He hasn't ever coded anything to functional completion.
Umm, just untrue. When Microsoft was a brand new company, he wrote their first products, one of which was a version of BASIC that ran on the Altair. Not a small accomplishment. Also remember that Windows became popular because of the programming tools for it made developer's lives much easier than developing for other platforms.
A couple of facts for the history-deprived Marxist wanna-be's:
No country in the world has ever completed the transition to Communism.
Communist-esque countries either have across-the-board low standards of living relative to Western countries (Cuba), or have liberalized and adopted some form of free-market capitalism (China). (Not that China has great standards of living, either.
For all the "flaws" in capitalism, it works. Rather well. And there is not one instance in history where Communism has. QED.
Yeah, because *every* OS out there fails to check for valid input, and in fact, *must* fail to check for valid input.
Um, Operating Systems don't do that kind of input validation. They can't. Believe it or not, some programs actually use zeroes - and they have to mingle peacably on the same OS with programs that don't allow zeroes.
The OS has no way of knowing what input is valid for each program - only the program knows that. It's the job of the program's creator to check for bad input - like division by zero.
Local news covered by local folks (unlike the local daily paper, which is owned by Gannett), [...]
It's funny that you mention that. When modern-ish radio was first becoming commercialized, the belief was that programming had to be "local local local!" in order to generate any viewership - that radio had to talk about the most local minutinae in order to draw attention.
The idea of nationally syndicated programming, music, etc. that left the "local local local!" paradigm was considered a revolution of sorts; now limiting the geographic appeal is the "it" thing.
Really, I could care less - I have my rock station, and it plays music that changes every once in a while without me having to pay them anything. Works welle enough for me.
You mean there's no middle ground between those two?
Nope. "Competitively", in an economic sense, means that a business is all alone, by itself, sink or swim, fighting to make a profit or go bankrupt.
This changes if you have government "help." Depending on how extensive said help is, you can make a lot of screw-ups and still get billions in pension forgiveness, forced contract re-negotiations, bankruptcy protection, etc.
"Competitively" is a good thing - because state help shifts the burden of business' poor planning from this business to the taxpayer. There is also no "middle ground" - either you have help or you don't, you succeed by your own merits or have assistance or gimped opponents.
Nope. WMP11 is included with Vista, and my first-hand knowledge is that it's been there since the first public beta.
Right now, Windows XP is the only operating system that their overworked techies will "support" - Windows Vista isn't even released yet, much less part of their official lineup.
Besides a reworked GUI, they also made the library tab nicer, with a winamp-style search bar. But, I'm sure there's other stuff if it warranted a new major version number...
The Office suite used to have a nice set of manuals. Back when 3.11 for Workgroups was hot, the office suite came with a 1-2" thick manuals for Microsoft Word, Excel, Money, etc.
Problem is that they're expensive to print, nobody read them, and nobody missed them.
These two bugs alone are responsible for the loss of two days of my life. Will Microsoft be giving those back to me with this release (which I can't install because I run a pirated copy of XP).
They'll give you those days back when you give them their $90. ^.^
You've got to be joking. Have you even used IE7? Seen a screenshot?
They got rid of the menu bar - that's about thirty pixels there. The address bar is about the same size and the navigation buttons are included on it, but the toolbar is also narrower. All the functions formerly accessible from the menu bar (which is still at your "alt" key if you really want it) can be accessed from 7 buttons - and three of those are responsible for the entire favorites menu and the new RSS reader.
All in all, IE7 has 10, tiny buttons. IE6 has 14+ big, ugly buttons depending on whether or not you axed some of the defaults. Since 10 is less than 14, and IE7 has the same functionality as 6 and then some, I'd call IE7 cleaner.
Besides that, using the "favorites" will no longer make your eyes bleed. Favorites/History/RSS subscriptions have their own collapsable side panel, instead of some stupid scrolling menu.
And, before anyone makes a jab at ActiveX - Firefox has it, too. Except their ActiveX controls are called "extensions". Except that they don't run in a sandbox, have any security restrictions, nor any privilige limitations.
Hmmm... a cleaner interface is a bad thing because it was Microsoft that innovated?
IE7 leaves much more space open on your screen for actual web browsing compared to IE6 (or Firefox, or most any browser minus lynx). Everything's accessible from a toolbar that uses the same icons Windows and IE have used since the dawn of time. And your precious menus that'll make it look like a "real Windows app" are hidden by your "alt" key.
Office 2007 uses a "ribbon" - a tabbed toolbar. It's pretty damn slick - you don't need your drawing tools open unless you're editing a picture, so you go to your drawing tab. (Or, you can use the toolbar that hovers by your mouse when you start editing a picture, or the formatting toolbar that appears by your mouse when you select text, etc.) It's so much cleaner, and intuitive.
But Microsoft changed things. They're not ugly and just-barely functional anymore. That's why I'm getting a Mac.
India has seen the end of a caste system and has moved into a knowledge-based economy. Their poor are becoming literate, and taking "our" IT jobs. The prospects for the average Indian are getting better as the days go on.
Ditto for China. The front page article of the Oct. 17 Investor's Business Daily is "Chinese Wage Growth Surging, But Hasn't Fueled Higher Prices." Although the focus of the article is on urban China (where unskilled/semiskilled workers have been seeing wage increases between 5 and 20 percent each year since 2000), it also mentions how efforts to "exploit" rural farmers for labor have also driven up their wages.
