What makes you think Pakistan is safe? Iran seems to have an infatuation with missiles and nukes. Korea is run by, you know, a bunch of well-adjusted, polite and totally insane maniacs. Nope, no one to defend against here.
" Stripped of idealistic verbiage, capitalism is about greed" Bullshit, capitalism is about satisfying needs and as populations increase, those needs only increase.
"It doesn't take much insight to see that open source initiatives, tapping a vast pool of talent who contribute for no direct recompense, will bury the traditional capitalist software models."
Sure, and Linux is built by people who aren't being paid either. Come to think of it, no one writing software should be paid to write software and the world will be overflowing with the stuff. Why just yesterday I wrote drivers for my car's embedded systems.
Ah, but you should also count the emphasema (sp?), arterial sclerosis, increased blood pressure (and its associated maladies), etc. So your 20% isn't counting the true health cost.
Yeah, you're right. And 9/11 didn't happen, neither did NK's nuclear tests, nor their missile test. But Kimmie is a reasonable guy, he wouldn't do anything stupid. And those nice well adjusted al Qaeda guys, they just want to be loved.
As someone else above noted, the first may only go 200ft underground, the second will go the next 200ft, rinse, and repeat as often as necessary. You forget precision targeting. I hear the U.S. has gotten pretty good at that recently.
On the contrary, I think their attacks are going to be self-defeating. Posts such as yours point out the schtick being advertised (the schtick having same veracity as the Marketing Dept. of the Sirius Cybernetic Corp. from Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy). PHBs don't read these boards, tech-savvy people do (well, more so than PHBs).
Put in a boarder context, MS would like to define a collection of lies by which it would like to be judged. The terms of that judgement, however, are collectively settled upon. MS is in effect attempting to lie to itself, and therein lies the seeds of MS's failure, Their approach cannot work and will only further antagonize and engender opposition. Who among us wants to be dictated to by semi-evolved Business School Product (will the people from the marketing dept. at MS please put your hands down, its embarrassing)?
I wouldn't worry about it coming to the States, we believe in the right to bear arms which means we get to shoot the eyes out of any camera they attempt to put in our homes. "I'm sorry officer, sir, but that camera started smoking and I was worried the family would get burnt, so I had to shoot to put it out of its misery before it killed us all."
"basically forcing every other country to adopt nuclear weapons", Wow!! Hey, yer right! We're forcing Saudi Arabia to want nukes by forcing Iran to have nukes so they can threaten Israel which needs its nukes to defend against Iran...how sneaky of us. And Indonesia, we're encouraging India to have nukes so they can threaten Pakistan which we supported so they can have nukes, so that then Indonesia feels its needs nukes to defend against India should India target their brothers in Pakistan. And the Japanese, let's not leave them out of the equation. We've been threatening to invade N. Korea and steal their state secrets for decades causing them to get nukes so that Japan will want them to defend themselves against Vietnam who still doesn't trust us from the last war but does want us to be valued trading partner.
I very much see the wisdom of your world view. You starched your shorts again, didn't you?
I am not convinced people will start shelling out for addons. They usually get the OS "for free", it comes with the machine. They don't dare change it lest it stop working. Given MS's track record, they will screw up some addons and that will cause enough angst to get the easily spooked (i.e., most of the public) out buying addons.
Corporate might be a different matter. I'm unsure whether they'd go for addons. Also, MS would have to lock their addons down because others may decide to make addons for free. I tend to doubt FOSS would go for it en masse since they'd be supporting a locked down architecture. Every addon would require a Corporate entity to extensively test. That's going to limit the appeal with addons. Right now, they extensively test on major upgrades they feel they must have. A stream of addons would be rejected as nickel and diming Corporate and the testing required for an addon wouldn't be significantly less than a major upgrade.
The problem with your prescription is that MS has no room to grow under it. That's a problem for them because it will mean stagnation and with it, a falling stock price and a susceptibility to change due to some other company's agenda, not theirs. As much as consumers abhor change, there is a reason they abhor it in MS's case. In MS's case, change usually means pain because of the investment (intellectual and monetary) involved in the use of a computer for anything beyond treating it as an entertainment vending machine. If a user treats it as a vending machine, any OS will do and that user won't notice MS being replaced. If a user needs it for something deeper requiring apps and learning, then that user will resist change. If a user must change, s/he starts looking around for choices meaning MS could lose that user. The paradox is that MS has built their company around being all things to all users. So, if they remain static, they'll lose a segment of the vending machine users. If they change, they'll lose a segment of the non-vending machine users. If their business model is maxed out, as I tend to think it is, then losing any users means a decrease in revenue.
