There's really two parts to the solution to the spam issue.
ISPs are in a unique position to filter out the bulk of spam. They're apparently just too stupid to do so, which isn't surprising, considering what they pay their people. This could be a decent side job opportunity, so I'm not delving into this aspect any further.
The other half of the issue is the user email client. If email clients would use whitelists to segregate known good mail from the general load of crap automatically, that would be a huge step forward. The client would have a "general inbox" and the default inbox. The default inbox is where everyone in your address book or anyone you've ever sent an email to (second tier contacts in your address book) emails would reside. The "general inbox" would be for untrusted email.
Additional features on the client side obviously involve a significantly enhanced address book features that would divide your contacts into multiple tiers, perhaps even with automatic expirations to remove sent to people. I'm sure MS is capable of doing something like this, but the UI would probably suck to hell and back.
It's an approximation, like most mathematical equations in physics. The fact that it measures something so esoteric within 1% is monumental. First, it proves that Einstein's theories were "correct" in their premise that this effect exists at all, and second, his theories approximate the effect within 1%.
Looking at it with hindsight, it's not too difficult to see that this probably is the way it should be, but for Einstein to have come up with it in an effectively hostile environment is truly a measure of his greatness that should not be understated. It was a leap of insight in a direction everyone else wouldn't even consider.
Yep, and that Word output in ASCII, RTF, or, god forbid, Word's HTML certainly makes for a wonderful transfer of the Word document, doesn't it? It looks exactly like the original Word doc. Same goes for Excel.
There seem to certainly be a lot of oranges around those apples.
You also have the standard output files and even full quality AAC - should be convertible to whatever you want, but it's not included in the program.
It's like iPhoto - RAW pictures can be displayed, but editing them for something like red eye creates a JPG. Purchase Aperture, and you get RAW editing capability.
The problem is that Y is advertising, and taking away customers purely because of advertising, not because it's a better product or more desireable or any other qualitative factor. It's purely that it is advertised and X is not. So X has to advertise too, so that it doesn't lose this marketshare via this leeching effect. It's very similar to the nuclear arms race, except advertising has no visible limits until people start tuning out.
I've tuned out "commercial" radio because it's mainly commercials. Actually, it's effectively almost all commercials with a spattering of chat that may or may not be localized advertising thanks to the RIAA dregs being pushed by national broadcast stations. Same thing with web pages - the ads got so bad that Adblock, flashblock, and noscript increase the pleasure of browsing to such an extent I no longer ever browse without them. TV has gone the same route. Disney is banned at my house because it is essentially just one mass commercial broken by... announcements of future commercials, er, programs....
It's a good thing too, since with something like 250 TV channels, about 150 radio channels and the endless web I wouldn't have any spare time at all if I weren't so turned off that I ignore most of it and instead spend time with friends and family and books. I've still got 16.5 volumes of 1001 Arabian Nights (unabridged) sitting on my shelf in case I have spare alone time.
Who ever saw a version of a Microsoft product that was compatible with the previous version?
Are you joking? I hope you're joking....
Say what you will about Microsoft, but backwards compatibility has always been one of their cornerstones. Their compatiblity layers still allow you to run apps from the early 90's on a modern copy of Vista today. I have managed to get some very old VB3 code working with a minimum of modification on VB6, which then, using Project Analyzer, got compiling in.NET in a matter of (admittedly frustrating) days. Obviously, your and my definitions of backwards compatibility differ a bit. OS/2 2.0 apps ran on all version through 2.4, and those OS versions also ran a lot of 1.x apps. No recompile or tweaking necessary, thank you very much. On Macs, apps compiled for OSX 10.2 run just fine on 10.4. Heck, apps compiled under 10.2 PPC run just fine on 10.4 Intel. All with no recompiles. Stuff just works.
Microsoft doesn't work. Look at all the apps they broke with XP SP2. Look at everything that doesn't run under Vista. Heck, look at what didn't work under Win XP/2K that did under NT 4. Remember the Office 95 fiasco? Microsoft is the poster boy for incompatibility. I'd dare you to name a company that had greater incompatibilities between versions than MS.
