We agree, but you're obviously not enslaved. W2 is ok if you keep your skills up, don't over extend your credit, and watch your company, industry, and ass. Any of those can mean a rapid shift in fate. It's best to be ready; corporate concern for its employees is poor at best. That's why I'm my own corp, and why it always remembers to look after me. Fortunately, so do my clients.
Whenever there's a bull market in tech, each company tries to get their share of the upswing, so they all get slim and attractive and put on financial lipstick at once. You can spot this trend starting in the 70's. I've seen it go this way about 15x. Dollars you spend in tech right now, barring a national catastrophe, will be rewarded.... even the hideous price of oil, which normally sags the market, isn't having an effect. It's a bull market. Run with it if you want. I'm not an investment counselor, lawyer, or other professional so take this all with your own grain of salt, then watch what happens about mid-Sept when it burns out. They'll be a few minor ugly crashes, and things will pick up again.
It isn't deadwood, it's perceived run-rate. These people have lives, and desires, and value- but they're expendable when personal wealth is concerned. The shareholders will smile for a while after Wall Street rewards the bloodletting, and everyone moves on. The myth of working 30years for a company and retiring with a nice investment egg is fantasy. All wage slaves are subject to this, sadly. That's why I quit being one, about ten years ago. I will never work for W2 wages again, ever. The enlightened who can manage their own finances should follow. It's the only way to survive.
Working in retail or for a manufacturer is a low-step on a ladder, and should be tolerated only for its educational experience. You can't live on the wages in any meaningful way-- that's what our 'society' has become. I wish it were different, but it seems this way to me.
Losing money for big corps is also done all at once. No corp wants to take a hit unless everyone else is. That's why in one quarter, everyone will lose money. The finances can be shifted to put the hurt timed with everyone else's hurt so that it doesn't look so bad. Read Liar's Poker for additional insight.
During growth cycles in the stock markets, like the record-breaking S&P 500, it's very typical for companies to shed employees. It has nothing to do with Tech as an industry segment, has nothing to do with outsourcing, has nothing to do with EducationInAmericaToday, has nothing to do with anything but pleasing Wall Street. This allows stockholders to fatten up the stock price, lower DE ratios, and at the end of the day, inject new blood.
Does it suck? Of course it does. Wall Street is a nasty bitch.
...People should be wise enough to know what they're dealing with.....
These sources of information, biased as they are, are now difficult to believe. In this world where we have unbelievably enhanced communication (compared to even 50 years ago), one would want to believe *someone*. It's very difficult to do. There are some organizations that try to keep track of political lies, and media spins (MediaMatters.Org comes to mind, although they seem largely focused on monitoring a perceived 'right wing' composite).
The list of censored items is simply harrowing... frightening, and there were even a few on the list that a researcher like me were unaware of.
The local Gannett-owned newspaper where I come from are lap-dog sycophants of local business, and the well-funded politicians (by the same local business and regional interests). They are rarely believable, get their facts wrong, and have a rich-white-boy way of looking at real problems, like local pollution problems, crime, and tax money pissed away down ratholes-- with glee.
There is an establishment..... something in the middle.... and an anti-establishment. I think the Noam Chomsky/Vonnegut/WEB Dubois way of looking at things has some merit, but I've read all of the aforementioned and know that most people haven't. It makes me the eternal skeptic..... and I'm often rewarded; I want to be trusting but the controlled media lies like rugs.
It can be controlled: email is by no means dead
on
Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Email is the largest and most critical app for businesses today. It requires administration, and it requires diligence on the part of email services provides-- who uniformly don't care if their systems are abused. It costs money, and no one wants to spend money. Yet no other app has done a better job of propelling the Internet, and business-to-business communications, as well as people-people communications. Yes, IM is great; so is texting, but email is the best because it's rich media.
It's kind of like spending money for a car, then find out you have to change the oil, the timing belt, rotate tires, and so on. Those whose inboxes are constantly full are idiots not to use intelligent spam filters, keep their email addresses from being harvested by bots, and other common-sense use policies.
Every once in a while, it's just fine to get away from your email app and breathe. Voicemail was invented to allow people to control their phone time, and there are numerous ways to prevent email overload. As a friend of mine once said, we're the humans-- they're the computers-- we're in control.
