Simple explanation: the music industry doesn't want to sell music anymore, not in the traditional sense. The fact is, in the beginning of a musician's career they are almost totally dominated by the label. They cost some money in promotion, recording, distribution, but those are known and controllable costs. In the end of a successful musician's career, they either own their own material or they have made deals in which they get a bigger chunk of sales and performance revenue.
By then usually their fans have grown older, more mature, more sophisticated and they no longer buy the latest CD of the current one hit wonder for that one hit. They already have a huge collection of music and buy less and less of harder and harder to produce quality. These are the people seen in local music stores.
The music industry wants to sell Doritos (nothing against Doritos), something a huge crowd will buy, consume and dump out the other end, ready to buy a new bag - you know, at WallMart. They want to keep music production just at the cusp where an artist is popular enough to justify burning large numbers of CDs but still cheap enough that profit is maximized.
Like with everything else, profit maximization is killing popular music. Mind you, I _like_ profit; but you see, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
They'll have an unrealistic expectation of any expression of technology, by definition. All the while War Games and Tron were inspiring a whole generation (myself included) to learn what it's all about. We knew very well the expectations in both movies were unrealistic, but that was never the point. I had no hope of making my Sinclair ZX81 do anything remotely close to what Tron showed me but I got to fell like Flynn when I hacked a reset button for it (pin 13 to ground on the Z80). (Good) sci-fi is about inspiration, not reality. If it were realistic it would be a documentary and in 1982 a very boring one...
I don't know what the original poster means, but I think I can relate. It's not that all actions have to benefit others; rather it's that some activities are only possible because of what society provides (such as a civilized context in which to trade, including police to make sure someone with a bigger gun doesn't steal your profits). Society provides these things because it gets in return something valuable: price discovery, a more-or-less fair way of allocating resources, jobs, goods, etc. However society needs to control the risks it exposes itself to or it will be obliterated by competing societies or mass-extinction. That's where regulation comes from and no matter how much traders dislike it I'm sure they are all glad for the regulations imposed on the chemical industry that prevent it from dumping carcinogenics in the reservoir their drinking water comes from.
It seems clear that societies should protect themselves and that means a constant evaluation of the risk/benefit of all activities made possible by the very existence of society. In this sense it is clear that the majority of the members of this society are now suffering because this society did very poorly at looking after itself in the last few years - by allowing the financial sector more freedom than it would have been wise. This attitude is identical to allowing our hypothetical chemical plant to dump poison in your reservoir. The deaths just happen in a more indirect way.
With all that in mind, it makes a lot of sense to ask if some kind of stock trading generates enough value that society should risk allowing it. I hope more people start asking that question.
In this, like in many other things, the Windows way of thinking has poisoned the issue. The way Windows people think, reinforced by Microsoft's implementation of Patch Tuesday, has been picked up by systems auditors and managers and bureaucrats everywhere. So the mantra today is that you must patch. Hurry! There's a new version! If you don't install it now we're all gonna die! This comes from the fact that that is a pretty simple metric that can be written in policies and checked during audits.
If you lose data or your system gets abused and you're patched to the latest version you're off the hook. If you don't have the latest patch however you're fired. Even if the latest patch fixes a local privilege escalation on libgd2 and all your server does is DHCP and it was actually exploited by someone cleverly guessing your co-worker's password.
Same thing with firewalls: if all you run is a web server, I say you make sure nothing else is running that opens any ports. It's no use to setup a firewall, because the thing that is most vulnerable, port 80, will need to be open anyway. But get caught without a firewall in some places and you're fired.
It's a lot easier to write a meaningless list of requirements than to think about needs and policies and design the requirements
It's a lot safer to follow some dumb list of requirements than to try to understand what your systems are doing and configure accordingly
It's a lot easier for an auditor to check a list of requirements against the output of some version-checker than to actually know what these things do
It's the dumbing down of engineering that passes for systems administration these days. It's the Windows way of thinking.