Also, it fits well in the phrase "the system administrator simply cannot be arsed to do his job" whereas "the system administrator simply cannot be assed to do his job" sounds vaguely kinky.
Bullshit, what you call capitalism ain't. You set up a strawman of unrestricted freedom and then attempt to impress us by blowing it down.
The "free" in "free market" refers to freedom of entry and exit. It doesn't mean free to act like rapacious beast. The "free" in "free market" always required law and regulation to constrain people's behavior so that entry and exit remain free.
There was a rage among the psuedo-intellectuals in tenured positions (who discovered Marxism during the 60's) to claim that there were no failed examples of Marxism because it had never been really tried. They conveniently forgot that it was the attempts at producing it which failed. Likewise, your strawman notion of capitalism is also an ideal that will always fail. The problem is your definition...like Marx and Engle's system for Communism. Now lets discuss whether the attempts at "Capitalism" work better than the attempts at Communism.
If anyone caught Gen. Patraeus's briefing last week, I forget where it was but it was a public briefing, he constantly referred to Microsoft. Usually, the phrasing went something like, "if Microsoft will allow this". I noted that several of his slides were a bit odd in that there were arrows that really pointed no where and had no information content that I could discern. In the Q&A afterward, he actually pointed out the MS person who helped him create the slides. That would explain the totally useless arrows. But I was struck that MS actually has a representative to help the brass do Powerpoint. Until that changes, DoD will always be enthralled by MS and their Powerpoint bulletpoints.
Just as a brief aside, there is a Stargate SG-1 episode where the General has been replaced by some other Air Force General and he calls O'Neill into his office to complain about the fonts and the fact that he'd prefer there be more bullet points in his report. The look on O'Neill's face was just too good.
theRegister has this story and a link, http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/cmvcr/Domestic%20cats.html. I have two female Siamese, Tinkerbell has this purr behavior and Ariel doesn't yet they are litter mates. Ariel manipulates me in other ways that Tinkerbell doesn't. They do seem to put an effort into the manipulation.
I have a horror story about Bank of America; never get near that bank without a flamethrower or a bazooka. Pa lend out some of his IRA money to various companies. The loans were in his IRA portfolio and kept at Fleet Bank. Fleet got bought by BofA and then the fun started. There was one remaining loan by that time since I had cleaned up the rest. The loan was to a microbrewery and they religiously pay their monthlies on time every month. BofA decided they had a problem with a loan in an IRA and wanted it and the IRA gone. They decided to charge $8K a year on about $64,000 worth of loan to keep it on their books and if I would like, the IRA (now the sole retirement for Ma since Pa went to the Great Food Bowl in the Sky) should be moved to somewhere else, anywhere but BofA. As they well knew, no other IRA keeper would accept an account with a loan in it, so we had to take it out in one large disbursement which caused $16,000 in taxes due to Uncle Sam. Under a typical year, Ma wouldn't pay anything. So thank you BofA from the bottom of my heart where it is cold and thinks wicked thoughts.
Hear, Hear! I nominate you for the Rory Award For The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word "Fuck" In A Serious Slashdot Reply. I find your argument very persuasive, can I pay you for your newletter?
Errr...you might want to look up IBM's hardware business, their mainframes are still doing well as are their servers. In the coming Cloud (sic), they may do even better. Jobs didn't appeal to people's vanity, only a Microsoft slave would say something like that. Jobs appeals to an sense of aesthetics, there's a big difference. Business standardized on the throw-away machine, it is all Business School Product know.
People do not respect power so much as they fear it. One can only keep a market in fear for so long before retribution comes in the form of people walking away from it. It is a sad commentary on a company whose motto appears to be: our customers loathe us, but stay because they fear us. This isn' t a recipe for long term success.
I got the general impression that MS got so big and unwieldy that it is difficult to assign direction to Gates or Ballmer. They seem to have spent most of the time since 2000 reacting, not leading. Gates didn't so much leave as he simply faded into insignificance. If he'd stayed, it wouldn't have changed the company which seems to lurch into markets solely because growth in their mature markets has stopped. They aren't leading advances in their mature markets either. They have nothing seemingly to offer to new markets, namely because the old strategy of letting others develop them before marching in and stealing customers won't work in the current environment. The new markets are fast moving, by the time MS decides to jump, the market isn't where they thought it was. If Gates had been on the ball from 2000 onward, he still didn't have the organization that could move quickly, decisively, and accurately with a product that could capture the market.
Apple would be in a similar position had they not the current management which is looking to define new markets or show how a staid market can be rejuvenated with a sharp line of products. The U.S. based auto industry lapsed into similar unconsciousness.
