I do have to agree with your comments. I agree that other OS's can have software added in bad ways. What I would prefer to see is that the OS's that I run, never allow any install to occurr without me personally OKing the operation. Maybe that would be obtrusive, but that is what I would wish.
But what I do object to in MS Windows is the concept that Microsoft has designed their "system" with the input from their 'strategic partners' like Sony, to allow these sorts of things which have happened, which is basically designing an OS to be primarily setup behind the scenes away from the user, such that the OS is at the beck and call of Microsoft and its partners. Microsoft is thus responsible for this mess, at the 'root' of the problem. They thus deserve my dissing and scorn. They have caused a LOT of wasted hours out of my life that should never have ocurred.
This attitude has caused an incredible amount of harm on so many levels that I am surprised some enterprising attorney has not filed a suit against Microsoft and tried to get class action status to represent all individual Windows users.
When someone states $200,000 to $300,000 to make a 20 megawatt generator, I just fall down laughing. You can't make a 20 megawatt transformer for probably 10-100 times that price, let alone the cost of the atomic "process equipment" and ion beam to electric current conversion.
There may be no "radiation" of dangerous particles or left over radioactivity, but shielding everything and everyone within site from X-Rays is going to also cost a lot.
This guy is looking for his next round of funding to keep himself alive. The people doing reputable work in this field are a small group of Phds who all know each other and have been in it for decades. If you search the scientific literature and read the articles (impossible as that is without a particle physics degree), you can see who is active and achieving results that are published.
That will dramatically increase cooling and virtually eliminate oxygen based fires.
Of course the hardware technicians will have to wear self-contained space suits to go into the room, and then those geeky types would then have a perfect way to really avoid the IT boss.
Plagarism becomes a lot harder when wide searches can be done, in addition to other benefits of scanned books.
Ultimately, a "whole earth" attitude toward information and learning is going to shift increasingly away from paper, so it is a matter of time before it is going to be more efficient for libraries to hold server banks in "the stacks", than actual paper copies, of which they can only have a very very limited small % of the works out there.
Time to get in with the new era, and actually, these recalcitrant authors, libraries, and publishers are similar to the music publishers, in that they are not taking the long and wide view of what digital libraries means to the widest range of interests of the sectors of societies.
If my out-of-print book were digitized and someone wanted a copy of the 'last chapter', why shouldn't I put a price on various digital copies of my work, and let Google give me a dime for each chapter and a dollar for the whole book?
If you really get one of 'those' meetings or classes, you can try this.
It is so boring, you have already made another Tic Tac Toe crossed set of lines.
Take all 10 numeral digits and put them in the Tic Tac Toe so that all horizontal, all vertical and all diagonal sums each add up to... 15
I give no hints.
I certainly wouldn't call Microsoft a failure, and did not.
What I do wonder, though, is whether MS's attempt to do everything for all forms of personal, business and server computing under the control of very few top decision makers (some would argue 2, Gates and Ballmer), and a relatively small board of directors which meets once in awhile, can successfully direct Microsoft as the competitiors become more nimble and can design solutions without the mountain of MS encumbrances and not make bad decisions that cause lower profits over time.
It is possible to become so large, you can't make the right decisions, when you are trying to "protect" Windows, but still supply the best "Office" (which might properly run on 6 different OSs).
If "Windows" was a corporation, and "Office" was a corporation, would the shareholders & their customers and employees be better served?
Ultimately, all monolithic, and particularly authoritarian human endeavors FAIL! Microsoft seems to be amongst that group, and I question if they can escape it easily.
When you build up montrously complex systems requiring the megalomaniac individual or small council at the top to make all decisions across such breadth of matters, they make mountains of bullcrap, that eventually bring them down, due to their own lack of ability to see the future and know enough.
GM & their unions come to mind as does the former Soviet Union.
Gates recounted going away to a lake once a year for a week or two where he and he alone appears to read non-stop and think about where MicroSoft will "go".
People think "the ice age" is a defining moment. There was a mini-ice age in the 17th century. There was one that ended maybe 14,000 years ago. Those are NOT the LONG TERM cycles that repeat on earth.
