Wasn't all that being done for Live Search too though? And that market share was way below Bing's and dropping. It's something more than just those 3 items.
Let's take a couple: "IE is derived from Mosaic, the original Web browser, open source with a license similar to Apache's." The implication is that Microsoft took Mosaic for free and then subverted it. While all browsers date their lineage back to Mosaic, Microsoft didn't base IE on open source code. Instead it licensed Spyglass which wasn't open.
"Vista's customer-hostile emphasis on digital rights management, often handicapping its own features in suspicion that the user might have illicit content, caused its downfall. IT managers won't stand for that, and thus Microsoft has a lot of code to trash and rewrite before it can make an acceptable server platform." Does Perens know anything about the server market about which he speaks? Microsoft has a server OS called Windows Server 2008 and it's selling quite well. It isn't the same as Vista and doesn't have the same perceived problems. Microsoft has a huge part of this market. Perens tries to use slight of hand by conflating Vista and Server 2008 but they are not the same OS.
He may or may not be right on his reasoning about why Microsoft is joining the Apache foundation, but the rest of the article is based on so many false premises that I'm skpetical about the objectiveness of his analysis.
How does a PhD make someone a good project manager? A good project manager is going to be someone with a lot of work experience. You don't learn to be a good manager in graduate school. Getting the PhD just takes time away from that experience. A PhD could be a good manager, but so could someone with a masters or even just a bachelor's.
Re:Vim is painful.
on
Hacking VIM
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've often had the same thoughts myself. As someone who really enjoys programming but doesn't enjoy the math classes associated with most CS degrees, I've wondered if they are truly necessary. In real, practical work, I find that I use a lot of what I've learned in OS classes, database classes, and algorithms classes but not what I've learned in classes on algorithm analysis, discrete math, computational theory, etc. I realize that there are places those are necessary but I don't think it intersects the work of the average programmer.
In my mind there are usually 2 kinds of CS classes: Those that require programming and those that require math. Rarely do the two meet. If you look at the classes I find I didn't use, they are all the "require math" classes. If you are touching a compiler or interpreter in the class, in my experience you are substantially less likely to have a use for that knowledge in the "real world."
What would someone be unable to do if a program went light on the math classes? Obviously I would have a more difficult time understanding the time/space implications of new algorithms, but how often does someone really need to do that?
I'm not advocating that these classes be no longer offered but how necessary as core classes?
| Actually, Windows 3.11 was 32-bits, at least partially. Actually, it wasn't. There was a Win32s subsystem that you could run on it which would get you some 32-bit compatibility but that came out late, was never part of the system you buy, and didn't work very well. Really it was just a dev kit for people writing Win95 programs early.
| Except for the fact that 32-bit Windows 95 was largely using 16-bit code. Microsoft's insistance that it would be all 32-bit really screwed over Intel when it introduced the Pentium Pro.
There was some 16-bit stuff in there I'm sure but saying it was "largely" 16 bit is wrong. All programs that ran natively on it were 32-bit programs. The kernel ran in 32-bit mode. There may have been parts that thunked to 16-bit code but most of what ran most of the time was 32-bits.
| WinXP is a huge improvement over Win9x, but it's nowhere near the stability of a real OS. It will still crash, though far less often, and it will still do nasty things like corrupting it's own registry and system files over time. There's nothing like administering 100+ Windows desktop to really show you how flaky it is.
What, pray-tell, is a "real os"? Unless you have bad device drivers, WinXP will almost never blue screen on you. I haven't run 100+ desktops at the same time but I can say that I run a half dozen or so and have never had the registry corrupt on me or the system files go bad.
|| with 128MB of RAM WinXP will run 'faster' than Win98. | No, not on a fairly old computer. Even with all the optimizations turned off, XP is a CPU hog.
I have to agree with you there. WinXP is quite painful on 128 MB of RAM. 256 is where it gets usable. 512 is where it is happy. It's not the CPU usage but the RAM usage that kills it. This is pretty true of other modern OS's though.
The whole concept that diversity somehow protects from viruses is ludicrous. It may stop a universal outbreak by limiting it to some subset of the population, but if you are part of that vulnerable population, a virus is no less devastating. Empirically, when there *was* a diversity of computer operating systems, viruses *still* ran rampant. Think about the late 1980s. There were substantial populations of MSDOS, Commodore, Apple, Macintosh, Amiga, Atari, etc. computers around. Most people here are probably too young to remember but there were a lot of viruses in those days too. It is not the evil Microsoft monoculture that brought about viruses. They pre-existed that by a long while.
