You hit the nail on the head with the problem, if you have crappy radios you have crappy wifi.
In my house I have neither and have no trouble streaming HD anywhere in my house. Of course I attached an antenna array to boost performance which worked remarkably well. I have no trouble filling my 20meg cable connection using wifi.
Sounds like we have similar experiences in regards to this. I agree as Linux gains traction the user experience will improve but right now I couldn't recommend Ubuntu to run on a laptop for someone although Linspire with the Acer Aspire One would be perfectly suitable for someone just looking to email on the road along with some other basic functionality. The user experience there is rock solid although I want to try out Linux4One as I hear it works great with the Aspire One but it installs in Italian so I'll have to wait.
All things which don't matter to a home computer especially when you use WPA2 with AES. Not uncrackable but one of your neighbors would really have to have it out for you.
Bandwidth is also practically irrelevant as even HD video can stream of 802.11g let alone 802.11n without a problem.
Interference is controllable because it is your home so that is also a non-issue.
That's funny because my laptop is an HP as well, of course it's a workstation model with ATI Big-Desktop which is the real reason for the power draw issue. Every-time I try to disable I get problems with X crashing. More a problem with the driver for it but still not an issue I have on Windows.
haha, fair enough, although I'll add that I do the same things on my desktop at home which is all wifi along with my printer. Why run cables when you don't have to?
Having used Ubuntu for the last year on the desktop for work and home I completely disagree with you. Boot times are atrociously slow with a nice long hangup in the middle I've noticed since installing 8.10. I've also noticed that Flash has the ability to disable my ability to play any sound. I restart alsa-utils and I still don't get it back, I haven't found a way out of having to reboot to get sound back. Battery life is also atrocious as I went from 3.5 hours with XP to 50 minutes with Ubuntu and now I'm lucky if I even get 25 minutes from Ubuntu.
I won't say it's all the distro's fault. I've seen many installs that work just fine, for instance with my Acer Aspire One Ubuntu runs great. The only thing I had to do was run a few scripts to make things like the wifi indicator work along with installing mad-wifi of course which will require a reinstall with the next kernel update.
Depending on your hardware you can have a good experience or a bad one. I've not seen an install yet where Suspend or Standby result in everything working when everything wakes back up. With my Aspire I managed to script a restart of wifi when the thing wakes up so that wifi can work but since I have a 9 cell battery in it I tend to just leave it on rather than suspend it. In a lot of cases a simple service restart doesn't do the trick.
I agree with the parent, it's not ready for the desktop and the best place is in the server room where it's proved itself again and again. It's getting pretty close but a lot of the little stuff doesn't work are far too much hardware for me to say it's ready.
Vista and Win7 introduced image based installers so you can use one image on all your enterprise hardware without having to worry about weird interactions like you did with unattended installations of XP.
Full disk encryption can be deployed centrally with keys managed centrally. Vista introduced a lot of new technologies that people are still learning. Group policy support has been greatly extended in Vista and Win7 allowing for much tighter control over the enterprise environment.
I would go into more details but I am just learning how to use all the new features myself as I am only beginning the process of deploying it out to the corporate desktops. It will take me a little while longer as I have no plans to upgrade XP, I'll only move to Vista or Win7 when hardware leases are up.
Centralized software licensing, auditing, encryption, and indexing are all new features in Vista that would appeal to the enterprise. This is in addition to things like bringing volume shadow copy to the desktop with automatic versioning.
The enterprise side of the house has a great number of features which make the experience worse for the home user but that's the trade-off. Microsoft should separate out the operating systems as they are trying to service everyone and making no-one happy.
This can be handled with a simple automated message forward, th email doesn't have to get rejected, it can merely be dropped which is coincidentally very easy to do with the vast majority of mail servers out there. It also means that if a user knows that an account exists and they go looking for it they won't find it because they aren't authorized to send through the distribution, the administrator then gets a copy of the message if the malicious user actually finds the address.
Of course in my company it's a well known address as hiding is pointless unless it's a company a couple of orders of magnitude larger than this one.
You're thinking properly implemented system. Exchange has this ability but lets not confused reality with Microsoft bashing.
This leaves out the fact that it was largely a user error scenario to begin with with people not BCC'ing to a large group of people or even using authenticated distribution lists.
All the features are there in Exchange, people just don't like to finish setting up servers whether they are MS based or Open-source. Very few people take the final steps to harden their systems because they have to move on to the next fire to put out and the thing is working.
I'm truly impressed you have people in your company willing to learn anything when they used to be able to just click a button to get a report or shoot an email. Most people I encounter would not accept your solution but your point is valid in that a lot of people don't work smart solutions although that is usually either through a lack of management or experience or worse yet, both.