All that you say is true, yet the conclusion is a fallacy. 1) the fact that things were so in the past is no guarantee they will remain so in the future. 2) Technological advances have made it possible to offset the growing demand on resources but there is no guarantee that that will always be true. 3) When you have billions of malnourished people with no access to health care you will see disease that shows in a chart of the world population. 4) By catastrophic war I mean conflicts that wipe out large chunks of the population; think several WW2s in parallel over the same period of time. 5) The standard of living has been growing steadily for certain segments of the population but by no means all the population. Ask the people in the slums of the world. If you think the whole world benefits from the accumulation of wealth in North America you have *my* pity. As I said, I don't know how close or far we are from the limits -- and nobody knows. The easiest way to find out is to keep increasing our population, demands on natural resources and energy. We are a smart species. I hope we learn to improve the standard of living for everyone without generating a consumption engine way before we approach any limits.
You are wrong. There are practical limits to how much people we can make if we stay on the same planet. We may be close or very far from the theoretical limit, but it gets very uncomfortable long before we approach the limit. The _only_ result of ever-increasing population is the lowering of the standard of living for everybody. It will not be at the same pace for everybody, of course, but it will affect everybody given time. For instance, increasing poverty in Mexico leads to more desperation to poor Mexicans, who tend to become illegal immigrants in this country. So you see how your standard of living may be affected by economic problems in another country.
We _must_ control our population growth.
We _must_ lower the demand on resources.
This seems very difficult for conservatives to understand.
The lessons of evolution are clear (that seems to be very difficult for conservatives to understand also). Either we stop growing at these rates or we will be stopped by scarcity of resources, increase of diseases or catastrophic wars.
That's a circular argument. People use Windows because the world runs on Windows. The world runs on Windows because people use Windows. There's no real reason for it to continue like that. As for the rest, I have not run Windows since circa 1998. I have not missed it. I don't think I'm special, anybody could do it. People are afraid of the unknown, that's all. When I started in this industry corporate users dealt with Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect on DOS. Believe me, there was nothing intuitive about that. Still, "clueless" users did very well on those platforms. Any recent version of Ubuntu is more intuitive, graphical and user friendly than any version of Windows before XP. So that's not the problem. Finally, who says it ain't broke? Complaints about how computers never work when you want them to, about excessive spam, about machines becoming slow for no reason, it's all users talk about when they talk about computers. It is very broke and it didn't have to be. It's just that it's the broke I know versus the unknown quantity of a different OS. I still say, there is no real good reason why people continue to use Windows in 2009. The reasons, which are not good at all, are fear and ignorance. But mostly fear.
From a lot of developers point of view, making it attractive to users is irrelevant. We do that for our day jobs. What people don't get is that this is, for a lot of developers, a hobby. I built a binary clock in my garage the other day. It's cool, it works, it keeps accurate time, it's amusing to my geeky sensitivities. If anybody wants my to build them one, I'll do it for pleasure. I'd be happy to post circuit diagrams and the source for the microcontroller if I thought it worthy. I will not produce a manual explaining to people who don't really want to know what binary is and how to read my clock. I don't care if it's all asymmetrical due to prototype boards. It gave me a lot of joy and much needed relaxation when I designed and built it. It makes me smile when I look at it. That's all that matters.
OTOH people are not trying to use my little garage project for serious work. Yes, we do it for love - you say that like it's a bad thing! And you know what? Where it really matters, most Open Source projects are really well made. Unix admins appreciate Linux. It's written by us, for us. It is very good, easy to use if you know what you're doing and yes, it's stable. I couldn't care less if your grandma can't use it. That's what Apple is for. (Sorry but it's completely beyond me why people still use Windows).
I understand the need for a company to make money, but excessive marketing causes way more evil than poorly designed user interfaces. I mean, I saw personally indigenous women in the Amazon spending a week's pay on cosmetics because, looking at local advertising, they were led to believe it would make them tall and blonde. Seriously.
I hope against all hope that you people stay out of my garage and that marketing stops polluting the stuff we, engineers, do for love.
The US is looking for ways to change its image abroad. The US is about to replace these birds with something better. The Brazilians use this to communicate in places where they have no other option, like the Amazon rain forest. I'd say... Let them have it. Sure, charge something from the Brazilian government, but this would go a long way as a firendly gesture. It could also be extended to other Souht/Central American countries. Why not?
Full disclosure: I'm Brazilian. I live in the US. I'm NOT a pirate. Or a ninja.
No. They have to because people expect them to. They can't just say "go buy your memory some place else." People expect them to offer it. So they do. For a price. I don't think they make a lot of profit from ram sticks though, despite the huge markup. I just don't believe a lot of people buy ram from Apple.
