The interesting thing about the arguments the theory that global climate is getting warmer is that they have much in common with the arguments against evolution. The 'data' against global warming consists almost entirely of out of context quotations from sources of questionable accuracy most of which are hopelessly out of date. While climate models certainly have a large degree of uncertainty, it never seems to occur to critics of global warming that the amount of available computing power for running these models might be, shall we say, somewhat greater than it was 30 or 40 years ago. This strikes me as very simlar to anti-evolution arguments where Creationists insist on refuting Darwin apparently unaware that there has been a mountain of evidence accumulated in the last 120 years, and none of it is on their side. The sad fact is that anti-intellectualism is very much in vogue in the US.
Microsoft must be worried about FireFox if they feel the need to fire up the old Vaporware machine again. The fact of the matter is that Microsoft will do everything in it's power to avoid actually responding to customer requirements which I would characterize as roughly the following:
1) They would like not to have a new browser exploit every week, block popups, and refuse spyware.
2) They would like the browser to be standard conformant.
3) They would like the browser to be cross-platform.
Well, one out of three (maybe) ain't bad, I guess. The wonderful thing about being Microsoft is that it doesn't matter how good or bad IE7 is whenever it actually ships since it will have a 90% market share regardless of merit. Of course, the media will wet themselves over every 'technology preview' release from now until it actually ships extolling the virtues of whatever crap Microsoft dishes up. It's a lousy job, but somebody has to do it.
And here I just posted elsewhere that Win Server security was getting to be almost OK. You contradict yourself in this post. First you state that all OSes are alike from a security point of view, and then you state that Linux and Windows are so different, they can't be compared. Which is it? The problem is that both statements are false.
There are certainly difference in the ability to secure an operating system, and in fact there are reams of US military documents devoted to classifying systems by security capabilities. According to you, they are all equally secure.
W/R/T the functionality of Windows vs Linux, they both run databases, they both run mail servers, they both run identity services, they both run file services, and on, and on, and on. The internal implementations are completely different, but the systems are used for largely the same purposes, and in the case of Java programs, even the code is the same.
The reality is that for better or worse, primairly because of the success of TCP/IP, every server operating system is essentially a Unix variant. Microsoft is still playing the Unix fragmentation game by trying to introduce gratuitously incompatible features, and this is a game that they will eventual lose just as all the other proprietary Unix vendors are losing.
Dog bites Man! Details at 11.
Really, what does anybody expect the guy to say? There was bound to be some metric out there that could be twisted to show that Windows is more secure than Linux, and it is Mike Nash's job to find it and promote it. Nobody likes Windows less than I do, but the server version has made a lot of progress w/r/t to security. It still isn't good, but it is better than it used to be.
You would still have to be a complete idiot to think that Windows Server represents a good IT investment. Even if it was just as secure as Linux , and it isn't, it is wildly more expensive and feature poor. Desktop Windows has the advantage of driver and application availability over Linux. Both are valid, though over rated points. That isn't true on the server side. The application availability is roughly the same, and the number of wierd devices is low.
There are good reasons that Linux has a much higher growth rate than Windows in the server market, so Mr. Nash has his work cut out for him.
Every time somebody tells you that they can't do without Windows because they absolutely must have application X, you have just identified 2 expensive software products that your company can do just as well without. It might well do better.
Step 2: Thin clients. If your users are primarily using web based apps and email, they don't need a PC. SolarPC has some nice LTS machines that only cost a couple of hundred bucks. You will save money on air conditioning and power as well. And you will save a fortune on system administration.
Of course, YOU will be fired for suggesting Step 1 at 99% of the companies in America, so it would be wise to have a Plan B.
May I remind you that the margin of error was only a few hundred votes in 2000? There are more than enough people whose incomes are tied to NASA to make up that big a difference. Granted, this time around the margin was much larger, but BushCo had no way to know that in advance. I was saying that Kennedy was key to Florida's economy, I was saying that there were enough votes available that it was worth giving out some pork, and the 'man on Mars' fantasy is 100% pure USDA Pork.
It has nothing to do with Scientific payoff and everything to do with Electoral votes. If you wanted to pick up a key southern state, say Florida, and you knew that their key reason for existence was about to disappear, you might want to invent an extremely expensive, open ended, project to keep thousands of potential voters employed. Let's face it, the Mars Rovers and Cassini probe have demonstrated pretty conclusively that space exploration is a job for the bots. They are cheaper, more tolerant of extreme conditions, and if they die, nobody cares much. The 'man on mars' program has nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics.