Out of curiosity who said Obama would solve all our problems? I keep hearing this drivel from sore republicans looking to blame Obama for the failures that Bush Jr already caused.
No one I know at least seriously thinks Obama can solve the majority of the problems that Bush has plagued us with, we all saw it coming as reckless spending always results in this outcome.
Most people I've talked to voted for Obama because they believe he will at least put the country on a path that the majority of us can agree is better for the majority of us. The recession will not end anytime soon, Obama taking office will result in a stock market spike because history puts a good economy at the helm of democrats traditionally at least over the last 60 years.
Like the ole saying goes, it's easier to destroy than it is to create, no one is expecting miracles because creating everything we lost will take some serious time and a lot of serious effort from people in both parties. One of Obama's biggest strengths was that he wasn't afraid to work with people that disagreed with him unlike Bush. We all like a reasoned debate and this country is in dire need of it.
A well balanced reply, we were merely mis-communicating. We agree Microsoft has real competition in every industry they participate in.
We even agree about Exchange, it's biggest problem is that it had no real competition for many years and Microsoft relied on that fact. Exchange became very monolithic and that results in weird interactions but Exchange with Live Communications server is a very solid foundation when referring to the 2007 products.
As for Windows Server 2003 I completely disagree as volume shadow copy, DFS replication with remote differential compression and proper offline files support easily made Server 2003 justifiable to upgrade.
Server 2008 we can most agree about as it doesn't offer a whole lot that would make me jump as something with a proven track record is always more comfortable than something new and shiny. Of course I'm also still learning 2008 so I may find features that make it worth my while.
In reference to my Asterisk upgrade and eventual migration to Zimbra it will cost a lot of money even though the individual products are free because it will need to spend a lot of time in testing, it is far from a turn-key solution which is what Microsoft is offering. Since it is turn-key you are right in that their products are often lacking in functionality, it's the price you pay. You run Debian with reduced functionality because it's rock solid stable, if it doesn't matter then you can run Ubuntu and stay on the cutting edge where you get the new and shiny stuff. Of course on that side of the fence you have an easier time obtaining any missing functionality, with Microsoft you're usually screwed until there is a new version available.
As for the Xbox 360 argument, I wasn't saying this particular issue is blown out of proportion, I was referring more to public sentiment about Microsoft products in general. Of course, 10 million Xbox 360s have been sold and 1 million seem to be having problems. That is too high to ignore but it doesn't mean the product isn't worth getting, I get about the same ratio of PCs and servers that are dead or have some hardware problem on arrival.
The thing you don't seem to understand is the difference between competition and viable competition. Firebird is no sufficient for a great many businesses that need the advanced featureset that you get with Oracle or MS SQL. The reason I went with Oracle had nothing to do with which product was superior but involved the costs of licensing since Oracle doesn't restrict the number of servers I can run it allows me to scale my business critical application out to several servers providing much increased redundancy. SQL 2005 handles data migration out of Oracle to run a website which sees many millions of people everyday with an MS SQL backend. It is a highly capable and very reliable product that had solid interoperability between many different database environments. I wasn't saying Firebird was fine with the features that are supported but any functionality to allow it to compete directing with commercial offerings fall far short because no one wants to run business critical applications on something that just received that functionality. This is the same reason there is always and should always be a lot of resistance to upgrading.
So yes, Microsoft has a lot of problems and is far from producing perfect products but there are several things do exceedingly well, so well that the costs of licensing and the comfort level many executives have with Microsoft support result in a lot of customer loyalty.
Also worth noting, in industries where Microsoft has real competition (Server OS, Database OS, Web Services, Management Services, Directory services) the products are rock solid and areas where they don't have a lot of real competition (Exchange) they do poorly.
I'll never understand why Office 2007 is crashing on you, I even do folder redirection for my users here and they can swap which file server they are connecting to without Word 2007 crashing. Outlook 2007 is sometimes clun
I'm sorry, you don't sound like you've actually deployed VMWare ESX if you say it's not buggy. Just recently VMWare had a production release whose serial number expired disabling the ability for a VM to boot, you were fine as long as you didn't reboot it. If you've ever dealt with Vmotion or really any VMWare product then you wouldn't be saying it's not buggy.
I've deployed Office 2007 on hundreds of machines and there were no complaints beyond the new interface since people had to learn where stuff had moved to. Quickly people realized that the interface made a lot more functionality accessible to them and I see much increased uses of things like pivot tables in Excel combined with multi-query data-sources which is something at least to my knowledge Open Office cannot do. I'm not aware of any other office suite besides Lotus which has all the same problems as Office.
Also, to suggest that Firebird is real competition for MS-SQL server is laughable as it lacks partitioning, a lot of transaction management functionality, a lot of data validation, clustering, different replication topologies. About the only thing it can do as well is integration with other data sources which I would say is also one of SQL Server's strongest selling points.
