Either way, this is stuff that Epic Systems of Verona, WI has already done. Their software runs at a lot of hospitals, from the check-in desk to the little dumb terminal in the doctor's office that brings up your charts and records.
They also have a "dashboard" application where you can check your medical records and schedule appointments online. I don't know of any hospital near me that uses that app, but some hospitals advertised the online features they got from Epic on television.
"Gibi" is a prefix invented by Wikipedia. For those of you who have been foiled, I supply a conversion chart.
Some people are angry that their precious SI prefixes were usurped. I'd say "understandably angry," but I'm afraid it's not. Memory has been measured in kilo-mega-giga-tera-et al. since at least the time that IBM made PCs, and probably since 5000 years ago when Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church every Sunday.
Case in point: Go to newegg.com's memory page. See any memory modules sold by the "gibibit"? Consult your motherboard manual; I doubt they'll support a 512 mebibit SDRAM stick, but it maybe, just maybe might support that 512 MEGABYTE module.
Gibi? Might as well measure memory in millionths of a square furlong chip area times a density coefficient.
Remember booting any computer made since the '70s? The BIOS POST would always report memory in "K" - which God^H^H^HIBM did not intend to mean metric kirbybits or whatever nonsense.
Moderators, I humbly suggest modding any "gibi" references as "troll." It's what's right for America!
What's the point of that? VLC is superior on any platform.
VLC chokes on a lot of subtitles. They'll be displayed, but it will ignore font, size, positioning, and all the special effects that make them legible.
I don't have more information other than "subtitles are broken" - it's just my experience when watching my daily fix of my beloved Japanesian cartoons. Some of them just don't render properly in VLC, which is important to me since I only pretend I can speak Japanese.
But, Windows Media Player renders them perfectly, and the Vista Codec Pack makes it just as versatile. Maybe not as important for 99% of the population... But the lowest common denominator uses Windows Media Player anyway. (I wish it handled differing aspect ratios as easily as VLC player or Windows Media Center does, tho.)
Or even built an OS that contained programs to a reasonable level and didn't always throw crap into the OS directory.
I assume you're talking about DLL hell. This has been solved since at least XP - overwriting a file in a system directory will silently fail if it's being replaced with an older copy. So, replacing winsock.dll version 2.1 with a version 1.0 because you fail at writing an installer will no longer screw up your system.
Think of Service Packs as analogous to kernel patches. Those have been known to screw up a few programs, haven't they?
I know I twitched a little when I read the "Java in Javascript" part. A really neat hack, tho.
Thing is Internet Explorer has supported lots of languages - even those not meant for a web browser! - for writing full-featured client-server code. They're called viruses.
So he created a service that runs with the necessary privileges to do what it needs, which communicates with a non-privileged front-end, and which requires privileges to install.
Indeed! That's exactly how it's supposed to work.
It's also what Steam did when they ported their client to Vista - the privileged parts (presumably code that decrypts game files or mucks about with your.gcf's in the program files directory) are installed as "Steam Client Service." After an admin installs it (with UAC prompts and everything) even limited or guest accounts can play all the Steam games.
Seems nobody reads style guides, or even checks MSDN anymore.
Whether or not it's the shareholders' decision or not is kinda debatable, but needing to issue more shares to bring on new employees is epic fail. They do everything they can to avoid making a profit (earlier posters talk about the fuzzy San Francisco community spirit thing), and then screw shareholders out of their stakes because they don't have enough money to hire? Not right. Not ethical.
Then again, it's not like eBay and other shareholders couldn't have known about their particular management "style" before purchasing the company. They purposefully make the website look amateurish just to make it seem more, "personal" I guess is the word, and do seem to charge just enough to get by. (The only exception is raising rates on job listings for some major urban cities.)
Nothing against Craigslist - I got a TV from them! But they seem kind of ambivalent about their own business incompetence, and my clueless armchair lawyering predicts that this won't go well for them.
