the SnR on my Qwest DSL line varies enough that i'll go days at a time with line-retrains every 3 minutes due to "crc_error threshhold exceeded". Years ago, I ditched the ISP supplied product ( an ActionTec 1524, which tended to hard-lock every 36 hours, and didn't support basic features like _port forwarding_ properly ) and got a cisco 678 off of ebay. I've called before and the gist is somewhere between "we're not seeing any problems here" and "it must be on the inside of your house".
Yeah - it must be, since the wire coming into my house goes directly into the back of my Cisco 678 and there's nothing else attached at all.
I'd love to axe my ties to the traditional phone co (i've been cable & tv free for a couple years) but short of a low speed long range wireless ISP, I need them because they own the cable in the ground, and really have no incentive to make my internet connectivity reliable. I can't see VoIP ever taking off when some other company owns the rights to their buried lines (and your property), and has no incentive to provide a good product/service.
Thank you for making the most intelligent post so far observed in this discussion.
It's very unappetizing to say or discuss in certain circles, but I beleive people have to agree that there is no "right" to healthcare. Many people are clamoring for the "right" to health care and that the government must provide this right. Some have said that the right to the persuit of happiness is derived from the right to health care, etc.
The issue is that the "right" to health care is not a natural right at all.. the reason being, that in order for you to receive treatment, someone else must provide it. When the government guarantees you healthcare, it in effect is saying it guarantees it will compell someone else to provide it for you.
Rights that grant one man something only via coercion of another are not rights at all.. but are instead tyrrany. The many can always generally agree to enslave the few.
The rights we are given in this country are granted to all humans and require no man or no government to realize them in our own lifetimes. Rather, they are realized best when we have as unobtrustive of a government as possible.
Another aspect of this discussion that people are uncomfortable with is the notion of health care as an economic issue.
Healthcare _is_ an economic issue. Isn't there a dollar amount you wouldn't spend more than to keep a pet alive? What about a family member? Few people will directly say "my wife is only worth 10m to me", but many people, when presented with a loved one who has 1 month to live, will forego a 20 million dollar treatment now which only delays the inevitable by a month or two. Some people will go for it, some won't. In a relatively privatized system, each person gets to decide for themselves how much they're willing to trade money for a quality of life. In a government run system, individuals by and large do NOT have that decision making power.
Insulating people from the true cost of health care is the cheif problem -- it presents the fallacy that they shouldn't have to choose between health and money. Well, we see what happens when distant insurance companies are left to make this decision...people are surprised at how much they have to pay for care they don't necessarily feel satisfied with.
It's surprising that some people assume replacing a distant entity (insurers) with some accountability (you can always get different insurance) with an even more distant entity (government) with ZERO accountability (you only get the chance to get a different government every few hundred years, with lots of bloodshed), is going to be an overall win.
To re-use more things I've read elsewhere... people are ok supporting public housing to help those in need because they don't have to live in the publicly provided houses. Ask people how they feel about providing public health care to the poor when they also begin receiving the same care.
I've heard of a family practice that doesn't accept any insurance payments whatsoever. You pay in cash, up front, for anything you see them for. They bill their patients about 1/3rd the normal going rate, and are extremely popular.
When people know the true cost of what they're buying, and are paying for it in black and white terms, they choose wisely, and the system works more efficiently for everyone.
Crap, we're falling behind Japan in _everything_. There kids have already killed themselves over cyberbullying and the national government is finalizing anti-cyberbullying laws.
I'm surprised at some of the comments as well. For as many "internal lists" as this supposedly went around to, I never saw it:)
All that said, generally if you re-post something MS internal to the outside world, it's poor form. Even if the information isn't that important, sensitive, or interesting, it breaks a pretty black and white corporate and ethical line. There's been a lot of internal censorship and lawyer finger-waves at people on what are supposed to be "internal" lists precisely because stuff has a habit of leaking to the outside world. This stifles internal communication and makes us less effective internally. There are many "taboo" topics internally because so little is truly internal, and we're such an attractive legal target, and because email / IM discovery/retention policies have gotten a lot of attention in court cases.
I think any of the respondants, if they're truly MS emplyoees, are upset that an _internal_ memo was leaked in its entirety with only basic edits to the outside world. We're a company that's trying hard to become more transparent, both officially through MSDN/Channel9 type stuff, and unofficially through stuff like Minimsft, but there still needs to be some discretion.
While the content of this mail doesn't strike me as problematic, the fact that it was leaked when the original author probably had no expectation that it would be, is the issue.
Becase Daycares are aggregately worse for children than staying at home with Mom, Dad, etc.
Over 40% of the total household income of 2 earner families goes towards taxes. Let's shrink government taxation and waste, and then put mom or dad back at home where they can raise a happy child that isn't perpetually sick. It would cut way down on the number of kids being sexually abused, neglected, or whatever the problem of the day with disinterested-party childcare is.
It'd also be nice if hospitals didn't equal healthcare in the public mindset. What about taking a walk once in a while?
Libertarians want the right to economically enslave others. When all resources are privately owned, all non-owners are defacto slaves, and it is this goal that libertarians work towards: the enslavement of the poor, worldwide.
Go re-read "The Wealth Of Nations"
It turns out that paying a free man to do a slaves job is cheaper for the owner and the would-be slave than just owning a slave.
The slave owner doesn't optimally provision the resources needed required for the maintenance of the slaves; the slave, acting in his own best interest, can distribute the stock required for his sustenance considerably more wisely than the slave-owner could
Slavery is only possible when the government permits it. In a libertarian model, "renters" work for "owners" to the mutual benefit of both, and where collusion and monopoly do not exist (and they rarely do apart from government intervention), abuse is essentially impossible (above what some majority of renters are willing to bear).