Or you could be a doctor. I'd hope my doctor wouldn't be researching something that I'm paying him for on the web! (But you make a good point, especially as more and more resources move to the web)
If you want a real life version of mass-market bombardment advertising working, look at the music industry and the no-talent ass-clowns they've promoted. Britney, In-Sync, Backstreet Boys (remember them?) Tiffany, the new sets of boy bands w/ guitars (Fall Out Boy, AFI, American Rejects, ad nauseum) and on and on and on.
The true test of whether these were advertising/marketing driven? In the older cases, have you seen anyone pull out for instance an In-Sync album in the last year and play it? Very little if any of this heavily produced crap will ever be played again except as a reminder of how bad something was at one time.
I'll agree with you as well that "hardware" multi-threading (which sounds suspiciously like the recently acknowledged failure of the superscalar hyperthreaded P4) would seem to be a largely dead-end. Creating multiple threads to handle several iterations of a loop concurrently would seem to be very dependent upon what that loop actually does and extremely difficult to manage from a hardware only viewpoint. So difficult, I'd wonder why anyone would bother other than from an academic viewpoint (it's always interesting to quantify those qualities, even if it is only academic. After all, more than one surprise has come out of someone researching what seemed to have an obvious answer)
Compiler improvements would seem much more likely for this process, or the actual programmer, both of which are software based. I'd also have to wonder whether the effort would even be worth it in hardware for media encoding/decoding processes when software multi-threaded code exists for these functions. Can hardware multi-threading improve on software multi-threading? (I'd think not)
I do however wonder if AMD is looking at parallelizing in hardware to a DSP core. Now that could speed up certain types of functions greatly, given AMD's architecture.
Sure, marketing is a part of business, and frankly, I feel as though it has become too large of a part of business, and it seems to be increasing over the years. TV used to be watchable, radio used to be listenable. I heard some statistic the other day (probably made up), but it said that the average American is bombarded with something like over 6,000 marketing attempts per day. Since I use a DVR or Netflix DVDs for the few shows I still watch @ home and an iPod/music library for what I listen to, my ad bombardment has greatly dropped and what I watch/listen to is also of my choice, not some censors lame attempt at pleasing the LCD. I noticed it recently when I set up a new machine without adblock and made the mistake of tuning into a Disney channel. That's definitely being blocked as soon as they're old enough to know that they can control the TV. Eek!
Oh, and basic behavioral psychology will tell you that the best predictor of future behavior is based on past behavior. And if someone is already a regular customer for X, does X need to be pushed on that person? Sadly, yes. Because if X isn't pushed, the average person apparently is easily swayed to product Y. You wouldn't think so, but apparently it is a problem.
Wow, an intended funny modded flamebait? What's wrong with the mods these days? Perhaps I'm the vicitm of an evil conspiracy... naah, that'd make me paranoid.
I'd call a web server a pretty basic application these days. Same goes for a DB. If you're talking about consumer programs like word editing and spreadsheets, I'd still say there's plenty of potential for multi-threading those to make various aspects more seamless to the end user. Just creating separate threads for input/output/main program would be a plus right there, and involves almost no high-level concurrency issues that don't already exist in the Windows world. (Most Windows programs don't have separate threads for this, but it definitely improves UI performance if done correctly. PMMail, originally designed for OS/2 and ported to windows, is a great example of how this paradigm improves responsiveness)
So, I'll disagree, and say that basic applications are a primary benefactor of multi-threaded coding even if it's not the gee-whiz performance enhancer he originally intended to talk about.
Oh, and because it's an MS thesis doesn't really lend any more credibility to the author's opinions than anyone else's, and in some cases less. Real world experience usually differs significantly from academia.
GarageBand output: Standard WAV/MP3/AAC or some other format if you care to encode it. iPhoto output: same as input or JPG iMovie output: standard MPEG2 on a DVD via iDVD
So, basically, none of these lock you into anything. Now, if you're talking about the intermediate project files for GarageBand or iMovie, I'd say that's not a valid argument. You still have the original inputs and can even produce standard output of various intermediate stages if desired.
What about people that do searches for their relatives? Or their pets? My dog has glaucoma. I'd be troubled greatly if my researching glaucoma medicines (dogs use the same medicine as people for this disease) caused any sort of reaction from anyone other than a pharmacy to offer me lower priced drops/pills. (Hey, check this guy out - he's researching glaucoma medicine and new cars - no cheap loans for him or insurance!!!!)
