For a pandemic, they could simply broadcast over all TV stations, all newspapers, all radios (Emergency Broadcast System) that people traveling on Plane Flight 123 from LNX to WIN or OSX should contact their local authorities to be tested, innoculated, treated.
An identity provision suggests the authorities want the option to be able to more strictly enforce quarantine measures.
its getting a team of CPA's to write and edit the rules.
Amen.
By now, isn't there some XML flavor for describing all of if, and, or, but, less than, greater, exceptcondition_i then add,subtract,multiply,divide that pretty much constitute tax codes?
And, if so, couldn't governments simply distribute versions in XML, just as they often translate tax codes into multiple language versions for segments of the population that speak another language?
It should all reduce down to just a few inputs asking if I raise goats, nurture oil wells, export arms or other factors that may change my tax liabilities in a big way.
Everyone knows that you look up company names and addresses using Google instead of DNS.
In the same way that DNS superseded host tables and host numbers, Google is making DNS into an underlying layer that only machines care about, not people.
It's incredibly important that your staff see that value, understand it, and are willing to put up with the costs (time, hassle, learning) with whatever system you use.
There's nothing more tiresome that getting a notification to attend a meeting where the New Coding Practices will be rammed down your throat for 3 hours. As if the high level decision makers are sufficiently in-touch with life in the trenches to understand the issues, much less dictate the answer of how to do the work.
[Apologies for the ranting]. My suggestion is to get the people in the trenches to meet together and come up with suggestions themselves. They can explain to each other the value of certain practices, the uselessness of Vendor Y's product, etc. In the process of coming up with a set of standard practices, they will buy in to the decision and practice because they have helped to define it (and they are less likely to include things in the definition that are onerous or stupid). Believe me, the worker bees really know what gets in their way and what helps their productivity. They have strong opinions about it and can convince people why certain practices apply or don't apply to your particular line of business.
By assigning your staff to help define, recommend and select the policies and any helper applications, commercial or FOSS, in-house, etc. you'll be in a lot better shape during the actual implementation of those polices.
Shrink-wrapped software for the PC, with nice Windows GUIs, with proprietary file formats, with good support built-in for other proprietary file formats, particularly for geometry.
Open source software with greater cross-platform portability but decidedly less friendly GUI's, much less support for the variety of proprietary file formats.
As one promising application in open source FEA, take a look at Gmsh.
Part of the problem is that there is whole sequence to typical FEA
Geometry creation, editing and repair.
Discretization, meshing.
Analysis.
Visualization.
Traditionally, analysis has been decoupled from geometry, using very simple low order elements to do the calculations. Visualization, likewise, can be done based on millions of linear tetrahedra, hexahedra, or surface patches.
Now, it seems increasingly useful if higher order, global geometric information (eg, NURBS) could be made part of some finite element analyses and passed back and forth more easily through each phase of analysis. I keep hoping that OpenCascade or perhaps something like X3D provides a geometry engine that is open and is useful to FEA.
When you get down to it, much FEA shares a lot with the gaming community in terms of needs for geometry, surface discretization, and visualization.
Perhaps my dream FEA FOSS geometry representation will be realized when someone in the gaming community decides to use FEA to help render more physically realistic scenes rather than faking things that look realistic enough but cheat (and why not?) on the physics with a less computationally expensive algorithm.
But, what I'm getting at, is I don't see a pressing need to have such high bandwidth at home at this time. Sure, this is subject to change in the future, but I do not at all feel as though my bandwidth is inadequate.
You're right. If your needs stay exactly within the capacity that has defined current use.
Me, someday I hope to be able to stream 1080i from a home webserver to watch a show that I missed, monitor the outside webcam for intruders, upload HD videos from my sightseeing in foreign lands, etc.
This announcement is good management practice though.
The public declaration of harsh measures means people won't be so hurt by rejection of their MyLifesBlood patches to the kernel - it's not personal anymore, just policy:)
Much of Linux success can be attributed to Linus ability to balance personalities and technologies. And, believe me, there are some Piece of Work personalities that happen to be tied together in single person packages with rare intellects and feverish workaholicism. Many technical managers are doing great if they can just not too badly piss off the prima donnas responsible for the great ideas and the hard work.
Microsoft has never been successful in an area where they couldn't leverage their desktop monopoly. Since they don't have a monopoly on the net, they'll have difficulty here.
