Of course we're bitching "because it's Microsoft": Microsoft have already shown us that they are more than willing to extract exhorbitant profits from the public from anything that they have a monopoly over, and more than willing to break the law to prevent anyone from encroaching on that. Companies like Google haven't and don't. (Yet? Maybe, but let's wait until that actually happens before we start bitching about them --- in the meantime, it obviously makes more sense to "bitch" about a current abusive monopoly that really is a problem, not some 'vaporware' hypothetical future problem.)
Anyway, Google DIDN'T file this patent. Microsoft DID. That by itself says a whole lot about the respective characters of these companies. So what's your point again? In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, MS execs were already thinking "how can we profit from this"? Google execs weren't.
We seem to have no problem destroying any and every sort of life right here on Earth, and almost nobody is effectively stopping it. I can't imagine that people would be that bothered about life elsewhere, either. The fringe placard-waving minority who cares will just be ignored. Just like here.
In any case, ultimately we have to worry about what's best for our future, not a few single-celled bacteria or something.
The stupid part about it is that partial solutions don't make it to market because they aren't complete solutions. The net result is that the target market is less safe than they could have been. Example, a company tried to introduce a baby breathing monitoring device that attached to a crib and would alert the parents if it detected anomolies in the baby's breathing. After much consultation with attorneys and so on, they decided not to introduce the product at all, because there existed a possibility that the device might occasionally miss an actual breathing problem and not notify the parents, which would have left the company open to being sued by the parents. Real dumb, because with no such device no parents are going to ever be notified at all now when their babies have problems. It could have saved many lives. (I don't know if there are such devices on the market now.)
We're a small ISV. Most of our clients use Windows (certainly not because it provides a "damn good out of the box experience", it most definintely doesn't, half of our clients' machines are so screwed up with spyware that they often can't even use them anymore, half of our support calls are related to spyware in some way. They use XP because they honestly and literally don't know any better, it's absolutely the only thing they know about, it just 'comes with the computer when they buy it', and 'everyone else uses it'). I would love to work on, and develop our software for, better platforms such as OS X. However, we would not sell enough to cover our costs, because the market is too small. Thus we are effectively forced to either go out of business, or develop for Windows. If that isn't forced, I don't know what is. And so I'm still stuck using Windows most of my time, battling with crappy APIs and a rubbishy OS that's full of, as the OP said, "fug".
Of course this is the core of the real reason for the OS monoculture. People use Windows because ISVs write software for it. ISVs write software for it because most people use it. Chicken and egg.
Fortunately there are now some good cross-platform APIs, like wxWidgets, that allow a significant reduction in the costs of targetting multiple platforms. But it still ultimately costs some money to target another platform, and the sales on that platform must bring in enough income to cover those costs. In a mainstream software market this might happen, but in niche markets it's tough.
Well, of course I was speaking in general, and I'm sure there are exceptions all along the curve. I think it would be most interesting to be able to see the true distribution of OS choice along the IQ curve though, I suspect there would be some degree of truth to what I suspect, although without any data I'm really just hypothesising. I often ponder in general if there are correlations between IQ and various day-to-day things.
Myself, I use Linux, Windows and Mac, although I use Linux less these days since I started with Mac. Most of my Windows usage is because we develop software products mainly for Windows (simply because that is what most of our clients use, same reason as almost any other ISV). As far as IQ goes I'm in the same percentile as you.
Windows is actually very powerful, although tapping into its full power is not easy.
This is generally true, but funnily I say the same thing rather about Mac. I do get a lot of out my Windows systems myself (especially if one installs e.g. UnixUtils, ImageMagick etc. and all the other UNIX 'favorites' that help you automate things and so on). But thanks to the fact that Mac is UNIX, it is also very powerful, I would say more powerful than Windows, especially if you know a bit of UNIX and can do some scripting, because it's "easier" to get that full power out of it than for Windows. And it's also got far fewer of the hundreds of irritating quirks and little bugs that make Windows annoying to use. "Little" things that probably don't bother most people, but reflect the low quality 'under the hood', e.g. the flickery interface of all aspects of Windows Explorer, but I could literally name dozens of things. I guess some people inherently aren't bothered by such things. Mac/Linux systems also always seem to perform far far better using VNC, Windows is very sluggish, thanks to architectural differences, and since I often use VNC to access my various systems, this is important to me. I guess it also all depends on what you need/want to get out of a system.
