Whether you are right or wrong (I'm not a fan of VS either)
How can I be wrong? I said "I find Visual Studio to be one of the worst development environments in existence". There is no "right or wrong" when it comes to choice of development tools, only personal preferences.
Of course, there are people who think that VS is the best thing since sliced bread, but the appeal of Microsoft's use of Microsoft tools for Xbox 360 is limited to that group. People who don't already love VS will find Microsoft's choice of tools at best irrelevant and more likely a nuisance.
The thing we can debate is how large and how significant the group of people is who think VS is a net plus for Xbox 360 development. Personally, I suspect that the class of people who loves VS is largely disjunct from the group of people who develop great games.
He also gets that that is one of the reasons Linux seems to have "scattershot design by committee of blind idiots"...
Except that Linux isn't designed by committee, it's not designed at all. The software that makes it on Linux is determined by free market choice.
OS X, in contrast, is designed by a monarch (Jobs) and Windows by central planning and committee (the technical leadership in Redmond). Monarchs and central committees build impressive castles and monuments. OS X is the equivalent of Versailles and Windows the equivalent of the Kremlin, but those are not good places to live.
Worship your despots, monarchs, and central committees, while the rest of us go on with the messy task of building a nice place to live in a democratic and market-driven way.
Never mind that easy to use GUI design is eschewed by Linux writers who seem to be inherently unable to grasp that what is easy for a techie geek is NOT the thing that the common end-users need or want.
I challenge you to show usability studies demonstrating that the OS X UI is any easier to use than Gnome, KDE, or Windows.
OSX is polished and has a singular top-down vision from Jobs and his unholy cult.
You are quite right. But being polished and having a singular vision doesn't make OS X better than everything else, it just represents a particular set of tradeoffs. OS X is very nice for certain things, and it's awful for others.
EASE, not FREE or OPEN should be the buzzword of Linux.
The buzzwords of Linux are variety and choice. That encompasses giving you the choice of something easy-to-use, like Ubuntu or Linspire.
for those reasons is why I prefer developing for *BSD or OSX because I know where the dependancies will be on a standard installation is a much better argument.
Except that you have to cope with four different versions of OS X at various patchlevels. And, unlike Linux, OS X lacks the consistent package management, dependency management, and updating to cope with that automatically.
Developers of OS X somehow make it work most of the time, but they do so by including lots of dependencies in their packages (hence, you get really fat applications) and using very little cross-application integration. And many OS X applications just deal with it by saying "only works on Tiger" or "doesn't work on Tiger".
Why I like OSX is because all my Unix goodies I was used to under BSD, Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl, were all extremely easy to install,
Unfortunately, it's hit or miss. Maybe all the UNIX goodies you needed were extremely easy to install, but a lot of UNIX goodies are not. Fink and OpenDarwin are both flaky, outdated, and incomplete compared to Linux distributions. Manual installation of software from source is hampered by problems like the fact that Apple has a proprietary window system and weird versions of gcc.
Altogether, I have found OS X to be a mixed bag. It's a pretty good system if it happens to do what you need, but its functionality is far more limited than that of a Linux or BSD system. The direction Apple is taking--more flaky features and less UNIX compatibility--is also worrisome. Still, while OS X and Linux each have their pros and cons, there are almost no reasons to use Windows compared to either of them.
..but even with Microsoft's development tools and strong technical support (another aspect for which the developers had kind words)
I find Visual Studio to be one of the worst development environments in existence, and I have never gotten useful technical support from Microsoft. On Windows, one can at least work around that with third party tools, but for something like Xbox 360, the need to use Microsoft tools and to rely on Microsoft support is a big strike against the platform.
This is a list of useful attributes for developers
Of course, it is: the secret behind the web's success is the developers and the fact that HTML and HTTP made it easy for them to deliver content and applications, while keeping them from doing the stupid things they used to do when programming applications for the desktop.
Even with technologies like DHTML and AJAX you're still layering application-like functionality on a page-based platform and it's awkward.
You're quite right that web technologies make it hard to layer application-like functionality on top of the web, and that's a good thing. It keeps people like you from treating the web as a desktop application delivery platform. You can either adapt to that, or you can get a different job.
Take a look at OpenLaszlo (http://openlaszlo.org/) for one example of an interesting open source, Flash-based Web application tool.
Yes, OpenLaszlo delivers typical Flash applications: applications that don't support cut-and-paste, ignore browser font sizes or preferences or screen resolution, don't provide accessibility, don't resize properly, and have numerous other usability problems.