Yeah, but by announcing it now for future delivery in 2010, MS will have plenty of time to sour the reception of the OEMs that Google thinks it has lined up. I wouldn't be surprised if in 2010, Google finds no OEM willing to ship their new OS. I hope I'm wrong but then Ballmer is very predictable.
It moves the computing world closer to MS controlled and controlling technologies. ECMAs standards mean nothing, when MS decides to take the standard in a new direction, it will go there.
The U.S. no longer has to worry about nuclear war? Probably. However, those nice N. Koreans are about as well adjusted as a squirrel after his third cup of coffee. Want to bet that even knowing full well they'd get annihilated, they wouldn't lob one in our direction if they started something they couldn't win? How about Al Qaeda and those gentle Islamic fanatics. Care to guess what they'd do with one of Pakistan's nukes if they were to, I don't know, maybe get one slipped to them as long as no they didn't ask questions?
Yes, DoD is expensive, losing a war is vastly more expensive. Let's talk some numbers, shall we. The U.S. DoD recurring budget (forgetting about Iraq and Afghanistan) is roughly $600 Billion/yr. Our recurring budget deficit is over $1 trillion. So even halving DoD's budget won't put us in the money. That doesn't count the Me Generation demanding their slice when they start retiring because there's nothing worse than a Baby Boomer who isn't made to feel the center of attention. Deficits from those nutjobs are well north of several trillion.
So no, there's isn't plenty of money to go around. Also, before you hop on the disarmament wagon train, you might want to consider that other countries reactions to the loss of the U.S. nuclear umbrella are probably not what you'd like them to be. First off, if Iran goes nuclear and the U.S. isn't around to back up the Arabs that hate us, the Arabs will want theirs too...of course they could rely on the Europeans...bwahahaahahaha...seriously, no one relies on those jokers. Hell, the U.S. is allied with them and knows better than to rely on them. Then there's the Asian countries who dearly love their Chinese brothers...as long as the their Chinese brothers don't have designs on their land, raw materials, etc...which they do. They will likely demand a nuclear counterpoint to China, Japan will find their pacifist notions are mere indulgences they can ill afford with China pushing them around, not to mention those nice well-adjusted N. Koreans.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you think Pakistan is safe? Iran seems to have an infatuation with missiles and nukes. Korea is run by, you know, a bunch of well-adjusted, polite and totally insane maniacs. Nope, no one to defend against here.
Such a witty put-down...you really showed us! I feel so baaaaad...
" Stripped of idealistic verbiage, capitalism is about greed" Bullshit, capitalism is about satisfying needs and as populations increase, those needs only increase.
"It doesn't take much insight to see that open source initiatives, tapping a vast pool of talent who contribute for no direct recompense, will bury the traditional capitalist software models."
Sure, and Linux is built by people who aren't being paid either. Come to think of it, no one writing software should be paid to write software and the world will be overflowing with the stuff. Why just yesterday I wrote drivers for my car's embedded systems.
Ah, but you should also count the emphasema (sp?), arterial sclerosis, increased blood pressure (and its associated maladies), etc. So your 20% isn't counting the true health cost.
Yeah, you're right. And 9/11 didn't happen, neither did NK's nuclear tests, nor their missile test. But Kimmie is a reasonable guy, he wouldn't do anything stupid. And those nice well adjusted al Qaeda guys, they just want to be loved.
As someone else above noted, the first may only go 200ft underground, the second will go the next 200ft, rinse, and repeat as often as necessary. You forget precision targeting. I hear the U.S. has gotten pretty good at that recently.
On the contrary, I think their attacks are going to be self-defeating. Posts such as yours point out the schtick being advertised (the schtick having same veracity as the Marketing Dept. of the Sirius Cybernetic Corp. from Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy). PHBs don't read these boards, tech-savvy people do (well, more so than PHBs).
Put in a boarder context, MS would like to define a collection of lies by which it would like to be judged. The terms of that judgement, however, are collectively settled upon. MS is in effect attempting to lie to itself, and therein lies the seeds of MS's failure, Their approach cannot work and will only further antagonize and engender opposition. Who among us wants to be dictated to by semi-evolved Business School Product (will the people from the marketing dept. at MS please put your hands down, its embarrassing)?
I wouldn't worry about it coming to the States, we believe in the right to bear arms which means we get to shoot the eyes out of any camera they attempt to put in our homes. "I'm sorry officer, sir, but that camera started smoking and I was worried the family would get burnt, so I had to shoot to put it out of its misery before it killed us all."
