled most of the country, how many attacks were there on US interests around the world? Embassy bombings, the USS Cole, etc. Finally, after 3,000 people were slaughtered on US soil, action against Afghanistan was authorized by NATO, the UN Security Council, and the US Congress. What law was broken, international or otherwise? Sorry if you didn't like it, but that doesn't make it illegal.
Keep your eyes on the ball, people. I understand you hate Bush, but at least try and think through these things.
From the CIA world factbook entry on the USA:
From here you can do your own research into which international laws the US is bound by. Or am I being overly optimistic?Yeah, but what does this dump of acronyms prove exactly? Did the World Health Organization, just to pick one, pass some kind of resolution that said the US could not invade Iraq? You have to understand the specific international laws relevant to Iraq, and have at least a loose understanding of how law works generally. Simply citing that the US is a member of ASEAN does not make your case. For example, the US argued with some merit (regardless of whether you agree with it) that Iraq stood in violation of some 12 or 13 UN resolutions requiring it to "disarm," including the most recent resolution 1441 passed unanimously by the Security Council last February (if memory serves). That resolution warned of "serious consequences" if Iraq did not disarm, and at the time of the invasion, the US government was making the case that Iraq had not disarmed and therefore "serious consequences" would ensue.
It does not matter whether or not you agree with this interpretation. What matters is that the language was sufficiently vague to allow for this interpretation. The language was also sufficiently vague for countries that opposed the war to plausibly argue that the US needed more explicit authorization from the Security Council before resorting to force. But given the "serious consequences" mentioned in 1441, and given the previous 12 years of UN resolutions demanding certain action by Iraq (which no one in a position of authority in any country seriously believes they ever obeyed), the US would probably be acquitted if brought before an international court, assuming standards of proof similar to those in US courts (beyond a reasonable doubt). But you have to understand that in February, when 1441 was passed, the US knew it was going to invade Iraq almost regardless of what they did to disarm. Therefore why would the US write a resolution (and it wrote 1441 itself) that it knew it was going to probably break in a few months? No, instead it gave itself enough flexibility in the language to do what it wanted to do "within the law." Such is the nature of international relations, and such is the way it will probably always be.
The article also said that maybe that's the only way of keeping this form of an Iraq together - something the British found out, something Saddam did, but something which seems to have been missed by much of the media chattering - quite possibly because they don't want to bring up the subject of Churchill.
I can't speak for what was in the news in the UK, but I can say that in the US there was much discussion of whether or not Iraq was governable in its current form without an iron fist enforcing order. The British experience was also discussed, but I don't remember Churchill's specific role ever coming up. I think this had more to do with the fact that it's relatively tangential to the central point (we're talking about the British experience in Iraq as an empire, not Churchill as an individual), rather than a concerted effort, intentional or otherwise, to maintain "silence" on the issue. But I don't live in the UK, so I can't really speak fairly about the specific treatment of this issue over there.
What gets me is how we go on about how Saddam gassed the Kurds etc, but hear little mention of how Churchill, in the 1920's also used poisoned gas to kill these peoples.
Would you prefer that every condemnation of Saddam's use of chemical weapons is qualified with an acknowledgement that Churchill once also used chemical weapons? Do you wish for Churchill's reputation to be sullied such that he and Saddam are viewed as moral equivalents? It should be relatively obvious to any impartial judge of history (if such a thing exists) that Churchill, warts and all, was an immeasurably more worthy leader for the British than Saddam Hussein was for the Iraqis. I would image that fundamental truth has some bearing on how they are each portrayed in the media.
Please do explain yourself. Just because Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and has been known to engage in predatory business practices does not automatically require that everything they do to be monopolistic. I can't see how they are leveraging their operating system monopoly to obtain a monopoly in instant messaging, or how a change in protocol is at all related. Now, if they were changing the next release of Windows so that it would only work with MSN Messenger (or whatever they call it these days), that would be different.
You missed the point entirely. Did Microsoft have to prevent Netscape from operating on Windows in order to leverage their OS monopoly to gain a browser monopoly? No. Simply "integrating" it with the OS was enough. Similarly, "integrating" MSN Messenger (or is it Windows Messenger? .NET Messenger?) with the OS will help to make MSN Messenger a monopoly. The same tactics are being used with Windows Media Player for audio and video. And so on and so forth.
Since you seem to accept that, "Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and has been known to engage in predatory business practices," you should think very hard about what they are doing with other products that are being "integrated" into the OS.
as a professional developer, even $2499 is recovered in a few days when you're tracking an extremely nasty bug.
Then write better code :)
Seriously, though, I am also both a C++ Win32 and Apple developer. I agree that PB is not as good as Visual Studio, but that's not the point. It's like saying that iMovie is not good enough because Final Cut Pro is better. Well, you pay $1000 for Final Cut Pro, so it should be better. Similarly, you pay an arm and a leg for Visual Studio, which gives Microsoft the resources to invest in adding more features and making it a richer development environment. You get what you pay for. That's life. And while there are some things about PB that drive me nuts, for free development tools I think PB and IB are pretty good (IMHO, IB spanks VC++ for UI design -- can't speak for VB or "C#" though), and I'm looking forward to XCode.