The algorithm looks good, but there are holes.
on
Rerouting the Networks
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Consider using the described method instead of routers, which use the ISO/OSI stack. The message uses an inference, in some ways like how striping works in a RAID 5 drive failure; the failed drive can be inferred from data on the surviving striped drives. Not a big deal. Chunks/nibbles of the messages have a low occupancy time within a cloud, but many receivers must evaluate many messages-- not all are intended for them and must be discarded or validated (imagine spoofing in such a concept as described in the diagrams!).
But in the message diagram, there's a talker, and a receiver that gets messages through inference. Between the two, the cloud between them becomes unbelievably saturated with diffuse messages-- the same reason that ATM looks good on paper with its 53-byte packets, but in reality can't deal with traffic jams. This is why MPLS and other deterministic routing methods were invented-- to qualify transmission routes, not just shoot them like a shotgun into a cloud, hoping that the intended receiver gets the message and deciphers it through receive-side heuristics.
This has been done before, and it didn't work. I'd love to hear comments on why this should succeed.
What part of slow downloads, captive carrier, snooze yawn feature set, and undecided blood-letting music distribution costs don't you get?
I use a PowerBook. It work. I have a fleet of cell/mobiles, of which many without question are far ahead of Apple's feature list. Beyond device competition there is the signing up with AT&T, that friendly, highly-rated-consumer-love organization that was variously PacBell, AmeriTech, SBC, and so on. Yummy.
Those that ignore history are doomed to be revisited by it.
Re:Apple will still need lots of luck
on
FCC Approves iPhone
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Hmmmmm. What part of 'Apple cache'' didn't you read? Sure, distribution is nice. Marketing plans are nice. But it's not the same as slogging MP3 players and MacBook Pros. I doubt Xserve's do very well, despite their margins and accessorizing. Are they making money on media? Perhaps a little. Hardware margins are tight, and they're asking a fat wad of cash for a phone, even with the checklist. I wish them luck, but they'll be bruises.
Apple will still need lots of luck
on
FCC Approves iPhone
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Cute phone, 2.5G speed, no CDMA, AT&T as a captive carrier (and let's see how much music downloads will cost-- and the GPRS airtime unless WiFi is used). They enter a mature market (not the nearly virgin MP3 player market) with lots of solid competition from Korea, Inc, Scandinavia, Inc., and Motorola. It'll be very interesting to see if the Apple cache' can give it market share in a truly hot market.
when you consider that it took many more years for Vista than was planned; the next Windows release ought to come about retirement age for most of us.
That and as Microsoft seems to feel that your next PC will be a cell/mobile phone, I'm waiting for the advent of the 64-bit mobile phone processor. Imagine its 128-bit predecessor. You'll be able to address every bit in the known universe with the memory map on *that* one.
Or, perhaps 'legacy' hardware will get some much needed added life, by utilizing ultra-fast 32-bit processors that just do work far faster than their 64-bit equivalents-simply because code maturity will force opmitizations.
Microsoft will shortly have to expose the patents they believe are violated. That will be their undoing.
If they sue, it will be against major distro makers that aren't otherwise indemnified (like Novell, it's believed). If they sue end users, they will rue the day, and it will become like the RIAA except that there'll be alternatives to software, where there is a monopoly on music distribution.
Who will suffer? Microsoft. They're already in trouble with sliding OS sales because they can't make a quality product because of decisions made more than a decade ago that are architectural in nature. Would a Linux user be sued? Hardly. A distro maker? Sure. And how much money are they going to get? Not very damn much-- that's the interesting part. It'll be like SCOx vs IBM all over again. Watch the smoke, watch the mirrors.
They say: if you know about it, you're obliged to fix them. And then you kick your QA department's butts around the corridor several times. If your customers are your software testers, then you're business model is likely corrupt. And while there are a number of coders that will complain that it was the libs, or the other guy's fault, ultimately, a responsible organization takes ownership of their faults, just like humans should.
And the window of opportunity for YouTube is like that of the photo sharing sites: short. Should we now start to list all of the trendy sites that *haven't* survived 24 months? YouTube is an interesting phenomenon. It's championed a genre that seems to have staying power. It lacks so many things, but now has a nice parent that will go to court to keep things interesting both in content and in financing/business ecology.