I'm not an apologist for MS here but you are attacking the things they actually do quite well. SQL Server in particular has a stellar record. In my own shop I run Oracle for the business critical applications but I run MS SQL for our accounting ledger application and for other intermediate databases that don't see the same level of traffic. It is a solid product that I rarely ever have to deal with after I set it up. The only time in my current deployment I've had to mess with it was when a web service was getting pounded by many thousands more people all of a sudden and it caused my database server to peak out, two minutes with SQL profiler and I had the problem narrowed to a particular stored procedure keeping in mind I'd only ever used SQL profiler on 2005 once prior.
Exchange has only recently started getting real competition from the open source world but you're not going to find too many people with solid skill sets for Zimbra so that makes it hard to justify to management.
I recently deployed Asterisk with a CentOS and a clustered MySQL rig inside VMWare ESX and I'm liking the ability to integrate all of that through Zimbra to create a unified messaging server. To be fair, this is something MS has been able to do for many years now and only recently the open-source world has had a complete solution available.
Of course as another poster pointed out, MS sells solutions, the open-source world with a small tools philosophy can and often does produce rock solid single task solutions but when you get into complicated functionality management becomes increasingly difficult. With MS, if you can manage 30 servers you can manage 3000 assuming something like System Center Configuration Manager is deployed.
I agree MS has a lot of ground to lose, they were not very competitive for a while but around 2005 things really started to change. I don't know where you get the idea Windows 2003 was crap as it's memory management and overall up-time are far better than Windows 2000 ever was. Windows 2008 is still too new to have a track record, from my experiences with it so far it's pretty nice taking many pages from the open-source world with head-less mode encouraging admins to do things properly from their management workstation instead of directly operating the server. Power-shell was also ported to Windows 2003 and is incredibly powerful.
Of course their VM solution is fairly laughable to the likes of VMWare and Xen, Virtual Box has a long way to go to catch up in functionality as a lot of hardware has been optimized around VMWare and Xen.
So in short, yes, Microsoft does have competition but your assessment of their product offerings seems completely off-base. The vast majority of X-box 360 owners don't have any problems, we even h
I'm not conflating anything, you stated the end result rather nicely. The spam contractor will move on to something else and thus will end the email clog as fewer and fewer people contract for spam.
It's a much simpler solution than changing fundamentally how the Internet operates to eliminate the problem when you can simply starve the supply and achieve a specific goal of reduced levels of spam.
The next technique will have a different solution. We can deal with it when it arrives.
The problem with spamming isn't that 1-2% reply and buy, it's that 98% of us ignore it so they endure no penalty. The 98% need to reply and present false information to waste their time which will result in them no longer being profitable. You'll have a short term problem with the fact that your address is now verified but over the long run it will die on its own and spammers give up.
This is of course easier said than done considering a great many of the links in the emails go to malware ridden sites so you need a secure web browser to do it effectively preferrably running something like noscript.
All depends on how you set the stage. It's why you don't go to clubs with a bunch of guys, its okay to go with a few guys but you need to have your own homebase girl for a dance partner. Sets the stage when other girls see you dancing they don't ask you to buy them a drink before they'll talk to you.
You're right though, the girls in the club are quite likely to be sleazy especially as they get up in age. Of course now looking back at some of the girls in high school I realize things actually weren't all that different then, I just wasn't a part of it because I was too busy working or going to college parties since most of my coworkers were in college at the time.
Methinks you'v been going to the wrong clubs but I agree with you in general that teens are far more mature than the media makes them out to be. Because of this immaturity image they let a lot slide.
Of course on the other hand, even at 21 I was making some pretty bone headed moves so who's to say what maturity even means.
Last I checked we had a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A kid with down syndrome would die rather early without help, I would say that is denying him the right to life and most certainly liberty since he inherently has to rely on others until he can come into his own for the most part. That's also just one use of social security.
How is the concept behind graduated rates arbitrary. Are you disputing that it is not easier for someone making a few million a year to pay 35% than it is for someone making 38k paying 18%? I would be interested in how you arrive at that conclusion. This is not anymore tyranny than taxes are in general. You are benefiting more from society so you should have to pay more back to society.
Just from your posts that you referenced again and again which don't actually define socialism, they only demonize it with a libertarian slant that the strong should survive like they have over the last couple billion years. Libertarians often forget that when 38k a year people struggle to pay rent they quite often turn to crime as you can see with the sizable increase in crime-rates of late. Don't take my word for it. CNN Source.
It is the same all over the world, when people are desperate they take desperate measures and that isn't good for anybody including the rich.