No, that is complete nonsense. The virus problem is a Microsoft Windows problem. I've had a Linux box on the net for years with minimal maintainenve, and it has never had a breakin of any kind. Of course, it only has one port open and firewall is turned on, but that is pretty much the way it came. The real reason it hasn't been compromise is that:
1) It doesn't run Windows
2) It doesn'r run IE
3) It doesn't run Outlook
4) It doesn't run MS Office
What do these products have in common?
My wife's Windows PC, well, it has had Klez and spyware despite being behind a firewall and having anti-virus. My son's Windows PC has had spyware galore despite having a Windows firewall and anti-virus. My desktop Linux box? No spyware, no viruses, nothing - it works like the energizer bunny. I did have the teardrop attack when I was ignorant and did my first RedHat (6?) install on a machine connected to DSL. I think that was in 1999. Since then, the only Linux problems I have had are hardware failures.
Microsoft has more viruses and spyware because there are more copies of Windows and hence a more attractive taret for attacks, but primarily because it has inherent and intentional design defects. That is definitely Microsoft's fault. For example, a huge number of Window's attacks were due to ActiveX. Microsoft create ActiveX as their response to Java applets. Everybody told them they were insane, but Microsoft didn't care because they were afraid that if Java enabled browsers could do things that IE could not, customers might switch. The slew of ActiveX viruses was inevitable, and surely Microsoft was aware of the problem (since they were warned repeatedly), but they did it anyway. That has been their modus operandi from day one; do whatever it takes to keep a customer regardless of how much damage it does to the customer. Unfortunately, Windows user's, just as Bill Gates predicted, ARE like heroin users. They know it is killing them, but they can't stop.
When it came out, the only thing that was keeping me from buying one is that Apple was gouging for upgrades that would make the system minimally usable and that it isn't dual head. Since Apple has rethought their upgrade pricing, it is only the lack of dual head support. That said, I'd be happy to buy a mobile AMD64/Linux box in the similar form factor, so I hope Shuttle and some of the other micro PC vendors are paying attention. You would certainly need a fan for the AMD, but I could live with that is it was quite enough.
You, my friend, are seriously ignorant. The answers to these question are in fact already known by everybody except Bush, who is a moron, and people that get their science education from Rush Limbaugh instead of say, science books and classes. I would guess that you are in the later group since reportedly Bush II has not yet figured out how to use a computer. In short.
1) The effects are serious. At the very least, most of the worlds population centers will be flooded and uninhabitable. And that's the good news.
2) Absolutely no doubt that greenhouse gases contribute, and absolutely no dobut that human activity is responsbile for most of those additional greenhouse gases. The only question is how much it matters.
3) The cost of preventing it is negligable. Banning monster trucks masquerading as passenger cars would be a good first step and would cost very little. Replacing CRT's with LCD's will help and will cost the economy almost nothing. It might even help. Wind power could help. Nuclear might help. There are alot of things that could be done that might even help the economy as much or more than they hurt. They will hurt big oil and Detroit in the short term, which is of course why there well funded propaganda campaign to ridicule solid science.
4) Growth and welath don't work so well when your assets are, literally, under water.
Seriously get yourself into a science class ASAP. You are fantastically ignorant or trolling.
FWIW, a temperature rise of 11K will put most of Florida under water, and quite a bit of the east coast as well. And much of India and China. It will be gradual though, so there will likely only be trillions of dollars in damage, and relatively few immediate deaths, unlesss the warmer water really does cause more monster storms. Canada is looking more attractive all the time.
Didn't somebody mention in statistics class that two points out of tens of thousands do not indicate a trend? Did it is occur to you that perhaps the average temperature on the planet might have been different then the minimum or maximum termperature on that date? Are you really Bush II posting under an assumed name?
The problem is that even 2 degrees would cause billions, if not trillions of dollars in damage to low lying costal areas where the vast majority of the world's population lives. Of course Bush II thinks the problem needs to be studied for another 5 or 10 years, because who knows? If you do enough studies, one of them may crank out a result that you like.
