Copyright was a very minor factor in Microsoft's exclusion of effective competition and suppression of any real innovation in software design.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that comparisons to the Holocaust and world wars are in fact quite appropriate when discussing the magnitude of what Microsoft did to the history of computing, and by extension to human history overall.

The reason for this is simple. The effect of the Microsoft monopoly lasted so long and was so stultifying that it meant we will never know what a different word processor might be like. We will never know if spreadsheets or email might be more usable or efficient. We will never know (at least not in our lifetime) what an operating system or software might be like that doesn't use the conventions laid down by a company that had no incentive to make anything better, no need to design anything more than barely adequate, or to listen to its customers. Yet all these things are of fundamental importance to our lives - far, far too important to have suffered under a brutal, money-grubbing monopoly.

Despite (very) small innovations, Apple was not and is not a counter-balance because they were forced to ape the conventions that the Microsoft juggernaut had laid down with it's 95% market share. Jobs knew as well as anyone that it would be suicide to create anything that the market place was not already at least partially familiar with.

In the final analysis, the Microsoft era was a massive failure of free market capitalism that left us all driving Trabants while thinking they were the best that we could have. The blame lies of course with politicians and industry regulators who had no clue what an immense influence personal computing would have on society until it was too late. But it is too late. The die has been cast for personal computing for generations to come, and that is an utter and maddening tragedy for all of us.

The issue is of course far bigger than just one man, but holy mother of god do I hate what Bill Gates did to all of us.

... in the vast majority of cases ... the homeowner does not contact the authorities ...

Bullshit. State laws on the subject vary massively; there's no way to make a blanket statement like that unless you're in confirmation-bias mode.

Nice to see my mum's allotment garden on /. :-)

Use the Slashdot poll for something useful for a once.

Looks like Beta has hidden the comments on the polls. Coincidence?

Joking apart, putting up a list of features to vote on will just be chaotic. Better to put a list of high-level principles up first. For example:

1. Slashdot is about commenting on stories.
2. Slashdot is about finding out about new stuff in tech
3. Slashdot is about creating a community of like-minded people

etc.

Which one of those gets the most votes sets the direction for any re-design. Discreet functions like "mod up" or "quote OP" would just wear everyone down I think.

"My companies websites (Insurance) have an IE share of about 40%."

I concur. W3Schools is completely unrepresentative of a normal web demographic and I never know why people take their reports seriously. I worked for 5 years at a multi-national online travel agent operating in 48 countries. I posted some stats on our browser usage about 18 months ago as part of a similar rant about some loons called StatCounter claiming that Chrome was now the majority browser in the UK. There is no way in hell that IE has declined over 40% since then:

http://webtorque.org/?p=1802

(BTW the differences between China and India on weekends is quite striking though)

"You are confusing features with capabilities. The problem with features is mostly about complexity and interface."

No, you're confusing good UI design with bad UI design. That's a different thing to what I'm talking about because in your example features can be rendered easy or hard to use by the way they are designed into the interface. Put it another way, you can have great features poorly executed, or poor features well executed - and in both cases the outcome is fail. Features are neutral until executed (AKA designed).

Instead, what I'm talking about is the knee-jerk reaction of product managers (as opposed to designers) who immediately start listing "better features" in order to compete with a rival. They don't realise that what they need to do instead is list customer needs, then come up with features from there. That's much harder to do of course. Who cares if I have 1080p video if I don't need to record any video?

 

"detect speed, altitude, temperature, light and position. It has built-in GPS, Bluetooth 4.0 and a microphone. ..."

OK. It'll fail.

When will product managers understand that trying to compete by stuffing features into products does not a better product make? Has the tech design industry learnt *nothing* from the likes of Apple?

When Google's "inferior" product completely crushes them, I bet these idiots will be crying to their mystified managers that they didn't "market" it hard enough.

Muppets.

The article only notes that teenagers are driving much less. Total miles driven has only declined very slightly in the last few years (starting with the recession), and was steadily climbing for decades prior to that.

Here's a chart: http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/DOT-Miles-Driven.php

There are times when transhumanists cause me to wax seriously nostalgic, for that magical bygone era, when society's answer to potentially extinction-inducing abominations, was to build a large, blazing pile of logs, and place the freak of nature in question, exactly at the center of it.

In most cases of course, when Muslims indulge in this type of behaviour, I consider it as barbaric and uncivilised as anyone else, but for some reason I'm willing to make an exception where transhumanism is concerned. There's just something about human/machine integration, and the erosion of privacy and control of our basic biological functions as a result, that causes me to want to reach for a torch and pitchfork.

Yeah, because its realistic for people to be their own code auditors for a whole OS, and for each install and update. It is entirely realistic if you know what you are doing. My default FreeBSD install fits into 65 Mb of RAM. As I have observed before on this site many times; narrow mindedness and aggression have a marked tendency to go together. The more ignorant a person is, the more adamant they usually are about expressing it. Not all of us live according to argumentum ad novitatem.

What 'busy traffic' used to look like: http://blueicehouse.com/n5ssi/i35_riverside_may_1957.jpg

(part of this wonderful collection: http://gmlongroof.4umer.com/t7911-great-old-pics-austin-texas)

More recent photos: http://www.texasfreeway.com/austin/photos/i35/i35.shtml

Basically, our definitions of traffic density have changed.

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." - Yogi Berra.

OK, that doesn't quite fit this situation, but you are only putting one variable into your equation - more roads. There's also:

• - More population. A lot more - the use population has grown something like 25% in the part 30-40 years.
• - More population in suburbs, and other changes to density.
• - And as a consequence of the previous item, more miles driven per capita, especially in some areas. Just because teens aren't driving doesn't mean nobody is.

Another factor - most driving is no longer 'fun' - It's fighting traffic. it's a job.

The only place you don't see traffic these days is car commercials.

I haven't seen anything that lists any Apple funding, although some articles mention Rackspace.

The primary political tension I was referring to was the continual battle between the county government and the city government here. The city has a very large (and pretty good) library system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Public_Library); they could have taken on this site as well. But it was probably easier to go bookless by not being part of the SAPL system (and Nelson Wolff, a county guy, couldn't get any credit if SA did it).