If they adopt strategies similar to previous, MS needn't have much difficulty. (Not counting paying off a few wasted litigants and regulatory authorities in return for dominance in a multibillion dollar market.)
They may not have a monopoly on the net, but they have a monopoly on how most people view the net: Windows and Internet Explorer pre-loaded on the PC.
Imagine a special version of IE "enhanced" with sidebars that show competing advertisements simply by harvesting whatever search keyword is typed into Google. Or show competing advertisements based on a word-frequency count in the content of the user's browsing history. Or have convenient out of the box functionality to have hover-over MSN search results popping up before the user types Enter/Return into Google's text box. Or 541 API calls from every Longhorn-ready application that automagically does MSN search/mail/map. All of could plausibly be called innovation. Part of the OS, in a matter of speaking. You get the idea.
Granted - MS doesn't control network protocols, the web pages that people decide to visit, the content of those web pages, W3C standards, etc.
But, because MS controls the single most influential viewer of the web (IE) and strongly sway how people see the web, they can have a huge influence on the many things that they don't control explicitly.
...but they might not know that they're creating an illegal act," Miller said
If a large number of intelligent people don't have an immediate instinctive reaction to the moral outrage of copying a CD, then there are 2 courses of action we can take
Use stronger measures at an earlier age to reinforce to children the abhorrent nature that is replication of copyrighted material. Making analogies to other recognized Bad acts (such as "piracy") might work; perhaps adding an eleventh commandment might help.
Legislation affecting analog and digital copying could be re-examined and the criminalization removed.
It looks like we're still adopting the first approach.
The problem with prohibitive laws that are not immediately recognizable as sound reasonable restraints on behavior is that the lessen respect for the law in general. I'll replicate a couple of fine sigs I've collected here over the years...
"To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all
law into contempt."
--E.C. Stanton
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
Alternately, if the user can set up a proxy of his own, SSH tunneled outbound, having the ability to use that proxy in Firefox vs. a locked down IE means that he can violate the security policy as well.
Anyone who is capable of doing this is probably much less a risk to the corporate IT assets than the harried manager hooking up a laptop to the network that has been hooked up to 5 hotel WiFi hotspots collecting spyware.
In the case of the knowledgeable user, risk is probably better mitigated if the heavy-handed policy is laid aside and the user politely informed that the company appreciates everything he can do to reduce risk, don't open exploitable inbound tunnels, we can't afford to support your exotic system, etc. Needlessly pissing off knowledgeable people by forcing them to graze with the rest of the sheep for the sake of lower cost herd maintenance doesn't seem necessarily like a good strategy.
Microsoft has made so many mistakes at the past, that they've lost the trust of customers.
Microsoft Revenues Grow 6 Percent, Profit Soars to $3.1 Billion [itjungle.com] Back-to-school sales were good. Server sales are strong. Windows MCE looks to be a big winner.
The mistakes are not in business execution of MS up until this point in time, just in losing the trust of customers.
flipping thru a book and wished I could use the search function,
This is an incredibly powerful technology that will assist researchers in all kinds of fields.
Harking back to the original intent of copyright (for promoting the advance of the sciences and the arts), an electronically-searchable set of books matches those objectives. I'm all for it.
I predict, too, that if Google rolls this out, that visits to the library (have you noticed they're used less and less these days?) and to the bookstore will actually increase as more people find out that certain books exist and have contained in them things that they're interested in reading.
I've always felt that indemnification against inadvertent use of someone else's "Intellectual Property" in free or open source software was a response to what amounted to a FUD campaign to discourage potential users from migrating away from a perfectly functional cash cow.
If I'm right, the price the market will bear for this sort of insurance won't be very high.
OTOH, I could envision a scenario where:
Large enterprises embarking on a larger scale rollouts of FOSS in their environments are spooked into buying insurance after a headline-grabbing suit is filed against other users (eg, Daimler, Autozone).
Other enterprises decide to forgo the insurance and stay within the known discomfort of vendor lock-in costs.
Very small operations, one-man consulting firms, go with FOSS and are so small they fly under the radar.
Small and medium-sized businesses would like the cost-savings, control, and security of FOSS solutions but can't afford the insurance.
The price of this insurance seems like it could fluctuate dramatically, depending on suits being filed.