Those 5 CO2 peaks over the last 400,000 years came from the Vostok Antarctica ice cores (about every 100,000 years). Our actual CO2 might be expected to go a bit higher based on the prior peaks, but then something repeatedly changes in the world's ecosphere in the past cycles and there is an ABRUPT drop in CO2 in the past history.
Why did it go up? Why did it turn? What long term sun cycles or sun spots only exist, which we have not detected yet? Does a direct hit by a large coronal mass ejection/s offer a drastic change to the earth's enviroment? Why did it go down precipitously? Once you know what caused it, does it have so much power behind it that man can or can NOT change it?
If you look at facts instead of blathering, it becomes apparent that scientists and interested laymen yet today have no proof of what moves the momentum of the truely long term ecosystem's atmosphere.
I personally believe we will find that man is incapable of altering the long term climatic cycles, and at some point Canada & Northern Europe and Asia will again go under kilometers of ice, and man (just like the Vikings in Greenland), will only be able to look on in horror as the ice relentlessly takes over the land they used to work and live on.
You can easily see the CO2 charts on the web, but I won't post any URLs.
Being a clutz engineer, and not a real programmer, I was printing my Fortran code to debug off a line printer, so I could get my Nomograms debugged in 1970.
I had never seen paper go vertical out of a line printer, completely to the ceiling, emptying the whole box of paper in what seemed like mere seconds, while my mouth was open, due to a page feed loop.
If a person using a personal computer for work can stand here with a straight face and say he will not use the best solution available for the task because he wants to save the price of from a few hundreds to a few thousands of dollars, he is nuts.
Economic sense says you pay a little money to get something which makes work go faster and better so you earn more one way or another.
OSX does all my work (without problems of bugs or blue screens) except for one program in 3D solids which runs on Wintel. Maybe next year I'll be able to run them both on the same Mac.
So we can be just like Germany & France with 1-2% growth rate in their economy over the last decade. And to fix the problem the government will need lots more beaurocrats to supervise the increased amount of more liberal labor laws, which "Benefit the Workers".
What they don't say, is that it doesn't benefit the workers who are out of work, OR the vast supermajority of the people in the country who are NOT beaurocrats or union members or union leaders.
Yeah, that is really what benefits me, my children and my grandchildren and my community.
I've worked at home much of my life, started & sold many small businesses doing innovative products (many patented), and it is the innovations that change a product forever that are the hardest, and rarely come from sitting at a regulation desk for regulation 40 hours/week.
At the point you make the breakthrough idea, it is only the start of a long creative process. New ideas often take thousands of hours to optimize, prove out & implement once conceived. I couldn't care less about where someone does the work, but it damn well better be the highest quality design when I do it or another party.
This sort of ruling is going to allow the likes of my not-so-honest good-for-nothing pseudo-developer in-law to start proposing "redevelopment" to the city council to generate more "tax revenue" which he will do once he gets his ever-loving crooked hands on my property or someone else's, possibly even yours.
All he has to do in California is remind the city council privately, out of range of the microphones, that once the property is sold to him, that his property taxes he will pay in the redev area will skyrocket over 10/1, in addition to him then "causing" increased sales tax revenue. The city will have an overwhelming financial reason to approve the developer's "plan", to the detriment of the existing property owner, if he does NOT want to sell.
And how are you going to defend yourself against this one?
There are going to be broken knees or worse over this one.
Ever see what happens to an old impact line printer when a line feed loop happens, and paper goes right to the ceiling and empties the box before you can hit the power key?
I used to design diving equipment, including helium oxygen rebreathers for the Navy at Cousteau's U.S. Divers in the mid 60s.
This new "invention" may be "SCUBA", self-contained underwater breathing apparatus" IF & only IF it is finally made in a workable form, and that is if with capitals.
The key is that this is a "patent", not a proven technology yet. A "prototype" has been done in the lab. Whoppee. Where are the test results. That doesn't say a thing about whether it will ever work out in the Ocean, where all sorts of things happen including plankton & nekton (yes it is a word) fouling your subtle systems over time.