In my experience, most coders simply aren't capable of thinking threading through clearly
I agree completely, though you can expect to catch some flack for that one, from the hoardes of poor coders who think nothing (or rather, who don't think about the implications) of splitting off another thread to boost performance (even in a single core environment).;-) Hordes of even "good coders" can't properly code multi-threaded apps. Actually, after more than a decade as a programmer, I'm not sure there are hordes of good coders. There are good coders, and a disturbingly large percentage of them do not understand concepts like multi-threading or effective techniques of fail-safe systems coding.
Personally, I consider myself a damned good coder - And I avoid multithreading wherever possible. If I really need the raw CPU power, I'll usually try to model it as a full slave process before resorting to messy threading. You may be a good coder, but you apparently fall into the majority camp by your own admission. Not that there's anything wrong with that though. You at least realize that multi-threading isn't your thing.
We desperately need higher-level threading primitives in computer science.... As one "mature" implementation, we could all start coding in HPF. I'd personally rather gnaw my own right leg off, but, to each their own. As many folks pointed out to me previously, Eiffel seems to be pretty nice in this arena. I've never seen a production use of it, but who's to say it's not the next big thing? (Perhaps 3+M Java coders?)
The major issue with multi-threading remains though, and that's identifying the parallel processes. Take a series of sequential code blocks that involve retrieving pieces of information from several sources. If those retrievals are independent of each other, you can retrieve all the pieces concurrently (in parallel) and then sequence them together when all retrievals are done. Now the process takes the time of the longest retrieval plus assembly vs an sum of all retrievals and assembly. This type of process is quite common in enterprise systems working off of several DBs. Putting such code in a slave process requires inefficient messaging results back to the calling process, and adds unnecessary overhead. This is but one case where multi-threading helps performance significantly. I'm not sure that something like Eiffel would make this code any easier to write since the bulk of the multi-threaded work is in the design itself.
The vendor lockin of old is mostly gone. It disappeared with the advent of RDBMSes. So what other lockin exists these days? I'm dead serious in asking this question, because from what I can tell with all the programs I use, everything has standard types of input data and produces standard types of output. That's because everything these days works with third party equipment. (OK, I know of some hardware/software combos that will lock you in in the enterprise, but those are very specific purposed applications and you don't have to choose them, or choose to use the ever helpful proprietary portions that will lock you in)
About the only non-MS product I can think of that even remotely smacks of vendor lockin is the iTunes music store. iPods aren't even vendor lockin. AAC is a standard that's not owned by Apple.
What other program that's designed to create essentially shared content forces upgrades via incompatible file formats and locks you into a single vendor?
They spent roughly 218M on researching cures last year. The remainder of roughly 1.3B went to treating symptoms. If you can't figure out those proportions, that's sad.
I think you're smoking crack. Windows 2005 was EOL'd for all intents and purposes on June 30th, 2005. If you bought into the Extended Support contract, you'll pay for support until a maximum of June 30th, 2010.
No operating system (including Mac OS or Vista) gets "leaner and faster" when they first implement their compositing window manager (Quartz, Aero). Remember how awfully slow OS X 10.0/10.1 were? OS X got faster because they had time to optimize a new, slow, buggy window manager. Vista is implementing a compositing window manager (Aero) that's more advanced than OS X 10.4's. Quartz 2D Extreme should catch up (or surpass) Aero when it's finally enabled in 10.5. I guess that would explain why Windows has gotten slower since NT 4.0 (the only one where the user experience got faster mainly because of a series of decisions that is still causing security conniptions today, about 14 years later).
Face it, Windows sucks because they don't care about the user experience. Vista is slower than XP even when you don't run Aero. OSX 10.0/10.1? I didn't run them, but hey, it was basically a version 1.0 of the OS, which would equate to Windows NT 3.1/3.5. Recall how dog slow those were? I do.