Although the "Cultural Revolution" was definitely a setback for the Chinese economy, things have been going wonderfully for them since. Consider that in the 80s, Proctor and Gamble researched expanding into the Chinese shampoo market - only to realize that there wasn't any. The average peasant could only afford a bottle the size you find complimentary with your hotel room; and even then, only once a year, for a special occaision. McDonalds and other fast food places ha da little more success, but mostly with the wealthy and tourists - as in Russia, peasants would make pilgrimages of sorts to a fast-food restaurant that they could only afford to eat at once a year.
Now, the standard of living in China is rising rapidly - people can not only feed themselves, but they have cars and consumer electronics! They have computers and internet - remember that big firewall China has? Their standard of living is rapidly approaching western standards - a far cry from when Mao Zedung encouraged peasants to smelt steel in their backyards.
Make electricity more expensive, then people will make a huge effort save power...
The price of electricity (in most areas, barring some horribly-managed municipal utility) is a happy medium between what people are willing to pay and what it costs to provide power. (This is "supply and demand.").
What it costs the power company to provide x units of power is directly related to the cost of the coal, natural gas, etc. that it takes to power the power plant. The fuel prices are again happy mediums between what the utilities are willing to pay and what it costs to mine/refine/extract the fuel.
Given this relationship, there is no need whatsoever to make electricity "more expensive." If the power grid is inadequate, utilities are going to raise rates - they need money to upgrade it, and this will also discourage excess consumption. If it's a "peak oil" problem, electricity prices will go up as fuel becomes scarce and people will again use proportionately less.
In the capitalism you tell us to "take advantage of", electricity already has been made more expensive for us. Thank your friendly neighborhood market economy for that one. ^.^
Microsoft's decision to trash the MBR probably isn't a malicious attempt to make dual-booting with Linux a pain - it seems to be normal, benign laziness.
Why would you waste all those man-hours coding a powerful, multi-OS bootloader that your OS doesn't need? It's not like Windows' normal demographic cares, and it's not like there aren't utilities out there that do the same thing for those that do care.
Markets reward fraud, primarily- because the real story is being hidden from the customer behind a viel of anonymity.
Bull. There is no "real story" in a market - there's a good of a certain legally-assured quality for a known price. You decide if it's value to you is worth that price.
In a free market, only the stupid will buy anything else- simply because if profit is king it's not short term profitable to buy the more expensive version.
You can't "profit" by buying something. People buy something because, to the buyer at least, it's worth the opportunity cost.
The problem is, the way they create the bulk rate is to pay people less- thus creating more people in poverty. The race for the bottom- a negative feedback loop.
You assume that labor is the only input in food. In fact, in corporate, "bulk" farming labor is the lest expensive of inputs. "Bulk farming" works because it is more efficient for a few mechanized individuals to exploit a vast tract of land than for many to hand-work a small one.
"Efficient" is the key word here. More food is produced from fewer resources; society gets more and pays less. Very few reductions in cost come becasue a minimum wage laborer got the axe - long-term gains come from productivity increases. Technologies that make better use of land, that require fewer or no pesticides, that more effictively use soil are the source of the reduction in cost and the source of society's riches.
And the farmer can't survive on anything less- so he'll go out of business.
If no farmer can survive on anything less, than the price would never get less. There would be no farmers around to sell at that price.
If one particular farmer can't survive on anything less, he is squandering resources that could be turned into much more by someone else. This one particular farmer is damaging the environment and wasting resources unproductively because he is unable or unwilling to utilize his labor better. Society as a whole should not have to pay for one man's stubbornness, and with markets, they don't have to.
It is impossible for a small farmer to produce food profitably nowadays not because of a corporate conspiracy or anonymity-enabled indifference - it's because a small farm is one of the worst ways to produce food. Using the worst possible way in lieu of a better alternative wastes finite resources to the detriment of society.
Rather, I see your 200 years of fake science, and counter it with 1.5 million years worth of human history.
I see your 1.5 million years of human history culminating in the success of capitalism. Nations with capitalistic economies have the highest standards of living across the board for both rich and poor. Not one nation has successfully completed the transitionto a communist state, and all that have tried have seen nothing but suffering.
Throughout the 1.5 million years of human evolution, there have been communal societies - but none have stayed communal for long, nor have any that did seen the prosperiety and wellbeing the poorest of their counterparts had.
Speaking empirically, capitalism has been more successful. communism has not.
You point out that "your system of allocating resources" only works when the units are small. Then go set it up right now - if you don't have to drag the rest of society with you, this should be easy. And I'm sure you'll be infinitely more prosperous cloistered in your island state than you will as an underemployed software engineer, once you've rid yourself of the oppressive shackles of markets.
No, but I can expect my tribe to pay me a ridiculous salary if I pay them a ridiculous salary.
No you can't. Salaries and money have value only in how much you can buy with them. Getting paid a billion dollars because you paid the rest of your community a billion dollars makes a nice, happy little circle - but all that matters is the productivity and efficiency of your tribe. If everybody has a billion dollars, but your farm production for the year resulted in a half acre of grain, you'll have a true understanding of where the value of money comes from.
Ridiculous salaries are not wealth; they're a measure of wealth with ever-changing dimensions. The mere transfer of goods does nothing to create wealth - the production of goods does.
I am if you are. In other words, if a CEO is worth that much, so is a software engineer.
Wrong. Human life has an intrinsic value which cannot and should never be measured through any economic means.
