Microsoft's research labs are excellent. I think it's their management (too obsessed with domination through sleazy business tricks) and their developers (spoiled kids hired right out of college who have seen nothing other than Microsoft in their careers) that keep messing up the products.
The truth is, there are only two markets in the US that consistently see greater than inflation price increases: medicine and education. Please note both markets are broken by government action.
The US government-run health care institutions and programs are the most efficient in the nation, handily beating private health care systems in terms of cost, overhead, and at least equalling it in quality. And I believe if you looked into it, you'd find the same for education. Both health care and education have been broken by the market.
I'm sorry, Adam Smith's invisible hand works almost everywhere, and frequently when it doesn't, it's failure is because of government, not big business
Adam Smith's invisible hand has a long list of preconditions to work, preconditions on the numbers and sizes of competitors, on information available to competitors and buyers, on the kinds of goods being exchanged, etc. Claiming that it "works almost everywhere" is just completely wrong and demonstrates an utter unfamiliarity with economic principles.
For health care and education, several of the preconditions are violated and therefore a free market approach doesn't work; the current failures of the US health care and educational system are a direct consequence of that (however, aspects of both health care and education can be left to the market--it just requires careful planning and design).
The free market works wonderfully when its preconditions are satisfied. It's the purpose of our government to ensure that free markets exist in as many goods and services as possible. It is also the purpose of our government to ensure that the small subset of goods and services the free market cannot supply efficiently are provided in some other way.
People like you, who have an irrational and factually wrong belief in the universal applicability of free market economics are at the source of a lot of our economic ills. It's adding insult to injury that after wrecking our health care and educational systems, you then turn around and blame the government for the mess you made through deregulation and privatization.
The author makes the erroneous assumption that FOSS is "aimed at geeks" and more complex. In fact, that's false. Systems like Ubuntu, SuSE, and RedHat are easier to install, more consistent, and easier to use for end users (this is in addition to having a simpler and more consistent internal architecture). There are many reasons for that, but some important ones are that desktop environments like KDE develop the entire suite of applications and utilities in a single project (Microsoft couldn't do that if they wanted to--antitrust), and because everything is tested and integrated by the distribution vendor and preinstalled at once.
Your typical Windows system, on the other hand, is cobbled together from dozens of applications from different vendors, and in different ways by different hardware vendors. Windows installations are such a mess that most people seem to buy new hardware rather than reinstall.
So, many people choose FOSS precisely because they want "freedom from complexity".
The law itself is stupid and should be abolished as a whole. However, as long as it's in effect, everybody might as well suffer equally, and if colleges and universities suffer under it, then there is a better chance that it will get repealed sooner rather than later.
It's kind of like musicians and instruments. A master musician will be able to produce great music on just about any kind of instrument. Nevertheless, they are also extremely finnicky about the kinds of instruments they actually use professionally--they just will not perform in public on some cheap instrument or an instrument that they don't like.
So, a master programmer will be able to produce good code in any language, but at the same time they'll also know better than to use the wrong language for the job because "good" isn't good enough for them.
It took a lot of balls to say "No" to Windows then.
It took no balls because Sun simply didn't have a choice; they couldn't have joined Microsoft if they wanted to.
He knows he has to make big changes, like getting the open-sourcing of Java right, and figuring out how to use Linux, during his honeymoon time in the CEO position or the chance will be lost.
Most of the damage has already been done. On the Linux side, many of Sun's former customers have already migrated and they will not be coming back. On the Java side, Sun has already written bad standards into stone (Swing, Java 5, J2EE), and the open source community has already created incompatible open alternatives (SWT, gcj, IKVM, Mono). Furthermore, cleaning up the Java standard and Sun's Java implementation is a huge task. Even if Schwartz had a change of heart from his former policies (and I doubt it), I think it wouldn't make much of a difference at this point.
What Schwartz does not mention is that MacNealy set a bad tone and created problems unneccessarily.
