then the school really needs to do a better job convincing them that they are in the wrong major.
For a very long time many students have been choosing careers in medicine for the same reason: that it is financially rewarding.
But, having to get all A's in courses like biochemistry has usually helped to insure that only the most capable students get through the system. Not always, but it does a reasonably effective job of weeding out the less intelligent and the lazy.
Likewise, most university CS courses have one or two weeder classes that require either some intelligence or prodigious homework/lab loads that convince those of lesser fortitude that CS is not Big Bucks Made EZ. I recall CS students having to keep their overall class load down in their junior years just because one of the courses required so much time out of class to do the lab projects.
A university that lets lesser qualified students through the gates is doing them a disservice as employers begin to get the idea that a CS degree from University X doesn't mean much. Sure, in the short term University X collects more tuition from CS students now, but the value of the degrees they're dispensing are depreciating with time.
Something to think about if you're majoring in CS.
What, exactly, did that post have to do with the post it was supposed to be in response to?
Nothing.
Execute headline summary: Pr0n Users Like Firefox.
If you're an IT executive thinking of getting Firefox for your department, this kind of short synopsis is exactly the kind of information you're looking for to help you make a decision:)
Carr makes a good point about overamitious projects that attempt to manufacture a grandiose kitchen sink that are wont to fail due to ever-accreting feature requirements and neglect of how resulting growth of complexity can hamstring a project.
But, too easily does he suggest that using COTS software solutions are the way to go and that businesses can modify their business processes to fit to the software.
All businesses don't make widgets, so trying to fit them into COTS software like a Procrustean bed could ential more pain and suffering than pursuing a middle road, balancing standard COTS components that are interoperable, simple and adaptable with a small amount of customization.
MA needs to insure the specifications are complete as well as free, publicly-avaiable, open, etc.
A few years ago there was a brouhaha about Microsoft Active Directory authentication and MIT's kerberos standard that developed because the latter left a hole in the specification and the former took advantage of the opportunity to "add value" and "extend" the protocol in their product offering.
There actually is a state interest in legislating morality, if you consider "morality" merely to be those guiding principles which help societies function stably and, hopefully, optimally. Random killing and stealing seems non-optimal.
But there are 2 different views of morality.
Moral principles are held very strongly by some people. They are especially important static principles, passed down from religious texts and standing the test of use by society, sometimes over millenia. They are above the realm of consideration for change because they are so important to society's overall well-being. And if you've got a good moral system, then it might be a good idea to hang on to it very strongly and prevent it from changing.
Other people figure that any rule ought to be put on the table and examined carefully for what it does for society, for it's advantages and disadvantages. And the rule be changed if needed. Morality is not static and could be improved upon and, yes, it is possible morality could be changed to something that is harmful, but not immediately recognized as harmful.
Just two different belief systems. Everyone has one.
In some sense, the "flawed" moral systems will selectively eliminate themselves and the "better" ones will create thriving societies. But since there have been numerous systems, they come and go frequently, and they are subject to different interpretations, it suggests to me that some measured pace of change in the moral systems could be appropriate.
Thus, any company trying to compete with the monopoly would have to lower its own prices, reducing its profits,
Two interesting symptoms have developed in the case of Microsoft in the way of differential pricing depending on the buyer's ability to pay. If the market makes it possible to do differential pricing, then it is more profitable for a company to do it. It is possible for Microsoft to use differential pricing and it is doing so.
To a small extent Microsoft does this in the domestic U.S. educational market (where the "get them accustomed to product X now so they'll buy it later" is an added long-term advantage) but moreso overseas where
Implicit tolerance of piracy accomplishes the same goals as educational discounts in the industrialized world by allowing people to become attached to their products before they are willing to pay the going price.
Explicit creation of things like Windows XP Lite for Thailand which are not substantially different than the product sold in the industrialized world, but has some deliberate crippling mechanisms added to turn off full functionality that would cost them less to leave in.
They've had to move towards explicit differential pricing because their usual business model is dependent upon consumers respecting their claims of intellectual property. If potential customers get too accustomted to piracy, they'll balk when the sheriff demands they cough up US$300.
