Indeed, from the description it sounds liked they were saying there was a free upgrade from Vista no matter when you bought it. Here I was thinking... "Whoah, they actually did The Right Thing" for a change.
True; but what I was getting at is that it's not a bad thing - if there's a situation where there is competition; that's what the market does handle well in most cases.
However, in cases of infrastructure, I think the government should own the fiber/communications backbone, and lease it out to providers at a fixed rate designed to break even on maintenance. (Same for water, electricity, sewage, etc)
Unfortunately, it's far too late for that - because as much as I would like to see that, I definitely would/not/ want to see government seizing the property of business(es) to make it happen. It's the kind of thing that would need to have been done from the start.
The responses (modding and comments) just re-affirm that slashdotters are no more immune to the froth-at-the-mouth kneejerk reaction to politically incorrect topics than the rest of the population. Not to mention that they seem to have missed the point of the joke completely anyway. No surprise there in either case.
Making customers happy is long term good business, and works fine in a deregulated market. The companies have to realize this on their own, though.
By then, it's too late. When there are no airlines that focus on making customers happy, and all airlines are making good money, there's no incentive to change. Stockholders don't like risky ideas like "making the customer happy" when they are not 100% sure how it will affect their year over year ROI.
bad example. People are willing to pay those fees in sufficient scale. The banks should charge "whatever the market will bear" - if they go too far, people will find other options. And there ARE other options in the case of ATMs - most places accept debit card. Wawa (locally around philly) has fee-free ATM, as do other places. You can go directly to the bank. Or use your bank's ATMs. Or... if you have to have cash NOW, you can pay the fee.
It's the difference between a luxury and a necessity. Getting cash out from an ATM is a luxury. Internet connection is more and more becoming a necessity of modern life (for a given standard of living).
Local ordinances. At the local level, the government is most directly representing the population - their actions presumably reflect what most of the populace wants. If most of the populace says "NIMBY", then local government must interfere. Sufficient funds and profitability don't help when the locality (the local market, if you will) say "We have already had our roads dug up for Company X. We are not willing to go through that again."
I think free market is a great thing in many if not most cases; but I also think there are some situations that the free market can't handle. Infrastructure - be it roads, telephone, fiber, sewage, trash collection, water lines - falls into the latter category. If any one company controls these things to the exclusion of all others (especially up to the point where a new provider can't enter market to offer competition), the consumers pay the price.
Consistently, every new version of Firefox comes with a larger installation footprint, larger use of resources
Erm... FF 3 had markedly reduced resource usage over FF 2...
arger lock in to Google who "sponsor" their development in return for a default search etc etc.
What lock in? Change search provider, turn off spam protection, done. (Even Microsoft has bought a clue about that one, and allows people to change their default search provider. )
... let's a look a little closer at the backgruond processes that get installed at the non-service level for a typical user.
Antivirus (doesn't count)
Anti-spyware (presumably counts)
firewall app
useless video card helper app
useless quicktime helper app
useless MS Office or OpenOffice helper app
Useless itunes helper app
Useless java updater app
Useless adobe acrobat helper app
Unnecessary verizon/comcast/whatever helper app for broadband.
Weatherbug and similar
All these are running as user processes, before the user launches a single application. The worst thing that MS ever did was allow "hide unused icons in the system tray" - it's turned a whole generation of mostly-unaware users into/completely/ unaware users. Now they don't even say "What's all this stuff down here for?"
Well... I guess time will tell. I certainly do hope that it does more good than harm; definitely a case where I'd welcome someone being able to say "I told you so".
They call that "political grandstanding", he knew it had no chance of being passed - even if it were not up to the democrats.
And still: 500bn is much, much greater than $0; and $0 is the only appropriate response - any attempt to print new money to "solve" the depression will at best drag it out longer.
"Holding... at bay?" By squabbling over 100-200bn dollars? If they wanted to be effective, they would be fighting to stop it altogether. Reducing a bill from 8000bn to 700bn is meaningless except for getting votes at reelection time.
The $800b he proposed was too small to begin with, and all of these cuts make it more likely that we're not going to have enough stimulus to do anything useful.
Trying to get the country out of a depression by adding debt is a losing policy designed to make people feel like the government is doing something useful. "Circus and peanuts".