Between the two, I think Schwartz's statements have done more damage to Sun's reputation than McNealy's. To me, McNealy seems simply out of touch, while Schwartz seems actively deceptive.
You mean like Java. What got Sun into trouble was Microsoft sabotaging Java on the desktop. Remember when they brought out an incompatible Microsoft Jave version.
The reason Java failed on the desktop was because Sun's desktop technologies sucked (and still do); Microsoft may have been planning to sabotage them, but they didn't even have to bother.
Are you seriously sugesting that Suns decline had nothing to do with Microsofts tactics.
I don't know about him, but I certainly am. Some time in the 1990's, Sun machines became overpriced and their software bloated and people looked for alternatives. By the end of the 1990's, Linux was the platform of choice for startups and universities (viz Google). None of that had anything to do with Microsoft, except that Sun didn't even attempt to compete with Microsoft at the low end.
Whether Firewire or USB have processor overhead, how fast they are, etc. depends on the interface chip, the drivers, etc. It's impossible to make a generic statement that Firewire is faster than USB beyond the basic bit rates and protocol-intrinsic overhead.
As for the claims on that site, they are a textbook example of how not to conduct and report benchmark measurements, and they are meaningless as reported.
Apple neither invented the FireWire-connected webcam (you could always get them), nor did they invent mounting on top of the monitor (Logitech), nor did they invent putting a camera above the screen in a laptop (Sony had that years before the MacBook).
If anything, Microsoft seems to have the opposite problem, in which employees sometimes design or cut a feature or product without fully appreciating the huge impact their decision can have outside the company.
Among the different forms of evil, that is actually a major one: if you have a lot of power and impact, it is your duty to think about the consequences of your actions carefully, otherwise you indeed are evil.
The reality is that Microsoft is made up of mostly honest, earnest, hardworking people. People with families. People with hardships. People with ordinary and extraordinary lives.
Yes, but the reality is that Microsoft's competitors are made up of mostly honest, earnest, and hardworking people as well. The problem is that Microsoft's senior management has adopted policies and strategies in the past that unfairly deprive the mostly honest, earnest, and hardworking people in those other companies of the just rewards of their hard work.
No one ever says "Hey, let's go ruin company P"
Actually, some people are on record saying that. People like Ballmer, for example. And that's what people refer to when they say "Microsoft is evil", namely that the people in charge have behaved unethically (not to mention illegally).
But there's one thing people do that really drives me nuts: anthropomorphization.
It drives me nuts, too--in particular, it drives me nuts that corporations have managed to get the rights of real persons in areas like free speech. However, given that they have, it seems only fair that at least we anthropomorphize them when we talk about them.
Overall, I think there are lots of good, well-meaning people working at Microsoft. But as long as there are on-going legal problems over monopolistic practices and as long as people like Ballmer are in charge, there continues to be reason to apply the label "evil" to the company as an entity, no matter what fraction of the employees are not evil.
You said public health concern. Public health concerns mean money.
Quite right. And potentially doubling the number of brain tumors in the population is hugely expensive, even if the absolute number and risk of such tumors remains low and of little concern to individuals.
I think at this point, we can pretty much end most funding for climate change research.
The reason is that even if, as Lindzen claims, the preponderance of the evidence were against man-made global warming or serious climate change, that would still be too risky given the potential for billions of lives lost. We could only continue emissions growth if we knew beyond a reasonable doubt that it was safe to do so, and climate change research is not going to achieve that kind of certainty over the next several decades no matter how much money we pump into it.
Give that reducing carbon emissions actually is likely to stimulate economic activity, reduce other pollution, and make nations less dependent on the Middle East, reducing carbon emissions now seems like a no brainer.
No, the argument applies equally well to public health. Better in fact. If the rate is so tiny then public health money and attention is FAR better spent on other areas.
WHAT money? So far, all we have is small, cheap studies.