Monopolies make me nervous too, but let's not confuse the existence of a monopoly with the quality of the technology in question.
I'm not; it is really the quality of the technology that is bad, and in two ways. First, Flash solves the wrong problem, and, in addition, it solves it badly. Flash is technically OK for little animations, which is what it was originally designed for. But Flash is a lousy web-based desktop application delivery platform; Java, RDP, VNC, and X11 would be far better for that and far easier to both develop for and use. But, in fact, it has turned out that the entire concept of a web-based desktop application delivery platform is flawed, which is why all those other platforms failed to catch on for mainstream web use as well.
Second, Flash does not suck resources unless there's heavy animation involved. It certainly doesn't use huge amounts of RAM.
That's the theory. In practice, Macromedia's Flash player has bugs that mean you end up with an unusable web browser and dozens of flash processes running in the background on some platforms.
Finally, whether you like it or not, Flash is the best way to create modern web applications,
Flash breaks just about everything about the web that made the web successful in the first place: open standards, text-based representations, user control over rendering, cut-and-paste, and screen scraping.
Fortunately, even though idiotic attitudes like yours still exist in some backwards corners of the web, there isn't much point in getting worked up about it: Flash is a niche application and won't ever be anything more than that.
Also, have you seen Adobe's SVG plugin for example? It makes Acrobat look small and snappy in comparison.
Have you seen Adobe Acrobat Reader? It sucks: it's slow and memory hungry, while Linux and OS X have fast and compact PDF viewers. Just because one of Adobe's viewers sucks doesn't mean that nobody can do a good job implementing a viewer for that document type.
As to SVG standard, read and weep: SVG Rendering Comparison.
That's FUD on your part. What's there to "weep"? We have a handful of open source SVG implementations that implement a substantial portion of the standard and largely differ mostly in obscure areas. Those open source implementations are being created in addition to multiple commercial implementations.
It will probably be a while until IE has native SVG support built in, but Firefox and Mozilla are going to have it soon. Hopefully, someone will port a decent SVG plug-in to IE.
Yeah, but why would you want to? I find Macromedia Flash to be a poorly written piece of software. Before I get around to uninstalling it, it regularly gets in some mode where half a dozen Flash-related processes run in the background and bring my machine to a crawl. And all that for a bunch of worthless content that usually doesn't even scale properly.
Thank you, but I don't give a f*ck whether I "can" or "may" install Flash on my laptop or my desktop; the sooner I can uninstall it, the better.
Hopefully, SVG will put Flash out of its misery; the world has suffered from it long enough.
A better measure of what's being done with one's energy consumption isn't per-capita, it's per-dollar-GDP. With that measure, the US is far more efficient than (for example) China and India, whose ability to claim decent per-capita energy consumption is entirely due to the tremendous difference between their urban middle and upper classes and their gigantic rural farming lower class.
No, that's not a better way. A citizen of the US should have no more right to damage the planet than a citizen of China or India, no matter how efficiently or inefficiently they use energy. In fact, ultimately, we should insist that nobody has a net impact on the planet; that's the only way we can survive as a species in the long term.
GDP is also a lousy comparative measure of economic activity. An economy can have a very high GDP and produce nothing of value to individuals.
If you want to talk about efficiency, a better measure might be quality-of-life produced per unit of energy; to the degree that has been quantified, the US does not come out very well.
That means that everyone is paying more - a lot more - for the same goods they bought last year, without a corresponding increase in wages. Sales decrease, so profits decrease, so people lose jobs. All that "extra money" goes into producing equipment that doesn't add anything to the growth of the economy,
So, you are saying that $100M spent on factories and power plants doesn't add anything to the economy and doesn't create jobs, while $100M on Barbie dolls and plasma TV's does. Thanks for illustrating so clearly how economically illiterate the people opposing energy efficiency are.
In fact, the $100M spent on new factories and power plants not only is equivalent to the $100M spent on consumer junk in terms of job creation and economic activity, it is actually better because it will last longer, make future production more efficient, improve the environment, and stimulate R&D.
I've had MS pro copies of Office for many years and I've had years of experience with Linux. My opion is Open Office doesn't yet touch MS pro office, especially Power Point.
I prepare several presentations per week and I find no practically relevant advantages in PowerPoint over Impress. If anything, Impress has a slight edge because formulas are integrated better. The same is true for word processing and spreadsheets.
Given how long Open Office has been chasing after MS Office, it's about time it got close enough to give MS Office a kick
Other office suites will never "catch up" with MS Office; that's because what sets apart MS Office and other office suites isn't quality or functionality, it's idiosyncracies and incompatibilities, and Microsoft invents new ones every release.