It's my belief that your optimistic revenue projections are a bit silly, frankly. It's a bit like the blather of blogs: I don't really care that someone had a tunafish sandwich yesterday, and I'm loathe further to click on a SunKist Tuna ad that was coughed onto the page like some sort of ad-phlegm. I recognize that there are those that do. Your Madison-Avenue optimism about the revenue potential, IMHO, is out of place.
Murdoch's bought bad bait before. I fervently hope that it hurts his Neo-Con wallet.
Ted Turner at one time had a huge fortune, mostly divested.
In terms of acumen, if Fox News thrills you, perhaps you're right about Murdoch.
The emo-Web is a nice place to play. Yet the value of a photo site is fairly dubious except for affinity-ad revenues. Few have broken that trend. Does Flickr make money? I don't think so. Even the revenues from GooTube are suspect. Adding a non-producing asset to a non-producing asset seems like an outcome of a non-producing asset.
If that's acumen, I'll cite that Pokey Mon was great for a while, too. Sitting in a closet upstairs are dozens and dozens of relic decks. There are the Beanie Babies, and other passing fads. They make a few short term dollars. Then they're a recycling problem.
We agree on the training. Yet when design problems cause major accidents, a bevy of lawyers will produce a loop where carmakers are forced to improve their safety records or face a jury and subsequent payment of damages. OS coders face no such liability when a kernel rootkit makes a user's machine part of a botnet. OS coders don't get sued when a person can't integrate a desired piece of common hardware because no drivers exist. OS coders that revise operating systems that then exclude prior releases of software have no liability.
Computers are indeed more complex. They have millions of discrete components aggregated as semiconductor substrates. This doesn't excuse an OS coder that permits rm/. It's like putting out brake hose lines made of flimsy plastic.
There is responsibility to prevent people using a component in its normal sense from hurting themselves, and this obligation isn't being met.
"Operating systems all have a way to go; they annoy even the most technologically savvy among us with their various quirks. But as anyone who has ever worked a help desk can tell you, 95% of user problems are caused by the user. A computer may be a tool but for some reason people accept that to use any other tool, knowledge is required. Somehow we don't let that carry over to the computing world."
That's what I'm getting at. Imagine an OS that would let an application infect it. Imagine an OS that would let a user-inserted component be introduced that would render it as a bot. Imagine an OS that contains a program that would let one accidently format the storage upon which it rests. Imagine the third party industry that's grown around not letting users hurt themselves with the operating system. Those shouldn't really exist.... along the lines that Bruce Shieir (sp?) believes that the security industry would be downsized dramatically if OS makers reduced the attack profiles of their kernel and core utilities. There's something to that. Even when things ostensibly work, they can blow up days of work. Or they can allow someone in St Paul MN to logon to a WEP network and infect a corporate computing system that allows millions of dollars worth of credit card records to be stolen (the Marshall's-TJ Max scandal).
It'll never be a perfect world. But there are few on slashdot that haven't had to nurse someone's sick Win2K or XP system back to health for them-- or have indeed encountered the results of poor quality OS design. And it's not limited to Windows, OSX has the same problems, and it's wicked-easy to have a supposedly trained user do something dangerously stupid with Linux in any incarnation.
No doubt users can be hapless. There's no arguing foolishness.
It isn't wise, however, to believe that users are as smart as OS makers. Writing an OS isn't easy, and it's a mistake to impose one's standards on what should be usable by 'common people'.
That's why there are chain guards, rip fences, and so on. Things that then go haywire... like disintegrating blades (browser bugs) or backup software that doesn't backup, and so on are design defects. They're what made John Edwards his fortune-- product liability, which barely exists in computing despite the comparative stakes involved.
I really believe that the state of OS development is nearly unmanageable because of the dependencies that grow factorially with each new OS iteration. They bloat. They don't really need to be so much larger and bigger but hardware resources have compensated. We're now in a huge competitive rush, miming the auto industry, waiting for each new faster bigger more deluxe thing to arrive when we don't use what we have now-- even though the new stuff is an availability/reliability exponent. I'm glad that advances are made, but I've also re-installed Windows so many times for users that have been hurt by not keeping up to the second virus and malware definitions that I feel for them. They really do try to do their best, but then they're thwarted. Or when they try to change something because a part has broken, they're stymied for want of cohesive support or interoperability issues. They're stuck with a Ford part problem where a Dodge part isn't going to fit. They just know it's an alternator and they can't go in their cars without it. It's the same mistake made twice.