Perhaps I lack a discerning ear, but neither I nor my friends can tell the difference between burnt-and-ripped songs and the originals when both are in a random shuffle. (The exception is if volume leveling gets turned on; besides the CD copies being louder, it also seems to magnify artifacts.) Not exactly a double-blind test, but in my experience the artifacts introduced are negligible.
Now, I don't buy much music - the DRM'd part of my collection fills 3 CD-Rs. Tagging is a hassle, but it's at most 5 minutes of work to tag Artist/Albulm/Title a CD-Rs worth of music. Still less time than traveling to a store, and less cost than buying the full albums ($10 per song on average versus $0.99) Besides, having a legal DRM-free copy is more than worth it.
But, let's assume you're right. Artifacts are noticible and painful. It's too expensive. It takes too much time. Puppies are dying. Etc. If the MSN music owners do not/did not do this, they're out their entire collection. A re-encoded collection is better than no collection.
I'm glad you've had good experiences with buying music online. If it's DRM'd, I still recommend backing up an unencumbered copy - otherwise you're SOL if the license servers go down, as at least two have.
DRM is perhaps a necessary evil, as long as the major labels feel the need to compel anyone who sells their music to use it.
But, it's not as big of a deal as people make it out to be - the DRM can be circumvented by burning to and ripping from a CD.
"But, this reduces audio quality!" you say? I figure if you were that concerned about audio quality, you wouldn't be buying compressed music from MSN, iTunes, etc.
If you use online stores, regularly burn your songs onto CD and re-rip them - it's the only way to "back up" your music. I almost got burned when "URGE", that store that used to be the default in Windows Media Player closed down. They weren't as heartless as Microsoft - they transferred your licenses to Rhapsody, so in theory you could use the Rhapsody player to listen to your DRM'd music. Except that Rhapsody wouldn't install on any computer I tried. (But, it didn't matter anyway, hahahaha!)
I'm rambling, but moral of the story is: "Don't buy music." They're trying their best to make it anything but worthwhile.
If lord == lady, why is "Hey, lady!" casual slang, bordering on rude?
And where does the phrase "ladies and gentlemen" come from? I'd expect something more Max Payne-esque like "lords and ladies." I also doubt lord == gentleman - "Gentleman Voldemort" doesn't have the same ring to it. Does this mean "ladies and gentlemen" puts women > men, if lady is a greater title than gentleman?
And since when did "ma'am" turn into something for old people? Age isn't the only reason to show respect to another person. (Actually, I think most old people are greedy, well-lobbied-and-lobbying crackpots out for my tax dollars, but that's another problem.) I mean, men don't take offense at being called "sir" with some insipid quip about "I'm not that old!"
And why is grass green? And why is the sky blue? And why are we here? How many angels can breakdance on a pinhead...
and now we get to "bail them all out" while the homes they helped everyone buy depreciate in value. weird, eh? almost like we have this system that makes sure the ones with money get to keep it, even when they screw up.....
A little knowledge can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Emphasis on "little."
The problem isn't that homes depreciated in value, whether or not they actually did. Banks made adjustable-rate loans to people who could barely afford them at the then-prevalent interest rate; they bought larger houses than they could afford, and defaulted the minute interest rates ratcheted up a point. These banks got burned when all the crappy loans they made went into default.
Now, these banks should stay burned - that's the incentive not to make crappy loans. Now, I'd like some references on your bank bail-out; even McCain is against it, and to my knowledge nothing has happened. Hillary and Obama support different forms of bailouts to home owners, who should likewise stay burned for taking on more debt than they could afford.
Excess supply in the housing market is an unrelated issue. Recall that we already had declining house values before the mortgage crisis, which merely worsened the pre-existing over-construction problem.
Now, I seriously consider you don't have a savings or checking account, or a 401(k) retirement fund, or probably most any job. I'd hate for you to be complicit in that "old boys network" that's guilty of helping too many people buy homes.