I would go so far as to predict that a diverse culture of computer operating systems would actually *increase* the damage viruses can do. Sure, a single virus couldn't take down everything at once, but there would also be far fewer resources thrown at stopping any given virus. Antivirus software would have to be written and maintained for each platform. Security vulnerabilities would have to be patched for each platform. Each time you diversify the culture, you increase the amount of redundant work needed to keep the entire population safe. Fewer resources means more vulnerabilities and slower response times. That, in turn, would mean more viruses doing damage in the real world.
In my opinion, Sony has mis-judged the market. They saw the success of the PS2 with its ability to play DVD and misread the reasons. It is true that the inclusion of DVD made the PS2 a better seller. You got a game system and a DVD player for a little more than the price of a DVD player at the time. Sony seems to be forgetting that DVD was an established trend when the PS2 launched. It was a given that most people would want DVD players, it was just a question of when. That is not the case for bluray. Two big factors effect this. First, BluRay is not a guaranteed winner the way DVD was. DVD had no competition. BluRay does. HD-DVD is a viable alternative and is on the market already. Second, there is no ready-made mass market for BluRay. It is a niche item at best right now. On a regular TV, it does me nothing that a DVD player won't. DVD brought better picture, direct scene access, and bonus features. BluRay brings a better picture iff you have a $2000+ TV. If you don't, it doesn't get you anything. Sony seems convinced that everyone wants a BRD player and will see the PS3 as a discounted way to get one. Listen to their execs. They all tout that it is cheaper than standalone BRD players. That's true. It is, however, more expensive than a standalone HD-DVD player. People will pay a little more for a combination item if the second part is something they want. Outside of the videophile community, I don't see the demand for high-definition movies. The extra $200 premium for BRD won't be viewed as a discount over the $1000 a standalone player costs. Instead, it will be viewed as a tax over the cost of an XBox 360.
VIIV has no soul
on
Viiv Falls Flat
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
VIIV failed because it has no reason to exist. What is VIIV? I have scoured the internet and Intel's site to figure this out. As far as I can tell, it is a marketing message surrounding Media Center PCs. How a VIIV Media Center is better than a non-VIIV Media Center, I have no idea. Other than including the Core Duo processor, I don't even really understand what it means to be a VIIV PC. At least with Centrino (another exercize in branding from Intel), I knew it meant these 3 chips were in the computer. Now, all I know is it has a sticker.
The internet is starting to dismantle some forms of traditional marketing. Hype alone doesn't cut it any more. Intel hasn't realized that. It created something that was pure hype and now it is seeing its balloon quickly deflated.
This is not a first for Intel to try this though. MMX makes the internet go faster. Anyone remember that?
"Neither Windows nor Linux uses kernel audio mixing -- they rely on hardware mixing instead."
You're simply incorrect. Others have covered ALSA on Linux so I'll not touch that here. Windows 2000 shipped with something called KMixer which did software audio mixing six years ago. Windows Vista is getting rid of this and going with something new called the Audio Engine that does the mixing is user mode. See http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1460 29 for some video discussing the new solution.
No, that's the Online Spotlight that has been shipping with Media Center for a while now. It has nothing to do with Apple's version of desktop search. It's not even remotely similar.
"And as to your statement about boys not wanted to play with barbies- do you think this could possibly be caused by the fact that girls are socialized from birth to act in a manner that is appropriate for their sex? "
Jason, is it fair to conclude that you've never raised children or at least that you haven't raised one of both sexes? There are obvious differences between boys and girls from a very early age. As a father of both a daughter and a son, your statement rings disconnected from reality. Girls are attracted to pink and dolls and dressing up without any help from their parents. Boys are attracted to trucks and guns without any help from their parents. From a very early age girls take a greater interest in social interactions--including appearances than boys. Boys are generally much rougher than girls. John Stossel did a report on this some years back. One example had children of about a year seperated from their mothers by a glass partition. The boys pounded the glass to get to their mothers. The girls tended to sit down and cry. We're wired differently (insert hypothesis why here).
Why is it that we must find few women in CS as a problem? There are few men in, say, nursing. Is that a problem? Not necessarily. If a group is self-selecting toward or away from a particular profession, why do we insist denying that?
I'm sure there are exceptions to these examples but it holds for the majority of the group.