For example, should we introduce new regulations on cell phones that force cell companies to build twice as many towers which will statistically save ten lives over the next twenty years or use the same amount of money to introduce subsidized prostate and breast cancer screening programs that will statistically save a thousand lives per year?
You are making up statistics in the complete absence of knowledge or data.
In fact, if the effect is real, the implications are much more far-reaching than merely how widely we space cell towers.
Public health is all about the economics. You put your money where it will do the most good.
Yes, and to do that, we first do studies.
Not that any of these studies are actually conclusive enough to justify anything.
I didn't claim that the studies were conclusive, nor did I claim that there was an effect. What I predicted was that people would dismiss them simply because they didn't fit their world view, and you keep proving me right.
I'm sorry you don't agree with the cost/benefit considerations that went into airbags; I don't know enough about the costs and benefits involved to make an informed statement. I suspect, however, you don't either. In any case, the people paying for the cost of air bags are mostly drivers, through the purchase prices of their cars, and if air bags make buying a car more expensive, I think that's a good thing in its own right.
As for risk mitigation, you are putting up your own strawman; I said nothing about needing to mitigate risks. I didn't even claim that cell phone use involved risk. I merely stated that people would make all sorts of bogus arguments why you wouldn't even want to look at the issue, and you keep proving me right: from pop-physics to pop-economics, people like you do everything to avoid facing inconvenient facts.
What we call things is up to us, the users of the English language. There is no reason to call something by a name pushed upon us by corporate propaganda machines--the RIAA doesn't own the English language.
If we want to call this technology "Digital Restrictions Management", it's bloody well our right to do so.
No it wouldn't. The incidence of brain tumours are so low that even a doubling in the risk would not pose a significant risk to the general population.
Since the Swedes actually treat people with brain tumors, doubling the incidence means doubling the resources spent on treating them, and that very much is a public health issue.
But perhaps more importantly, if it turns out that these results are real, they will have a strong impact on regulation of radio emissions. There is also a good chance that they would be of fundamental importance for cell biology.
As far as cell phones go, I don't plan on altering my usage of them because the risk is negligible. But that is not the point.
The risk is so small that it would be impossible to demonstrate an increased risk factor, because, well, there really isn't one. There's this Confidence Interval thingy to take into account. Ya know, flip a fair coin 10 million times and you won't actually get 5 million heads and 5 million tails, even though the odds are 50/50.
Thanks for demonstrating again how intuition is a dangerous guide in making conclusions; I suggest you work this out to see where your intuition went wrong.
If you wish to speak about inducing tumors you'll have to show me a cause/effect relationship,
I didn't claim a causal relationship, I said that if there existed a causal relationship, it would take a lot of rats to determine it.
I didn't even claim that the results in the study were real, I simply pointed out that people will dismiss the study out of hand (again) because of their preconceived notions about the interaction between non-ionizing radiation and cells. Turns out, I was right.
Again, your blind spot is that you take as a given that the only way radiation can cause cancer is through DNA damage, but there is no reason to assume that. When we get a study like this, we need to try and explain it.
One small point:
Hell, you might even score some points if you cited the 85 heavy cell phone users of 905 brain case numbers and told us, which the article fails to explain, how that's 240% higher than the general population.
If you think about that for a moment, I'm sure you can figure it out.
But some other smart ass would tell you you could prove anything with such tiny numbers.
Well, that smartass doesn't know anything about modern statistical methods, then; those numbers are anything but tiny.
These studies aren't mainly for individuals, they are conducted for making public health decisions and regulating wireless devices. And for public health, doubling brain cancer rates would be a big deal.
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Yeah, and investors would pull out all their money, the stock would collapse, and Microsoft would disappear.
Microsoft exists only because investors (the owners) have continuing confidence in it.
Microsoft's research labs are excellent. I think it's their management (too obsessed with domination through sleazy business tricks) and their developers (spoiled kids hired right out of college who have seen nothing other than Microsoft in their careers) that keep messing up the products.