I run a wintel box as a multimedia web box because too many formats are locked into MS apps and I'm not enough of a zealot to forgo information.
I have been using OOo2 beta under Linux and Windows and it works fine for me. I also don't understand why you don't want beta software on your system; it doesn't bite--the worst that can happen is that you don't like it.
Also, OOo on NT4 will consistently blue screen when running above 256 colors. Thie problem is independent of any hardware that is installed and has occured on every revision i have tried.
Which means that NT4 has some serious bugs in its video APIs and that you should upgrade to a fixed version of Windows ASAP. The fact that OOo triggers that bug is immaterial; the OOo developers have better things to do than to try to find workarounds for bugs in obsolete Microsoft software.
(I'm forced to use OOo on computers running NT4 and Win2k with 256MB RAM)
OOo is neither designed for that kind of hardware nor for that kind of software environment. The people who are screwing you are neither Microsoft nor OOo, they are your IT staff.
If you want to run OOo on that kind of hardware, install Linux. It will still be slow, but it will work better than NT.
My numbers assume that office pays for itself if it saves each employee using it 15 minutes a week. That's it
You're neglecting...
- the hours per week the PC user spends waiting for tech support - training expenses (time, materials, downtime, mistakes, etc.) - the expense of maintaining an IT staff supporting Office - the expense of hardware upgrades resulting from bigger, slower software
If you profit margins are in the 0.3% range, you are in trouble. Sure, controlling software costs is a pretty good way to increase that profit margin, but you still only have less than 0.5% to work with, which can only go so far. max
Adding 0.6% (or 0.3% or 0.5% or whatever other numbers you dream up) to one's profit margin is a big deal. And, in actual fact, the cost of keeping an organization of 200 people up-to-date on the latest Office versions is likely in the millions of dollars over half a dozen years, and that's a big overhead no matter what kind of business you are.
You aren't in business, are you? It doesn't make sense to calculate additional expenses as fraction of operating expenses. You can pay your employees $2M each, and the $210k expense would still be a $210k expense. Does paying the $210k for licenses yield at least $210k in extra revenue? No? Then it isn't worth it. In fact, those 0.6% may be a substantial portion of the profit margin of the busines. (But given Microsoft's obscene profit margins, you may be excused for not understanding such a fine point.)
More importantly, you forgot to add the extra IT staff of 10 people working for six years (which is about what you need to support Windows desktops for an organization of 200 desktop users). And all of a sudden, we are talking real money.
He wasn't a faculty member at Caltech, he was a research associate. In most cases, infrastructure work, project management, and software development experience are not sufficient to get you tenure at a top university.
There are people who claim HIV doesn't cause AIDS and is a harmless virus. There are people who claim that the holocaust never happened. And there are people who claim that global warming isn't happening. There are lots of foolish theories out there, and occasionally one is even right.
In this case, however, global warming due to artificial emissions of CO2 is a widely believed and well-supported theory. If it is true, the consequences are drastic. On the other hand, addressing the issue is neither costly nor technically difficult; in fact, it has many side-benefits. So, even in the unlikely event that it isn't true, we still don't lose anything by acting on it.
Taken together, that means that we should act to drastically reduce carbon emissions.
Finally, the economic change - read as depression - that would come from doing "drastic" things stands a good chance of killing as many people as climate change might.
There is not an iota of evidence that reducing carbon emissions would lead to a depression. Quite to the contrary: it is quite clear that an aggressive move to energy efficient technologies would create new jobs and growth, and would lower operating costs. Scrapping the energy inefficient technologies of today and building new power plants and factories is probably the best thing that could happen to the US economy.
The only people who stand to lose are the people who have large investments in current, inefficient technologies.
First off, we just don't understand what is happening or why.
I'm sorry you haven't been paying attention, but we do understand what is happening and why it's happening.
Unfortunately, if we are in a position where human-added CO2 is the root cause of all of this, we cannot afford the luxury of these kinds of measures. Sure, they might have some effect and that might help. But if we're the cause of climate change, far, far more drastic measures need to be taken right now.
As comparison with other Western nations alone shows, the US could easily cut its CO2 emissions in half without any decrease in its standard of living; quite to the contrary: a serious program to do that would increase the standard of living and create jobs.
Furthermore, if you think you can't "afford" that level of change, what do you think loss of what is probably going to be 50% of the currently inhabited area of the US is going to do to quality of life? Because that's what's going to happen if the trend continues.