...If the new interface catches on. The reviews of it sound positive so far but it remains to be seen if average users will accept it or not. I was speaking to a friend who works in a large corp. They spend a lot of time training non-techies to use Office (and other apps) and a wholesale change in the UI is going to be difficult to roll out. It will require retraining everyone. If the new UI is indeed more intuitive, perhaps that isn't as big an issue but it is still going to require a lot of training....What this does to competitors like OpenOffice. Right now they are chasing the tail lights of office. They look and act a lot like it. If Office changes radically as it appears to, that seems to move the goalposts. It will be interesting to see how they respond. Do they clone this new interface paradigm or do they continue with the old, cluttered one?
Bell labs, DEC, and Xerox PARC may be things of the past, but Microsoft is funding a lot of general research today. This is not product R&D but basic research of the sort done at many of the big companies of the past. Check out their website for a list of some current topics. They employ over 700 people doing everything from pure algorithms to graphics to networking.
I think the big problem is that it cannot run x86 software very quickly. Most software that people want to run in the mass market is precompiled, binary x86 software. That stuff just does not run well on the Itanic. That, combined with the fact that the mass market still doesn't really benefit from a 64-bit address space means that the Itanium was a more expensive, slower processor. It's no wonder that it didn't sell.
Early versions also had problems with heat. Where I work we have some Itanic workstations and in the winter, if we were chilly, we literally turned them on to help warm up our offices.
"Heck, I suspect that if Real or Apple approached Microsoft with a proposal to ship their codecs as part of a standard installation, MS would be more than happy to include it, even if it was only to say "look, Windows plays everything!"."
Windows did ship with Real (version 4) and Quicktime codecs at one point. Windows 98 I think came with both. You are exactly right that Apple and Real are trying to leverage their formats via their own players rather than via codecs and this has impeded their being used. This hurts them. I personally started refusing to watch Real streams when I had to load their buggy and advertising-heavy RealOne player. Even Apple's Quicktime player is painful to use compared to Windows Media Player. The Windows client is slow and kludgy.
Let's say I'm a small inventor and I come up with a widget but don't file. Now BigCompany comes along and files for the same invention some time later. Do you think perhaps there might be some *prior art*? Like, say, my invention? Thought so.
I love the way these companies continue to file for thousands of patents themselves but when a competitor's patent gets in the way, they want to squash it. I'm all for them squashing patents. The more the merrier as far as I'm concerned. I haven't seen a software/algorithm patents that helped foster competition or reduce prices for the consumer. Part of me hopes that patent issues for the big companies will help them realize that the patent system is in need of massive reform. Right after that my realist side recognizes that the big companies will just play the system like they always do. Sigh.
It sure beats community service. I've long maintained that the way to learn to code is by coding. As someone who does hiring into programming positions, I know I would look highly at someone who spent his downtime working on OSS projects.
As someone in the software development industry (not IT but real development) I can say that a) the outsource wave appears to have peaked. I've worked on a few outsource projects. They sometimes work out but often do not. The quality just isn't there. I also know someone who runs a company in India doing outsource work. He concurs that there just aren't the number of workers they need with any kind of skill. They are hiring a lot of people with only mediocre skills. Think the.com era in the U.S. and you get the picture. The logistics of outsourcing are bad. The long-term brain drain on the company is bad. The quality of the end product is bad. Two years ago I was worried about outsourcing. Today, I'm not.
Wow. Something good coming out of France. Who'da thought?
I wonder what will happen here. The French market is not so large that it gets all DVDs made specifically for it. Instead, they tend to use multiple languages and market to a lot of Europe at the same time. If that is the case, do the big media companies stop selling in France or do they start selling non-protected DVDs more broadly? This could get interesting. I wonder if France's actions will snowball or make it a backwater for digital media.
I think that is a lot of what is broken with the system. To try to avoid a little bit of abuse, we take away all discretion. This has the effect of causing more damage than it removes. This is but one example. Others are kids being arrested or suspended for bringing drugs (aspirin) or guns (1" GI Joe plastic guns) to school. If the cops know that something isn't wrong, they should be able to tell the store manager and clerk that they are idiots and let this guy go. I hope he can sue.
I'm not sure whether I should never shop at Best Buy again or whether I should go buy something with $2 bills.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't all that being done for Live Search too though? And that market share was way below Bing's and dropping. It's something more than just those 3 items.
