***I just wish Microsoft would take down Quicken.***
For personal use, Is there something wrong with MSMoney? As far as I can see, it works fine.
For Personal Taxes, you can use either TaxCut or TaxAct instead of TurboTax
Business is tougher, but didn't Microsoft buy out Great Plains a decade or so ago in order to get a competetive low end accounting product? What ever happened to that?
***I am truly baffled when it comes to the history of gambling.***
Well, part of that is because you do not seem to understand the legal status of Indians and Indian Reservations. For the most part, the reservations are the result of treaties between the Indians and the US and/or state governments. Although the reservations are within states, they are for the most part not subject to state laws. For example, an Indian living on his reservation is not subject to state income tax from income earned on the reservation. That's not a modern concession to "affirmative action". It's a rather ancient (by American standards) concession to the likelihood that if pushed too far, the Indians would start butchering their neighbors.
One of the things that is under the control of the indians is whether gambling is permited on their reservations.
As to why Indian reservations are mostly way out in the boonies... y'know, I'm not sure if it's a matter of the illegal immigrants (the Puritans et. al) settled where the Indians weren't or whether the Indians actually once had treaty land in or near what are now big cities, but had them ripped off. Mostly the former I think. In any case, the reservations were way the hell out where they are now many decades before the first Indian Casino opened its doors.
The CPU is made out of Silicon with small controlled amounts of impurities. The beach is made out of Silicon Dioxide with small uncontrolled amounts of impurites.
Silicon is to SIicon Dioxide as Hydrogen is to Water.
Frankly, I have a few doubts myself about anything that uses any part of the technology associated with CDR or CDRW. One hopes the technology works a LOT better when it is integrated onto a chip.
I'd also point out that maybe 15% of these magic new technology announcements ever make it into a serious product.
***What exactly does one do with a 100 Mbps FTTH connection other than downloading a 700 MB DivX movie in 1 sec @ 12500 MB/sec ? ***
I imagine that just like DSL, one waits for packets from websites from slow servers to slog through the lethargic backbones then race down the final mile and display at speeds not all that much faster than dialup.
***You'd be underestimating the sheer size of China as an economy and its importance to the rest of the world, USA included. 1,3 billion people is not a market to sneeze at.***
For sure it is big. But why do you think that the US can compete there? it's not like we have much manufacturing and what we do have is expensive and not overly high quality compared to our competitors. Services? Same problems, only more so, Agriculture? Forget it. The only reason we are remotely competetive is because of our questionably legal farm subsidies. Weapons systems? There we have a product, but I expect a certain lack of enthusiasm for selling China Nuclear aircraft carriers and stealth fighters.
Not that I expect the US to default without spending at least 72 hours thinking about the consequences -- which will surely be horrendous for the entire world. But if we continue to allow the country to be run by faux coyboys, religious flakes, and right wing dingbats, I'd guess that default might seem less painful, at least to their tiny minds, than the ghastly spectre of paying our IOUs.
***Oh, and by the way, whos' fault is that chinese are financing USAs balances?***
Clearly either Castro, Iran, North Korea or the French. Doesn't matter which. We'll bomb 'em all back to the stone age once we get this here beacon of democracy lit in Baghdad.
One thing to be learned from this. The Chinerse may be great tradesmen, but as investors, they have a lot to learn. Just watch their little eyes pop open when the US walks away from its foreign debt.
Having had some experience dealing with classified information, I couldn't agree with you more. Most of what is classified, shouldn't be. I've seen documents that clearly were classified by applying a if_there_s_a_number_in_it,_it's_Secret rule. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of stupidity. If you have any doubts, read The Pentagon Papers (you won't finish).
In my opinion, a very small percentage of classified data -- crypto codes, some technology information, a small amount of operational data -- really should be classified and should be protected a lot better than it is.
***Considering some present civil and amateur (well, academic) efforts for sending microsatelites to outer space, it is quite possible that soon there will be an amassment of small space equipment.***
Maybe. A bunch of little satellites probably work fine for some things. But, it's not at all clear that current technology can deliver small versions of the platform stabilization, light collection, and adaptive lensing required for high resolution imagery. The KH-11 is said to be about the size of a greyhound bus. Hubble -- built by the same people -- and facing some of the same stabilization and light collection issues isn't that much smaller.
***The other possibility is that it simply doesn't work, but Americans have detected the attempt and now are faking beeing seriously disabilitated in order to let Chinese burn some more cash on a dead end research or induce a false sense of security, to assure surprize when and if it will matter.***
It almost certainly does work. Satellite image sensors probably can't see with a bright light in their eyes any better than you or I can. Polarizing filters or some such might help, but I'd guess not enough to get good imagery. Whether the Chinese, Russians, US or whoever's anti-satellite ground stations can put enough joules onto the sensors to permanently damage them rather than just temporarily blind them is a different issue. I expect they can if they want to since the satellites will be optimised for maximum sensitivity.