Secondly, the third-world countries would bitterly oppose anything that cuts them off from the developed world or limits their exploitation of fossil fuel energy.
They sure do, because the message we are sending right now is that we want to limit them while continuing our wasteful energy use, since our negotiating position is to use our current, wasteful usage as the basis for future budgets. I suspect developing nations would easily agree to a uniform global per-capita energy and fossil fuel budget.
For something to float, it must displace an equal mass of whatever its floating in. By definition, the north polar ice cap is displacing exactly its own mass in water
That's neither "by definition" nor in actual fact; significant parts of the ice in the arctic rest on solid ground. When that ice melts, it will raise the sea level. It won't be anywhere near as dramatic as when the southern polar ice cap melts, but it will have an effect.
I agree, but first-to-invent obviously doesn't do it, since the churning is much worse in the US than anywhere else.
There's no innovation whatsoever (nor any reason for rewarding this behavior) for any company that patents anything just in case it might be of some value in the future.
And how does first-to-invent prevent that? First-to-invent means that those same companies can keep secret signed notebooks which they can then use to sue you after you, the small inventor, have just scraped together the several thousand $$$ to file your one big invention.
I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty that this is not what patents were designed to accomplish.
Oh, I agree. But first-to-invent doesn't help fix that. Arguably, it makes things worse.
If I invented something and published my idea, only to have to pay royalties to the first person to copy and submit my idea to the patent office.
That's a problem in the US with "first to invent", which gives you up to one year after publication.
I believe patent reform will fix that even in the US: once it's been published, it becomes unpatentable immediately.
First to publish would mean that the person publishing it gets an exception to that, so they have a chance for patenting the invention for a limited time after publication (say, 1 year). I think that would be OK, but I don't see any compelling reason for it either.
If you have something you've invented do you have the $10,000 or whatever it takes to file for a patent? What if you don't have the money to file?
If you don't have the $10k to file the patent, then you usually don't have the resources to get into a legal first-to-invent battle with a big company.
Creating a rule that countervenes the whole purpose of patent law is not a solution; the solution is to reduce filing costs and requirements.
Or what if you've been working on something for years to get all the bugs out before you patent only to find someone else beat you to it by days, weeks, or months?
Well, that's your fault: you don't have to get the bugs out before patenting. And sometimes it's just bad luck.
Also, many inventors aren't so bothered by it: there are lots more good ideas to be had.
Look at Philo T. Farnsworth and RCA.
I believe there was actual fraud involved in that.
The proposal itself tells you that Microsoft just doesn't understand that software quality isn't about having the most features or doing the best on some benchmark. Microsoft probably does really win (slightly) on both counts for some (maybe even many) of their products on some (contrived) benchmarks.
But that's no accident, nor is it anything to boast about. The UNIX principles are to keep things as simple as possible, to ruthlessly eliminate features, and to live with inefficiencies in places where they don't matter much. There is no point, for example, optimizing a mainstream web server beyond the performance actually demanded by real-world setups.
If Microsoft delivered clear-cut 10-fold improvements in productivity and performance compared to open source, then people might be willing to put up with being tied to Microsoft, but we don't need OSDL or anybody else to see that Microsoft isn't delivering that. And for perhaps a 5% or even a 50% improvement in performance, the risks, hassles, and costs of going with a proprietary solution aren't worth it to an increasing number of people.
The reason why businesses increasingly choose open source is that they simply don't want to be tied to Microsoft (or any other software vendor); it all comes down to risk and predictability.
If something can't propagate, why bother talking about the speed at which it propagates? It's like asking whether or not dinosaurs would enjoy baseball.
It can propagate, just not very far.
The results are correct. The question is how precise the results are. So gravity propagates at approximately the speed of light. The question of how exact that approximation is needs to be measured better. But it's not, say, infinity.
If you're referring to the Kopeikin results (the only plausible experiment that attempts to measure the speed of gravity AFAIK), the analysis depends on a number of unproven assumptions, and it hasn't been independently verified. For now, we can at most consider the results "plausible and suggestive", but no stronger than that.
Uh, it has. The W and Z do have mass. Measured, and all. Really.
I don't dispute that. What hasn't been demonstrated experimentally is that the corresponding interactions propagate slower than lightspeed. It's a very plausible inference, but it's still a hypothesis until it has been measured.
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Whether you are right or wrong (I'm not a fan of VS either)
How can I be wrong? I said "I find Visual Studio to be one of the worst development environments in existence". There is no "right or wrong" when it comes to choice of development tools, only personal preferences.
