At the same time, if you look beyond the individual worker, and the select few that make and shape policy, it is very possible to argue that the US is more corrupt than India. If you look at the influences of 3rd parties on government decissions in the US, it becomes quickly apparant how the government may not be corrupt in its foundations, but in its design outright.
How so? Wasn't the checks and balances system designed to give the government a measure of resistance to influence from third parties? Indeed, if you compare the American political system to some of the others, you'll find that there is less absolute corruption than in even Western European countries.
I'm not suggesting that the American system is perfect, or that it applies to all regions. I'm simply stating that the American government has less outright corruption than most places in the world.
The problem is that independent regulation doesn't tend to stay independent. The airline regulators in America used to be independent. However, over the years, as there was more exchange between the industry and regulatory body, the regulators were "captured" by the industry, and regulations were used to lock out new carriers, creating a high cost to fly anywhere. The regulated system also reinforced the hub-and-spoke model of flight scheduling, which tended to cut off smaller towns.
Yes, there have been problems with deregulation. However, it must be admitted that deregulation has cut prices by allowing low-cost carriers (like Southwest) to flourish by bringing a more efficient business model and serving previously untapped markets.
I agree that the free market has its pitfalls. However, excessive bureaucracy in a regulated environment can and often does choke out innovation and change.
For example, in India, it can take up to 3 years for one to get a phone line installed in his or her house, because of all of the bureaucracy and red tape. The phone company is a regulated government monopoly. The situation has gotten so bad that private individuals are finding that its easier and more profiable to string their own phone lines, despite the fact that its grossly inefficient (and far more expensive) for everyone to string their own lines.
Just saying that government regulation isn't a panacea.
Not to mention the 11% of Google's business they supply.
If AOL is spun off and killed, its not like its customers would just drop off the Internet. They would find other ISPs, and therefore Google would still presumably get their business. Its just that you'd see a host of smaller contributors to Google's traffic, rather than a large block coming from AOL.
Maybe you've been out since 1996, but the Linux kernel isn't and hasn't been a "one-man show" for quite a while. If Linus were to bite it, Linux would still continue on with teams and teams of other people.
The kernel would break for political reasons rather than technical reasons. The way I see it, Linus is the guy with enough prestige to hold the kernel together, maintaining a semblance of compatibility between the various distros. If Linus were to "bite it", you'd have at least Novell and RedHat forking. Both of these companies have been agitating to get certain features included in the kernel (example: Xen), and Linus' leadership and political skills is basically what is holding the kernel together.
I wish it weren't so, but you're right. Even worse is the fact that you often have no idea if the site you're connecting to practices good physical security that would protect you from someone walking onto their premises and stealing their credentials to pull off a man in the middle attack.
Give me access to a webmaster's computer for 5 minutes while he's out on break, and I can have a certificate for his domain in my control and be out the door.
This entire conversation presumes the presence of enough physical security to make this sort of activity impractical. Personally, I wouldn't trust a sysadmin who left his/her desk for more than 30 seconds without locking his/her workstation.
As has been posted many times before, there can be no electronic security without physical security.
another "stifling" factor: slow bandwith. unfortunately i only have friggin dial up, and anytime a website has done something that i could have run on my desktop, guess which is a lot slower by comparison.
Ummm... That's the whole point of AJAX: to use JavaScript to allow the client to take care of the pretty visual effects while the server sends the data using XML. This way, not only can pages change dynamically without refreshing, but the bandwidth load is lessenend greatly, as you're just transmitting XML formatted plaintext, rather than graphics.
You are, of course. All rights carry responsibility. The responsibility that goes along with free speech is that the speech may not cause physical harm to someone. In this case, the speech directly caused a panic and therefore led to physical harm, leaving you responsible as the person who exercised his right in an irresponsible way.
Property rights mean very little in this case. If I yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, I am responsible, whether it is my theater or someone else's.
In a corporate environment, though, the user does not expect to be able to install applications, or do mundane things like change the date/time on their machine. In a home environment, the user expects quite a bit more freedom on his/her machine, and therefore is likely to remain in Admin mode for the convenience, even though there are lower rights modes available.
You're right. Account management exists in large scale corporate networks. But the topic of this discussion is account management on single-user machines, and this is an area in which Apple still has the lead.
The problem with things like social security, and welfare is that they remove incentive to work.
When Social Security was conceived during the Great Depression, the entire point of the program was to remove the incentive to work. By providing a safety net for retirement, FDR was able to get the elderly out of the workforce, freeing up higher paying jobs for younger workers. However, that strategy is exactly the opposite of what you would want to do today, given the increasing proportion of the elderly in the population. As originally designed, the "disincentive to work" was a feature, rather than a bug.
You have every right to sentence yourself to a slow smokey painful death. You do not have the right to sentence me to the same by virtue my breathing secondhand smoke.