"basically forcing every other country to adopt nuclear weapons", Wow!! Hey, yer right! We're forcing Saudi Arabia to want nukes by forcing Iran to have nukes so they can threaten Israel which needs its nukes to defend against Iran...how sneaky of us. And Indonesia, we're encouraging India to have nukes so they can threaten Pakistan which we supported so they can have nukes, so that then Indonesia feels its needs nukes to defend against India should India target their brothers in Pakistan. And the Japanese, let's not leave them out of the equation. We've been threatening to invade N. Korea and steal their state secrets for decades causing them to get nukes so that Japan will want them to defend themselves against Vietnam who still doesn't trust us from the last war but does want us to be valued trading partner.
I very much see the wisdom of your world view. You starched your shorts again, didn't you?
I am not convinced people will start shelling out for addons. They usually get the OS "for free", it comes with the machine. They don't dare change it lest it stop working. Given MS's track record, they will screw up some addons and that will cause enough angst to get the easily spooked (i.e., most of the public) out buying addons.
Corporate might be a different matter. I'm unsure whether they'd go for addons. Also, MS would have to lock their addons down because others may decide to make addons for free. I tend to doubt FOSS would go for it en masse since they'd be supporting a locked down architecture. Every addon would require a Corporate entity to extensively test. That's going to limit the appeal with addons. Right now, they extensively test on major upgrades they feel they must have. A stream of addons would be rejected as nickel and diming Corporate and the testing required for an addon wouldn't be significantly less than a major upgrade.
The problem with your prescription is that MS has no room to grow under it. That's a problem for them because it will mean stagnation and with it, a falling stock price and a susceptibility to change due to some other company's agenda, not theirs. As much as consumers abhor change, there is a reason they abhor it in MS's case. In MS's case, change usually means pain because of the investment (intellectual and monetary) involved in the use of a computer for anything beyond treating it as an entertainment vending machine. If a user treats it as a vending machine, any OS will do and that user won't notice MS being replaced. If a user needs it for something deeper requiring apps and learning, then that user will resist change. If a user must change, s/he starts looking around for choices meaning MS could lose that user. The paradox is that MS has built their company around being all things to all users. So, if they remain static, they'll lose a segment of the vending machine users. If they change, they'll lose a segment of the non-vending machine users. If their business model is maxed out, as I tend to think it is, then losing any users means a decrease in revenue.
Also, it fits well in the phrase "the system administrator simply cannot be arsed to do his job" whereas "the system administrator simply cannot be assed to do his job" sounds vaguely kinky.
Bullshit, what you call capitalism ain't. You set up a strawman of unrestricted freedom and then attempt to impress us by blowing it down.
The "free" in "free market" refers to freedom of entry and exit. It doesn't mean free to act like rapacious beast. The "free" in "free market" always required law and regulation to constrain people's behavior so that entry and exit remain free.
There was a rage among the psuedo-intellectuals in tenured positions (who discovered Marxism during the 60's) to claim that there were no failed examples of Marxism because it had never been really tried. They conveniently forgot that it was the attempts at producing it which failed. Likewise, your strawman notion of capitalism is also an ideal that will always fail. The problem is your definition...like Marx and Engle's system for Communism. Now lets discuss whether the attempts at "Capitalism" work better than the attempts at Communism.
If anyone caught Gen. Patraeus's briefing last week, I forget where it was but it was a public briefing, he constantly referred to Microsoft. Usually, the phrasing went something like, "if Microsoft will allow this". I noted that several of his slides were a bit odd in that there were arrows that really pointed no where and had no information content that I could discern. In the Q&A afterward, he actually pointed out the MS person who helped him create the slides. That would explain the totally useless arrows. But I was struck that MS actually has a representative to help the brass do Powerpoint. Until that changes, DoD will always be enthralled by MS and their Powerpoint bulletpoints.
Just as a brief aside, there is a Stargate SG-1 episode where the General has been replaced by some other Air Force General and he calls O'Neill into his office to complain about the fonts and the fact that he'd prefer there be more bullet points in his report. The look on O'Neill's face was just too good.
Let's not bring managers into this.
theRegister has this story and a link, http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/cmvcr/Domestic%20cats.html. I have two female Siamese, Tinkerbell has this purr behavior and Ariel doesn't yet they are litter mates. Ariel manipulates me in other ways that Tinkerbell doesn't. They do seem to put an effort into the manipulation.