For every 1 "owner" that says "i'd rather see poor people starve to death", there are 100 that say "i'd rather put poor people to work and get rich". You can count on this basic tenet of economic well being to ensure that a capitalist, libertarian society does not devolve into owners exerting control over non-owners via economic pressure.
This ignores altogether any altruistic or moral difficulty in pseudo-slavery arrangement. It is worth noting that in the history of the US, some of the most effective charitable giving and humanitarian work was established long ago, when there was an aggregately lower standard of living and considerbly less taxation on the populace, and the real-wealth of the giving and middle class population was aggregately lower.
There are a few basic tenets of market economies and human nature that we can agree or disagree on. I'll state a few that I agree with
- all consentual transactions between adults that do not involve force or fraud are inherently just - wealth is not a zero-sum game - laws and a legal system are effectively required to establish and enforce "the rules" of a functional market economy - the division of labor, and the free market, is responsible for the overwhelming majority of progress in the western world, no matter how you choose to define it, since its real inception in the 1600-1700s.
If you disagree with these points, we're obviously not going to come to the same conclusion about what libertarianism is or if it is an effective method of governance.
You seem to enjoy trolling people or at least being as caustic as possible in your remarks. I encourage you to read "The Wealth of Nations" and "Free to Choose" if you haven't already done so to try and better grasp the rationale for libertarian thinking.
If you can point me to any worthwhile reading that makes the argument you're pushing in a more compelling and rational way, I'm curious enough that I'll give it a try.
If you're really a MS employee, you should be working to convince us users not to switch. I'm the one holding the cash and I'm willing to walk. Heh. Heh. Heh
Marketing works to convince people to switch. My interest is in making software as free of irritating defects as possible (and which is why I have plenty of work left at Microsoft;)
My "pro Microsoft" posts here at slashdot revolve around correcting misstakes or clearing up misconceptions people have. It's easy for generally bright people to let their zeal get out infront of their critical thinking skills, and it seems to happen a lot on Microsoft stories.
Theo DeRaadt doesn't try and convince me not to use Windows. I won't try and convince you to use something that isn't right for you. However, if you've got questions or concerns of a falsifiable nature, I can try and help with them.
I'm runnng Vista on 2 work machines and 2 of my home machines. It needs more ram than XP. It's prettier. My Hp 7150 doesn't work with Vista. Getting CCCP setup in Vista media center is easier than it was on XP Media Center.
My 4 year old work laptop sleeps/wakes/hibernates faster and much more reliably than it did under XP.
None of my Vista installs were OEM. The two home machines are stuff i built out of newegg orders.
I'm sure none of my Vista installs count in the "40m sold" figure, since I'm an MS employee.:)
That said, Vista does show up in retail boxes on store shelves at places like Best Buy, and it does sell.
I think it's worth mentioning that during the latest earnings disclosure, part of our increased (beat the street) numbers were due to better than expected vista sales. You can be as cynical as you want, but at some point, stretching the truth too much gets you in trouble with the SEC, and the guys that sit on the golden toilets at wallstreet are at least as good as the average slashdotter at wading through the marketing to pick out the reality.
On one hand, the current legal environment around intellectual property is broken. Everytime you read something by RMS and think "this guy is a crack pot", 6 months later something happens that is uncomfortably moving us toward some of his dystopian predictions (i.e. "Freedom to Read").
OTOH, the key innovation in the liberal western revolution (liberal in the Adam Smith sense of the word) has been the ability, due to lax legal and societal restrictions, of the individual to use their ingenuity to better their condition.
Said differently, absolutely all of the progress of society in the last 300 years comes not from the owners, or from the workers, or such strange Marxist notions, but from the ideas and ability to make good on them.
The progress of humanity western society is based in the ability of the individual to profit from their own intellectual labor - not their lower back strength.
So how does one resolve this apparent conflict? It is man's mind, not his back, which creates wealth, progress, and an easier life. Yet the current implementation of intellectual property laws is broken, causing many to question even the valididty of intellectual property as a concept?
I'm familiar with Jefferson's quote, but i don't think it can credibly used as an argument for dismissing the concept of intellectual property entirely.
So what does a world look like where people are still compensated for the labor of their mind but which has a rational / sane legal framework around that compensation?
Actually, you'd be wrong -- HP dropped support for my printer in Vista (Photosmart 7150), last time I looked.
Once upon a time, you could just shoot bits at the parallel port and printing would work. The HP 7150 "driver software" (which is 200mb, by the way), doesn't ever detect USB device insertion on vista. Why HP feels the need to have some convoluted, assinine way of doing this is beyond me, but they do.
So no, there is no HP print driver stuff on my main vista machine at home. But it's not for want of trying.
I'm a software tester at Microsoft, although I'm not involved with the Windows team or the security process.
Just so we're clear:
Microsoft is not selling you products that have gone through exhaustive QA, nor are we issuing patches that have gone through exhaustive QA.
The key word here is "exhaustive".
You can imagine that as much as it costs a business when they get a hotfix from us that breaks them, it costs us _at least_ that much in real employee hours (dollars), not to mention the direct and indirect, monetary and non-monetary costs of having to admit that we screwed up a patch.
Software testing cannot tell you how good your product is, only in what ways it doesn't appear to be bad. Every release decision is a _decision_, and its based on necessarily incomplete data put together by imperfect humans with non-infinite time.
A release decision is a culmination of many nested risk/reward tradeoffs. Sometimes, that decision gets made incorrectly, or at least gets made in a way with known or even unknown downsides.