But your intrinsic worth as a human being has nothing to do with what is equitable. Capitalism conveniently lets a worker keep the bulk of his labor. How much he contributes to the prosperity of society determines how much he is paid. A "team member" at a fast food joint (my current employment) produces much less, measured in real dollars, to the prosperity of society than does than does the entrepreneur how created a restaurant that employs dozens and feeds thousands, who produces less than a theoretical physicist doing groundbreaking work on nanotechnology.
The fast food worker takes a 79 cent hamburger, cooks it, and sells it for a 99 cents. It is impossible for this worker to get paid any more than 20 cents a hamburger if his job is to remain past his employer's savings. The profits the owner enjoys are proportional to what he contribues - not only does he have to work hours if his business is to be successful, but he has created 20 cents of wealth per burger than did not exist before. The happy side effects of this profit are that 1) people have jobs and 2) people are fed - both useful things coming from nothing but profit motive. Meanwhile, the physicist with the nanotechnology breakthrough has revolutionized practically everything in use by society, and by virtue of his skill is paid more.
Notice how each individual keeps the bulk of his labor. Just that each person's labor is capable of creating vastly different amounts of real, tangible, non-monetary wealth - a cooked burger is intrinsically less valuable than a place of employment than a life-changing technology. Capitalism ensures that each person keeps the bulk of their labor - inequality comes from each person being capable of a different labor.
It is ridiculous to assume that a fry chef has had the same contribution to the prosperity of society as an even mildly-successful software engineer. That's why the engineer is paid more - it's his share of his own contribution, the best definition of equity.
Microsoft should have a short "style guide" that appears the first time a user account starts powerpoint. It would have a nice list of my pet peeves, including:
All slids should use the background image. The image should not just be a rectangle you drew over a blacnk slide because you were too stupid to click file->new, and if all else, it should not show a different seizure-inducing color every slide.
Your powerpoint should never feature sound effects. This feature was included as a test to determine which people will make it onto Microsoft's colonization ship to Mars should anything apocalyptically uncool happen on Earth.
Animation should be limited to making your bullet points appear one at a time. The text itself should not be used to induce seizures.
Ues spl3ll chkec.
Don't copy and paste what you're going to read, word for word, onto your slides a paragraph at a time.
How much pain would I have been saved if people would just follow these simple rules. Or stop their presentation when a representative sample of (captive) audience members experience retinal bleeding.
Not really a problem with bells and whistles, per se - Powerpoint's a nice, powerful app capable of creating really professional presentations. Just that there's a "max capacity" on each slide for flash. If x is the number of bells, whistles, and features (ab)used per slide, comprehension and aesthetic appeal, and the audience's opinion of the presentor have their limit lim x->oo = 0.
Then let them sell it to their own country, and leave me the hell alone.
Or, you could leave them the hell alone. Nobody's forcing you to buy from them.
In fact, by forcing said person to stay in his own country, you're also forcing everyone in your country who actually wants to buy from him to go elsewhere. For spite of a foreigner, you hurt all those who could benefit from trade.
The moral difference is the human connection- the willingness to pay more to ensure the well being of your neighbor, because they too will pay more to ensure your well being.
An economic system is the most terrible vehicle imaginable for peddling "human connection." No system of allocating resources can force others to care about each other; to have that "human connnection."
To pretend this is possible is "religious claptrap." Besides, I'd wager that most people would rather keep their money and ensure their own wellbeing than trust something that important to anonymous others.
Society as a whole is still made up of individuals. If the individuals are allowed to keep that which they need to care for themselves, than society as a whole will be better. In a capitalist society, you're still free to do the opposite - to pay more to someone who can also "pay more to ensure your wellbeing."
We currently have a labor surplus, especially in software engineering- and that's exactly what I was told 5 years ago. I had to carve out a new position in government- because according to private industry, I'm worthless; it's better to give a position to 5 engineers in Bangalore than allow me to be a software engineer.
In a capitalistic society, there's nothing preventing you from moving to Bangalore. Sure, you'll get paid less - but you can't expect the entire world to pay you a ridiculous salary at the expense of the Bangalorians, can you? Are you worth that much more as a human being to justify your profit at their expense?
As for your critique of "ownership", I still don't understand why you believe it's such a "bad thing." You can reject texts containing 200 years of science because it "appeals to an authority you cannot accept", so I'll appeal to one you do seem to worhship: There is no "human connection" depriving someone of the result of their toils, because it was never "theirs" to begin with.
Ever read Slaughterhouse 5? LOTS. That which you can't sell to the rich, you sell to the poor. By eliminating waste, you've increased efficiency. And made a profit to boot.
Nope; can't say that I have. But, even though the poor getting fed horrible food is, well, horrible - at least they have food.
The magic of "profit" is that even with the most selfishly-motivated individual (the rotton meat-seller) fed the poor.
Thus Wal*Mart takes over retail and forces more companies to become profit-motive-only. It's a race for the bottom- destruction of the innovation motive.
So, the inefficient retailers suffer when WalMart shows the world how much they're overcharging. Instead of selling things for what they're worth, other retailers such as Target try to make their crap look more "valuable" by wasting money on advertising. It's cases like these where Wal-Mart is a sorely-needed breath of fresh air.
Besides, how much has Wal-Mart done to help the poor, even being motivated only by profit? Families can afford much more than their limited incomes could before because Wal-Mart has made everything more affordable for them. The poor have more, even though Wal-Mart was motivated only by profit and not by altruism.
Do you really think $400/year veggies will be able to compete when Wal*Mart comes in with bulk-rate organic at half the cost, shipped thousands of miles?
