The argument that monopolies raise the price of cell phone service is well-supported.
Cell phone service voice and data plans are extraordinarily high in the U.S., Japan and Canada, compared to other nations. America is way above the international average. We're the most expensive when it comes to texting. For the whole package of cell phone service America and Canada are the most expensive. Guess which countries keeps coming up as among the most expensive? The U.S. and Canada.
As for PC prices, the number of competitors had very little effect compared to the power of Moore's Law. Had we had more competitors, PC prices might be 25% less right now. A huge part of what we pay for PCs is Windows. If we had more competition there we certainly would see lower prices.
So yes, oligopolies mean higher prices. And Jesus WAS/is in fact a liberal.:D
How about us BROWN PEOPLE in the United States? They're suffering the worst because of jobs lost to other countries.
And when the US Dollar collapses because of all this debt, where will your "brown people" overseas get any jobs? America is just about everyone's biggest export market, when we can't buy your goods or services... whoops.
Companies do not offshore jobs for tax breaks. They don't even do it because of regulations.
Companies offshore because of one simple thing: wages. The wage differential between offshore-happy countries and the U.S. is far above 20 to 1. This is a bigger factor than regulations or taxes combined.
Reduce the minimum wage and you'll have more people trying to take 2 and 3 jobs to make ends meet.
Plus the price of energy will never reduce drastically. Not ever. Which means that when the minimum wage is gone, food transportation costs will drive the price of food out of reach for millions. That means mass starvation and CIVIL WAR.
No, really, you will not ever show how energy will ever become 10 times cheaper. You will not even show how energy prices will drop even by 10%. Ever. Not happening.
Apparently there is no market for people who know history. Which means nobody's taking history as a major and in a few generations we'll have no historians.
"and now india is not only becoming a superpower, but taking entire industries away from angloamerican sphere. talk about what goes around comes around."
And when the US dollar collapses because of the socialism we need to support our unemployed, India will have no customers because outsourced labor will become too expensive for America. What will India do then? Or China, for that matter? Or the Middle East, Brazil, and everyone else who depends on exports to America?
Ayn Rand may have been an idiot but this would be a real case of a John Galt effect.
De-fund schools so that parents, who have a hard enough time making ends meet with two incomes, have no options for educating their kids?
Great move.
We're getting our butts kicked by cheap labor countries whose kids are coming up as educated or better, in Government-funded schools. Imagine how badly we'll get beat when there's no schools for most of our kids... except for the wealthy 1% who can afford private school.
Get real proof of this so-called Russian mafia connection, then bring in the DHS and the FBI.
You never know when those Federal agencies will decide they're sick and tired of all the unlicensed foreign competitors in the American organized crime business.
EA hands you that glass of purple kool-aid and you just drink it without a second thought?
Given what these corporations have done in the past you HAVE GOT to be drinking the kool-aid to believe they won't sell any information they get, to third parties. They may even do so illegally.
"The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." - Henry Kissinger. And it applies to Corporations, too.
Never, ever give sensitive information to anyone you do not trust. Always monitor every app you use and know fully what information it transmits. Paranoia? Hardly. It's the most basic law of survival.
I don't know of any cartels that have bombed airplanes, flown them into buildings, attacked the Pentagon (9/11), attacked U.S. military bases, attacked a U.S. Navy warship, or gone toe to toe with U.S. Marines. Moreover, cartel thugs like to kill and make it back home alive. Radical Muslims don't care.
The cartels have killed tens of thousands because no one has stood up to them. The Muslim radicals have killed hundreds of thousands including 4,000 U.S. troops. Radical Muslims have gone toe to toe against far worse than any cartel has.
If we are talking about end users or hobbyists, your point would be fairly unassailable.
However, "Linux is free if your time is worthless".is aimed at business situations. It based on the fact that time is money. So it is not a useless quote when talking about Linux and businesses.