You'll notice that the patch was an interaction problem with an antique 3rd party product. From my time doing admin work on Solaris, IRIX, and Linux machines, I can tell you the big difference between this situation and "those" situations. I never _ran_ 3rd party software on Solaris, IRIX, or Linux (well, I ran 3rd party software on linux all the time, but i just expected it to break anytime i patched anything.. it was a mandatory recompile of any dependant libraries and applications).
I also think your glasses are a little rosy. There were some IRIX patches back in the day that you couldn't back out. Or that wrecked your XFS volumes. I think in every operating system there has been at least one instance of a patch / upgrade / new version that some user opted to back out, because it hurt them and their scenarios more than it helped.
I run very little non-Microsoft software on my windows machines and thus I rarely worry about patches from MS. If you're doing something weird, you need to be more risk averse. IIRC, Microsoft's official recommendation for businesses with critical systems is to install patches in a pre-production environment to ensure compatability with the specific intricacies of your business. You can choose to play fast and loose, but you should be aware that you're making a risk/reward tradeoff decision, based on incomplete data.
Uhm, excuse me, pardon me, what? In any economy that has a fixed amount of money and fixed natural resource base with people who live finite lives (limited time) it is most certainly Zero sum game given the constraints of the age
I'm glad you started your response with this qualifer since it lets me completely dismiss your argument out of hand.
Point zero is that the economy doesn't have a fixed supply of money. In a stable economy, the money supply grows at roughly the rate of GDP growth. Monetary supply expansion which outpaces GDP growth leads to currency inflation. Given that the money supply is constnatly increasing, and given that the GDP is constantly changing (at a different rate!), your conditions about fixed money and fixed resources are completely off-base.
Now, on to my real point:
Our economy _doesn't_ have a fixed amount of money and it _doesn't_ have a fixed natural resource base.
The explosive growth of the world economy comes primarily from tapping one resource and one resource only - human ingenuity and aspiration. And that is a resource we have come nowhere even close to exhausting, assuming it is exhaustible at all.
The tremendous progress of freer civilizations in the last 300 years comes from the legal and social freedoms individuals have to try and take best advantage of their own ingenuity.
The notion of fixed natural resources creating wealth is a fallacy. A resource about which some are now concerned of its supply (crude oil) was a nuisance 150 years ago and unknown 200 years ago. What gave oil value? Ingenuity that realized its worth at solving some particular need.
The modern prosperity of the US and the free western world has very little to do with reserves of oil, aluminum, or arable land. Look at the Fortune 100 and consider what natural resources they employ to make their money. Do you think IBM is only great because of how easy it is to grow Corn in the US?
Talking about wealth distribution, displacement, resource control, and so on, is backwards Marxism.
Housing prices are crashing right now just like any other non-controlled price in a market economy does from time to time.
Compare 2 people.
Person A lives in the united states today, but below the poverty line.
Person B is the wealthiest robber baron in the US in the year 1900.
Person A has indoor plumbing, electricity, air conditioning, television, a longer life expectancy, and works fewer hours per week than person B does.
In general, across all segments of society, in the US, people live longer, are healthier, work fewer hours, and have more of their offspring survive than was the case 100 years ago.
The progress of man in the US is real. Pick however you like to measure it - the poorest of today are often relatively better off than the wealthiest of 100 years ago.
Great. Bread will cost 15% less because the baking company and grocery store is spending less on IT.
YES! That is the very defintion of progress. What is that 15% now going to go into? Some Grocers will pass on the savings to you and I (now what are we doing to do with that 15%? Maybe use the money we save as seed money for a small business?) Some grocers will retain all of it as profit.. (but probably not for very long, as the market corrects the price of bread). This profit will invariably be employed doing something else, and odds are, at least one grocer that has an extra 15% margin on bread will view that as a 15% budget surplus in their IT department.
Meanwhile, all of us programmers will have gone from upper-middle-class salaries to scraping by on whatever we can find.
I've forwarded your address to the Buggy Whip Manufacturers Union. I hear that they send the nicest Christmas cards.
Computer Stuff is not some magic darling child of the professional world. We're worth what people are willing to pay us, and not any more. The same factors that make Software/IT a field where you can become a billionare in your garage mean that someone else can come along and steal your billions from their garage.
Do you want freedom or security? There are other fields (like Law) where only Lawyers get to decide who can teach law, who can become a lawyer, and who can remain a lawyer. There's pretty good job security in law, i hear. But there are other downsides.
Average American is *NOT* benefiting from globalism.
I guess you're right - globalism isn't lowering the cost of goods for the lowest sectors of society at all. Somebody should tell Wal-Mart that they can't afford to keep undercutting every other retailer out there, thus delivering huge savings to the poorest sectors of the economy.
saving capital on one type of cost (90s era IT positions) frees up capital to spend it on other types of costs (domestic IT sector positions in 2007).
Wealth is not a zero sum game.
It sucks in the very short term to be a worker who is laid off because someone else can do their job more cheaply, but its better for everyone else in the entire world economy. By and large, those who direct the employment of stock do not simply horde it, as they know that they can get more return by skillfullly investing it.
Humans are not insects. We can specialize when it suits us and we can adapt when it suits us. Do I ever fear losing my job? Sure. Do I have some money saved up to help? Yes. Am I developing contingency employment plans? Yes.
Security and Freedom are often at odds, and employment is no exception.
You are exactly right. Given the relative lack of binary compatability in linux x86, there's no reason to stick with any part of the hardware that is problematic. LinuxBIOS is a great example of how elegant and performant something can be when you curtail some of its compatabiliy requirements.
I'd welcome the sort of hardware one might see if one were to build a dedicated linux workstation.
I'm not talking about ditching the x86 processor (necessarily). Keeping CPUs fast requires real, heavy lifting. But there is a wide variance in the quality of ethernet controllers, for instance, and there's no reason to put up with a low quality one..and these things are afterthoughts for a lot of the big vendors, but very important to me.