I don't really play games anymore, so gaming support is simply not a factor to me at all. As a programmer though, quality of APIs is important, as I have to use them very often, and Windows APIs are generally shockingly bad - one wastes so much of one's own time because they are so inconsistent, so illogically designed, and the documentation frequently blatantly lies (I say "lies" rather than "is outright incorrect" because I have this theory that MS do it on purpose, but that's a rant for another day).
OK, my mistake, I rushed that one out without proper research indeed.
Yes, perhaps $129 is rather high, especially for e.g. a 10.4 user there is really not nearly enough incentive to fork that over. They should offer more graded options relative to the difference in value over one's current system, e.g. I would probably pay maybe $40 max for Tiger.
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Microsoft have a clever strategy here - they "invite stupid people in". They make a point of marketing specifically to those people who fall usually no more than, say, half a standard deviation to the right of the mean on the IQ bell curve, people who would never otherwise amount to anything, and tell them "look, you can be somebody 'clever', you can be a 'computer wizard', and have people look up to you" (notice their latest "make a name for yourself with MS server" ad campaign? precisely this strategy in action... it's these insecure people who delight at the notion that they finally have an opportunity to 'make a name for themselves' "thanks" to MS)... so these people love MS because they then feel like MS has allowed them to be 'compooter experts', something they could only have dreamed of just years before. And these people form a larger base of Windows pseudo-experts running around than if Microsoft had tried to attract the brightest of the bright.. moreover MS knows they can't attract the smartest people because the smarter people are capable of evaluating OSs on a technical level. Look at Linux on the other hand, which "markets" itself only to the smartest people, but alienates most people further to the left of the bell curve (like C++) by promoting it's powerful but arcane complexity. So of course these people don't like Linux - from their perspective, it makes them "feel stupid". It's something they feel they can't understand, it reminds them they're not that smart. There's a lot of psychology behind choosing OSs.. the OSS guys should take advantage of it, and try to change their image. The general (buying) public can't tell the difference between real computer experts and the so-called "IT professionals" you mention... so by having lots of these morons running around making ignorant statements about Microsoft inventing everything, they spread the lies to the public, who then buy into it.
Funnily enough, on a purely technical level, Apple, with its good design in OS X, could really cater for the full range of the IQ bell curve, but is mostly marketed to the left side (for the public) and marketed slightly to the extreme right (e.g. actual experts, many of whom like the UNIX aspect)... they don't seem to aim much for the middle, which seems odd to me as this is the bulk of the market and where MS pitches their stuff. MS avoid the extreme left (or vice versa) because Windows is not very user-friendly, and the extreme right avoid Windows automatically because they know better. (I mean left/right of the IQ curve, not the political spectrum).
Pity you got -1 redundant, because you've summed it up better than any other post on this thread I've read so far.. you hit the nail on the head exactly. Yes, MS are experts and old hands at this tactic.
Firstly, how is that different from MS? Secondly, if you already have OS X you can get Tiger for under $10... by what math do you figure that that comes to "$129"? Thirdly, there are more than just a few 'minor features additions and bugfixes' - inform yourself.
There is an issue of trust in the ability of your engineers though. I had this problem at my previous employer (which I left). If the manager consistently does not listen to your advice (however presented), think about it a bit: It means he/she actually does not have much faith in your skills, and does not trust your advice. This is inherently going to be a problem for you, regardless of whether or not you are able to 'document your thought processes'. What kind of reference are you going to get from a manager who doesn't trust your capabilities and thinks you're probably mediocre? What kind of opportunities for promotion, salary increases, increased responsibility etc. are you going to get from a manager who doesn't recognize or trust your capabilities? If this is what is going on, you need to get out anyway, because you're going to hit a "glass ceiling" very soon in your career.
IMO, good managers recognize skills, and place trust in their employees, giving them enough 'free rein' to 'work their magic' and not preventing them from doing so.
Does anyone actually still pay by impression? Geez.. I thought pretty much everyone in the ad affiliate world switched to at the very least pay by click-through back in +/- 2000 after the bust, and many switched to pay by "conversion", i.e. pay only those click-throughs that are converted to sales.
