And they had a book value of about $98K as of their last quarterly report in Yahoo (which was Mar 05, I think) and just borrowed $3M at 10% interest last december - with a 10% commission to their loan agent. Their R&D budget seems to be a steady $0/quarter, so they don't do any of that. Their scientific advisor is a dermatologist, which isn't too surprising since they are a spinoff of a skin creme company. The website looks amatureish. As of todays market close, this company with a book value of (at most) $98K, no products and no R&D budget, now has a market cap of $46M. Can you say scam?
We shouldn't even bother landing a crewed vehicle on the moon; been there, done that. It is a total waste of time, money, and resources. How about we spend the limited resource dollars available on doing useful science instead of some halfwit's recycled 1960's 'vision thing' (or more accurately, the 'aerospace industry welfare thing'). Either than, or just don't spend it at all and try closing the deficit.
[So even though the average temp is increasing, the amplitude is increasing even faster.]
That's why it is global warming and not local warming that people are concerned about. FWIW, here in the SF Bay area, we already have cherry blossoms. I've been here almost twenty years and I don't remember ever having cheery blossoms in January. But that doesn't say anything about the global situation, just that it has been a really mild winter here.
The problem is, at least in the software development world, that the majority of meetings are about the same topic: "How can we bring the schedule in without dropping any features?". Since there usually isn't any solution to this problem, the meeting fails to achieve it's goal (and makes the schedule T hours * N participants later) resulting in another meeting the next day (or perhaps later the same day) on the exact same topic. Sometimes I think software engineers are required to check their brains at the door when they are 'promoted' into management.
Vista will be 'The most successful operating system release in history' simply because the overwhelming majority of computer users won't have a choice; it will come pre-installed with their computer whether they want it or not. It's good to be an abusive monopolist. This certainly does show that Vista is not 'completely rewritten from scratch', marketing BS to the contrary. It is truly astounding that Microsoft can dump anything, no matter how preposterous, on the PR newswire and have it accepted as gospel truth.
[So because one program running on Mono is causing problems, you're assumption is that the entire platform is bad and shouldn't be allowed near your machine?]
Yep, that and because I can't easily tell what program is causing the problem. FWIW, I reinstalled SuSE 10 without installing Mono, and the problem is solved. Whatver the offending program was, I don't miss it now that it is gone.
I don't expect Mono to be around long anyway. Eventually Microsoft will sue Novell for patent infringement, and that will be the end of Mono. It is just a matter of time.
Mono appears to be the single biggest consumer of CPU cycles on my laptop running SuSE 10, and I have no idea what it is doing but I seem to have a hang somewhere in the desktop launch. I'm guessing, that since it is the only thing running, Mono is the culprit. So if Fedora 5 core includes it, I won't be installing it. As near as I can tell, Mono is the FOSS answer to Microsoft's anser to a question that nobody asked, or to paraphrase Dennis Ritchie, Mono fills a much needed gap in computer languages/runtime environments.
The rash of Microsoft security problems isn't because it was targeted at the corporate market, it is because it never had a security model to begin with, and then, to the extent that Microsoft manage to retrofit one, they immediately subverted in by introducing ActiveX. ActiveX was a feature that no customer, corporate or otherwise, was demanding. But Microsoft needed it to prevent Java from getting traction. The rest, as they say, is history.
Microsoft still owns 95% of the desktop computing market.
Monopolies can and do reduce prices during periods of competition in order to crush that compeition, and then raise prices later on. That is what Microsoft is doing now. It's called predatory pricing, and it has worked extremely well for Microsoft in the past, and it is a tool they will continue to use.
Microsoft's products have gotten better, but they were starting with a totally abysmal product, and their
OS product is still inferior to most of their competitors in everything except applications and driver availability. Yet they continue to control the market by controlling the distribution channel. The question you should always ask is 'why can't I buy a Dell, HP, or other major brand computer with no OS with the price of Windows deducted?'. The answer is you can't because Microsoft doesn't allow it. That's the sort of power that only a monopolist can wield.