I understand the points you're making, but i think one thing you are overlooking can be described the following way:
the things that would make people standardize on an open source hardware platform are the same things that would make them standardize on an open source software / app stack: absolute and complete freedom
Linux generally isn't the technical winner at any particular task, IMO. But anyone is free to make it arbitrarily good or arbitrarily suit their purpose, and the mainstream, non-tinkering linux user gets something pretty good as a result.
Why not the same for hardware?
Linux is a good idea. LinuxBIOS is a good idea. Replacing embedded firmware with linux is often a good idea.
There is a great deal of crazy, one-or-two off projects happening in and around the linux code base, but most people just get -latest or whatever their vendor ships. No one takes something existing and standardizes it by fiat... what's good gains acceptance via inertia and iterative improvement.
I don't see why the situation with open hardware would be different?
What was the point of your message? Do you actually think I don't know about pci cards?
I don't think there is an issue of "cheap" or "not cheap" here.. irrespective of how much or how little you pay for a peice of PC hardware, it will tend to have some fault when used in combination with some other peice of hardware.. or it will have some quirk that makes it irritating for your particular scenario. Want your machine to S3 sleep? Hope all of your expansion cards work properly with S3. The fan on my VGA card doesn't power down in sleep modes.. only in hibernate... so I effectively can't use sleep. Now, if i scour high resolution board photos of any part i buy before buying it, i MIGHT get to learn things like that.. but whenever you do a new machine build there is always some discovery / quirkyness to uncover.. no matter how much time you spend reading reviews of hardware from other people, or how carefully you research components.
One answer to this is "buy a mac", where the whole stack from silicon to software is owned and tested as a cohesive unit. There are some advantages to that model, and I don't see why the same model can't work, or even be better, with a mostly or completely open system.
- gate-level design of a modern CPU - gate-level design of a modern GPU - gate-level design of a modern northbridge - gate-level design of a modern southbridge - gate-level design of a modern audio controller - gate-level design of a modern ethernet controller - gate-level design of a modern wifi chip - gate-level design of a modern usb controller - the linux kernel
my understanding is that there is a lot of really, really badly made hardware out there. the software people are clever enough to reverse engineer the hardware and write drivers. Why not put a few of them to work forward engineering the hardware?
Which peices of a modern computing system cannot run acceptably off of re-flashable firmware, or better yet, re-flashable FPGAs?
At this point, are (some) resources better spent trying to create F/OSS reference designs for every essential component to build a fully open computer platform?
I like the idea of being able to have a 100% open computer, where each of the components is well understood and discussed out in the open, and people aren't wasting a lot of time supporting badly made hardware. Some de-facto standardization around reference open source implementations of the hardware could be a pretty good thing.
It's actually not stuff like the CPU that i care about.. its more like.. all of the other things that make it onto a motherboard. There's no reason to put up with noisy audio, non-functional s/pdif outputs, buggy "hardware" raid, crappy bios, etc. The only value-add in these components is when they manage to live up to their as-advertised specs reliably.
Exactly. A few of us have been saying that municipal wifi is a horrible, horrible idea for a long time.
How many more things like this will have to happen before you are convinced that you DON'T want your neighbors (or worse, some unaccountable entity with no marketplace competitors, with no incentive to provide a valuable service) getting to decide on what you can get internet access to (and wether or not you can opt-out of paying for access that doesn't suit your needs?)
I was never violent. I never picked a fight and I never was picked on. In fact, none of my friends were like that either.
When I have my son, which might be in September, I'm going to teach him that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, and that if inter-personal relations come to blows it represents a personal failure to avoid that conflict.
Maybe your son will turn out like I did.
After being punished every time I got in a fight with someone, even though I was told to not retaliate and tell a teacher when someone was picking on me... i got progressively angrier with the world and could't wait until the day I was old enough to start lifting weights. I modified my school habits, my dress, and my outward demeanor all for the worse, just to try and get people to leave me the hell alone. And one day when someone was messing with me, I had decided that today would be the day that I wasn't going to just take it, and I snapped.
I strangled a guy over a quarter. And it felt _great_. I loved every second of it.
All of the years that people were fucking with me just because they could... because I wasn't allowed to fight back or because I wasn't strong enough to fight back properly... they all came out on this guy that took a quarter from me because he thought he could get away with it. I picked him up out of his chair by his neck, and put him in a wrestling move called "the hang" where you have the guys throat in the small of your elbow, and you hold his knees in your other elbow, and you bend his spine backwards across your own back by pulling your arms forward. The guy was hanging by his throat and his knees and flailing, trying to do anything he could to hit me in the face or escape or whatever. After a few seconds of futility he, gasping for breath, said "you can have your fucking quarter" and threw it down on the ground.
I set him down and thanked him for understanding, and then picked up my quarter and then sat back down at the table in the seat right across from him. The next day things were "normal" again.
It was the best day of my life (up to that point), and a story that scares the shit out of my wife and anyone else I tell it to.
So, if you want your kid to become a mal-adjusted sociopath, put him in public schools, and tell him that anytime he gets in a fight, it's because he's a failure. That's all your kid needs - his dads voice playing in his head, telling him what a failure he is as each fist lands in his face.
It's healthy to tell your kid that fighting is less preferably to diplomacy. But it's also healthy to let them work out differences physically when they're young.. when the body can heal.. and when nobody is packing heat. Kids need to learn how to set boundaries and with boys especially, fighting is part of that.
I say this not to call you out or anything, but I'm not sure you realize.. especially in traditional American schools... its a damn jungle out there, and its a quasi-suppressed version of lord of the flies... playing itself out every day. It's amazing that nobody ever started anything with you because that was certainly not my experience or the experience of my wife, or any of her male friends in highschool.