Windows 3.1 = Macintosh '84
Windows XP = NextSTEP '92
There was absolutely nothing new in Windows 95 either, and it was already far behind competition when it was released. If you've actually used many older computers since the early 80's, it would be very clear that Windows has always been behind and has always been holding computing back by at least 5 to 10 years. This has been constant. The only truly 'new' things since 1992 are Unicode, and poor security and malware taken to new levels.
Meanwhile, the rest of us easily managed to figure out that the reference to "brain" obviously referred to the intellect, as opposed to emotions. And this is not just a case of us realising a 'mistake', because it's not: one of the most common senses (by FAR) of the word "brain" really is to refer to strictly logic/intellect/reasoning as opposed to the emotions. It may be true that emotions are also borne in the brain, but that is entirely irrelevant to how the naming works in our language. We have many words which have become clear (in hindsight) that they are misnomers, e.g. "atom", but once the word and meaning are entrenched its too late to change the word.
An interesting offshoot of this is that some organisms have even evolved to the point where death "deliberately" occurs shortly after reproduction when it increases in some way the likelihood of the offspring surviving. An obvious example is the praying mantis, where the female eats the male even as they mate, providing a nice burst of food/energy for developing her eggs at a point where the male has anyway served his 'purpose of existence'. Other examples are frequent in the plant kingdom though, e.g. hormones in many plant flowers trigger the parent plant to effectively "shut down and die" as soon as it has produced a bunch of seeds. This seemingly provides the offspring benefits (e.g. the parent will compost at that point, providing nutrition and for the next generation), and prevents the offspring from having to compete for resources with its parents.
Evolution can be cruel; it generally produces organisms that favour not the survival of an individual but the survival of an individual's offspring; the former secondly goal being favoured only in cases where it more or less "incidentally" in some way assists with the latter primary goal (fortunately this is usually the case).
Yes and no. The government is only supposed to implement (using tax dollars) the will of the people. Which may of course involve making decisions as to how best to go about it, but it cannot fundamentally be in contradiction to what the majority of the people have expressed that they want. People give tax dollars to the government because the majority agree that they want things like police and fire services, a defence force, a national road infrastructure and so on. The government's decisions are confined within the framework of implementing those things only. They don't make decisions "for" the people in a broader sense. Well, sometimes they do (e.g. cf. current administration), but it's not supposed to work that way, and in an ideal world the populace would give a shit.
How is it communism if the majority of people choose to have the government provide certain services? That's a democracy if ever there was one. What you're suggesting is that ideologically the free market (i.e. corporations) must rule above the will of the people, and even in contradiction to the will of the people, which if it were strictly the case that would be far more closely aligned to other totalitarian/mercantilist/communist systems. The executive board of a small handful of companies should not be imposing decisions on communities about how any service should be provided. Now you might ask, should people be "allowed" to vote in a socialist policy? Of course they should, if they were not then it would not be a democracy anymore (don't confuse socialism with totalitarianism with communism etc.)... modern democracies like the USA are full of socialist-like policies (e.g. minimum wage), and most people actually regard them as a good thing for society at large.
Exactly, the idea is that the government could deliver the service at cost, while SBC provide the service at cost plus big profits. However governments are usually less efficient since there is no competition. So what it boils down to is that you're either going to be paying for wireless plus inefficiency, or you're going to be paying for wireless plus the massive bonuses, mansions, expensive cars, private jets etc. of the executives and major shareholders of SBC.
In any case this is supposedly a democracy, so the choice should be up to the people. If the majority of people in a community want to fund a public wireless service with their tax dollars, and they vote to do so, then it must happen, because the people decide, not the government, and certainly not corporations (who do not have an inherent "right" to make money). The government is only a structure to implement the common will of the people.
Really? Have you led several complex software projects using OSS to successful completion, delivery, and use by the client base? How exactly does that make us "blind"? I guess the key phrase was "if you know what you are doing"; if you aren't terribly smart, then just pay up and stick with the "easy" proprietary stuff. Our own estimates are that less than 5-10% additional investment has been required to go with platform-neutral solutions over platform-specific ones. Could you perhaps provide a more intelligently formulated and more specific rebuttal? Your argument makes no sense.