Even in your average American "luxury" car, multiple attempts to start the car without the appropriate key will disable the ECU.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster; at least on my cars, the anti-theft devices have often caused trouble.
The truth is, there are only two markets in the US that consistently see greater than inflation price increases: medicine and education. Please note both markets are broken by government action.
The US government-run health care institutions and programs are the most efficient in the nation, handily beating private health care systems in terms of cost, overhead, and at least equalling it in quality. And I believe if you looked into it, you'd find the same for education. Both health care and education have been broken by the market.
I'm sorry, Adam Smith's invisible hand works almost everywhere, and frequently when it doesn't, it's failure is because of government, not big business
Adam Smith's invisible hand has a long list of preconditions to work, preconditions on the numbers and sizes of competitors, on information available to competitors and buyers, on the kinds of goods being exchanged, etc. Claiming that it "works almost everywhere" is just completely wrong and demonstrates an utter unfamiliarity with economic principles.
For health care and education, several of the preconditions are violated and therefore a free market approach doesn't work; the current failures of the US health care and educational system are a direct consequence of that (however, aspects of both health care and education can be left to the market--it just requires careful planning and design).
The free market works wonderfully when its preconditions are satisfied. It's the purpose of our government to ensure that free markets exist in as many goods and services as possible. It is also the purpose of our government to ensure that the small subset of goods and services the free market cannot supply efficiently are provided in some other way.
People like you, who have an irrational and factually wrong belief in the universal applicability of free market economics are at the source of a lot of our economic ills. It's adding insult to injury that after wrecking our health care and educational systems, you then turn around and blame the government for the mess you made through deregulation and privatization.
The author makes the erroneous assumption that FOSS is "aimed at geeks" and more complex. In fact, that's false. Systems like Ubuntu, SuSE, and RedHat are easier to install, more consistent, and easier to use for end users (this is in addition to having a simpler and more consistent internal architecture). There are many reasons for that, but some important ones are that desktop environments like KDE develop the entire suite of applications and utilities in a single project (Microsoft couldn't do that if they wanted to--antitrust), and because everything is tested and integrated by the distribution vendor and preinstalled at once.
Your typical Windows system, on the other hand, is cobbled together from dozens of applications from different vendors, and in different ways by different hardware vendors. Windows installations are such a mess that most people seem to buy new hardware rather than reinstall.
So, many people choose FOSS precisely because they want "freedom from complexity".
The law itself is stupid and should be abolished as a whole. However, as long as it's in effect, everybody might as well suffer equally, and if colleges and universities suffer under it, then there is a better chance that it will get repealed sooner rather than later.
I haven't started up IE this year at all; it simply isn't needed anymore.
That's not spin, that's the truth.
With its market share and history, Microsoft simply cannot do what smaller companies and open source projects can do both legally and ethically.
Besides, it's not like Apache refuses to serve pages to IE.
It's kind of like musicians and instruments. A master musician will be able to produce great music on just about any kind of instrument. Nevertheless, they are also extremely finnicky about the kinds of instruments they actually use professionally--they just will not perform in public on some cheap instrument or an instrument that they don't like.
So, a master programmer will be able to produce good code in any language, but at the same time they'll also know better than to use the wrong language for the job because "good" isn't good enough for them.
It took a lot of balls to say "No" to Windows then.
It took no balls because Sun simply didn't have a choice; they couldn't have joined Microsoft if they wanted to.
He knows he has to make big changes, like getting the open-sourcing of Java right, and figuring out how to use Linux, during his honeymoon time in the CEO position or the chance will be lost.
Most of the damage has already been done. On the Linux side, many of Sun's former customers have already migrated and they will not be coming back. On the Java side, Sun has already written bad standards into stone (Swing, Java 5, J2EE), and the open source community has already created incompatible open alternatives (SWT, gcj, IKVM, Mono). Furthermore, cleaning up the Java standard and Sun's Java implementation is a huge task. Even if Schwartz had a change of heart from his former policies (and I doubt it), I think it wouldn't make much of a difference at this point.