Taking the cash from Larry Elison that he was going to dump into an insanely costly mega-yacht, distributing that to low-income people, who will in turn spend it in more geographically diverse areas, than say, the 100-miles surrounding a yacht-building shipyard, has a measurable net economic benefit.
Reply to This
As you say "right or wrongness aside," let's ignore for a moment whether or not it's right or wrong to take money from someone who has gained it legally.
Do you think that nobody works at the yacht-building shipyard? That the marine industry isn't filled with those blue-collar, union jobs like wielders and machinists? That none of these people have families?
You argue that distributing his money instead to low-income people will spend it in a more "geographically diverse area." That point is debatable, but do you really think that nobody who works at the shipyard will spend any of their income? That they won't buy groceries that are shipped from across the country before the end up in the store? That they won't purchase anything over the internet? That everything they buy will be in-state, and that everything the employees of those in-state companies buy will also be in state?
Spreading money around in that way doesn't have any economic benefit. $100 in one place or $10 in 10 places, you still have the same $100 and the same multiplier.
Your other point "Government can easily take from those that have a surplus, and redistribute to those who otherwise would have a net zero or a deficit of assets or cash." Except that they don't stop at bilking the "top 5%" that everyone seems to hate for whatever reason; the middle class has way more money than the top 5%, and far fewer lobbyists. Do you think the government would only tax those top 5%, even if it was possible to force them to pay? Remember that the Beatles came to America from Britain when the income tax rate for their bracket was 98% - listen to Taxman.
I understand that anti-socialist rhetoric is unpopular on Slashdot, but these ideas are silly and dangerous. A few other things to chew over: Why settle for a "living wage" - why not just set minimum wage to $100 million an hour? Why not have 100% income tax on the top 5%? Of course the "top 5%" could never creep down to include the middle class, and the middle class will never creep up to what was once the "top 5%." Why not put a price ceiling on food - it's unfair for WalMart to profit exorbitantly from what the poor and everyone else need to live, isn't it? Why not make the ceiling $0 - it should be illegal to charge for a basic necessity, shouldn't it? And so on.
an intelligent government, voted for by the people and working for the people, can spend/invest the people's money more wisely then they can themselves
"Intelligent" government? That can spend my money "more wisely" than I can? I'm glad you're separated from my government by an ocean.
If people are too dumb (in your opinion) to handle budgeting their own money, they're not going to elect people who are any better. The other problem is you don't "lubricate the wheels of commerce" by taking huge amounts of money from business. Even if you give it back to them again, all you did was give them what they had to begin with - minus the salaries of the federal employees necessary to do the taking.
I'd also like to point out that we have the highest quality health care in the world, and the best higher education. But let's ignore all of that - if you replace all consumer spending with government spending, you haven't changed a country's wealth at all.
The Fed "old boys network" is a system of banks. When the Fed wants to lower the interest rates, they reduce the money supply by instructing their brokers to sell government bonds. Anybody can purchase these - the point is that there's less money in circulation (the Fed has it now and is sitting on it, while people have bonds.)
Likewise, when they want to "print more money" (that's what the Bureau of Engraving and Printing does, actually) they instruct their brokers to buy bonds. Anyone is free to sell them, and the effect is that more money is in circulation. Instead of trading bonds for money, they trade money for bonds. It's not some illuminati association; they're probably the only branch of the government that isn't reveling in corruption.
Running the presses would devalue the dollar therefore people's savings, but the problem is giving all of the new notes to only a few individuals. We don't have a system to do that; the government relies on private banks to circulate currency.
I personally haven't had any problems with them - an old Western Digital is still ticking away in my parents machine despite the fact that the thing is an oven.
And, of course, anecdotal evidence is the epitome of accuracy and reliability.