Let's take a couple:
"IE is derived from Mosaic, the original Web browser, open source with a license similar to Apache's." The implication is that Microsoft took Mosaic for free and then subverted it. While all browsers date their lineage back to Mosaic, Microsoft didn't base IE on open source code. Instead it licensed Spyglass which wasn't open.
"Vista's customer-hostile emphasis on digital rights management, often handicapping its own features in suspicion that the user might have illicit content, caused its downfall. IT managers won't stand for that, and thus Microsoft has a lot of code to trash and rewrite before it can make an acceptable server platform." Does Perens know anything about the server market about which he speaks? Microsoft has a server OS called Windows Server 2008 and it's selling quite well. It isn't the same as Vista and doesn't have the same perceived problems. Microsoft has a huge part of this market. Perens tries to use slight of hand by conflating Vista and Server 2008 but they are not the same OS.
He may or may not be right on his reasoning about why Microsoft is joining the Apache foundation, but the rest of the article is based on so many false premises that I'm skpetical about the objectiveness of his analysis.
How does a PhD make someone a good project manager? A good project manager is going to be someone with a lot of work experience. You don't learn to be a good manager in graduate school. Getting the PhD just takes time away from that experience. A PhD could be a good manager, but so could someone with a masters or even just a bachelor's.
http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial.html is another good cheat sheet and a good tutorial.
Check out this series of posts. They highlight many of the problems you are likely to see when making the transition. Becoming a Lead Learning to Trust Delegating We Not I
I've often had the same thoughts myself. As someone who really enjoys programming but doesn't enjoy the math classes associated with most CS degrees, I've wondered if they are truly necessary. In real, practical work, I find that I use a lot of what I've learned in OS classes, database classes, and algorithms classes but not what I've learned in classes on algorithm analysis, discrete math, computational theory, etc. I realize that there are places those are necessary but I don't think it intersects the work of the average programmer.
In my mind there are usually 2 kinds of CS classes: Those that require programming and those that require math. Rarely do the two meet. If you look at the classes I find I didn't use, they are all the "require math" classes. If you are touching a compiler or interpreter in the class, in my experience you are substantially less likely to have a use for that knowledge in the "real world."
What would someone be unable to do if a program went light on the math classes? Obviously I would have a more difficult time understanding the time/space implications of new algorithms, but how often does someone really need to do that?
I'm not advocating that these classes be no longer offered but how necessary as core classes?
| Actually, Windows 3.11 was 32-bits, at least partially.
Actually, it wasn't. There was a Win32s subsystem that you could run on it which would get you some 32-bit compatibility but that came out late, was never part of the system you buy, and didn't work very well. Really it was just a dev kit for people writing Win95 programs early.
| Except for the fact that 32-bit Windows 95 was largely using 16-bit code. Microsoft's insistance that it would be all 32-bit really screwed over Intel when it introduced the Pentium Pro.
There was some 16-bit stuff in there I'm sure but saying it was "largely" 16 bit is wrong. All programs that ran natively on it were 32-bit programs. The kernel ran in 32-bit mode. There may have been parts that thunked to 16-bit code but most of what ran most of the time was 32-bits.
| WinXP is a huge improvement over Win9x, but it's nowhere near the stability of a real OS. It will still crash, though far less often, and it will still do nasty things like corrupting it's own registry and system files over time. There's nothing like administering 100+ Windows desktop to really show you how flaky it is.
What, pray-tell, is a "real os"? Unless you have bad device drivers, WinXP will almost never blue screen on you. I haven't run 100+ desktops at the same time but I can say that I run a half dozen or so and have never had the registry corrupt on me or the system files go bad.
|| with 128MB of RAM WinXP will run 'faster' than Win98.
| No, not on a fairly old computer. Even with all the optimizations turned off, XP is a CPU hog.
I have to agree with you there. WinXP is quite painful on 128 MB of RAM. 256 is where it gets usable. 512 is where it is happy. It's not the CPU usage but the RAM usage that kills it. This is pretty true of other modern OS's though.
The whole concept that diversity somehow protects from viruses is ludicrous. It may stop a universal outbreak by limiting it to some subset of the population, but if you are part of that vulnerable population, a virus is no less devastating. Empirically, when there *was* a diversity of computer operating systems, viruses *still* ran rampant. Think about the late 1980s. There were substantial populations of MSDOS, Commodore, Apple, Macintosh, Amiga, Atari, etc. computers around. Most people here are probably too young to remember but there were a lot of viruses in those days too. It is not the evil Microsoft monoculture that brought about viruses. They pre-existed that by a long while.