There are also some areas where upwelling or algae blooms starve the ocean water of oxygen, and then...guess what? An extractor system won't work.
My guess is there will now be a request for an initial $4-6m investment from investors to fund "product development", with no guarantee it will ever work in practice. But with all the whoopla in the press and articles repeated around the world, there will be people who will plunk the money down.
The book "The Bottomless Well" noted that if you get batteries good enough, meaning light enough and small enough volume, able to travel for a normal day's travel (say 250 miles) & inexpensive enough, to fit in a car that you can potentially drop your cost per mile for power to 10% of that using gasoline today.
How? Off peak power now at night (when stationary power plants would love to sell you power) is $.03-$.04 per KWHr, versus about $.40/kwhr for gasoline.
Altair Nanotechnologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALTI) received 2 patents on a way to make Li-ion batteries that charge in minutes and hold 3 times the charge in January 2005, and Fujitsu just announced they will start shipping batteries probably licensed under this patent in 2006.
All-electric cars are FAR FAR closer to practicality than people think because of these dramatic technology breaththroughs.
Is Brazil on his mind, Where Bill reads, thinks, and charts MS's future...(from WSJ the other day)...
Bill, Bill, where are you?____
The bottom line gets lost in the log cabin on the waterfront overlooking the Cascade Mountains with the 100 of the worlds Classic books on your 2nd floor office with 2 Dell Monitors, and absolute solitude & Orange soda, where Brazil likely is not thought of, nor of what the bottom line is in Brazil, or your Cascade lake front retreat, where cost is not something you bother with...
Clue #1: It is the Money Given vs Value Received...
Clue #2: It is the headaches with Windows...
If Windows was $25-50 per pop, and any support was for a fee, then maybe, just maybe, there would be enough Value & Brazil would be "in the fold".
With handwriting on the wall, I'm surprised more people have not moved to alternatives.
I'll just stick with my Macs for Internet use. PCs can't handle it easily enough.
Bo
I'm not a programmer, just a heavy user of PCs, to design plastic parts, and all the other reasons people use PCs. Questions to Martin and answers from him were much about "competition" in all sorts of ways.
I used only Macs for over a decade until SolidWorks for product design on the Wintel side became viable, and have use Win2000 and now XP Pro for SolidWorks. But keeping Windows running 100% with minimal problems means I use the Mac for everything else including the Internet.
I can't believe the lower level of intuitive or consistent use features in Windows, and any user of both Macs and PCs understands what I mean. I'll give only two examples.
1. The OS keeps adding networking icons in the Task bar and attempts to Delete them crash my Dell Laptop.
2. Dialogs which interupt and note attempts to automatically install software (which can't be cancelled many times) for newly added hardware (BlueTooth), in spite of the fact that the Dell PC has NEVER had any hardware change since it was bought.
The Mac OSX has not had a glitch like any of these in over a year of use. In fact it has been nearly glitch free for a common user who doesn't "play around" with shareware or other strange programs on either computer.
The average user just wants his computer to work without becoming an IT technician, and when it doesn't to provide a known way to either automatically get reconfigured to work or provide clear concise detailed instructions on how to "fix" it.
MS fails in this big time in my personal opinion...but I have to use its products anyway...but only when I absolutely must.
Slashdot Mirror
I do have to agree with your comments. I agree that other OS's can have software added in bad ways. What I would prefer to see is that the OS's that I run, never allow any install to occurr without me personally OKing the operation. Maybe that would be obtrusive, but that is what I would wish.
But what I do object to in MS Windows is the concept that Microsoft has designed their "system" with the input from their 'strategic partners' like Sony, to allow these sorts of things which have happened, which is basically designing an OS to be primarily setup behind the scenes away from the user, such that the OS is at the beck and call of Microsoft and its partners. Microsoft is thus responsible for this mess, at the 'root' of the problem. They thus deserve my dissing and scorn. They have caused a LOT of wasted hours out of my life that should never have ocurred.