I don't see another method of fair distribution, wealthy people can't get that way on their own, they have to rely on public funds in one way or another whether it be through roads, telecomm, or power infrastructure which was all publicly funded while it got off the ground.
Socialism is not a dirty word nor a dirty concept, as long as it is applied appropriately it serves the vast majority of people's interests. As you like to keep saying, you give up a little liberty so that there isn't chaos.
So you agree that police and fire are necessary evils to prevent chaos but you ignore that financial causes of the crime that needs to be prevented. They are intrinsically linked.
I also think you need to read the comments on your graph more carefully as they state why those numbers are misleading. No one was disputing that the rich put more dollars into the pot but those graphs don't add up. The author himself contradicts himself with his graphs. He presents different numbers with the same title and then his other graph shows that the bottom bracket pay 96.93% while the top bracket pays 39.38%
I'm unsure what you think socialism is. You use social security as an example of socialism which it is, but it is no different from fire and police protections.
I have a cousin for example with down syndrome who received social security dollars to help pay for his care and ensure he is being treated properly getting the help he needs to live as normal a life as he can. How is this not protecting his rights as a fellow citizen?
For the older folks it ensures that they won't have to go hungry just because they can no longer work. That's the idea anyway, reality often twists the best intentions.
Additionally your graph there is completely shortsighted and I might add ignores income such as dividends which for Bill Gates is in the realm of three billion dollars a year which is all taxed at 15%. If you don't believe me for whatever reason I'll refer you to the wikipedia page describing how things have transpired over the last few years.
In terms of what you are describing, people that make over $250,000 per year are taxed at 35% for that $250,000. In reality they aren't but for simplicity's sake we'll say they do as the next bracket starts at 75k.
So lets continue the Bill Gates example, 3 billion in dividends taxed at 15% and 250k taxed at 35%. He donates a couple million to charity and that 250k he would have been taxed on is completely written off making his effective tax rate 15% which is roughly 10% less than what I'm paying.
Now your flat tax attempt to educate me shows that you completely misunderstood my part. Someone making 38k per year has a harder time paying 25% of their income to taxes than I do in the next tax bracket. That is why we use graduated rates to begin with.
Taxes for the rich are no simple matter as they often have many sources of income versus a middle class person who in all likelihood these days only has one source of income. The rich will have their companies buy cars for them so they don't have to meaning the corporation pays the tax so they have all sorts of loopholes which generally aren't available to someone scraping by.
I am by no means stating we should redistribute the wealth, there are a great many that worked hard to achieve something great and they shouldn't be stripped of all their hard earned money. A higher taxrate for people that can easily afford it doesn't sound like tyranny though, I don't mind paying a higher tax rate than my sister for example who earns less than half of what I do because I can afford it.
How do the high income levels pay higher tax rates? I'll agree the total dollar figure is higher but the percentage is much much smaller given that stocks and dividends are capped at 15% which is less than half of what someone making 80k a year would be paying, they would be paying approximately 30%.
If you consider Bill Gates and a great many others they will donate to charity using dividends to cut their exposure, so the income they are taxed at 35% will become 0 as they write-off the charity. It's a win for the charities but the government and social services lose out. I won't make any statements as to whether this is right or wrong in this post.
The fact is a flat tax is quite unfair to the middle class as it is harder for someone making 80k a year to pay 30% in taxes than it is for someone making several million a year.
Obviously it's no simple issue but be fair, the rich don't pay as much percentage wise in taxes even though dollar wise they do.
I also can't find any references where Obama invokes Joe, every google hit results in McCain invoking that name. I'm not disputing it but I didn't see it while it was happening so I don't feel it was anywhere even close to as often as McCain did.
You also don't state why police and fire are bad examples of socialism. They are imperfect applications of socialism as they are publically funded using the threat of force through tax dollars. They have their issues as results of this public funding (ex. traffic quotas.) They are most certainly socialism to the truest definitions. They are easy to justify because the common good is very obvious which gets back to applying socialism where it is appropriate such as the parent again stated.
That's funny because my roommates Macbook while it does come out of suspend often doesn't have working wifi afterwards resulting in her needing to reboot to hop back online.
I've found newer harder doesn't sleep properly, four years ago I had a reliable Dell lattitude that would suspend and wake up without any problems hopping back on wifi networks without any issue. For whatever reason it seems newer hardware has other priorities or there is a general decline in driver stability lately.
Aren't Bart and Lisa over 20 years old? How can be kiddie porn? Although I have had a similar misfortune I don't think it qualifies as child porn as there are no actual children involved.
You mean only four wires are required for 10/100 Ethernet. POE and GIGe both require all the wires in a standard Cat5e or Cat6 cable. They also don't tolerate interference over distance as well.
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You hit the nail on the head with the problem, if you have crappy radios you have crappy wifi.
