And do not whip out that fucking monotonous response "Apple is not a convicted monopolist" because they fucking should be, and we're all (except the Apple fanbois) sick of hearing it
Except, um, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on computers or operating systems. In fact, last I checked, despite good growth in those segments, they're still trailing, and by a lot. Apple uses their OS to sell an overpriced PC because they don't sell many PCs, and would like sell more. Like maybe, break 10% market share. maybe.
Further, Microsoft doesn't sell Media Player. They use their OSs monopoly position, to give away free copies of their media player, to lock people into WMA/V formats. Apple is doing something similar with iTMS and iPods, and you're certainly welcome to argue whether that's right or wrong, but in this thread, it's off-topic.
My wife was a bit more sophisticated in her requests: she wanted to know: 1) can we get Firefox for the Mac? and 2) isn't it funny how the Mac only crashes when Office is running?
See, it might be more subtle than that: it may be that Microsoft has instructed Gartner to publish this analysis, to generate support for a planned future move away from the Vista codebase. It may be that Windows Vista is going down, but Microsoft wants the next version to go sideways, and is using sock puppets to get everyone clamouring for it.
And really, there are a lot of people who don't have a clue, who need "analysts" to help them form opinions: they're called "customers" or in some circles "clients".
No, sorry, going from XP to Mac OS X is fairly trivial for casual users. I think it might be more difficult for an expert user actually, as you have to dig into the more arcane aspects of Mac OS X where the difference is really noticeable. When our house switched to Macs I found that common tasks and such, where they differed from XP, made more sense than XP's configuration. I don't have any Vista experience though, so I don't know what switching from XP to Vista is like.
The American Empire is build on the US Dollar, and the fact that the world trades (oil) in Dollars. The fall of the American Empire is beginning with the collapse of the American Dollar against pretty much all the other world currencies.
Incidentally, the chances of the people of the US bringing in a fascist demagogue are pretty high. Certainly the Dominionist movement of the Christian Right is just waiting for the right moment (i.e., another WTC-scale calamity) to get rid of even more of your human rights and impose martial law. They already managed to get George W. Bush elected, and look at the damage he did.
Anyway, this has strayed far from the topic, but I agree with GP that Microsoft, like so many other companies, nations, empires, will not stay on top forever. Of course, I think the change will be more like IBM's change than like the fall of the Roman or British Empires, but that's a fairly subtle distinction.
I thought that Gartner was a Microsoft sock puppet...am I wrong? Or is Microsoft (via sock puppet) floating the idea that big changes are coming? Maybe they really are going to re-write Windows 7 from scratch (or put it on a BSD kernel - even better, but much less likely).
Thanks.
I don't think my provider throttles, but of course, whoever is upstream from it does, so really there's not much way around it. That's what makes the "traffic shaping" so much worse than crooked pricing schemes. Throttling hurts most users, while crappy pricing structures just hurt the company's customers.
My impression was, from hearing many people abuse the term, that when using bandwidth in the context of the web, that it referred not strictly to the volume of information being transmitted, but to the volume transmitted within a certain time period. In this context, your accepted use and mine are essentially the same, but we're using different timescales for the denominator of the unit.
For example, in a given month, I can download a maximum of 5 megabits/second * (however many seconds there are in a month).60 which is about 12.6 million megabits/month, which although not technically "unlimited" is far more than I can practically download for my use.
My mistake was to assume that "bandwidth" in the web context was more useful as a measure of the density of the information, and not just the total volume. Certainly if you wanted to measure information density, bits/second would provide a better approximation than bits/month.
The really crazy thing is...this idea is implemented by my provider, and I for one think it works well. My (smallish) Canadian cable provider offers three or four packages, each with different bandwidth limits. The lowest offers 1mbps/320kbps, for about the same price as dial-up. The highest offers 5Mbps/640kbps (I know, not great, but the best we have). All packages have unlimited up/download volumes.
Everything's spelled out nice and clearly on their website, no tricks, and they have in me a brand-loyal customer. Why can't other ISPs do this?
What I'm saying is that 95%* of people who use e-mail won't have time to help. 95%* of employers won't want to pay someone to sit there and help instead of do work. For your system to work, everyone needs to help.
*statistics pulled out of my ass, for illustrative purposes only.
You can argue that the harm of a particular piece of spam is very small. Perhaps a second or two if I'm just checking for misfiled ham--but the cumulative effect of *MILLIONS* of spams is enormous. The problem is that your solution requires more time, processor power, and packets than it would take to open an e-mail, check that it's spam, and hit "Report Spam". Your cure is worse than the disease, because on top of the expenses of the spam itself, you've added on the cost of running through this Super Report and checking off boxes. Further, most people using the e-mail system would then have to be educated on how to use the system properly, or the system would fail. This education, even through roll-overs, would again add to the cost.