Of course, there are people who think that VS is the best thing since sliced bread, but the appeal of Microsoft's use of Microsoft tools for Xbox 360 is limited to that group. People who don't already love VS will find Microsoft's choice of tools at best irrelevant and more likely a nuisance.
The thing we can debate is how large and how significant the group of people is who think VS is a net plus for Xbox 360 development. Personally, I suspect that the class of people who loves VS is largely disjunct from the group of people who develop great games.
He also gets that that is one of the reasons Linux seems to have "scattershot design by committee of blind idiots"...
Except that Linux isn't designed by committee, it's not designed at all. The software that makes it on Linux is determined by free market choice.
OS X, in contrast, is designed by a monarch (Jobs) and Windows by central planning and committee (the technical leadership in Redmond). Monarchs and central committees build impressive castles and monuments. OS X is the equivalent of Versailles and Windows the equivalent of the Kremlin, but those are not good places to live.
Worship your despots, monarchs, and central committees, while the rest of us go on with the messy task of building a nice place to live in a democratic and market-driven way.
Never mind that easy to use GUI design is eschewed by Linux writers who seem to be inherently unable to grasp that what is easy for a techie geek is NOT the thing that the common end-users need or want.
I challenge you to show usability studies demonstrating that the OS X UI is any easier to use than Gnome, KDE, or Windows.
OSX is polished and has a singular top-down vision from Jobs and his unholy cult.
You are quite right. But being polished and having a singular vision doesn't make OS X better than everything else, it just represents a particular set of tradeoffs. OS X is very nice for certain things, and it's awful for others.
EASE, not FREE or OPEN should be the buzzword of Linux.
The buzzwords of Linux are variety and choice. That encompasses giving you the choice of something easy-to-use, like Ubuntu or Linspire.
for those reasons is why I prefer developing for *BSD or OSX because I know where the dependancies will be on a standard installation is a much better argument.
Except that you have to cope with four different versions of OS X at various patchlevels. And, unlike Linux, OS X lacks the consistent package management, dependency management, and updating to cope with that automatically.
Developers of OS X somehow make it work most of the time, but they do so by including lots of dependencies in their packages (hence, you get really fat applications) and using very little cross-application integration. And many OS X applications just deal with it by saying "only works on Tiger" or "doesn't work on Tiger".
Why I like OSX is because all my Unix goodies I was used to under BSD, Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl, were all extremely easy to install,
Unfortunately, it's hit or miss. Maybe all the UNIX goodies you needed were extremely easy to install, but a lot of UNIX goodies are not. Fink and OpenDarwin are both flaky, outdated, and incomplete compared to Linux distributions. Manual installation of software from source is hampered by problems like the fact that Apple has a proprietary window system and weird versions of gcc.
Altogether, I have found OS X to be a mixed bag. It's a pretty good system if it happens to do what you need, but its functionality is far more limited than that of a Linux or BSD system. The direction Apple is taking--more flaky features and less UNIX compatibility--is also worrisome. Still, while OS X and Linux each have their pros and cons, there are almost no reasons to use Windows compared to either of them.
..but even with Microsoft's development tools and strong technical support (another aspect for which the developers had kind words)
I find Visual Studio to be one of the worst development environments in existence, and I have never gotten useful technical support from Microsoft. On Windows, one can at least work around that with third party tools, but for something like Xbox 360, the need to use Microsoft tools and to rely on Microsoft support is a big strike against the platform.
This is a list of useful attributes for developers
Of course, it is: the secret behind the web's success is the developers and the fact that HTML and HTTP made it easy for them to deliver content and applications, while keeping them from doing the stupid things they used to do when programming applications for the desktop.
Even with technologies like DHTML and AJAX you're still layering application-like functionality on a page-based platform and it's awkward.
You're quite right that web technologies make it hard to layer application-like functionality on top of the web, and that's a good thing. It keeps people like you from treating the web as a desktop application delivery platform. You can either adapt to that, or you can get a different job.
Take a look at OpenLaszlo (http://openlaszlo.org/) for one example of an interesting open source, Flash-based Web application tool.
Yes, OpenLaszlo delivers typical Flash applications: applications that don't support cut-and-paste, ignore browser font sizes or preferences or screen resolution, don't provide accessibility, don't resize properly, and have numerous other usability problems.
Monopolies make me nervous too, but let's not confuse the existence of a monopoly with the quality of the technology in question.