In my house I have neither and have no trouble streaming HD anywhere in my house. Of course I attached an antenna array to boost performance which worked remarkably well. I have no trouble filling my 20meg cable connection using wifi.
Man, I remember doing rawrites to install Slackware, talk about the bad old days. You are quite right in that it has come a long way since then.
Sounds like we have similar experiences in regards to this. I agree as Linux gains traction the user experience will improve but right now I couldn't recommend Ubuntu to run on a laptop for someone although Linspire with the Acer Aspire One would be perfectly suitable for someone just looking to email on the road along with some other basic functionality. The user experience there is rock solid although I want to try out Linux4One as I hear it works great with the Aspire One but it installs in Italian so I'll have to wait.
All things which don't matter to a home computer especially when you use WPA2 with AES. Not uncrackable but one of your neighbors would really have to have it out for you.
Bandwidth is also practically irrelevant as even HD video can stream of 802.11g let alone 802.11n without a problem.
Interference is controllable because it is your home so that is also a non-issue.
That's funny because my laptop is an HP as well, of course it's a workstation model with ATI Big-Desktop which is the real reason for the power draw issue. Every-time I try to disable I get problems with X crashing. More a problem with the driver for it but still not an issue I have on Windows.
haha, fair enough, although I'll add that I do the same things on my desktop at home which is all wifi along with my printer. Why run cables when you don't have to?
Having used Ubuntu for the last year on the desktop for work and home I completely disagree with you. Boot times are atrociously slow with a nice long hangup in the middle I've noticed since installing 8.10. I've also noticed that Flash has the ability to disable my ability to play any sound. I restart alsa-utils and I still don't get it back, I haven't found a way out of having to reboot to get sound back. Battery life is also atrocious as I went from 3.5 hours with XP to 50 minutes with Ubuntu and now I'm lucky if I even get 25 minutes from Ubuntu.
I won't say it's all the distro's fault. I've seen many installs that work just fine, for instance with my Acer Aspire One Ubuntu runs great. The only thing I had to do was run a few scripts to make things like the wifi indicator work along with installing mad-wifi of course which will require a reinstall with the next kernel update.
Depending on your hardware you can have a good experience or a bad one. I've not seen an install yet where Suspend or Standby result in everything working when everything wakes back up. With my Aspire I managed to script a restart of wifi when the thing wakes up so that wifi can work but since I have a 9 cell battery in it I tend to just leave it on rather than suspend it. In a lot of cases a simple service restart doesn't do the trick.
I agree with the parent, it's not ready for the desktop and the best place is in the server room where it's proved itself again and again. It's getting pretty close but a lot of the little stuff doesn't work are far too much hardware for me to say it's ready.
Vista and Win7 introduced image based installers so you can use one image on all your enterprise hardware without having to worry about weird interactions like you did with unattended installations of XP.
Full disk encryption can be deployed centrally with keys managed centrally. Vista introduced a lot of new technologies that people are still learning. Group policy support has been greatly extended in Vista and Win7 allowing for much tighter control over the enterprise environment.
I would go into more details but I am just learning how to use all the new features myself as I am only beginning the process of deploying it out to the corporate desktops. It will take me a little while longer as I have no plans to upgrade XP, I'll only move to Vista or Win7 when hardware leases are up.
Centralized software licensing, auditing, encryption, and indexing are all new features in Vista that would appeal to the enterprise. This is in addition to things like bringing volume shadow copy to the desktop with automatic versioning.
The enterprise side of the house has a great number of features which make the experience worse for the home user but that's the trade-off. Microsoft should separate out the operating systems as they are trying to service everyone and making no-one happy.
This can be handled with a simple automated message forward, th email doesn't have to get rejected, it can merely be dropped which is coincidentally very easy to do with the vast majority of mail servers out there. It also means that if a user knows that an account exists and they go looking for it they won't find it because they aren't authorized to send through the distribution, the administrator then gets a copy of the message if the malicious user actually finds the address.
Of course in my company it's a well known address as hiding is pointless unless it's a company a couple of orders of magnitude larger than this one.
You're thinking properly implemented system. Exchange has this ability but lets not confused reality with Microsoft bashing.
This leaves out the fact that it was largely a user error scenario to begin with with people not BCC'ing to a large group of people or even using authenticated distribution lists.
All the features are there in Exchange, people just don't like to finish setting up servers whether they are MS based or Open-source. Very few people take the final steps to harden their systems because they have to move on to the next fire to put out and the thing is working.
I'm truly impressed you have people in your company willing to learn anything when they used to be able to just click a button to get a report or shoot an email. Most people I encounter would not accept your solution but your point is valid in that a lot of people don't work smart solutions although that is usually either through a lack of management or experience or worse yet, both.