Please keep in mind when complaining about PB and XCode that while PB is free, and XCode will at a minimum come free with Panther, Visual Studio .NET can cost you anywhere from $549 to $2,499, depending on the package you choose.
Copyright ionfringement is creating a new copy of something which you are not allowed to do. That is, you gained something you should ne have been allowed to gain.
Theft has an additional part, which is that not only did you gain something, the one you stole from lost his copy of it (since there was not any copying involved creating a second copy).
Not according to DOJ lawyers. I quote:
Traditionally, theft involves taking something from another person without their permission. In short, you deprive that person of their property and they can no longer enjoy its use. Some have argued, particularly in the context of online or digital piracy, that infringement or misappropriation really doesn't deprive the victim of their product because it is merely being copied, so infringement or misappropriation is not truly theft.
As criminal prosecutors, we focus on the conduct, regardless of the label that might be applied. That said, in the cases we prosecute, we believe that using the term theft is not misleading. While there may be technical differences between certain types of infringing activity, conduct that triggers the criminal statutes is analogous to theft.
In some instances, piracy can actually be more damaging than traditional theft. Unlike traditional theft, where a person steals a specific number of tangible objects, one product in digital format can alone be used to generate hundreds of thousands of near-perfect digital copies within hours. In the case of software piracy, for example, the developer has not been deprived of his product in the traditional sense it has merely been copied. Yet, he faces the grim reality that his product is now available around the world, often for free, to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. In very real terms, even though he retains his property, the digital victim is in a much worse position than the victim of a more traditional theft. To him, the theft is clear and the harm couldn t be more real.
We should immediately get the NEA, AFL-CIO, NOW, ACLU, Trial Lawyers Assocation, AARP, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, GALA, and Citizens United for the American Way to immediately contribute to the Democrat cause of showing how the Republicans are in the pockets of the special interest groups.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. What I meant by, "it will help the Democrats to paint Bush as being in the pockets of special interests," was not that the Democrats are not beholden to their own special interests, but that the Democrats will be able to portray Bush as such. And not only special interests generally, but corporate interests in particular, which is perceived as worse by most people. The Democrats have used this strategy successfully before, portraying Republicans as being controlled by certain "boogeymen" of the right, like the NRA or the Christian Coalition, or unpopular corporate interests like the pharmaceutical or oil industries.
Sometimes the Republicans do the same, like accusing Democrats of being puppets of trial lawyers. Typically, though, the Democrats have been more successful at it because, like it or not, the Republicans tend to have wealthier patrons than Democrats, and that wealth creates suspicion. With Bush accused of favoring wealthy individuals over average individuals with the income tax cuts, wealthy investors over average investors with the dividend tax cuts, corporate interests over public interests in the environment, corporate interests over public interests with tort reform (though many average people support tort reform), corporate interests over public interests with Medicare and Social Security reform, they can now throw another log on the fire. While some of these issues resonate with the public more than others, vetoing a rollback of the FCC ruling will very much resonate with the public, and thus I would be very surprised if he followed through on his threat. A similar situation arose with campaign finance reform, which he did not veto despite being strongly ideologically opposed to it, because it would be an effective issue for Democrats to use against him. That is an issue that resonates with the public, and even though the Democrats weren't too excited about cleaning up the system either, they would have been very excited to slam Bush as being in the pocket of multinational corporations and "extremist" interest groups like the Christian Coalition. Bush won't veto this bill, either. Karl Rove won't let him (and he would be right, politically speaking).
Anyway, the point is that what I was trying to emphasize was the tactics, not the merits of any particular claim. Sorry if that got lost in the translation.
Of course the whole election won't turn on this one issue, but it will help the Democrats to paint Bush as being in the pockets of special interests.
You also underestimate the amount of public outcry from the FCC ruling. From an article in the Wall Street Journal today:
In the months before the FCC voted June 2 to relax the television cap and other media-ownership rules, more than a million wrote the agency in opposition; more than a million others have written since. Groups ranging from the National Rifle Association to the National Organization of Women joined media executives such as Barry Diller and Ted Turner in urging the commission to retain the existing rules.
It's still a long way from here to a veto override, but a veto would clearly demonstrate that Bush does not care what large numbers of his own party, influential conservatives like William Safire (who correctly fear the concentration of power whatever its form, public or private, like conservatives or supposed to), or the public thinks -- not to mention liberals and Democrats -- if it conflicts with the narrow interests of massive corporations that just happen to also be his financial benefactors.
Apple restricts their service to 5%~ of all computerdom, and it's a 'cool service'.
Your oversimplification obscures the point. Apple's service is considered "cool" not because it is Mac-only (though a Windows version is due out by the end of the year), but because of the fact that its relatively liberal DRM constituted a major step forward in finding a proper balance between consumer and producer rights. For any song you buy, you can burn it onto as many CDs as you want (with marginal restrictions), copy it onto as many iPods as you want, and share it with 3 computers. Not complete freedom, but it definitely beats having your music disappear from your computer when you decide to stop paying subscription fees.