I personally won't buy any other brand - my friend did have two damaged and non-functional Raptors, but the first was shipped in a box that was ripped to shreds, and the second he installed with both IDE ribbon, SATA cord, AND power connector, which may have had something to do with it. (He didn't really know what he was doing.)
"Probably comes from people who, like me, used a ton of WD200, WD400, WD800..."
Personally, I use some WD40 on my WD400 to reduce axial friction. Although seek latency, power consumption, and heat were all reduced, I had to replace the drive due to data loss.
I understand that you're trying to be bitterly dark and sarcastic, maybe even a little but humorous, but the "express" purpose of our government is spelled out in that little Constitution thing we like to bandy about during election years.
You can argue that for the purpose of practical discussion we've fallen to a plutocracy; however, it is unfair to say that "fewer and bigger corporation own" the government - corporate lobbyists are a minority on K street. You're forgetting unions (AFL-CIO), old people (AARP), minorities (NAACP), bored lawyers (ACLU), etc.
Money greases the cogs of governance, to be sure. But, more people than ever have money nowadays. Maybe political scientists can recognize the new breed of "democracy" we've formed in the Washingtonian super collider of... bad metaphors. You get my point.
Quite true! My monitor's only 1680x1050, but in Visual Studio I can still have the code definition window mounted on the right side, with my little solution explorer on the left - use the extra space on the sides instead of letting those things dock on the bottom and monopolize vertical screen space.
I got a special stand for my desktop LCD - with the help from my nVidia card and drivers, I rotate the screen 90* (1200x1920) and I can view a billion (metric billion) more pages of code at a time than my old 4:3 1600x1200 monitor could.
If, instead of saying "open source has taken out $60 billion of traditional software revenues," the article said "open source has saved businesses over $60 billion in expense compared to traditional software," don't you think people might view it differently?
It's the same idea with trade deficits, inflation, etc. "We have a $x trade deficit with China!" vs. "American consumers saved $y through imports." "The dollar is weaker!" vs. "Exports are up!" "Negative savings rate!" vs. "High consumer confidence!" etc.
Licensing is a separate issue, and I won't discuss it, since I have not read the OOXML licenses. But, Microsoft is generally very permissive with software made with their SDKs - "Developers developers developers!" You think I send Microsoft a check every time I #include <windows.h>?
As for SDK support on later versions of Windows? Until Vista, you could still call 16-bit memory locking routines. Not that they'd do much, but your Windows 3.11 code would still compile without much porting (depending on what it does, of course.) DirectX is based on that icky COM model - all previous versions are there in their entirety, with new interfaces added over the top. Winsock APIs have had only 2 major "version" since 3.11, and version 1 code will work on systems where version 2 is the default (2000/XP/Vista/others maybe).
This is obviously a different kind of SDK than Microsoft has released before, but their track record is pretty damn good when it comes to maintaining APIs. (Again, personal anecdotal evidence trumps all!)
And, no - the only hardware platform/Windows version problems you will generally run into is "NT or 98?" The Windows API hasn't changed much, nor have most of their SDKs. And discontinuing the SDK won't keep anyone from using the old version; it'll only hurt if ISO comes out with "OOXML 2."
If they decide to quit supporting OOXML, the OOXML SDK, or fuzzykittens32.lib, guess what? All your code's still going to work. None of your binaries will magically disappear off of the face of the earth. Your "MyOOXMLReader.NET" will still read those same OOXML documents.
Furthermore, if Microsoft's supposed to be the only one who could possibly implement this covoluted excuse of a "standard," it would obviously be idiotic to do anything but use their SDK.
Slashdot Mirror
Troll?
Either way, this is stuff that Epic Systems of Verona, WI has already done. Their software runs at a lot of hospitals, from the check-in desk to the little dumb terminal in the doctor's office that brings up your charts and records.
They also have a "dashboard" application where you can check your medical records and schedule appointments online. I don't know of any hospital near me that uses that app, but some hospitals advertised the online features they got from Epic on television.