And my aunt has a 'driver's license'. It's a PhD. She'd no dummy. Ask her about Vista 64-bit WiFi drivers. She'll tell you a story about how she's becoming an expert. And how she'd love to accidently run over her 64-bit notebook for the insurance money.... though she'd never do this.
When safety is defined as people not becoming physiologically injured, we agree.
How many people do you know that drive cars that need frequent pull-overs to the side of the road, where the ignition is set to off, then it's restarted? How many cars will allow a user's property and work to vanish without the chance of even a marginally inexpensive recovery? And how many automotive computers simply croak? Ask any long-time Ford owner.
Users shouldn't be permitted to easily hurt themselves, hence the mindlessly awful antagonisms of Vista. But Microsoft has only a vaguely larger share of the sharp-edge market. Steve Job's wonderful OS X will let you hurt yourself, although not as badly a wound as 10.1. Linux in 2.2, could shoot holes through structure steel, because it was Swiss Cheese. And don't get me started on Solaris, with no one's mother ever used, or the hallowed SmallTalk derivative arguments.
It is not easy to do operating systems. Each new code set added represents almost a factorial increase in dependencies. That's why it's not easy. Yet no one treats an OS like it's a homogeneous application. It's supposed to be a foundational platform above hardware to manage the basic components of a system's functionality for its user. It fails. Some far more frequently and with larger craters left than others. Operating systems, frankly, are out of control except for some very confined platforms. They've been 'featured' to death-- the death of their users files and good will.
Slashdot Mirror
We agree, but you're obviously not enslaved. W2 is ok if you keep your skills up, don't over extend your credit, and watch your company, industry, and ass. Any of those can mean a rapid shift in fate. It's best to be ready; corporate concern for its employees is poor at best. That's why I'm my own corp, and why it always remembers to look after me. Fortunately, so do my clients.
Whenever there's a bull market in tech, each company tries to get their share of the upswing, so they all get slim and attractive and put on financial lipstick at once. You can spot this trend starting in the 70's. I've seen it go this way about 15x. Dollars you spend in tech right now, barring a national catastrophe, will be rewarded.... even the hideous price of oil, which normally sags the market, isn't having an effect. It's a bull market. Run with it if you want. I'm not an investment counselor, lawyer, or other professional so take this all with your own grain of salt, then watch what happens about mid-Sept when it burns out. They'll be a few minor ugly crashes, and things will pick up again.
It isn't deadwood, it's perceived run-rate. These people have lives, and desires, and value- but they're expendable when personal wealth is concerned. The shareholders will smile for a while after Wall Street rewards the bloodletting, and everyone moves on. The myth of working 30years for a company and retiring with a nice investment egg is fantasy. All wage slaves are subject to this, sadly. That's why I quit being one, about ten years ago. I will never work for W2 wages again, ever. The enlightened who can manage their own finances should follow. It's the only way to survive.
Working in retail or for a manufacturer is a low-step on a ladder, and should be tolerated only for its educational experience. You can't live on the wages in any meaningful way-- that's what our 'society' has become. I wish it were different, but it seems this way to me.
Losing money for big corps is also done all at once. No corp wants to take a hit unless everyone else is. That's why in one quarter, everyone will lose money. The finances can be shifted to put the hurt timed with everyone else's hurt so that it doesn't look so bad. Read Liar's Poker for additional insight.
Amen.
It's a genuine madness that makes highly intelligent companies act like idiots for three weeks each quarter.
There's a better way. We just haven't thought of it yet.
During growth cycles in the stock markets, like the record-breaking S&P 500, it's very typical for companies to shed employees. It has nothing to do with Tech as an industry segment, has nothing to do with outsourcing, has nothing to do with EducationInAmericaToday, has nothing to do with anything but pleasing Wall Street. This allows stockholders to fatten up the stock price, lower DE ratios, and at the end of the day, inject new blood.
Does it suck? Of course it does. Wall Street is a nasty bitch.
...People should be wise enough to know what they're dealing with.....