I hope your son has an easier time than I did. My experience was by no means the worst of the people I've met.
Slashdot Mirror
... as long as there is the last-mile monopoly.
the SnR on my Qwest DSL line varies enough that i'll go days at a time with line-retrains every 3 minutes due to "crc_error threshhold exceeded". Years ago, I ditched the ISP supplied product ( an ActionTec 1524, which tended to hard-lock every 36 hours, and didn't support basic features like _port forwarding_ properly ) and got a cisco 678 off of ebay. I've called before and the gist is somewhere between "we're not seeing any problems here" and "it must be on the inside of your house".
Yeah - it must be, since the wire coming into my house goes directly into the back of my Cisco 678 and there's nothing else attached at all.
I'd love to axe my ties to the traditional phone co (i've been cable & tv free for a couple years) but short of a low speed long range wireless ISP, I need them because they own the cable in the ground, and really have no incentive to make my internet connectivity reliable. I can't see VoIP ever taking off when some other company owns the rights to their buried lines (and your property), and has no incentive to provide a good product/service.
Thank you for making the most intelligent post so far observed in this discussion.
It's very unappetizing to say or discuss in certain circles, but I beleive people have to agree that there is no "right" to healthcare. Many people are clamoring for the "right" to health care and that the government must provide this right. Some have said that the right to the persuit of happiness is derived from the right to health care, etc.
The issue is that the "right" to health care is not a natural right at all.. the reason being, that in order for you to receive treatment, someone else must provide it. When the government guarantees you healthcare, it in effect is saying it guarantees it will compell someone else to provide it for you.
Rights that grant one man something only via coercion of another are not rights at all.. but are instead tyrrany. The many can always generally agree to enslave the few.
The rights we are given in this country are granted to all humans and require no man or no government to realize them in our own lifetimes. Rather, they are realized best when we have as unobtrustive of a government as possible.
Another aspect of this discussion that people are uncomfortable with is the notion of health care as an economic issue.
Healthcare _is_ an economic issue. Isn't there a dollar amount you wouldn't spend more than to keep a pet alive? What about a family member? Few people will directly say "my wife is only worth 10m to me", but many people, when presented with a loved one who has 1 month to live, will forego a 20 million dollar treatment now which only delays the inevitable by a month or two. Some people will go for it, some won't. In a relatively privatized system, each person gets to decide for themselves how much they're willing to trade money for a quality of life. In a government run system, individuals by and large do NOT have that decision making power.
Insulating people from the true cost of health care is the cheif problem -- it presents the fallacy that they shouldn't have to choose between health and money. Well, we see what happens when distant insurance companies are left to make this decision...people are surprised at how much they have to pay for care they don't necessarily feel satisfied with.
It's surprising that some people assume replacing a distant entity (insurers) with some accountability (you can always get different insurance) with an even more distant entity (government) with ZERO accountability (you only get the chance to get a different government every few hundred years, with lots of bloodshed), is going to be an overall win.
To re-use more things I've read elsewhere... people are ok supporting public housing to help those in need because they don't have to live in the publicly provided houses. Ask people how they feel about providing public health care to the poor when they also begin receiving the same care.
I've heard of a family practice that doesn't accept any insurance payments whatsoever. You pay in cash, up front, for anything you see them for. They bill their patients about 1/3rd the normal going rate, and are extremely popular.
When people know the true cost of what they're buying, and are paying for it in black and white terms, they choose wisely, and the system works more efficiently for everyone.
Crap, we're falling behind Japan in _everything_. There kids have already killed themselves over cyberbullying and the national government is finalizing anti-cyberbullying laws.
:/
We just can't compete with the Asian Tigers
I'm surprised at some of the comments as well. For as many "internal lists" as this supposedly went around to, I never saw it :)
All that said, generally if you re-post something MS internal to the outside world, it's poor form. Even if the information isn't that important, sensitive, or interesting, it breaks a pretty black and white corporate and ethical line. There's been a lot of internal censorship and lawyer finger-waves at people on what are supposed to be "internal" lists precisely because stuff has a habit of leaking to the outside world. This stifles internal communication and makes us less effective internally. There are many "taboo" topics internally because so little is truly internal, and we're such an attractive legal target, and because email / IM discovery/retention policies have gotten a lot of attention in court cases.
I think any of the respondants, if they're truly MS emplyoees, are upset that an _internal_ memo was leaked in its entirety with only basic edits to the outside world. We're a company that's trying hard to become more transparent, both officially through MSDN/Channel9 type stuff, and unofficially through stuff like Minimsft, but there still needs to be some discretion.
While the content of this mail doesn't strike me as problematic, the fact that it was leaked when the original author probably had no expectation that it would be, is the issue.
No.
Becase Daycares are aggregately worse for children than staying at home with Mom, Dad, etc.
Over 40% of the total household income of 2 earner families goes towards taxes. Let's shrink government taxation and waste, and then put mom or dad back at home where they can raise a happy child that isn't perpetually sick. It would cut way down on the number of kids being sexually abused, neglected, or whatever the problem of the day with disinterested-party childcare is.
It'd also be nice if hospitals didn't equal healthcare in the public mindset. What about taking a walk once in a while?
Go re-read "The Wealth Of Nations"
It turns out that paying a free man to do a slaves job is cheaper for the owner and the would-be slave than just owning a slave.
The slave owner doesn't optimally provision the resources needed required for the maintenance of the slaves; the slave, acting in his own best interest, can distribute the stock required for his sustenance considerably more wisely than the slave-owner could
Slavery is only possible when the government permits it. In a libertarian model, "renters" work for "owners" to the mutual benefit of both, and where collusion and monopoly do not exist (and they rarely do apart from government intervention), abuse is essentially impossible (above what some majority of renters are willing to bear).