This attitude has caused an incredible amount of harm on so many levels that I am surprised some enterprising attorney has not filed a suit against Microsoft and tried to get class action status to represent all individual Windows users.
Lest anyone at Microsoft or Sony not understand why they don't "hear from my XP box"...
It is because the damned thing is NEVER allowed online!
And if and when I eventually go to VISTA, I won't allow it to go online either.
Microsoft has simply created an unbelievable amount of ill-will and lack of trust in me.
My Macs are the only thing I trust to go online, with the exception of running XP in emulation on my Mac.
& indeed also a manufacturing CFO on call.
When someone states $200,000 to $300,000 to make a 20 megawatt generator, I just fall down laughing. You can't make a 20 megawatt transformer for probably 10-100 times that price, let alone the cost of the atomic "process equipment" and ion beam to electric current conversion.
There may be no "radiation" of dangerous particles or left over radioactivity, but shielding everything and everyone within site from X-Rays is going to also cost a lot.
This guy is looking for his next round of funding to keep himself alive. The people doing reputable work in this field are a small group of Phds who all know each other and have been in it for decades. If you search the scientific literature and read the articles (impossible as that is without a particle physics degree), you can see who is active and achieving results that are published.
That will dramatically increase cooling and virtually eliminate oxygen based fires.
Of course the hardware technicians will have to wear self-contained space suits to go into the room, and then those geeky types would then have a perfect way to really avoid the IT boss.
Plagarism becomes a lot harder when wide searches can be done, in addition to other benefits of scanned books.
Ultimately, a "whole earth" attitude toward information and learning is going to shift increasingly away from paper, so it is a matter of time before it is going to be more efficient for libraries to hold server banks in "the stacks", than actual paper copies, of which they can only have a very very limited small % of the works out there.
Time to get in with the new era, and actually, these recalcitrant authors, libraries, and publishers are similar to the music publishers, in that they are not taking the long and wide view of what digital libraries means to the widest range of interests of the sectors of societies.
If my out-of-print book were digitized and someone wanted a copy of the 'last chapter', why shouldn't I put a price on various digital copies of my work, and let Google give me a dime for each chapter and a dollar for the whole book?
Sheesh
If you really get one of 'those' meetings or classes, you can try this. It is so boring, you have already made another Tic Tac Toe crossed set of lines. Take all 10 numeral digits and put them in the Tic Tac Toe so that all horizontal, all vertical and all diagonal sums each add up to ... 15
I give no hints.
I certainly wouldn't call Microsoft a failure, and did not.
What I do wonder, though, is whether MS's attempt to do everything for all forms of personal, business and server computing under the control of very few top decision makers (some would argue 2, Gates and Ballmer), and a relatively small board of directors which meets once in awhile, can successfully direct Microsoft as the competitiors become more nimble and can design solutions without the mountain of MS encumbrances and not make bad decisions that cause lower profits over time.
It is possible to become so large, you can't make the right decisions, when you are trying to "protect" Windows, but still supply the best "Office" (which might properly run on 6 different OSs).
If "Windows" was a corporation, and "Office" was a corporation, would the shareholders & their customers and employees be better served?
It is not an easy or trivial answer.
Ultimately, all monolithic, and particularly authoritarian human endeavors FAIL! Microsoft seems to be amongst that group, and I question if they can escape it easily.
When you build up montrously complex systems requiring the megalomaniac individual or small council at the top to make all decisions across such breadth of matters, they make mountains of bullcrap, that eventually bring them down, due to their own lack of ability to see the future and know enough.
GM & their unions come to mind as does the former Soviet Union.
Gates recounted going away to a lake once a year for a week or two where he and he alone appears to read non-stop and think about where MicroSoft will "go".
Does this sound a lot like a dicatator?
People think "the ice age" is a defining moment. There was a mini-ice age in the 17th century. There was one that ended maybe 14,000 years ago. Those are NOT the LONG TERM cycles that repeat on earth.
Those 5 CO2 peaks over the last 400,000 years came from the
Vostok Antarctica ice cores (about every 100,000 years). Our actual CO2 might be expected to go a bit higher based on the prior peaks, but then something repeatedly changes in the world's ecosphere in the past cycles and there is an ABRUPT drop in CO2 in the past history.