What Schwartz does not mention is that MacNealy set a bad tone and created problems unneccessarily.
Between the two, I think Schwartz's statements have done more damage to Sun's reputation than McNealy's. To me, McNealy seems simply out of touch, while Schwartz seems actively deceptive.
There are also lots of COBOL jobs; that doesn't mean the platform is doing well...
You mean like Java. What got Sun into trouble was Microsoft sabotaging Java on the desktop. Remember when they brought out an incompatible Microsoft Jave version.
The reason Java failed on the desktop was because Sun's desktop technologies sucked (and still do); Microsoft may have been planning to sabotage them, but they didn't even have to bother.
Are you seriously sugesting that Suns decline had nothing to do with Microsofts tactics.
I don't know about him, but I certainly am. Some time in the 1990's, Sun machines became overpriced and their software bloated and people looked for alternatives. By the end of the 1990's, Linux was the platform of choice for startups and universities (viz Google). None of that had anything to do with Microsoft, except that Sun didn't even attempt to compete with Microsoft at the low end.
I think it should be possible to incorporate many of the UI features that make SketchUp so easy to use into Blender without too much work.
Whether Firewire or USB have processor overhead, how fast they are, etc. depends on the interface chip, the drivers, etc. It's impossible to make a generic statement that Firewire is faster than USB beyond the basic bit rates and protocol-intrinsic overhead.
As for the claims on that site, they are a textbook example of how not to conduct and report benchmark measurements, and they are meaningless as reported.
Apple neither invented the FireWire-connected webcam (you could always get them), nor did they invent mounting on top of the monitor (Logitech), nor did they invent putting a camera above the screen in a laptop (Sony had that years before the MacBook).
If anything, Microsoft seems to have the opposite problem, in which employees sometimes design or cut a feature or product without fully appreciating the huge impact their decision can have outside the company.
Among the different forms of evil, that is actually a major one: if you have a lot of power and impact, it is your duty to think about the consequences of your actions carefully, otherwise you indeed are evil.
The reality is that Microsoft is made up of mostly honest, earnest, hardworking people. People with families. People with hardships. People with ordinary and extraordinary lives.
Yes, but the reality is that Microsoft's competitors are made up of mostly honest, earnest, and hardworking people as well. The problem is that Microsoft's senior management has adopted policies and strategies in the past that unfairly deprive the mostly honest, earnest, and hardworking people in those other companies of the just rewards of their hard work.
No one ever says "Hey, let's go ruin company P"
Actually, some people are on record saying that. People like Ballmer, for example. And that's what people refer to when they say "Microsoft is evil", namely that the people in charge have behaved unethically (not to mention illegally).
But there's one thing people do that really drives me nuts: anthropomorphization.
It drives me nuts, too--in particular, it drives me nuts that corporations have managed to get the rights of real persons in areas like free speech. However, given that they have, it seems only fair that at least we anthropomorphize them when we talk about them.
Overall, I think there are lots of good, well-meaning people working at Microsoft. But as long as there are on-going legal problems over monopolistic practices and as long as people like Ballmer are in charge, there continues to be reason to apply the label "evil" to the company as an entity, no matter what fraction of the employees are not evil.
You said public health concern. Public health concerns mean money.
Quite right. And potentially doubling the number of brain tumors in the population is hugely expensive, even if the absolute number and risk of such tumors remains low and of little concern to individuals.
I think at this point, we can pretty much end most funding for climate change research.
The reason is that even if, as Lindzen claims, the preponderance of the evidence were against man-made global warming or serious climate change, that would still be too risky given the potential for billions of lives lost. We could only continue emissions growth if we knew beyond a reasonable doubt that it was safe to do so, and climate change research is not going to achieve that kind of certainty over the next several decades no matter how much money we pump into it.