*** If I built a spy satellite and orbitted it over the united states I would be a terrorist and bombed in seconds.***
The Russians operated a multitude of surveillance satellites over the US in the 1960s-1980s. They still do I believe. As do the Chinese. As do, I believe, others. Almost all reconisiance sattelites should be able to "spy" on the US should their owners be so inclined.
If anyone cares enough to try to figure out exactly how many surveillence satellites are in orbit, here's a link to the Union Of Concerned Scientists sattelite database
It's not too widely known, but the Russians apparently did something similar to a US IR detecting Early Warning sattelite several decades ago. That one got about a paragraph on page A-26 of a few large newspapers.
The big deal here is that this is yet another message to the folks who want to spend hundreds of billions on satellite weapons. Put 'em up there, and someone will spend a lot less money to disable them when the need arrises.
Space based weapons systems are not "siezing the high ground". They are more like climbing a tree with a sack full of rocks. They have some advantages, but overall against a serious opponent, they are a poor and expensive strategy.
***Don't you yanks have a constitiution for this sort of thing?***
Sure, but so do Cuba, China, and Libya.
Here's a short excerpt from the constitution of the People's Republic of China.
"Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
Article 36. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief..."
Constitutions only work when the people in charge feel constrained by their content
First of all, GUIs came a long way between 1980 and 1995. I expect that by the time of IBM;s Workplace Shell and Microsoft's Explorer, they were about as good as they are going to get. If you don't think there was improvement, install the Windows 3 Program Manager on your PC (I imagine that it will still run) and using it for a couple of days. You won't keep it.
Second, not everyone likes the same features in a GUI. I greatly admire the consistency of the Macintosh user interface. But the interface itself is, for many people, not even remotely easy, natural or intuitive. I don't want to drag things to a trashbox. (You can do that in Windows also incidentally, but I have never seen anyone actually do so). Give me IBM's Common User Architecture anytime. CUA -- which far to few people are aware off -- is the published specification that defines the File-Edit-View-Menu. The CUA interface may not be optimal, but the world would be a much better place if Windows and Linux software designers who approximate it actually read it and adhered to it. If your Windows program doesn't exit when I hit Alt-F-X kindly don't explain to me that I need to train myself to use superior technology. Fix the damn thing..
The principle problem with GUIs other than the lack of discipline displayed by programmers is that they are not very scriptable. Yes, you can stuff keystrokes using the language of your choice. But getting a script to work is an exercise in frustration. Invariably, in any non-trivial script some keystrokes don't produce the same results in a script they do when inserted manually. And many programs are very hard to use from the keyboard. And increasingly, programmers don't make everything keyboard accessible. And God help you if you get an unexpected dialog box.
Anyway, I don't think GUIs are going anywhere other than slightly downhill as people who are pretty much clueless try to improve things that are already about as good as they are going to get. I personally couldn't care less if my icons are transparent, translucent, or rendered in 32 million colors. What I'd like is for them to be comprehensible. Using words rather than giving me a picture that looks vaguely like a grasshopper that has lost an argument with a semi would be nice. Words are English-Centric? Well, A very large percentage of the human race understands Yes, No, Stop and OK, but if we really need to be universal, use Chinese Characters. I'll learn the ones I don't know.
Anyway, there will be other User Interfaces someday. But I think they will be developed independently and will not come about by tinkering with today's GUI. It would be nice if the designers of new UIs made them scriptable, consistent, and comprehensible. But that's probably too much to ask.
***Then, what happens if that huge capacitor you're sitting on gets in a car wreck? As a firefighter, do I have to find a way to discharge it somewhere (safely?) before I can cut you out of this deathtrap?***
You've got it wrong. If the capacitor goes, the car and it's payload will be scattered fairly evenly over several acres. All you firefighters will have to do is put out the burning asphalt pavement and extinguish any secondary blazes. Technology is making your job easier every day.
***As a former broadcaster and a licensed amateur radio operator I know there is a legal route these 'Freedom Fighters' could take if they weren't so busy making martyrs of themselves***
Absolutely. An excellent point. But are you sure that the frequencies are there? There are certainly parts of the country where the FM band is nearly empty, but in areas like the Northeast, even the educational sub-band -- only 20 channels, no? already has a station on every channel. I'm located on the edge of the wilderness about 8 miles out of Burlington, Vermont -- hardly the center of the universe. A quick scan looks like two thirds of the channels in the educational sub-band here are already occupied. In Boston, Chicago, LA and New York where they actually have people an open channel to park your low-power station on is going to be a real rarity.