"Gibi" is a prefix invented by Wikipedia. For those of you who have been foiled, I supply a conversion chart.
Some people are angry that their precious SI prefixes were usurped. I'd say "understandably angry," but I'm afraid it's not. Memory has been measured in kilo-mega-giga-tera-et al. since at least the time that IBM made PCs, and probably since 5000 years ago when Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church every Sunday.
Case in point: Go to newegg.com's memory page. See any memory modules sold by the "gibibit"? Consult your motherboard manual; I doubt they'll support a 512 mebibit SDRAM stick, but it maybe, just maybe might support that 512 MEGABYTE module.
Gibi? Might as well measure memory in millionths of a square furlong chip area times a density coefficient.
Remember booting any computer made since the '70s? The BIOS POST would always report memory in "K" - which God^H^H^HIBM did not intend to mean metric kirbybits or whatever nonsense.
Moderators, I humbly suggest modding any "gibi" references as "troll." It's what's right for America!
DW does not rewrite your code (for the most part).
Neither does the new Microsoft Frontpage! (ducks)
What's the point of that? VLC is superior on any platform.
VLC chokes on a lot of subtitles. They'll be displayed, but it will ignore font, size, positioning, and all the special effects that make them legible.
I don't have more information other than "subtitles are broken" - it's just my experience when watching my daily fix of my beloved Japanesian cartoons. Some of them just don't render properly in VLC, which is important to me since I only pretend I can speak Japanese.
But, Windows Media Player renders them perfectly, and the Vista Codec Pack makes it just as versatile. Maybe not as important for 99% of the population... But the lowest common denominator uses Windows Media Player anyway. (I wish it handled differing aspect ratios as easily as VLC player or Windows Media Center does, tho.)
Bah. "FUD," I think the word is.
Or even built an OS that contained programs to a reasonable level and didn't always throw crap into the OS directory.
I assume you're talking about DLL hell. This has been solved since at least XP - overwriting a file in a system directory will silently fail if it's being replaced with an older copy. So, replacing winsock.dll version 2.1 with a version 1.0 because you fail at writing an installer will no longer screw up your system.
Think of Service Packs as analogous to kernel patches. Those have been known to screw up a few programs, haven't they?
How the fuck is MS going to make a gui to manage such systems?
Windows (c)(tm)(R) for Linux! (Professional Business x64 Ultimate Edition!) (With powershell!)
With Microsoft's experience in GUI development, Linux will finally be a real alternative to Windows for desktop machines!
Wait...
Try hacking my IPv6 only machine at ::1
I know I twitched a little when I read the "Java in Javascript" part. A really neat hack, tho.
Thing is Internet Explorer has supported lots of languages - even those not meant for a web browser! - for writing full-featured client-server code. They're called viruses.
So he created a service that runs with the necessary privileges to do what it needs, which communicates with a non-privileged front-end, and which requires privileges to install.
Indeed! That's exactly how it's supposed to work.
It's also what Steam did when they ported their client to Vista - the privileged parts (presumably code that decrypts game files or mucks about with your .gcf's in the program files directory) are installed as "Steam Client Service." After an admin installs it (with UAC prompts and everything) even limited or guest accounts can play all the Steam games.
Seems nobody reads style guides, or even checks MSDN anymore.
Whether or not it's the shareholders' decision or not is kinda debatable, but needing to issue more shares to bring on new employees is epic fail. They do everything they can to avoid making a profit (earlier posters talk about the fuzzy San Francisco community spirit thing), and then screw shareholders out of their stakes because they don't have enough money to hire? Not right. Not ethical.
Then again, it's not like eBay and other shareholders couldn't have known about their particular management "style" before purchasing the company. They purposefully make the website look amateurish just to make it seem more, "personal" I guess is the word, and do seem to charge just enough to get by. (The only exception is raising rates on job listings for some major urban cities.)