These sources of information, biased as they are, are now difficult to believe. In this world where we have unbelievably enhanced communication (compared to even 50 years ago), one would want to believe *someone*. It's very difficult to do. There are some organizations that try to keep track of political lies, and media spins (MediaMatters.Org comes to mind, although they seem largely focused on monitoring a perceived 'right wing' composite).
The list of censored items is simply harrowing... frightening, and there were even a few on the list that a researcher like me were unaware of.
The local Gannett-owned newspaper where I come from are lap-dog sycophants of local business, and the well-funded politicians (by the same local business and regional interests). They are rarely believable, get their facts wrong, and have a rich-white-boy way of looking at real problems, like local pollution problems, crime, and tax money pissed away down ratholes-- with glee.
There is an establishment..... something in the middle.... and an anti-establishment. I think the Noam Chomsky/Vonnegut/WEB Dubois way of looking at things has some merit, but I've read all of the aforementioned and know that most people haven't. It makes me the eternal skeptic..... and I'm often rewarded; I want to be trusting but the controlled media lies like rugs.
Email is the largest and most critical app for businesses today. It requires administration, and it requires diligence on the part of email services provides-- who uniformly don't care if their systems are abused. It costs money, and no one wants to spend money. Yet no other app has done a better job of propelling the Internet, and business-to-business communications, as well as people-people communications. Yes, IM is great; so is texting, but email is the best because it's rich media.
It's kind of like spending money for a car, then find out you have to change the oil, the timing belt, rotate tires, and so on. Those whose inboxes are constantly full are idiots not to use intelligent spam filters, keep their email addresses from being harvested by bots, and other common-sense use policies.
Every once in a while, it's just fine to get away from your email app and breathe. Voicemail was invented to allow people to control their phone time, and there are numerous ways to prevent email overload. As a friend of mine once said, we're the humans-- they're the computers-- we're in control.
Consider using the described method instead of routers, which use the ISO/OSI stack. The message uses an inference, in some ways like how striping works in a RAID 5 drive failure; the failed drive can be inferred from data on the surviving striped drives. Not a big deal. Chunks/nibbles of the messages have a low occupancy time within a cloud, but many receivers must evaluate many messages-- not all are intended for them and must be discarded or validated (imagine spoofing in such a concept as described in the diagrams!).
But in the message diagram, there's a talker, and a receiver that gets messages through inference. Between the two, the cloud between them becomes unbelievably saturated with diffuse messages-- the same reason that ATM looks good on paper with its 53-byte packets, but in reality can't deal with traffic jams. This is why MPLS and other deterministic routing methods were invented-- to qualify transmission routes, not just shoot them like a shotgun into a cloud, hoping that the intended receiver gets the message and deciphers it through receive-side heuristics.
This has been done before, and it didn't work. I'd love to hear comments on why this should succeed.
"get it"?
What part of slow downloads, captive carrier, snooze yawn feature set, and undecided blood-letting music distribution costs don't you get?
I use a PowerBook. It work. I have a fleet of cell/mobiles, of which many without question are far ahead of Apple's feature list. Beyond device competition there is the signing up with AT&T, that friendly, highly-rated-consumer-love organization that was variously PacBell, AmeriTech, SBC, and so on. Yummy.
Those that ignore history are doomed to be revisited by it.
Hmmmmm. What part of 'Apple cache'' didn't you read? Sure, distribution is nice. Marketing plans are nice. But it's not the same as slogging MP3 players and MacBook Pros. I doubt Xserve's do very well, despite their margins and accessorizing. Are they making money on media? Perhaps a little. Hardware margins are tight, and they're asking a fat wad of cash for a phone, even with the checklist. I wish them luck, but they'll be bruises.
Cute phone, 2.5G speed, no CDMA, AT&T as a captive carrier (and let's see how much music downloads will cost-- and the GPRS airtime unless WiFi is used). They enter a mature market (not the nearly virgin MP3 player market) with lots of solid competition from Korea, Inc, Scandinavia, Inc., and Motorola. It'll be very interesting to see if the Apple cache' can give it market share in a truly hot market.
Hmmm. Leptons.... other charmed particles. Perhaps we need a kilobit processor. Windows 71 ought to work on that, eh?
when you consider that it took many more years for Vista than was planned; the next Windows release ought to come about retirement age for most of us.