***If these people want a voice, take it to the internet. Streaming audio and video using the same studio equipment is possible and if the message has validity the word will spread. The technology is mature and anyone with broadband can do it.***
If this is a mature technology, I'd hate to see an immature technology. Can I tune into an Internet Radio Station? Absolutely.
Every time I set up a PC to do that I have to try two or three different programs to find one that works on any given PC. And, of course, there are three or four different formats in use. I have yet to find a program that works with all of them. Will the connection still be there if I come back in two hours? With Verizon DSL it probably won't. And don't forget the 10-20% or so of your fellow citizens in the US who have no access whatsoever to broadband. US broadband to rural users is a national embarassment. If I am to believe the Internet, Canada gets DSL to towns with 100 people 300km from the nearest movie theatre. The US often doesn't deliver broadband to towns with a couple of thousand people, 30 minutes drive from local population centers.
***In general I'm pro patent and copyright but I may be facing a real problem with a new project. How can I be sure I'm not infringing on some one else's patent?***
You can't. Which is why you should rethink your position on patents. At least for software and other intangibles. Personally, I think the patent system is just plain rotten from bowsprint to rudder post and should be scuttled.
Copyright is a different issue. It is largely enforceable. Many people, including me, feel that the duration of copyright is too long but in your context, you know if you are stealing someone's code. Copyright can not be used to protect something that is independently developed even if turns out to have the same expression. Unlike patent, copyright is not a threat to your undertaking.
The major reason that copyright duration is too long is that Disney has a substantial investment in cartoon characters that were created 70 years ago. I actually don't have any problem with Disney's being able to prevent Donald Duck's Tattoo Parlor from being opened up across the street from Disneyworld. Seems reasonable that Disney should control the characters they developed -- in Disney's domain. But I think that rather than extending all copyrights, some sort of special exemption or perhaps an extension to Trademark would be preferable.
***How many of these are based on methods that are centuries old, like Projective Gauss-Siegel? And how many are just plain obvious?***
Who the hell knows? Patents are, by intent, generally written in such a manner as to be pretty much incomprehensible. At a guess, the percentage of software patents that would pass muster amongst knowledgable software people as passing reasonable tests of originality and non-obviousness is in the single digits.
BTW, it isn't just software. An acquaintance recently bent my ear about what he felt were absolutely whacko patents being granted on chemical compounds that the applicants couldn't even make.
Because NT based Windows is an ongoing disaster and Linux isn't ready for prime time yet? Could be other reasons. Inertia and unwillingness to replace an old Pentium or even fast 486 that works acceptably could have something to do with it in some cases.
***What has Citrix solved that X Windows and VNC haven't solved decades earlier?***
Answer: Bandwidth and speed.
Nothing against VNC, but if you have ever tried to run VNC over anything other than a high speed local network, you know that can be annoyingly slow. It's a hell of an improvement over nothing, but with some applications it is pretty much unusable. As for X-Windows... what can one say? Yes it runs fast enough to support desktop Linux over the PC's local loop. That pretty much sums up its merits as far as I can see. If you have ever tried to run Word Perfect for Unix from an X terminal over 10mbps ethernet, you'll understand that X can be a problem rather than a solution in many situations.
Note that even a T-1 line is by no means a high speed connection. Its data rate is -- at best -- less than twice that of an original IBM PC parallel port. And it's not always at its best. In addition latencies over the phone network can be moderately horrendous.
We inadvertantly conducted an experiment with this a couple of years ago. The local school district deployed some software that did a LOT of screen updates. It was virtually unusable over our T1 connection to them. We and they tried almost every alternative known to man. The only one that worked acceptably was Citrix. From the research I did at the time, I think XP remote desktop might have been OK, but we and they had reasons for not deploying XP.
I don't know if the District folks have ever really understood at the level they needed to understand that they did not have a T1 line from us to them. We had a T1 line to the Local Office to Burlington to Boston to our ISP in New Hampshire to Boston to New York to Burlington to the Local Office (same Local Office they went through seven hops ago) to their ISP to them. Bits took a while to move. Neither the application, nor VNC could move enough data fast enough. Citrix apparently moves a lot less data. Or something... anyway... It did the job and VNC didn't.
***a real (I hope) expert watches entries like this and provides good solid data and knuckle draggers are not allowed to correct the "expert" with pop culture bullsh1t***
That's the theory. And who knows, it might work out that way. However, my experience has been that just because an individual is an expert does not mean they are unbiased or have a neutral point of view.
Don't you kind of suspect that an article on Operating System Microkernels vetted by Andrew Tannenbaum might be a great deal different than the same article vetted by Linus Torvalds?. It is true that both those very smart guys will get rid of any garbage inserted by the black helicopter or Only_hanging_out_here_until_the_rapture crowd (Is there anything we can do to expedite the latter's departure BTW?) But they both have some rather strong opinions which do not, as I recall, coincide.