[ I'll grant that the repetitive get/set wrappers are unfortunate and unnecessary. ]
It's worth mentioning though that the language doesn't force you to implement the accessors. If you don't think the wrappers buy anything, you can just make the members public.
As near as I can tell, the 'advantage' of the Windows method over what Unix does is something invented by Microsoft's marketing department, so you see, they do innovate!
You must have gotten a different version of VS.NET then I got through the student discount program at my Univ. I brirfly had it installed on my laptop (dual boot XP and FC3). I paid $15 and it would have been a bargain at 1/2 the price. It sucks up an ungodly amount of disk space, wastes tons of screen real estate on eye candy (just what I need in an IDE!) and is not in any sense 'light weight'. I uninstalled it as soon as I needed the space for something useful and went back to booting Linux, coding in emacs, and debugging in Netbeans 4.1. There is a huge need for a light weight IDE for Java and.NET programming. VS.NET isn't it.
When the boss(es) tell you to piss away all your money on a PR, corporate welfare (aka contributions), and jobs (aka votes) project instead of science, that's what you do. NASA doesn't have any choice in the matter. I suspect a lot of people at NASA would rather do science, but it really isn't up to them.
You missed one thing: a large part of the cost of R&D, perhaps the majority, is already payed for by the taxpayers.The Bayh-Dole Act passed in 1990 allowed Universities that did medical research to obtain patents on the results of that research, and lead to the development of public-private 'partnerships' where the bulk of the research is funded by the taxpayers through grants, and the taxpayers subsequently pay monoploy rates to the drug company 'partners' that eventually bring the drug to market. Were it not for this act, many drugs would start life as generics.
Sorry, but that isn't going to happen simply because of Microsoft's desktop monopoly and their hammer lock on the distribution channel. Windows Vista will be 'The most successful Windows release in history' simply because most consumers won't have a choice; Vista is going to be what comes bundled on their new machine. There won't be a lot of upgrade sales, but that doesn't matter much because PC hardware has reached almost disposable price levels. Vista could be worse then Windows ME and it would still be 'the most successful Windows rlease in history'. Always remeber, it's good to be an abusive monopolist.
Supposedly yes, but you have to have both 32 and 64 bit libs installed and I hvaen't tried it. This is true for Solaris too IIRC. I would imagine WinXP 64 does something similar.
[It pisses me off though, because I had to uninstall my 64bit install of Ubuntu 5.10 yesterday and install the x86 version because too much stuff didn't "just work".]
Yep, agreed. I had to go back to 'regular' x86 on Fedora 3 not only because of the Java installer issue, but also because the Cisco vpnclient wouldn't build. The vendors won't support Linux because there isn't a big enough market, and there isn't a big enough market because their isn't enough vendor support. The user base is growing though, and all it will take is a couple of mainstream vendors like Adobe to offer a first class product for Linux, and the floodgates will open.
[ The most prominent popular culture conservatives don't run Windows, nor are Microsoft cheerleaders. Rush Limbaugh and Tom Clancy are OSX users]
Rush was indeed cheerleading for Microsoft during the USDOJ vs Microsoft trial on a pretty much weekly basis, though I think it was more a case of if the Spawn of Satan Bill Clinton was for it, then it must be evil. I doubt seriously that Rush knows any more about software than he does about science; essentially nothing.
I'll start writing bug free, secure code when my employer starts putting the same amount of pressure on me to do that as they do to cram the next ill concieved feature just before the code 'freeze'. It isn't caused by a lack of ability, it is purely a lack of time. Time to think out a proper design, time to do an implementation, time to make a concerted effort to break security, and time to do it all over again whe a fundamental flaw is discovered. The sad reality is that customer's don't demand secure code until after there is a breach, so vendors don't insist on it either. Customers buy features. They only find out about the rampant security flaws after it is too late and they are locked in. It is the secret of Microsoft's success, and pretty much every other software vendors success. The remedy is to hold the vendors legally liable for security flaws, not the individual programers. If the vendors knew that they were liable, they wouldn't be applying continual pressure on the developers to ship broken products.