The quote refers to the concept known as "Total Cost of Ownership" (TCO). This is a 3-Dimensional concept that includes the cost of downtime, system maintenance, and future costs for adapting to software upgrades and industry changes; in the universe of TCO, the price to purchase and install an OS is practically meaningless. And I mean meaningless: numerically speaking, when you have a company where downtime costs $10,000 an hour, exactly how significant is the cost of actually purchasing and installing the OS? Absolutely zip.
TCO dictates that such a business would be better off paying $100,000 to install and support an OS that will provide you 10 seconds per year of downtime, rather than paying $0 for an operating system that results in one day of downtime (which would set you back at least $240,000). *
The point is not that Windows is not free, everyone knows that; nor is the quote you're contesting denying the fact that Linux has zero cost to purchase. Linux may have zero cost to purchase but when you are paying someone to install it and you are sacrificing hours of productivity to switch to it, it is not free.
The fact that your servers and systems will not get built and magically deployed by Linux elves, says it is not free. From a TCO perspective.
Please don't get hung up over the 1-Dimensional concept of "purchase price" when talking about whether Linux is Free[tm], at least not when talking to a competent business. Businesses look at this issue from a 3-Dimensional perspective - as in, TCO. Of course, you can ignore TCO and stick with judging an OS by a 1-Dimensional concept like "purchase price"; but if depending on your mission imperatives, this may bite you on the rear.
Your argument only shows that the masses do not yet understand that competent businesses barely even look at the purchase price of an operating system. They look at TCO.
All of this basically means that you may think the quote is useless, but in fact it is the basis of any competent business's IT strategy.
* It just so happens that Linux's installation price IS free, and studies suggest that its down time less than Windows. Plus, now Linux applications have largely caught up with Windows. Linux is definitely more secure-able. But from a TCO perspective, Linux is not free.
Now I'd like to wrap two responses in one - this part going to the OP. The question of "can independent Cent OS support guarantee us downtime equal or less than going with Enterprise Linux?" is absolutely critical to the credibility of their decision to go with Cent OS. Allow me to distill that into an equation:
E= (I1+S1+D1 * C) - (I2+S2+D2 * C). The magnitude of folly in choosing CentOS over RHEL is represented by E. It is folly if E is greater than zero. It is epic fail if E is really really greater than zero. Do note, from my arguments above, that C is by far the biggest number in this equation.
I1 = cost of deploying CentOS (including labor) I2 = cost of deploying RHEL (including labor) D1 = downtime in hours (CentOS) D2 = downtime in hours (RHEL) C = cost of downtime per hour (applies to both scenarios) S1 = cost per hour of CentOS independent support (this includes maintenance, upgrades, deploying software) S2 = cost per hour of RHEL official support
There are content providers who produce for private clients. These include QualityGal, ContentDiva, etc.
These companies are not like AssociatedContent or DemandMedia, they produce for actual clients. Things like articles, press releases, a variety of work, and it's all original content.
Content mills will overpopulate and die. Their business model is limited to how many how-to's people want to look up. The market will get saturated. But press releases, technical articles, website design, client articles and white papers will never go away.
The parent post is severely under-rated. Someone please mod it up.
I mean, really, the "Middle Eastern Bazaar" analogy was quite hypocritical considering America is the PRIMARY breeding ground for this crap. China, Russia and the Middle East have a long way to go to catch up to America.
Slashdot Mirror
The argument that monopolies raise the price of cell phone service is well-supported.
Cell phone service voice and data plans are extraordinarily high in the U.S., Japan and Canada, compared to other nations. America is way above the international average. We're the most expensive when it comes to texting. For the whole package of cell phone service America and Canada are the most expensive. Guess which countries keeps coming up as among the most expensive? The U.S. and Canada.
http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/an_international_comparison_of_cell_phone_plans_and_prices
As for PC prices, the number of competitors had very little effect compared to the power of Moore's Law. Had we had more competitors, PC prices might be 25% less right now. A huge part of what we pay for PCs is Windows. If we had more competition there we certainly would see lower prices.
So yes, oligopolies mean higher prices. And Jesus WAS/is in fact a liberal. :D
How about us BROWN PEOPLE in the United States? They're suffering the worst because of jobs lost to other countries.