All that is happening is that Larry Sanger -- who knows a lot about the Wikipedia -- is going to set up a new project that addresses some of the problems that he believes affect the Wikipedia. I don't think Larry was ever entirely sold on the anyone can contribute anytime aspect of the Wikipedia. But that didn't stop him from doing a fine job of herding the project off on a course to success. Presumably his new project addresses what he sees as problems with the Wikipedia -- I'd guess he will attack the (perceived) lack of respect for and deference to expert opinion that leads to a (percieved) failure of the Wikipedia to be "authorative" -- whatever the hell that means.
The Wikipedia has been much more successful than anyone anticipated, and I don't think anyone fully understands why. Personally, I think that excluding a few minor and localized problem areas the Wikipedia is pretty damn impressive. Moreover, I think that for the most part its critics are not impressive. At least, they haven't impressed me much. Frankly, most of them seem to be silly people who are pretty much clueless.
Full disclosure, I wrote a number of wikipedia articles -- mostly about Earth Science -- in the early days of the project. I had to stop because some personal things came up that required that I manufacture some spare time somewhere. Frankly, I think that the Wikipedia may be the better for it. Much of what I wrote has been extensively rewritten by others, and with one minor exception, every one of those edits has been an improvement.
Anyway, I'm not sure that Larry's new project will work out. All sorts of things could go wrong. For example, his experts may end up wrangling over "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin" issues. But if he really does achieve some success, I can't see how that can make the world a worse place.
***All I need to do to is get your account number and the banks routing number and I can initial an ACH electronic funds transfer against your account.***
The bank's routing number has to be in the check's MICR line, right? And ones' account number is almost always right next to it on the other side of that funny looking colon, right? So, any check one writes is a gateway to one's account via an ACH transfer? If so, surely that is a security problem. And how can it be the account holder's fault -- When was the last time your bank asked you what to put in the MICR line in your checks?
***Acrobat Reader has a number of other problems, foremost that it's slow and that it fails to comply with Gnome, KDE, and Macintosh desktop UI standards.***
There are Gnome and KDE UI standards? Who knew?
OK, OK, that's snarky. But when you port a program from one OS to another -- Windows to Linux in this case -- there are going to be UI problems. Most Mac programs are human factors disasters when ported to Windows. And heck yes, that includes Excel. Personally, I've always found Excel to be major aggravation because of its non-Windows (and IMHO pointlessly obtuse) clipboard handling.
Note that Firefox (for example) integration with KDE is less than perfect. The clipboard only works with text, not images. And the cursor control is less than exemplary. Why would Acrobat be any better?
Acrobat doesn't run well in Linux? No suprise. Its ponderous and doesn't run all that well in Windows. Personally, I switched to FOXIT on Windows a couple of years ago and use xpdf on Linux. But I'm retired and don't need to read PDFs to do my job. So I don't mind all that much that images are sometimes missing, and other aggravations that might not occur with Acrobat.
***The Diebold machine used for this article came via private hands. There is no independent verification that the software contained in it is the same as the production Diebold machines used in the vote tallies.***
So, you're suggesting that the Princeton Center for whatever might have gotten ahold of a machine that someone had already hacked? Yeah, maybe so. Somehow, that doesn't make me feel better about these things.
Oh... you're suggesting that the flaws identified by the Princeton team may already have been fixed. Possible I suppose, but unless the machine was stolen originally from a back room in the Diebold factory, doesn't that imply that Diebold has, in the past, shipped vulnerable machines? Should that make me feel more secure? Have they been seeking the old vulnerable models out and fixing them?
This may be a case like aircraft safety where really strict, impartial, government monitoring is required to ensure that private industry doesn't screw up. Or we could just go back to paper ballots which are cheap, easy to understand, and auditable.
***IMHO Dijkstra is right and you are wrong. BASIC is a horrible language for learning to code and it is the wrong language to learn to code. It is not designed as a learning language.***
Most of your discussion is a matter of taste and fashion, but one point is I believe just plain wrong. Kemeny and Kurtz most certainly DID design BASIC as a learning language. A few minutes research on the Internet should make that clear. See http://www.columbia.edu/~jrh29/kemeny.html There's no way to know if they would have designed their language the same way a decade or two later. I'd guess probably not, but I doubt Dijkstra would have liked whatever they designed then any better. Kemeny (who has a record every bit as illustrious as Dijkstra's) and Dijkstra worship at different alters in the church of computing.. While I'm not particularly a fan of BASIC, I can't say that I'm overwhelmed by the products of Dijkstra's ideas. There have been innumerable times when I have felt that code readability would be enhanced by a few judiciously placed GOTOs. And frankly, I'd rather deal with a well written 50,000 line FORTRAN program than 3000 short "encapsulated" subprograms in some "modern" language. When a simple task is fragmented into more than 5 entities, I run out of fingers to mark pages.