The "one market price for a product" model has been practically exhausted by a company that owns over 90% of the desktop OS market and office productivity suite market, so new ways of increasing sales by extending into new markets, pushing customers into more frequent upgrades or a subscription service model (all 3 much discussed here) and using novel techniques like differential pricing are ways for Microsoft to grow.
And, yes, DRM (TCPA) will give them more fine-grain control over differntial pricing techniques than they have now. Expect the existing unfixed rampant computer security problems to be used to sell DRM to customers.
Re:It's not the business model...
on
Linux, Inc.
·
· Score: 1
...companies wanted to be able to point fingers at someone to say, "You... FIX THIS!"
I remember reading a few years ago about this phenomena in the IT press. They were interviewing an upper level executive in an IT services company. His remarks:
"Customers know what they want. Customers have told us what they want. Customers want one throat to choke."
Incidentally, while it's true that suits don't want to hear how they made horrible decisions, it's possible to present your findings in ways that give them an exit strategy. Instead of just offering a withering assessment of how bad things suck and photo evidence of the boss turning on the vacuum cleaner, you ought to gently suggest ways to improve things.
If you really want to get them on the clue wagon, you'll present alternatives to the present situation. These would be modest looking choices of little risk for making things better that look good and don't cost too much money. Then they get to exercise their decision-making capabilities which they love to do and to claim credit for making such wise choices to other managers.
Something along the lines: authorize you to work one day a week on an evaluation of alternative X and to report on cost/benefit/features/uptime etc. to him in a few months. If you make your presentation humbly, then you can make it "their decision" to do something that was obvious to you a year ago. Should we:
Poke ourselves with a sharp stick in the eye? or...
Drink beer with the Swedish bikini team?
Your choice boss. You command - I will execute.
Plus, like a friend once told me, "Your raise is correlated to how well you make your boss look good." You don't need to suck up or backstab to do it, either, just give them good choices in ways their egos can take.
Wouldn't a "Conservative" interpretation of the law be minimalist?
While a liberal one would be flixible in either way?
Conservative: "Things used to be so much better and are fucked up now. Therefore, we should stop changing things."
Liberal:"Things could be so much better in the future and are so fucked up now. Therefore, we should change things."
Liberals and conservatives agree things are fucked up now; one looks to a rose-colored past for the best solution while the other looks to a rose-colored future for the best solution.
At that point, the ONLY solution would be to completely undo the last vestiges of the New Deal and Great Society. Social Security and Medicaire gone.
You mean like the harsh fiscal reforms that the World Bank and the IMF demands of countries like Argentina and Brazil that allow their debt to reach trigger points in terms of percentage of GDP? If the U.S. were in a similar position, there would be excruciating pressure from the outside to reduce our the largesse of our entitlement programs.
I've often thought that once the slide into the Euro as a reserve currency gains momentum that the U.S. will be in the same pickle.
Unfortunately, global economic collapse is part of the route toward eliminating the dollar's role as a reserve currency. Broke Americans can't buy all the export economy products coming out of east Asia, so they continue to buy T-Bills to keep their currencies cheap.
It's like never changing your car's oil and then complaining that it breaks down too often.
As bad a practice as that is, running a car non-stop without changing the oil until it just stops, for whatever the reason, would be a very interesting durability metric for cars.
Likewise for computers and OS: while no one here in secure 31337/. land would run their machines with the default configurations or without verifying the digital signatures on the install media, the time to 0\/\/n3r5h1p for a fall-of-the-log, quick, default install is still a very interesting security metric for computers.
I know, lies, damn lies, statistics and benchmarks. As long as we all know it's not the only figure of merit for evaluating computer security, it's still useful.
I've used CVS for about a dozen years with pretty good luck for a small community (~20) users on one project.
Things that made life go better: encourage developers to do:
cvs update after their grand upgrade of the source to incorporate other's changes in the interim; this avoids doing messy conflict resolution at commit time
test your new version on all the test problems (it sure better compile at a very minimum)
only then do the cvs commit with concise commit log message
The repository stayed in pretty good shape, even after we manually hacked files in the CVSROOT directory instead of doing what we were supposed to do and checkout and checkin changes to files in that directory.