Is the name not a reference to their policy on IP? They pull in ideas from all over, but none of them ever make it back over the threshold....
To extend your analogy, like a black hole, MS pulls in information from all around it and releases it in mangled form. Look at Monad, their new scriptable shell. Is it not a bastardized version of the scriptable shells that have been available on Unix for years? And now with Singularity, they're trying to copy the Mac OSX microkernel architecture.
According to the article, the existing Windows infrastructure was dying. For them, Windows was no longer an investement. Instead, it had turned itself into a cost (measured in downtime, lost productivity, etc.). Since he didn't have any additional money to spend on refurbishing and upgrading the Windows infrastructure, Uemura just decided to replace it free software.
In other words, he treated the money spent on Windows as a sunk cost. Rather than throwing good money after bad, Uemura switched the infrastructure to OpenBSD, eliminating the ongoing cost of staying with Windows.
Your comment is spot-on. I have a Palm Zire, that I bought for $99. 300MHz processor, 4 MB RAM, no color screen, no backlight. I've used that thing for almost a month without recharging it, and it still has about 1/4th of its battery capacity (according to the meter). It doesn't aspire to much, but it does 2 things and does them well: to-do lists, and calendaring (it has no problems syncing with Evolution).
If we had more PDAs like that, the market might be revived. But all I see today are multi-use devices that aspire to be a cross between a laptop, PSP, and iPod, and fail at all three uses, and have a terrible battery life to boot.
A lightyear is a measure of distance, like miles. You saying it can achieve 240 miles per lightyear would be like me saying it can go 25 miles per meter.
Do you mean 240 miles per year? Given the scale that this thing operates on, that would still be pretty quick. Maybe 24 inches in a year, but 240 miles? That's a bit much.
Yes, I know its a joke, but it doesn't make any sense the way you've written it.
you should differentiate between corporate desktops and home desktops in that case.
True enough. I was talking about the consumer market. As the adoption rate among servers shows, Linux is already well accepted among corporate buyers.
there are games that have been released for linux.
That's why I said simultaneous releases. While games have been ported to Linux, there aren't very many games released simultaneously for Windows and Linux.
gamers - now that is a different cathegory. why do we hear that much about this ? because people who tend to play games a lot are more active, they are louder.
That's true. And its precisely because gamers are vocal and active that Linux should actively seek to woo them. Games have driven CPU and graphics technology for at least the past 5 years. If Linux could gain the support of a few major game studios, the backing would make it much easier for Linux to access the consumer market.
I (and all of my friends) used Mac OS 8, 9, and 10 in school. In college, we use Fedora Core, Solaris, and Debian. Yet what have we run on our personal systems for the past 6 years? Windows. Why? Windows allows us to play games in addition to doing everything that Linux and Mac can.
When major development houses like Valve and Blizzard start releasing games simultaneously for Linux and Windows, then I'll consider Linux to be "mainstream". Until then I'll consider Linux on the server, but would be doubtful about using it on the desktop side of things.
And to all of the people who say, "PCs are for serious work, consoles are for games...", bugger off. If most people thought that way, the PC game market wouldn't nearly be as large as it is today.
Well the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD fight is going to make this struggle seem like a cakewalk, since, from what I've heard, its a lot harder to make multi-format players for the next-gen disks than for the current DVD-R/DVD+R set.
This also brings up another issue. The DVD recordable format has still not stabilized. This is no issue if I'm recording for my own archival purposes, but, if I'm taking footage to someone else's house, I want to be sure that the footage will play.
And tapes are vulnerable to magnets, and they also tend to jam if they've ever been exposed to heat > room temps. (i.e. if you leave them sitting near a radiator). DVDs, while also vulnerable to heat, seem to have a much higher tolerance than VHS cassettes.
I do agree about the ease of recording, though. It's pretty difficult to simply transfer shows from your TV to DVD. Until DVD recorders come down in price to the point that they are competitive with VCRs, the VHS industry will remain profitable.
And I might want a new computer but not know how to put one together. SO I LEARNED HOW TO DO IT.
And when your car's transmission needed fixing? Did you learn how to rebuild it? Did you learn plumbing when you wanted to put in a new bathroom on your house? When the electricity goes down do you read up on Electrical Engineering to locate the problem? Returning to the topic at hand, have you written an extension for Ardour?
I use whatever software that gives me the features I need to get the job done. If a free/open source application fulfills my requirements, so much the better. If not, well that's why I still retain a Windows partition.
My point is, you can't really berate others about not being accomplished in your field (computing) until you become accomplished in their field (e.g. plumbing, auto repair, nuclear physics, etc.) And don't complain about others not accomplishing a task until you've accomplished it yourself.