Harvard's study is perfectly OK. Not only that, but Ghemawat and Casadesus-Masanell say up front that what you are getting is the result of conventional economic modelling and acknowledge that might not be correct. They also say that the results were significantly different than they expected going in -- which is interesting. (at least to me) All they are saying is that if you take their assumptions and build a model, free (as in beer) plus access to source ("demand-side learning") isn't sufficient to drive Microsoft from the marketplace.
Actually, there is, I think. a lot of interesting stuff buried in this study. Too much to assimilate and comment on quickly. For example, they seem to have found that so called "strategic buyers" (governments, large corporations) could drive Microsoft from a segment of the market if they trust OSS code -- which they can look at -- more than Microsoft code that they maybe can't.
There are lots of hidden gems. e.g. Microsoft would benefit from changing its pricing strategies to make older products cheaper over time. I have no idea if that is true, but it sure seems to me that selling MSDOS licenses for $5 would bring in more revenue than telling folks that if they want to use MSDOS 6.22 they will just have to pirate it. Well, sure... if that's really how you feel about it... -- let's see "diskcopy a: b:", right?
And there is an interesting discussion near the end of Microsoft strategies to deal with OSS. e.g. make it hard to run Windows software on the free Unixes, but make it easy to run OSS software on Windows.... etc. Might pay system administrators to look at these closely just to see what Microsoft might do in the future that might have nasty side affects.
Anyway, I think there is at least one basic problem with the study. It assumes that Microsoft is progressing toward some goal and that OSS is forever following. Could be, but the Vista fiasco looks to me like floundering, not progressing. So, one wonders if the model were altered to reflect a shrinking lag between Microsoft and OSS capabilities and also, an increasing fraction of the marketplace where OSS is good enough or better than good enough, if the results wouldn't be different.
Slashdot Mirror
For personal use, Is there something wrong with MSMoney? As far as I can see, it works fine.
For Personal Taxes, you can use either TaxCut or TaxAct instead of TurboTax
Business is tougher, but didn't Microsoft buy out Great Plains a decade or so ago in order to get a competetive low end accounting product? What ever happened to that?
Well, part of that is because you do not seem to understand the legal status of Indians and Indian Reservations. For the most part, the reservations are the result of treaties between the Indians and the US and/or state governments. Although the reservations are within states, they are for the most part not subject to state laws. For example, an Indian living on his reservation is not subject to state income tax from income earned on the reservation. That's not a modern concession to "affirmative action". It's a rather ancient (by American standards) concession to the likelihood that if pushed too far, the Indians would start butchering their neighbors.
One of the things that is under the control of the indians is whether gambling is permited on their reservations.
As to why Indian reservations are mostly way out in the boonies ... y'know, I'm not sure if it's a matter of the illegal immigrants (the Puritans et. al) settled where the Indians weren't or whether the Indians actually once had treaty land in or near what are now big cities, but had them ripped off. Mostly the former I think. In any case, the reservations were way the hell out where they are now many decades before the first Indian Casino opened its doors.
Silicon is to SIicon Dioxide as Hydrogen is to Water.
Frankly, I have a few doubts myself about anything that uses any part of the technology associated with CDR or CDRW. One hopes the technology works a LOT better when it is integrated onto a chip.
I'd also point out that maybe 15% of these magic new technology announcements ever make it into a serious product.
I imagine that just like DSL, one waits for packets from websites from slow servers to slog through the lethargic backbones then race down the final mile and display at speeds not all that much faster than dialup.
For sure it is big. But why do you think that the US can compete there? it's not like we have much manufacturing and what we do have is expensive and not overly high quality compared to our competitors. Services? Same problems, only more so, Agriculture? Forget it. The only reason we are remotely competetive is because of our questionably legal farm subsidies. Weapons systems? There we have a product, but I expect a certain lack of enthusiasm for selling China Nuclear aircraft carriers and stealth fighters.
Not that I expect the US to default without spending at least 72 hours thinking about the consequences -- which will surely be horrendous for the entire world. But if we continue to allow the country to be run by faux coyboys, religious flakes, and right wing dingbats, I'd guess that default might seem less painful, at least to their tiny minds, than the ghastly spectre of paying our IOUs.
Clearly either Castro, Iran, North Korea or the French. Doesn't matter which. We'll bomb 'em all back to the stone age once we get this here beacon of democracy lit in Baghdad.
One thing to be learned from this. The Chinerse may be great tradesmen, but as investors, they have a lot to learn. Just watch their little eyes pop open when the US walks away from its foreign debt.