Nothing against Craigslist - I got a TV from them! But they seem kind of ambivalent about their own business incompetence, and my clueless armchair lawyering predicts that this won't go well for them.
Perhaps I lack a discerning ear, but neither I nor my friends can tell the difference between burnt-and-ripped songs and the originals when both are in a random shuffle. (The exception is if volume leveling gets turned on; besides the CD copies being louder, it also seems to magnify artifacts.) Not exactly a double-blind test, but in my experience the artifacts introduced are negligible.
Now, I don't buy much music - the DRM'd part of my collection fills 3 CD-Rs. Tagging is a hassle, but it's at most 5 minutes of work to tag Artist/Albulm/Title a CD-Rs worth of music. Still less time than traveling to a store, and less cost than buying the full albums ($10 per song on average versus $0.99) Besides, having a legal DRM-free copy is more than worth it.
But, let's assume you're right. Artifacts are noticible and painful. It's too expensive. It takes too much time. Puppies are dying. Etc. If the MSN music owners do not/did not do this, they're out their entire collection. A re-encoded collection is better than no collection.
I'm glad you've had good experiences with buying music online. If it's DRM'd, I still recommend backing up an unencumbered copy - otherwise you're SOL if the license servers go down, as at least two have.
DRM is perhaps a necessary evil, as long as the major labels feel the need to compel anyone who sells their music to use it.
But, it's not as big of a deal as people make it out to be - the DRM can be circumvented by burning to and ripping from a CD.
"But, this reduces audio quality!" you say? I figure if you were that concerned about audio quality, you wouldn't be buying compressed music from MSN, iTunes, etc.
If you use online stores, regularly burn your songs onto CD and re-rip them - it's the only way to "back up" your music. I almost got burned when "URGE", that store that used to be the default in Windows Media Player closed down. They weren't as heartless as Microsoft - they transferred your licenses to Rhapsody, so in theory you could use the Rhapsody player to listen to your DRM'd music. Except that Rhapsody wouldn't install on any computer I tried. (But, it didn't matter anyway, hahahaha!)
I'm rambling, but moral of the story is: "Don't buy music." They're trying their best to make it anything but worthwhile.
I've wondered about that.
If lord == lady, why is "Hey, lady!" casual slang, bordering on rude?
And where does the phrase "ladies and gentlemen" come from? I'd expect something more Max Payne-esque like "lords and ladies." I also doubt lord == gentleman - "Gentleman Voldemort" doesn't have the same ring to it. Does this mean "ladies and gentlemen" puts women > men, if lady is a greater title than gentleman?
And since when did "ma'am" turn into something for old people? Age isn't the only reason to show respect to another person. (Actually, I think most old people are greedy, well-lobbied-and-lobbying crackpots out for my tax dollars, but that's another problem.) I mean, men don't take offense at being called "sir" with some insipid quip about "I'm not that old!"
And why is grass green? And why is the sky blue? And why are we here? How many angels can breakdance on a pinhead...
and now we get to "bail them all out" while the homes they helped everyone buy depreciate in value. weird, eh? almost like we have this system that makes sure the ones with money get to keep it, even when they screw up.....
A little knowledge can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Emphasis on "little."
The problem isn't that homes depreciated in value, whether or not they actually did. Banks made adjustable-rate loans to people who could barely afford them at the then-prevalent interest rate; they bought larger houses than they could afford, and defaulted the minute interest rates ratcheted up a point. These banks got burned when all the crappy loans they made went into default.
Now, these banks should stay burned - that's the incentive not to make crappy loans. Now, I'd like some references on your bank bail-out; even McCain is against it, and to my knowledge nothing has happened. Hillary and Obama support different forms of bailouts to home owners, who should likewise stay burned for taking on more debt than they could afford.
Excess supply in the housing market is an unrelated issue. Recall that we already had declining house values before the mortgage crisis, which merely worsened the pre-existing over-construction problem.