Except that you don't have to buy memory from Apple. Get the base system from them, there's no tax there. And go buy memory at the best price you can get. This is just Apple saying they don't want to be in the accessory market...
Hm, maybe this is just like the "Linux myths" campaign of years ago. Just a place to consolidate all the talking points. Accuracy or even honesty are not important. What matters is putting workable arguments in the mouths of opinion formers, which in the Windows ecosystem are usually store sales people, support "IT guys" and the neighbor's kid. They don't need to know a lot to defend or even understand the arguments. They just need to sound like they know what they're talking about and this kind of article does that for them. The real news to me is the fact that MS seems to be worried enough to launch a campaign against Apple.
My desktop: Mac Pro, 2 x 2.8 GHz quad-core Xeon, 10 GB RAM, 1.5 TB disk, 2 x Radeon 2600 XT. Cost $4.8K. Similar Dell: $ 9K (Precision T7500 64bit). This does not include iWork and iLife which I got with the Mac. My laptop: MacBook, 2 GHz Core2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, 160 GB disk, 15", camera, bluetooth, etc. Cost $1.4K. Similar Dell: ~ $1.3K, but the Dell comes with no camera and no additional software.
My point: Apple's problem (or strength) is that they refuse to make low-end stuff. In the middle range, Dells cost as much as Apples, as my laptop shows. At the higher end, Apples are significantly cheaper. It's not a tax, it's money you pay for more features.
Of course if you compare the cheapest possible Apple (a mini for $600) with the cheapest possible Dell (Inspiron for $300), it looks like there's a tax but I'd argue that the mini's 2 GHz Core2 Duo beats the inspiron's 2.2 GHz Celeron any day, even if the Inspiron comes with twice the memory -- and the Inspiron would need to run Vista Ultimate for an extra $ 150 to even compare with OS X Leopard; and might need some more memory then.
Be that as it may, it doesn't change the fact that there are many MUAs that have no problems with IMAP while Outlook constantly chokes on it.
There are many reasons why you'd leave messages on the server. You may want to get to them from different computers in different parts of the world and you wan to use your MUA of choice; or you want to ride with the server backups; or your server, sitting behind a locked door, is more secure than your laptop, which could be stolen taking all your e-mail history with it... I'll stop here but there are many others.
Replace with FOSS. No, really. I've done this, literally, hundreds of times when I was consulting. This is what I suggest:
- Do your homework. Inventory all the software in use, figure out how much it would cost to legitimize it.
- Do your homework. Write a plan to implement FOSS solutions. Figure out what can be replaced and what can't. Maximize productivity, try to go with drop-in replacements when possible, try to avoid retraining costs if possible.
- Go to the higher-ups with both homeworks. Give them the options. Don't be a rabid supporter of FOSS, don't be a MS yes man. Explain that the third way, keeping things as they are, is a huge potential risk. It's not hard to find information online about companies that have been audited and had to settle for all their illegal software.
- If you manage to sell the project, be thorough and plan ahead (or hire someone like me as a consultant).
Do this right and you'll be a hero. But be careful, do this wrong and you're out of a job... Great opportunity comes with great risk usually.
Sure. Let people buy guns. When they use them to kill people, ban video games. Hey, some crazies have killed people because God told them to! Let's ban religion!
Sorry, but Gmail is not the problem here. Outlook is. I find it hilarious that you think Outlook is a "real" mail program. Outlook is a MS Exchange client and very good at that. But it is a lousy client for anything else. We have all sorts of users here (state university) and the Outlook users are constantly whining about IMAP, so much so that now they just don't even try it anymore. They just have decided "IMAP sucks" and they all just POP. Meanwhile the people using Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Eudora, Netscape Mail (yes, there are some of those. No, really.), heck, even Pine use IMAP with no problem at all. If you want to know about "real" mail programs, try something other than Outlook and take the time to learn -- say, Thunderbird -- properly. You'll be amazed.
Congrats and thanks. I'm just starting down the path you've been on (my son will turn 3 next month) and what you describe is what I intend to do -- or whatever will be equivalent to that in the years ahead. I really hope I'll be able to say I'm proud of him 10 years from now -- because I know if I'm not, it will largely be my own fault. You deserve to hear this and if nobody has told you before please allow me: congratulations, sir, on a job well done!
Some information your kids just need to be largely innocent of until they become adults.
