The sibling poster is correct ; I'll expand on one of his points, the cost of solar panels.
The active element in this technology - cyanobacteria - is self-assembling. All you have to do is provide it with sunshine, CO2, and trace nutrients. That beats out any photovoltaic panel manufacturing technology, leaving the glass the only component you have to manufacture en-masse. As long as there aren't any odd quirks to this (ie - it's not some fancy enzyme coated glass, it's just plain old glass), we already have a vast infrastructure devoted to manufacturing oodles of the stuff. The more panels you make, the more infrastructure you have devoted to the manufacture of cyanobacteria, because each panel is also a breeder factory.
The limiting step therefore becomes the speed at which you can manufacture, erect, and assemble what are essentially windows (with tubes). The end product is familiar and useful to existing infrastructure. The process removes CO2 from the air, so if you start stockpiling the hydrocarbons or using them as feedstock for the chemical / plastic industry, you are reversing greenhouse gas accumulation. Even if we all got delivered an electrically powered flying car by a benevolent mad scientist tomorrow, that would be a good thing.
I hope it works as well as they claim, and I hope it sells like hotcakes.
They could lock them in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door that says "Beware of the Leopard", and eventually, someone will find them.
My guarantee of data destruction - thermite. It's the only way to be sure.
Well, ok, there are a lot of ways. You could extract the platters and scrub all the ferrite off with soapy water. You could just do a 1-pass wipe and it puts it beyond the capability of all known data recovery labs. There's those specialist industrial shredders designed just for disk drives that reduce them to a small heap of granules.
I believe that all software produced by the US government has no copyright protection in the USA and is effectively public domain. This doesn't apply to the work of contractors though.
It evens out and in both cases, you actually pay the same
I'm not sure about that - take healthcare. The USA spends more than any nation in the world, per capita, more than double the UK, yet is rated 42nd in terms of it's actual healthcare outcomes (worst of the G5 nations and worse than Chile and Cuba, nations with an economic model that you mock and oppose).
Private companies figure that 15% is a low profit margin for a healthcare operation in the States. If it truly was a model of efficient private competition, you'd see much lower profits, perhaps more in line with the Wal-Mart profit margin of 4%. Who knows what you'd get for your money if you transplanted the UK National Health Service to your shores.
It's a shame that the UK government has been trying their best to subvert our socialized healthcare system and convert it to a corporate milchcow for the last couple of decades. Not least because they are succeeding. The provision of patient care is already suffering where private corporations have been gifted with sweetheart contracts to run hospitals for the next 30 years (regardless of whether those services are actually needed, they'll get paid).
I never really grokked Linux so well until I set up my MythTV box and had to use Gentoo because it was the only distro that had the ridiculously bleeding edge kernels that I needed for the drivers to support my DVB-T tuners.
The setup guide was excellent - it explained the commands you needed to use, and WHY these commands and what they did as well.
The first thing you teach should be how to summon a man page. And encourage that it be read before you issue the command.
It may be the case that OpenGL is not an easy API to write for ; or that the available OpenGL implementations are easy to break, or that the OpenGL spec is loose enough that it is easy to implement badly.
The Wine developers almost certainly have more experience than Firefox devs of working around OpenGL quirks because they've been coding their version of DirectX for so long.
It speaks volumes about the relative ease of coding and general robustness of design of DirectX versus OpenGL if the Firefox team, who essentially started their experience writing clients for both platforms from scratch, and ended up with a DirectX client that works, and an OpenGL client that breaks.
From their comments, it seems that OpenGL is hard to develop for on Windows too.
This might just be down to a lack of OpenGL driver love from the GPU manufacturers, but I'd guess that DirectX is easier to write code for - I remember a time when most 3D games rendered using OpenGL or Glide. Now virtually everything on PC uses DirectX, and it can't just be because Microsoft paid the GPU manufacturers to make their OpenGL drivers suck.
Anecdotally I hear a lot of users do this anyway. I know I do.
The pain and suffering it takes to go through procurement to get an $80 RAM upgrade that the outsourced 3rd-party support will charge $200 for anyway and take weeks to fit, is worth paying the $80 to avoid. I get to be more productive, which is satisfying, which is again, worth more than $80. I may even save myself doing more than $80 worth of unpaid overtime because my computer works faster.
And at the end of it, when I leave, my old desktop gets a RAM upgrade. Which is probably worth a bit less than $80 because of depreciation, but what the heck.
So buying your own RAM upgrade is the gift that keeps giving...