Occassionally, we'd have problems with users of the "wrong" group id checkin and make it hard for others to check out. That problem might be fixable with a sgid sticky bit on the repository directory. We even limped past the Y2K thing with an old version of CVS that tells people that it's 19105 right now.
Do not branch. We never have but have heard of hair being pulled out when people do that.
If you can build a script system to cvs export -D now a snapshot to do automated build testing and feature testing you and your developers will sleep better at night. Even better if you can do multiple platforms and show the results on an updated web page.
Occassionally it's good to tag a release. A major bump in the release number helps morale, too.
CVS does work, but I'm seriously looking into subversion for my next repository.
I just installed three XP Pro boxes from Dell for a client of mine and am now in the position of having to bill them an hour for spyware removal on their new boxes. What the hell is Dell thinking?
That you'll recommend Windows XP on Dell to your future customers because of the extra business it throws your way after the initial setup?
thanks to the Slashdot effect, they're down again.
Which means people are RTFA, which confuses me to no end, because on/. you're not supposed to RTFA, but obviously people haven't read the highly rated frist post denigrating the article.
Predicting/. readership is like predicting the stock market...you'll always be wrong.
When I was doing my setup, a DVI cable was provided. IIRC, the HDMI cables, gold-plated SuperDuper were something like US$ 120 at my retail outlet. The improvement is noticeable but slight, so you could get by quite well living on the component video cables. If you saw the digital signal, you'd notice it and say it was slight. But if you were introduced to HD on the component video and hadn't been "spoiled" with the digital you'd probaby be quite happy and just pick up a cable when the prices come down in a year.
Some of the decision is proportional - I shelled out close to $7k on a 45in AQUOS so a $120 cable would have been less than the sales tax was on the display.
When Windows users can easily move w/o doing any "scary" OS change and try out open source applications "risk free", they'll be more likely to try.
The last, most significant jump will be made smaller and easier, after new users become comfortable with that suite of applications.
Namely, Linux instead of Windows.
Which is down where an OS should be; a standard commodity, interchangeable, free, stable and not full of Innovations® like HTML renderers, special codec media players.
From my understanding, HDMI was DVI plus digital audio (up to 7.1).
FWIW, I noticed some slight improvement for the 1080i using the DVI connector vs the component video connectors from my Hughes HD receiver (outputs RF/composite/S-video/component/DVI/HDMI) to my Sharp LCD HD display (accepts all those and odd firewire, pc data cards).
My DVD player is older and its highest output quality is component, but since it's only 480p I'm not sure I'm missing too much. I'm accustomed to viewing DVD's under S-video, so component was a step up.
And like another/. poster mentioned about HD's fabulous picture: it's so good that the dogs start watching it when the wildlife shows are on.
you just can't help losing a lot of structure and formatting.
Those two issues seem to be the sticky ones.
Years ago I recall someone referring to a document on Microsoft's web site describing what the elements in an RTF document were: this a paragraph, this tag means that, etc.
But the description was largely structural and left out the critical part of how the document actually was formatted and looked on the screen or on the printer. That formatting or rendering was hidden; it was "whatever Word does on your system" - which could vary slightly from platform and version of Word.
Unless the XML Schemas lock down and completely describe the formatting of a document, then the loss of interoperability by competing applications being unable to "render as Word does" will make them useless.
liberals have an especially hard time understanding this concept. They want the government to give everyone money and support the world,
Not this liberal. Don't believe the caricatures of liberals that the right-wing talk-radio pundits paint.
I believe that Social Security should be a safety net of last resort to prevent old people and truly disabled from starving to death. It should not be any kind of comfortable retirement.
It was designed as a pay as you go system (most people think it was designed like an IRA or 401k - it's not - it was pyramid scheme to begin with). The only trouble was that, politically, old people vote, and they have voted that their benefits increase to where many of them get many many times more dollars out of the system than they ever put into the system by virtue of demographics.
The whole privatization of accounts is stupid IMHO. There already exist 401k and IRA options for tax-deferred retirement savings.