If you had said "some information kids need to be protected of until they become adults" I'd tend to agree with you. First you shouldn't be using the term "innocent". That has religious connotations that really have no place here. Second, at the age which he is describing, children are no longer your brand of "innocent". They are starting to feel the irresistible pull of their hormones and they WILL find what they are looking for, filters or no filters. Frankly, I'd rather my son looked at porn on his computer in his bedroom than hide in some public place with a couple of friends and a stolen magazine. I only hope to make it clear enough that he will never be punished for it and that he will always be welcome to talk to me about anything that he might find disturbing. I will also promise I will never be condescending and will always treat him with respect. I will of course also force his machine to go through squid on the family firewall... I'm still his father and responsible for him and I should have some way of knowing where he's going. Don't filter. Be aware, be available, be protective.
I'm a big fan. I have all of their CDs up until when they started nagging about Napster (ReLoad is the latest studio recording and S&M the latest live I own). I have not bought a single Metallica CD since. I have not downloaded anything either. I have never heard Saint Anger or Death Magnetic. I had the opportunity to see them in Denver during the Saint Anger tour and decided against it. Their whole attitude about electronic media disgusts me. The whole rebel act they put forward in their songs is just that then, just an act. When they don't understand an issue and so much as suspect it might hurt the bottom line, they side with the man. Bah.
We agree more than disagree. Two operative words: 'basic' and 'taught'. Yes, basic troubleshooting can be documented (like in the clogged pipe). And yes, advanced (for lack of a better word) troubleshooting can be taught. However to expect any documentation system to substitute for experienced, knowledgeable people is unreasonable. I like that you added 'judgment' to the mix though. That's something that AFAIK can be neither documented nor taught - although it can be learned.
Not the way you're thinking. Where I work we use a wiki (mediawiki) and it works as well as any system I've seen, probably better than most. Now for the "can't be done" part:
Tasks like building a server, installing some software, connecting cables, etc., can and should be documented. Troubleshooting however cannot. Troubleshooting takes profound understanding of all the parts surrounding an issue and how they inter-operate; the ability to think long, hard and meaningfully; the ability to devise experiments, execute them, collect and analyze data and arrive at meaningful conclusions based on all that -- the scientific method, in other words. This is the kind of job that humans do better than machines and it is proverbially difficult to even understand, let alone document -- witness the "expert systems" of 20 years ago.
The big problem is that all non-technically-inclined people, including most people in management positions, think what we do is something mechanical akin to what plumbers do -- no offense to plumbers, who do things I can't do. From a user's point of view, "I can't print my e-mail message" is not much different from "I can't wash my dishes". Locating a clogged pipe and clearing it does require some technical skills and can certainly be documented. The e-mail printing problem however is several orders of magnitude more complex than that and, although it's probably possible to write a flowchart to document any possible thing that could be wrong in this scenario, it would be ludicrously huge, silly really. And that's talking only about day-to-day. If I'm really good at what I do I will design and implement systems so that errors of that sort are minimized. In other words, we're being asked to do the job of civil or hydraulic engineers on a plumber's salary.
There, of course, is the crux of the matter. Microsoft in particular, but the whole industry actually, are guilty of selling to managers the idea that this job can be done by drones, at all levels. Management is happy because drones don't cost much. Then, of course, drones are all they can get for what they offer.
What you want is knowledge, knowledge that can be provided by some, but by no means all, not even most, of the people who work for you. And you're tired of seeing those few good ones go away, leaving mostly drones behind. The only advice I can give you is: do document what can be documented. Make it a priority and make everybody responsible and accountable for documentation. But do acknowledge the really knowledgeable people in your team, treat them and pay them just as you would any other kind of expert. I know you're probably not in a position of paying your tech guru at orthodontist levels, but try to treat her at least as well as you do accountants.
I believe the author means 'free', not open source. There are lots of reasons why MS wouldn't do either, but even if you buy the argument, all MS would need to do would be drop the price to $0. That doesn't mean GPL'ing the code! Gosh!
I don't think many atheists believe life on other planets will prove Christians wrong. Most atheists I know believe that life on other planets is irrelevant to the god hypothesis. Doesn't prove or disprove it. Christians on the other hand believe ETs may have hard evidence against their case -- from a simple thing like video evidence from certain events that supposedly happened in Judea circa 2000 years ago to something more complex like showing that among the 7,854 galactic civilizations on file, ours is the only one that ever invented the notion of god(s)...