[IPTV is the needed "invention" to roll faster connections for less money. IPTV can offer a variable payment method - subscription (show, channel or all channels), pay per view, or ad]
IPTV is nothing new. I can already get video on demand from Comcast, as well as Internet and phone service if I wanted it, and I don't need Microsoft for any of it. The video-on-demand is OK for the free movies, but I wouldn't pay for it as the quality is poor and there is too much artifacting, and IPTV will do nothing to solve that. The bigger problem is that there simply isn't all that much content that is worth watching, let alone paying for, and 'sneaker net', aka, a trip to your local video store, still has much higher bandwidth than you are likely to have either via broadcast or landlines. Using sneaker net, I get about 9MB (that's Bytes)/sec for video, more if I rent more than 2 movies at a time. The internet is good for non-realtime video, and low bandwidth news clips, and that's about it.
Regulation has nothing to do with it either. There is a finite amount of bandwidth available at a price people are willing to pay. Better compression and transmission technology will continue to help, but that will happen with or without MS IPTV which is really totally irrelevant.
After 25 years in the business, that's all I can think of that Microsoft 'invented'. Microsoft is really good at monopolizing other people's ideas, novel preditory pricing schemes and spewing complete nonsense about how much they 'innovate', and that is all they are good at. BTW, the article points out the John Carroll has been a paid Microsoft shill since May. That might color his thinking somewhat.
Slashdot Mirror
And they had a book value of about $98K as of their last quarterly report in Yahoo (which was Mar 05, I think) and just borrowed $3M at 10% interest last december - with a 10% commission to their loan agent. Their R&D budget seems to be a steady $0/quarter, so they don't do any of that. Their scientific advisor is a dermatologist, which isn't too surprising since they are a spinoff of a skin creme company. The website looks amatureish. As of todays market close, this company with a book value of (at most) $98K, no products and no R&D budget, now has a market cap of $46M. Can you say scam?
We shouldn't even bother landing a crewed vehicle on the moon; been there, done that. It is a total waste of time, money, and resources. How about we spend the limited resource dollars available on doing useful science instead of some halfwit's recycled 1960's 'vision thing' (or more accurately, the 'aerospace industry welfare thing'). Either than, or just don't spend it at all and try closing the deficit.
[So even though the average temp is increasing, the amplitude is increasing even faster.]
That's why it is global warming and not local warming that people are concerned about. FWIW, here in the SF Bay area, we already have cherry blossoms. I've been here almost twenty years and I don't remember ever having cheery blossoms in January. But that doesn't say anything about the global situation, just that it has been a really mild winter here.
Afterall, if they don't make IE dependent on ActiveX, they are going to need some new improved method for virus writers to gain access to your system.
Given the inherent insecurity of ActiveX, why not eliminate it completely?
The problem is, at least in the software development world, that the majority of meetings are about the same topic: "How can we bring the schedule in without dropping any features?". Since there usually isn't any solution to this problem, the meeting fails to achieve it's goal (and makes the schedule T hours * N participants later) resulting in another meeting the next day (or perhaps later the same day) on the exact same topic. Sometimes I think software engineers are required to check their brains at the door when they are 'promoted' into management.
Vista will be 'The most successful operating system release in history' simply because the overwhelming majority of computer users won't have a choice; it will come pre-installed with their computer whether they want it or not. It's good to be an abusive monopolist. This certainly does show that Vista is not 'completely rewritten from scratch', marketing BS to the contrary. It is truly astounding that Microsoft can dump anything, no matter how preposterous, on the PR newswire and have it accepted as gospel truth.
[So because one program running on Mono is causing problems, you're assumption is that the entire platform is bad and shouldn't be allowed near your machine?]