What file formats will be "incomatible" with Windows XP and Office 2003? Microsoft always released Office Compatability Packs that allow previous versions of Office to use (not just read) the newest Office formats. The Compatability Pack for Office 2007 allows users of Office XP and Office 2003 to "open, edit, save, and create files using the Open XML Formats new to the 2007 Microsoft Office system." Heck, it even allows Office/Windows 2000 users to convert Office 2007 files. Yep, MS's solution to "interoperability" is to require you to manually select to save in the previous office format. I'm assuming that you'll get that nifty wunderbar modal dialog stating something about the potential to lose formatting and features of your current worksheet because you're saving in an older version. WTF can't I select a system wide document version to save to, and disable or at least warn all those features not compatible with the designated version? Now that would at least be user friendly. Even better would be to fail seamlessly into older versions, so that basically your documents would always be good, just not as pretty.
You can thank Microsoft for allowing Windows to be run on Apple hardware. You can blame Apple for disallowing OS X to be run on non-Apple hardware. I believe I can thank Apple for allowing Windows to run on Apple hardware. You are correct about blaming Apple for not allowing OSX to be run on non-Apple hardware, but then, it is their OS/hardware, isn't it? Do you blame MS for not allowing XBox software to be run on Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Sun, IBM, or Sega? No? Interesting.
Right now, I see the only lock in program(s) out there as MS Office. To give you an idea of how bad the lockin is, Office 2007 will force yet another upgrade/training cycle as it's largely incompatible (for all practical reason) with previous versions. No, it is not appropriate to "offer" a save in previous version on the save menu. By default it should save in a compatible mode with a warning if for some reason it could not be saved in a previous mode. (MS's mode operandi has generally been to indivate that you're losing some functionality if you save in an older format even if that's not true.)
I don't see how the Unix base has anything to do with it. Which Unix systems can run typical OS X apps? You can run *nix apps on OSX. No one claimed that OSX specific apps could be run elsewhere. That'd be like complaining about windows apps not running on *nix.
Interesting that most Apple software continues to work for years. I don't recall anyone having to upgrade to 10.4 or 10.3. You might have wanted to, since the OS got leaner and faster and offered some serious new benies, quite unlike, say, the XP -> Vista "upgrade".
However, unlike Mac upgrades, the Vista/Office upgrade is designed to force an upgrade cycle, by that wonderful "incompatible" format structure. What do you get for your upgrade dollar? A more unstable system with a new UI to learn and ever adoring love from everyone you exchange files with who now have to upgrade to read them.
Lastly, about lock in: You've never run an apple. You're anything but locked in. Apple is hardware with some software provided. It's damn good hardware, and if you really want, you can even run MS software on it, along with various other flavors of *nix, and even OS/2 if you're really into convoluted configurations.
I don't think you understand the concept, you're still blinded by $ signs. Billy "donated" 30B to the foundation. He's worth an estimated 56B (I don't recall if that's before or after the donation, but let's take a worst case example of before, so his worth after is 26B. At a mere 4% interest, he'd have to spend a mere $2.8+M a day just to keep that 26B from growing. (BTW, that's over 1B A year)
So, is he philanthropic? Maybe. Is he philanthropic compared to someone that actually sacrifices something to give to others? No.
I think you have a limited level of reading comprehension.
You'll note that I said most of their work is in treating symptoms, not causes. This is a true statement. Check their financials out. Vaccine research is drop in the bucket compared to the rest.
It's not my "hatred", as I don't know him personally. I dislike his business practices and the harm he's done to my chosen industry. I also disagree with most of what he's doing with his foundation, mainly because of the PR aspects. They also are largely contradictory in statement and effect, but there's so many that are blinded by the $ figures that their critical abilities are hampered.
I could just as easily say "Please, don't let the dollar amounts influence your objectivity in evaluating the real effect of this donation as opposed to its claimed effect."
Slashdot Mirror
There's really two parts to the solution to the spam issue.
ISPs are in a unique position to filter out the bulk of spam. They're apparently just too stupid to do so, which isn't surprising, considering what they pay their people. This could be a decent side job opportunity, so I'm not delving into this aspect any further.
The other half of the issue is the user email client. If email clients would use whitelists to segregate known good mail from the general load of crap automatically, that would be a huge step forward. The client would have a "general inbox" and the default inbox. The default inbox is where everyone in your address book or anyone you've ever sent an email to (second tier contacts in your address book) emails would reside. The "general inbox" would be for untrusted email.