Now, I seriously consider you don't have a savings or checking account, or a 401(k) retirement fund, or probably most any job. I'd hate for you to be complicit in that "old boys network" that's guilty of helping too many people buy homes.
Taking the cash from Larry Elison that he was going to dump into an insanely costly mega-yacht, distributing that to low-income people, who will in turn spend it in more geographically diverse areas, than say, the 100-miles surrounding a yacht-building shipyard, has a measurable net economic benefit. Reply to This
As you say "right or wrongness aside," let's ignore for a moment whether or not it's right or wrong to take money from someone who has gained it legally.
Do you think that nobody works at the yacht-building shipyard? That the marine industry isn't filled with those blue-collar, union jobs like wielders and machinists? That none of these people have families?
You argue that distributing his money instead to low-income people will spend it in a more "geographically diverse area." That point is debatable, but do you really think that nobody who works at the shipyard will spend any of their income? That they won't buy groceries that are shipped from across the country before the end up in the store? That they won't purchase anything over the internet? That everything they buy will be in-state, and that everything the employees of those in-state companies buy will also be in state?
Spreading money around in that way doesn't have any economic benefit. $100 in one place or $10 in 10 places, you still have the same $100 and the same multiplier.
Your other point "Government can easily take from those that have a surplus, and redistribute to those who otherwise would have a net zero or a deficit of assets or cash." Except that they don't stop at bilking the "top 5%" that everyone seems to hate for whatever reason; the middle class has way more money than the top 5%, and far fewer lobbyists. Do you think the government would only tax those top 5%, even if it was possible to force them to pay? Remember that the Beatles came to America from Britain when the income tax rate for their bracket was 98% - listen to Taxman.
I understand that anti-socialist rhetoric is unpopular on Slashdot, but these ideas are silly and dangerous. A few other things to chew over: Why settle for a "living wage" - why not just set minimum wage to $100 million an hour? Why not have 100% income tax on the top 5%? Of course the "top 5%" could never creep down to include the middle class, and the middle class will never creep up to what was once the "top 5%." Why not put a price ceiling on food - it's unfair for WalMart to profit exorbitantly from what the poor and everyone else need to live, isn't it? Why not make the ceiling $0 - it should be illegal to charge for a basic necessity, shouldn't it? And so on.
an intelligent government, voted for by the people and working for the people, can spend/invest the people's money more wisely then they can themselves
"Intelligent" government? That can spend my money "more wisely" than I can? I'm glad you're separated from my government by an ocean.
If people are too dumb (in your opinion) to handle budgeting their own money, they're not going to elect people who are any better. The other problem is you don't "lubricate the wheels of commerce" by taking huge amounts of money from business. Even if you give it back to them again, all you did was give them what they had to begin with - minus the salaries of the federal employees necessary to do the taking.
I'd also like to point out that we have the highest quality health care in the world, and the best higher education. But let's ignore all of that - if you replace all consumer spending with government spending, you haven't changed a country's wealth at all.
The Fed "old boys network" is a system of banks. When the Fed wants to lower the interest rates, they reduce the money supply by instructing their brokers to sell government bonds. Anybody can purchase these - the point is that there's less money in circulation (the Fed has it now and is sitting on it, while people have bonds.)
Likewise, when they want to "print more money" (that's what the Bureau of Engraving and Printing does, actually) they instruct their brokers to buy bonds. Anyone is free to sell them, and the effect is that more money is in circulation. Instead of trading bonds for money, they trade money for bonds. It's not some illuminati association; they're probably the only branch of the government that isn't reveling in corruption.
Running the presses would devalue the dollar therefore people's savings, but the problem is giving all of the new notes to only a few individuals. We don't have a system to do that; the government relies on private banks to circulate currency.
I personally haven't had any problems with them - an old Western Digital is still ticking away in my parents machine despite the fact that the thing is an oven.
And, of course, anecdotal evidence is the epitome of accuracy and reliability.