Out of curiosity who said Obama would solve all our problems? I keep hearing this drivel from sore republicans looking to blame Obama for the failures that Bush Jr already caused.
No one I know at least seriously thinks Obama can solve the majority of the problems that Bush has plagued us with, we all saw it coming as reckless spending always results in this outcome.
Most people I've talked to voted for Obama because they believe he will at least put the country on a path that the majority of us can agree is better for the majority of us. The recession will not end anytime soon, Obama taking office will result in a stock market spike because history puts a good economy at the helm of democrats traditionally at least over the last 60 years.
Like the ole saying goes, it's easier to destroy than it is to create, no one is expecting miracles because creating everything we lost will take some serious time and a lot of serious effort from people in both parties. One of Obama's biggest strengths was that he wasn't afraid to work with people that disagreed with him unlike Bush. We all like a reasoned debate and this country is in dire need of it.
A well balanced reply, we were merely mis-communicating. We agree Microsoft has real competition in every industry they participate in. We even agree about Exchange, it's biggest problem is that it had no real competition for many years and Microsoft relied on that fact. Exchange became very monolithic and that results in weird interactions but Exchange with Live Communications server is a very solid foundation when referring to the 2007 products.
As for Windows Server 2003 I completely disagree as volume shadow copy, DFS replication with remote differential compression and proper offline files support easily made Server 2003 justifiable to upgrade.
Server 2008 we can most agree about as it doesn't offer a whole lot that would make me jump as something with a proven track record is always more comfortable than something new and shiny. Of course I'm also still learning 2008 so I may find features that make it worth my while.
In reference to my Asterisk upgrade and eventual migration to Zimbra it will cost a lot of money even though the individual products are free because it will need to spend a lot of time in testing, it is far from a turn-key solution which is what Microsoft is offering. Since it is turn-key you are right in that their products are often lacking in functionality, it's the price you pay. You run Debian with reduced functionality because it's rock solid stable, if it doesn't matter then you can run Ubuntu and stay on the cutting edge where you get the new and shiny stuff. Of course on that side of the fence you have an easier time obtaining any missing functionality, with Microsoft you're usually screwed until there is a new version available.
As for the Xbox 360 argument, I wasn't saying this particular issue is blown out of proportion, I was referring more to public sentiment about Microsoft products in general. Of course, 10 million Xbox 360s have been sold and 1 million seem to be having problems. That is too high to ignore but it doesn't mean the product isn't worth getting, I get about the same ratio of PCs and servers that are dead or have some hardware problem on arrival.
The thing you don't seem to understand is the difference between competition and viable competition. Firebird is no sufficient for a great many businesses that need the advanced featureset that you get with Oracle or MS SQL. The reason I went with Oracle had nothing to do with which product was superior but involved the costs of licensing since Oracle doesn't restrict the number of servers I can run it allows me to scale my business critical application out to several servers providing much increased redundancy. SQL 2005 handles data migration out of Oracle to run a website which sees many millions of people everyday with an MS SQL backend. It is a highly capable and very reliable product that had solid interoperability between many different database environments. I wasn't saying Firebird was fine with the features that are supported but any functionality to allow it to compete directing with commercial offerings fall far short because no one wants to run business critical applications on something that just received that functionality. This is the same reason there is always and should always be a lot of resistance to upgrading.
So yes, Microsoft has a lot of problems and is far from producing perfect products but there are several things do exceedingly well, so well that the costs of licensing and the comfort level many executives have with Microsoft support result in a lot of customer loyalty.
Also worth noting, in industries where Microsoft has real competition (Server OS, Database OS, Web Services, Management Services, Directory services) the products are rock solid and areas where they don't have a lot of real competition (Exchange) they do poorly.
I'll never understand why Office 2007 is crashing on you, I even do folder redirection for my users here and they can swap which file server they are connecting to without Word 2007 crashing. Outlook 2007 is sometimes clun
I'm sorry, you don't sound like you've actually deployed VMWare ESX if you say it's not buggy. Just recently VMWare had a production release whose serial number expired disabling the ability for a VM to boot, you were fine as long as you didn't reboot it. If you've ever dealt with Vmotion or really any VMWare product then you wouldn't be saying it's not buggy.
I've deployed Office 2007 on hundreds of machines and there were no complaints beyond the new interface since people had to learn where stuff had moved to. Quickly people realized that the interface made a lot more functionality accessible to them and I see much increased uses of things like pivot tables in Excel combined with multi-query data-sources which is something at least to my knowledge Open Office cannot do. I'm not aware of any other office suite besides Lotus which has all the same problems as Office.
Also, to suggest that Firebird is real competition for MS-SQL server is laughable as it lacks partitioning, a lot of transaction management functionality, a lot of data validation, clustering, different replication topologies. About the only thing it can do as well is integration with other data sources which I would say is also one of SQL Server's strongest selling points.