Probably just becuase I'm old fashioned, but I absolutely can't stand incremental compilation. It disrupts my logical flow when I'm coding and I the pause while it is figuring stuff out drives me crazy. For me, it is more productive to just write code and fix the typos later. For debugging, much to my surprise, netbeans 4.0 is much better than Eclipse. It uses your existing ant build.xml file to construct it's project file, and feels a lot more responsive. I still wouldn't use it to acutally edit a program though.
Jonathan ought to just shut up and concentrate on his knitting. Given global warming, the glaciers move faster than Sun does these days. Having made a strategic decision to move to Opteron, 64 bt Solaris should have been available one quarter later. It still isn't here. It should ahve taken about 2 quaters to do a respin of the USIIIi such that was pin compatible with Opteron. It still hasn't happened. It should have taken a couple of quarters to crank out an Opteron version of the uniboard. It still hasn't happened. It should have taken a quarter or so to ditch lxrun and make Solaris 100% Linux compatible. It still hasn't happened.
The problem with your OpenOffice example is that Sun has been bleeding tons of red ink in general since they purchased StartOffice, and I suspect that they are bleeding quite a lot to maintain it. There is no incentive for anyone to buy a Sun platform to run OO, so the 'giving it away for free' and hoping for a profit someplace else doesn't work. In addition, the DOJ action has constrained MS from performing the sort of blatently illegal acts that would have prevented any distrbutor from selling StartOffice. Unless Sun is spending less developing StarOffice than they would on buying MS Office licences (and remembeer, most Sun employees run Unix of some sort which MS doesn't run on) bleeding money on StarOffice is a luxury they can't afford for long. That shows you just how exhorbitant Microsoft's price is when it may well cost a large company les s to develop their own Office suite.
That isn't true in the software industry for obvious reasons that Microsoft is fond of reporting in it's 'Get the facts' campaign. There is an extremely high price to pay in retraining, software acquisition, and transition costs for a company that has already standardized on a particular solution. If the current set of applications uses proprietary, patent encumbered protocols and file formats it may not even be possible to legally transfer your data to a new format. This means that any new competitor must not only undercut the current product on price, the price must be low enough to allow for the transition cost as well. That's just about impossible with proprietary software. In addition, software costs virtually nothing to manufacture after the first copy, so an entrenched competitor with a shipping product has an enormous advantage. The software monopolist can temporarily lower their prices to any price that is required to prevent a new competitor from gaining traction, and this ability to dictate price is sufficient to discourage any would be competitor from even entering the market. The new competitor will have no opportunity to even recover their development costs which means they never even try.GNU/Linux is threatening the Microsoft monopoly only because the business model doesn't fit the 'free enterprise system'. The thousands of contributors never expected to earn anything from the sale of their contribution, and by and large, they haven't.
Exactly right. This is called predatory pricing, and Microsoft is the world leader in preadatory pricing. If your recall, at one point, Borland and MS used to sell complete professional program development environments for less than $100. Neither company could turn a profit at that price, but Microsoft didn't have to since it had more than enough profit from it's OS monopoly to maintain the low price until Borland essentially tossed in the towel. For good measure, they hired away many of Borland's key people at exhorbitant salaries. Once Borland was no longer a factor, the price rapidly went up to $500. They did the same thing with Office suite prices until they crushed Lotus and then the price went up.Windows costs a heck of a lot more than it used to. realistically, if not for application and driver availbility, it would have to be considered almost the 4th best x86 operating system on the market. Were it not for Linux, which has a business model that doesn't rely on profit from the sale of the software, there would be effectively no competition and the price for Window's would be whtaver MS wanted to charge. This has nothing to do with the intrinsic goodness of Windows and has everything to do with illegal business practices that resulted in the MS stranglehold on application and driver availability. Finally, any measure of the price of MS software should include the price of trying to prevent exploits of inherent defects and repair of the after effects of those defects. A product with as many critical defects as Windows simply couldn't survive were there any alternatives with the same degree of hardware and application compatibility.
You can't 'raid' the Social Security Trust fund. The entire idea is nonsensical. What has happened is tha the Social Security Trust fund must, by law, buy US Treasury Bonds. These are backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government just like any other government security. They must be paid back or the government is in default, and the US government has never defaulted on it's debt. That is why US Treasuries are considered the safest investment in the world (well, they were before Bush II). The Federal government has run a small debt since the 60's with the exception of the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II years when the debt was (is) enormous, and the Clinton years where the budget was largely brought back into balance. At no point was the Social Security trust fund 'raided'. The money to make up for the debt was in large part borrowed from future Social Security recipients. The only people even proposing 'raid' Social Security are Bush II and the neo-fuedalists who want to renege on their obligation to pay that money back in order to allow for a tax system in which the richest people in the country pay the lowest effective tax rate. This is the plan that they refer to as Social Security 'reform'.