Several of the examples in the article are not talking about owning your own computer, but using your own computer to access a remote desktop on a VM in a server farm somewhere. I fail to see how this makes the computer "your own" or allows you to customize it to your requirements. Quite the opposite, because VDI images are usually the same snapshot of the same VM with your user profile mounted over a network.
Sounds like business promoting an externality to me - they want all the advantages of a locked down computer in a physically secure location, realized they'll have to shell out for the server farm, the network infrastructure AND a bunch of VDI terminals - and then realized they could get silly mugs to pay for their own terminal on the premise they are "owning their own".
This is a world apart from companies that actually allow users to be in charge of their own computer - and that typically is only practical, and only occurs, where there is a high level of tech savvy. Like Google, who will buy you the computer you ask for and let you install what the hell you like on it.
Kraft? I'd be gobsmacked if they fell into the latter group.
Corporations originally received a corporate charter that stated their purpose in limited terms ; like the "West Bumhump Bridge Corporation". Once that purpose was fulfilled, the corporation was dissolved.
They weren't the amoral, immortal monsters we have today. They had a purpose beyond maximising shareholder value. And most importantly, they did not have the rights of a person, without the responsibilities.
I guess what we really need are rulers like Lord Vetinari in the Discworld novels ; who considers a slice a dry bread and a glass of water an elegant sufficency, and who's one quirk seems to be a disproportionate dislike of mime artists.
If a genius does works out from first principle the means to manufacture explosives, that is legal. But outlaw chemistry lessons! They teach people how to make explosives! If those people are not clever enough to work out how to make explosives on their own, they are not smart enough to have explosives.
Moreover, any form of collaboration on any technical project is FORBIDDEN. There's no telling what might result. Teaching each other things is DANGEROUS. It gives you more choices. What would become of that?
Yes, people who want "free stuff" without seeing the true cost of their habits are asshats. But if just a few of them take a look at some homebrew and are inspired to create, maybe it's worth it, or some fraction of it. Most of the people who were into computers when I was a kid ripped off massive heaps of content, but they all took a delight in making the machine dance to their tune as well ; it's a shame that today, on the standard system, they can't - the console doesn't ship with an SDK, Windows doesn't ship with an SDK. All the computers when I was a kid had BASIC in the box, and some even had an assembler.
To the sibling poster ; of course a large collective of open-source d00ds doesn't have the direction, focus, or purpose of a large media company. They are unlikely to produce works on the same scale or in the same volume.
But if we accept systems that are locked down then we are handing control over some of the most powerful tools on earth (computers) to the corporations. Do you really want your future any MORE in their hands? They have a taste for control, as you can see from the efforts to control the iPhone, consoles, TiVo, etc. What do you prefer, a computer that does what you tell it to, or what they do?
Erm, no. These are complex systems. Even early systems like the ZX Spectrum (or Timex as it was in the USA) had a long production life - from 1982 to 1990. This was powered by a piddly little Z80 processor. Later software on these systems was significantly improved compared to earlier releases, eventually doing things that you wouldn't really expect from a computer that had less transistors in it than the clock generator on a modern motherboard (Z80 - 8500 transistors. CY2292 clock generator - 9271). It should be possible to wring more performance out of a modern console every year for quite a span of years.
The real reason for the dearth of titles? Content production costs. Major game titles are now easily up there with movies in terms of production budgets. Voice recording, motion capture, artwork, storyboarding, modelling. A major title is a multimillion dollar investment. A far cry from the times when a couple of kids working in their bedroom could produce something as addictive as crack in their spare time and make their fortune. It's all very well to say "focus on fewer, better titles", but the risk is already sky high, which is why you get an endless parade of sequels and formula games ; I'm sure developers want to be working on better content, but it's what they can get an advance for. The only developers innovating are the indies, and to a lesser extent, the PC developers - and they don't have the budget for "impressive".
That's the problem with corporations, right there, in a nutshell.
They favour the concentration of a large amount of power in the hands a few people. The larger the corporation (and thus the more power it wields), the more likely the CEO is to be a sociopathic bastard, because this is what it takes to compete with all the other sociopathic bastards to get to the top of that massive pyramid.
So the most effective means of consolidating power is also the most likely to place that power in the hands of someone who'll misuse it. And they get to command the actions of otherwise OK guys who have become the equivalent of the henchmen of Dr Evil just because they have this overpowering urge not to be street people.