For every 1 "owner" that says "i'd rather see poor people starve to death", there are 100 that say "i'd rather put poor people to work and get rich". You can count on this basic tenet of economic well being to ensure that a capitalist, libertarian society does not devolve into owners exerting control over non-owners via economic pressure.
This ignores altogether any altruistic or moral difficulty in pseudo-slavery arrangement. It is worth noting that in the history of the US, some of the most effective charitable giving and humanitarian work was established long ago, when there was an aggregately lower standard of living and considerbly less taxation on the populace, and the real-wealth of the giving and middle class population was aggregately lower.
There are a few basic tenets of market economies and human nature that we can agree or disagree on. I'll state a few that I agree with
- all consentual transactions between adults that do not involve force or fraud are inherently just
- wealth is not a zero-sum game
- laws and a legal system are effectively required to establish and enforce "the rules" of a functional market economy
- the division of labor, and the free market, is responsible for the overwhelming majority of progress in the western world, no matter how you choose to define it, since its real inception in the 1600-1700s.
If you disagree with these points, we're obviously not going to come to the same conclusion about what libertarianism is or if it is an effective method of governance.
You seem to enjoy trolling people or at least being as caustic as possible in your remarks. I encourage you to read "The Wealth of Nations" and "Free to Choose" if you haven't already done so to try and better grasp the rationale for libertarian thinking.
If you can point me to any worthwhile reading that makes the argument you're pushing in a more compelling and rational way, I'm curious enough that I'll give it a try.
Marketing works to convince people to switch. My interest is in making software as free of irritating defects as possible (and which is why I have plenty of work left at Microsoft
My "pro Microsoft" posts here at slashdot revolve around correcting misstakes or clearing up misconceptions people have. It's easy for generally bright people to let their zeal get out infront of their critical thinking skills, and it seems to happen a lot on Microsoft stories.
Theo DeRaadt doesn't try and convince me not to use Windows. I won't try and convince you to use something that isn't right for you. However, if you've got questions or concerns of a falsifiable nature, I can try and help with them.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
I'm runnng Vista on 2 work machines and 2 of my home machines. It needs more ram than XP. It's prettier. My Hp 7150 doesn't work with Vista. Getting CCCP setup in Vista media center is easier than it was on XP Media Center.
My 4 year old work laptop sleeps/wakes/hibernates faster and much more reliably than it did under XP.
None of my Vista installs were OEM. The two home machines are stuff i built out of newegg orders.
I'm sure none of my Vista installs count in the "40m sold" figure, since I'm an MS employee.:)
That said, Vista does show up in retail boxes on store shelves at places like Best Buy, and it does sell.
I think it's worth mentioning that during the latest earnings disclosure, part of our increased (beat the street) numbers were due to better than expected vista sales. You can be as cynical as you want, but at some point, stretching the truth too much gets you in trouble with the SEC, and the guys that sit on the golden toilets at wallstreet are at least as good as the average slashdotter at wading through the marketing to pick out the reality.
On one hand, the current legal environment around intellectual property is broken. Everytime you read something by RMS and think "this guy is a crack pot", 6 months later something happens that is uncomfortably moving us toward some of his dystopian predictions (i.e. "Freedom to Read").
OTOH, the key innovation in the liberal western revolution (liberal in the Adam Smith sense of the word) has been the ability, due to lax legal and societal restrictions, of the individual to use their ingenuity to better their condition.
Said differently, absolutely all of the progress of society in the last 300 years comes not from the owners, or from the workers, or such strange Marxist notions, but from the ideas and ability to make good on them.
The progress of humanity western society is based in the ability of the individual to profit from their own intellectual labor - not their lower back strength.
So how does one resolve this apparent conflict? It is man's mind, not his back, which creates wealth, progress, and an easier life. Yet the current implementation of intellectual property laws is broken, causing many to question even the valididty of intellectual property as a concept?
I'm familiar with Jefferson's quote, but i don't think it can credibly used as an argument for dismissing the concept of intellectual property entirely.
So what does a world look like where people are still compensated for the labor of their mind but which has a rational / sane legal framework around that compensation?
I don't think it was me. Which boards?
More people discovering what Christopher Alexander discovered, and what thousands of years of humans knew before he re-discovered it.
Pattern #190: Ceiling Height Variety
http://www.ahartman.com/apl/patterns/apl190.htm
Actually, you'd be wrong -- HP dropped support for my printer in Vista (Photosmart 7150), last time I looked.
Once upon a time, you could just shoot bits at the parallel port and printing would work. The HP 7150 "driver software" (which is 200mb, by the way), doesn't ever detect USB device insertion on vista. Why HP feels the need to have some convoluted, assinine way of doing this is beyond me, but they do.
So no, there is no HP print driver stuff on my main vista machine at home. But it's not for want of trying.
I'm a software tester at Microsoft, although I'm not involved with the Windows team or the security process.
Just so we're clear:
Microsoft is not selling you products that have gone through exhaustive QA, nor are we issuing patches that have gone through exhaustive QA.
The key word here is "exhaustive".
You can imagine that as much as it costs a business when they get a hotfix from us that breaks them, it costs us _at least_ that much in real employee hours (dollars), not to mention the direct and indirect, monetary and non-monetary costs of having to admit that we screwed up a patch.
Software testing cannot tell you how good your product is, only in what ways it doesn't appear to be bad. Every release decision is a _decision_, and its based on necessarily incomplete data put together by imperfect humans with non-infinite time.
A release decision is a culmination of many nested risk/reward tradeoffs. Sometimes, that decision gets made incorrectly, or at least gets made in a way with known or even unknown downsides.