No funds are set aside to pay out ANY US treasury. The concept simply doesn't exist for Federal Governments as they, unlike everybody else, have the ability to print money. The thing that you, and the neo-feudalists, call an IOU is backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government which has exactly the same obligation (nay, more so) to be paid back as any other Government bond. If you want to direct your anger someplace, direct it where it belongs, at George W. Bush and the other neo-feudalists who have embarked on a grand scheme to steal from the poor and give to the rich which they call 'Social Security Reform'. Just another Big Lie from the world champions of Big Lies. IF you are concerned that these IOU's are so much worthless paper, write your Congressperson and tell him/her to roll back the Bush tax cuts (all of them), depart from Iraq on Jan 31 and give up the Imperial vision, repeal the Medicare prescription drug bill,... in fact, repeal every law signed by Bush II, and the budget would be in pretty good shape again.
Bill Clinton had a solution to the problem; pass responsible Federal budgets such that the amount of Federal accumulated debt out side the Social Security system was so small that the Federal governemnt in 2048 could easily repay its obligation to the SS system as well as have the flexibility to raise enough in taxes to cover a short term demographic problem. George W. Bush and his fellow neo-feudalists decided instead to steal from future Social Security recipients to give to the rich and conquer Iraq. Now, all of a sudden, Treasury bonds backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government have beome, according to the new-feudalists, worthless IOU's. If Bush succeeds in his plan to 'refom' Social Security, it will be the largest theft in history by a huge margin, and the impact will be felt most by from the poorest peopl. And these scum call themselves 'moral'.
I agree that it has all it needs for the market that Apple was shooting for, though it doesn't have quite enough for me personally. If the $499 included 512MB of mem (as it should) and had it been dual head, my check would have been in the mail by now. Maybe next year. Mac mini will be a huge success even without my order.
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The interesting thing about the arguments the theory that global climate is getting warmer is that they have much in common with the arguments against evolution. The 'data' against global warming consists almost entirely of out of context quotations from sources of questionable accuracy most of which are hopelessly out of date. While climate models certainly have a large degree of uncertainty, it never seems to occur to critics of global warming that the amount of available computing power for running these models might be, shall we say, somewhat greater than it was 30 or 40 years ago. This strikes me as very simlar to anti-evolution arguments where Creationists insist on refuting Darwin apparently unaware that there has been a mountain of evidence accumulated in the last 120 years, and none of it is on their side. The sad fact is that anti-intellectualism is very much in vogue in the US.
Microsoft must be worried about FireFox if they feel the need to fire up the old Vaporware machine again. The fact of the matter is that Microsoft will do everything in it's power to avoid actually responding to customer requirements which I would characterize as roughly the following:
1) They would like not to have a new browser exploit every week, block popups, and refuse spyware.
2) They would like the browser to be standard conformant.
3) They would like the browser to be cross-platform.
Well, one out of three (maybe) ain't bad, I guess. The wonderful thing about being Microsoft is that it doesn't matter how good or bad IE7 is whenever it actually ships since it will have a 90% market share regardless of merit. Of course, the media will wet themselves over every 'technology preview' release from now until it actually ships extolling the virtues of whatever crap Microsoft dishes up. It's a lousy job, but somebody has to do it.
And here I just posted elsewhere that Win Server security was getting to be almost OK. You contradict yourself in this post. First you state that all OSes are alike from a security point of view, and then you state that Linux and Windows are so different, they can't be compared. Which is it? The problem is that both statements are false.
There are certainly difference in the ability to secure an operating system, and in fact there are reams of US military documents devoted to classifying systems by security capabilities. According to you, they are all equally secure.
W/R/T the functionality of Windows vs Linux, they both run databases, they both run mail servers, they both run identity services, they both run file services, and on, and on, and on. The internal implementations are completely different, but the systems are used for largely the same purposes, and in the case of Java programs, even the code is the same.
The reality is that for better or worse, primairly because of the success of TCP/IP, every server operating system is essentially a Unix variant. Microsoft is still playing the Unix fragmentation game by trying to introduce gratuitously incompatible features, and this is a game that they will eventual lose just as all the other proprietary Unix vendors are losing.