The problem is that the tax revenue from Social Security will decrease relative to expenditures making our deficits look as bad as they really are. Our really deficits are masked because the excess of Social Security contributions buying up treasury bills is not counted the same as if the Asian central bankers buying T-bills. The trust fund in T-bills that social security owns really is fine till 2040. But politically, Congress knows that they'll have to start finding new revenue sources or cutting spending as the excess disappears entirely by 2018.
But if giving the Republicans a nonsensical red-herring private account (like going into fscking Iraq to look for al-Qaeda) and further deficits is the cost for providing true fiscally-prudent measures such as indexing benefit increases to prices instead of wages, then so be it.
Most of these following measures hurt me personally from a financial perspective but need to be done: Social security benefits should be means-tested. Also, there should be no $90K limit on taxable income for social security as there is now. And the retirement age should be raised. All of this is hard medicine that will offend one constituency or another, but are the measures that ought to be taken.
I want a true lasting safety net for Social Security that is fiscally prudent. We owe this much to future taxpayers.
The real problem is Medicare, which all the politicians are conveniently ignoring. And the real problem there is that 90% of an individual's Medicare costs are incurred in the last 6 months of life.
Inheritence taxes should be increased (preventing children of "noble birth" from benefitting unfairly and not having to compete like everyone else. Those inheritence taxes should go into paying end of life expenses from Medicare.
Finally, some fraction, progressively pegged to income, of medical expenses should always be paid by the recipient to encourage cost effective medical care. Also, more information about malpractice insurance costs, costs of added test for preventing malpractices suits, actual rankings of doctors including number of successful cases of malpractice
(vs industry average) should be made available so people can make informed decisions about health care providers.
Slashdot Mirror
then the school really needs to do a better job convincing them that they are in the wrong major.
For a very long time many students have been choosing careers in medicine for the same reason: that it is financially rewarding.
But, having to get all A's in courses like biochemistry has usually helped to insure that only the most capable students get through the system. Not always, but it does a reasonably effective job of weeding out the less intelligent and the lazy.
Likewise, most university CS courses have one or two weeder classes that require either some intelligence or prodigious homework/lab loads that convince those of lesser fortitude that CS is not Big Bucks Made EZ. I recall CS students having to keep their overall class load down in their junior years just because one of the courses required so much time out of class to do the lab projects.
A university that lets lesser qualified students through the gates is doing them a disservice as employers begin to get the idea that a CS degree from University X doesn't mean much. Sure, in the short term University X collects more tuition from CS students now, but the value of the degrees they're dispensing are depreciating with time.
Something to think about if you're majoring in CS.
What, exactly, did that post have to do with the post it was supposed to be in response to?
Nothing.
Execute headline summary: Pr0n Users Like Firefox.
If you're an IT executive thinking of getting Firefox for your department, this kind of short synopsis is exactly the kind of information you're looking for to help you make a decision:)
Carr makes a good point about overamitious projects that attempt to manufacture a grandiose kitchen sink that are wont to fail due to ever-accreting feature requirements and neglect of how resulting growth of complexity can hamstring a project.
But, too easily does he suggest that using COTS software solutions are the way to go and that businesses can modify their business processes to fit to the software.
All businesses don't make widgets, so trying to fit them into COTS software like a Procrustean bed could ential more pain and suffering than pursuing a middle road, balancing standard COTS components that are interoperable, simple and adaptable with a small amount of customization.
MA needs to insure the specifications are complete as well as free, publicly-avaiable, open, etc.
A few years ago there was a brouhaha about Microsoft Active Directory authentication and MIT's kerberos standard that developed because the latter left a hole in the specification and the former took advantage of the opportunity to "add value" and "extend" the protocol in their product offering.
All legislation is morality based!
There actually is a state interest in legislating morality, if you consider "morality" merely to be those guiding principles which help societies function stably and, hopefully, optimally. Random killing and stealing seems non-optimal.
But there are 2 different views of morality.
Moral principles are held very strongly by some people. They are especially important static principles, passed down from religious texts and standing the test of use by society, sometimes over millenia. They are above the realm of consideration for change because they are so important to society's overall well-being. And if you've got a good moral system, then it might be a good idea to hang on to it very strongly and prevent it from changing.