Additional features on the client side obviously involve a significantly enhanced address book features that would divide your contacts into multiple tiers, perhaps even with automatic expirations to remove sent to people. I'm sure MS is capable of doing something like this, but the UI would probably suck to hell and back.
It's an approximation, like most mathematical equations in physics. The fact that it measures something so esoteric within 1% is monumental. First, it proves that Einstein's theories were "correct" in their premise that this effect exists at all, and second, his theories approximate the effect within 1%.
Looking at it with hindsight, it's not too difficult to see that this probably is the way it should be, but for Einstein to have come up with it in an effectively hostile environment is truly a measure of his greatness that should not be understated. It was a leap of insight in a direction everyone else wouldn't even consider.
Yep, and that Word output in ASCII, RTF, or, god forbid, Word's HTML certainly makes for a wonderful transfer of the Word document, doesn't it? It looks exactly like the original Word doc. Same goes for Excel.
There seem to certainly be a lot of oranges around those apples.
You also have the standard output files and even full quality AAC - should be convertible to whatever you want, but it's not included in the program.
It's like iPhoto - RAW pictures can be displayed, but editing them for something like red eye creates a JPG. Purchase Aperture, and you get RAW editing capability.
The problem is that Y is advertising, and taking away customers purely because of advertising, not because it's a better product or more desireable or any other qualitative factor. It's purely that it is advertised and X is not. So X has to advertise too, so that it doesn't lose this marketshare via this leeching effect. It's very similar to the nuclear arms race, except advertising has no visible limits until people start tuning out.
I've tuned out "commercial" radio because it's mainly commercials. Actually, it's effectively almost all commercials with a spattering of chat that may or may not be localized advertising thanks to the RIAA dregs being pushed by national broadcast stations. Same thing with web pages - the ads got so bad that Adblock, flashblock, and noscript increase the pleasure of browsing to such an extent I no longer ever browse without them. TV has gone the same route. Disney is banned at my house because it is essentially just one mass commercial broken by... announcements of future commercials, er, programs....
It's a good thing too, since with something like 250 TV channels, about 150 radio channels and the endless web I wouldn't have any spare time at all if I weren't so turned off that I ignore most of it and instead spend time with friends and family and books. I've still got 16.5 volumes of 1001 Arabian Nights (unabridged) sitting on my shelf in case I have spare alone time.
Are you joking? I hope you're joking....
Say what you will about Microsoft, but backwards compatibility has always been one of their cornerstones. Their compatiblity layers still allow you to run apps from the early 90's on a modern copy of Vista today. I have managed to get some very old VB3 code working with a minimum of modification on VB6, which then, using Project Analyzer, got compiling in
Microsoft doesn't work. Look at all the apps they broke with XP SP2. Look at everything that doesn't run under Vista. Heck, look at what didn't work under Win XP/2K that did under NT 4. Remember the Office 95 fiasco? Microsoft is the poster boy for incompatibility. I'd dare you to name a company that had greater incompatibilities between versions than MS.
If you want a real life version of mass-market bombardment advertising working, look at the music industry and the no-talent ass-clowns they've promoted. Britney, In-Sync, Backstreet Boys (remember them?) Tiffany, the new sets of boy bands w/ guitars (Fall Out Boy, AFI, American Rejects, ad nauseum) and on and on and on.
The true test of whether these were advertising/marketing driven? In the older cases, have you seen anyone pull out for instance an In-Sync album in the last year and play it? Very little if any of this heavily produced crap will ever be played again except as a reminder of how bad something was at one time.
I'll agree with you as well that "hardware" multi-threading (which sounds suspiciously like the recently acknowledged failure of the superscalar hyperthreaded P4) would seem to be a largely dead-end. Creating multiple threads to handle several iterations of a loop concurrently would seem to be very dependent upon what that loop actually does and extremely difficult to manage from a hardware only viewpoint. So difficult, I'd wonder why anyone would bother other than from an academic viewpoint (it's always interesting to quantify those qualities, even if it is only academic. After all, more than one surprise has come out of someone researching what seemed to have an obvious answer)
Compiler improvements would seem much more likely for this process, or the actual programmer, both of which are software based. I'd also have to wonder whether the effort would even be worth it in hardware for media encoding/decoding processes when software multi-threaded code exists for these functions. Can hardware multi-threading improve on software multi-threading? (I'd think not)
I do however wonder if AMD is looking at parallelizing in hardware to a DSP core. Now that could speed up certain types of functions greatly, given AMD's architecture.