Dog bites Man! Details at 11. Really, what does anybody expect the guy to say? There was bound to be some metric out there that could be twisted to show that Windows is more secure than Linux, and it is Mike Nash's job to find it and promote it. Nobody likes Windows less than I do, but the server version has made a lot of progress w/r/t to security. It still isn't good, but it is better than it used to be.
You would still have to be a complete idiot to think that Windows Server represents a good IT investment. Even if it was just as secure as Linux , and it isn't, it is wildly more expensive and feature poor. Desktop Windows has the advantage of driver and application availability over Linux. Both are valid, though over rated points. That isn't true on the server side. The application availability is roughly the same, and the number of wierd devices is low.
There are good reasons that Linux has a much higher growth rate than Windows in the server market, so Mr. Nash has his work cut out for him.
Every time somebody tells you that they can't do without Windows because they absolutely must have application X, you have just identified 2 expensive software products that your company can do just as well without. It might well do better.
Step 2: Thin clients. If your users are primarily using web based apps and email, they don't need a PC. SolarPC has some nice LTS machines that only cost a couple of hundred bucks. You will save money on air conditioning and power as well. And you will save a fortune on system administration. Of course, YOU will be fired for suggesting Step 1 at 99% of the companies in America, so it would be wise to have a Plan B.
Sorry, I was saying that Kennedy was NOT key to Florida's economy, but may have been key to a few thousand extra votes.
May I remind you that the margin of error was only a few hundred votes in 2000? There are more than enough people whose incomes are tied to NASA to make up that big a difference. Granted, this time around the margin was much larger, but BushCo had no way to know that in advance. I was saying that Kennedy was key to Florida's economy, I was saying that there were enough votes available that it was worth giving out some pork, and the 'man on Mars' fantasy is 100% pure USDA Pork.
It has nothing to do with Scientific payoff and everything to do with Electoral votes. If you wanted to pick up a key southern state, say Florida, and you knew that their key reason for existence was about to disappear, you might want to invent an extremely expensive, open ended, project to keep thousands of potential voters employed. Let's face it, the Mars Rovers and Cassini probe have demonstrated pretty conclusively that space exploration is a job for the bots. They are cheaper, more tolerant of extreme conditions, and if they die, nobody cares much. The 'man on mars' program has nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics.
No, that is complete nonsense. The virus problem is a Microsoft Windows problem. I've had a Linux box on the net for years with minimal maintainenve, and it has never had a breakin of any kind. Of course, it only has one port open and firewall is turned on, but that is pretty much the way it came. The real reason it hasn't been compromise is that:
1) It doesn't run Windows
2) It doesn'r run IE
3) It doesn't run Outlook
4) It doesn't run MS Office
What do these products have in common? My wife's Windows PC, well, it has had Klez and spyware despite being behind a firewall and having anti-virus. My son's Windows PC has had spyware galore despite having a Windows firewall and anti-virus. My desktop Linux box? No spyware, no viruses, nothing - it works like the energizer bunny. I did have the teardrop attack when I was ignorant and did my first RedHat (6?) install on a machine connected to DSL. I think that was in 1999. Since then, the only Linux problems I have had are hardware failures.
Microsoft has more viruses and spyware because there are more copies of Windows and hence a more attractive taret for attacks, but primarily because it has inherent and intentional design defects. That is definitely Microsoft's fault. For example, a huge number of Window's attacks were due to ActiveX. Microsoft create ActiveX as their response to Java applets. Everybody told them they were insane, but Microsoft didn't care because they were afraid that if Java enabled browsers could do things that IE could not, customers might switch. The slew of ActiveX viruses was inevitable, and surely Microsoft was aware of the problem (since they were warned repeatedly), but they did it anyway. That has been their modus operandi from day one; do whatever it takes to keep a customer regardless of how much damage it does to the customer. Unfortunately, Windows user's, just as Bill Gates predicted, ARE like heroin users. They know it is killing them, but they can't stop.
When it came out, the only thing that was keeping me from buying one is that Apple was gouging for upgrades that would make the system minimally usable and that it isn't dual head. Since Apple has rethought their upgrade pricing, it is only the lack of dual head support. That said, I'd be happy to buy a mobile AMD64/Linux box in the similar form factor, so I hope Shuttle and some of the other micro PC vendors are paying attention. You would certainly need a fan for the AMD, but I could live with that is it was quite enough.