The ideal anti-spam solution would 1)attack the spammer as close as possible to the source, and 2) require no user intervention at all. Your system is at the opposite end of the spectrum to the ideal solution.
I take it you missed the Simpsons reference. Here's your clue:
"One nation, under the dollar, with liberty and justice for none."
I really need to make that my.sig
Why doesn't Google sell or lease "Google Apps Appliances" that businesses can keep on-site, much like they peddle Google Search Appliances? Wouldn't this be a way around the issue? The GooAPPliance is stored in Canada (or wherever), and support can come from Mountain View or wherever. An API could connect the local servers to the Googleweb, or Google could take their money in lease terms instead of serving ads, or whatever. It would solve the data storage problem.
Oh, and if Page or Brin are reading this, and you haven't already thought of this (yeah, right), I want my cut dammit!
If enough countries get sick of the US' bullying, they could basically tell the WTO to piss off. The WTO is just a bunch of agreements made by world leaders after all. If the EU, and China, and the rest of Asia decided to make the US irrelevant by restricting trade, who'd enforce the embargoes? Hell, China just has to cash in its greenbacks and you're all screwed. What exactly do you think is propping up the American economy right now, other than China, Japan, maybe a few other creditor nations? You don't think the EU would love to see the Middle East receiving payment for oil in Euros? The American gov't has two things going for it: the military, and the world's biggest consumer culture.
The Iraq war is showing everyone what the limits of the US military really are (they can't handle a geurilla war in a country that they'd previously bombed the snot out of for twelve years, despite the best-equipped military in the world), and China and India -- that's 2B potential consumers, kids -- are set to outpace American consumption levels, probably in the next decade or two, less if we're all really unlucky.
You know, it doesn't even matter what the rest of the world does, the US government is well on the way to making your country a backwater anyway. Too bad you're going to take us down with you.
If you miss that universal health care is a fascist play to control you "for your own good", then the propaganda has indeed worked well. Fail. Fascism isn't just about controlling the behaviour of the people. Fascism, like Communism, is a form of authoritarianism. Fascism, unlike Communism, occurs when the State colludes with Corporations to control the behaviour of the people. Communism occurs when the State takes over the functions of the Corporations, "nationalizing" them and thus taking direct control of the economy. This is oversimplifying, but bear with me.
So, to apply this to your example, if a State collaborates with privately owned hospitals and insurance companies to make "universal health care" mandatory, thereby enriching the Corporations involved, who then collaborate with the State, this would be Fascist. If on the other hand, the State takes over and administers the Health Care system, and then forces the people to change their behaviour (stop smoking, wear a helmet, you rebels are costing too much money) then this would be Communist, not Fascist.
Now as I said before, this oversimplifies the case, because it doesn't take into account how that government got into power in the first place. Presumably, if the government was elected fairly, and on the platform of either nationalizing health care (like Canada) or setting up a privately held system to which everyone has access (more the US style) then the element of coercion is missing, and the system is merely rightist or leftist, and not Fascist or Communist at all. Even if certain behaviours are coerced (stop smoking dammit!) this isn't necessarily fascist if a majority agree to the coercion. After all, non-smokers are a majority, and they shouldn't have to pay for someone else's lung cancer treatments. So if you want to have universal health care, and you don't want to pay for lung cancer treatments, then the only fair option is to convince smokers to quit. It's only authoritarian if the State, and not the people, are coercing you. Of course the degree to which you are coerced is important too. If the State and the People are merely providing you with opportunities to change your behaviour, there isn't a lot of authoritarianism there. If they are criminalizing some aspects of the behaviour, there is more, and if they are criminalizing it outright...you get my drift.
The real question is, how much do you trust your electoral system?
You misunderstand: WordPerfect stored its files in a proprietary markup language. (It wasn't exactly hard to get the specifications; all you had to do was ask.) There was a special key combination (Alt-F3, if memory serves) that toggled Reveal Codes mode. In that mode, the screen was split into to halves. In the upper, you had the regular display. In the lower, you could see all the markup and edit it. That way, if you'd accidentally entered (let's say) a new margin by accident, you could see exactly were it was and remove it. I've known people who learned the program by having Reveal Codes on at all times so that they could see the effects of what they were doing and learn how the program worked. Why do you speak in the past tense? Reveal Codes is awesome (it's the only thing that makes importing Word documents tolerable), and you can take it away when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Wordperfect FTW
Back in the Day, Word Perfect WAS better. But because you couldn't import files from MS's solutions, and MS used it's well-documented anti-competitive practices to push their productivity offerings, the net result was harm to Word Perfect's viability.
