1 is certainly true.
2 - do you know that they've reduced manpower from, say, Word 95? And even if they have, I'd bet large sums of money that their development team is significantly larger than the team that brought you WP for DOS, because of point 3...
3 - that may be so, but the projects also get bigger and more complicated. Word 2003 does stuff that WP for DOS couldn't have dreamed about doing, so I tend to think that there's little if any net gain realized by RAD tools. The tendency is not to do the same amount of stuff with fewer people, but to do more stuff with the same number of people.
In any case, there are real cost savings now versus twenty years ago - whether we think those savings would have been more or less in the absence of MS is speculation, with precious little basis in fact.
Given how much time and effort is being put into developing OO, something makes me doubt it's really that much cheaper and easier than in the old days. Sure, the tools are better, but the projects are also a lot bigger - we also expect a heck of a lot more than we did from WP for DOS.
I don't need a crystal ball to tell you this. I can speak from my own personal experience over that period as someone who does not buy Microsoft products.
And how many of those non-Microsoft products you use arose in response to Microsoft?
You don't have to like Microsoft to acknowledge that it's had some influence - you may argue that it's been negative, and I would agree that some of it has been, but I don't think it's reasonable to deny that some effects have been positive - $800 non-MS word processors led to $400 MS word processors, which are now leading to free non-MS word processors. Unless you prefer paying $800 for wordprocessors, that is. Or more - google up how much the original Data General version of WP cost next time you're bored.
You're a glass-is-half-empty kind of person, I can tell;)
Anyway, unless you have a crystal ball, for all you know, the situation would be much, much worse in the absence of MS. Given that, let's stick to the facts we have, rather than assuming the ones we don't have will mirror our perception of the world.
There is no way of knowing for certain, but I would be willing to bet the answer is yes.
"Willing" based on what? That is, you've already said there's no way to know for sure, so any answer you come up with is not much more than pure speculation - for all we know, without Microsoft, we'd be paying more in real terms, not less. It's fun to play the "what if?" game - what if the South had won the civil war, what if Vienna had fallen in 1683, and so on - but at the end of the day, it's all speculation. What we do know, on the other hand, is that prices are less than what they were. Is MS responsible for that? Maybe partly, but as you say, there's no real way to know for sure.
However, once a particular vendor has asserted dominance over a particular product area, they are free to raise their prices again.
Nevertheless, the price is still lower in real terms than it was before. In 1985, Wordperfect for DOS was selling for $450, which is around $790 when adjusted for inflation to today's dollars. Even if I go out and buy the full retail version of Office Professional 2003, it'll cost me $499 or so, or almost $300 less in real terms than WP cost back in 1985. And in return for that lower price in real terms, you get a product that is virtually infinitely more capable than the older product.
Whether they've raised their prices or not since 1985 is really neither here nor there - consumers are still winners over the same period.
Therefore, nobody cares about this topic on Slashdot.
Or, more likely, most people don't know this article is here, since by default it's buried in the Apple section and not present on the front page - unless you specifically search the Apple-related articles, or you changed the defaults to push all Apple-related articles on to the front page (most people don't), you won't see this, and hence you won't know it even exists.
Of course, once you realize that, the opportunity to rant via creative misspellings about how nobody cares about Microsoft on OSX is lost, so perhaps you should just ignore this post and carry on as you were.
At the current price at Argos, it's selling for cheaper than it is in the US (correct my if I'm wrong, I'm aware of the difference between the pound and the dollar).
No, you're right. Despite the weak dollar, at the current interbank exchange rate £39.99 is worth $76.76 - most US retailers are still at the $99 point, IIRC. Of course, back before the dollar started its slide, it would have been around $60.;)
What Unix needs is a compiler (pick your favorite language) that generates code which prevents buffer overflows.
You already have basically that in Ada95 + GNAT, but every programmer seems to fancy himself a master hacker - and not just a master hacker, but one who is so skilled that he is perfectly capable of working without a net absolutely 100% of the time. And given that he absolutely never, ever makes mistakes, of course he doesn't need such "restrictive" features. And so it goes basically unused.
MIT isn't accredited at all, last I heard, under the theory that people already know they're just fine.
MIT is very much accredited. "Everybody knows they're just fine" is not nearly enough to continue in business, not least because neither the federal government nor any state will extend grants or loans to students attending institutions that are not accredited by a recognized governing body. No accreditation = no $$$$, period. Recognized accreditation commissions are organized regionally in the United States - the US Department of Education would probably be the best place to start for a comprehensive list.
The reason the organization that accredits UC Berkeley has any clout is that it accredits Berkeley.
Nope. The reason the organization that accredits UC Berkeley has clout is for the same reason the organization that accredits MIT has clout - without it, the money dries up and the joint either shuts down or converts over to a for-profit trade school.