I'm not an apologist for MS here but you are attacking the things they actually do quite well. SQL Server in particular has a stellar record. In my own shop I run Oracle for the business critical applications but I run MS SQL for our accounting ledger application and for other intermediate databases that don't see the same level of traffic. It is a solid product that I rarely ever have to deal with after I set it up. The only time in my current deployment I've had to mess with it was when a web service was getting pounded by many thousands more people all of a sudden and it caused my database server to peak out, two minutes with SQL profiler and I had the problem narrowed to a particular stored procedure keeping in mind I'd only ever used SQL profiler on 2005 once prior.
Exchange has only recently started getting real competition from the open source world but you're not going to find too many people with solid skill sets for Zimbra so that makes it hard to justify to management.
I recently deployed Asterisk with a CentOS and a clustered MySQL rig inside VMWare ESX and I'm liking the ability to integrate all of that through Zimbra to create a unified messaging server. To be fair, this is something MS has been able to do for many years now and only recently the open-source world has had a complete solution available.
Of course as another poster pointed out, MS sells solutions, the open-source world with a small tools philosophy can and often does produce rock solid single task solutions but when you get into complicated functionality management becomes increasingly difficult. With MS, if you can manage 30 servers you can manage 3000 assuming something like System Center Configuration Manager is deployed.
I agree MS has a lot of ground to lose, they were not very competitive for a while but around 2005 things really started to change. I don't know where you get the idea Windows 2003 was crap as it's memory management and overall up-time are far better than Windows 2000 ever was. Windows 2008 is still too new to have a track record, from my experiences with it so far it's pretty nice taking many pages from the open-source world with head-less mode encouraging admins to do things properly from their management workstation instead of directly operating the server. Power-shell was also ported to Windows 2003 and is incredibly powerful.
Of course their VM solution is fairly laughable to the likes of VMWare and Xen, Virtual Box has a long way to go to catch up in functionality as a lot of hardware has been optimized around VMWare and Xen.
So in short, yes, Microsoft does have competition but your assessment of their product offerings seems completely off-base. The vast majority of X-box 360 owners don't have any problems, we even h
Finally someone that gets my life philosophy!
I'm not conflating anything, you stated the end result rather nicely. The spam contractor will move on to something else and thus will end the email clog as fewer and fewer people contract for spam.
It's a much simpler solution than changing fundamentally how the Internet operates to eliminate the problem when you can simply starve the supply and achieve a specific goal of reduced levels of spam.
The next technique will have a different solution. We can deal with it when it arrives.
The problem with spamming isn't that 1-2% reply and buy, it's that 98% of us ignore it so they endure no penalty. The 98% need to reply and present false information to waste their time which will result in them no longer being profitable. You'll have a short term problem with the fact that your address is now verified but over the long run it will die on its own and spammers give up.
This is of course easier said than done considering a great many of the links in the emails go to malware ridden sites so you need a secure web browser to do it effectively preferrably running something like noscript.
All depends on how you set the stage. It's why you don't go to clubs with a bunch of guys, its okay to go with a few guys but you need to have your own homebase girl for a dance partner. Sets the stage when other girls see you dancing they don't ask you to buy them a drink before they'll talk to you.
You're right though, the girls in the club are quite likely to be sleazy especially as they get up in age. Of course now looking back at some of the girls in high school I realize things actually weren't all that different then, I just wasn't a part of it because I was too busy working or going to college parties since most of my coworkers were in college at the time.
Methinks you'v been going to the wrong clubs but I agree with you in general that teens are far more mature than the media makes them out to be. Because of this immaturity image they let a lot slide.
Of course on the other hand, even at 21 I was making some pretty bone headed moves so who's to say what maturity even means.
Last I checked we had a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A kid with down syndrome would die rather early without help, I would say that is denying him the right to life and most certainly liberty since he inherently has to rely on others until he can come into his own for the most part. That's also just one use of social security.
How is the concept behind graduated rates arbitrary. Are you disputing that it is not easier for someone making a few million a year to pay 35% than it is for someone making 38k paying 18%? I would be interested in how you arrive at that conclusion. This is not anymore tyranny than taxes are in general. You are benefiting more from society so you should have to pay more back to society.
Just from your posts that you referenced again and again which don't actually define socialism, they only demonize it with a libertarian slant that the strong should survive like they have over the last couple billion years. Libertarians often forget that when 38k a year people struggle to pay rent they quite often turn to crime as you can see with the sizable increase in crime-rates of late. Don't take my word for it. CNN Source.
It is the same all over the world, when people are desperate they take desperate measures and that isn't good for anybody including the rich.