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At the same time, if you look beyond the individual worker, and the select few that make and shape policy, it is very possible to argue that the US is more corrupt than India. If you look at the influences of 3rd parties on government decissions in the US, it becomes quickly apparant how the government may not be corrupt in its foundations, but in its design outright.
How so? Wasn't the checks and balances system designed to give the government a measure of resistance to influence from third parties? Indeed, if you compare the American political system to some of the others, you'll find that there is less absolute corruption than in even Western European countries.
I'm not suggesting that the American system is perfect, or that it applies to all regions. I'm simply stating that the American government has less outright corruption than most places in the world.
Independent regulation works perfect.
The problem is that independent regulation doesn't tend to stay independent. The airline regulators in America used to be independent. However, over the years, as there was more exchange between the industry and regulatory body, the regulators were "captured" by the industry, and regulations were used to lock out new carriers, creating a high cost to fly anywhere. The regulated system also reinforced the hub-and-spoke model of flight scheduling, which tended to cut off smaller towns.
Yes, there have been problems with deregulation. However, it must be admitted that deregulation has cut prices by allowing low-cost carriers (like Southwest) to flourish by bringing a more efficient business model and serving previously untapped markets.
I agree that the free market has its pitfalls. However, excessive bureaucracy in a regulated environment can and often does choke out innovation and change.
For example, in India, it can take up to 3 years for one to get a phone line installed in his or her house, because of all of the bureaucracy and red tape. The phone company is a regulated government monopoly. The situation has gotten so bad that private individuals are finding that its easier and more profiable to string their own phone lines, despite the fact that its grossly inefficient (and far more expensive) for everyone to string their own lines.
Just saying that government regulation isn't a panacea.
Where is the energy for these tornadoes coming from? To be more specific, how much energy is needed to start up one of these things?
Not to mention the 11% of Google's business they supply.
If AOL is spun off and killed, its not like its customers would just drop off the Internet. They would find other ISPs, and therefore Google would still presumably get their business. Its just that you'd see a host of smaller contributors to Google's traffic, rather than a large block coming from AOL.
Maybe you've been out since 1996, but the Linux kernel isn't and hasn't been a "one-man show" for quite a while. If Linus were to bite it, Linux would still continue on with teams and teams of other people.
The kernel would break for political reasons rather than technical reasons. The way I see it, Linus is the guy with enough prestige to hold the kernel together, maintaining a semblance of compatibility between the various distros. If Linus were to "bite it", you'd have at least Novell and RedHat forking. Both of these companies have been agitating to get certain features included in the kernel (example: Xen), and Linus' leadership and political skills is basically what is holding the kernel together.
I wish it weren't so, but you're right. Even worse is the fact that you often have no idea if the site you're connecting to practices good physical security that would protect you from someone walking onto their premises and stealing their credentials to pull off a man in the middle attack.
Give me access to a webmaster's computer for 5 minutes while he's out on break, and I can have a certificate for his domain in my control and be out the door.
This entire conversation presumes the presence of enough physical security to make this sort of activity impractical. Personally, I wouldn't trust a sysadmin who left his/her desk for more than 30 seconds without locking his/her workstation.
As has been posted many times before, there can be no electronic security without physical security.
another "stifling" factor: slow bandwith. unfortunately i only have friggin dial up, and anytime a website has done something that i could have run on my desktop, guess which is a lot slower by comparison.
Ummm... That's the whole point of AJAX: to use JavaScript to allow the client to take care of the pretty visual effects while the server sends the data using XML. This way, not only can pages change dynamically without refreshing, but the bandwidth load is lessenend greatly, as you're just transmitting XML formatted plaintext, rather than graphics.
You are, of course. All rights carry responsibility. The responsibility that goes along with free speech is that the speech may not cause physical harm to someone. In this case, the speech directly caused a panic and therefore led to physical harm, leaving you responsible as the person who exercised his right in an irresponsible way.
Property rights mean very little in this case. If I yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, I am responsible, whether it is my theater or someone else's.
In a corporate environment, though, the user does not expect to be able to install applications, or do mundane things like change the date/time on their machine. In a home environment, the user expects quite a bit more freedom on his/her machine, and therefore is likely to remain in Admin mode for the convenience, even though there are lower rights modes available.
You're right. Account management exists in large scale corporate networks. But the topic of this discussion is account management on single-user machines, and this is an area in which Apple still has the lead.
The problem with things like social security, and welfare is that they remove incentive to work.
When Social Security was conceived during the Great Depression, the entire point of the program was to remove the incentive to work. By providing a safety net for retirement, FDR was able to get the elderly out of the workforce, freeing up higher paying jobs for younger workers. However, that strategy is exactly the opposite of what you would want to do today, given the increasing proportion of the elderly in the population. As originally designed, the "disincentive to work" was a feature, rather than a bug.
You have every right to sentence yourself to a slow smokey painful death. You do not have the right to sentence me to the same by virtue my breathing secondhand smoke.