Nope - and it's not supposed to. You shouldn't have to spend $400/year to get pesticide-free vegetables. The poor won't be able to afford that.
But, if somebody makes "bulk-rate organic" at half the cost, hooray for them. They made food that was formerly affordable only for elitists available to those much poorer. Even though these "bulk-rate" people were motivated only by profit, the poor can now afford better food.
Markets don't create the cheapest, crappiest goods - they create the most profitable. Since organic food is more profitable than "regular" food, it is made despite the higher production cost and effort.
And it will be destroyed when somebody comes in with a crappier, cheaper version that is marketed as the same. It's the same old story- eventually you're left with only the crappy version in the marketplace.
Simply not true. Just because somebody comes up with a "crappy-but-cheap" version doesn't mean anybody will want to buy it.
How much it costs to make something is a very different concept from "efficiency." If a new process to ship vegetables costs a tenth of the old, but makes most of the food inedible, it's hadly a more "efficient" way to ship food.
Markets reward efficiency - how well you can deliver what consumers actually want and how much of the earth's reasources you consume in doing so (input price). If you don't produce what people actually want, there's no $profit for you, even if it is dirt cheap. Supply and demand.
Vista will not run on ancient hardware. You need a graphics accelerator, and it needs more than 4MB of memory.
It will run on "older" hardware - you need something from this decade (800MHz CPU and 512MB RAM) and all the POW! FWOOSH! ZING! eye candy is turned off unless Vista sees that you actually have said quad-GPU-DirectX-12d-compatible-5GHz-4096Mo cards.
As for your point about community-developed drivers - yea, that sure sucks, because odds are the "community" isn't going to be able to fork over $cash to get a digital signature.
I'm a bit sympathetic with Microsoft's view, tho - every blue-screen reflects poorly on Windows, not what actually caused the crash. Even if a shitty HP printer driver makes your system unstable, in the user's eyes this is because Windows is crap, not because HP is lazy and made a broken driver.
So, Microsoft took away everyone's blue-screen priviliges by forcing most drivers into user mode. Anything with blue-screen priviliges (kernel-mode) they want to look over themselves to make sure they can call this version of Windows "stable" with a straight face. (Kinda important considering "bluescreen" and "Windows" are synonymous, even though the kernel runs just fine.)
I'm fine with a lack of subsidies- I'm not fine with allowing access to foreign markets.
Why? If a person wants to sell stuff in China, there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to. If a person in China wants to sell stuff here, there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to. They're not doing anything wrong - they've made something, they want to sell it.
There's no moral difference, whether the "they" is a "nice" stereotype, such as the rural farmer, rustic blacksmith, or other proletarian image, or an "evil" archetype, such as a multinational corporation.
Selling "ownership" in a company is exactly the fraud I'm refering to. We are stewards and custodians of what we have, not owners.
Ridiculous. I can quite clearly say that something is "mine", and I can claim a right to it. Nothing wrong with the individual ownership of property.
Say that you spent a dollar on the most delicious nectar that is in a 24oz bottle of "Mountain Dew." Whatsay I believe that I can be a better "steward" of your Mountain Dew than you are capable of. Even if this were true, I have no right to take your Mountain Dew because, presumably, you worked for your dolalr, you spent it, and the fruits of your efforts are yours, to do with as you wish.
Just as I can't claim "stewardship" over what others have worked to create and obtain, neither can anyone else. This is the point of private property - you own the products of your labor.
If you can't pay for it, you're not a consumer by capitalist standards; you're just so much meat to be used and thrown away.
By the "capitalist" standards in my macroeconomics text, yes, aflmost everyone on the face of the earth is a consumer of public goods. This type of consumership is different than the soundbytes read by the talking heads on television.
By a purely cold and theory-driven capitalistic standpoint, a person with no money is not "worthless", because it is not personal ownership that gives a person work. The potential labor that a person is capable of producing has value. Nobody's going to tell a software engineer that he's "so much meat to be thrown away" because he missed a rent payment - the landlord's going to be pissed, but the engineer's work is worth a six-figure salary.
Even in less glamorous jobs, any individual has value insofar that they are capable of labor. The market for their particular type of labor - what people are willing to work for, and what companies are willing to pay - determines a unit of labor's value in monetary terms.
Those who are infirm and incapable of work, in a theoretical, strictly capitalistic market-driven world, are considered "worthless." That's why America, even though it is a (not truly) "capitalist" country, has social programs.
Would you serve your friend rotting meat if you had filet mingon available? Of course not. But the so called "free markets" and "free trade" will- because there's no actual human relationship, no friendship, only profit
You forget - what kind of profit is to be made from rotting meat? Consumers demand the most value for the lowest price; manufacturers demand the highest price for the lowest cost. At some price in the middle of these extremes, a critical mass of people is willing to sell a product, and a critical mass is willing to buy. This compromise between the consumer's "give me everything for nothing" and the manufacturers "give me everything for nothing" results in a market price.
In this way, markets are fair to both buyers and sellers, and they are efficient.
The same thing works by the hypothetical profit-motive-only-soulless-capitalist archetype. The artistic work will sell for much more than slag. If that price difference justifies the extra effort, you will see only artistic work.
It's not just what's cheapest to make - it's what's most profitable. Look at the booming organic food industry - the higher-quality food is much more expensive to grow than traditional, mid-quality "bulk" food. But, people will pay more for the quality.