Give that reducing carbon emissions actually is likely to stimulate economic activity, reduce other pollution, and make nations less dependent on the Middle East, reducing carbon emissions now seems like a no brainer.
No, the argument applies equally well to public health. Better in fact. If the rate is so tiny then public health money and attention is FAR better spent on other areas.
WHAT money? So far, all we have is small, cheap studies.
For example, should we introduce new regulations on cell phones that force cell companies to build twice as many towers which will statistically save ten lives over the next twenty years or use the same amount of money to introduce subsidized prostate and breast cancer screening programs that will statistically save a thousand lives per year?
You are making up statistics in the complete absence of knowledge or data.
In fact, if the effect is real, the implications are much more far-reaching than merely how widely we space cell towers.
Public health is all about the economics. You put your money where it will do the most good.
Yes, and to do that, we first do studies.
Not that any of these studies are actually conclusive enough to justify anything.
I didn't claim that the studies were conclusive, nor did I claim that there was an effect. What I predicted was that people would dismiss them simply because they didn't fit their world view, and you keep proving me right.
I'm sorry you don't agree with the cost/benefit considerations that went into airbags; I don't know enough about the costs and benefits involved to make an informed statement. I suspect, however, you don't either. In any case, the people paying for the cost of air bags are mostly drivers, through the purchase prices of their cars, and if air bags make buying a car more expensive, I think that's a good thing in its own right.
As for risk mitigation, you are putting up your own strawman; I said nothing about needing to mitigate risks. I didn't even claim that cell phone use involved risk. I merely stated that people would make all sorts of bogus arguments why you wouldn't even want to look at the issue, and you keep proving me right: from pop-physics to pop-economics, people like you do everything to avoid facing inconvenient facts.
What we call things is up to us, the users of the English language. There is no reason to call something by a name pushed upon us by corporate propaganda machines--the RIAA doesn't own the English language.
If we want to call this technology "Digital Restrictions Management", it's bloody well our right to do so.
No it wouldn't. The incidence of brain tumours are so low that even a doubling in the risk would not pose a significant risk to the general population.
Since the Swedes actually treat people with brain tumors, doubling the incidence means doubling the resources spent on treating them, and that very much is a public health issue.
But perhaps more importantly, if it turns out that these results are real, they will have a strong impact on regulation of radio emissions. There is also a good chance that they would be of fundamental importance for cell biology.
As far as cell phones go, I don't plan on altering my usage of them because the risk is negligible. But that is not the point.
The risk is so small that it would be impossible to demonstrate an increased risk factor, because, well, there really isn't one. There's this Confidence Interval thingy to take into account. Ya know, flip a fair coin 10 million times and you won't actually get 5 million heads and 5 million tails, even though the odds are 50/50.
Thanks for demonstrating again how intuition is a dangerous guide in making conclusions; I suggest you work this out to see where your intuition went wrong.
If you wish to speak about inducing tumors you'll have to show me a cause/effect relationship,
I didn't claim a causal relationship, I said that if there existed a causal relationship, it would take a lot of rats to determine it.
I didn't even claim that the results in the study were real, I simply pointed out that people will dismiss the study out of hand (again) because of their preconceived notions about the interaction between non-ionizing radiation and cells. Turns out, I was right.
Again, your blind spot is that you take as a given that the only way radiation can cause cancer is through DNA damage, but there is no reason to assume that. When we get a study like this, we need to try and explain it.
One small point:
Hell, you might even score some points if you cited the 85 heavy cell phone users of 905 brain case numbers and told us, which the article fails to explain, how that's 240% higher than the general population.
If you think about that for a moment, I'm sure you can figure it out.
But some other smart ass would tell you you could prove anything with such tiny numbers.
Well, that smartass doesn't know anything about modern statistical methods, then; those numbers are anything but tiny.
These studies aren't mainly for individuals, they are conducted for making public health decisions and regulating wireless devices. And for public health, doubling brain cancer rates would be a big deal.