Other people figure that any rule ought to be put on the table and examined carefully for what it does for society, for it's advantages and disadvantages. And the rule be changed if needed. Morality is not static and could be improved upon and, yes, it is possible morality could be changed to something that is harmful, but not immediately recognized as harmful.
Just two different belief systems. Everyone has one.
In some sense, the "flawed" moral systems will selectively eliminate themselves and the "better" ones will create thriving societies. But since there have been numerous systems, they come and go frequently, and they are subject to different interpretations, it suggests to me that some measured pace of change in the moral systems could be appropriate.
Thus, any company trying to compete with the monopoly would have to lower its own prices, reducing its profits,
Two interesting symptoms have developed in the case of Microsoft in the way of differential pricing depending on the buyer's ability to pay. If the market makes it possible to do differential pricing, then it is more profitable for a company to do it. It is possible for Microsoft to use differential pricing and it is doing so.
To a small extent Microsoft does this in the domestic U.S. educational market (where the "get them accustomed to product X now so they'll buy it later" is an added long-term advantage) but moreso overseas where
- Implicit tolerance of piracy accomplishes the same goals as educational discounts in the industrialized world by allowing people to become attached to their products before they are willing to pay the going price.
- Explicit creation of things like Windows XP Lite for Thailand which are not substantially different than the product sold in the industrialized world, but has some deliberate crippling mechanisms added to turn off full functionality that would cost them less to leave in.
They've had to move towards explicit differential pricing because their usual business model is dependent upon consumers respecting their claims of intellectual property. If potential customers get too accustomted to piracy, they'll balk when the sheriff demands they cough up US$300.The "one market price for a product" model has been practically exhausted by a company that owns over 90% of the desktop OS market and office productivity suite market, so new ways of increasing sales by extending into new markets, pushing customers into more frequent upgrades or a subscription service model (all 3 much discussed here) and using novel techniques like differential pricing are ways for Microsoft to grow.
And, yes, DRM (TCPA) will give them more fine-grain control over differntial pricing techniques than they have now. Expect the existing unfixed rampant computer security problems to be used to sell DRM to customers.
I remember reading a few years ago about this phenomena in the IT press. They were interviewing an upper level executive in an IT services company. His remarks:
Incidentally, while it's true that suits don't want to hear how they made horrible decisions, it's possible to present your findings in ways that give them an exit strategy. Instead of just offering a withering assessment of how bad things suck and photo evidence of the boss turning on the vacuum cleaner, you ought to gently suggest ways to improve things.
If you really want to get them on the clue wagon, you'll present alternatives to the present situation. These would be modest looking choices of little risk for making things better that look good and don't cost too much money. Then they get to exercise their decision-making capabilities which they love to do and to claim credit for making such wise choices to other managers.
Something along the lines: authorize you to work one day a week on an evaluation of alternative X and to report on cost/benefit/features/uptime etc. to him in a few months. If you make your presentation humbly, then you can make it "their decision" to do something that was obvious to you a year ago. Should we:
- Poke ourselves with a sharp stick in the eye? or...
- Drink beer with the Swedish bikini team?
Your choice boss. You command - I will execute.Plus, like a friend once told me, "Your raise is correlated to how well you make your boss look good." You don't need to suck up or backstab to do it, either, just give them good choices in ways their egos can take.
What I learned later was that, despite my grades, I really didn't know math all that well.
Good advice I received was
It's easier to adapt to living on more income than you have now than it is to learn to adapt to living on less income than you have now. Always.
So aim low, learn to live lean, to live well within your means.
It's not the American way, it's not what's popularized on TV with VISA cards, but it's the better way and you'll be much happier in the long run.
Go hug a tree - it will "boost your spirits"
It sure will, at least until the chainsaw coming from other side reaches my abdomen.
Wouldn't a "Conservative" interpretation of the law be minimalist?
While a liberal one would be flixible in either way?
Conservative: "Things used to be so much better and are fucked up now. Therefore, we should stop changing things."
Liberal:"Things could be so much better in the future and are so fucked up now. Therefore, we should change things."
Liberals and conservatives agree things are fucked up now; one looks to a rose-colored past for the best solution while the other looks to a rose-colored future for the best solution.
