The entire government is not a series of redundant clusterFs right now. It is large, parts of it work very well, parts of it do not.
"Why? With virtual servers the same people can still create new ones, the only difference being they don't manage the hardware or networking." You have no understanding of how organizations work. There will be an "authority" whose job it is to keep the server store for "security" if nothing else.
"But this would provide incentive for reducing waste in that regard rather than providing incentive for it, like we do now."
It won't, it will provide a new government agency with the reasons for increase expenditures, increased staffing, and with that increase "regulation" on users (i.e., the rest of the government) who will be forced to use it. If your agency wants to provide a new service, it will have to run the gauntlet of the new "service" agency.
Not only that, every few years when the new agency gets a new director, s/he will issue new marching orders merely to piss in the corners and make the agency his/her own...why...just like the current dolt proposing this reorg. It isn't working in Virginia because dolts like him are great at proposing but have not the means to make the proposal actually work.
You will get a sclerotic monolith of a clusterF. Any small change will require you contact a different agency than your own, i.e., the one running the data center. They will decide whether and when your new IT bauble the public has clamored for you to provide is appropriate for their pristine data center.
There is no free market, go bitch slap some sense into Ron Paul. Free market in software, hah? Explain MS, please. Free market in drugs? No way are we going to let the drug companies put any magic elixir on the market without adequate FDA approval. Want to put a new vehicle on the road that rolls over at the first gust of wind? Nope. The market is not free and cannot be free if we value survival. Put Paul in your pipe and smoke him if you like, but you are just pissing in the wind.
yer right, they have a 100 % failure rate in attempting to create a new market with the Newton. If they do manage to create a new market with some new device, they'll still be failures at 50%.
How does Amazon give access to open source to Microsoft. Would MS already have access to it? Either MS is bullshitting about the meaning or something is nefarious is in the details that MS will attempt to pull out in a future court case against FOSS....probably a bit of both. Come to think of it, MS has been using Amazon's One Click IP when their software blue screens with but one click of the mouse.
I don't know about the intersection between deniers and creationists, but they do seem to have a similar philosophy. Both seem to want to think that people do not affect their environment very much. If the creationists admit that, then they couldn't ascribe bad things happening to people to a vengeful G-d. That in turn would mean they have no mooring to achieve their political ends of telling everyone else what to do...a bit like progressives and liberals but with the shadow of G-d as the enforcer. Also, they seem to have a steady state notion of the Universe...conveniently forgetting the Universe periodically tries to kill us all dead with an arrant asteroid or comet. If they were to admit that, then they'd have to admit maybe G-d doesn't think they're so special. They also seem to think that the climate change people are part of a general relativity plot where all morals and ethics are relative and not handed down by G-d. Consequently, they feel perfectly at home being scientific relativists where science is all relative.
The Deniers seem split between the constant Earth and the Earth's dynamics are on a trajectory that cannot be changed. Either one is consistent with a G-d who's pulling the strings behind the scenes somehow. I do think there is a large segment of Deniers who deny merely because to change their lifestyle would be too much trouble. These are rather selfish people who just want to live the high life. Then there are the Conservative Deniers who see another nefarious plot by the Liberals to stop economic and scientific development in its tracks. They are the same group who believe scientists are in on a nefarious plot of squeezing the G-d of the Gaps into smaller and smaller gaps.
Both groups believe so many inherently contradictory beliefs that you would think their heads would explode. The reason they do not is easy, they think of contradictory beliefs on different days so they never meet in their heads at the same time. Think of their brains as being timeshared among various intellectual viruses.
A lot of DEC people and users hated Unix. I could never figure out why exactly other than they had a lot of time and effort invested in VMS and Unix was growing at the time. They felt threatened because Unix did a lot of things differently. I recall VMS being a quite capable OS. It was never intended for small computers, it doesn't surprise me that Culter produced a NT which wasn't suited to small computers given that MS had to drill holes in it to get acceptable UI behavior. Java had/has the same problem, it was developed by a Big Machine people and as a consequence, their UI stuff still sucks.
Unless I'm missing something, I don't see why some other enterprising young programmer couldn't produce a similar iPhone app to fill the void. Or that Apple could fold the notion into their mail program (I presume iPhone has an Apple mail widget or app).
Uh, Gary's in Indiana, not Illinois. And Gary isn't dictating policy to Indiana. Gary is poor, they lost most of their industry when the steel mills shut down.