Like I said, that's certainly a position worth discussing, whether the settlement was fair or not. But there was a settlement, and yet it's done absolutely no good to the survivors whatsoever. What good is a settlement of one million billion trillion dollars if none of the victims ever sees a single dime?
That money's working for someone, though, and it ain't the poor folks who got gassed or their families....
...let me point out that compensation was already in the works. Union Carbide paid India $480 million back in 1989 - we can certainly argue about the amount and whether it's enough, but the money was paid. The real problem there is that the Indian government kept most of the money, and didn't distribute it to or use it on behalf of the survivors. Frankly, I don't see much point in paying out any more, so long as the government of India is going to act as a sinkhole and suck down any more money that gets transferred. Sorry, but maybe this time it should be held in trust for the survivors by someone other than Indian bureaucrats.
Former. After years of therapy, I've been able to block out the nights of macaroni-noodles-with-ketchup for dinner, the Friday nights spent rolling pennies, when $0.50 for a load of laundry seemed like an enormous amount of money. That is, I was able to block it out until you came along, you insensitive clod...
I don't want Microsoft to win money from spammers, but I want to spammers to burn and die (and go broke in the process). Who should I root for?
Microsoft has such an ungodly amount of money already that you might as well root for them, since nothing they win is likely to have much of a material impact on who they are or what they do. MS winning a million dollars in court is like you finding a $10 bill on the sidewalk - it might perk up your morning a bit, but it's not going to change your life. Spammers paying out millions, though - that'll wreck your whole day if you're in the spam business...
Depends on what you define as "decent". At a 99% confidence level, a sample size of 200 means that the margin of error for this survey is +/- 9%. Even if you open it up to a 95% confidence level, the MOE is still +/- 7%. If you wanted to drop the margin of error down to +/- 3% at a 95% confidence level, you'd need a sample size of just over a thousand respondents.
But every ten or fifteen minutes I have to spend ten seconds waiting for a new level to load.
If that was the actual ratio of play time to load time, I doubt anyone would complain at all - I sure wouldn't. But the problem is that it takes quite a bit longer than that, which becomes especially noticeable during parts of the Route Kanal chapter - you cover so much ground so fast on the hoverbike, that there are places where you're loading a new segment every two or three minutes, and then the ratio becomes a rather aggravating three-minutes-of-play-time to one-minute-of-load-time. It's hardly a dealbreaker, and I still love the game, but it's a bit annoying.
Wrong, because it affected only the electronic counties of 2004.
Exactly so - you didn't really read what I wrote, did you?;)
That's the whole point, and that's why it's an equally good explanation - it only affected the electronic counties in 2004. Let me spell it out - the problems with paper/mechanical ballots resulted in excess votes for Democrats in lots of precincts in 1996 and 2000, but only the electronic precincts eliminated those errors in 2004. So only the electronic precincts show the discrepancy, and the rest of the precincts still reflect the problems with paper/mechanical ballots in that existed in 2000. Get it?
And the nice thing is, there's just as much evidence to support that explanation as there is to support the explanation that there was a problem with the electronic ballots - none whatsoever.
Slashdot Mirror
There are 1.2 billion of them - Sims or not, I think it's a bit late to hide sex from them...
1 is certainly true.
2 - do you know that they've reduced manpower from, say, Word 95? And even if they have, I'd bet large sums of money that their development team is significantly larger than the team that brought you WP for DOS, because of point 3...
3 - that may be so, but the projects also get bigger and more complicated. Word 2003 does stuff that WP for DOS couldn't have dreamed about doing, so I tend to think that there's little if any net gain realized by RAD tools. The tendency is not to do the same amount of stuff with fewer people, but to do more stuff with the same number of people.
In any case, there are real cost savings now versus twenty years ago - whether we think those savings would have been more or less in the absence of MS is speculation, with precious little basis in fact.
Given how much time and effort is being put into developing OO, something makes me doubt it's really that much cheaper and easier than in the old days. Sure, the tools are better, but the projects are also a lot bigger - we also expect a heck of a lot more than we did from WP for DOS.
And how many of those non-Microsoft products you use arose in response to Microsoft?
You don't have to like Microsoft to acknowledge that it's had some influence - you may argue that it's been negative, and I would agree that some of it has been, but I don't think it's reasonable to deny that some effects have been positive - $800 non-MS word processors led to $400 MS word processors, which are now leading to free non-MS word processors. Unless you prefer paying $800 for wordprocessors, that is. Or more - google up how much the original Data General version of WP cost next time you're bored.
Anyway, unless you have a crystal ball, for all you know, the situation would be much, much worse in the absence of MS. Given that, let's stick to the facts we have, rather than assuming the ones we don't have will mirror our perception of the world.