From reading the AP story, it seems that some songs have stricter licensing terms than others. So some can be burned onto a CD, copied to another computer, or played on an mp3 player, but others can't. Does that mean consumers have to read the fine print for every song, or is it easy to discern which is which? What will happen to customers who are rudely surprised when they find they can't burn their song onto a CD? Will they keep shopping at the store and be more careful, or abandon it altogether? Only time will tell.
The interesting part will be to see how it compares with Apple's Windows version of its store. It sounds like the buy.com store still has some restrictions that could end up being deal breakers, but competition between the two is probably a good thing. If nothing else, it will hopefully put some downward pressure on prices.
Boromir son of Faram is a good troll. Read his comments -- it's quite amusing. Most people fall for it, but some people figure it out. Even his name is a troll. I am not into the Lord of the Rings, but apparently Boromir is not the son of Faram, but a brother or something.
Sorry, Boromir, if I've embarrassed you :)
- Iran contra
I don't have time to get into this with you, but the hostage crisis was certainly not Regan's fault. The hostages were taken when Carter was president and released on Reagan's inauguration day, partly (but not totally) because they were afraid of his hard line stance. See, sad as it is in this world, people with guns only seem to respect people with bigger guns. I'm no arch-conservative, nor am I a Reagan fanatic, and I disagree with a lot of his policies, but Carter's sad handling of the hostage crisis is one of the contributers to the "malaise" of the late 70's you hear so much about. Indeed, one of Reagan's most important contributions to this country, in my opinion, was his effort to change that: "Morning in America".
That and, of course, Bedtime for Bonzo.
You're right, the submitter of the article took a little shot at Microsoft, and the editor didn't have to choose that story submission, but it's not as if the comment is completely without merit. The article states, "The rogue program does not affect the Apple Macintosh line of computers or computers running variants of the Unix operating system." That pretty much leaves...Windows. And the submitter's comment was right that the Windows monopoly makes these types of abuses more likely, and the poor design of Windows makes them harder to stop, track, and remove.
For example, I went home to visit my parents one weekend, and my mom asked me to take a look at her computer because she was getting dialog box advertisements on her screen. I took a look, and when we got to her computer she had 5 to 10 queued up formatted advertisements on her screen sent to her using "net send". So I shut down the messenger service and turned on the firewall in XP. Problem solved. But why, on the "home edition" of Windows, is the messenger service running in the first place? Why is there this open port on someone's home machine accepting random text messages from the outside world? It's poor design, and the fact that Windows is a monopoly exaggerates the problem and creates an issue for almost every home computer user in the world.
And don't forget the countless other MS-specific issues. Consider ActiveX controls. A user installs something like Comet Cursor on their machine and ends up polluting their OS with adware and spyware. Do users of non-MS browsers have this issue? No. True, the user clicked Yes, but most people are not in the habit of clicking No to every ActiveX control that tries to install itself. Most are benign (as Comet Cursor would appear to be at first glance), and some are useful or necessary (like Windows Update). But you make a bad decision once, and you pay for it effectively until you get a new machine or re-install the OS. There are tools to remove spyware, but sometimes they don't find everything, and that misses the point anyway. The question is why do I have to solve this problem in the first place? Why can't you, the user, transparently remove software from your machine? Because Windows is designed to be so opaque that it's impossible for anyone to know where everything is and how everything works together.
And of course the vast majority of e-mail worms and viruses only affect users of Windows, and more specifically users of Microsoft mail clients on Windows machines. Users of Outlook Express or Entourage on the Mac are safe.
I find this to be a huge issue in the home PC market. Most people are completely unaware that they should not be dealing with these frustrations, and that there is a better way, simply because Windows is all they know. So in that sense, I think it was fair for the submitter to take a shot at Microsoft for this, and fair for michael to allow it to go through.
Besides, is their a huge advantage to centralizing on only one email app?
:). But, for the time being at least, we are still using Exchange for the mail server. I use Moz Mail to interface with Exchange strictly via IMAP, but there are still some here who use Outlook and interface "natively" with Exchange.
Well, many large enterprises standardize on Outlook because they use Exchange as their mail server. They do this so that they can use extra mail features that Exchange provides, like marking messages for follow-up or recalling messages. Admins at my former employer used follow-up flags to remind us that, say, we had to fill out an HR form by a certain date. The e-mail would be flagged for follow-up by such-and-such a date, an appointment would be added to the calendar (if memory serves), and the admin can configure a reminder to pop-up on my screen if I don't clear the follow-up flag by a certain amount of time before the deadline.
The real biggie is the ability to see everyone else's calendar and schedule meetings based on that. You can also do things like marking individual attendees as optional or required; setting up a uniform reminder time that will appear on all attendees' screens; replying to a meeting request as confirmed, tentative, or decline the invitation; proposing a new meeting time; etc. It's actually pretty powerful, and works well in large, beauracratic organizations. You can do similar things with tasks and the journal.
However, I have recently jumped ship to a small company, and much to my delight they are getting off of Outlook and onto Mozilla Mail because the "desktop engineering team" (two guys) are big into OSS