And when the US Dollar collapses because of all this debt, where will your "brown people" overseas get any jobs? America is just about everyone's biggest export market, when we can't buy your goods or services... whoops.
Same with my desktop. I keep one Windows computer for games though.
you do not understand it.
Companies do not offshore jobs for tax breaks. They don't even do it because of regulations.
Companies offshore because of one simple thing: wages. The wage differential between offshore-happy countries and the U.S. is far above 20 to 1. This is a bigger factor than regulations or taxes combined.
Reduce the minimum wage and you'll have more people trying to take 2 and 3 jobs to make ends meet.
Plus the price of energy will never reduce drastically. Not ever. Which means that when the minimum wage is gone, food transportation costs will drive the price of food out of reach for millions. That means mass starvation and CIVIL WAR.
No, really, you will not ever show how energy will ever become 10 times cheaper. You will not even show how energy prices will drop even by 10%. Ever. Not happening.
Apparently there is no market for people who know history. Which means nobody's taking history as a major and in a few generations we'll have no historians.
That's a bug, not a feature.
How much does it cost for criminal interests to bribe a call center employee or manager in America? How about India?
And how does the FBI expect to prosecute someone in India for stealing Americans' personal information?
Whitey? What about the "darkies" in America? Their unemployment is FAR higher than any unemployment in China or India.
No one talks about how "free trade" affects non-white employment in America.
"and now india is not only becoming a superpower, but taking entire industries away from angloamerican sphere. talk about what goes around comes around."
And when the US dollar collapses because of the socialism we need to support our unemployed, India will have no customers because outsourced labor will become too expensive for America. What will India do then? Or China, for that matter? Or the Middle East, Brazil, and everyone else who depends on exports to America?
Ayn Rand may have been an idiot but this would be a real case of a John Galt effect.
and I can clearly see that beelsebob has done his/her research.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2524922&cid=38053256
"FAA certification is a farce. A government agency says the plane is ok? Ya, that makes me feel better. How about a private enterprise that"
Smart move. The private enterprise needs money to function, too. So they'll have their fees that they charge.
Tell ya what. You go move to a country with a private version of the FAA. And every time you hear the roar of a plane engine overhead you can pray.
De-fund schools so that parents, who have a hard enough time making ends meet with two incomes, have no options for educating their kids?
Great move.
We're getting our butts kicked by cheap labor countries whose kids are coming up as educated or better, in Government-funded schools. Imagine how badly we'll get beat when there's no schools for most of our kids... except for the wealthy 1% who can afford private school.
While putting more Americans out of work and onto the welfare system.
Seriously, all you're suggesting is we exchange mythical British overlords with Chinese debt-holding overlords.
so loud I woke up my wife and kids.
Get real proof of this so-called Russian mafia connection, then bring in the DHS and the FBI.
You never know when those Federal agencies will decide they're sick and tired of all the unlicensed foreign competitors in the American organized crime business.
EA hands you that glass of purple kool-aid and you just drink it without a second thought?
Given what these corporations have done in the past you HAVE GOT to be drinking the kool-aid to believe they won't sell any information they get, to third parties. They may even do so illegally.
"The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." - Henry Kissinger. And it applies to Corporations, too.
Never, ever give sensitive information to anyone you do not trust. Always monitor every app you use and know fully what information it transmits. Paranoia? Hardly. It's the most basic law of survival.
That's like asking for a car that's pink. She picks the lightest weight one. And it turns out it's something on the quality level of a Yugo.
Why not just turn the legitimate cell phone tower into a super spying device? This new thing sounds redundant.
You need to connect to a cell phone tower to communicate. Make the cell phone tower the spy. Easy... right?
I wouldn't go that far.
I don't know of any cartels that have bombed airplanes, flown them into buildings, attacked the Pentagon (9/11), attacked U.S. military bases, attacked a U.S. Navy warship, or gone toe to toe with U.S. Marines. Moreover, cartel thugs like to kill and make it back home alive. Radical Muslims don't care.