Ironically this means I agree with you - if we're going to print up money because we think it will solve our problems, we should be doing it in the trillions. That way we can get this farce over with more quickly and hasten the inevitable collapse -- and perhaps begin to recover from it.
Slashdot Mirror
Then I read TFA.
If your exchange server will handle this message in the routing chain, you're vulnerable.
Well Flash came with the computer, so it's really just part of it and there's nothing wrong with /that/ ;)
True; but what I was getting at is that it's not a bad thing - if there's a situation where there is competition; that's what the market does handle well in most cases.
However, in cases of infrastructure, I think the government should own the fiber/communications backbone, and lease it out to providers at a fixed rate designed to break even on maintenance. (Same for water, electricity, sewage, etc)
Unfortunately, it's far too late for that - because as much as I would like to see that, I definitely would /not/ want to see government seizing the property of business(es) to make it happen. It's the kind of thing that would need to have been done from the start.
The responses (modding and comments) just re-affirm that slashdotters are no more immune to the froth-at-the-mouth kneejerk reaction to politically incorrect topics than the rest of the population. Not to mention that they seem to have missed the point of the joke completely anyway. No surprise there in either case.
Recommended listening for you sir or madam: Track 7.
Making customers happy is long term good business, and works fine in a deregulated market. The companies have to realize this on their own, though.
By then, it's too late. When there are no airlines that focus on making customers happy, and all airlines are making good money, there's no incentive to change. Stockholders don't like risky ideas like "making the customer happy" when they are not 100% sure how it will affect their year over year ROI.
Folders raises an interesting question - I assume those count as "explorer.exe" instances, which is already running as the desktop shell?
It's the difference between a luxury and a necessity. Getting cash out from an ATM is a luxury. Internet connection is more and more becoming a necessity of modern life (for a given standard of living).
I think free market is a great thing in many if not most cases; but I also think there are some situations that the free market can't handle. Infrastructure - be it roads, telephone, fiber, sewage, trash collection, water lines - falls into the latter category. If any one company controls these things to the exclusion of all others (especially up to the point where a new provider can't enter market to offer competition), the consumers pay the price.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
What ever happened to "Duck duck duck goose"?
There's a good AC post above where he checked the results on Vista Starter - sounds like it's not as bad as the conclusions I jumped to.
Good info, thanks for posting it. Hopefully someone will mod this up 'informative', as it is.
b) actually I think sin was defaulting it to 'enabled', more than including it.
Consistently, every new version of Firefox comes with a larger installation footprint, larger use of resources
Erm... FF 3 had markedly reduced resource usage over FF 2...
arger lock in to Google who "sponsor" their development in return for a default search etc etc.
What lock in? Change search provider, turn off spam protection, done. (Even Microsoft has bought a clue about that one, and allows people to change their default search provider. )
All these are running as user processes, before the user launches a single application. The worst thing that MS ever did was allow "hide unused icons in the system tray" - it's turned a whole generation of mostly-unaware users into /completely/ unaware users. Now they don't even say "What's all this stuff down here for?"
Well... I guess time will tell. I certainly do hope that it does more good than harm; definitely a case where I'd welcome someone being able to say "I told you so".
For all we know, this was "leaked" by someone in the administration who wanted to bypass the years of red type required to simply release the stuff...
Holy carp! Our Founding Fathers were talking about OO design and refactoring even then - they really were omniscient!
And still: 500bn is much, much greater than $0; and $0 is the only appropriate response - any attempt to print new money to "solve" the depression will at best drag it out longer.
"Holding... at bay?" By squabbling over 100-200bn dollars? If they wanted to be effective, they would be fighting to stop it altogether. Reducing a bill from 8000bn to 700bn is meaningless except for getting votes at reelection time.
The $800b he proposed was too small to begin with, and all of these cuts make it more likely that we're not going to have enough stimulus to do anything useful.
Trying to get the country out of a depression by adding debt is a losing policy designed to make people feel like the government is doing something useful. "Circus and peanuts".
Ironically this means I agree with you - if we're going to print up money because we think it will solve our problems, we should be doing it in the trillions. That way we can get this farce over with more quickly and hasten the inevitable collapse -- and perhaps begin to recover from it.
What does this have to do with republicans? Soundbites have been the currency of politics since the advent of radio.
Perhaps it drew some inspiration from this one.
Thanks! The fact that 'do this every time' option has been disabled for a couple of my devices has been driving me nuts.