I can't really agree. Being locked in to any platform is bad, sure, but you are only as locked in as you choose to be, because by and large there are cross-platform choices out there. And although it will never be 100% trouble-free to transition to alternative software, it is usually only minimal effort/expenditure required. And initial costs are usually only marginally higher. For example use wxWidgets for application development instead of a platform-specific API like Win32 or Cocoa. Not only is it a good API, but available for many platforms. Choose OpenGL instead of Direct3D for 3D graphics, games etc. Not only is it just as capable, it's cross-platform and non-proprietary. For databases use cross-platform database-neutral access methods like ODBC. We've done this with our application, and with only a relatively tiny amount of additional effort, we now have the choice of several major databases, and an easy path to others. If MySQL goes bad, we can just use another database.
Many people become locked in because they choose to do so, most do not seem to realise the longer-term penalties incurred when they lock themselves in to the latest flashy proprietary goodies from the traditional behemoths. In some cases one might need some more advanced functionality available only from specific vendors, but in most cases the requirements are a lot simpler and if you know what you're doing, you can avoid locking yourself in so badly that you can never get out.
The above is absolute rubbish, you do not need to GPL your code if you interact with MySQL, they even explicitly make this clear on their site.
The MySQL licensing works as follows: if you distribute MySQL with your commercial product or install it for the client as part of the overall solution you provide to the client, then you need to pay the commercial license fee (you do NOT need to GPL your own product or anything like that). If you distribute just your own software to the client and merely tell the client to install MySQL themselves, then you do not need to pay the commercial license fee.
The OpenSource MySQL license ONLY applies IF you are already developing OpenSource.
The referrer spammers have become increasingly sophisticated, it's gotten a lot harder to automatically detect. For one thing they now use 'farms' of infected Windows systems all over the world, so it's impossible to pin down any IP or range of IPs from which the requests come. Also, they've become more organized as 'advertisers' (or e.g. "search engine optimizers") for multiple clients, so the referrer field itself is often for something totally new and different - as you say, they do requests for lots of sites. And of course they fake the user agent string. So there is actually basically no explicit information left anymore to the webserver that could be used to detect that it's a spammer.
If it weren't for Windows and IE being so insecure, this might have been easier to fight, as it would be a lot harder for them to use basically "random" IP addresses of the millions of infected machines.. if they had to use a limited number of systems to do the spamming it would be a 'simple' matter of finding out and blocking their IP ranges each time they moved. SP2 may help in future, but it's too late, the damage is done.
It is wrong, but keep in mind the US government does this all the time too. For example they spend billions of dollars each year on subsidising local farming so that US agricultural products such as wheat can be exported at well below cost. Millions in 3rd world countries are currently losing their jobs as their agricultural industries strain and in some cases collapse. I guess the moral should be, don't do unto others as you don't want done to yourself. Either this sort of thing should be allowed - by everyone - or banned - by everyone.
The fact that things "aren't as bad as" (other_totalitarian_regime) doesn't mean that things are good Remember, the goal is only to control the populace and keep them "in line" like sheep. And you don't have to be North Korea to attain this goal. Even if there is on the surface some freedom of speech, it doesn't matter if that speech can be kept to the margins and never amounts to any action - as is the case in the US - you can say whatever you want, but (and in fact BECAUSE) in practice it has no effect at all. The government knows that a few people ranting on websites like/. will never amount to any true resistance to their policies. If there was any danger that it would, you can bet they would at least try to resist more. But the fact is the majority of the population gets their views from sources like Fox; the "fringe media" poses absolutely no threat whatsoever to the status quo.
By simply "going after" a few choice sites in this way that promote views contrary to the "behave like sheep" goal, they send a clear message to the populace: "you better get in line and stay in line, or we'll go after you". The vast majority of the rest of the populace is then easily cowed into sticking to the "social norms" that promote our 'cattle behaviour' - it's just easier that way - "don't stand out", just try to blend in.
The MAIN goal is only to control the populace and prevent actual dissent and resistance. They already succeed in doing this with just a little fear and social engineering. Many here even on/. after reading this would never consider starting any "radical" sites... it's easier to just try to be 'one of the herd'. The government can already do whatever they want; no need to shoot anyone.
The thing is that here, in our mostly free market economies, the price of a product is set by WHAT THE MARKET WILL BEAR
Hmm... yes, that's mostly true, especially in software, there seems to be a kind of culture of 'de facto' not competing on price, even when there is theoretically competition.. there is a kind of mutual realisation from businesses that everyone can make a lot of money if they all keep prices at similarly high levels. This is not true in many other market sectors though.