I don't see another method of fair distribution, wealthy people can't get that way on their own, they have to rely on public funds in one way or another whether it be through roads, telecomm, or power infrastructure which was all publicly funded while it got off the ground.
Socialism is not a dirty word nor a dirty concept, as long as it is applied appropriately it serves the vast majority of people's interests. As you like to keep saying, you give up a little liberty so that there isn't chaos.
Here is some more material. more evidence.
So you agree that police and fire are necessary evils to prevent chaos but you ignore that financial causes of the crime that needs to be prevented. They are intrinsically linked.
I also think you need to read the comments on your graph more carefully as they state why those numbers are misleading. No one was disputing that the rich put more dollars into the pot but those graphs don't add up. The author himself contradicts himself with his graphs. He presents different numbers with the same title and then his other graph shows that the bottom bracket pay 96.93% while the top bracket pays 39.38%
I find that whole page very poorly written.
I'm unsure what you think socialism is. You use social security as an example of socialism which it is, but it is no different from fire and police protections.
I have a cousin for example with down syndrome who received social security dollars to help pay for his care and ensure he is being treated properly getting the help he needs to live as normal a life as he can. How is this not protecting his rights as a fellow citizen?
For the older folks it ensures that they won't have to go hungry just because they can no longer work. That's the idea anyway, reality often twists the best intentions.
Additionally your graph there is completely shortsighted and I might add ignores income such as dividends which for Bill Gates is in the realm of three billion dollars a year which is all taxed at 15%. If you don't believe me for whatever reason I'll refer you to the wikipedia page describing how things have transpired over the last few years.
In terms of what you are describing, people that make over $250,000 per year are taxed at 35% for that $250,000. In reality they aren't but for simplicity's sake we'll say they do as the next bracket starts at 75k.
So lets continue the Bill Gates example, 3 billion in dividends taxed at 15% and 250k taxed at 35%. He donates a couple million to charity and that 250k he would have been taxed on is completely written off making his effective tax rate 15% which is roughly 10% less than what I'm paying.
Now your flat tax attempt to educate me shows that you completely misunderstood my part. Someone making 38k per year has a harder time paying 25% of their income to taxes than I do in the next tax bracket. That is why we use graduated rates to begin with.
Taxes for the rich are no simple matter as they often have many sources of income versus a middle class person who in all likelihood these days only has one source of income. The rich will have their companies buy cars for them so they don't have to meaning the corporation pays the tax so they have all sorts of loopholes which generally aren't available to someone scraping by.
I am by no means stating we should redistribute the wealth, there are a great many that worked hard to achieve something great and they shouldn't be stripped of all their hard earned money. A higher taxrate for people that can easily afford it doesn't sound like tyranny though, I don't mind paying a higher tax rate than my sister for example who earns less than half of what I do because I can afford it.
How do the high income levels pay higher tax rates? I'll agree the total dollar figure is higher but the percentage is much much smaller given that stocks and dividends are capped at 15% which is less than half of what someone making 80k a year would be paying, they would be paying approximately 30%.
If you consider Bill Gates and a great many others they will donate to charity using dividends to cut their exposure, so the income they are taxed at 35% will become 0 as they write-off the charity. It's a win for the charities but the government and social services lose out. I won't make any statements as to whether this is right or wrong in this post.
The fact is a flat tax is quite unfair to the middle class as it is harder for someone making 80k a year to pay 30% in taxes than it is for someone making several million a year.
Obviously it's no simple issue but be fair, the rich don't pay as much percentage wise in taxes even though dollar wise they do.
I also can't find any references where Obama invokes Joe, every google hit results in McCain invoking that name. I'm not disputing it but I didn't see it while it was happening so I don't feel it was anywhere even close to as often as McCain did.
You also don't state why police and fire are bad examples of socialism. They are imperfect applications of socialism as they are publically funded using the threat of force through tax dollars. They have their issues as results of this public funding (ex. traffic quotas.) They are most certainly socialism to the truest definitions. They are easy to justify because the common good is very obvious which gets back to applying socialism where it is appropriate such as the parent again stated.
That's funny because my roommates Macbook while it does come out of suspend often doesn't have working wifi afterwards resulting in her needing to reboot to hop back online.
I've found newer harder doesn't sleep properly, four years ago I had a reliable Dell lattitude that would suspend and wake up without any problems hopping back on wifi networks without any issue. For whatever reason it seems newer hardware has other priorities or there is a general decline in driver stability lately.
Aren't Bart and Lisa over 20 years old? How can be kiddie porn? Although I have had a similar misfortune I don't think it qualifies as child porn as there are no actual children involved.
You mean only four wires are required for 10/100 Ethernet. POE and GIGe both require all the wires in a standard Cat5e or Cat6 cable. They also don't tolerate interference over distance as well.