That and as Microsoft seems to feel that your next PC will be a cell/mobile phone, I'm waiting for the advent of the 64-bit mobile phone processor. Imagine its 128-bit predecessor. You'll be able to address every bit in the known universe with the memory map on *that* one.
Or, perhaps 'legacy' hardware will get some much needed added life, by utilizing ultra-fast 32-bit processors that just do work far faster than their 64-bit equivalents-simply because code maturity will force opmitizations.
You hit the nail on the head. Bravo!
The entire sham is corporate-speak for 'look out, buddy, don't go messing with that stuff or you'll get hurt'.
In a way, I wish the RICO Act covered this kind of behavior. Conspiracy to Bluff or something.
Microsoft will shortly have to expose the patents they believe are violated. That will be their undoing.
If they sue, it will be against major distro makers that aren't otherwise indemnified (like Novell, it's believed). If they sue end users, they will rue the day, and it will become like the RIAA except that there'll be alternatives to software, where there is a monopoly on music distribution.
Who will suffer? Microsoft. They're already in trouble with sliding OS sales because they can't make a quality product because of decisions made more than a decade ago that are architectural in nature. Would a Linux user be sued? Hardly. A distro maker? Sure. And how much money are they going to get? Not very damn much-- that's the interesting part. It'll be like SCOx vs IBM all over again. Watch the smoke, watch the mirrors.
They say: if you know about it, you're obliged to fix them. And then you kick your QA department's butts around the corridor several times. If your customers are your software testers, then you're business model is likely corrupt. And while there are a number of coders that will complain that it was the libs, or the other guy's fault, ultimately, a responsible organization takes ownership of their faults, just like humans should.
Redmond Washington.
Ok, mod me as troll. I deserve it.
Ah-- wait: we both entertain children. I knew both the cards and furry things would be useless in several years. Murdoch doesn't seem to think so.
And the window of opportunity for YouTube is like that of the photo sharing sites: short. Should we now start to list all of the trendy sites that *haven't* survived 24 months? YouTube is an interesting phenomenon. It's championed a genre that seems to have staying power. It lacks so many things, but now has a nice parent that will go to court to keep things interesting both in content and in financing/business ecology.
It's my belief that your optimistic revenue projections are a bit silly, frankly. It's a bit like the blather of blogs: I don't really care that someone had a tunafish sandwich yesterday, and I'm loathe further to click on a SunKist Tuna ad that was coughed onto the page like some sort of ad-phlegm. I recognize that there are those that do. Your Madison-Avenue optimism about the revenue potential, IMHO, is out of place.
Murdoch's bought bad bait before. I fervently hope that it hurts his Neo-Con wallet.
Ted Turner at one time had a huge fortune, mostly divested.
In terms of acumen, if Fox News thrills you, perhaps you're right about Murdoch.
The emo-Web is a nice place to play. Yet the value of a photo site is fairly dubious except for affinity-ad revenues. Few have broken that trend. Does Flickr make money? I don't think so. Even the revenues from GooTube are suspect. Adding a non-producing asset to a non-producing asset seems like an outcome of a non-producing asset.
If that's acumen, I'll cite that Pokey Mon was great for a while, too. Sitting in a closet upstairs are dozens and dozens of relic decks. There are the Beanie Babies, and other passing fads. They make a few short term dollars. Then they're a recycling problem.
In three years, your MySpace and PhotoBucket and Flicr and FaceBook accounts will be like PokeyMon cards.
Kinka-chu!
Just a prediction, but I've yet to see Murdoch turn his purchases into anything but short-term banalities.
Mod me troll, but it's like Yahoo! buying Broadcast.com (Mark Cuban's org). $2B was spent-- in cash-- and does anyone buy mp3s from Yahoo?
We agree on the training. Yet when design problems cause major accidents, a bevy of lawyers will produce a loop where carmakers are forced to improve their safety records or face a jury and subsequent payment of damages. OS coders face no such liability when a kernel rootkit makes a user's machine part of a botnet. OS coders don't get sued when a person can't integrate a desired piece of common hardware because no drivers exist. OS coders that revise operating systems that then exclude prior releases of software have no liability.
/. It's like putting out brake hose lines made of flimsy plastic.