People get the government they deserve in a democracy,
Or, in our free market system, the people get the best government that money can buy.
Which is kind of like getting the best woman that money can buy.
Forcing your project to run in different environments is
- a real PITA.
- a great way to uncover problems in your project before release
Of course, sometimes the problems you uncover aren't in your project, but in the underlying platforms. Ugh....about a programming project you worked on with me and a couple of other senior programmers.
Do this for 15 minutes or so and people ought to be able to figure out if you are the person they need.
At that point, the ONLY solution would be to completely undo the last vestiges of the New Deal and Great Society. Social Security and Medicaire gone.
You mean like the harsh fiscal reforms that the World Bank and the IMF demands of countries like Argentina and Brazil that allow their debt to reach trigger points in terms of percentage of GDP? If the U.S. were in a similar position, there would be excruciating pressure from the outside to reduce our the largesse of our entitlement programs.
I've often thought that once the slide into the Euro as a reserve currency gains momentum that the U.S. will be in the same pickle.
Unfortunately, global economic collapse is part of the route toward eliminating the dollar's role as a reserve currency. Broke Americans can't buy all the export economy products coming out of east Asia, so they continue to buy T-Bills to keep their currencies cheap.
Why have the news at all? Why not just have 24/7 commercials?
Check.
We're way ahead of you on that one, buddy.
Sincerly,
The Media
It's like never changing your car's oil and then complaining that it breaks down too often.
As bad a practice as that is, running a car non-stop without changing the oil until it just stops, for whatever the reason, would be a very interesting durability metric for cars.
Likewise for computers and OS: while no one here in secure 31337 /. land would run their machines with the default configurations or without verifying the digital signatures on the install media, the time to 0\/\/n3r5h1p for a fall-of-the-log, quick, default install is still a very interesting security metric for computers.
I know, lies, damn lies, statistics and benchmarks. As long as we all know it's not the only figure of merit for evaluating computer security, it's still useful.
I've used CVS for about a dozen years with pretty good luck for a small community (~20) users on one project.
Things that made life go better: encourage developers to do:
- cvs update after their grand upgrade of the source to incorporate other's changes in the interim; this avoids doing messy conflict resolution at commit time
- test your new version on all the test problems (it sure better compile at a very minimum)
- only then do the cvs commit with concise commit log message
The repository stayed in pretty good shape, even after we manually hacked files in the CVSROOT directory instead of doing what we were supposed to do and checkout and checkin changes to files in that directory.Occassionally, we'd have problems with users of the "wrong" group id checkin and make it hard for others to check out. That problem might be fixable with a sgid sticky bit on the repository directory. We even limped past the Y2K thing with an old version of CVS that tells people that it's 19105 right now.
Do not branch. We never have but have heard of hair being pulled out when people do that.
If you can build a script system to cvs export -D now a snapshot to do automated build testing and feature testing you and your developers will sleep better at night. Even better if you can do multiple platforms and show the results on an updated web page.
Occassionally it's good to tag a release. A major bump in the release number helps morale, too.
CVS does work, but I'm seriously looking into subversion for my next repository.
I just installed three XP Pro boxes from Dell for a client of mine and am now in the position of having to bill them an hour for spyware removal on their new boxes. What the hell is Dell thinking?
That you'll recommend Windows XP on Dell to your future customers because of the extra business it throws your way after the initial setup?
thanks to the Slashdot effect, they're down again.
Which means people are RTFA, which confuses me to no end, because on /. you're not supposed to RTFA, but obviously people haven't read the highly rated frist post denigrating the article.
Predicting /. readership is like predicting the stock market...you'll always be wrong.
Hard call.
When I was doing my setup, a DVI cable was provided. IIRC, the HDMI cables, gold-plated SuperDuper were something like US$ 120 at my retail outlet. The improvement is noticeable but slight, so you could get by quite well living on the component video cables. If you saw the digital signal, you'd notice it and say it was slight. But if you were introduced to HD on the component video and hadn't been "spoiled" with the digital you'd probaby be quite happy and just pick up a cable when the prices come down in a year.