I would go so far as to predict that a diverse culture of computer operating systems would actually *increase* the damage viruses can do. Sure, a single virus couldn't take down everything at once, but there would also be far fewer resources thrown at stopping any given virus. Antivirus software would have to be written and maintained for each platform. Security vulnerabilities would have to be patched for each platform. Each time you diversify the culture, you increase the amount of redundant work needed to keep the entire population safe. Fewer resources means more vulnerabilities and slower response times. That, in turn, would mean more viruses doing damage in the real world.
In my opinion, Sony has mis-judged the market. They saw the success of the PS2 with its ability to play DVD and misread the reasons. It is true that the inclusion of DVD made the PS2 a better seller. You got a game system and a DVD player for a little more than the price of a DVD player at the time. Sony seems to be forgetting that DVD was an established trend when the PS2 launched. It was a given that most people would want DVD players, it was just a question of when. That is not the case for bluray.
Two big factors effect this. First, BluRay is not a guaranteed winner the way DVD was. DVD had no competition. BluRay does. HD-DVD is a viable alternative and is on the market already. Second, there is no ready-made mass market for BluRay. It is a niche item at best right now. On a regular TV, it does me nothing that a DVD player won't. DVD brought better picture, direct scene access, and bonus features. BluRay brings a better picture iff you have a $2000+ TV. If you don't, it doesn't get you anything.
Sony seems convinced that everyone wants a BRD player and will see the PS3 as a discounted way to get one. Listen to their execs. They all tout that it is cheaper than standalone BRD players. That's true. It is, however, more expensive than a standalone HD-DVD player. People will pay a little more for a combination item if the second part is something they want. Outside of the videophile community, I don't see the demand for high-definition movies. The extra $200 premium for BRD won't be viewed as a discount over the $1000 a standalone player costs. Instead, it will be viewed as a tax over the cost of an XBox 360.
VIIV failed because it has no reason to exist. What is VIIV? I have scoured the internet and Intel's site to figure this out. As far as I can tell, it is a marketing message surrounding Media Center PCs. How a VIIV Media Center is better than a non-VIIV Media Center, I have no idea. Other than including the Core Duo processor, I don't even really understand what it means to be a VIIV PC. At least with Centrino (another exercize in branding from Intel), I knew it meant these 3 chips were in the computer. Now, all I know is it has a sticker.
The internet is starting to dismantle some forms of traditional marketing. Hype alone doesn't cut it any more. Intel hasn't realized that. It created something that was pure hype and now it is seeing its balloon quickly deflated.
This is not a first for Intel to try this though. MMX makes the internet go faster. Anyone remember that?
"Neither Windows nor Linux uses kernel audio mixing -- they rely on hardware mixing instead."
0 29 for some video discussing the new solution.
You're simply incorrect. Others have covered ALSA on Linux so I'll not touch that here. Windows 2000 shipped with something called KMixer which did software audio mixing six years ago. Windows Vista is getting rid of this and going with something new called the Audio Engine that does the mixing is user mode. See http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=146
No, that's the Online Spotlight that has been shipping with Media Center for a while now. It has nothing to do with Apple's version of desktop search. It's not even remotely similar.
"And as to your statement about boys not wanted to play with barbies- do you think this could possibly be caused by the fact that girls are socialized from birth to act in a manner that is appropriate for their sex? "
Jason, is it fair to conclude that you've never raised children or at least that you haven't raised one of both sexes? There are obvious differences between boys and girls from a very early age. As a father of both a daughter and a son, your statement rings disconnected from reality. Girls are attracted to pink and dolls and dressing up without any help from their parents. Boys are attracted to trucks and guns without any help from their parents. From a very early age girls take a greater interest in social interactions--including appearances than boys. Boys are generally much rougher than girls. John Stossel did a report on this some years back. One example had children of about a year seperated from their mothers by a glass partition. The boys pounded the glass to get to their mothers. The girls tended to sit down and cry. We're wired differently (insert hypothesis why here).
Why is it that we must find few women in CS as a problem? There are few men in, say, nursing. Is that a problem? Not necessarily. If a group is self-selecting toward or away from a particular profession, why do we insist denying that?
I'm sure there are exceptions to these examples but it holds for the majority of the group.