I personally won't buy any other brand - my friend did have two damaged and non-functional Raptors, but the first was shipped in a box that was ripped to shreds, and the second he installed with both IDE ribbon, SATA cord, AND power connector, which may have had something to do with it. (He didn't really know what he was doing.)
"Probably comes from people who, like me, used a ton of WD200, WD400, WD800..."
Personally, I use some WD40 on my WD400 to reduce axial friction. Although seek latency, power consumption, and heat were all reduced, I had to replace the drive due to data loss.
Crappy WD drives...
I understand that you're trying to be bitterly dark and sarcastic, maybe even a little but humorous, but the "express" purpose of our government is spelled out in that little Constitution thing we like to bandy about during election years.
You can argue that for the purpose of practical discussion we've fallen to a plutocracy; however, it is unfair to say that "fewer and bigger corporation own" the government - corporate lobbyists are a minority on K street. You're forgetting unions (AFL-CIO), old people (AARP), minorities (NAACP), bored lawyers (ACLU), etc.
Money greases the cogs of governance, to be sure. But, more people than ever have money nowadays. Maybe political scientists can recognize the new breed of "democracy" we've formed in the Washingtonian super collider of... bad metaphors. You get my point.
Very true - SDK or no, I wouldn't want to have to implement OOXML. I can see this as turning into some kind of Sisyphusian (sp?) nightmare.
But, at least they released an SDK. Buggy SDK is still a lot easier than starting from scratch, especially on Windows.
Quite true! My monitor's only 1680x1050, but in Visual Studio I can still have the code definition window mounted on the right side, with my little solution explorer on the left - use the extra space on the sides instead of letting those things dock on the bottom and monopolize vertical screen space.
I got a special stand for my desktop LCD - with the help from my nVidia card and drivers, I rotate the screen 90* (1200x1920) and I can view a billion (metric billion) more pages of code at a time than my old 4:3 1600x1200 monitor could.
If, instead of saying "open source has taken out $60 billion of traditional software revenues," the article said "open source has saved businesses over $60 billion in expense compared to traditional software," don't you think people might view it differently?
It's the same idea with trade deficits, inflation, etc. "We have a $x trade deficit with China!" vs. "American consumers saved $y through imports." "The dollar is weaker!" vs. "Exports are up!" "Negative savings rate!" vs. "High consumer confidence!" etc.
Licensing is a separate issue, and I won't discuss it, since I have not read the OOXML licenses. But, Microsoft is generally very permissive with software made with their SDKs - "Developers developers developers!" You think I send Microsoft a check every time I #include <windows.h>?
As for SDK support on later versions of Windows? Until Vista, you could still call 16-bit memory locking routines. Not that they'd do much, but your Windows 3.11 code would still compile without much porting (depending on what it does, of course.) DirectX is based on that icky COM model - all previous versions are there in their entirety, with new interfaces added over the top. Winsock APIs have had only 2 major "version" since 3.11, and version 1 code will work on systems where version 2 is the default (2000/XP/Vista/others maybe).
This is obviously a different kind of SDK than Microsoft has released before, but their track record is pretty damn good when it comes to maintaining APIs. (Again, personal anecdotal evidence trumps all!)
And, no - the only hardware platform/Windows version problems you will generally run into is "NT or 98?" The Windows API hasn't changed much, nor have most of their SDKs. And discontinuing the SDK won't keep anyone from using the old version; it'll only hurt if ISO comes out with "OOXML 2."
You don't need to explain that point.
If they decide to quit supporting OOXML, the OOXML SDK, or fuzzykittens32.lib, guess what? All your code's still going to work. None of your binaries will magically disappear off of the face of the earth. Your "MyOOXMLReader .NET" will still read those same OOXML documents.
Furthermore, if Microsoft's supposed to be the only one who could possibly implement this covoluted excuse of a "standard," it would obviously be idiotic to do anything but use their SDK.