"Willing" based on what? That is, you've already said there's no way to know for sure, so any answer you come up with is not much more than pure speculation - for all we know, without Microsoft, we'd be paying more in real terms, not less. It's fun to play the "what if?" game - what if the South had won the civil war, what if Vienna had fallen in 1683, and so on - but at the end of the day, it's all speculation. What we do know, on the other hand, is that prices are less than what they were. Is MS responsible for that? Maybe partly, but as you say, there's no real way to know for sure.
Nevertheless, the price is still lower in real terms than it was before. In 1985, Wordperfect for DOS was selling for $450, which is around $790 when adjusted for inflation to today's dollars. Even if I go out and buy the full retail version of Office Professional 2003, it'll cost me $499 or so, or almost $300 less in real terms than WP cost back in 1985. And in return for that lower price in real terms, you get a product that is virtually infinitely more capable than the older product.
Whether they've raised their prices or not since 1985 is really neither here nor there - consumers are still winners over the same period.
Or, more likely, most people don't know this article is here, since by default it's buried in the Apple section and not present on the front page - unless you specifically search the Apple-related articles, or you changed the defaults to push all Apple-related articles on to the front page (most people don't), you won't see this, and hence you won't know it even exists.
Of course, once you realize that, the opportunity to rant via creative misspellings about how nobody cares about Microsoft on OSX is lost, so perhaps you should just ignore this post and carry on as you were.
No, you're right. Despite the weak dollar, at the current interbank exchange rate £39.99 is worth $76.76 - most US retailers are still at the $99 point, IIRC. Of course, back before the dollar started its slide, it would have been around $60. ;)
You already have basically that in Ada95 + GNAT, but every programmer seems to fancy himself a master hacker - and not just a master hacker, but one who is so skilled that he is perfectly capable of working without a net absolutely 100% of the time. And given that he absolutely never, ever makes mistakes, of course he doesn't need such "restrictive" features. And so it goes basically unused.
MIT is very much accredited. "Everybody knows they're just fine" is not nearly enough to continue in business, not least because neither the federal government nor any state will extend grants or loans to students attending institutions that are not accredited by a recognized governing body. No accreditation = no $$$$, period. Recognized accreditation commissions are organized regionally in the United States - the US Department of Education would probably be the best place to start for a comprehensive list.
The reason the organization that accredits UC Berkeley has any clout is that it accredits Berkeley.
Nope. The reason the organization that accredits UC Berkeley has clout is for the same reason the organization that accredits MIT has clout - without it, the money dries up and the joint either shuts down or converts over to a for-profit trade school.
That money's working for someone, though, and it ain't the poor folks who got gassed or their families....
Uh-huh. And the fact that the RBI can make loans against it has nothing to do with it still sitting there. Right.
UN-PC. Dammit. Also, I'm one of the resident un-spelling posters.
Microsoft has such an ungodly amount of money already that you might as well root for them, since nothing they win is likely to have much of a material impact on who they are or what they do. MS winning a million dollars in court is like you finding a $10 bill on the sidewalk - it might perk up your morning a bit, but it's not going to change your life. Spammers paying out millions, though - that'll wreck your whole day if you're in the spam business...
Did any of them have as many people as LA County?
(rolls eyes)
So was mine - geometry must have been a real bitch for whoever modded it "informative" ;)
Well, I ain't got no physics degree, but I do hate to see someone straining themselves so - try this...
Tell me more about building this "Service Unavailable"....
Depends on what you define as "decent". At a 99% confidence level, a sample size of 200 means that the margin of error for this survey is +/- 9%. Even if you open it up to a 95% confidence level, the MOE is still +/- 7%. If you wanted to drop the margin of error down to +/- 3% at a 95% confidence level, you'd need a sample size of just over a thousand respondents.
If that was the actual ratio of play time to load time, I doubt anyone would complain at all - I sure wouldn't. But the problem is that it takes quite a bit longer than that, which becomes especially noticeable during parts of the Route Kanal chapter - you cover so much ground so fast on the hoverbike, that there are places where you're loading a new segment every two or three minutes, and then the ratio becomes a rather aggravating three-minutes-of-play-time to one-minute-of-load-time. It's hardly a dealbreaker, and I still love the game, but it's a bit annoying.
Exactly so - you didn't really read what I wrote, did you? ;)
That's the whole point, and that's why it's an equally good explanation - it only affected the electronic counties in 2004. Let me spell it out - the problems with paper/mechanical ballots resulted in excess votes for Democrats in lots of precincts in 1996 and 2000, but only the electronic precincts eliminated those errors in 2004. So only the electronic precincts show the discrepancy, and the rest of the precincts still reflect the problems with paper/mechanical ballots in that existed in 2000. Get it?
And the nice thing is, there's just as much evidence to support that explanation as there is to support the explanation that there was a problem with the electronic ballots - none whatsoever.