The initiators of litigation could, of course, come from the ranks of those who stand to lose the most by more widespread adoption of FOSS, or from agents acting on their behalf.
But another possible scenario is for purveyors of such insurance to demonstrate the need for their product or for its premium price. Just speculation; but it represents a potential conflict of interest reminiscent of the computer/network security marketplace.
Microsoft has the right idea: software as a hosted subscription service is an idea that could work. People like to be able to work on their stuff from anywhere, even if they don't have a laptop computer. The One Place for data also helps to eliminate the problem of file version mismatches if more than one copy of a document exists.
But Microsoft is wrong if they think they can charge what they've been charging (if you divide the purchase price by the mean years of service times the number of people using the product to guess the subscription rate.)
Software commoditisation forces want the price to be much lower. Perhaps even as low as putting up with a few Google ad sidebars in the browser you use to edit your OO.o docs sitting on your 10 GB of anywhere accessible Google/home.
Right, because the anonymity of the Internet brings out only the best in people, especially when they have an opinion!
In the face of ruthless power anonymity is often the only means for bringing out criticism of that power, never mind whether the criticism is soundly based or an irrational rant.
You have to put up with some noise to get the signal.
It reminded me of an old cartoon in the early days of the AOL MSN wars where Joe Consumer's latest computer indicated that it "works best with Microsoft House":)
Sigh. I oughtn't post stupid questions without first checking out TFA...
The new device will run a Linux 2.6 kernel, according to Neuros CEO Joe Born.
I/O includes a 12Mbps USB host interface, as well as a USB gadget interface, a non-DMA (PIO only) IDE hard drive interface, CF interface supporting I/O, SD/MMC interface, 10/100 Ethernet, NTSC/PAL composite or S-video input, S-video output, and 10 user buttons.
Do it over USB, infrared, WiFi, Bluetooth, I don't care
How about an Ethernet plug, too? A web interface to tell my Neuros to start downloading various podcasts, schedule future recording of favorite program X on FM station 101.1 from 2:00am - 3:00am tomorrow, etc.
I've held off buying an MP3 player for a long time, waiting for just the right feature set. The Neuros II and III looked pretty good at the time they came out.
FM record and playback feature would be essential; I live far enough out of town where reception gets bad that I'd like to be able to broadcast low power into my car's existing FM receiver when the airwaves have nothing but country music.
RFPs with exacting specification of standards compliance for browsers would be an excellent idea for the same reason that standards compliance for any application, such as word processors, is a good idea.
Practically, though, it would meet resistance since the largest provider of such applications wouldn't meet the specification. There'd be consternation from colleagues, users and management as they wondered how MS got booted out from on a standards clause while, simultaneously, MS is what everyone uses! How can this be?!? As a result, at the end of the day, there would be pressure to relax the specification requiring full and exacting compliance with free, open published standards.
And why not? IT decision makers get evaluated based on costs and benefits that are heavily weighted to here, now and 6 months out. Not 5 years and 10 years out. And that's the cost of not enforcing standards -- 10 years out being locked into a vendor's Solution and being slowly bled through incremental upgrades. It's like agreeing to buy a house mortgage with a pre-payment penalty and an upwardly adjustable interest rate because, well, the paper work is short, the biggest bank in town offers it, it's easier to do than the alternatives, and "everyone else has one".
There's a reassurance associated with being in the same boat with lots of other people.
"These people can't all be wrong. Besides, if a boat this big started to sink Something Would be Done About It."
There are more reasons...
Requirement for standards compliance just don't look sexy: it seems to say that you want to use established technology, yesterday's technology, that you are opposed to Innovation®.
While, in fact, insisting on standards compliance gives you reliability and a path forward towards commoditized applications (exactly what the application vendors don't want) where the price will spiral down fast.
The most successful parasitic organisms don't bleed their victims too fast and kill off their source of livelihood. And, they inject an anasthetic to dull the pain by muttering soothing words that distract, boost your ego, etc.
I left my car door unlocked and the keys in the ignition. After someone stole my car I'm blaming toyota fault for not making a secure vehicle.
You have half a point.
If you carefully examine the security situation when you bought your car, they probably did have the car sitting on the lot with the door unlocked and the keys in the ignition for you after the papers had been signed.
But what most people don't notice is that at the dealer ship they paid close attention to who was on the lot, if one of the salespeople recognized you as an authorized person so you wouldn't be stopped on the way off the lot with your new car by their security guys.