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Of course we're bitching "because it's Microsoft": Microsoft have already shown us that they are more than willing to extract exhorbitant profits from the public from anything that they have a monopoly over, and more than willing to break the law to prevent anyone from encroaching on that. Companies like Google haven't and don't. (Yet? Maybe, but let's wait until that actually happens before we start bitching about them --- in the meantime, it obviously makes more sense to "bitch" about a current abusive monopoly that really is a problem, not some 'vaporware' hypothetical future problem.)
Anyway, Google DIDN'T file this patent. Microsoft DID. That by itself says a whole lot about the respective characters of these companies. So what's your point again? In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, MS execs were already thinking "how can we profit from this"? Google execs weren't.
We seem to have no problem destroying any and every sort of life right here on Earth, and almost nobody is effectively stopping it. I can't imagine that people would be that bothered about life elsewhere, either. The fringe placard-waving minority who cares will just be ignored. Just like here.
In any case, ultimately we have to worry about what's best for our future, not a few single-celled bacteria or something.
The stupid part about it is that partial solutions don't make it to market because they aren't complete solutions. The net result is that the target market is less safe than they could have been. Example, a company tried to introduce a baby breathing monitoring device that attached to a crib and would alert the parents if it detected anomolies in the baby's breathing. After much consultation with attorneys and so on, they decided not to introduce the product at all, because there existed a possibility that the device might occasionally miss an actual breathing problem and not notify the parents, which would have left the company open to being sued by the parents. Real dumb, because with no such device no parents are going to ever be notified at all now when their babies have problems. It could have saved many lives. (I don't know if there are such devices on the market now.)
We're a small ISV. Most of our clients use Windows (certainly not because it provides a "damn good out of the box experience", it most definintely doesn't, half of our clients' machines are so screwed up with spyware that they often can't even use them anymore, half of our support calls are related to spyware in some way. They use XP because they honestly and literally don't know any better, it's absolutely the only thing they know about, it just 'comes with the computer when they buy it', and 'everyone else uses it'). I would love to work on, and develop our software for, better platforms such as OS X. However, we would not sell enough to cover our costs, because the market is too small. Thus we are effectively forced to either go out of business, or develop for Windows. If that isn't forced, I don't know what is. And so I'm still stuck using Windows most of my time, battling with crappy APIs and a rubbishy OS that's full of, as the OP said, "fug".
Of course this is the core of the real reason for the OS monoculture. People use Windows because ISVs write software for it. ISVs write software for it because most people use it. Chicken and egg.
Fortunately there are now some good cross-platform APIs, like wxWidgets, that allow a significant reduction in the costs of targetting multiple platforms. But it still ultimately costs some money to target another platform, and the sales on that platform must bring in enough income to cover those costs. In a mainstream software market this might happen, but in niche markets it's tough.
Well, of course I was speaking in general, and I'm sure there are exceptions all along the curve. I think it would be most interesting to be able to see the true distribution of OS choice along the IQ curve though, I suspect there would be some degree of truth to what I suspect, although without any data I'm really just hypothesising. I often ponder in general if there are correlations between IQ and various day-to-day things.
Myself, I use Linux, Windows and Mac, although I use Linux less these days since I started with Mac. Most of my Windows usage is because we develop software products mainly for Windows (simply because that is what most of our clients use, same reason as almost any other ISV). As far as IQ goes I'm in the same percentile as you.
Windows is actually very powerful, although tapping into its full power is not easy.
This is generally true, but funnily I say the same thing rather about Mac. I do get a lot of out my Windows systems myself (especially if one installs e.g. UnixUtils, ImageMagick etc. and all the other UNIX 'favorites' that help you automate things and so on). But thanks to the fact that Mac is UNIX, it is also very powerful, I would say more powerful than Windows, especially if you know a bit of UNIX and can do some scripting, because it's "easier" to get that full power out of it than for Windows. And it's also got far fewer of the hundreds of irritating quirks and little bugs that make Windows annoying to use. "Little" things that probably don't bother most people, but reflect the low quality 'under the hood', e.g. the flickery interface of all aspects of Windows Explorer, but I could literally name dozens of things. I guess some people inherently aren't bothered by such things. Mac/Linux systems also always seem to perform far far better using VNC, Windows is very sluggish, thanks to architectural differences, and since I often use VNC to access my various systems, this is important to me. I guess it also all depends on what you need/want to get out of a system.