Markets don't create the cheapest, crappiest goods - they create the most profitable. Since organic food is more profitable than "regular" food, it is made despite the higher production cost and effort.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot sigs aren't long enough to provide the link to the correct platform. ^.^
He hasn't ever coded anything to functional completion.
Umm, just untrue. When Microsoft was a brand new company, he wrote their first products, one of which was a version of BASIC that ran on the Altair. Not a small accomplishment. Also remember that Windows became popular because of the programming tools for it made developer's lives much easier than developing for other platforms.
A couple of facts for the history-deprived Marxist wanna-be's:
No country in the world has ever completed the transition to Communism.
Communist-esque countries either have across-the-board low standards of living relative to Western countries (Cuba), or have liberalized and adopted some form of free-market capitalism (China). (Not that China has great standards of living, either.
For all the "flaws" in capitalism, it works. Rather well. And there is not one instance in history where Communism has. QED.
Yeah, because *every* OS out there fails to check for valid input, and in fact, *must* fail to check for valid input.
Um, Operating Systems don't do that kind of input validation. They can't. Believe it or not, some programs actually use zeroes - and they have to mingle peacably on the same OS with programs that don't allow zeroes.
The OS has no way of knowing what input is valid for each program - only the program knows that. It's the job of the program's creator to check for bad input - like division by zero.
Local news covered by local folks (unlike the local daily paper, which is owned by Gannett), [...]
It's funny that you mention that. When modern-ish radio was first becoming commercialized, the belief was that programming had to be "local local local!" in order to generate any viewership - that radio had to talk about the most local minutinae in order to draw attention.
The idea of nationally syndicated programming, music, etc. that left the "local local local!" paradigm was considered a revolution of sorts; now limiting the geographic appeal is the "it" thing.
Really, I could care less - I have my rock station, and it plays music that changes every once in a while without me having to pay them anything. Works welle enough for me.
You mean there's no middle ground between those two?
Nope. "Competitively", in an economic sense, means that a business is all alone, by itself, sink or swim, fighting to make a profit or go bankrupt.
This changes if you have government "help." Depending on how extensive said help is, you can make a lot of screw-ups and still get billions in pension forgiveness, forced contract re-negotiations, bankruptcy protection, etc.
"Competitively" is a good thing - because state help shifts the burden of business' poor planning from this business to the taxpayer. There is also no "middle ground" - either you have help or you don't, you succeed by your own merits or have assistance or gimped opponents.
Nope. WMP11 is included with Vista, and my first-hand knowledge is that it's been there since the first public beta.
Right now, Windows XP is the only operating system that their overworked techies will "support" - Windows Vista isn't even released yet, much less part of their official lineup.
Besides a reworked GUI, they also made the library tab nicer, with a winamp-style search bar. But, I'm sure there's other stuff if it warranted a new major version number...
The Office suite used to have a nice set of manuals. Back when 3.11 for Workgroups was hot, the office suite came with a 1-2" thick manuals for Microsoft Word, Excel, Money, etc.
Problem is that they're expensive to print, nobody read them, and nobody missed them.
These two bugs alone are responsible for the loss of two days of my life. Will Microsoft be giving those back to me with this release (which I can't install because I run a pirated copy of XP).
They'll give you those days back when you give them their $90. ^.^
If you can say it, it's a word.
Dictionary's reflect language; language doesn't wait for the next Webster-Merriam standard revision.
Besides, demerger is a word, even in that context.
You've got to be joking. Have you even used IE7? Seen a screenshot?
They got rid of the menu bar - that's about thirty pixels there. The address bar is about the same size and the navigation buttons are included on it, but the toolbar is also narrower. All the functions formerly accessible from the menu bar (which is still at your "alt" key if you really want it) can be accessed from 7 buttons - and three of those are responsible for the entire favorites menu and the new RSS reader.
All in all, IE7 has 10, tiny buttons. IE6 has 14+ big, ugly buttons depending on whether or not you axed some of the defaults. Since 10 is less than 14, and IE7 has the same functionality as 6 and then some, I'd call IE7 cleaner.
Besides that, using the "favorites" will no longer make your eyes bleed. Favorites/History/RSS subscriptions have their own collapsable side panel, instead of some stupid scrolling menu.
And, before anyone makes a jab at ActiveX - Firefox has it, too. Except their ActiveX controls are called "extensions". Except that they don't run in a sandbox, have any security restrictions, nor any privilige limitations.
Hmmm... a cleaner interface is a bad thing because it was Microsoft that innovated?
IE7 leaves much more space open on your screen for actual web browsing compared to IE6 (or Firefox, or most any browser minus lynx). Everything's accessible from a toolbar that uses the same icons Windows and IE have used since the dawn of time. And your precious menus that'll make it look like a "real Windows app" are hidden by your "alt" key.
Office 2007 uses a "ribbon" - a tabbed toolbar. It's pretty damn slick - you don't need your drawing tools open unless you're editing a picture, so you go to your drawing tab. (Or, you can use the toolbar that hovers by your mouse when you start editing a picture, or the formatting toolbar that appears by your mouse when you select text, etc.) It's so much cleaner, and intuitive.
But Microsoft changed things. They're not ugly and just-barely functional anymore. That's why I'm getting a Mac.
Are you kidding me?
India has seen the end of a caste system and has moved into a knowledge-based economy. Their poor are becoming literate, and taking "our" IT jobs. The prospects for the average Indian are getting better as the days go on.