You, too, can leave your car door unlocked with the keys in the ignition iff you take exactly the same security precautions that the dealership takes with their inventory of cars.
But most people don't have time to even notice what's going on with security measures.
Yes, some people will try to externalize their responsibilities of looking after security. But this is symptomatic of a larger problem: awash in a sea of competing information demanding their attention (eg, advertisements, new product literature with legal boilerplate), people can't afford to devote the time and attention to learning how to be secure.
The only solution, AFAICT, is to start out as secure as possible by default (and less functional) and let the user move incrementally towards greater functionality be learning a little bit at a time and relaxing security a little bit at a time.
The Windows OS owes a great deal of its success these days to some element of backward compatibility to earlier versions of Windows, versions which originated in the unconnected, stand-alone, single-user days of personal computing. Starting out from a less secure beginning, it's very difficult for them to move the mass of users towards greater security. New obstacles seem more frustrating where old, familiar obstacles are tolerated.
While Windows security is straining at the seams, the UNIX world continues to wrestle with its own security/convenience issues (eg, ACLs vs the old ugo model) and, if it becomes a widespread success with a lot of users, it will eventually suffer from the weight of whatever security was designed into it at the outset.
Free software is inherently better than proprietary software because...
it is transparent. You forgot to say transparency.
When you look at free software you can see all the way through it and not just some shiny surface. That way you're better able to judge whether the software will serve your needs both now and in the future. Closed-source, proprietary software is buying a pig in a poke.
BTW, transparency is also a really great idea in scientific publishing, accounting (especially in publicly traded companies like Enron) and in government (+FOIA;-a lot of recent action).
the fact that there is competition now will hopefully mean better products, innovation and hopefully an overall better deal for the consumer.
"hopefully" is the operative word.
Competition is a free for all, no-holds-barred event in which better products, technical innovation and lower prices are but a small subset of the weapons available to both Microsoft and Google.
Don't forget, either, that once the event is largely over and a single victor emerges that things can change in the opposite direction on all 3 of the named expectations.
Still, he was a master of BASIC. He developed many BASIC roms for a lot of different machines in the late 70s and early 80s. DOS's BASIC was actually a derivative of much of his early code.
I'm inclined to believe that Bill Gates was a sharp programmer back in the late 1970's and early 1980's from what I've read.
Not to mention that he has a talent for reading legalese (Dad was a lawyer) that typically turns off many programmers. That talent was instrumental in his company's ascendency; people didn't expect a computer nerd to pay attention to contract language and he was able to attack and defend his interests the better due to his opponents underestimating his ability.
But what I (and I suspect many other programmers here) are curious about is to see actual examples of code Bill Gates has written. Someone's code tells a lot about them, in the same way that written language in general is emblematic of the author, his personality, outlook on life, etc.
So, I'd like to see examples of Bill Gates' code, just out of historical curiousity.
Or is it still closed source after a quarter of a century?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
For a pandemic, they could simply broadcast over all TV stations, all newspapers, all radios (Emergency Broadcast System) that people traveling on Plane Flight 123 from LNX to WIN or OSX should contact their local authorities to be tested, innoculated, treated.
An identity provision suggests the authorities want the option to be able to more strictly enforce quarantine measures.
Amen.
By now, isn't there some XML flavor for describing all of if, and, or, but, less than, greater, except condition_i then add,subtract,multiply,divide that pretty much constitute tax codes?
And, if so, couldn't governments simply distribute versions in XML, just as they often translate tax codes into multiple language versions for segments of the population that speak another language?
It should all reduce down to just a few inputs asking if I raise goats, nurture oil wells, export arms or other factors that may change my tax liabilities in a big way.
Everyone knows that you look up company names and addresses using Google instead of DNS.
In the same way that DNS superseded host tables and host numbers, Google is making DNS into an underlying layer that only machines care about, not people.
This all sounds like good advice from someone who understands the value of these practices.
But, if I might, there is a higher level Meta stage that needs attention.
In my experience, there are tons of opinions and and tons of vendors with Solutions © to these kinds of problems. And, yes, there is some value in that advice and in those solutions. That's not enough.
It's incredibly important that your staff see that value, understand it, and are willing to put up with the costs (time, hassle, learning) with whatever system you use.