Yep, that and because I can't easily tell what program is causing the problem. FWIW, I reinstalled SuSE 10 without installing Mono, and the problem is solved. Whatver the offending program was, I don't miss it now that it is gone.
I don't expect Mono to be around long anyway. Eventually Microsoft will sue Novell for patent infringement, and that will be the end of Mono. It is just a matter of time.
Mono appears to be the single biggest consumer of CPU cycles on my laptop running SuSE 10, and I have no idea what it is doing but I seem to have a hang somewhere in the desktop launch. I'm guessing, that since it is the only thing running, Mono is the culprit. So if Fedora 5 core includes it, I won't be installing it. As near as I can tell, Mono is the FOSS answer to Microsoft's anser to a question that nobody asked, or to paraphrase Dennis Ritchie, Mono fills a much needed gap in computer languages/runtime environments.
The rash of Microsoft security problems isn't because it was targeted at the corporate market, it is because it never had a security model to begin with, and then, to the extent that Microsoft manage to retrofit one, they immediately subverted in by introducing ActiveX. ActiveX was a feature that no customer, corporate or otherwise, was demanding. But Microsoft needed it to prevent Java from getting traction. The rest, as they say, is history.
Microsoft still owns 95% of the desktop computing market.
Monopolies can and do reduce prices during periods of competition in order to crush that compeition, and then raise prices later on. That is what Microsoft is doing now. It's called predatory pricing, and it has worked extremely well for Microsoft in the past, and it is a tool they will continue to use.
Microsoft's products have gotten better, but they were starting with a totally abysmal product, and their OS product is still inferior to most of their competitors in everything except applications and driver availability. Yet they continue to control the market by controlling the distribution channel. The question you should always ask is 'why can't I buy a Dell, HP, or other major brand computer with no OS with the price of Windows deducted?'. The answer is you can't because Microsoft doesn't allow it. That's the sort of power that only a monopolist can wield.
[ I'll grant that the repetitive get/set wrappers are unfortunate and unnecessary. ]
It's worth mentioning though that the language doesn't force you to implement the accessors. If you don't think the wrappers buy anything, you can just make the members public.
As near as I can tell, the 'advantage' of the Windows method over what Unix does is something invented by Microsoft's marketing department, so you see, they do innovate!
You must have gotten a different version of VS.NET then I got through the student discount program at my Univ. I brirfly had it installed on my laptop (dual boot XP and FC3). I paid $15 and it would have been a bargain at 1/2 the price. It sucks up an ungodly amount of disk space, wastes tons of screen real estate on eye candy (just what I need in an IDE!) and is not in any sense 'light weight'. I uninstalled it as soon as I needed the space for something useful and went back to booting Linux, coding in emacs, and debugging in Netbeans 4.1. There is a huge need for a light weight IDE for Java and .NET programming. VS.NET isn't it.
When the boss(es) tell you to piss away all your money on a PR, corporate welfare (aka contributions), and jobs (aka votes) project instead of science, that's what you do. NASA doesn't have any choice in the matter. I suspect a lot of people at NASA would rather do science, but it really isn't up to them.
You missed one thing: a large part of the cost of R&D, perhaps the majority, is already payed for by the taxpayers.The Bayh-Dole Act passed in 1990 allowed Universities that did medical research to obtain patents on the results of that research, and lead to the development of public-private 'partnerships' where the bulk of the research is funded by the taxpayers through grants, and the taxpayers subsequently pay monoploy rates to the drug company 'partners' that eventually bring the drug to market. Were it not for this act, many drugs would start life as generics.
[Seriously. Vista is going to flop]
Sorry, but that isn't going to happen simply because of Microsoft's desktop monopoly and their hammer lock on the distribution channel. Windows Vista will be 'The most successful Windows release in history' simply because most consumers won't have a choice; Vista is going to be what comes bundled on their new machine. There won't be a lot of upgrade sales, but that doesn't matter much because PC hardware has reached almost disposable price levels. Vista could be worse then Windows ME and it would still be 'the most successful Windows rlease in history'. Always remeber, it's good to be an abusive monopolist.