Ditto for China. The front page article of the Oct. 17 Investor's Business Daily is "Chinese Wage Growth Surging, But Hasn't Fueled Higher Prices." Although the focus of the article is on urban China (where unskilled/semiskilled workers have been seeing wage increases between 5 and 20 percent each year since 2000), it also mentions how efforts to "exploit" rural farmers for labor have also driven up their wages.
Although the "Cultural Revolution" was definitely a setback for the Chinese economy, things have been going wonderfully for them since. Consider that in the 80s, Proctor and Gamble researched expanding into the Chinese shampoo market - only to realize that there wasn't any. The average peasant could only afford a bottle the size you find complimentary with your hotel room; and even then, only once a year, for a special occaision. McDonalds and other fast food places ha da little more success, but mostly with the wealthy and tourists - as in Russia, peasants would make pilgrimages of sorts to a fast-food restaurant that they could only afford to eat at once a year.
Now, the standard of living in China is rising rapidly - people can not only feed themselves, but they have cars and consumer electronics! They have computers and internet - remember that big firewall China has? Their standard of living is rapidly approaching western standards - a far cry from when Mao Zedung encouraged peasants to smelt steel in their backyards.
Make electricity more expensive, then people will make a huge effort save power...
The price of electricity (in most areas, barring some horribly-managed municipal utility) is a happy medium between what people are willing to pay and what it costs to provide power. (This is "supply and demand.").
What it costs the power company to provide x units of power is directly related to the cost of the coal, natural gas, etc. that it takes to power the power plant. The fuel prices are again happy mediums between what the utilities are willing to pay and what it costs to mine/refine/extract the fuel.
Given this relationship, there is no need whatsoever to make electricity "more expensive." If the power grid is inadequate, utilities are going to raise rates - they need money to upgrade it, and this will also discourage excess consumption. If it's a "peak oil" problem, electricity prices will go up as fuel becomes scarce and people will again use proportionately less.
In the capitalism you tell us to "take advantage of", electricity already has been made more expensive for us. Thank your friendly neighborhood market economy for that one. ^.^
Microsoft's decision to trash the MBR probably isn't a malicious attempt to make dual-booting with Linux a pain - it seems to be normal, benign laziness.
Why would you waste all those man-hours coding a powerful, multi-OS bootloader that your OS doesn't need? It's not like Windows' normal demographic cares, and it's not like there aren't utilities out there that do the same thing for those that do care.
The second cubed is easy to visualize
A joke, I think?
Markets reward fraud, primarily- because the real story is being hidden from the customer behind a viel of anonymity.
Bull. There is no "real story" in a market - there's a good of a certain legally-assured quality for a known price. You decide if it's value to you is worth that price.
In a free market, only the stupid will buy anything else- simply because if profit is king it's not short term profitable to buy the more expensive version.
You can't "profit" by buying something. People buy something because, to the buyer at least, it's worth the opportunity cost.
The problem is, the way they create the bulk rate is to pay people less- thus creating more people in poverty. The race for the bottom- a negative feedback loop.
You assume that labor is the only input in food. In fact, in corporate, "bulk" farming labor is the lest expensive of inputs. "Bulk farming" works because it is more efficient for a few mechanized individuals to exploit a vast tract of land than for many to hand-work a small one.
"Efficient" is the key word here. More food is produced from fewer resources; society gets more and pays less. Very few reductions in cost come becasue a minimum wage laborer got the axe - long-term gains come from productivity increases. Technologies that make better use of land, that require fewer or no pesticides, that more effictively use soil are the source of the reduction in cost and the source of society's riches.
And the farmer can't survive on anything less- so he'll go out of business.
If no farmer can survive on anything less, than the price would never get less. There would be no farmers around to sell at that price.
If one particular farmer can't survive on anything less, he is squandering resources that could be turned into much more by someone else. This one particular farmer is damaging the environment and wasting resources unproductively because he is unable or unwilling to utilize his labor better. Society as a whole should not have to pay for one man's stubbornness, and with markets, they don't have to.
It is impossible for a small farmer to produce food profitably nowadays not because of a corporate conspiracy or anonymity-enabled indifference - it's because a small farm is one of the worst ways to produce food. Using the worst possible way in lieu of a better alternative wastes finite resources to the detriment of society.
Rather, I see your 200 years of fake science, and counter it with 1.5 million years worth of human history.
I see your 1.5 million years of human history culminating in the success of capitalism. Nations with capitalistic economies have the highest standards of living across the board for both rich and poor. Not one nation has successfully completed the transitionto a communist state, and all that have tried have seen nothing but suffering.
Throughout the 1.5 million years of human evolution, there have been communal societies - but none have stayed communal for long, nor have any that did seen the prosperiety and wellbeing the poorest of their counterparts had.
Speaking empirically, capitalism has been more successful. communism has not.
You point out that "your system of allocating resources" only works when the units are small. Then go set it up right now - if you don't have to drag the rest of society with you, this should be easy. And I'm sure you'll be infinitely more prosperous cloistered in your island state than you will as an underemployed software engineer, once you've rid yourself of the oppressive shackles of markets.
No, but I can expect my tribe to pay me a ridiculous salary if I pay them a ridiculous salary.
No you can't. Salaries and money have value only in how much you can buy with them. Getting paid a billion dollars because you paid the rest of your community a billion dollars makes a nice, happy little circle - but all that matters is the productivity and efficiency of your tribe. If everybody has a billion dollars, but your farm production for the year resulted in a half acre of grain, you'll have a true understanding of where the value of money comes from.