You'll notice that the patch was an interaction problem with an antique 3rd party product. From my time doing admin work on Solaris, IRIX, and Linux machines, I can tell you the big difference between this situation and "those" situations. I never _ran_ 3rd party software on Solaris, IRIX, or Linux (well, I ran 3rd party software on linux all the time, but i just expected it to break anytime i patched anything.. it was a mandatory recompile of any dependant libraries and applications).
I also think your glasses are a little rosy. There were some IRIX patches back in the day that you couldn't back out. Or that wrecked your XFS volumes. I think in every operating system there has been at least one instance of a patch / upgrade / new version that some user opted to back out, because it hurt them and their scenarios more than it helped.
I run very little non-Microsoft software on my windows machines and thus I rarely worry about patches from MS. If you're doing something weird, you need to be more risk averse. IIRC, Microsoft's official recommendation for businesses with critical systems is to install patches in a pre-production environment to ensure compatability with the specific intricacies of your business. You can choose to play fast and loose, but you should be aware that you're making a risk/reward tradeoff decision, based on incomplete data.
Just like we have to do.
Oh.
6 1770.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/mattev/archive/2004/06/21/1
You should read this, which I wrote a few years ago, and which upset many mac zealots (as seen from the comments)
I'm glad you started your response with this qualifer since it lets me completely dismiss your argument out of hand.
Point zero is that the economy doesn't have a fixed supply of money. In a stable economy, the money supply grows at roughly the rate of GDP growth. Monetary supply expansion which outpaces GDP growth leads to currency inflation. Given that the money supply is constnatly increasing, and given that the GDP is constantly changing (at a different rate!), your conditions about fixed money and fixed resources are completely off-base.
Now, on to my real point:
Our economy _doesn't_ have a fixed amount of money and it _doesn't_ have a fixed natural resource base.
The explosive growth of the world economy comes primarily from tapping one resource and one resource only - human ingenuity and aspiration. And that is a resource we have come nowhere even close to exhausting, assuming it is exhaustible at all.
The tremendous progress of freer civilizations in the last 300 years comes from the legal and social freedoms individuals have to try and take best advantage of their own ingenuity.
The notion of fixed natural resources creating wealth is a fallacy. A resource about which some are now concerned of its supply (crude oil) was a nuisance 150 years ago and unknown 200 years ago. What gave oil value? Ingenuity that realized its worth at solving some particular need.
The modern prosperity of the US and the free western world has very little to do with reserves of oil, aluminum, or arable land. Look at the Fortune 100 and consider what natural resources they employ to make their money. Do you think IBM is only great because of how easy it is to grow Corn in the US?
Talking about wealth distribution, displacement, resource control, and so on, is backwards Marxism.
Housing prices are crashing right now just like any other non-controlled price in a market economy does from time to time.
Compare 2 people.
Person A lives in the united states today, but below the poverty line.
Person B is the wealthiest robber baron in the US in the year 1900.
Person A has indoor plumbing, electricity, air conditioning, television, a longer life expectancy, and works fewer hours per week than person B does.
In general, across all segments of society, in the US, people live longer, are healthier, work fewer hours, and have more of their offspring survive than was the case 100 years ago.
The progress of man in the US is real. Pick however you like to measure it - the poorest of today are often relatively better off than the wealthiest of 100 years ago.
YES! That is the very defintion of progress. What is that 15% now going to go into? Some Grocers will pass on the savings to you and I (now what are we doing to do with that 15%? Maybe use the money we save as seed money for a small business?) Some grocers will retain all of it as profit.. (but probably not for very long, as the market corrects the price of bread). This profit will invariably be employed doing something else, and odds are, at least one grocer that has an extra 15% margin on bread will view that as a 15% budget surplus in their IT department.
I've forwarded your address to the Buggy Whip Manufacturers Union. I hear that they send the nicest Christmas cards.
Computer Stuff is not some magic darling child of the professional world. We're worth what people are willing to pay us, and not any more. The same factors that make Software/IT a field where you can become a billionare in your garage mean that someone else can come along and steal your billions from their garage.
Do you want freedom or security? There are other fields (like Law) where only Lawyers get to decide who can teach law, who can become a lawyer, and who can remain a lawyer. There's pretty good job security in law, i hear. But there are other downsides.
I guess you're right - globalism isn't lowering the cost of goods for the lowest sectors of society at all. Somebody should tell Wal-Mart that they can't afford to keep undercutting every other retailer out there, thus delivering huge savings to the poorest sectors of the economy.
Do you want to draft the memo, or Should I?
saving capital on one type of cost (90s era IT positions) frees up capital to spend it on other types of costs (domestic IT sector positions in 2007).
Wealth is not a zero sum game.
It sucks in the very short term to be a worker who is laid off because someone else can do their job more cheaply, but its better for everyone else in the entire world economy. By and large, those who direct the employment of stock do not simply horde it, as they know that they can get more return by skillfullly investing it.
Humans are not insects. We can specialize when it suits us and we can adapt when it suits us. Do I ever fear losing my job? Sure. Do I have some money saved up to help? Yes. Am I developing contingency employment plans? Yes.
Security and Freedom are often at odds, and employment is no exception.
You are exactly right. Given the relative lack of binary compatability in linux x86, there's no reason to stick with any part of the hardware that is problematic. LinuxBIOS is a great example of how elegant and performant something can be when you curtail some of its compatabiliy requirements.
I'd welcome the sort of hardware one might see if one were to build a dedicated linux workstation.
I'm not talking about ditching the x86 processor (necessarily). Keeping CPUs fast requires real, heavy lifting. But there is a wide variance in the quality of ethernet controllers, for instance, and there's no reason to put up with a low quality one..and these things are afterthoughts for a lot of the big vendors, but very important to me.