I'm not; it is really the quality of the technology that is bad, and in two ways. First, Flash solves the wrong problem, and, in addition, it solves it badly. Flash is technically OK for little animations, which is what it was originally designed for. But Flash is a lousy web-based desktop application delivery platform; Java, RDP, VNC, and X11 would be far better for that and far easier to both develop for and use. But, in fact, it has turned out that the entire concept of a web-based desktop application delivery platform is flawed, which is why all those other platforms failed to catch on for mainstream web use as well.
Second, Flash does not suck resources unless there's heavy animation involved. It certainly doesn't use huge amounts of RAM.
That's the theory. In practice, Macromedia's Flash player has bugs that mean you end up with an unusable web browser and dozens of flash processes running in the background on some platforms.
Finally, whether you like it or not, Flash is the best way to create modern web applications,
Flash breaks just about everything about the web that made the web successful in the first place: open standards, text-based representations, user control over rendering, cut-and-paste, and screen scraping.
Fortunately, even though idiotic attitudes like yours still exist in some backwards corners of the web, there isn't much point in getting worked up about it: Flash is a niche application and won't ever be anything more than that.
Also, have you seen Adobe's SVG plugin for example? It makes Acrobat look small and snappy in comparison.
Have you seen Adobe Acrobat Reader? It sucks: it's slow and memory hungry, while Linux and OS X have fast and compact PDF viewers. Just because one of Adobe's viewers sucks doesn't mean that nobody can do a good job implementing a viewer for that document type.
As to SVG standard, read and weep: SVG Rendering Comparison.
That's FUD on your part. What's there to "weep"? We have a handful of open source SVG implementations that implement a substantial portion of the standard and largely differ mostly in obscure areas. Those open source implementations are being created in addition to multiple commercial implementations.
It will probably be a while until IE has native SVG support built in, but Firefox and Mozilla are going to have it soon. Hopefully, someone will port a decent SVG plug-in to IE.
You can install the player on laptops.
Yeah, but why would you want to? I find Macromedia Flash to be a poorly written piece of software. Before I get around to uninstalling it, it regularly gets in some mode where half a dozen Flash-related processes run in the background and bring my machine to a crawl. And all that for a bunch of worthless content that usually doesn't even scale properly.
Thank you, but I don't give a f*ck whether I "can" or "may" install Flash on my laptop or my desktop; the sooner I can uninstall it, the better.
Hopefully, SVG will put Flash out of its misery; the world has suffered from it long enough.
A better measure of what's being done with one's energy consumption isn't per-capita, it's per-dollar-GDP. With that measure, the US is far more efficient than (for example) China and India, whose ability to claim decent per-capita energy consumption is entirely due to the tremendous difference between their urban middle and upper classes and their gigantic rural farming lower class.
No, that's not a better way. A citizen of the US should have no more right to damage the planet than a citizen of China or India, no matter how efficiently or inefficiently they use energy. In fact, ultimately, we should insist that nobody has a net impact on the planet; that's the only way we can survive as a species in the long term.
GDP is also a lousy comparative measure of economic activity. An economy can have a very high GDP and produce nothing of value to individuals.
If you want to talk about efficiency, a better measure might be quality-of-life produced per unit of energy; to the degree that has been quantified, the US does not come out very well.
That means that everyone is paying more - a lot more - for the same goods they bought last year, without a corresponding increase in wages. Sales decrease, so profits decrease, so people lose jobs. All that "extra money" goes into producing equipment that doesn't add anything to the growth of the economy,
So, you are saying that $100M spent on factories and power plants doesn't add anything to the economy and doesn't create jobs, while $100M on Barbie dolls and plasma TV's does. Thanks for illustrating so clearly how economically illiterate the people opposing energy efficiency are.
In fact, the $100M spent on new factories and power plants not only is equivalent to the $100M spent on consumer junk in terms of job creation and economic activity, it is actually better because it will last longer, make future production more efficient, improve the environment, and stimulate R&D.
I've had MS pro copies of Office for many years and I've had years of experience with Linux. My opion is Open Office doesn't yet touch MS pro office, especially Power Point.
I prepare several presentations per week and I find no practically relevant advantages in PowerPoint over Impress. If anything, Impress has a slight edge because formulas are integrated better. The same is true for word processing and spreadsheets.
Given how long Open Office has been chasing after MS Office, it's about time it got close enough to give MS Office a kick
Other office suites will never "catch up" with MS Office; that's because what sets apart MS Office and other office suites isn't quality or functionality, it's idiosyncracies and incompatibilities, and Microsoft invents new ones every release.
I run a wintel box as a multimedia web box because too many formats are locked into MS apps and I'm not enough of a zealot to forgo information.