I don't really play games anymore, so gaming support is simply not a factor to me at all. As a programmer though, quality of APIs is important, as I have to use them very often, and Windows APIs are generally shockingly bad - one wastes so much of one's own time because they are so inconsistent, so illogically designed, and the documentation frequently blatantly lies (I say "lies" rather than "is outright incorrect" because I have this theory that MS do it on purpose, but that's a rant for another day).
OK, my mistake, I rushed that one out without proper research indeed.
Yes, perhaps $129 is rather high, especially for e.g. a 10.4 user there is really not nearly enough incentive to fork that over. They should offer more graded options relative to the difference in value over one's current system, e.g. I would probably pay maybe $40 max for Tiger.
Microsoft have a clever strategy here - they "invite stupid people in". They make a point of marketing specifically to those people who fall usually no more than, say, half a standard deviation to the right of the mean on the IQ bell curve, people who would never otherwise amount to anything, and tell them "look, you can be somebody 'clever', you can be a 'computer wizard', and have people look up to you" (notice their latest "make a name for yourself with MS server" ad campaign? precisely this strategy in action ... it's these insecure people who delight at the notion that they finally have an opportunity to 'make a name for themselves' "thanks" to MS) ... so these people love MS because they then feel like MS has allowed them to be 'compooter experts', something they could only have dreamed of just years before. And these people form a larger base of Windows pseudo-experts running around than if Microsoft had tried to attract the brightest of the bright .. moreover MS knows they can't attract the smartest people because the smarter people are capable of evaluating OSs on a technical level. Look at Linux on the other hand, which "markets" itself only to the smartest people, but alienates most people further to the left of the bell curve (like C++) by promoting it's powerful but arcane complexity. So of course these people don't like Linux - from their perspective, it makes them "feel stupid". It's something they feel they can't understand, it reminds them they're not that smart. There's a lot of psychology behind choosing OSs .. the OSS guys should take advantage of it, and try to change their image. The general (buying) public can't tell the difference between real computer experts and the so-called "IT professionals" you mention ... so by having lots of these morons running around making ignorant statements about Microsoft inventing everything, they spread the lies to the public, who then buy into it.
Funnily enough, on a purely technical level, Apple, with its good design in OS X, could really cater for the full range of the IQ bell curve, but is mostly marketed to the left side (for the public) and marketed slightly to the extreme right (e.g. actual experts, many of whom like the UNIX aspect) ... they don't seem to aim much for the middle, which seems odd to me as this is the bulk of the market and where MS pitches their stuff. MS avoid the extreme left (or vice versa) because Windows is not very user-friendly, and the extreme right avoid Windows automatically because they know better. (I mean left/right of the IQ curve, not the political spectrum).
Pity you got -1 redundant, because you've summed it up better than any other post on this thread I've read so far .. you hit the nail on the head exactly. Yes, MS are experts and old hands at this tactic.
Firstly, how is that different from MS? Secondly, if you already have OS X you can get Tiger for under $10 ... by what math do you figure that that comes to "$129"? Thirdly, there are more than just a few 'minor features additions and bugfixes' - inform yourself.
There is an issue of trust in the ability of your engineers though. I had this problem at my previous employer (which I left). If the manager consistently does not listen to your advice (however presented), think about it a bit: It means he/she actually does not have much faith in your skills, and does not trust your advice. This is inherently going to be a problem for you, regardless of whether or not you are able to 'document your thought processes'. What kind of reference are you going to get from a manager who doesn't trust your capabilities and thinks you're probably mediocre? What kind of opportunities for promotion, salary increases, increased responsibility etc. are you going to get from a manager who doesn't recognize or trust your capabilities? If this is what is going on, you need to get out anyway, because you're going to hit a "glass ceiling" very soon in your career.
IMO, good managers recognize skills, and place trust in their employees, giving them enough 'free rein' to 'work their magic' and not preventing them from doing so.
Does anyone actually still pay by impression? Geez .. I thought pretty much everyone in the ad affiliate world switched to at the very least pay by click-through back in +/- 2000 after the bust, and many switched to pay by "conversion", i.e. pay only those click-throughs that are converted to sales.
Windows 3.1 = Macintosh '84
Windows XP = NextSTEP '92
There was absolutely nothing new in Windows 95 either, and it was already far behind competition when it was released. If you've actually used many older computers since the early 80's, it would be very clear that Windows has always been behind and has always been holding computing back by at least 5 to 10 years. This has been constant. The only truly 'new' things since 1992 are Unicode, and poor security and malware taken to new levels.