In my opinion, a very small percentage of classified data -- crypto codes, some technology information, a small amount of operational data -- really should be classified and should be protected a lot better than it is.
Maybe. A bunch of little satellites probably work fine for some things. But, it's not at all clear that current technology can deliver small versions of the platform stabilization, light collection, and adaptive lensing required for high resolution imagery. The KH-11 is said to be about the size of a greyhound bus. Hubble -- built by the same people -- and facing some of the same stabilization and light collection issues isn't that much smaller.
***The other possibility is that it simply doesn't work, but Americans have detected the attempt and now are faking beeing seriously disabilitated in order to let Chinese burn some more cash on a dead end research or induce a false sense of security, to assure surprize when and if it will matter.***
It almost certainly does work. Satellite image sensors probably can't see with a bright light in their eyes any better than you or I can. Polarizing filters or some such might help, but I'd guess not enough to get good imagery. Whether the Chinese, Russians, US or whoever's anti-satellite ground stations can put enough joules onto the sensors to permanently damage them rather than just temporarily blind them is a different issue. I expect they can if they want to since the satellites will be optimised for maximum sensitivity.
The Russians operated a multitude of surveillance satellites over the US in the 1960s-1980s. They still do I believe. As do the Chinese. As do, I believe, others. Almost all reconisiance sattelites should be able to "spy" on the US should their owners be so inclined.
If anyone cares enough to try to figure out exactly how many surveillence satellites are in orbit, here's a link to the Union Of Concerned Scientists sattelite database
The big deal here is that this is yet another message to the folks who want to spend hundreds of billions on satellite weapons. Put 'em up there, and someone will spend a lot less money to disable them when the need arrises.
Space based weapons systems are not "siezing the high ground". They are more like climbing a tree with a sack full of rocks. They have some advantages, but overall against a serious opponent, they are a poor and expensive strategy.
Sure, but so do Cuba, China, and Libya.
Here's a short excerpt from the constitution of the People's Republic of China.
"Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
Article 36. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief..."
Constitutions only work when the people in charge feel constrained by their content
Second, not everyone likes the same features in a GUI. I greatly admire the consistency of the Macintosh user interface. But the interface itself is, for many people, not even remotely easy, natural or intuitive. I don't want to drag things to a trashbox. (You can do that in Windows also incidentally, but I have never seen anyone actually do so). Give me IBM's Common User Architecture anytime. CUA -- which far to few people are aware off -- is the published specification that defines the File-Edit-View-Menu. The CUA interface may not be optimal, but the world would be a much better place if Windows and Linux software designers who approximate it actually read it and adhered to it. If your Windows program doesn't exit when I hit Alt-F-X kindly don't explain to me that I need to train myself to use superior technology. Fix the damn thing..
The principle problem with GUIs other than the lack of discipline displayed by programmers is that they are not very scriptable. Yes, you can stuff keystrokes using the language of your choice. But getting a script to work is an exercise in frustration. Invariably, in any non-trivial script some keystrokes don't produce the same results in a script they do when inserted manually. And many programs are very hard to use from the keyboard. And increasingly, programmers don't make everything keyboard accessible. And God help you if you get an unexpected dialog box.
Anyway, I don't think GUIs are going anywhere other than slightly downhill as people who are pretty much clueless try to improve things that are already about as good as they are going to get. I personally couldn't care less if my icons are transparent, translucent, or rendered in 32 million colors. What I'd like is for them to be comprehensible. Using words rather than giving me a picture that looks vaguely like a grasshopper that has lost an argument with a semi would be nice. Words are English-Centric? Well, A very large percentage of the human race understands Yes, No, Stop and OK, but if we really need to be universal, use Chinese Characters. I'll learn the ones I don't know.
Anyway, there will be other User Interfaces someday. But I think they will be developed independently and will not come about by tinkering with today's GUI. It would be nice if the designers of new UIs made them scriptable, consistent, and comprehensible. But that's probably too much to ask.
You've got it wrong. If the capacitor goes, the car and it's payload will be scattered fairly evenly over several acres. All you firefighters will have to do is put out the burning asphalt pavement and extinguish any secondary blazes. Technology is making your job easier every day.
Absolutely. An excellent point. But are you sure that the frequencies are there? There are certainly parts of the country where the FM band is nearly empty, but in areas like the Northeast, even the educational sub-band -- only 20 channels, no? already has a station on every channel. I'm located on the edge of the wilderness about 8 miles out of Burlington, Vermont -- hardly the center of the universe. A quick scan looks like two thirds of the channels in the educational sub-band here are already occupied. In Boston, Chicago, LA and New York where they actually have people an open channel to park your low-power station on is going to be a real rarity.