Although in larger enterprises their remuneration becomes divorced from actual outcomes. They either sign a contract with a guaranteed golden parachute, or their pay is so large that it doesn't actually affect them materially - what ends up the difference between a job and unemployment for you is probably the difference between one or two carats in their mistresses next diamond ring.
I hope you're gently trolling for "Funny" points. I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, with that wink.
But for those who'll take it seriously ; using gcc does not in any way impose any license on the output. And GPL specifically excludes components that are ordinarily installed with your target platform from consideration when determining what constitutes a derivative work.
This is mainly down to carotene (the same chemical that gives carrots their colour) which the birds ingest from grass. Battery feed is not as rich in this stuff - this is the same reason that winter butter is paler than summer butter, because the feed the cattle get in winter does not have as much carotene as the grass they receive in summer.
I would sincerely like the plethora of stupid paper documents I have to deal with reduced to a single wad of data, cryptographically signed by the appropriate gov. dept for each part -
e.g. - the DMV for the driving license, etc.
On the proviso that there is NOT a giant central DB tracking it all.
Indeed, and they are filming it at Jodrell Bank... which is noted for it's RADIO astronomy. Because as you note, the region is notorious for being overcast and wet.
It's not about the hardware being unsuitable - it clearly was, since the machine came with win2k3 server out of the factory (or it wouldn't have an original license sticker on it). It's about it being a royal pain in the ass to actually install Windows on some hardware.
The major issue with systems like these is probably drivers for the disk controllers. You obviously can't install an OS without using the disk controller. Everything else you can install afterwards. But what if your OS install disk doesn't have a driver for the disk controller in your machine?
For Windows, the answer has historically been to bang F6 at the appropriate moment during installer boot and shove a floppy disk containing a special "OEM" driver in. What's that? Your machine no longer has a floppy drive because they are an obsolete technology? It doesn't work with your USB floppy drive because there is only a limited set that are supported? Then you are left cooking your own install disk with the OEM drivers on it, using nLite or similar.
Linux tends to solve this problem by just having drivers integrated into it. One of the advantages of the Linux driver development model is that because the source is available for most drivers and most devices in a similar class need similar driver code, adding a new driver typically just involves adding either a very small abstraction layer or sometimes just a row in a list of supported devices, so the basic kernel can have support for a vast selection of devices in a relatively small space which happily fits on an install CD. Drivers only get thrown out of the main kernel when they get extremely obsolete AND a maintenance headache, so Linux tends to support more and more hardware each year.
With the Windows proprietary model, of course, everyone has their own super-secret-sauce driver, so it's impossible to fit them all on the install disk. Older drivers must be frequently dropped from the disk image or it won't fit in 700MB. Hence OEM floppies and banging F6. Drivers for ubiquitous consumer hardware are probably more likely to be on there than obscure server hardware, so I'm not surprised you had a different experience.
I suspect the GP poster also encountered a lot of problems finding device drivers for the other components in his server, like the network adapter.
As I recall, the reason they were only considering MS products was because the spec says "Use MS products".
The spec SHOULD detail all the requirements, and products that meet them should be considered. The system of bidding is supposed to reduce the cost to the public by introducing competition, but clearly if part of your spec can state "MUST use the product of this particular supplier" then there is no hope of competition in the first place, which defeats the purpose of having a bidding process.
If you can choose a product on arbitrary criteria then the process becomes that much more open to corruption. I'm not saying it happened, but you must at least concede that someone could have received a fat wad of cash for writing that particular clause into the spec from Microsoft.
It's likely that you could very easily write a spec that favoured the MS solution on functional grounds, but coming in a box with the MS logo on it is not one of them.
I do trust Gmail to have better data integrity because they are more open about their architecture and having read about it, I think it's well designed.
I don't have any expectation of them caring about my email apart from its data-mining value though.
You gets what you pays for. You're paying nothing except your privacy - which corporations demonstrably don't value highly - in exchange for a webmail service. One which explicitly declares in its terms and conditions that you have no expectation of data integrity.
And if you only ever use the web interface, there isn't even any chance that you've mirrored your mail to your local computer. Webmail relieves you of the responsibility of installing a mail client, backing up your data, etc.
Now everything is going "cloud", I can see a gap in the market for "family cloud" appliances - plonk them on your home network, trust a few similar units on the networks of family members, and get the benefits of redundant backups, mail service, etc, exchanging the cost of your privacy for a few hundred dollars.
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But the ethanol industry currently consumes 2.6B bushels of core per year ; around 20% of your 13B bushel harvest.
So it sounds like a good deal that would drive food prices DOWN.