You are a zealot, actually.
I have been using OOo2 beta under Linux and Windows and it works fine for me. I also don't understand why you don't want beta software on your system; it doesn't bite--the worst that can happen is that you don't like it.
Also, OOo on NT4 will consistently blue screen when running above 256 colors. Thie problem is independent of any hardware that is installed and has occured on every revision i have tried.
Which means that NT4 has some serious bugs in its video APIs and that you should upgrade to a fixed version of Windows ASAP. The fact that OOo triggers that bug is immaterial; the OOo developers have better things to do than to try to find workarounds for bugs in obsolete Microsoft software.
(I'm forced to use OOo on computers running NT4 and Win2k with 256MB RAM)
OOo is neither designed for that kind of hardware nor for that kind of software environment. The people who are screwing you are neither Microsoft nor OOo, they are your IT staff.
If you want to run OOo on that kind of hardware, install Linux. It will still be slow, but it will work better than NT.
My numbers assume that office pays for itself if it saves each employee using it 15 minutes a week. That's it
You're neglecting...
- the hours per week the PC user spends waiting for tech support
- training expenses (time, materials, downtime, mistakes, etc.)
- the expense of maintaining an IT staff supporting Office
- the expense of hardware upgrades resulting from bigger, slower software
If you profit margins are in the 0.3% range, you are in trouble. Sure, controlling software costs is a pretty good way to increase that profit margin, but you still only have less than 0.5% to work with, which can only go so far. max
Adding 0.6% (or 0.3% or 0.5% or whatever other numbers you dream up) to one's profit margin is a big deal. And, in actual fact, the cost of keeping an organization of 200 people up-to-date on the latest Office versions is likely in the millions of dollars over half a dozen years, and that's a big overhead no matter what kind of business you are.
$210,000 / $36,000,000 = 0.00583 ~= 0.6%
You aren't in business, are you? It doesn't make sense to calculate additional expenses as fraction of operating expenses. You can pay your employees $2M each, and the $210k expense would still be a $210k expense. Does paying the $210k for licenses yield at least $210k in extra revenue? No? Then it isn't worth it. In fact, those 0.6% may be a substantial portion of the profit margin of the busines. (But given Microsoft's obscene profit margins, you may be excused for not understanding such a fine point.)
More importantly, you forgot to add the extra IT staff of 10 people working for six years (which is about what you need to support Windows desktops for an organization of 200 desktop users). And all of a sudden, we are talking real money.
You only have yourself to blame for not finding the setting for this. It's on the top of the first tab in the user options.
Ah, yes, that's the "blame the user" approach to GUI design. It is practiced quite commonly among programmers.
The default mode is wrong. The default mode shouldn't even exist, even as an option, because it violates GUI conventions.
He wasn't a faculty member at Caltech, he was a research associate. In most cases, infrastructure work, project management, and software development experience are not sufficient to get you tenure at a top university.
There are people who claim HIV doesn't cause AIDS and is a harmless virus. There are people who claim that the holocaust never happened. And there are people who claim that global warming isn't happening. There are lots of foolish theories out there, and occasionally one is even right.
In this case, however, global warming due to artificial emissions of CO2 is a widely believed and well-supported theory. If it is true, the consequences are drastic. On the other hand, addressing the issue is neither costly nor technically difficult; in fact, it has many side-benefits. So, even in the unlikely event that it isn't true, we still don't lose anything by acting on it.
Taken together, that means that we should act to drastically reduce carbon emissions.
Finally, the economic change - read as depression - that would come from doing "drastic" things stands a good chance of killing as many people as climate change might.
There is not an iota of evidence that reducing carbon emissions would lead to a depression. Quite to the contrary: it is quite clear that an aggressive move to energy efficient technologies would create new jobs and growth, and would lower operating costs. Scrapping the energy inefficient technologies of today and building new power plants and factories is probably the best thing that could happen to the US economy.
The only people who stand to lose are the people who have large investments in current, inefficient technologies.
First off, we just don't understand what is happening or why.
I'm sorry you haven't been paying attention, but we do understand what is happening and why it's happening.
Unfortunately, if we are in a position where human-added CO2 is the root cause of all of this, we cannot afford the luxury of these kinds of measures. Sure, they might have some effect and that might help. But if we're the cause of climate change, far, far more drastic measures need to be taken right now.
As comparison with other Western nations alone shows, the US could easily cut its CO2 emissions in half without any decrease in its standard of living; quite to the contrary: a serious program to do that would increase the standard of living and create jobs.