***If these people want a voice, take it to the internet. Streaming audio and video using the same studio equipment is possible and if the message has validity the word will spread. The technology is mature and anyone with broadband can do it.***
If this is a mature technology, I'd hate to see an immature technology. Can I tune into an Internet Radio Station? Absolutely.
Every time I set up a PC to do that I have to try two or three different programs to find one that works on any given PC. And, of course, there are three or four different formats in use. I have yet to find a program that works with all of them. Will the connection still be there if I come back in two hours? With Verizon DSL it probably won't. And don't forget the 10-20% or so of your fellow citizens in the US who have no access whatsoever to broadband. US broadband to rural users is a national embarassment. If I am to believe the Internet, Canada gets DSL to towns with 100 people 300km from the nearest movie theatre. The US often doesn't deliver broadband to towns with a couple of thousand people, 30 minutes drive from local population centers.
You can't. Which is why you should rethink your position on patents. At least for software and other intangibles. Personally, I think the patent system is just plain rotten from bowsprint to rudder post and should be scuttled.
Copyright is a different issue. It is largely enforceable. Many people, including me, feel that the duration of copyright is too long but in your context, you know if you are stealing someone's code. Copyright can not be used to protect something that is independently developed even if turns out to have the same expression. Unlike patent, copyright is not a threat to your undertaking.
The major reason that copyright duration is too long is that Disney has a substantial investment in cartoon characters that were created 70 years ago. I actually don't have any problem with Disney's being able to prevent Donald Duck's Tattoo Parlor from being opened up across the street from Disneyworld. Seems reasonable that Disney should control the characters they developed -- in Disney's domain. But I think that rather than extending all copyrights, some sort of special exemption or perhaps an extension to Trademark would be preferable.
Who the hell knows? Patents are, by intent, generally written in such a manner as to be pretty much incomprehensible. At a guess, the percentage of software patents that would pass muster amongst knowledgable software people as passing reasonable tests of originality and non-obviousness is in the single digits.
BTW, it isn't just software. An acquaintance recently bent my ear about what he felt were absolutely whacko patents being granted on chemical compounds that the applicants couldn't even make.
Because NT based Windows is an ongoing disaster and Linux isn't ready for prime time yet? Could be other reasons. Inertia and unwillingness to replace an old Pentium or even fast 486 that works acceptably could have something to do with it in some cases.
Answer: Bandwidth and speed.
Nothing against VNC, but if you have ever tried to run VNC over anything other than a high speed local network, you know that can be annoyingly slow. It's a hell of an improvement over nothing, but with some applications it is pretty much unusable. As for X-Windows ... what can one say? Yes it runs fast enough to support desktop Linux over the PC's local loop. That pretty much sums up its merits as far as I can see. If you have ever tried to run Word Perfect for Unix from an X terminal over 10mbps ethernet, you'll understand that X can be a problem rather than a solution in many situations.
Note that even a T-1 line is by no means a high speed connection. Its data rate is -- at best -- less than twice that of an original IBM PC parallel port. And it's not always at its best. In addition latencies over the phone network can be moderately horrendous.
We inadvertantly conducted an experiment with this a couple of years ago. The local school district deployed some software that did a LOT of screen updates. It was virtually unusable over our T1 connection to them. We and they tried almost every alternative known to man. The only one that worked acceptably was Citrix. From the research I did at the time, I think XP remote desktop might have been OK, but we and they had reasons for not deploying XP.
I don't know if the District folks have ever really understood at the level they needed to understand that they did not have a T1 line from us to them. We had a T1 line to the Local Office to Burlington to Boston to our ISP in New Hampshire to Boston to New York to Burlington to the Local Office (same Local Office they went through seven hops ago) to their ISP to them. Bits took a while to move. Neither the application, nor VNC could move enough data fast enough. Citrix apparently moves a lot less data. Or something ... anyway ... It did the job and VNC didn't.
That's the theory. And who knows, it might work out that way. However, my experience has been that just because an individual is an expert does not mean they are unbiased or have a neutral point of view.
Don't you kind of suspect that an article on Operating System Microkernels vetted by Andrew Tannenbaum might be a great deal different than the same article vetted by Linus Torvalds?. It is true that both those very smart guys will get rid of any garbage inserted by the black helicopter or Only_hanging_out_here_until_the_rapture crowd (Is there anything we can do to expedite the latter's departure BTW?) But they both have some rather strong opinions which do not, as I recall, coincide.
The Wikipedia has been much more successful than anyone anticipated, and I don't think anyone fully understands why. Personally, I think that excluding a few minor and localized problem areas the Wikipedia is pretty damn impressive. Moreover, I think that for the most part its critics are not impressive. At least, they haven't impressed me much. Frankly, most of them seem to be silly people who are pretty much clueless.