I don't want to plug Verizon but I just switched from Comcast to Verizon FIOS. I'm a Mac person but surprisingly, it wasn't too hard to connect once you learn to ignore the Verizon tech they send to connect you up.
First Verizon runs fiber up and down the street, then if you sign up, they run copper from the street to the cable splitter Comcast had on the outside of my house. They cut the Comcast cable and connect theirs, so now they running their stuff through the coax you have in your house. They also connect up the phone box they have outside the house (I got the triple play option...TV, phone, internet). They drill a hole in your house and connect up a battery to the phone box outside so if you lose power, you get several hours of phone use.
They put a settop box near your TV, connect that up and then the network box. The tech they send will know nothing about Macs. They will give you a password you will type into airport. They will neglect to tell you that case matters, in fact they will tell you the opposite. Their password must be entered in upper case and you cannot change it. (Maybe if you call them).
I've not tested throughput for internet connection but it seems relatively fast for my browser. There probably are not enough people connected up to test the system under any sort of load.
I think this fixation on *the* way forward is inspiring most of this discussion. Maybe it stems from the convergence of some computing devices to be entertainment vending machines. There are, most likely, many paths all of which go into the future and we can be on all of them at the same time.
There is also the difference in philosophies. MS has always tried to be everything to everyone. The reason appears to be a fear that someone else might actually succeed in any one area that someone might not be MS. So they fight against the entire market, construct their own closed ecosystem, get their sycophants to claim it is open, and still must do underhanded deals to get their stuff accepted.
Apple seems to segment their markets and hit each with an enticing but closed system for each. If there is a convergence for any of their devices, they seem to need to be convinced of it first in the marketplace and then make small leaps to close the gaps.
Open software is somewhat rudderless (in the sense of there being no system to rule them all) and tends more towards Apple's model of targeted systems.
The device manufacturers are clueless when it comes to software and interfaces and so are left dancing to what MS and Open software provide for them. They could regain the initiative but only if they adopt open software and open standards...which runs counter to their inherent bias that to succeed means to screw the opposition. This leads them directly back to MS which has a similar philosophy....all Business School Product think alike even if it will never succeed for them. They then jump in bed with MS, either get stabbed in the back or realize they are no longer in control (or realize MS stuff is too stifling) and venture out on their own (symbian, the new Franken-software Intel and Nokia are going to flog, etc.).
As much as I detest MS, but in fairness to their R&D...well....R&D in general...it does not need to translate into new products. It needs to get translated into products even if those products are currently existing and the R&D is simply streamlining them or making them better in some way. Those kinds of improvements will be off the radar to most end users. It isn't clear that MS is doing this but I expect some of it must be happening.
That said, MS probably has the problems many big companies have with R&D, any genuinely new idea for a new product will be seen as a threat by Business School Product running the company. They will marshal their forces to defend any current products by claiming the new product will cannibalize their old products. And that may very well be the case but the result is the tired lineup of products that MS is currently pimping.
What will you be willing to offer Iran to stop their nuclear program? Jews in death camps? That would make Iran happy but I don't think it will fly. Refusal to interfere in their internal politics? The U.S. is already doing this but the sawed off runts running the joint still accuse the U.S. of interference. In short, there's nothing you can offer the Iranians to stop their nuclear program. Nor N. Korea (well, you could offer S. Korea but then they'd just start again complaining of Japan).
And what will you do if you catch them continuing nuclear weapon development after they've agreed to stop it? Huff and puff like Obama is now? You may have noticed how effective that is. The only deterrence would be armed conflict that you must be willing to use. Everyone raise their hands who's up for another S. Asian war. Anyone?
Yeah, no weapon system should even be researched if it cannot fix all the U.S. defense problems at one go at even the experimental stage. What were they thinking?
The retail section of most appliance stores is filthy with MS inspired crapware. There's no way Apple will stand out enough in that environment to garner the sales necessary to make it worth the expense. That and MS will simply stab them in the back with under the table deals involving those appliance stores. MS didn't get to be a monopoly by playing fair and square. The fish always rots from the head to the tail.
Innovation in any large company is hard regardless of the market. I don't recall MS innovating much of anything...ever, but then I'm a Mac person.