Meanwhile, the rest of us easily managed to figure out that the reference to "brain" obviously referred to the intellect, as opposed to emotions. And this is not just a case of us realising a 'mistake', because it's not: one of the most common senses (by FAR) of the word "brain" really is to refer to strictly logic/intellect/reasoning as opposed to the emotions. It may be true that emotions are also borne in the brain, but that is entirely irrelevant to how the naming works in our language. We have many words which have become clear (in hindsight) that they are misnomers, e.g. "atom", but once the word and meaning are entrenched its too late to change the word.
An interesting offshoot of this is that some organisms have even evolved to the point where death "deliberately" occurs shortly after reproduction when it increases in some way the likelihood of the offspring surviving. An obvious example is the praying mantis, where the female eats the male even as they mate, providing a nice burst of food/energy for developing her eggs at a point where the male has anyway served his 'purpose of existence'. Other examples are frequent in the plant kingdom though, e.g. hormones in many plant flowers trigger the parent plant to effectively "shut down and die" as soon as it has produced a bunch of seeds. This seemingly provides the offspring benefits (e.g. the parent will compost at that point, providing nutrition and for the next generation), and prevents the offspring from having to compete for resources with its parents.
Evolution can be cruel; it generally produces organisms that favour not the survival of an individual but the survival of an individual's offspring; the former secondly goal being favoured only in cases where it more or less "incidentally" in some way assists with the latter primary goal (fortunately this is usually the case).
Yes and no. The government is only supposed to implement (using tax dollars) the will of the people. Which may of course involve making decisions as to how best to go about it, but it cannot fundamentally be in contradiction to what the majority of the people have expressed that they want. People give tax dollars to the government because the majority agree that they want things like police and fire services, a defence force, a national road infrastructure and so on. The government's decisions are confined within the framework of implementing those things only. They don't make decisions "for" the people in a broader sense. Well, sometimes they do (e.g. cf. current administration), but it's not supposed to work that way, and in an ideal world the populace would give a shit.
How is it communism if the majority of people choose to have the government provide certain services? That's a democracy if ever there was one. What you're suggesting is that ideologically the free market (i.e. corporations) must rule above the will of the people, and even in contradiction to the will of the people, which if it were strictly the case that would be far more closely aligned to other totalitarian/mercantilist/communist systems. The executive board of a small handful of companies should not be imposing decisions on communities about how any service should be provided. Now you might ask, should people be "allowed" to vote in a socialist policy? Of course they should, if they were not then it would not be a democracy anymore (don't confuse socialism with totalitarianism with communism etc.) ... modern democracies like the USA are full of socialist-like policies (e.g. minimum wage), and most people actually regard them as a good thing for society at large.
Exactly, the idea is that the government could deliver the service at cost, while SBC provide the service at cost plus big profits. However governments are usually less efficient since there is no competition. So what it boils down to is that you're either going to be paying for wireless plus inefficiency, or you're going to be paying for wireless plus the massive bonuses, mansions, expensive cars, private jets etc. of the executives and major shareholders of SBC.
In any case this is supposedly a democracy, so the choice should be up to the people. If the majority of people in a community want to fund a public wireless service with their tax dollars, and they vote to do so, then it must happen, because the people decide, not the government, and certainly not corporations (who do not have an inherent "right" to make money). The government is only a structure to implement the common will of the people.
Really? Have you led several complex software projects using OSS to successful completion, delivery, and use by the client base? How exactly does that make us "blind"? I guess the key phrase was "if you know what you are doing"; if you aren't terribly smart, then just pay up and stick with the "easy" proprietary stuff. Our own estimates are that less than 5-10% additional investment has been required to go with platform-neutral solutions over platform-specific ones. Could you perhaps provide a more intelligently formulated and more specific rebuttal? Your argument makes no sense.