The cartels have killed tens of thousands because no one has stood up to them. The Muslim radicals have killed hundreds of thousands including 4,000 U.S. troops. Radical Muslims have gone toe to toe against far worse than any cartel has.
My post above was meant for you, not the Anonymous Coward.
Argh...
If we are talking about end users or hobbyists, your point would be fairly unassailable.
However, "Linux is free if your time is worthless".is aimed at business situations. It based on the fact that time is money. So it is not a useless quote when talking about Linux and businesses.
The quote refers to the concept known as "Total Cost of Ownership" (TCO). This is a 3-Dimensional concept that includes the cost of downtime, system maintenance, and future costs for adapting to software upgrades and industry changes; in the universe of TCO, the price to purchase and install an OS is practically meaningless. And I mean meaningless: numerically speaking, when you have a company where downtime costs $10,000 an hour, exactly how significant is the cost of actually purchasing and installing the OS? Absolutely zip.
TCO dictates that such a business would be better off paying $100,000 to install and support an OS that will provide you 10 seconds per year of downtime, rather than paying $0 for an operating system that results in one day of downtime (which would set you back at least $240,000). *
The point is not that Windows is not free, everyone knows that; nor is the quote you're contesting denying the fact that Linux has zero cost to purchase. Linux may have zero cost to purchase but when you are paying someone to install it and you are sacrificing hours of productivity to switch to it, it is not free.
The fact that your servers and systems will not get built and magically deployed by Linux elves, says it is not free. From a TCO perspective.
Please don't get hung up over the 1-Dimensional concept of "purchase price" when talking about whether Linux is Free[tm], at least not when talking to a competent business. Businesses look at this issue from a 3-Dimensional perspective - as in, TCO. Of course, you can ignore TCO and stick with judging an OS by a 1-Dimensional concept like "purchase price"; but if depending on your mission imperatives, this may bite you on the rear.
Your argument only shows that the masses do not yet understand that competent businesses barely even look at the purchase price of an operating system. They look at TCO.
All of this basically means that you may think the quote is useless, but in fact it is the basis of any competent business's IT strategy.
* It just so happens that Linux's installation price IS free, and studies suggest that its down time less than Windows. Plus, now Linux applications have largely caught up with Windows. Linux is definitely more secure-able. But from a TCO perspective, Linux is not free.
Now I'd like to wrap two responses in one - this part going to the OP. The question of "can independent Cent OS support guarantee us downtime equal or less than going with Enterprise Linux?" is absolutely critical to the credibility of their decision to go with Cent OS. Allow me to distill that into an equation:
E= (I1+S1+D1 * C) - (I2+S2+D2 * C). The magnitude of folly in choosing CentOS over RHEL is represented by E. It is folly if E is greater than zero. It is epic fail if E is really really greater than zero. Do note, from my arguments above, that C is by far the biggest number in this equation.
I1 = cost of deploying CentOS (including labor)
I2 = cost of deploying RHEL (including labor)
D1 = downtime in hours (CentOS)
D2 = downtime in hours (RHEL)
C = cost of downtime per hour (applies to both scenarios)
S1 = cost per hour of CentOS independent support (this includes maintenance, upgrades, deploying software)
S2 = cost per hour of RHEL official support
They both have different reasons for spying on you.
Corporations do it for profit.
Governments do it for control-er, "National Security".
They all spy on you.
I like to paraphrase an old song... "My mind is not for rent / for corporations or Government".
There are content providers who produce for private clients. These include QualityGal, ContentDiva, etc.
These companies are not like AssociatedContent or DemandMedia, they produce for actual clients. Things like articles, press releases, a variety of work, and it's all original content.
Content mills will overpopulate and die. Their business model is limited to how many how-to's people want to look up. The market will get saturated. But press releases, technical articles, website design, client articles and white papers will never go away.
The parent post is severely under-rated. Someone please mod it up.
I mean, really, the "Middle Eastern Bazaar" analogy was quite hypocritical considering America is the PRIMARY breeding ground for this crap. China, Russia and the Middle East have a long way to go to catch up to America.