Is the name not a reference to their policy on IP? They pull in ideas from all over, but none of them ever make it back over the threshold....
To extend your analogy, like a black hole, MS pulls in information from all around it and releases it in mangled form. Look at Monad, their new scriptable shell. Is it not a bastardized version of the scriptable shells that have been available on Unix for years? And now with Singularity, they're trying to copy the Mac OSX microkernel architecture.
You mean, "so they can prosecute you for assault"...
According to the article, the existing Windows infrastructure was dying. For them, Windows was no longer an investement. Instead, it had turned itself into a cost (measured in downtime, lost productivity, etc.). Since he didn't have any additional money to spend on refurbishing and upgrading the Windows infrastructure, Uemura just decided to replace it free software.
In other words, he treated the money spent on Windows as a sunk cost. Rather than throwing good money after bad, Uemura switched the infrastructure to OpenBSD, eliminating the ongoing cost of staying with Windows.
The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more, no less.
Your comment is spot-on. I have a Palm Zire, that I bought for $99. 300MHz processor, 4 MB RAM, no color screen, no backlight. I've used that thing for almost a month without recharging it, and it still has about 1/4th of its battery capacity (according to the meter). It doesn't aspire to much, but it does 2 things and does them well: to-do lists, and calendaring (it has no problems syncing with Evolution).
If we had more PDAs like that, the market might be revived. But all I see today are multi-use devices that aspire to be a cross between a laptop, PSP, and iPod, and fail at all three uses, and have a terrible battery life to boot.
Huh?
A lightyear is a measure of distance, like miles. You saying it can achieve 240 miles per lightyear would be like me saying it can go 25 miles per meter.
Do you mean 240 miles per year? Given the scale that this thing operates on, that would still be pretty quick. Maybe 24 inches in a year, but 240 miles? That's a bit much.
Yes, I know its a joke, but it doesn't make any sense the way you've written it.
you should differentiate between corporate desktops and home desktops in that case.
True enough. I was talking about the consumer market. As the adoption rate among servers shows, Linux is already well accepted among corporate buyers.
there are games that have been released for linux.
That's why I said simultaneous releases. While games have been ported to Linux, there aren't very many games released simultaneously for Windows and Linux.
gamers - now that is a different cathegory. why do we hear that much about this ? because people who tend to play games a lot are more active, they are louder.
That's true. And its precisely because gamers are vocal and active that Linux should actively seek to woo them. Games have driven CPU and graphics technology for at least the past 5 years. If Linux could gain the support of a few major game studios, the backing would make it much easier for Linux to access the consumer market.
I (and all of my friends) used Mac OS 8, 9, and 10 in school. In college, we use Fedora Core, Solaris, and Debian. Yet what have we run on our personal systems for the past 6 years? Windows. Why? Windows allows us to play games in addition to doing everything that Linux and Mac can.
When major development houses like Valve and Blizzard start releasing games simultaneously for Linux and Windows, then I'll consider Linux to be "mainstream". Until then I'll consider Linux on the server, but would be doubtful about using it on the desktop side of things.
And to all of the people who say, "PCs are for serious work, consoles are for games...", bugger off. If most people thought that way, the PC game market wouldn't nearly be as large as it is today.
Well the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD fight is going to make this struggle seem like a cakewalk, since, from what I've heard, its a lot harder to make multi-format players for the next-gen disks than for the current DVD-R/DVD+R set.
This also brings up another issue. The DVD recordable format has still not stabilized. This is no issue if I'm recording for my own archival purposes, but, if I'm taking footage to someone else's house, I want to be sure that the footage will play.
So are these DVD recorder's multiformat?
And tapes are vulnerable to magnets, and they also tend to jam if they've ever been exposed to heat > room temps. (i.e. if you leave them sitting near a radiator). DVDs, while also vulnerable to heat, seem to have a much higher tolerance than VHS cassettes.
I do agree about the ease of recording, though. It's pretty difficult to simply transfer shows from your TV to DVD. Until DVD recorders come down in price to the point that they are competitive with VCRs, the VHS industry will remain profitable.
And I might want a new computer but not know how to put one together. SO I LEARNED HOW TO DO IT.
And when your car's transmission needed fixing? Did you learn how to rebuild it? Did you learn plumbing when you wanted to put in a new bathroom on your house? When the electricity goes down do you read up on Electrical Engineering to locate the problem? Returning to the topic at hand, have you written an extension for Ardour?
I use whatever software that gives me the features I need to get the job done. If a free/open source application fulfills my requirements, so much the better. If not, well that's why I still retain a Windows partition.
My point is, you can't really berate others about not being accomplished in your field (computing) until you become accomplished in their field (e.g. plumbing, auto repair, nuclear physics, etc.) And don't complain about others not accomplishing a task until you've accomplished it yourself.