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Simple explanation: the music industry doesn't want to sell music anymore, not in the traditional sense. The fact is, in the beginning of a musician's career they are almost totally dominated by the label. They cost some money in promotion, recording, distribution, but those are known and controllable costs. In the end of a successful musician's career, they either own their own material or they have made deals in which they get a bigger chunk of sales and performance revenue.
By then usually their fans have grown older, more mature, more sophisticated and they no longer buy the latest CD of the current one hit wonder for that one hit. They already have a huge collection of music and buy less and less of harder and harder to produce quality. These are the people seen in local music stores.
The music industry wants to sell Doritos (nothing against Doritos), something a huge crowd will buy, consume and dump out the other end, ready to buy a new bag - you know, at WallMart. They want to keep music production just at the cusp where an artist is popular enough to justify burning large numbers of CDs but still cheap enough that profit is maximized.
Like with everything else, profit maximization is killing popular music. Mind you, I _like_ profit; but you see, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
They'll have an unrealistic expectation of any expression of technology, by definition. All the while War Games and Tron were inspiring a whole generation (myself included) to learn what it's all about. We knew very well the expectations in both movies were unrealistic, but that was never the point. I had no hope of making my Sinclair ZX81 do anything remotely close to what Tron showed me but I got to fell like Flynn when I hacked a reset button for it (pin 13 to ground on the Z80). (Good) sci-fi is about inspiration, not reality. If it were realistic it would be a documentary and in 1982 a very boring one...
I don't know what the original poster means, but I think I can relate. It's not that all actions have to benefit others; rather it's that some activities are only possible because of what society provides (such as a civilized context in which to trade, including police to make sure someone with a bigger gun doesn't steal your profits). Society provides these things because it gets in return something valuable: price discovery, a more-or-less fair way of allocating resources, jobs, goods, etc. However society needs to control the risks it exposes itself to or it will be obliterated by competing societies or mass-extinction. That's where regulation comes from and no matter how much traders dislike it I'm sure they are all glad for the regulations imposed on the chemical industry that prevent it from dumping carcinogenics in the reservoir their drinking water comes from.
It seems clear that societies should protect themselves and that means a constant evaluation of the risk/benefit of all activities made possible by the very existence of society. In this sense it is clear that the majority of the members of this society are now suffering because this society did very poorly at looking after itself in the last few years - by allowing the financial sector more freedom than it would have been wise. This attitude is identical to allowing our hypothetical chemical plant to dump poison in your reservoir. The deaths just happen in a more indirect way.
With all that in mind, it makes a lot of sense to ask if some kind of stock trading generates enough value that society should risk allowing it. I hope more people start asking that question.
In this, like in many other things, the Windows way of thinking has poisoned the issue. The way Windows people think, reinforced by Microsoft's implementation of Patch Tuesday, has been picked up by systems auditors and managers and bureaucrats everywhere. So the mantra today is that you must patch. Hurry! There's a new version! If you don't install it now we're all gonna die! This comes from the fact that that is a pretty simple metric that can be written in policies and checked during audits.
If you lose data or your system gets abused and you're patched to the latest version you're off the hook. If you don't have the latest patch however you're fired. Even if the latest patch fixes a local privilege escalation on libgd2 and all your server does is DHCP and it was actually exploited by someone cleverly guessing your co-worker's password.
Same thing with firewalls: if all you run is a web server, I say you make sure nothing else is running that opens any ports. It's no use to setup a firewall, because the thing that is most vulnerable, port 80, will need to be open anyway. But get caught without a firewall in some places and you're fired.
It's a lot easier to write a meaningless list of requirements than to think about needs and policies and design the requirements
It's a lot safer to follow some dumb list of requirements than to try to understand what your systems are doing and configure accordingly
It's a lot easier for an auditor to check a list of requirements against the output of some version-checker than to actually know what these things do
It's the dumbing down of engineering that passes for systems administration these days. It's the Windows way of thinking.
All that you say is true, yet the conclusion is a fallacy. 1) the fact that things were so in the past is no guarantee they will remain so in the future. 2) Technological advances have made it possible to offset the growing demand on resources but there is no guarantee that that will always be true. 3) When you have billions of malnourished people with no access to health care you will see disease that shows in a chart of the world population. 4) By catastrophic war I mean conflicts that wipe out large chunks of the population; think several WW2s in parallel over the same period of time. 5) The standard of living has been growing steadily for certain segments of the population but by no means all the population. Ask the people in the slums of the world. If you think the whole world benefits from the accumulation of wealth in North America you have *my* pity. As I said, I don't know how close or far we are from the limits -- and nobody knows. The easiest way to find out is to keep increasing our population, demands on natural resources and energy. We are a smart species. I hope we learn to improve the standard of living for everyone without generating a consumption engine way before we approach any limits.