Someone above wrote about what it was like to be in a small company taken over by MS. If the corporate culture is to promote a competition amongst the employees instead of competition geared toward competitors, then MS is probably what results. If you have a good idea, your co-workers will screw you because if it succeeds, they do not. That leaves the competition aspect of MS in the hands of Business School Product who understand nothing technical and but who really get "screwing a competitor" as a measure of success. Good ideas rise to the top at MS in spite of their current culture as opposed to because of their current culture.
Many other companies are in the same boat. HP used to be an innovator before they became PC/printer box makers. They screwed their engineering culture and now attempts to get it back are drowned by the Business School Product running the company. IBM appears somewhat similar although they do seem to have some hardware innovation kept alive, probably an oversight that will get killed off eventually.
It's a bit hard to tell where Apple's innovation comes from since the company is so secretive. Presumably, they have not neutered their engineering and some ideas are bubbling up from them.
Because then you can schedule the redo at your leisure rather than having to do it under the gun. Transitioning to a new system isn't done lightly and stopping it in midstream because your MS infected widget is coughing up a hairball is expensive.
If no one in an organization understands how some home grown widget works any longer, I should think one could make a case for that widget being replaced by a modern widget that conforms to internet standards so that the next upgrade won't break it and leave them screwed.
A big system, the Defense Travel System, injected up our arses by DoD continues to require an IE browser. I found the company that produced that pile of stinking shit. They took some system intended for some other use, and somehow got DoD (probably via Congressional influence) to afflict the DoD proles who must use it. They have no intention of not requiring to use MS inspired CrapWare.
The Joint Naval/Marine IT infrastructure organization has "standardized" on MS technologies. With this kind of government inspired stupidity (does security mean anything to these compu-weenies?), there's no getting rid of the malevolent influence of MS.
More to the point, we Apple people simply like their interfaces and the way the software matches the hardware. Those of us with a CS background appreciate Unix under the hood. MS produces interfaces that could knock a dead buzzard off a shit wagon at 20 paces and...well...there's something under the hood, sort of like the dotty relative kept in the back room when company is over. And Linux interfaces reimplementing MS bad choices isn't doing it any good.
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The entire government is not a series of redundant clusterFs right now. It is large, parts of it work very well, parts of it do not.
"Why? With virtual servers the same people can still create new ones, the only difference being they don't manage the hardware or networking." You have no understanding of how organizations work. There will be an "authority" whose job it is to keep the server store for "security" if nothing else.
"But this would provide incentive for reducing waste in that regard rather than providing incentive for it, like we do now."
It won't, it will provide a new government agency with the reasons for increase expenditures, increased staffing, and with that increase "regulation" on users (i.e., the rest of the government) who will be forced to use it. If your agency wants to provide a new service, it will have to run the gauntlet of the new "service" agency.
Not only that, every few years when the new agency gets a new director, s/he will issue new marching orders merely to piss in the corners and make the agency his/her own...why...just like the current dolt proposing this reorg. It isn't working in Virginia because dolts like him are great at proposing but have not the means to make the proposal actually work.
You will get a sclerotic monolith of a clusterF. Any small change will require you contact a different agency than your own, i.e., the one running the data center. They will decide whether and when your new IT bauble the public has clamored for you to provide is appropriate for their pristine data center.
There is no free market, go bitch slap some sense into Ron Paul. Free market in software, hah? Explain MS, please. Free market in drugs? No way are we going to let the drug companies put any magic elixir on the market without adequate FDA approval. Want to put a new vehicle on the road that rolls over at the first gust of wind? Nope. The market is not free and cannot be free if we value survival. Put Paul in your pipe and smoke him if you like, but you are just pissing in the wind.
Why was the parent modded down? Simply not agreeing with the sentiments is not a good reason.
yer right, they have a 100 % failure rate in attempting to create a new market with the Newton. If they do manage to create a new market with some new device, they'll still be failures at 50%.
How does Amazon give access to open source to Microsoft. Would MS already have access to it? Either MS is bullshitting about the meaning or something is nefarious is in the details that MS will attempt to pull out in a future court case against FOSS....probably a bit of both. Come to think of it, MS has been using Amazon's One Click IP when their software blue screens with but one click of the mouse.