I can't really agree. Being locked in to any platform is bad, sure, but you are only as locked in as you choose to be, because by and large there are cross-platform choices out there. And although it will never be 100% trouble-free to transition to alternative software, it is usually only minimal effort/expenditure required. And initial costs are usually only marginally higher. For example use wxWidgets for application development instead of a platform-specific API like Win32 or Cocoa. Not only is it a good API, but available for many platforms. Choose OpenGL instead of Direct3D for 3D graphics, games etc. Not only is it just as capable, it's cross-platform and non-proprietary. For databases use cross-platform database-neutral access methods like ODBC. We've done this with our application, and with only a relatively tiny amount of additional effort, we now have the choice of several major databases, and an easy path to others. If MySQL goes bad, we can just use another database.
Many people become locked in because they choose to do so, most do not seem to realise the longer-term penalties incurred when they lock themselves in to the latest flashy proprietary goodies from the traditional behemoths. In some cases one might need some more advanced functionality available only from specific vendors, but in most cases the requirements are a lot simpler and if you know what you're doing, you can avoid locking yourself in so badly that you can never get out.
Gee ... may I ask, are you familiar with the expression "to know the price of everything, and the value of nothing"?
The above is absolute rubbish, you do not need to GPL your code if you interact with MySQL, they even explicitly make this clear on their site.
The MySQL licensing works as follows: if you distribute MySQL with your commercial product or install it for the client as part of the overall solution you provide to the client, then you need to pay the commercial license fee (you do NOT need to GPL your own product or anything like that). If you distribute just your own software to the client and merely tell the client to install MySQL themselves, then you do not need to pay the commercial license fee.
The OpenSource MySQL license ONLY applies IF you are already developing OpenSource.
See http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/ for more info.
The referrer spammers have become increasingly sophisticated, it's gotten a lot harder to automatically detect. For one thing they now use 'farms' of infected Windows systems all over the world, so it's impossible to pin down any IP or range of IPs from which the requests come. Also, they've become more organized as 'advertisers' (or e.g. "search engine optimizers") for multiple clients, so the referrer field itself is often for something totally new and different - as you say, they do requests for lots of sites. And of course they fake the user agent string. So there is actually basically no explicit information left anymore to the webserver that could be used to detect that it's a spammer.
If it weren't for Windows and IE being so insecure, this might have been easier to fight, as it would be a lot harder for them to use basically "random" IP addresses of the millions of infected machines .. if they had to use a limited number of systems to do the spamming it would be a 'simple' matter of finding out and blocking their IP ranges each time they moved. SP2 may help in future, but it's too late, the damage is done.
It is wrong, but keep in mind the US government does this all the time too. For example they spend billions of dollars each year on subsidising local farming so that US agricultural products such as wheat can be exported at well below cost. Millions in 3rd world countries are currently losing their jobs as their agricultural industries strain and in some cases collapse. I guess the moral should be, don't do unto others as you don't want done to yourself. Either this sort of thing should be allowed - by everyone - or banned - by everyone.
The fact that things "aren't as bad as" (other_totalitarian_regime) doesn't mean that things are good Remember, the goal is only to control the populace and keep them "in line" like sheep. And you don't have to be North Korea to attain this goal. Even if there is on the surface some freedom of speech, it doesn't matter if that speech can be kept to the margins and never amounts to any action - as is the case in the US - you can say whatever you want, but (and in fact BECAUSE) in practice it has no effect at all. The government knows that a few people ranting on websites like /. will never amount to any true resistance to their policies. If there was any danger that it would, you can bet they would at least try to resist more. But the fact is the majority of the population gets their views from sources like Fox; the "fringe media" poses absolutely no threat whatsoever to the status quo.
By simply "going after" a few choice sites in this way that promote views contrary to the "behave like sheep" goal, they send a clear message to the populace: "you better get in line and stay in line, or we'll go after you". The vast majority of the rest of the populace is then easily cowed into sticking to the "social norms" that promote our 'cattle behaviour' - it's just easier that way - "don't stand out", just try to blend in.
The MAIN goal is only to control the populace and prevent actual dissent and resistance. They already succeed in doing this with just a little fear and social engineering. Many here even on /. after reading this would never consider starting any "radical" sites ... it's easier to just try to be 'one of the herd'. The government can already do whatever they want; no need to shoot anyone.
The thing is that here, in our mostly free market economies, the price of a product is set by WHAT THE MARKET WILL BEAR
Hmm ... yes, that's mostly true, especially in software, there seems to be a kind of culture of 'de facto' not competing on price, even when there is theoretically competition .. there is a kind of mutual realisation from businesses that everyone can make a lot of money if they all keep prices at similarly high levels. This is not true in many other market sectors though.