Whether or not Word Perfect could have continued to compete based on merit is a moot point because Microsoft's practices DIDN'T GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO DO SO I'm here to tell you that Wordperfect still works just fine, and yes, it is better than Word. Our law office uses Wordperfect 10, and nobody wants to switch any time soon. I expect we'll upgrade to Wordperfect X3 (yes, Corel is still making new versions of Wordperfect) before we ever switch to Office. I know that our office, though in the minority, is far from singular in continuing to support Wordperfect over Word, despite the fact that Microsoft Office formats dominate electronic Court filings in my neck of the woods. Ironically, the Courts probably use Word in part because an unusually large number of law firms run Macs, with Microsoft Orifice loaded on them.
Slashdot Mirror
"This is my rifle, and this is my gun. One is for fighting, the other's for...oh wait."
Except, um, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on computers or operating systems. In fact, last I checked, despite good growth in those segments, they're still trailing, and by a lot. Apple uses their OS to sell an overpriced PC because they don't sell many PCs, and would like sell more. Like maybe, break 10% market share. maybe.
Further, Microsoft doesn't sell Media Player. They use their OSs monopoly position, to give away free copies of their media player, to lock people into WMA/V formats. Apple is doing something similar with iTMS and iPods, and you're certainly welcome to argue whether that's right or wrong, but in this thread, it's off-topic.
Yeah, but they take 20-30 years to assemble, and if you lose the special Allen key, you're fucked.
My wife was a bit more sophisticated in her requests: she wanted to know: 1) can we get Firefox for the Mac? and 2) isn't it funny how the Mac only crashes when Office is running?
And really, there are a lot of people who don't have a clue, who need "analysts" to help them form opinions: they're called "customers" or in some circles "clients".
No, sorry, going from XP to Mac OS X is fairly trivial for casual users. I think it might be more difficult for an expert user actually, as you have to dig into the more arcane aspects of Mac OS X where the difference is really noticeable. When our house switched to Macs I found that common tasks and such, where they differed from XP, made more sense than XP's configuration. I don't have any Vista experience though, so I don't know what switching from XP to Vista is like.
The American Empire is build on the US Dollar, and the fact that the world trades (oil) in Dollars. The fall of the American Empire is beginning with the collapse of the American Dollar against pretty much all the other world currencies. Incidentally, the chances of the people of the US bringing in a fascist demagogue are pretty high. Certainly the Dominionist movement of the Christian Right is just waiting for the right moment (i.e., another WTC-scale calamity) to get rid of even more of your human rights and impose martial law. They already managed to get George W. Bush elected, and look at the damage he did. Anyway, this has strayed far from the topic, but I agree with GP that Microsoft, like so many other companies, nations, empires, will not stay on top forever. Of course, I think the change will be more like IBM's change than like the fall of the Roman or British Empires, but that's a fairly subtle distinction.
I thought that Gartner was a Microsoft sock puppet...am I wrong? Or is Microsoft (via sock puppet) floating the idea that big changes are coming? Maybe they really are going to re-write Windows 7 from scratch (or put it on a BSD kernel - even better, but much less likely).
Thanks. I don't think my provider throttles, but of course, whoever is upstream from it does, so really there's not much way around it. That's what makes the "traffic shaping" so much worse than crooked pricing schemes. Throttling hurts most users, while crappy pricing structures just hurt the company's customers.
I wasn't aware MS was supporting OOXML yet either...
Persona Internet
I think its service area is a lot more limited than Rogers or Shaw, Persona may not be available in your area
Okay, got me there.
My impression was, from hearing many people abuse the term, that when using bandwidth in the context of the web, that it referred not strictly to the volume of information being transmitted, but to the volume transmitted within a certain time period. In this context, your accepted use and mine are essentially the same, but we're using different timescales for the denominator of the unit.
For example, in a given month, I can download a maximum of 5 megabits/second * (however many seconds there are in a month).60 which is about 12.6 million megabits/month, which although not technically "unlimited" is far more than I can practically download for my use.
My mistake was to assume that "bandwidth" in the web context was more useful as a measure of the density of the information, and not just the total volume. Certainly if you wanted to measure information density, bits/second would provide a better approximation than bits/month.