There's nothing more tiresome that getting a notification to attend a meeting where the New Coding Practices will be rammed down your throat for 3 hours. As if the high level decision makers are sufficiently in-touch with life in the trenches to understand the issues, much less dictate the answer of how to do the work.
[Apologies for the ranting]. My suggestion is to get the people in the trenches to meet together and come up with suggestions themselves. They can explain to each other the value of certain practices, the uselessness of Vendor Y's product, etc. In the process of coming up with a set of standard practices, they will buy in to the decision and practice because they have helped to define it (and they are less likely to include things in the definition that are onerous or stupid). Believe me, the worker bees really know what gets in their way and what helps their productivity. They have strong opinions about it and can convince people why certain practices apply or don't apply to your particular line of business.
By assigning your staff to help define, recommend and select the policies and any helper applications, commercial or FOSS, in-house, etc. you'll be in a lot better shape during the actual implementation of those polices.
You can go one of two ways for FEA.
As one promising application in open source FEA, take a look at Gmsh.
Part of the problem is that there is whole sequence to typical FEA
Traditionally, analysis has been decoupled from geometry, using very simple low order elements to do the calculations. Visualization, likewise, can be done based on millions of linear tetrahedra, hexahedra, or surface patches.
Now, it seems increasingly useful if higher order, global geometric information (eg, NURBS) could be made part of some finite element analyses and passed back and forth more easily through each phase of analysis. I keep hoping that OpenCascade or perhaps something like X3D provides a geometry engine that is open and is useful to FEA.
When you get down to it, much FEA shares a lot with the gaming community in terms of needs for geometry, surface discretization, and visualization.
Perhaps my dream FEA FOSS geometry representation will be realized when someone in the gaming community decides to use FEA to help render more physically realistic scenes rather than faking things that look realistic enough but cheat (and why not?) on the physics with a less computationally expensive algorithm.
You're right. If your needs stay exactly within the capacity that has defined current use.
Me, someday I hope to be able to stream 1080i from a home webserver to watch a show that I missed, monitor the outside webcam for intruders, upload HD videos from my sightseeing in foreign lands, etc.
This announcement is good management practice though.
The public declaration of harsh measures means people won't be so hurt by rejection of their MyLifesBlood patches to the kernel - it's not personal anymore, just policy:)
Much of Linux success can be attributed to Linus ability to balance personalities and technologies. And, believe me, there are some Piece of Work personalities that happen to be tied together in single person packages with rare intellects and feverish workaholicism. Many technical managers are doing great if they can just not too badly piss off the prima donnas responsible for the great ideas and the hard work.
If they adopt strategies similar to previous, MS needn't have much difficulty. (Not counting paying off a few wasted litigants and regulatory authorities in return for dominance in a multibillion dollar market.)
They may not have a monopoly on the net, but they have a monopoly on how most people view the net: Windows and Internet Explorer pre-loaded on the PC.
Imagine a special version of IE "enhanced" with sidebars that show competing advertisements simply by harvesting whatever search keyword is typed into Google. Or show competing advertisements based on a word-frequency count in the content of the user's browsing history. Or have convenient out of the box functionality to have hover-over MSN search results popping up before the user types Enter/Return into Google's text box. Or 541 API calls from every Longhorn-ready application that automagically does MSN search/mail/map. All of could plausibly be called innovation. Part of the OS, in a matter of speaking. You get the idea.
Granted - MS doesn't control network protocols, the web pages that people decide to visit, the content of those web pages, W3C standards, etc.
But, because MS controls the single most influential viewer of the web (IE) and strongly sway how people see the web, they can have a huge influence on the many things that they don't control explicitly.
If a large number of intelligent people don't have an immediate instinctive reaction to the moral outrage of copying a CD, then there are 2 courses of action we can take
- Use stronger measures at an earlier age to reinforce to children the abhorrent nature that is replication of copyrighted material. Making analogies to other recognized Bad acts (such as "piracy") might work; perhaps adding an eleventh commandment might help.
- Legislation affecting analog and digital copying could be re-examined and the criminalization removed.
It looks like we're still adopting the first approach.The problem with prohibitive laws that are not immediately recognizable as sound reasonable restraints on behavior is that the lessen respect for the law in general. I'll replicate a couple of fine sigs I've collected here over the years...