...If the new interface catches on. The reviews of it sound positive so far but it remains to be seen if average users will accept it or not. I was speaking to a friend who works in a large corp. They spend a lot of time training non-techies to use Office (and other apps) and a wholesale change in the UI is going to be difficult to roll out. It will require retraining everyone. If the new UI is indeed more intuitive, perhaps that isn't as big an issue but it is still going to require a lot of training. ...What this does to competitors like OpenOffice. Right now they are chasing the tail lights of office. They look and act a lot like it. If Office changes radically as it appears to, that seems to move the goalposts. It will be interesting to see how they respond. Do they clone this new interface paradigm or do they continue with the old, cluttered one?
Umm, Virtual Earth is not a Google product. It is a pretty cool product though.
I think Intel should get the engineers out of their marketing department. I mean, look at some of the winners they've had recently:
HT Technology
EM64T
SSE/2/3
MMX
and now VIIV. WTF?
Are consumers really supposed to get something out of these? At least Centrino was capable of being pronounced.
Bell labs, DEC, and Xerox PARC may be things of the past, but Microsoft is funding a lot of general research today. This is not product R&D but basic research of the sort done at many of the big companies of the past. Check out their website for a list of some current topics. They employ over 700 people doing everything from pure algorithms to graphics to networking.
I think the big problem is that it cannot run x86 software very quickly. Most software that people want to run in the mass market is precompiled, binary x86 software. That stuff just does not run well on the Itanic. That, combined with the fact that the mass market still doesn't really benefit from a 64-bit address space means that the Itanium was a more expensive, slower processor. It's no wonder that it didn't sell.
Early versions also had problems with heat. Where I work we have some Itanic workstations and in the winter, if we were chilly, we literally turned them on to help warm up our offices.
"Heck, I suspect that if Real or Apple approached Microsoft with a proposal to ship their codecs as part of a standard installation, MS would be more than happy to include it, even if it was only to say "look, Windows plays everything!"."
Windows did ship with Real (version 4) and Quicktime codecs at one point. Windows 98 I think came with both. You are exactly right that Apple and Real are trying to leverage their formats via their own players rather than via codecs and this has impeded their being used. This hurts them. I personally started refusing to watch Real streams when I had to load their buggy and advertising-heavy RealOne player. Even Apple's Quicktime player is painful to use compared to Windows Media Player. The Windows client is slow and kludgy.
Let's say I'm a small inventor and I come up with a widget but don't file. Now BigCompany comes along and files for the same invention some time later. Do you think perhaps there might be some *prior art*? Like, say, my invention? Thought so.
I love the way these companies continue to file for thousands of patents themselves but when a competitor's patent gets in the way, they want to squash it. I'm all for them squashing patents. The more the merrier as far as I'm concerned. I haven't seen a software/algorithm patents that helped foster competition or reduce prices for the consumer. Part of me hopes that patent issues for the big companies will help them realize that the patent system is in need of massive reform. Right after that my realist side recognizes that the big companies will just play the system like they always do. Sigh.
It sure beats community service. I've long maintained that the way to learn to code is by coding. As someone who does hiring into programming positions, I know I would look highly at someone who spent his downtime working on OSS projects.
As someone in the software development industry (not IT but real development) I can say that a) the outsource wave appears to have peaked. I've worked on a few outsource projects. They sometimes work out but often do not. The quality just isn't there. I also know someone who runs a company in India doing outsource work. He concurs that there just aren't the number of workers they need with any kind of skill. They are hiring a lot of people with only mediocre skills. Think the .com era in the U.S. and you get the picture. The logistics of outsourcing are bad. The long-term brain drain on the company is bad. The quality of the end product is bad. Two years ago I was worried about outsourcing. Today, I'm not.
Wow. Something good coming out of France. Who'da thought?
I wonder what will happen here. The French market is not so large that it gets all DVDs made specifically for it. Instead, they tend to use multiple languages and market to a lot of Europe at the same time. If that is the case, do the big media companies stop selling in France or do they start selling non-protected DVDs more broadly? This could get interesting. I wonder if France's actions will snowball or make it a backwater for digital media.
I think that is a lot of what is broken with the system. To try to avoid a little bit of abuse, we take away all discretion. This has the effect of causing more damage than it removes. This is but one example. Others are kids being arrested or suspended for bringing drugs (aspirin) or guns (1" GI Joe plastic guns) to school. If the cops know that something isn't wrong, they should be able to tell the store manager and clerk that they are idiots and let this guy go. I hope he can sue.
I'm not sure whether I should never shop at Best Buy again or whether I should go buy something with $2 bills.