Wow, an intended funny modded flamebait? What's wrong with the mods these days? Perhaps I'm the vicitm of an evil conspiracy... naah, that'd make me paranoid.
I'd call a web server a pretty basic application these days. Same goes for a DB. If you're talking about consumer programs like word editing and spreadsheets, I'd still say there's plenty of potential for multi-threading those to make various aspects more seamless to the end user. Just creating separate threads for input/output/main program would be a plus right there, and involves almost no high-level concurrency issues that don't already exist in the Windows world. (Most Windows programs don't have separate threads for this, but it definitely improves UI performance if done correctly. PMMail, originally designed for OS/2 and ported to windows, is a great example of how this paradigm improves responsiveness)
So, I'll disagree, and say that basic applications are a primary benefactor of multi-threaded coding even if it's not the gee-whiz performance enhancer he originally intended to talk about.
Oh, and because it's an MS thesis doesn't really lend any more credibility to the author's opinions than anyone else's, and in some cases less. Real world experience usually differs significantly from academia.
GarageBand output: Standard WAV/MP3/AAC or some other format if you care to encode it.
iPhoto output: same as input or JPG
iMovie output: standard MPEG2 on a DVD via iDVD
So, basically, none of these lock you into anything. Now, if you're talking about the intermediate project files for GarageBand or iMovie, I'd say that's not a valid argument. You still have the original inputs and can even produce standard output of various intermediate stages if desired.
What about people that do searches for their relatives? Or their pets? My dog has glaucoma. I'd be troubled greatly if my researching glaucoma medicines (dogs use the same medicine as people for this disease) caused any sort of reaction from anyone other than a pharmacy to offer me lower priced drops/pills. (Hey, check this guy out - he's researching glaucoma medicine and new cars - no cheap loans for him or insurance!!!!)
:)
I'm doubly glad for adblock and *doubleclick*
threading through clearly
I agree completely, though you can expect to catch some flack for
that one, from the hoardes of poor coders who think nothing (or rather,
who don't think about the implications) of splitting off another thread
to boost performance (even in a single core environment).
multithreading wherever possible. If I really need the raw CPU
power, I'll usually try to model it as a full slave process before
resorting to messy threading. You may be a good coder, but you apparently fall into the majority camp by your own admission. Not that there's anything wrong with that though. You at least realize that multi-threading isn't your thing. We desperately need higher-level threading primitives in computer science.
As one "mature" implementation, we could all start coding in HPF. I'd
personally rather gnaw my own right leg off, but, to each their own. As many folks pointed out to me previously, Eiffel seems to be pretty nice in this arena. I've never seen a production use of it, but who's to say it's not the next big thing? (Perhaps 3+M Java coders?)
The major issue with multi-threading remains though, and that's identifying the parallel processes. Take a series of sequential code blocks that involve retrieving pieces of information from several sources. If those retrievals are independent of each other, you can retrieve all the pieces concurrently (in parallel) and then sequence them together when all retrievals are done. Now the process takes the time of the longest retrieval plus assembly vs an sum of all retrievals and assembly. This type of process is quite common in enterprise systems working off of several DBs. Putting such code in a slave process requires inefficient messaging results back to the calling process, and adds unnecessary overhead. This is but one case where multi-threading helps performance significantly. I'm not sure that something like Eiffel would make this code any easier to write since the bulk of the multi-threaded work is in the design itself.
Good lord, let me sell all my web, application, and DB servers then!!!! I've overpaid for 32 CPU systems!!!! ACK!!!
The vendor lockin of old is mostly gone. It disappeared with the advent of RDBMSes. So what other lockin exists these days? I'm dead serious in asking this question, because from what I can tell with all the programs I use, everything has standard types of input data and produces standard types of output. That's because everything these days works with third party equipment. (OK, I know of some hardware/software combos that will lock you in in the enterprise, but those are very specific purposed applications and you don't have to choose them, or choose to use the ever helpful proprietary portions that will lock you in)
About the only non-MS product I can think of that even remotely smacks of vendor lockin is the iTunes music store. iPods aren't even vendor lockin. AAC is a standard that's not owned by Apple.