Why did it go up?
Why did it turn?
What long term sun cycles or sun spots only exist, which we have not detected yet?
Does a direct hit by a large coronal mass ejection/s offer a drastic change to the earth's enviroment?
Why did it go down precipitously?
Once you know what caused it, does it have so much power behind it that man can or can NOT change it?
If you look at facts instead of blathering, it becomes apparent that scientists and interested laymen yet today have no proof of what moves the momentum of the truely long term ecosystem's atmosphere.
I personally believe we will find that man is incapable of altering the long term climatic cycles, and at some point Canada & Northern Europe and Asia will again go under kilometers of ice, and man (just like the Vikings in Greenland), will only be able to look on in horror as the ice relentlessly takes over the land they used to work and live on.
You can easily see the CO2 charts on the web, but I won't post any URLs.
Bo
"...the cat's out of the bag & in the river...",
;-)
or more likely, we now realize that Bill Gates has hidden a Mac PowerBook motherboard inside his Dell laptop!
Bill has jumped on the other side of the Gate and it really a Mac Head
Bo
Being a clutz engineer, and not a real programmer, I was printing my Fortran code to debug off a line printer, so I could get my Nomograms debugged in 1970.
I had never seen paper go vertical out of a line printer, completely to the ceiling, emptying the whole box of paper in what seemed like mere seconds, while my mouth was open, due to a page feed loop.
If a person using a personal computer for work can stand here with a straight face and say he will not use the best solution available for the task because he wants to save the price of from a few hundreds to a few thousands of dollars, he is nuts.
Economic sense says you pay a little money to get something which makes work go faster and better so you earn more one way or another.
OSX does all my work (without problems of bugs or blue screens) except for one program in 3D solids which runs on Wintel. Maybe next year I'll be able to run them both on the same Mac.
Don't forget Google searches & their highlighted words in cached docs at least.
...Not Sony.
Fossilization is a real big problem.
So we can be just like Germany & France with 1-2% growth rate in their economy over the last decade. And to fix the problem the government will need lots more beaurocrats to supervise the increased amount of more liberal labor laws, which "Benefit the Workers".
What they don't say, is that it doesn't benefit the workers who are out of work, OR the vast supermajority of the people in the country who are NOT beaurocrats or union members or union leaders.
Yeah, that is really what benefits me, my children and my grandchildren and my community.
I've worked at home much of my life, started & sold many small businesses doing innovative products (many patented), and it is the innovations that change a product forever that are the hardest, and rarely come from sitting at a regulation desk for regulation 40 hours/week.
At the point you make the breakthrough idea, it is only the start of a long creative process. New ideas often take thousands of hours to optimize, prove out & implement once conceived. I couldn't care less about where someone does the work, but it damn well better be the highest quality design when I do it or another party.
This sort of ruling is going to allow the likes of my not-so-honest good-for-nothing pseudo-developer in-law to start proposing "redevelopment" to the city council to generate more "tax revenue" which he will do once he gets his ever-loving crooked hands on my property or someone else's, possibly even yours.
All he has to do in California is remind the city council privately, out of range of the microphones, that once the property is sold to him, that his property taxes he will pay in the redev area will skyrocket over 10/1, in addition to him then "causing" increased sales tax revenue. The city will have an overwhelming financial reason to approve the developer's "plan", to the detriment of the existing property owner, if he does NOT want to sell.
And how are you going to defend yourself against this one?
There are going to be broken knees or worse over this one.
Ever see what happens to an old impact line printer when a line feed loop happens, and paper goes right to the ceiling and empties the box before you can hit the power key?
I used to design diving equipment, including helium oxygen rebreathers for the Navy at Cousteau's U.S. Divers in the mid 60s.
This new "invention" may be "SCUBA", self-contained underwater breathing apparatus" IF & only IF it is finally made in a workable form, and that is if with capitals.