You, my friend, are seriously ignorant. The answers to these question are in fact already known by everybody except Bush, who is a moron, and people that get their science education from Rush Limbaugh instead of say, science books and classes. I would guess that you are in the later group since reportedly Bush II has not yet figured out how to use a computer. In short.
1) The effects are serious. At the very least, most of the worlds population centers will be flooded and uninhabitable. And that's the good news.
2) Absolutely no doubt that greenhouse gases contribute, and absolutely no dobut that human activity is responsbile for most of those additional greenhouse gases. The only question is how much it matters.
3) The cost of preventing it is negligable. Banning monster trucks masquerading as passenger cars would be a good first step and would cost very little. Replacing CRT's with LCD's will help and will cost the economy almost nothing. It might even help. Wind power could help. Nuclear might help. There are alot of things that could be done that might even help the economy as much or more than they hurt. They will hurt big oil and Detroit in the short term, which is of course why there well funded propaganda campaign to ridicule solid science.
4) Growth and welath don't work so well when your assets are, literally, under water.
Seriously get yourself into a science class ASAP. You are fantastically ignorant or trolling.
FWIW, a temperature rise of 11K will put most of Florida under water, and quite a bit of the east coast as well. And much of India and China. It will be gradual though, so there will likely only be trillions of dollars in damage, and relatively few immediate deaths, unlesss the warmer water really does cause more monster storms. Canada is looking more attractive all the time.
Didn't somebody mention in statistics class that two points out of tens of thousands do not indicate a trend? Did it is occur to you that perhaps the average temperature on the planet might have been different then the minimum or maximum termperature on that date? Are you really Bush II posting under an assumed name?
The problem is that even 2 degrees would cause billions, if not trillions of dollars in damage to low lying costal areas where the vast majority of the world's population lives. Of course Bush II thinks the problem needs to be studied for another 5 or 10 years, because who knows? If you do enough studies, one of them may crank out a result that you like.
Probably just becuase I'm old fashioned, but I absolutely can't stand incremental compilation. It disrupts my logical flow when I'm coding and I the pause while it is figuring stuff out drives me crazy. For me, it is more productive to just write code and fix the typos later. For debugging, much to my surprise, netbeans 4.0 is much better than Eclipse. It uses your existing ant build.xml file to construct it's project file, and feels a lot more responsive. I still wouldn't use it to acutally edit a program though.
Jonathan ought to just shut up and concentrate on his knitting. Given global warming, the glaciers move faster than Sun does these days. Having made a strategic decision to move to Opteron, 64 bt Solaris should have been available one quarter later. It still isn't here. It should ahve taken about 2 quaters to do a respin of the USIIIi such that was pin compatible with Opteron. It still hasn't happened. It should have taken a couple of quarters to crank out an Opteron version of the uniboard. It still hasn't happened. It should have taken a quarter or so to ditch lxrun and make Solaris 100% Linux compatible. It still hasn't happened.
The problem with your OpenOffice example is that Sun has been bleeding tons of red ink in general since they purchased StartOffice, and I suspect that they are bleeding quite a lot to maintain it. There is no incentive for anyone to buy a Sun platform to run OO, so the 'giving it away for free' and hoping for a profit someplace else doesn't work. In addition, the DOJ action has constrained MS from performing the sort of blatently illegal acts that would have prevented any distrbutor from selling StartOffice. Unless Sun is spending less developing StarOffice than they would on buying MS Office licences (and remembeer, most Sun employees run Unix of some sort which MS doesn't run on) bleeding money on StarOffice is a luxury they can't afford for long. That shows you just how exhorbitant Microsoft's price is when it may well cost a large company les s to develop their own Office suite.
That isn't true in the software industry for obvious reasons that Microsoft is fond of reporting in it's 'Get the facts' campaign. There is an extremely high price to pay in retraining, software acquisition, and transition costs for a company that has already standardized on a particular solution. If the current set of applications uses proprietary, patent encumbered protocols and file formats it may not even be possible to legally transfer your data to a new format. This means that any new competitor must not only undercut the current product on price, the price must be low enough to allow for the transition cost as well. That's just about impossible with proprietary software. In addition, software costs virtually nothing to manufacture after the first copy, so an entrenched competitor with a shipping product has an enormous advantage. The software monopolist can temporarily lower their prices to any price that is required to prevent a new competitor from gaining traction, and this ability to dictate price is sufficient to discourage any would be competitor from even entering the market. The new competitor will have no opportunity to even recover their development costs which means they never even try.GNU/Linux is threatening the Microsoft monopoly only because the business model doesn't fit the 'free enterprise system'. The thousands of contributors never expected to earn anything from the sale of their contribution, and by and large, they haven't.