I don't know about the intersection between deniers and creationists, but they do seem to have a similar philosophy. Both seem to want to think that people do not affect their environment very much. If the creationists admit that, then they couldn't ascribe bad things happening to people to a vengeful G-d. That in turn would mean they have no mooring to achieve their political ends of telling everyone else what to do...a bit like progressives and liberals but with the shadow of G-d as the enforcer. Also, they seem to have a steady state notion of the Universe...conveniently forgetting the Universe periodically tries to kill us all dead with an arrant asteroid or comet. If they were to admit that, then they'd have to admit maybe G-d doesn't think they're so special. They also seem to think that the climate change people are part of a general relativity plot where all morals and ethics are relative and not handed down by G-d. Consequently, they feel perfectly at home being scientific relativists where science is all relative.
The Deniers seem split between the constant Earth and the Earth's dynamics are on a trajectory that cannot be changed. Either one is consistent with a G-d who's pulling the strings behind the scenes somehow. I do think there is a large segment of Deniers who deny merely because to change their lifestyle would be too much trouble. These are rather selfish people who just want to live the high life. Then there are the Conservative Deniers who see another nefarious plot by the Liberals to stop economic and scientific development in its tracks. They are the same group who believe scientists are in on a nefarious plot of squeezing the G-d of the Gaps into smaller and smaller gaps.
Both groups believe so many inherently contradictory beliefs that you would think their heads would explode. The reason they do not is easy, they think of contradictory beliefs on different days so they never meet in their heads at the same time. Think of their brains as being timeshared among various intellectual viruses.
A lot of DEC people and users hated Unix. I could never figure out why exactly other than they had a lot of time and effort invested in VMS and Unix was growing at the time. They felt threatened because Unix did a lot of things differently. I recall VMS being a quite capable OS. It was never intended for small computers, it doesn't surprise me that Culter produced a NT which wasn't suited to small computers given that MS had to drill holes in it to get acceptable UI behavior. Java had/has the same problem, it was developed by a Big Machine people and as a consequence, their UI stuff still sucks.
Unless I'm missing something, I don't see why some other enterprising young programmer couldn't produce a similar iPhone app to fill the void. Or that Apple could fold the notion into their mail program (I presume iPhone has an Apple mail widget or app).
Uh, Gary's in Indiana, not Illinois. And Gary isn't dictating policy to Indiana. Gary is poor, they lost most of their industry when the steel mills shut down.
I don't want to plug Verizon but I just switched from Comcast to Verizon FIOS. I'm a Mac person but surprisingly, it wasn't too hard to connect once you learn to ignore the Verizon tech they send to connect you up.
First Verizon runs fiber up and down the street, then if you sign up, they run copper from the street to the cable splitter Comcast had on the outside of my house. They cut the Comcast cable and connect theirs, so now they running their stuff through the coax you have in your house. They also connect up the phone box they have outside the house (I got the triple play option...TV, phone, internet). They drill a hole in your house and connect up a battery to the phone box outside so if you lose power, you get several hours of phone use.
They put a settop box near your TV, connect that up and then the network box. The tech they send will know nothing about Macs. They will give you a password you will type into airport. They will neglect to tell you that case matters, in fact they will tell you the opposite. Their password must be entered in upper case and you cannot change it. (Maybe if you call them).
I've not tested throughput for internet connection but it seems relatively fast for my browser. There probably are not enough people connected up to test the system under any sort of load.
I think this fixation on *the* way forward is inspiring most of this discussion. Maybe it stems from the convergence of some computing devices to be entertainment vending machines. There are, most likely, many paths all of which go into the future and we can be on all of them at the same time.
There is also the difference in philosophies. MS has always tried to be everything to everyone. The reason appears to be a fear that someone else might actually succeed in any one area that someone might not be MS. So they fight against the entire market, construct their own closed ecosystem, get their sycophants to claim it is open, and still must do underhanded deals to get their stuff accepted.
Apple seems to segment their markets and hit each with an enticing but closed system for each. If there is a convergence for any of their devices, they seem to need to be convinced of it first in the marketplace and then make small leaps to close the gaps.
Open software is somewhat rudderless (in the sense of there being no system to rule them all) and tends more towards Apple's model of targeted systems.
The device manufacturers are clueless when it comes to software and interfaces and so are left dancing to what MS and Open software provide for them. They could regain the initiative but only if they adopt open software and open standards...which runs counter to their inherent bias that to succeed means to screw the opposition. This leads them directly back to MS which has a similar philosophy....all Business School Product think alike even if it will never succeed for them. They then jump in bed with MS, either get stabbed in the back or realize they are no longer in control (or realize MS stuff is too stifling) and venture out on their own (symbian, the new Franken-software Intel and Nokia are going to flog, etc.).