[Can Linux x86_64 run 32 bit apps?]
1 79
Supposedly yes, but you have to have both 32 and 64 bit libs installed and I hvaen't tried it. This is true for Solaris too IIRC. I would imagine WinXP 64 does something similar.
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=19
[It pisses me off though, because I had to uninstall my 64bit install of Ubuntu 5.10 yesterday and install the x86 version because too much stuff didn't "just work".]
Yep, agreed. I had to go back to 'regular' x86 on Fedora 3 not only because of the Java installer issue, but also because the Cisco vpnclient wouldn't build. The vendors won't support Linux because there isn't a big enough market, and there isn't a big enough market because their isn't enough vendor support. The user base is growing though, and all it will take is a couple of mainstream vendors like Adobe to offer a first class product for Linux, and the floodgates will open.
[ ...Sun to do a 64-bit verison of Java]
s essionid=DA5B35C261DED503304CFE10857DC842
There is a 64 bit Linux version of Java available at the bottom of this URL.
https://jsecom15.sun.com/ECom/EComActionServlet;j
I couldn't get the installer to run on FC4 when I tried but the package clearly does exist.
[ The most prominent popular culture conservatives don't run Windows, nor are Microsoft cheerleaders. Rush Limbaugh and Tom Clancy are OSX users]
Rush was indeed cheerleading for Microsoft during the USDOJ vs Microsoft trial on a pretty much weekly basis, though I think it was more a case of if the Spawn of Satan Bill Clinton was for it, then it must be evil. I doubt seriously that Rush knows any more about software than he does about science; essentially nothing.
I'll start writing bug free, secure code when my employer starts putting the same amount of pressure on me to do that as they do to cram the next ill concieved feature just before the code 'freeze'. It isn't caused by a lack of ability, it is purely a lack of time. Time to think out a proper design, time to do an implementation, time to make a concerted effort to break security, and time to do it all over again whe a fundamental flaw is discovered. The sad reality is that customer's don't demand secure code until after there is a breach, so vendors don't insist on it either. Customers buy features. They only find out about the rampant security flaws after it is too late and they are locked in. It is the secret of Microsoft's success, and pretty much every other software vendors success. The remedy is to hold the vendors legally liable for security flaws, not the individual programers. If the vendors knew that they were liable, they wouldn't be applying continual pressure on the developers to ship broken products.
[ But how much wired bandwidth could be added if more providers could run connections? Overregulation prevents that ]
Sadly, no. Cost, physics and Shannon's Law prevent that.
[IPTV is the needed "invention" to roll faster connections for less money. IPTV can offer a variable payment method - subscription (show, channel or all channels), pay per view, or ad]
IPTV is nothing new. I can already get video on demand from Comcast, as well as Internet and phone service if I wanted it, and I don't need Microsoft for any of it. The video-on-demand is OK for the free movies, but I wouldn't pay for it as the quality is poor and there is too much artifacting, and IPTV will do nothing to solve that. The bigger problem is that there simply isn't all that much content that is worth watching, let alone paying for, and 'sneaker net', aka, a trip to your local video store, still has much higher bandwidth than you are likely to have either via broadcast or landlines. Using sneaker net, I get about 9MB (that's Bytes)/sec for video, more if I rent more than 2 movies at a time. The internet is good for non-realtime video, and low bandwidth news clips, and that's about it.
Regulation has nothing to do with it either. There is a finite amount of bandwidth available at a price people are willing to pay. Better compression and transmission technology will continue to help, but that will happen with or without MS IPTV which is really totally irrelevant.
After 25 years in the business, that's all I can think of that Microsoft 'invented'. Microsoft is really good at monopolizing other people's ideas, novel preditory pricing schemes and spewing complete nonsense about how much they 'innovate', and that is all they are good at. BTW, the article points out the John Carroll has been a paid Microsoft shill since May. That might color his thinking somewhat.