Exactly right. This is called predatory pricing, and Microsoft is the world leader in preadatory pricing. If your recall, at one point, Borland and MS used to sell complete professional program development environments for less than $100. Neither company could turn a profit at that price, but Microsoft didn't have to since it had more than enough profit from it's OS monopoly to maintain the low price until Borland essentially tossed in the towel. For good measure, they hired away many of Borland's key people at exhorbitant salaries. Once Borland was no longer a factor, the price rapidly went up to $500. They did the same thing with Office suite prices until they crushed Lotus and then the price went up.Windows costs a heck of a lot more than it used to. realistically, if not for application and driver availbility, it would have to be considered almost the 4th best x86 operating system on the market. Were it not for Linux, which has a business model that doesn't rely on profit from the sale of the software, there would be effectively no competition and the price for Window's would be whtaver MS wanted to charge. This has nothing to do with the intrinsic goodness of Windows and has everything to do with illegal business practices that resulted in the MS stranglehold on application and driver availability. Finally, any measure of the price of MS software should include the price of trying to prevent exploits of inherent defects and repair of the after effects of those defects. A product with as many critical defects as Windows simply couldn't survive were there any alternatives with the same degree of hardware and application compatibility.
No.
You can't 'raid' the Social Security Trust fund. The entire idea is nonsensical. What has happened is tha the Social Security Trust fund must, by law, buy US Treasury Bonds. These are backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government just like any other government security. They must be paid back or the government is in default, and the US government has never defaulted on it's debt. That is why US Treasuries are considered the safest investment in the world (well, they were before Bush II). The Federal government has run a small debt since the 60's with the exception of the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II years when the debt was (is) enormous, and the Clinton years where the budget was largely brought back into balance. At no point was the Social Security trust fund 'raided'. The money to make up for the debt was in large part borrowed from future Social Security recipients. The only people even proposing 'raid' Social Security are Bush II and the neo-fuedalists who want to renege on their obligation to pay that money back in order to allow for a tax system in which the richest people in the country pay the lowest effective tax rate. This is the plan that they refer to as Social Security 'reform'.
No funds are set aside to pay out ANY US treasury. The concept simply doesn't exist for Federal Governments as they, unlike everybody else, have the ability to print money. The thing that you, and the neo-feudalists, call an IOU is backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government which has exactly the same obligation (nay, more so) to be paid back as any other Government bond. If you want to direct your anger someplace, direct it where it belongs, at George W. Bush and the other neo-feudalists who have embarked on a grand scheme to steal from the poor and give to the rich which they call 'Social Security Reform'. Just another Big Lie from the world champions of Big Lies. IF you are concerned that these IOU's are so much worthless paper, write your Congressperson and tell him/her to roll back the Bush tax cuts (all of them), depart from Iraq on Jan 31 and give up the Imperial vision, repeal the Medicare prescription drug bill, ... in fact, repeal every law signed by Bush II, and the budget would be in pretty good shape again.
Bill Clinton had a solution to the problem; pass responsible Federal budgets such that the amount of Federal accumulated debt out side the Social Security system was so small that the Federal governemnt in 2048 could easily repay its obligation to the SS system as well as have the flexibility to raise enough in taxes to cover a short term demographic problem. George W. Bush and his fellow neo-feudalists decided instead to steal from future Social Security recipients to give to the rich and conquer Iraq. Now, all of a sudden, Treasury bonds backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government have beome, according to the new-feudalists, worthless IOU's. If Bush succeeds in his plan to 'refom' Social Security, it will be the largest theft in history by a huge margin, and the impact will be felt most by from the poorest peopl. And these scum call themselves 'moral'.
I agree that it has all it needs for the market that Apple was shooting for, though it doesn't have quite enough for me personally. If the $499 included 512MB of mem (as it should) and had it been dual head, my check would have been in the mail by now. Maybe next year. Mac mini will be a huge success even without my order.