Ridiculous salaries are not wealth; they're a measure of wealth with ever-changing dimensions. The mere transfer of goods does nothing to create wealth - the production of goods does.
I am if you are. In other words, if a CEO is worth that much, so is a software engineer.
Wrong. Human life has an intrinsic value which cannot and should never be measured through any economic means.
But your intrinsic worth as a human being has nothing to do with what is equitable. Capitalism conveniently lets a worker keep the bulk of his labor. How much he contributes to the prosperity of society determines how much he is paid. A "team member" at a fast food joint (my current employment) produces much less, measured in real dollars, to the prosperity of society than does than does the entrepreneur how created a restaurant that employs dozens and feeds thousands, who produces less than a theoretical physicist doing groundbreaking work on nanotechnology.
The fast food worker takes a 79 cent hamburger, cooks it, and sells it for a 99 cents. It is impossible for this worker to get paid any more than 20 cents a hamburger if his job is to remain past his employer's savings. The profits the owner enjoys are proportional to what he contribues - not only does he have to work hours if his business is to be successful, but he has created 20 cents of wealth per burger than did not exist before. The happy side effects of this profit are that 1) people have jobs and 2) people are fed - both useful things coming from nothing but profit motive. Meanwhile, the physicist with the nanotechnology breakthrough has revolutionized practically everything in use by society, and by virtue of his skill is paid more.
Notice how each individual keeps the bulk of his labor. Just that each person's labor is capable of creating vastly different amounts of real, tangible, non-monetary wealth - a cooked burger is intrinsically less valuable than a place of employment than a life-changing technology. Capitalism ensures that each person keeps the bulk of their labor - inequality comes from each person being capable of a different labor.
It is ridiculous to assume that a fry chef has had the same contribution to the prosperity of society as an even mildly-successful software engineer. That's why the engineer is paid more - it's his share of his own contribution, the best definition of equity.
Microsoft should have a short "style guide" that appears the first time a user account starts powerpoint. It would have a nice list of my pet peeves, including:
How much pain would I have been saved if people would just follow these simple rules. Or stop their presentation when a representative sample of (captive) audience members experience retinal bleeding.
Not really a problem with bells and whistles, per se - Powerpoint's a nice, powerful app capable of creating really professional presentations. Just that there's a "max capacity" on each slide for flash. If x is the number of bells, whistles, and features (ab)used per slide, comprehension and aesthetic appeal, and the audience's opinion of the presentor have their limit lim x->oo = 0.
Then let them sell it to their own country, and leave me the hell alone.
Or, you could leave them the hell alone. Nobody's forcing you to buy from them.
In fact, by forcing said person to stay in his own country, you're also forcing everyone in your country who actually wants to buy from him to go elsewhere. For spite of a foreigner, you hurt all those who could benefit from trade.
The moral difference is the human connection- the willingness to pay more to ensure the well being of your neighbor, because they too will pay more to ensure your well being.
An economic system is the most terrible vehicle imaginable for peddling "human connection." No system of allocating resources can force others to care about each other; to have that "human connnection."
To pretend this is possible is "religious claptrap." Besides, I'd wager that most people would rather keep their money and ensure their own wellbeing than trust something that important to anonymous others.
Society as a whole is still made up of individuals. If the individuals are allowed to keep that which they need to care for themselves, than society as a whole will be better. In a capitalist society, you're still free to do the opposite - to pay more to someone who can also "pay more to ensure your wellbeing."
We currently have a labor surplus, especially in software engineering- and that's exactly what I was told 5 years ago. I had to carve out a new position in government- because according to private industry, I'm worthless; it's better to give a position to 5 engineers in Bangalore than allow me to be a software engineer.
In a capitalistic society, there's nothing preventing you from moving to Bangalore. Sure, you'll get paid less - but you can't expect the entire world to pay you a ridiculous salary at the expense of the Bangalorians, can you? Are you worth that much more as a human being to justify your profit at their expense?
As for your critique of "ownership", I still don't understand why you believe it's such a "bad thing." You can reject texts containing 200 years of science because it "appeals to an authority you cannot accept", so I'll appeal to one you do seem to worhship: There is no "human connection" depriving someone of the result of their toils, because it was never "theirs" to begin with.
Ever read Slaughterhouse 5? LOTS. That which you can't sell to the rich, you sell to the poor. By eliminating waste, you've increased efficiency. And made a profit to boot.
Nope; can't say that I have. But, even though the poor getting fed horrible food is, well, horrible - at least they have food.
The magic of "profit" is that even with the most selfishly-motivated individual (the rotton meat-seller) fed the poor.
Thus Wal*Mart takes over retail and forces more companies to become profit-motive-only. It's a race for the bottom- destruction of the innovation motive.
So, the inefficient retailers suffer when WalMart shows the world how much they're overcharging. Instead of selling things for what they're worth, other retailers such as Target try to make their crap look more "valuable" by wasting money on advertising. It's cases like these where Wal-Mart is a sorely-needed breath of fresh air.
Besides, how much has Wal-Mart done to help the poor, even being motivated only by profit? Families can afford much more than their limited incomes could before because Wal-Mart has made everything more affordable for them. The poor have more, even though Wal-Mart was motivated only by profit and not by altruism.
Do you really think $400/year veggies will be able to compete when Wal*Mart comes in with bulk-rate organic at half the cost, shipped thousands of miles?
Nope - and it's not supposed to. You shouldn't have to spend $400/year to get pesticide-free vegetables. The poor won't be able to afford that.