The key is that this is a "patent", not a proven technology yet. A "prototype" has been done in the lab. Whoppee. Where are the test results. That doesn't say a thing about whether it will ever work out in the Ocean, where all sorts of things happen including plankton & nekton (yes it is a word) fouling your subtle systems over time.
There are also some areas where upwelling or algae blooms starve the ocean water of oxygen, and then...guess what? An extractor system won't work.
My guess is there will now be a request for an initial $4-6m investment from investors to fund "product development", with no guarantee it will ever work in practice. But with all the whoopla in the press and articles repeated around the world, there will be people who will plunk the money down.
That might be fun to watch what happens to a swarm after a bolt from the sky disrupts a tight maneover.
Well "methods of management", whatever.
Drucker created the scientific study of management and has stuck with it up in Claremont, CA for some 6 decades and he is now 96, if I remember right
Drucker has written some 3 dozen books on it, and every MBA knows a lot of his concepts by heart.
He has spawned a lot of great work and students.
Peter Drucker, the creator of management science study, noted people don't buy "products". They buy "value".
Apple is finally being recognized by more and more people as offering high value, compared to the competition.
Ease of use and stability with a wide range of capabilities (arguably widest of personal computers...maybe) is starting to make a consumer impact.
The book "The Bottomless Well" noted that if you get batteries good enough, meaning light enough and small enough volume, able to travel for a normal day's travel (say 250 miles) & inexpensive enough, to fit in a car that you can potentially drop your cost per mile for power to 10% of that using gasoline today.
How? Off peak power now at night (when stationary power plants would love to sell you power) is $.03-$.04 per KWHr, versus about $.40/kwhr for gasoline.
Altair Nanotechnologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALTI) received 2 patents on a way to make Li-ion batteries that charge in minutes and hold 3 times the charge in January 2005, and Fujitsu just announced they will start shipping batteries probably licensed under this patent in 2006.
All-electric cars are FAR FAR closer to practicality than people think because of these dramatic technology breaththroughs.
Is Brazil on his mind, Where Bill reads, thinks, and charts MS's future...(from WSJ the other day)...
Bill, Bill, where are you?____
The bottom line gets lost in the log cabin on the waterfront overlooking the Cascade Mountains with the 100 of the worlds Classic books on your 2nd floor office with 2 Dell Monitors, and absolute solitude & Orange soda, where Brazil likely is not thought of, nor of what the bottom line is in Brazil, or your Cascade lake front retreat, where cost is not something you bother with...
Clue #1: It is the Money Given vs Value Received...
Clue #2: It is the headaches with Windows...
If Windows was $25-50 per pop, and any support was for a fee, then maybe, just maybe, there would be enough Value & Brazil would be "in the fold".
With handwriting on the wall, I'm surprised more people have not moved to alternatives. I'll just stick with my Macs for Internet use. PCs can't handle it easily enough. Bo
I'm not a programmer, just a heavy user of PCs, to design plastic parts, and all the other reasons people use PCs. Questions to Martin and answers from him were much about "competition" in all sorts of ways. I used only Macs for over a decade until SolidWorks for product design on the Wintel side became viable, and have use Win2000 and now XP Pro for SolidWorks. But keeping Windows running 100% with minimal problems means I use the Mac for everything else including the Internet. I can't believe the lower level of intuitive or consistent use features in Windows, and any user of both Macs and PCs understands what I mean. I'll give only two examples. 1. The OS keeps adding networking icons in the Task bar and attempts to Delete them crash my Dell Laptop. 2. Dialogs which interupt and note attempts to automatically install software (which can't be cancelled many times) for newly added hardware (BlueTooth), in spite of the fact that the Dell PC has NEVER had any hardware change since it was bought. The Mac OSX has not had a glitch like any of these in over a year of use. In fact it has been nearly glitch free for a common user who doesn't "play around" with shareware or other strange programs on either computer. The average user just wants his computer to work without becoming an IT technician, and when it doesn't to provide a known way to either automatically get reconfigured to work or provide clear concise detailed instructions on how to "fix" it. MS fails in this big time in my personal opinion...but I have to use its products anyway...but only when I absolutely must.