The sibling poster is correct ; I'll expand on one of his points, the cost of solar panels.
The active element in this technology - cyanobacteria - is self-assembling. All you have to do is provide it with sunshine, CO2, and trace nutrients. That beats out any photovoltaic panel manufacturing technology, leaving the glass the only component you have to manufacture en-masse. As long as there aren't any odd quirks to this (ie - it's not some fancy enzyme coated glass, it's just plain old glass), we already have a vast infrastructure devoted to manufacturing oodles of the stuff. The more panels you make, the more infrastructure you have devoted to the manufacture of cyanobacteria, because each panel is also a breeder factory.
The limiting step therefore becomes the speed at which you can manufacture, erect, and assemble what are essentially windows (with tubes). The end product is familiar and useful to existing infrastructure. The process removes CO2 from the air, so if you start stockpiling the hydrocarbons or using them as feedstock for the chemical / plastic industry, you are reversing greenhouse gas accumulation. Even if we all got delivered an electrically powered flying car by a benevolent mad scientist tomorrow, that would be a good thing.
I hope it works as well as they claim, and I hope it sells like hotcakes.
Don't forget the gingers.
They could lock them in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door that says "Beware of the Leopard", and eventually, someone will find them.
My guarantee of data destruction - thermite. It's the only way to be sure.
Well, ok, there are a lot of ways. You could extract the platters and scrub all the ferrite off with soapy water. You could just do a 1-pass wipe and it puts it beyond the capability of all known data recovery labs. There's those specialist industrial shredders designed just for disk drives that reduce them to a small heap of granules.
But thermite is more fun.
I believe that all software produced by the US government has no copyright protection in the USA and is effectively public domain. This doesn't apply to the work of contractors though.
It evens out and in both cases, you actually pay the same
I'm not sure about that - take healthcare. The USA spends more than any nation in the world, per capita, more than double the UK, yet is rated 42nd in terms of it's actual healthcare outcomes (worst of the G5 nations and worse than Chile and Cuba, nations with an economic model that you mock and oppose).
Private companies figure that 15% is a low profit margin for a healthcare operation in the States. If it truly was a model of efficient private competition, you'd see much lower profits, perhaps more in line with the Wal-Mart profit margin of 4%. Who knows what you'd get for your money if you transplanted the UK National Health Service to your shores.
It's a shame that the UK government has been trying their best to subvert our socialized healthcare system and convert it to a corporate milchcow for the last couple of decades. Not least because they are succeeding. The provision of patient care is already suffering where private corporations have been gifted with sweetheart contracts to run hospitals for the next 30 years (regardless of whether those services are actually needed, they'll get paid).
This.
I never really grokked Linux so well until I set up my MythTV box and had to use Gentoo because it was the only distro that had the ridiculously bleeding edge kernels that I needed for the drivers to support my DVB-T tuners.
The setup guide was excellent - it explained the commands you needed to use, and WHY these commands and what they did as well.
The first thing you teach should be how to summon a man page. And encourage that it be read before you issue the command.
It may be the case that OpenGL is not an easy API to write for ; or that the available OpenGL implementations are easy to break, or that the OpenGL spec is loose enough that it is easy to implement badly.
The Wine developers almost certainly have more experience than Firefox devs of working around OpenGL quirks because they've been coding their version of DirectX for so long.
It speaks volumes about the relative ease of coding and general robustness of design of DirectX versus OpenGL if the Firefox team, who essentially started their experience writing clients for both platforms from scratch, and ended up with a DirectX client that works, and an OpenGL client that breaks.
From their comments, it seems that OpenGL is hard to develop for on Windows too.
This might just be down to a lack of OpenGL driver love from the GPU manufacturers, but I'd guess that DirectX is easier to write code for - I remember a time when most 3D games rendered using OpenGL or Glide. Now virtually everything on PC uses DirectX, and it can't just be because Microsoft paid the GPU manufacturers to make their OpenGL drivers suck.
Anecdotally I hear a lot of users do this anyway. I know I do.
The pain and suffering it takes to go through procurement to get an $80 RAM upgrade that the outsourced 3rd-party support will charge $200 for anyway and take weeks to fit, is worth paying the $80 to avoid. I get to be more productive, which is satisfying, which is again, worth more than $80. I may even save myself doing more than $80 worth of unpaid overtime because my computer works faster.
And at the end of it, when I leave, my old desktop gets a RAM upgrade. Which is probably worth a bit less than $80 because of depreciation, but what the heck.
