True enough. The link was severed as it was felt that being tied to gold was and impediment to growth. That's quite correct, however the trouble is it was also an impediment to RUNAWAY growth and consequent BUST. I wonder how long it'll be before we're required to surrender up to the government all our gold jewellery and fillings so they start the whole scam-cycle over again.

It's basically based on BS - the problem now is that people start to recognize the smell....

Think about it: You got stocks that are trading for 100's of $$ with a nominal value of 5 $ and at the same time the company (that has a market capitalisation of a couple of billion) makes like 10 cent profit per share.
Of course people buy into those papers because they assume they are going to rise in value not because of the profit a company makes.

If the company needs money for a merger or whatever the have 5$ nominal shares printed at 5 cents a piece and trade them for 100$ - yes something might be wrong twith this picture.

The papers that did cause the shit to hit the fan don't behave fundamentally different -> people sell loans -> trade them above reasonable value -> suckers buy them -> money that never really existed (because there is no collateral)seizes to exist in fantasy world,too.

US dollar isn't supported by gold at least since 1971, (although moving away from gold standard started much earlier, approximately in 1933). It is called "Fiat Currency".
All this is explained here.

Yet they sure have an interest in manipulating the price of gold down.

Yes, the US government was quite recently (some time last year) operating covertly through a proxy (think it was JP Morgan but I can't be sure) to manipulate the price of gold artificially lower in an attempt to forestall inflationary expectations. Judging by the very recent jump in gold prices, however, it appears they may well have since given up!

So jiml8 you are saying that we are on the verge of a Great Depression?

Either way, the day I hear on the news "M$ has finally gone belly up today, the former software giant has been in a heap of trouble for the past few years, with the 3 failed attempts to produce something other than an impotent, DRM-filled, POS OS (put in politically correct terms), its life flashed before its eyes, and the great undead demon fell with a loud "thud". Its carcass then disintegrated, a sign that it was living on borrowed time and should have passed away decades ago." I will open a bottle of champagne.

As for the fate of the staff and devs that M$ fired, it doesn't concern me too much. They are responsible for Vi$ta, now they pay the price. Besides, if they really were good at something, they should be able to get a job at Red Hat, which has been doing quite well.

Amen, brother! <cue Gospel music> Testify.. oh yeah Lord, testify....!

Redhat indeed isn't doing as bad as most other IT companies, but honestly, with ~$20M/quarter in profits the company is microscopic compared to everyone else-- it's an anomaly. And many of the other companies involved in linux/open-source (sun, IBM) are doing terribly.

Right, so it's not managements fault - the Vista OS was completely developed, managed by the coders. They all sat around the table and decided what features to put in, time scales of the development cycle and how they were going to implement it. Understood.

I assume you work or have worked in a large company before, so i would of thought you would of realised that decisions in said companys come from the top in a "do as i say" attitude and not from the bottom. With only (i can recall) Google being different in this case.

And still not understanding the hate for Windows OS's here (yes it's a Linux forum), but i figured the "mines better than yours" attitude was reserved for school children. It's an OS, it's lines of code, it's a free market you can choose what OS you want to use, no one is forcing anyone to use Windows. If your job requires it - find another job.

Amazing that some people here believe that people's and their families lively hoods are less important than some lines of code.

Funny that came up - the market capitalisation of redhat is getting close to sun.It's not microscopic at all in that point.

Of course something is bound to crash there soon if the profits don't get in line.....

Open source bubble burst - cool.

I agree with every word you said stevemassey. A little tip though: some users like H_TeXMeX_H are just trolling. If you search his posts, he is basically searching for anything related to Java, Microsoft and Ubuntu just to start a little "it sucks". No arguments or anything valid comes from him.

I don't particularly have a problem with Windows (in fact, I like it) and you will not believe how many times I've got flamed for saying that. Do yourself a favor and learn one of the most important features in this forum - the ignore list, and start by adding trolls to it right away

Well, some people stay children forever (generally speaking, not directing it at anyone here now...)

Windows has its place, as Linux has too, I don't think anyone will argue that.
If it weren't for MS, we would probably still be some years back regarding computers in every house and for every family.

In one way you could say that even also promoted the use of Open Source.
If the computers weren't wide spread as they are now, there'd be way less
FOSS out there.

In the end they're coders, just like many of us.
I.e. our fate can sooner or later be quite similar to theirs.

Too bad, because it is very easy to understand.
Keeping aside DRM, hardware requirements, and all other stuff that was discussed many times.
Windows is inferior product (if you disagree with that statement this is not my problem), when compared to opensource *nix-like system (like linux). Yet it is widely used. People who use better OS do not understand why windows is being used. Having to deal with windows instead of your favorite OS will make you dislike windows. Because most likely you will have to deal with windows OS frequently, and because you will meet a lot of people that won't understand why you aren't using windows, and because you'll have a lot of troubles with, for example, ISP's that supports only windows, sites that support internet explorer only, devices that have windows-only drivers (because manufacturer decided it this way), and many similarly annoying problems, eventually you will begin to hate windows. It is quite easy to understand.


Most people don't care about people they never met or never heard about.
In short - feeding family of a bad coder is a problem of a bad coder, not mine. If he got fired - that is his problem and probably his fault. That's how life works.

Well, maybe, but I heard M$ is not all that mechanistic ... or as much as they say.

As for people, well an incorrect philosophy can do much more damage than a few laid-off workers. M$ sucks up money like a sponge and almost all of it goes into Gates' and Ballmer's pockets. Yeah, sure, they give to charities ... to lower their taxes, and they tend give computer with Window$ on them. Imagine if all that money were used for better purposes ... with M$ having more money than all of Eastern Europe they could probably end the recession today.