I have a horror story about Bank of America; never get near that bank without a flamethrower or a bazooka. Pa lend out some of his IRA money to various companies. The loans were in his IRA portfolio and kept at Fleet Bank. Fleet got bought by BofA and then the fun started. There was one remaining loan by that time since I had cleaned up the rest. The loan was to a microbrewery and they religiously pay their monthlies on time every month. BofA decided they had a problem with a loan in an IRA and wanted it and the IRA gone. They decided to charge $8K a year on about $64,000 worth of loan to keep it on their books and if I would like, the IRA (now the sole retirement for Ma since Pa went to the Great Food Bowl in the Sky) should be moved to somewhere else, anywhere but BofA. As they well knew, no other IRA keeper would accept an account with a loan in it, so we had to take it out in one large disbursement which caused $16,000 in taxes due to Uncle Sam. Under a typical year, Ma wouldn't pay anything. So thank you BofA from the bottom of my heart where it is cold and thinks wicked thoughts.
Hear, Hear! I nominate you for the Rory Award For The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word "Fuck" In A Serious Slashdot Reply. I find your argument very persuasive, can I pay you for your newletter?
Errr...you might want to look up IBM's hardware business, their mainframes are still doing well as are their servers. In the coming Cloud (sic), they may do even better. Jobs didn't appeal to people's vanity, only a Microsoft slave would say something like that. Jobs appeals to an sense of aesthetics, there's a big difference. Business standardized on the throw-away machine, it is all Business School Product know.
People do not respect power so much as they fear it. One can only keep a market in fear for so long before retribution comes in the form of people walking away from it. It is a sad commentary on a company whose motto appears to be: our customers loathe us, but stay because they fear us. This isn' t a recipe for long term success.
I got the general impression that MS got so big and unwieldy that it is difficult to assign direction to Gates or Ballmer. They seem to have spent most of the time since 2000 reacting, not leading. Gates didn't so much leave as he simply faded into insignificance. If he'd stayed, it wouldn't have changed the company which seems to lurch into markets solely because growth in their mature markets has stopped. They aren't leading advances in their mature markets either. They have nothing seemingly to offer to new markets, namely because the old strategy of letting others develop them before marching in and stealing customers won't work in the current environment. The new markets are fast moving, by the time MS decides to jump, the market isn't where they thought it was. If Gates had been on the ball from 2000 onward, he still didn't have the organization that could move quickly, decisively, and accurately with a product that could capture the market.
Apple would be in a similar position had they not the current management which is looking to define new markets or show how a staid market can be rejuvenated with a sharp line of products. The U.S. based auto industry lapsed into similar unconsciousness.
Yeah, but by announcing it now for future delivery in 2010, MS will have plenty of time to sour the reception of the OEMs that Google thinks it has lined up. I wouldn't be surprised if in 2010, Google finds no OEM willing to ship their new OS. I hope I'm wrong but then Ballmer is very predictable.
It moves the computing world closer to MS controlled and controlling technologies. ECMAs standards mean nothing, when MS decides to take the standard in a new direction, it will go there.
WWII...we waited, we got hurt, and so did countless others much more so than we.
What's bad is that it furthers MS's goal of turning computing into a vending machine that they can tax. Maybe that feels good to you.
The U.S. no longer has to worry about nuclear war? Probably. However, those nice N. Koreans are about as well adjusted as a squirrel after his third cup of coffee. Want to bet that even knowing full well they'd get annihilated, they wouldn't lob one in our direction if they started something they couldn't win? How about Al Qaeda and those gentle Islamic fanatics. Care to guess what they'd do with one of Pakistan's nukes if they were to, I don't know, maybe get one slipped to them as long as no they didn't ask questions?
Yes, DoD is expensive, losing a war is vastly more expensive. Let's talk some numbers, shall we. The U.S. DoD recurring budget (forgetting about Iraq and Afghanistan) is roughly $600 Billion/yr. Our recurring budget deficit is over $1 trillion. So even halving DoD's budget won't put us in the money. That doesn't count the Me Generation demanding their slice when they start retiring because there's nothing worse than a Baby Boomer who isn't made to feel the center of attention. Deficits from those nutjobs are well north of several trillion.
So no, there's isn't plenty of money to go around. Also, before you hop on the disarmament wagon train, you might want to consider that other countries reactions to the loss of the U.S. nuclear umbrella are probably not what you'd like them to be. First off, if Iran goes nuclear and the U.S. isn't around to back up the Arabs that hate us, the Arabs will want theirs too...of course they could rely on the Europeans...bwahahaahahaha...seriously, no one relies on those jokers. Hell, the U.S. is allied with them and knows better than to rely on them. Then there's the Asian countries who dearly love their Chinese brothers...as long as the their Chinese brothers don't have designs on their land, raw materials, etc...which they do. They will likely demand a nuclear counterpoint to China, Japan will find their pacifist notions are mere indulgences they can ill afford with China pushing them around, not to mention those nice well-adjusted N. Koreans.