So buying your own RAM upgrade is the gift that keeps giving...
Several of the examples in the article are not talking about owning your own computer, but using your own computer to access a remote desktop on a VM in a server farm somewhere. I fail to see how this makes the computer "your own" or allows you to customize it to your requirements. Quite the opposite, because VDI images are usually the same snapshot of the same VM with your user profile mounted over a network.
Sounds like business promoting an externality to me - they want all the advantages of a locked down computer in a physically secure location, realized they'll have to shell out for the server farm, the network infrastructure AND a bunch of VDI terminals - and then realized they could get silly mugs to pay for their own terminal on the premise they are "owning their own".
This is a world apart from companies that actually allow users to be in charge of their own computer - and that typically is only practical, and only occurs, where there is a high level of tech savvy. Like Google, who will buy you the computer you ask for and let you install what the hell you like on it.
Kraft? I'd be gobsmacked if they fell into the latter group.
Corporations originally received a corporate charter that stated their purpose in limited terms ; like the "West Bumhump Bridge Corporation". Once that purpose was fulfilled, the corporation was dissolved.
They weren't the amoral, immortal monsters we have today. They had a purpose beyond maximising shareholder value. And most importantly, they did not have the rights of a person, without the responsibilities.
Nice to be proven wrong so well.
I guess what we really need are rulers like Lord Vetinari in the Discworld novels ; who considers a slice a dry bread and a glass of water an elegant sufficency, and who's one quirk seems to be a disproportionate dislike of mime artists.
If a genius does works out from first principle the means to manufacture explosives, that is legal. But outlaw chemistry lessons! They teach people how to make explosives! If those people are not clever enough to work out how to make explosives on their own, they are not smart enough to have explosives.
Moreover, any form of collaboration on any technical project is FORBIDDEN. There's no telling what might result. Teaching each other things is DANGEROUS. It gives you more choices. What would become of that?
Yes, people who want "free stuff" without seeing the true cost of their habits are asshats. But if just a few of them take a look at some homebrew and are inspired to create, maybe it's worth it, or some fraction of it. Most of the people who were into computers when I was a kid ripped off massive heaps of content, but they all took a delight in making the machine dance to their tune as well ; it's a shame that today, on the standard system, they can't - the console doesn't ship with an SDK, Windows doesn't ship with an SDK. All the computers when I was a kid had BASIC in the box, and some even had an assembler.
To the sibling poster ; of course a large collective of open-source d00ds doesn't have the direction, focus, or purpose of a large media company. They are unlikely to produce works on the same scale or in the same volume.
But if we accept systems that are locked down then we are handing control over some of the most powerful tools on earth (computers) to the corporations. Do you really want your future any MORE in their hands? They have a taste for control, as you can see from the efforts to control the iPhone, consoles, TiVo, etc. What do you prefer, a computer that does what you tell it to, or what they do?
Erm, no. These are complex systems. Even early systems like the ZX Spectrum (or Timex as it was in the USA) had a long production life - from 1982 to 1990. This was powered by a piddly little Z80 processor. Later software on these systems was significantly improved compared to earlier releases, eventually doing things that you wouldn't really expect from a computer that had less transistors in it than the clock generator on a modern motherboard (Z80 - 8500 transistors. CY2292 clock generator - 9271). It should be possible to wring more performance out of a modern console every year for quite a span of years.
The real reason for the dearth of titles? Content production costs. Major game titles are now easily up there with movies in terms of production budgets. Voice recording, motion capture, artwork, storyboarding, modelling. A major title is a multimillion dollar investment. A far cry from the times when a couple of kids working in their bedroom could produce something as addictive as crack in their spare time and make their fortune. It's all very well to say "focus on fewer, better titles", but the risk is already sky high, which is why you get an endless parade of sequels and formula games ; I'm sure developers want to be working on better content, but it's what they can get an advance for. The only developers innovating are the indies, and to a lesser extent, the PC developers - and they don't have the budget for "impressive".
That's the problem with corporations, right there, in a nutshell.
They favour the concentration of a large amount of power in the hands a few people. The larger the corporation (and thus the more power it wields), the more likely the CEO is to be a sociopathic bastard, because this is what it takes to compete with all the other sociopathic bastards to get to the top of that massive pyramid.
So the most effective means of consolidating power is also the most likely to place that power in the hands of someone who'll misuse it. And they get to command the actions of otherwise OK guys who have become the equivalent of the henchmen of Dr Evil just because they have this overpowering urge not to be street people.