Anyone who is capable of doing this is probably much less a risk to the corporate IT assets than the harried manager hooking up a laptop to the network that has been hooked up to 5 hotel WiFi hotspots collecting spyware.
In the case of the knowledgeable user, risk is probably better mitigated if the heavy-handed policy is laid aside and the user politely informed that the company appreciates everything he can do to reduce risk, don't open exploitable inbound tunnels, we can't afford to support your exotic system, etc. Needlessly pissing off knowledgeable people by forcing them to graze with the rest of the sheep for the sake of lower cost herd maintenance doesn't seem necessarily like a good strategy.
Microsoft Revenues Grow 6 Percent, Profit Soars to $3.1 Billion [itjungle.com] Back-to-school sales were good. Server sales are strong. Windows MCE looks to be a big winner.
The mistakes are not in business execution of MS up until this point in time, just in losing the trust of customers.
It's easy for a near monopoly to earn great profits while people don't like or trust them.
Trained, certified, skilled radiologists make more money than god (at least in the USA).
Which partially explains the popularity of outsourcing to India and the benefits of digitization.
This is an incredibly powerful technology that will assist researchers in all kinds of fields.
Harking back to the original intent of copyright (for promoting the advance of the sciences and the arts), an electronically-searchable set of books matches those objectives. I'm all for it.
I predict, too, that if Google rolls this out, that visits to the library (have you noticed they're used less and less these days?) and to the bookstore will actually increase as more people find out that certain books exist and have contained in them things that they're interested in reading.
Indeed, how much?
I've always felt that indemnification against inadvertent use of someone else's "Intellectual Property" in free or open source software was a response to what amounted to a FUD campaign to discourage potential users from migrating away from a perfectly functional cash cow.
If I'm right, the price the market will bear for this sort of insurance won't be very high.
OTOH, I could envision a scenario where:
- Large enterprises embarking on a larger scale rollouts of FOSS in their environments are spooked into buying insurance after a headline-grabbing suit is filed against other users (eg, Daimler, Autozone).
- Other enterprises decide to forgo the insurance and stay within the known discomfort of vendor lock-in costs.
- Very small operations, one-man consulting firms, go with FOSS and are so small they fly under the radar.
- Small and medium-sized businesses would like the cost-savings, control, and security of FOSS solutions but can't afford the insurance.
The price of this insurance seems like it could fluctuate dramatically, depending on suits being filed.The initiators of litigation could, of course, come from the ranks of those who stand to lose the most by more widespread adoption of FOSS, or from agents acting on their behalf.
But another possible scenario is for purveyors of such insurance to demonstrate the need for their product or for its premium price. Just speculation; but it represents a potential conflict of interest reminiscent of the computer/network security marketplace.
Microsoft has the right idea: software as a hosted subscription service is an idea that could work. People like to be able to work on their stuff from anywhere, even if they don't have a laptop computer. The One Place for data also helps to eliminate the problem of file version mismatches if more than one copy of a document exists.
But Microsoft is wrong if they think they can charge what they've been charging (if you divide the purchase price by the mean years of service times the number of people using the product to guess the subscription rate.)
Software commoditisation forces want the price to be much lower. Perhaps even as low as putting up with a few Google ad sidebars in the browser you use to edit your OO.o docs sitting on your 10 GB of anywhere accessible Google /home.
In the face of ruthless power anonymity is often the only means for bringing out criticism of that power, never mind whether the criticism is soundly based or an irrational rant.
You have to put up with some noise to get the signal.
Sorry for misreading the article.
It reminded me of an old cartoon in the early days of the AOL MSN wars where Joe Consumer's latest computer indicated that it "works best with Microsoft House":)
Sigh. I oughtn't post stupid questions without first checking out TFA...
How about an Ethernet plug, too? A web interface to tell my Neuros to start downloading various podcasts, schedule future recording of favorite program X on FM station 101.1 from 2:00am - 3:00am tomorrow, etc.
I've held off buying an MP3 player for a long time, waiting for just the right feature set. The Neuros II and III looked pretty good at the time they came out.
FM record and playback feature would be essential; I live far enough out of town where reception gets bad that I'd like to be able to broadcast low power into my car's existing FM receiver when the airwaves have nothing but country music.
RFPs with exacting specification of standards compliance for browsers would be an excellent idea for the same reason that standards compliance for any application, such as word processors, is a good idea.