Some of the decision is proportional - I shelled out close to $7k on a 45in AQUOS so a $120 cable would have been less than the sales tax was on the display.
- Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.
- OpenOffice.org instead of Office
- Evolution instead of Outlook
When Windows users can easily move w/o doing any "scary" OS change and try out open source applications "risk free", they'll be more likely to try.The last, most significant jump will be made smaller and easier, after new users become comfortable with that suite of applications.
Namely, Linux instead of Windows.
Which is down where an OS should be; a standard commodity, interchangeable, free, stable and not full of Innovations® like HTML renderers, special codec media players.
From my understanding, HDMI was DVI plus digital audio (up to 7.1).
FWIW, I noticed some slight improvement for the 1080i using the DVI connector vs the component video connectors from my Hughes HD receiver (outputs RF/composite/S-video/component/DVI/HDMI) to my Sharp LCD HD display (accepts all those and odd firewire, pc data cards).
My DVD player is older and its highest output quality is component, but since it's only 480p I'm not sure I'm missing too much. I'm accustomed to viewing DVD's under S-video, so component was a step up.
And like another /. poster mentioned about HD's fabulous picture: it's so good that the dogs start watching it when the wildlife shows are on.
you just can't help losing a lot of structure and formatting.
Those two issues seem to be the sticky ones.
Years ago I recall someone referring to a document on Microsoft's web site describing what the elements in an RTF document were: this a paragraph, this tag means that, etc.
But the description was largely structural and left out the critical part of how the document actually was formatted and looked on the screen or on the printer. That formatting or rendering was hidden; it was "whatever Word does on your system" - which could vary slightly from platform and version of Word.
Unless the XML Schemas lock down and completely describe the formatting of a document, then the loss of interoperability by competing applications being unable to "render as Word does" will make them useless.
liberals have an especially hard time understanding this concept. They want the government to give everyone money and support the world,
Not this liberal. Don't believe the caricatures of liberals that the right-wing talk-radio pundits paint.
I believe that Social Security should be a safety net of last resort to prevent old people and truly disabled from starving to death. It should not be any kind of comfortable retirement.
It was designed as a pay as you go system (most people think it was designed like an IRA or 401k - it's not - it was pyramid scheme to begin with). The only trouble was that, politically, old people vote, and they have voted that their benefits increase to where many of them get many many times more dollars out of the system than they ever put into the system by virtue of demographics.
The whole privatization of accounts is stupid IMHO. There already exist 401k and IRA options for tax-deferred retirement savings.
The problem is that the tax revenue from Social Security will decrease relative to expenditures making our deficits look as bad as they really are. Our really deficits are masked because the excess of Social Security contributions buying up treasury bills is not counted the same as if the Asian central bankers buying T-bills. The trust fund in T-bills that social security owns really is fine till 2040. But politically, Congress knows that they'll have to start finding new revenue sources or cutting spending as the excess disappears entirely by 2018.
But if giving the Republicans a nonsensical red-herring private account (like going into fscking Iraq to look for al-Qaeda) and further deficits is the cost for providing true fiscally-prudent measures such as indexing benefit increases to prices instead of wages, then so be it.
Most of these following measures hurt me personally from a financial perspective but need to be done: Social security benefits should be means-tested. Also, there should be no $90K limit on taxable income for social security as there is now. And the retirement age should be raised. All of this is hard medicine that will offend one constituency or another, but are the measures that ought to be taken.
I want a true lasting safety net for Social Security that is fiscally prudent. We owe this much to future taxpayers.
The real problem is Medicare, which all the politicians are conveniently ignoring. And the real problem there is that 90% of an individual's Medicare costs are incurred in the last 6 months of life.
Inheritence taxes should be increased (preventing children of "noble birth" from benefitting unfairly and not having to compete like everyone else. Those inheritence taxes should go into paying end of life expenses from Medicare.
Finally, some fraction, progressively pegged to income, of medical expenses should always be paid by the recipient to encourage cost effective medical care. Also, more information about malpractice insurance costs, costs of added test for preventing malpractices suits, actual rankings of doctors including number of successful cases of malpractice (vs industry average) should be made available so people can make informed decisions about health care providers.