As much as I detest MS, but in fairness to their R&D...well....R&D in general...it does not need to translate into new products. It needs to get translated into products even if those products are currently existing and the R&D is simply streamlining them or making them better in some way. Those kinds of improvements will be off the radar to most end users. It isn't clear that MS is doing this but I expect some of it must be happening.
That said, MS probably has the problems many big companies have with R&D, any genuinely new idea for a new product will be seen as a threat by Business School Product running the company. They will marshal their forces to defend any current products by claiming the new product will cannibalize their old products. And that may very well be the case but the result is the tired lineup of products that MS is currently pimping.
What will you be willing to offer Iran to stop their nuclear program? Jews in death camps? That would make Iran happy but I don't think it will fly. Refusal to interfere in their internal politics? The U.S. is already doing this but the sawed off runts running the joint still accuse the U.S. of interference. In short, there's nothing you can offer the Iranians to stop their nuclear program. Nor N. Korea (well, you could offer S. Korea but then they'd just start again complaining of Japan).
And what will you do if you catch them continuing nuclear weapon development after they've agreed to stop it? Huff and puff like Obama is now? You may have noticed how effective that is. The only deterrence would be armed conflict that you must be willing to use. Everyone raise their hands who's up for another S. Asian war. Anyone?
Yeah, no weapon system should even be researched if it cannot fix all the U.S. defense problems at one go at even the experimental stage. What were they thinking?
Ever use MS Office on a Mac? You won't be convinced MS has any software skills.
The retail section of most appliance stores is filthy with MS inspired crapware. There's no way Apple will stand out enough in that environment to garner the sales necessary to make it worth the expense. That and MS will simply stab them in the back with under the table deals involving those appliance stores. MS didn't get to be a monopoly by playing fair and square. The fish always rots from the head to the tail.
Innovation in any large company is hard regardless of the market. I don't recall MS innovating much of anything...ever, but then I'm a Mac person.
Someone above wrote about what it was like to be in a small company taken over by MS. If the corporate culture is to promote a competition amongst the employees instead of competition geared toward competitors, then MS is probably what results. If you have a good idea, your co-workers will screw you because if it succeeds, they do not. That leaves the competition aspect of MS in the hands of Business School Product who understand nothing technical and but who really get "screwing a competitor" as a measure of success. Good ideas rise to the top at MS in spite of their current culture as opposed to because of their current culture.
Many other companies are in the same boat. HP used to be an innovator before they became PC/printer box makers. They screwed their engineering culture and now attempts to get it back are drowned by the Business School Product running the company. IBM appears somewhat similar although they do seem to have some hardware innovation kept alive, probably an oversight that will get killed off eventually.
It's a bit hard to tell where Apple's innovation comes from since the company is so secretive. Presumably, they have not neutered their engineering and some ideas are bubbling up from them.
Apple's image has nothing to do with it. We use them because their interfaces don't work like the ass that is MS.
Because then you can schedule the redo at your leisure rather than having to do it under the gun. Transitioning to a new system isn't done lightly and stopping it in midstream because your MS infected widget is coughing up a hairball is expensive.
If no one in an organization understands how some home grown widget works any longer, I should think one could make a case for that widget being replaced by a modern widget that conforms to internet standards so that the next upgrade won't break it and leave them screwed.
A big system, the Defense Travel System, injected up our arses by DoD continues to require an IE browser. I found the company that produced that pile of stinking shit. They took some system intended for some other use, and somehow got DoD (probably via Congressional influence) to afflict the DoD proles who must use it. They have no intention of not requiring to use MS inspired CrapWare.
The Joint Naval/Marine IT infrastructure organization has "standardized" on MS technologies. With this kind of government inspired stupidity (does security mean anything to these compu-weenies?), there's no getting rid of the malevolent influence of MS.
He's 74 years old. Maybe he'll have a very short life back in China.
And if we all close our eyes and click our heels, we'll be back in Kansas.
More to the point, we Apple people simply like their interfaces and the way the software matches the hardware. Those of us with a CS background appreciate Unix under the hood. MS produces interfaces that could knock a dead buzzard off a shit wagon at 20 paces and...well...there's something under the hood, sort of like the dotty relative kept in the back room when company is over. And Linux interfaces reimplementing MS bad choices isn't doing it any good.