What other program that's designed to create essentially shared content forces upgrades via incompatible file formats and locks you into a single vendor?
They spent roughly 218M on researching cures last year. The remainder of roughly 1.3B went to treating symptoms. If you can't figure out those proportions, that's sad.
Face it, Windows sucks because they don't care about the user experience. Vista is slower than XP even when you don't run Aero. OSX 10.0/10.1? I didn't run them, but hey, it was basically a version 1.0 of the OS, which would equate to Windows NT 3.1/3.5. Recall how dog slow those were? I do. What file formats will be "incomatible" with Windows XP and Office 2003? Microsoft always released Office Compatability Packs that allow previous versions of Office to use (not just read) the newest Office formats. The Compatability Pack for Office 2007 allows users of Office XP and Office 2003 to "open, edit, save, and create files using the Open XML Formats new to the 2007 Microsoft Office system." Heck, it even allows Office/Windows 2000 users to convert Office 2007 files. Yep, MS's solution to "interoperability" is to require you to manually select to save in the previous office format. I'm assuming that you'll get that nifty wunderbar modal dialog stating something about the potential to lose formatting and features of your current worksheet because you're saving in an older version. WTF can't I select a system wide document version to save to, and disable or at least warn all those features not compatible with the designated version? Now that would at least be user friendly. Even better would be to fail seamlessly into older versions, so that basically your documents would always be good, just not as pretty. You can thank Microsoft for allowing Windows to be run on Apple hardware. You can blame Apple for disallowing OS X to be run on non-Apple hardware. I believe I can thank Apple for allowing Windows to run on Apple hardware. You are correct about blaming Apple for not allowing OSX to be run on non-Apple hardware, but then, it is their OS/hardware, isn't it? Do you blame MS for not allowing XBox software to be run on Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Sun, IBM, or Sega? No? Interesting.
Right now, I see the only lock in program(s) out there as MS Office. To give you an idea of how bad the lockin is, Office 2007 will force yet another upgrade/training cycle as it's largely incompatible (for all practical reason) with previous versions. No, it is not appropriate to "offer" a save in previous version on the save menu. By default it should save in a compatible mode with a warning if for some reason it could not be saved in a previous mode. (MS's mode operandi has generally been to indivate that you're losing some functionality if you save in an older format even if that's not true.)
Interesting that most Apple software continues to work for years. I don't recall anyone having to upgrade to 10.4 or 10.3. You might have wanted to, since the OS got leaner and faster and offered some serious new benies, quite unlike, say, the XP -> Vista "upgrade".
However, unlike Mac upgrades, the Vista/Office upgrade is designed to force an upgrade cycle, by that wonderful "incompatible" format structure. What do you get for your upgrade dollar? A more unstable system with a new UI to learn and ever adoring love from everyone you exchange files with who now have to upgrade to read them.
Lastly, about lock in: You've never run an apple. You're anything but locked in. Apple is hardware with some software provided. It's damn good hardware, and if you really want, you can even run MS software on it, along with various other flavors of *nix, and even OS/2 if you're really into convoluted configurations.
Depends upon your font ;)
I don't think you understand the concept, you're still blinded by $ signs. Billy "donated" 30B to the foundation. He's worth an estimated 56B (I don't recall if that's before or after the donation, but let's take a worst case example of before, so his worth after is 26B. At a mere 4% interest, he'd have to spend a mere $2.8+M a day just to keep that 26B from growing. (BTW, that's over 1B A year)
So, is he philanthropic? Maybe. Is he philanthropic compared to someone that actually sacrifices something to give to others? No.
I think you have a limited level of reading comprehension.
You'll note that I said most of their work is in treating symptoms, not causes. This is a true statement. Check their financials out. Vaccine research is drop in the bucket compared to the rest.
It's not my "hatred", as I don't know him personally. I dislike his business practices and the harm he's done to my chosen industry. I also disagree with most of what he's doing with his foundation, mainly because of the PR aspects. They also are largely contradictory in statement and effect, but there's so many that are blinded by the $ figures that their critical abilities are hampered.
I could just as easily say "Please, don't let the dollar amounts influence your objectivity in evaluating the real effect of this donation as opposed to its claimed effect."