Furthermore, if you think you can't "afford" that level of change, what do you think loss of what is probably going to be 50% of the currently inhabited area of the US is going to do to quality of life? Because that's what's going to happen if the trend continues.
Secondly, the third-world countries would bitterly oppose anything that cuts them off from the developed world or limits their exploitation of fossil fuel energy.
They sure do, because the message we are sending right now is that we want to limit them while continuing our wasteful energy use, since our negotiating position is to use our current, wasteful usage as the basis for future budgets. I suspect developing nations would easily agree to a uniform global per-capita energy and fossil fuel budget.
For something to float, it must displace an equal mass of whatever its floating in. By definition, the north polar ice cap is displacing exactly its own mass in water
That's neither "by definition" nor in actual fact; significant parts of the ice in the arctic rest on solid ground. When that ice melts, it will raise the sea level. It won't be anywhere near as dramatic as when the southern polar ice cap melts, but it will have an effect.
Whatever happens, this ought to be stopped.
I agree, but first-to-invent obviously doesn't do it, since the churning is much worse in the US than anywhere else.
There's no innovation whatsoever (nor any reason for rewarding this behavior) for any company that patents anything just in case it might be of some value in the future.
And how does first-to-invent prevent that? First-to-invent means that those same companies can keep secret signed notebooks which they can then use to sue you after you, the small inventor, have just scraped together the several thousand $$$ to file your one big invention.
I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty that this is not what patents were designed to accomplish.
Oh, I agree. But first-to-invent doesn't help fix that. Arguably, it makes things worse.
If I invented something and published my idea, only to have to pay royalties to the first person to copy and submit my idea to the patent office.
That's a problem in the US with "first to invent", which gives you up to one year after publication.
I believe patent reform will fix that even in the US: once it's been published, it becomes unpatentable immediately.
First to publish would mean that the person publishing it gets an exception to that, so they have a chance for patenting the invention for a limited time after publication (say, 1 year). I think that would be OK, but I don't see any compelling reason for it either.
If you have something you've invented do you have the $10,000 or whatever it takes to file for a patent? What if you don't have the money to file?
If you don't have the $10k to file the patent, then you usually don't have the resources to get into a legal first-to-invent battle with a big company.
Creating a rule that countervenes the whole purpose of patent law is not a solution; the solution is to reduce filing costs and requirements.
Or what if you've been working on something for years to get all the bugs out before you patent only to find someone else beat you to it by days, weeks, or months?
Well, that's your fault: you don't have to get the bugs out before patenting. And sometimes it's just bad luck.
Also, many inventors aren't so bothered by it: there are lots more good ideas to be had.
Look at Philo T. Farnsworth and RCA.
I believe there was actual fraud involved in that.
The proposal itself tells you that Microsoft just doesn't understand that software quality isn't about having the most features or doing the best on some benchmark. Microsoft probably does really win (slightly) on both counts for some (maybe even many) of their products on some (contrived) benchmarks.
But that's no accident, nor is it anything to boast about. The UNIX principles are to keep things as simple as possible, to ruthlessly eliminate features, and to live with inefficiencies in places where they don't matter much. There is no point, for example, optimizing a mainstream web server beyond the performance actually demanded by real-world setups.
If Microsoft delivered clear-cut 10-fold improvements in productivity and performance compared to open source, then people might be willing to put up with being tied to Microsoft, but we don't need OSDL or anybody else to see that Microsoft isn't delivering that. And for perhaps a 5% or even a 50% improvement in performance, the risks, hassles, and costs of going with a proprietary solution aren't worth it to an increasing number of people.
The reason why businesses increasingly choose open source is that they simply don't want to be tied to Microsoft (or any other software vendor); it all comes down to risk and predictability.
If something can't propagate, why bother talking about the speed at which it propagates? It's like asking whether or not dinosaurs would enjoy baseball.
It can propagate, just not very far.
The results are correct. The question is how precise the results are. So gravity propagates at approximately the speed of light. The question of how exact that approximation is needs to be measured better. But it's not, say, infinity.
If you're referring to the Kopeikin results (the only plausible experiment that attempts to measure the speed of gravity AFAIK), the analysis depends on a number of unproven assumptions, and it hasn't been independently verified. For now, we can at most consider the results "plausible and suggestive", but no stronger than that.
Uh, it has. The W and Z do have mass. Measured, and all. Really.
I don't dispute that. What hasn't been demonstrated experimentally is that the corresponding interactions propagate slower than lightspeed. It's a very plausible inference, but it's still a hypothesis until it has been measured.