You are wrong. There are practical limits to how much people we can make if we stay on the same planet. We may be close or very far from the theoretical limit, but it gets very uncomfortable long before we approach the limit. The _only_ result of ever-increasing population is the lowering of the standard of living for everybody. It will not be at the same pace for everybody, of course, but it will affect everybody given time. For instance, increasing poverty in Mexico leads to more desperation to poor Mexicans, who tend to become illegal immigrants in this country. So you see how your standard of living may be affected by economic problems in another country.
We _must_ control our population growth.
We _must_ lower the demand on resources.
This seems very difficult for conservatives to understand.
The lessons of evolution are clear (that seems to be very difficult for conservatives to understand also). Either we stop growing at these rates or we will be stopped by scarcity of resources, increase of diseases or catastrophic wars.
That's a circular argument. People use Windows because the world runs on Windows. The world runs on Windows because people use Windows. There's no real reason for it to continue like that. As for the rest, I have not run Windows since circa 1998. I have not missed it. I don't think I'm special, anybody could do it. People are afraid of the unknown, that's all. When I started in this industry corporate users dealt with Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect on DOS. Believe me, there was nothing intuitive about that. Still, "clueless" users did very well on those platforms. Any recent version of Ubuntu is more intuitive, graphical and user friendly than any version of Windows before XP. So that's not the problem. Finally, who says it ain't broke? Complaints about how computers never work when you want them to, about excessive spam, about machines becoming slow for no reason, it's all users talk about when they talk about computers. It is very broke and it didn't have to be. It's just that it's the broke I know versus the unknown quantity of a different OS. I still say, there is no real good reason why people continue to use Windows in 2009. The reasons, which are not good at all, are fear and ignorance. But mostly fear.
From a lot of developers point of view, making it attractive to users is irrelevant. We do that for our day jobs. What people don't get is that this is, for a lot of developers, a hobby. I built a binary clock in my garage the other day. It's cool, it works, it keeps accurate time, it's amusing to my geeky sensitivities. If anybody wants my to build them one, I'll do it for pleasure. I'd be happy to post circuit diagrams and the source for the microcontroller if I thought it worthy. I will not produce a manual explaining to people who don't really want to know what binary is and how to read my clock. I don't care if it's all asymmetrical due to prototype boards. It gave me a lot of joy and much needed relaxation when I designed and built it. It makes me smile when I look at it. That's all that matters.
OTOH people are not trying to use my little garage project for serious work. Yes, we do it for love - you say that like it's a bad thing! And you know what? Where it really matters, most Open Source projects are really well made. Unix admins appreciate Linux. It's written by us, for us. It is very good, easy to use if you know what you're doing and yes, it's stable. I couldn't care less if your grandma can't use it. That's what Apple is for. (Sorry but it's completely beyond me why people still use Windows).
I understand the need for a company to make money, but excessive marketing causes way more evil than poorly designed user interfaces. I mean, I saw personally indigenous women in the Amazon spending a week's pay on cosmetics because, looking at local advertising, they were led to believe it would make them tall and blonde. Seriously.
I hope against all hope that you people stay out of my garage and that marketing stops polluting the stuff we, engineers, do for love.
The US is looking for ways to change its image abroad. The US is about to replace these birds with something better. The Brazilians use this to communicate in places where they have no other option, like the Amazon rain forest. I'd say... Let them have it. Sure, charge something from the Brazilian government, but this would go a long way as a firendly gesture. It could also be extended to other Souht/Central American countries. Why not?
Full disclosure: I'm Brazilian. I live in the US. I'm NOT a pirate. Or a ninja.
No. They have to because people expect them to. They can't just say "go buy your memory some place else." People expect them to offer it. So they do. For a price. I don't think they make a lot of profit from ram sticks though, despite the huge markup. I just don't believe a lot of people buy ram from Apple.
Except that you don't have to buy memory from Apple. Get the base system from them, there's no tax there. And go buy memory at the best price you can get. This is just Apple saying they don't want to be in the accessory market...
