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Comment Re:This naming trend has to stop (Score 1) 188

Why is it that OSS projects always seem to pick names that are, at best, obscure, and at worst, completely nondescriptive, yet have cutesy sounding names? I think it started somewhere around 2000.

Hardly restricted to OSS, since plenty of proprietary software does the same.
Microsoft Office is also a good example, since "Excel", "PowerPoint" and "Outlook" don't really describe the function at all. Ditto for web browsers, regardless of if they are OSS or proprietary.

Comment Re:Disengenous (Score 1) 306

Why is it bad for efficient suppliers to replace inefficient suppliers? And why bad in the long run but not the short run?

The only thing which tends to make suppliers "efficient" in a "market" is competition.
Or at least the reasonable possibility of competition apearing.

If efficient suppliers replaced inefficient suppliers, but then in the long run inefficient suppliers returned to dominate the market,

It's more the other way around. Without effective competition suppliers who "dominate" a market will tend to become inefficient.
Not only is there the issue of "barrier to entry" there's also that of "ease of switching".
With the related issue of having to use a single supplier for all goods/services of type X. Since in a true "market" the customer is not tied to any supplier in the first place.

Comment Re:Disengenous (Score 1) 306

If by Middlemen you are referring to Editors (who read the book, find grammatical errors, find plot errors, etc etc), typesetters ,Graphics illustrators then they will still be there. Unless of course you dont want book proof read etc which will lower the quality.

There are also, especially when it comes to self published authors like likes of "beta readers". Something quite interesting is that often different people spot different errors. Traditional publishers and editors are also far from foolproof in catching spelling and gramatical errors. Never mind plot and continuity errors.

The author is NOT the right person to do this. Lawyers have a saying "A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client".

The actual reason is that the author know what the text should be. Thus their brain will "error correct".

Comment Re:Amazon is right (Score 1) 306

The other forgotten point in this discussion is that traditional publishing houses "cannabalize" their back catalogs and stop printing older paperbacks when they go out of print in order to promote their newer authors and/or new "bestsellers"

You see similar behaviour with publishers of other media. Another reason is to drive up demand for something which is "out of print".
The most notorious example being the "Disney Vault".
If anything it works the least wel for books because of lending libraries, which are outside of the publishers control.

They drop a book for a while, and then reprint it right when the royalty deals with the author expires, extending the deal and their "ownership" of the copyright. It's pretty shady stuff.

Extending copyright would require changing the work in some way. Which is also possibly easier for the movie and music industries. Where a "director's cut" or "remix" might be easy to create.

Comment Re:No so sure about this (Score 1) 91

I think it's also good to distinguish between "cannot afford a computer" and "does not think a computer is worth the cost". What I mean is, if instead of providing a computer or a voucher that can only be used to buy a computer, charities gave people $200 (enough to buy a Chromebook or Chromebox that's sufficient for all school-related uses), would they go out and buy a PC?

An obvious problem with any kind of "voucher" is that the voucher value is likely to become the minimum price for the whatever.
As is a Chromebook/box is rather tied to "the cloud" and having a network connection. Unless you reformat it back into a general purpose PC.

Comment Re:Two computers is too expensive and cumbersome (Score 1) 184

Most managers wouldn't want people to have two computers on their desk, since hey, they can save 50% on desk top systems by merging them. As long as system admins do their work, nothing could go wrong, right?

The "air gapped" approach may well involve even more system admin work. Since both "secure" and "insecure" networks need to go to the same desks. Even if they have completly different cabling runs and cabinets. Then there's the issue of things like "sneaker net". Even someone plugging cables into the wrong place "accidentally".

Comment Re:Terrorism (Score 1) 868

In a word: no. Terrorism is almost definitionally non-government organizations engaged in violence to effect political change.

Or for that matter to keep the status quo...

When governments do it, we call it various other things based on our own perspective of the situation: war, policing, tyranny, among others.

Definitions of "terrorist" and "government" often have more to do with politics (and if somone supports or opposes a group) rather than what actually happens. There have also been many historical cases of "terrorists" winding up as "politicians" (even "heads of state"). Usually that way around too.

Comment Re:Don't allow missils to be fired... (Score 1) 868

from your territitory and chances are good that you won't get missles fired back at you. Sign a document to that effect and you will most likely have peace.

This would be a difficult condition for even the most well run state with the best equipped and well trained police force to fulfil. Something which certainly dosn't apply to Gaza.

Comment Re:TCO (Score 1) 158

"the world runs windows?" have you ever entered in a real server room? do you know google, facebook, yahoo, rackspace and every other "big player" on internet?

Even if they just ment "on the desktop" Do they mean Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 ? (Not even considering the various sub versions of these.) There might even be some Win95, Win98, WinME, NT4, Windows 2000 still around. Commercial companies can be very reluctant to spend money "fixing" something which isn't "broken".

Comment Re:TCO (Score 1) 158

For maintaining a farm of identical servers, I agree with you completely. For maintaining Grandma's desktop remotely, I agree with you completely. But for maintaining an enterprise desktop environment, Microsoft simply has the best tools for the job. Linux AD-via-Samba quite simply doesn't even come close for the convenience of centralized GP maintenance, and has aothing anywhere near the convenience of drag-and-drop group-based software installation (though Linux does have non-stock application deployment packages available, like Puppet, that partially fill that last point). Linux has nothing even remotely like (W)SUS. And those two alone count as complete showstoppers when it comes to minimizing the number of people required to maintain a large network.

On the other hand Windows dosn't have anything like apt :) or the ability to replace major sections of the system without rebooting.
The whole idea of "deploying" applications is very much a "Windows way of doing things" too. In many cases even Windows applications can run from networked drives.
There's also the Windows profile mechanism, with it's half baked writeback caching, which makes no sense at all in many situations.

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