But, if somebody makes "bulk-rate organic" at half the cost, hooray for them. They made food that was formerly affordable only for elitists available to those much poorer. Even though these "bulk-rate" people were motivated only by profit, the poor can now afford better food.
And it will be destroyed when somebody comes in with a crappier, cheaper version that is marketed as the same. It's the same old story- eventually you're left with only the crappy version in the marketplace.
Simply not true. Just because somebody comes up with a "crappy-but-cheap" version doesn't mean anybody will want to buy it.
How much it costs to make something is a very different concept from "efficiency." If a new process to ship vegetables costs a tenth of the old, but makes most of the food inedible, it's hadly a more "efficient" way to ship food.
Markets reward efficiency - how well you can deliver what consumers actually want and how much of the earth's reasources you consume in doing so (input price). If you don't produce what people actually want, there's no $profit for you, even if it is dirt cheap. Supply and demand.
Vista will not run on ancient hardware. You need a graphics accelerator, and it needs more than 4MB of memory.
It will run on "older" hardware - you need something from this decade (800MHz CPU and 512MB RAM) and all the POW! FWOOSH! ZING! eye candy is turned off unless Vista sees that you actually have said quad-GPU-DirectX-12d-compatible-5GHz-4096Mo cards.
As for your point about community-developed drivers - yea, that sure sucks, because odds are the "community" isn't going to be able to fork over $cash to get a digital signature.
I'm a bit sympathetic with Microsoft's view, tho - every blue-screen reflects poorly on Windows, not what actually caused the crash. Even if a shitty HP printer driver makes your system unstable, in the user's eyes this is because Windows is crap, not because HP is lazy and made a broken driver.
So, Microsoft took away everyone's blue-screen priviliges by forcing most drivers into user mode. Anything with blue-screen priviliges (kernel-mode) they want to look over themselves to make sure they can call this version of Windows "stable" with a straight face. (Kinda important considering "bluescreen" and "Windows" are synonymous, even though the kernel runs just fine.)
I'm fine with a lack of subsidies- I'm not fine with allowing access to foreign markets.
Why? If a person wants to sell stuff in China, there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to. If a person in China wants to sell stuff here, there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to. They're not doing anything wrong - they've made something, they want to sell it.
There's no moral difference, whether the "they" is a "nice" stereotype, such as the rural farmer, rustic blacksmith, or other proletarian image, or an "evil" archetype, such as a multinational corporation.
Selling "ownership" in a company is exactly the fraud I'm refering to. We are stewards and custodians of what we have, not owners.
Ridiculous. I can quite clearly say that something is "mine", and I can claim a right to it. Nothing wrong with the individual ownership of property.
Say that you spent a dollar on the most delicious nectar that is in a 24oz bottle of "Mountain Dew." Whatsay I believe that I can be a better "steward" of your Mountain Dew than you are capable of. Even if this were true, I have no right to take your Mountain Dew because, presumably, you worked for your dolalr, you spent it, and the fruits of your efforts are yours, to do with as you wish.
Just as I can't claim "stewardship" over what others have worked to create and obtain, neither can anyone else. This is the point of private property - you own the products of your labor.
If you can't pay for it, you're not a consumer by capitalist standards; you're just so much meat to be used and thrown away.
By the "capitalist" standards in my macroeconomics text, yes, aflmost everyone on the face of the earth is a consumer of public goods. This type of consumership is different than the soundbytes read by the talking heads on television.
By a purely cold and theory-driven capitalistic standpoint, a person with no money is not "worthless", because it is not personal ownership that gives a person work. The potential labor that a person is capable of producing has value. Nobody's going to tell a software engineer that he's "so much meat to be thrown away" because he missed a rent payment - the landlord's going to be pissed, but the engineer's work is worth a six-figure salary.
Even in less glamorous jobs, any individual has value insofar that they are capable of labor. The market for their particular type of labor - what people are willing to work for, and what companies are willing to pay - determines a unit of labor's value in monetary terms.
Those who are infirm and incapable of work, in a theoretical, strictly capitalistic market-driven world, are considered "worthless." That's why America, even though it is a (not truly) "capitalist" country, has social programs.
Would you serve your friend rotting meat if you had filet mingon available? Of course not. But the so called "free markets" and "free trade" will- because there's no actual human relationship, no friendship, only profit
You forget - what kind of profit is to be made from rotting meat? Consumers demand the most value for the lowest price; manufacturers demand the highest price for the lowest cost. At some price in the middle of these extremes, a critical mass of people is willing to sell a product, and a critical mass is willing to buy. This compromise between the consumer's "give me everything for nothing" and the manufacturers "give me everything for nothing" results in a market price.
In this way, markets are fair to both buyers and sellers, and they are efficient.
The same thing works by the hypothetical profit-motive-only-soulless-capitalist archetype. The artistic work will sell for much more than slag. If that price difference justifies the extra effort, you will see only artistic work.
It's not just what's cheapest to make - it's what's most profitable. Look at the booming organic food industry - the higher-quality food is much more expensive to grow than traditional, mid-quality "bulk" food. But, people will pay more for the quality.
Markets don't create the cheapest, crappiest goods - they create the most profitable. Since organic food is more profitable than "regular" food, it is made despite the higher production cost and effort.
So how do they access the hardware if they're not in ring 0?
The Windows Driver Model provides an interface to do this. The software calls kernel functions, and the KERNEL accesses the hardware.
This lets drivers reside in user mode, yet still talk to the hardware. Keeps things nice and stable, and DOESN'T require signing.