The really crazy thing is...this idea is implemented by my provider, and I for one think it works well. My (smallish) Canadian cable provider offers three or four packages, each with different bandwidth limits. The lowest offers 1mbps/320kbps, for about the same price as dial-up. The highest offers 5Mbps/640kbps (I know, not great, but the best we have). All packages have unlimited up/download volumes. Everything's spelled out nice and clearly on their website, no tricks, and they have in me a brand-loyal customer. Why can't other ISPs do this?
What I'm saying is that 95%* of people who use e-mail won't have time to help. 95%* of employers won't want to pay someone to sit there and help instead of do work. For your system to work, everyone needs to help.
*statistics pulled out of my ass, for illustrative purposes only.
Maybe they all have to obey the speed limit.
Really? What were your search terms....? Not that I'm interested in that kind of thing. Oh boy.
AC has nailed the heart of the issue.
...They also don't sue people who dare leave the fold. But have been known in the past to execute them.I take it you missed the Simpsons reference. Here's your clue: "One nation, under the dollar, with liberty and justice for none." I really need to make that my .sig
Why doesn't Google sell or lease "Google Apps Appliances" that businesses can keep on-site, much like they peddle Google Search Appliances? Wouldn't this be a way around the issue? The GooAPPliance is stored in Canada (or wherever), and support can come from Mountain View or wherever. An API could connect the local servers to the Googleweb, or Google could take their money in lease terms instead of serving ads, or whatever. It would solve the data storage problem.
Oh, and if Page or Brin are reading this, and you haven't already thought of this (yeah, right), I want my cut dammit!
If enough countries get sick of the US' bullying, they could basically tell the WTO to piss off. The WTO is just a bunch of agreements made by world leaders after all. If the EU, and China, and the rest of Asia decided to make the US irrelevant by restricting trade, who'd enforce the embargoes? Hell, China just has to cash in its greenbacks and you're all screwed. What exactly do you think is propping up the American economy right now, other than China, Japan, maybe a few other creditor nations? You don't think the EU would love to see the Middle East receiving payment for oil in Euros? The American gov't has two things going for it: the military, and the world's biggest consumer culture.
The Iraq war is showing everyone what the limits of the US military really are (they can't handle a geurilla war in a country that they'd previously bombed the snot out of for twelve years, despite the best-equipped military in the world), and China and India -- that's 2B potential consumers, kids -- are set to outpace American consumption levels, probably in the next decade or two, less if we're all really unlucky.
You know, it doesn't even matter what the rest of the world does, the US government is well on the way to making your country a backwater anyway. Too bad you're going to take us down with you.
So, to apply this to your example, if a State collaborates with privately owned hospitals and insurance companies to make "universal health care" mandatory, thereby enriching the Corporations involved, who then collaborate with the State, this would be Fascist. If on the other hand, the State takes over and administers the Health Care system, and then forces the people to change their behaviour (stop smoking, wear a helmet, you rebels are costing too much money) then this would be Communist, not Fascist.
Now as I said before, this oversimplifies the case, because it doesn't take into account how that government got into power in the first place. Presumably, if the government was elected fairly, and on the platform of either nationalizing health care (like Canada) or setting up a privately held system to which everyone has access (more the US style) then the element of coercion is missing, and the system is merely rightist or leftist, and not Fascist or Communist at all. Even if certain behaviours are coerced (stop smoking dammit!) this isn't necessarily fascist if a majority agree to the coercion. After all, non-smokers are a majority, and they shouldn't have to pay for someone else's lung cancer treatments. So if you want to have universal health care, and you don't want to pay for lung cancer treatments, then the only fair option is to convince smokers to quit. It's only authoritarian if the State, and not the people, are coercing you. Of course the degree to which you are coerced is important too. If the State and the People are merely providing you with opportunities to change your behaviour, there isn't a lot of authoritarianism there. If they are criminalizing some aspects of the behaviour, there is more, and if they are criminalizing it outright...you get my drift.
The real question is, how much do you trust your electoral system?
Whether or not Word Perfect could have continued to compete based on merit is a moot point because Microsoft's practices DIDN'T GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO DO SO I'm here to tell you that Wordperfect still works just fine, and yes, it is better than Word. Our law office uses Wordperfect 10, and nobody wants to switch any time soon. I expect we'll upgrade to Wordperfect X3 (yes, Corel is still making new versions of Wordperfect) before we ever switch to Office. I know that our office, though in the minority, is far from singular in continuing to support Wordperfect over Word, despite the fact that Microsoft Office formats dominate electronic Court filings in my neck of the woods. Ironically, the Courts probably use Word in part because an unusually large number of law firms run Macs, with Microsoft Orifice loaded on them.