I understand the points you're making, but i think one thing you are overlooking can be described the following way:
the things that would make people standardize on an open source hardware platform are the same things that would make them standardize on an open source software / app stack: absolute and complete freedom
Linux generally isn't the technical winner at any particular task, IMO. But anyone is free to make it arbitrarily good or arbitrarily suit their purpose, and the mainstream, non-tinkering linux user gets something pretty good as a result.
Why not the same for hardware?
Linux is a good idea. LinuxBIOS is a good idea. Replacing embedded firmware with linux is often a good idea.
There is a great deal of crazy, one-or-two off projects happening in and around the linux code base, but most people just get -latest or whatever their vendor ships. No one takes something existing and standardizes it by fiat... what's good gains acceptance via inertia and iterative improvement.
I don't see why the situation with open hardware would be different?
What was the point of your message? Do you actually think I don't know about pci cards?
I don't think there is an issue of "cheap" or "not cheap" here.. irrespective of how much or how little you pay for a peice of PC hardware, it will tend to have some fault when used in combination with some other peice of hardware.. or it will have some quirk that makes it irritating for your particular scenario. Want your machine to S3 sleep? Hope all of your expansion cards work properly with S3. The fan on my VGA card doesn't power down in sleep modes.. only in hibernate... so I effectively can't use sleep. Now, if i scour high resolution board photos of any part i buy before buying it, i MIGHT get to learn things like that.. but whenever you do a new machine build there is always some discovery / quirkyness to uncover.. no matter how much time you spend reading reviews of hardware from other people, or how carefully you research components.
One answer to this is "buy a mac", where the whole stack from silicon to software is owned and tested as a cohesive unit. There are some advantages to that model, and I don't see why the same model can't work, or even be better, with a mostly or completely open system.
Rank the following tasks in order of complexity:
- gate-level design of a modern CPU
- gate-level design of a modern GPU
- gate-level design of a modern northbridge
- gate-level design of a modern southbridge
- gate-level design of a modern audio controller
- gate-level design of a modern ethernet controller
- gate-level design of a modern wifi chip
- gate-level design of a modern usb controller
- the linux kernel
my understanding is that there is a lot of really, really badly made hardware out there. the software people are clever enough to reverse engineer the hardware and write drivers. Why not put a few of them to work forward engineering the hardware?
Which peices of a modern computing system cannot run acceptably off of re-flashable firmware, or better yet, re-flashable FPGAs?
At this point, are (some) resources better spent trying to create F/OSS reference designs for every essential component to build a fully open computer platform?
I like the idea of being able to have a 100% open computer, where each of the components is well understood and discussed out in the open, and people aren't wasting a lot of time supporting badly made hardware. Some de-facto standardization around reference open source implementations of the hardware could be a pretty good thing.
It's actually not stuff like the CPU that i care about.. its more like.. all of the other things that make it onto a motherboard. There's no reason to put up with noisy audio, non-functional s/pdif outputs, buggy "hardware" raid, crappy bios, etc. The only value-add in these components is when they manage to live up to their as-advertised specs reliably.
Exactly. A few of us have been saying that municipal wifi is a horrible, horrible idea for a long time.
How many more things like this will have to happen before you are convinced that you DON'T want your neighbors (or worse, some unaccountable entity with no marketplace competitors, with no incentive to provide a valuable service) getting to decide on what you can get internet access to (and wether or not you can opt-out of paying for access that doesn't suit your needs?)
Maybe your son will turn out like I did.
After being punished every time I got in a fight with someone, even though I was told to not retaliate and tell a teacher when someone was picking on me... i got progressively angrier with the world and could't wait until the day I was old enough to start lifting weights. I modified my school habits, my dress, and my outward demeanor all for the worse, just to try and get people to leave me the hell alone. And one day when someone was messing with me, I had decided that today would be the day that I wasn't going to just take it, and I snapped.
I strangled a guy over a quarter. And it felt _great_. I loved every second of it.
All of the years that people were fucking with me just because they could... because I wasn't allowed to fight back or because I wasn't strong enough to fight back properly... they all came out on this guy that took a quarter from me because he thought he could get away with it. I picked him up out of his chair by his neck, and put him in a wrestling move called "the hang" where you have the guys throat in the small of your elbow, and you hold his knees in your other elbow, and you bend his spine backwards across your own back by pulling your arms forward. The guy was hanging by his throat and his knees and flailing, trying to do anything he could to hit me in the face or escape or whatever. After a few seconds of futility he, gasping for breath, said "you can have your fucking quarter" and threw it down on the ground.
I set him down and thanked him for understanding, and then picked up my quarter and then sat back down at the table in the seat right across from him. The next day things were "normal" again.
It was the best day of my life (up to that point), and a story that scares the shit out of my wife and anyone else I tell it to.
So, if you want your kid to become a mal-adjusted sociopath, put him in public schools, and tell him that anytime he gets in a fight, it's because he's a failure. That's all your kid needs - his dads voice playing in his head, telling him what a failure he is as each fist lands in his face.
It's healthy to tell your kid that fighting is less preferably to diplomacy. But it's also healthy to let them work out differences physically when they're young.. when the body can heal.. and when nobody is packing heat. Kids need to learn how to set boundaries and with boys especially, fighting is part of that.
I say this not to call you out or anything, but I'm not sure you realize.. especially in traditional American schools... its a damn jungle out there, and its a quasi-suppressed version of lord of the flies... playing itself out every day. It's amazing that nobody ever started anything with you because that was certainly not my experience or the experience of my wife, or any of her male friends in highschool.
I hope your son has an easier time than I did. My experience was by no means the worst of the people I've met.