Full disclosure, I wrote a number of wikipedia articles -- mostly about Earth Science -- in the early days of the project. I had to stop because some personal things came up that required that I manufacture some spare time somewhere. Frankly, I think that the Wikipedia may be the better for it. Much of what I wrote has been extensively rewritten by others, and with one minor exception, every one of those edits has been an improvement.
Anyway, I'm not sure that Larry's new project will work out. All sorts of things could go wrong. For example, his experts may end up wrangling over "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin" issues. But if he really does achieve some success, I can't see how that can make the world a worse place.
The bank's routing number has to be in the check's MICR line, right? And ones' account number is almost always right next to it on the other side of that funny looking colon, right? So, any check one writes is a gateway to one's account via an ACH transfer? If so, surely that is a security problem. And how can it be the account holder's fault -- When was the last time your bank asked you what to put in the MICR line in your checks?
There are Gnome and KDE UI standards? Who knew?
OK, OK, that's snarky. But when you port a program from one OS to another -- Windows to Linux in this case -- there are going to be UI problems. Most Mac programs are human factors disasters when ported to Windows. And heck yes, that includes Excel. Personally, I've always found Excel to be major aggravation because of its non-Windows (and IMHO pointlessly obtuse) clipboard handling.
Note that Firefox (for example) integration with KDE is less than perfect. The clipboard only works with text, not images. And the cursor control is less than exemplary. Why would Acrobat be any better?
Acrobat doesn't run well in Linux? No suprise. Its ponderous and doesn't run all that well in Windows. Personally, I switched to FOXIT on Windows a couple of years ago and use xpdf on Linux. But I'm retired and don't need to read PDFs to do my job. So I don't mind all that much that images are sometimes missing, and other aggravations that might not occur with Acrobat.
So, you're suggesting that the Princeton Center for whatever might have gotten ahold of a machine that someone had already hacked? Yeah, maybe so. Somehow, that doesn't make me feel better about these things.
Oh ... you're suggesting that the flaws identified by the Princeton team may already have been fixed. Possible I suppose, but unless the machine was stolen originally from a back room in the Diebold factory, doesn't that imply that Diebold has, in the past, shipped vulnerable machines? Should that make me feel more secure? Have they been seeking the old vulnerable models out and fixing them?
This may be a case like aircraft safety where really strict, impartial, government monitoring is required to ensure that private industry doesn't screw up. Or we could just go back to paper ballots which are cheap, easy to understand, and auditable.
Most of your discussion is a matter of taste and fashion, but one point is I believe just plain wrong. Kemeny and Kurtz most certainly DID design BASIC as a learning language. A few minutes research on the Internet should make that clear. See http://www.columbia.edu/~jrh29/kemeny.html There's no way to know if they would have designed their language the same way a decade or two later. I'd guess probably not, but I doubt Dijkstra would have liked whatever they designed then any better. Kemeny (who has a record every bit as illustrious as Dijkstra's) and Dijkstra worship at different alters in the church of computing.. While I'm not particularly a fan of BASIC, I can't say that I'm overwhelmed by the products of Dijkstra's ideas. There have been innumerable times when I have felt that code readability would be enhanced by a few judiciously placed GOTOs. And frankly, I'd rather deal with a well written 50,000 line FORTRAN program than 3000 short "encapsulated" subprograms in some "modern" language. When a simple task is fragmented into more than 5 entities, I run out of fingers to mark pages.
Actually, there is, I think. a lot of interesting stuff buried in this study. Too much to assimilate and comment on quickly. For example, they seem to have found that so called "strategic buyers" (governments, large corporations) could drive Microsoft from a segment of the market if they trust OSS code -- which they can look at -- more than Microsoft code that they maybe can't.
There are lots of hidden gems. e.g. Microsoft would benefit from changing its pricing strategies to make older products cheaper over time. I have no idea if that is true, but it sure seems to me that selling MSDOS licenses for $5 would bring in more revenue than telling folks that if they want to use MSDOS 6.22 they will just have to pirate it. Well, sure ... if that's really how you feel about it ... -- let's see "diskcopy a: b:", right?
And there is an interesting discussion near the end of Microsoft strategies to deal with OSS. e.g. make it hard to run Windows software on the free Unixes, but make it easy to run OSS software on Windows. ... etc. Might pay system administrators to look at these closely just to see what Microsoft might do in the future that might have nasty side affects.
Anyway, I think there is at least one basic problem with the study. It assumes that Microsoft is progressing toward some goal and that OSS is forever following. Could be, but the Vista fiasco looks to me like floundering, not progressing. So, one wonders if the model were altered to reflect a shrinking lag between Microsoft and OSS capabilities and also, an increasing fraction of the marketplace where OSS is good enough or better than good enough, if the results wouldn't be different.