Computers are indeed more complex. They have millions of discrete components aggregated as semiconductor substrates. This doesn't excuse an OS coder that permits rm
There is responsibility to prevent people using a component in its normal sense from hurting themselves, and this obligation isn't being met.
You say:
"Operating systems all have a way to go; they annoy even the most technologically savvy among us with their various quirks. But as anyone who has ever worked a help desk can tell you, 95% of user problems are caused by the user. A computer may be a tool but for some reason people accept that to use any other tool, knowledge is required. Somehow we don't let that carry over to the computing world."
That's what I'm getting at. Imagine an OS that would let an application infect it. Imagine an OS that would let a user-inserted component be introduced that would render it as a bot. Imagine an OS that contains a program that would let one accidently format the storage upon which it rests. Imagine the third party industry that's grown around not letting users hurt themselves with the operating system. Those shouldn't really exist.... along the lines that Bruce Shieir (sp?) believes that the security industry would be downsized dramatically if OS makers reduced the attack profiles of their kernel and core utilities. There's something to that. Even when things ostensibly work, they can blow up days of work. Or they can allow someone in St Paul MN to logon to a WEP network and infect a corporate computing system that allows millions of dollars worth of credit card records to be stolen (the Marshall's-TJ Max scandal).
It'll never be a perfect world. But there are few on slashdot that haven't had to nurse someone's sick Win2K or XP system back to health for them-- or have indeed encountered the results of poor quality OS design. And it's not limited to Windows, OSX has the same problems, and it's wicked-easy to have a supposedly trained user do something dangerously stupid with Linux in any incarnation.
No doubt users can be hapless. There's no arguing foolishness.
It isn't wise, however, to believe that users are as smart as OS makers. Writing an OS isn't easy, and it's a mistake to impose one's standards on what should be usable by 'common people'.
That's why there are chain guards, rip fences, and so on. Things that then go haywire... like disintegrating blades (browser bugs) or backup software that doesn't backup, and so on are design defects. They're what made John Edwards his fortune-- product liability, which barely exists in computing despite the comparative stakes involved.
I really believe that the state of OS development is nearly unmanageable because of the dependencies that grow factorially with each new OS iteration. They bloat. They don't really need to be so much larger and bigger but hardware resources have compensated. We're now in a huge competitive rush, miming the auto industry, waiting for each new faster bigger more deluxe thing to arrive when we don't use what we have now-- even though the new stuff is an availability/reliability exponent. I'm glad that advances are made, but I've also re-installed Windows so many times for users that have been hurt by not keeping up to the second virus and malware definitions that I feel for them. They really do try to do their best, but then they're thwarted. Or when they try to change something because a part has broken, they're stymied for want of cohesive support or interoperability issues. They're stuck with a Ford part problem where a Dodge part isn't going to fit. They just know it's an alternator and they can't go in their cars without it. It's the same mistake made twice.
And my aunt has a 'driver's license'. It's a PhD. She'd no dummy. Ask her about Vista 64-bit WiFi drivers. She'll tell you a story about how she's becoming an expert. And how she'd love to accidently run over her 64-bit notebook for the insurance money.... though she'd never do this.
When safety is defined as people not becoming physiologically injured, we agree.
How many people do you know that drive cars that need frequent pull-overs to the side of the road, where the ignition is set to off, then it's restarted? How many cars will allow a user's property and work to vanish without the chance of even a marginally inexpensive recovery? And how many automotive computers simply croak? Ask any long-time Ford owner.
Users shouldn't be permitted to easily hurt themselves, hence the mindlessly awful antagonisms of Vista. But Microsoft has only a vaguely larger share of the sharp-edge market. Steve Job's wonderful OS X will let you hurt yourself, although not as badly a wound as 10.1. Linux in 2.2, could shoot holes through structure steel, because it was Swiss Cheese. And don't get me started on Solaris, with no one's mother ever used, or the hallowed SmallTalk derivative arguments.
It is not easy to do operating systems. Each new code set added represents almost a factorial increase in dependencies. That's why it's not easy. Yet no one treats an OS like it's a homogeneous application. It's supposed to be a foundational platform above hardware to manage the basic components of a system's functionality for its user. It fails. Some far more frequently and with larger craters left than others. Operating systems, frankly, are out of control except for some very confined platforms. They've been 'featured' to death-- the death of their users files and good will.