Hm, maybe this is just like the "Linux myths" campaign of years ago. Just a place to consolidate all the talking points. Accuracy or even honesty are not important. What matters is putting workable arguments in the mouths of opinion formers, which in the Windows ecosystem are usually store sales people, support "IT guys" and the neighbor's kid. They don't need to know a lot to defend or even understand the arguments. They just need to sound like they know what they're talking about and this kind of article does that for them. The real news to me is the fact that MS seems to be worried enough to launch a campaign against Apple.
My desktop: Mac Pro, 2 x 2.8 GHz quad-core Xeon, 10 GB RAM, 1.5 TB disk, 2 x Radeon 2600 XT. Cost $4.8K. Similar Dell: $ 9K (Precision T7500 64bit). This does not include iWork and iLife which I got with the Mac.
My laptop: MacBook, 2 GHz Core2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, 160 GB disk, 15", camera, bluetooth, etc. Cost $1.4K. Similar Dell: ~ $1.3K, but the Dell comes with no camera and no additional software.
My point: Apple's problem (or strength) is that they refuse to make low-end stuff. In the middle range, Dells cost as much as Apples, as my laptop shows. At the higher end, Apples are significantly cheaper. It's not a tax, it's money you pay for more features.
Of course if you compare the cheapest possible Apple (a mini for $600) with the cheapest possible Dell (Inspiron for $300), it looks like there's a tax but I'd argue that the mini's 2 GHz Core2 Duo beats the inspiron's 2.2 GHz Celeron any day, even if the Inspiron comes with twice the memory -- and the Inspiron would need to run Vista Ultimate for an extra $ 150 to even compare with OS X Leopard; and might need some more memory then.
Be that as it may, it doesn't change the fact that there are many MUAs that have no problems with IMAP while Outlook constantly chokes on it.
There are many reasons why you'd leave messages on the server. You may want to get to them from different computers in different parts of the world and you wan to use your MUA of choice; or you want to ride with the server backups; or your server, sitting behind a locked door, is more secure than your laptop, which could be stolen taking all your e-mail history with it... I'll stop here but there are many others.
Replace with FOSS. No, really. I've done this, literally, hundreds of times when I was consulting. This is what I suggest:
- Do your homework. Inventory all the software in use, figure out how much it would cost to legitimize it.
- Do your homework. Write a plan to implement FOSS solutions. Figure out what can be replaced and what can't. Maximize productivity, try to go with drop-in replacements when possible, try to avoid retraining costs if possible.
- Go to the higher-ups with both homeworks. Give them the options. Don't be a rabid supporter of FOSS, don't be a MS yes man. Explain that the third way, keeping things as they are, is a huge potential risk. It's not hard to find information online about companies that have been audited and had to settle for all their illegal software.
- If you manage to sell the project, be thorough and plan ahead (or hire someone like me as a consultant).
Do this right and you'll be a hero. But be careful, do this wrong and you're out of a job... Great opportunity comes with great risk usually.
Sure. Let people buy guns. When they use them to kill people, ban video games. Hey, some crazies have killed people because God told them to! Let's ban religion!
Sorry, but Gmail is not the problem here. Outlook is. I find it hilarious that you think Outlook is a "real" mail program. Outlook is a MS Exchange client and very good at that. But it is a lousy client for anything else. We have all sorts of users here (state university) and the Outlook users are constantly whining about IMAP, so much so that now they just don't even try it anymore. They just have decided "IMAP sucks" and they all just POP. Meanwhile the people using Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Eudora, Netscape Mail (yes, there are some of those. No, really.), heck, even Pine use IMAP with no problem at all. If you want to know about "real" mail programs, try something other than Outlook and take the time to learn -- say, Thunderbird -- properly. You'll be amazed.
Congrats and thanks. I'm just starting down the path you've been on (my son will turn 3 next month) and what you describe is what I intend to do -- or whatever will be equivalent to that in the years ahead. I really hope I'll be able to say I'm proud of him 10 years from now -- because I know if I'm not, it will largely be my own fault. You deserve to hear this and if nobody has told you before please allow me: congratulations, sir, on a job well done!
Some information your kids just need to be largely innocent of until they become adults.
