_pi

And most importantly the people who are in the Tea Party also use the Internet. Here's the problem with his concept of nations, look at the UN. Look at congress, they are all abstracts of general political distributions. All of the deadlock, ALL the time. Why? Because there's going to always be a pro-coffee and an anti-coffee nation/interest group/campaign. Sean Tevis can't fix human nature with any amount of money.

Seriously? You're complaining about Wikileaks doing it (debatable) when Bush & Co make this seem like so 2006.

KDE has had very good PIM software for a while now even before KDE4. Kontact has always been a suite for that kind of stuff, and it's possible to do most things in Outlook in Kontact. Also if you're talking about Exchange and groupware servers there are a few for Linux like Zimbra. However I haven't even seen Fortune 500 companies make most of the use of Exchange features.

Also your measure for success is very shallow. Essentially you don't see OSS as competition, which belies your actual position and tells me that there's no point in arguing this with you considering your mind is made up about OSS. As far as I'm concerned all vendor software loses out because it's missing basic features from a IT management standpoint. Also from my experiences millions of business users are too stupid to use Outlook in any shape or form because they lack basic computer proficiency skills.

Inotify was a replacement for dnotify. Which was there since 2.4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnotify

Also comparing the two subsystems is entirely wrong. ReadDirectoryChangesW is still a polling mechanism, inotify and dnotify are kernel level events.

>Amusingly, this just displays your own naivete. The only way to get security if someone has physical access is through cryptography. Pressing cancel on a local login screen is equivalent to booting into single user mode or just using a boot disk and wiping out the local administrator's password.

You're just being an obstinate child here. There's a difference when anyone can defeat your security, and when knowledgeable people can defeat your security. Why do company's take people of the premises when they're fired? Because it's easier for them to lash out, and cause damage. Well it's certainly easier for a passerby to break into your system by pressing cancel. Outside physical threats are always there, especially in the form of delivery men. What's the point of even password protecting something when the UPS guy can come and hit cancel cause he has 95 at home? Not only that but you still need a password for single user mode, and it would take a bit longer for him if he had a boot disk.

>Microsoft Research is the most prolific non-university academic CS research lab in the world. The people that work there are all truly brilliant. (disclosure: I did an internship there this summer)

This isn't about Microsoft Research, this is about Microsoft products. This is a completely irrelevant point. MSR is a fine institution which is a great place for academic papers, they don't generally develop products for Microsoft.

Surely you're joking? Outlook is a crappy email client. Mutt which is older than I am, handles mail better than Outlook does, I hate using Outlook. It means archiving my mail every month (several accounts over several PST files over an a very high mail volume). Ever since it's beginning outlook was the crappiest mail software. You can't figure out what the hell it's doing and it crashes all the damn time without error or with generic/cryptic ones. The only way to fix it is to wipe your settings from the hard drive, and reset registry keys to defaults. And if that doesn't work reinstall office.

Not to mention compiz/beryl had desktop effects before any other operating system. Linux in the kernel level has removed the need for file polling, replacing it with iwatch. Linux has on demand file system and virtual file system mounting. There are hardly any drivers for file systems or virtual file systems on Windows. Dokan is the only place where you can get FUSE or SSH and the software is crappy.

MS to this day hasn't standardized it's own security structure (EX: runas.exe in XP will have the processes pass on administrator rights to all child processes 7 doesn't neither does Vista). And lets face it on the top of it's game Windows default security could have been over-riden by pressing cancel on the logon screen. On anything but a fickle consumer and ease level Windows and to some extent OSX (although the use of a BSD kernel and the growth of MacPorts mitigates this a bit) don't hold a candle to the features found in Linux.

You seem to equate success and innovation with sales and press releases. In this case you probably think that MS is doing something revolutionary by letting Xboxes read usb drives.

Edit: seems actual jump selection can be finicky.

I love it when people say games value thinking out of the box. Yeah! My Zerglings can beat a Yamato Cruiser right? Because they can like jump off of a cliff onto it... or something. Every game has a tiered structure of what works and doesn't SC2 is no different. At competitive levels of play there's only a handful of strategies people use, they'll work them selves out over the next month or so and then be set in stone unless people find glitches in the game that don't get patched like the original SC. SC2 is a game of rock paper scissors at the core. Every strategy game is.

>not only will starcraft 2 reiterate what a big deal video games are, it's going to shape popular culture, it's going to be played by millions of players each and every day for the next decade or so.

You know every other pop music group is listened to by millions of people some for even 3 or 4 decades! Example Led Zeppelin, so how come Led Zeppelin posts aren't on HN? SC2 is entertainment pure and simple, essentially by posting entertainment links it's going against the spirit of the rules. It's essentially cat pictures. And you know those are big on the internet which we're on, and that argument makes as much sense as your "on a computer clause".

Here you go. Took a bit. Also it's risen about 1$ in the last year.

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090327/reddits-ad-experime...

It's common to be allergic to aluminum.

>I think we need to get real. Programming isn't something most people are interested in, it's not glamorous, it's factory work. Lets not delude ourselves that we're at the cutting edge of new discovery.

And:

>Building companies, developing products, increasing revenue are all far more interesting to everyone.

But really, when was the last revolutionary product made? The last revolutionary way to increase revenue that was sustainable in the long run?

I've seen many revolutions in software, distributed version control for instance ie git, LLVM, gaming and visualization software, and hybrid synchronization systems such as unison. In OSS the 'As Seen on TV' type products generally don't see the light of day, they get buried and forgotten, it's only incorporate environments I've seen crappy interfaces using decrepit languages from the 90's, because those programmers have stopped, or never even started caring about programming. If they did they might take the initiative to fix up the program themselves.

As for the factory worker analogy, I think it's dead wrong. It's like saying anyone who ever designed a product is a factory worker. Programmers have to do a lot of design decisions, interop systems etc. Yeah if you're programming in Java, or making corporate program in programing lanaguage du jour you're probably not really innovating, like any part of life programming is self driven, for every Google there's a struggling business and for every git, there's a Java webapp for accessing an Access database.

Also if you think AI is going to obsoltete us in 50 years you're kinda pushing reality there. MS tried to make programming easy and accessible, look at every <LANGUAGE> in 24 hours book. They download MSVS and run through a bunch of wizards, that's about as much control and innovation as you get with a Java webapp that accesses an access database. Not only that but who's going to program all the new features into the the automation AI? When Intel releases a new architecture or something happens there's always gonna be a need for programmers to translate and incorporate data.

Essentially if what you said was true SIGGRAPH wouldn't exist. There's plenty of innovation going on in the software field, and plenty of talent, like every field there's a bunch of idiots, and plenty of talent. If anything you made a great social commentary, people care only about money, the easiest way to get money is working in middle management. Your argument is based on the corporate programmer stereotype.