Although in larger enterprises their remuneration becomes divorced from actual outcomes. They either sign a contract with a guaranteed golden parachute, or their pay is so large that it doesn't actually affect them materially - what ends up the difference between a job and unemployment for you is probably the difference between one or two carats in their mistresses next diamond ring.
Erm, no.
I hope you're gently trolling for "Funny" points. I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, with that wink.
But for those who'll take it seriously ; using gcc does not in any way impose any license on the output. And GPL specifically excludes components that are ordinarily installed with your target platform from consideration when determining what constitutes a derivative work.
This is mainly down to carotene (the same chemical that gives carrots their colour) which the birds ingest from grass. Battery feed is not as rich in this stuff - this is the same reason that winter butter is paler than summer butter, because the feed the cattle get in winter does not have as much carotene as the grass they receive in summer.
I would sincerely like the plethora of stupid paper documents I have to deal with reduced to a single wad of data, cryptographically signed by the appropriate gov. dept for each part -
e.g. - the DMV for the driving license, etc.
On the proviso that there is NOT a giant central DB tracking it all.
"Who's the more foolish, the fool, or the fool who follows him?"
Indeed, and they are filming it at Jodrell Bank... which is noted for it's RADIO astronomy. Because as you note, the region is notorious for being overcast and wet.
It's not about the hardware being unsuitable - it clearly was, since the machine came with win2k3 server out of the factory (or it wouldn't have an original license sticker on it). It's about it being a royal pain in the ass to actually install Windows on some hardware.
The major issue with systems like these is probably drivers for the disk controllers. You obviously can't install an OS without using the disk controller. Everything else you can install afterwards. But what if your OS install disk doesn't have a driver for the disk controller in your machine?
For Windows, the answer has historically been to bang F6 at the appropriate moment during installer boot and shove a floppy disk containing a special "OEM" driver in. What's that? Your machine no longer has a floppy drive because they are an obsolete technology? It doesn't work with your USB floppy drive because there is only a limited set that are supported? Then you are left cooking your own install disk with the OEM drivers on it, using nLite or similar.
Linux tends to solve this problem by just having drivers integrated into it. One of the advantages of the Linux driver development model is that because the source is available for most drivers and most devices in a similar class need similar driver code, adding a new driver typically just involves adding either a very small abstraction layer or sometimes just a row in a list of supported devices, so the basic kernel can have support for a vast selection of devices in a relatively small space which happily fits on an install CD. Drivers only get thrown out of the main kernel when they get extremely obsolete AND a maintenance headache, so Linux tends to support more and more hardware each year.
With the Windows proprietary model, of course, everyone has their own super-secret-sauce driver, so it's impossible to fit them all on the install disk. Older drivers must be frequently dropped from the disk image or it won't fit in 700MB. Hence OEM floppies and banging F6. Drivers for ubiquitous consumer hardware are probably more likely to be on there than obscure server hardware, so I'm not surprised you had a different experience.
I suspect the GP poster also encountered a lot of problems finding device drivers for the other components in his server, like the network adapter.
As I recall, the reason they were only considering MS products was because the spec says "Use MS products".
The spec SHOULD detail all the requirements, and products that meet them should be considered. The system of bidding is supposed to reduce the cost to the public by introducing competition, but clearly if part of your spec can state "MUST use the product of this particular supplier" then there is no hope of competition in the first place, which defeats the purpose of having a bidding process.
If you can choose a product on arbitrary criteria then the process becomes that much more open to corruption. I'm not saying it happened, but you must at least concede that someone could have received a fat wad of cash for writing that particular clause into the spec from Microsoft.
It's likely that you could very easily write a spec that favoured the MS solution on functional grounds, but coming in a box with the MS logo on it is not one of them.
I do trust Gmail to have better data integrity because they are more open about their architecture and having read about it, I think it's well designed.
I don't have any expectation of them caring about my email apart from its data-mining value though.
You gets what you pays for. You're paying nothing except your privacy - which corporations demonstrably don't value highly - in exchange for a webmail service. One which explicitly declares in its terms and conditions that you have no expectation of data integrity.
And if you only ever use the web interface, there isn't even any chance that you've mirrored your mail to your local computer. Webmail relieves you of the responsibility of installing a mail client, backing up your data, etc.
Now everything is going "cloud", I can see a gap in the market for "family cloud" appliances - plonk them on your home network, trust a few similar units on the networks of family members, and get the benefits of redundant backups, mail service, etc, exchanging the cost of your privacy for a few hundred dollars.