If you had said "some information kids need to be protected of until they become adults" I'd tend to agree with you. First you shouldn't be using the term "innocent". That has religious connotations that really have no place here. Second, at the age which he is describing, children are no longer your brand of "innocent". They are starting to feel the irresistible pull of their hormones and they WILL find what they are looking for, filters or no filters. Frankly, I'd rather my son looked at porn on his computer in his bedroom than hide in some public place with a couple of friends and a stolen magazine. I only hope to make it clear enough that he will never be punished for it and that he will always be welcome to talk to me about anything that he might find disturbing. I will also promise I will never be condescending and will always treat him with respect. I will of course also force his machine to go through squid on the family firewall... I'm still his father and responsible for him and I should have some way of knowing where he's going. Don't filter. Be aware, be available, be protective.
I'm a big fan. I have all of their CDs up until when they started nagging about Napster (ReLoad is the latest studio recording and S&M the latest live I own). I have not bought a single Metallica CD since. I have not downloaded anything either. I have never heard Saint Anger or Death Magnetic. I had the opportunity to see them in Denver during the Saint Anger tour and decided against it. Their whole attitude about electronic media disgusts me. The whole rebel act they put forward in their songs is just that then, just an act. When they don't understand an issue and so much as suspect it might hurt the bottom line, they side with the man. Bah.
We agree more than disagree. Two operative words: 'basic' and 'taught'. Yes, basic troubleshooting can be documented (like in the clogged pipe). And yes, advanced (for lack of a better word) troubleshooting can be taught. However to expect any documentation system to substitute for experienced, knowledgeable people is unreasonable. I like that you added 'judgment' to the mix though. That's something that AFAIK can be neither documented nor taught - although it can be learned.
Not the way you're thinking. Where I work we use a wiki (mediawiki) and it works as well as any system I've seen, probably better than most. Now for the "can't be done" part:
Tasks like building a server, installing some software, connecting cables, etc., can and should be documented. Troubleshooting however cannot. Troubleshooting takes profound understanding of all the parts surrounding an issue and how they inter-operate; the ability to think long, hard and meaningfully; the ability to devise experiments, execute them, collect and analyze data and arrive at meaningful conclusions based on all that -- the scientific method, in other words. This is the kind of job that humans do better than machines and it is proverbially difficult to even understand, let alone document -- witness the "expert systems" of 20 years ago.
The big problem is that all non-technically-inclined people, including most people in management positions, think what we do is something mechanical akin to what plumbers do -- no offense to plumbers, who do things I can't do. From a user's point of view, "I can't print my e-mail message" is not much different from "I can't wash my dishes". Locating a clogged pipe and clearing it does require some technical skills and can certainly be documented. The e-mail printing problem however is several orders of magnitude more complex than that and, although it's probably possible to write a flowchart to document any possible thing that could be wrong in this scenario, it would be ludicrously huge, silly really. And that's talking only about day-to-day. If I'm really good at what I do I will design and implement systems so that errors of that sort are minimized. In other words, we're being asked to do the job of civil or hydraulic engineers on a plumber's salary.
There, of course, is the crux of the matter. Microsoft in particular, but the whole industry actually, are guilty of selling to managers the idea that this job can be done by drones, at all levels. Management is happy because drones don't cost much. Then, of course, drones are all they can get for what they offer.
What you want is knowledge, knowledge that can be provided by some, but by no means all, not even most, of the people who work for you. And you're tired of seeing those few good ones go away, leaving mostly drones behind. The only advice I can give you is: do document what can be documented. Make it a priority and make everybody responsible and accountable for documentation. But do acknowledge the really knowledgeable people in your team, treat them and pay them just as you would any other kind of expert. I know you're probably not in a position of paying your tech guru at orthodontist levels, but try to treat her at least as well as you do accountants.
I believe the author means 'free', not open source. There are lots of reasons why MS wouldn't do either, but even if you buy the argument, all MS would need to do would be drop the price to $0. That doesn't mean GPL'ing the code! Gosh!
I don't think many atheists believe life on other planets will prove Christians wrong. Most atheists I know believe that life on other planets is irrelevant to the god hypothesis. Doesn't prove or disprove it. Christians on the other hand believe ETs may have hard evidence against their case -- from a simple thing like video evidence from certain events that supposedly happened in Judea circa 2000 years ago to something more complex like showing that among the 7,854 galactic civilizations on file, ours is the only one that ever invented the notion of god(s)...
...Does it run Linux?