Practically, though, it would meet resistance since the largest provider of such applications wouldn't meet the specification. There'd be consternation from colleagues, users and management as they wondered how MS got booted out from on a standards clause while, simultaneously, MS is what everyone uses! How can this be?!? As a result, at the end of the day, there would be pressure to relax the specification requiring full and exacting compliance with free, open published standards.
And why not? IT decision makers get evaluated based on costs and benefits that are heavily weighted to here, now and 6 months out. Not 5 years and 10 years out. And that's the cost of not enforcing standards -- 10 years out being locked into a vendor's Solution and being slowly bled through incremental upgrades. It's like agreeing to buy a house mortgage with a pre-payment penalty and an upwardly adjustable interest rate because, well, the paper work is short, the biggest bank in town offers it, it's easier to do than the alternatives, and "everyone else has one".
There's a reassurance associated with being in the same boat with lots of other people.
There are more reasons...Requirement for standards compliance just don't look sexy: it seems to say that you want to use established technology, yesterday's technology, that you are opposed to Innovation®.
While, in fact, insisting on standards compliance gives you reliability and a path forward towards commoditized applications (exactly what the application vendors don't want) where the price will spiral down fast.
The most successful parasitic organisms don't bleed their victims too fast and kill off their source of livelihood. And, they inject an anasthetic to dull the pain by muttering soothing words that distract, boost your ego, etc.
You have half a point.
If you carefully examine the security situation when you bought your car, they probably did have the car sitting on the lot with the door unlocked and the keys in the ignition for you after the papers had been signed.
But what most people don't notice is that at the dealer ship they paid close attention to who was on the lot, if one of the salespeople recognized you as an authorized person so you wouldn't be stopped on the way off the lot with your new car by their security guys.
You, too, can leave your car door unlocked with the keys in the ignition iff you take exactly the same security precautions that the dealership takes with their inventory of cars.
But most people don't have time to even notice what's going on with security measures.
Yes, some people will try to externalize their responsibilities of looking after security. But this is symptomatic of a larger problem: awash in a sea of competing information demanding their attention (eg, advertisements, new product literature with legal boilerplate), people can't afford to devote the time and attention to learning how to be secure.
The Windows OS owes a great deal of its success these days to some element of backward compatibility to earlier versions of Windows, versions which originated in the unconnected, stand-alone, single-user days of personal computing. Starting out from a less secure beginning, it's very difficult for them to move the mass of users towards greater security. New obstacles seem more frustrating where old, familiar obstacles are tolerated.
While Windows security is straining at the seams, the UNIX world continues to wrestle with its own security/convenience issues (eg, ACLs vs the old ugo model) and, if it becomes a widespread success with a lot of users, it will eventually suffer from the weight of whatever security was designed into it at the outset.
it is transparent. You forgot to say transparency.
When you look at free software you can see all the way through it and not just some shiny surface. That way you're better able to judge whether the software will serve your needs both now and in the future. Closed-source, proprietary software is buying a pig in a poke.
BTW, transparency is also a really great idea in scientific publishing, accounting (especially in publicly traded companies like Enron) and in government (+FOIA;-a lot of recent action).
I hate to say this, but there is intense competition for the position of least innovative, most reactive corporation on the planet.
"hopefully" is the operative word.
Competition is a free for all, no-holds-barred event in which better products, technical innovation and lower prices are but a small subset of the weapons available to both Microsoft and Google.
Don't forget, either, that once the event is largely over and a single victor emerges that things can change in the opposite direction on all 3 of the named expectations.
Exhibit A: Sole sourced government.
I'm inclined to believe that Bill Gates was a sharp programmer back in the late 1970's and early 1980's from what I've read.
Not to mention that he has a talent for reading legalese (Dad was a lawyer) that typically turns off many programmers. That talent was instrumental in his company's ascendency; people didn't expect a computer nerd to pay attention to contract language and he was able to attack and defend his interests the better due to his opponents underestimating his ability.
But what I (and I suspect many other programmers here) are curious about is to see actual examples of code Bill Gates has written. Someone's code tells a lot about them, in the same way that written language in general is emblematic of the author, his personality, outlook on life, etc.
So, I'd like to see examples of Bill Gates' code, just out of historical curiousity.
Or is it still closed source after a quarter of a century?