I just responded to a very similar post above, but I want to address this...
The revisionist, content-free pronouncements from MS corporate spokespersons and Mr. Gates further support the fact that his software wouldn't be able to compete in a fair market, and that the only reason MS is in the position it is, is the stranglehold the licenses have on the OEM's. That is not competition, nor is it innovation.
In fact, as I am sure you are aware, this stranglehold is weakening, and the DOJ had nothing to do with it. I think to a large extent, the reason MS has maintained its market share in recent years is leftover credibility from pre-Linux days, and the advantage Windoze still has in the non-geek market. I know that many/.ers want to believe that Linux is the One True OS for ever purpose, but the fact is that 90% of the population would be scared to death of reformatting their hard drive or using a command-line interface, to say nothing of recompiling their kernal!
They have the authority granted by Congress under various anti-trust acts. Microsoft is not a person, so has no natural rights.
Microsoft may have no rights in and of itself, but it has rights derived from the rights of its shareholders.
One of the laws in question has to do with leveraging a virtual monopoly in one area (like desktop OSs) into another area (like browsers).
Anti-trust is an arbitrary and unjust mess of a law. It is written in a way that is so vague and far-reaching, that one can go after just about anyone with a large market share. Microsoft has only about 90% of the OS market, and anyone who wants to is free to switch to Linux, or to buy a Mac, a Sun machine, etc. Any idiot can download and install Netscape in a matter of hours.
Microsoft voluntarily signed an agreement (consent decree) some years ago that they would not engage in certain practises, so that the DOJ would drop proceedings against them at that time. The DOJ (among others) now feel that MS has reneged on that agreement (violated the consent decree).
There was nothing voluntary about it. Microsoft faced the prospect of years of court battles over a law that as I just said is arbitrary, vague, and overreaching. Microsoft should certainly live up to its committments, but I question whether they should have been put in the position in which they signed it in the first place.
It seems to me that he is simply a very successful software developer, and the anti-trust suit is a combination of envy from companies who can't compete (like Netscape) and self-serving politicians. If Linux is a better OS, it doesn't need any help from the Do(in)J to win.
iMacs are still a pain...
on
iMac Linux
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· Score: 2
On the other hand, it makes a kick-ass second computer, because it has built in 10/100 Base-T ethernet. Hook it up with a crossover cable, and set it copying overnight, and use the more traditional ports of the older machine to attach a zip, Jaz, Superdisk, or whatever. This saves the added expense of a floppy drive, scsi, ADB, and serial ports, which you don't need if you have another ethernet-enabled computer. Remember also that pretty much everything it comes with on its hard drive is on the included CD's.
These machines perform just fine..?
on
iMac Linux
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· Score: 1
It is certainly true that the Mac OS will cripple an otherwise speedy machine, but my impression is that with LinuxPPC, it screams. Remember that it is a RISC chip, and is a fundamentally superior architecture to x86.
Remember also that Mac OS X, due by the end of the year, will be built on a real Unix kernal, and will feature premptive multitasking and protected memory. So once it is out, the iMac will easily outperform a similarly priced PC.
Apple makes its money from hardware, but there is a serious danger for them: If they were to completely open-source their OS, someone could port it to the PC, and then people would have no particular reason to buy a Mac. So I don't think they can afford to completely release the source.
As I see it, the SEC simply wants more things to regulate, so they make up an excuse to regulate a new business model. I don't think they are the least bit concerned about anyone's privacy.
I am amazed that a lot of you are actually supporting this. If the SN's bother you, you have several choices: buy a PII, buy a clone, buy a Mac, boycott, etc. All Arizona is doing is taking away from users and manufacturers the right to choose what products they are goiing to buy and sell. It is a horrendous violation of Intel's right to make any damn chip it wants.
I'm not sure that this is necessarily a bad thing, and it certainly is not something the government should be involved in. The fact is that every time Microsoft pumps up its earnings to improve its staock price, its stock proce is going to take a hit the next quarter when he stock price is low. It may not be an ideal situation, but I don't know if fraud is the right word for it.
Look at it this way: Who is hurt by it? Certainly the stockholders aren't hurt: their stock price is ultimately going to be the same, only this way there is less volatility. The only person I could see benfitting undfairly from this is insider traders, who have the real profit numbers and use them to make a profit on the stock market.
In any event, this is something that can be handled within Microsoft. If shareholders really don't like it, they can get Bill fired. I suspect, however, that they are happy with the job he's doing, cooked books or no.
I still don't see why the college kid has an unfair advantage, or what should be done about it. It may be true that college kids are willing to work for less money, but it seems to me that that simply means that the older worker is overpaid. Now I can sypathize with him, and I'm sure his family is important, but his company pays him because he does valuable work, not because he has a family to support. So although it is certainly tragic when the older worker is laid off, it would be equally unfair to force the college kid not to enter the field, or to subsidize him, or just about any other remedy I can think of.
About going back to school, there are lots of options besides going back to a full-time, four year college. There are night classes, there are self-taught programs, there are web sites, tutorials, textbooks, and so forth. And probably the best way to keep your skills up to date is to make sure that you are doing something that is new and interesting. That way you are learning new skills and getting payed for it.
I guess my point is that life has problems, but the world is not coming to an end, and our families are not all about to starve. Making living takes more than showing up for work 8 hours a day. It means making sure that you are earning your paycheck, and that therefore your employer will not want to lay you off. If that includes putting in an extra few hours to learn new skills or changing jobs to keep your skills fresh, so be it. How you manage to support yourself and your family is and should be your responsibility. No one else should be forced to do it for you.
About the poor worker, I am maybe a bit naive about how hard it is to move up in the world. But I have barely more than a high school deploma, and I can already get a job for $8/hour without too much trouble. For a single person working 60 hours a week, that is $25k/year, which is plenty to support oneself on. So you can easily save $1000 over the course of a year or two.
Obviously, once you have a family, $25k is not so much money, but even then you often have both parents working, in which case you can still save some. And a couple who has trouble making ends meet should maybe work on getting a better job before having kids. Obviously that doesn't happen sometimes, but still, I think it is true that many poor people have the opportunity to improve their conditions if they work at it.
As for using skills once one has them, it is certainly true that no one is going to get a high-paying IT job on the strength of having read a Java book, but, for example, they can set up a web site to show off their skills, and/or get a simple data-entry job or something. The point is that with a little perseverence one can get a job in the IT field without a 4-year degree.
"Once you loose that.edu address & get in the real world, your perspective will change."
Most of that 4% is what is called "structural unemployment:" people who are between jobs, seasonal employment, people who just graduated, etc. If you look at the number of people who are looking for jobs and actually can't find them, that number is much lower.
Leftists have been saying this crap since the Industrial Revolution. They have always told us that workers are "alienated" from their jobs, that we are pawns of the "super-rich," that corporations are "inhuman" and so forth.
This article is the result of a monolithic view of the American workplace, what Drew Carey calls the "Shiity Jobs" phenomenon. There's all this nostalgia for the fifties, when `everyone had 9-5 jobs pushing papers from the right side of their desks to the left.
It is particularily ludicrous to bemoan early retirement as some kind of inhumane punishment. If a corporation lays you off, you are free to seek another job. If you cannot get one, perhaps you should go back to school, and develop your skills. Companies in today's economy cannot afford to pass up skilled workers, no matter what their skills. This gives skilled workers an enourmous amount of freedom.
Even the poor can move up in the world faster than they ever could before. For 1000 bucks, one can buy a computer and some books, and learn Java, html, or whatever, and get a job doing IT stuff. Never before has knowledge been so cheap and readily accessable.
No one ever said the Mac OS was a good server OS. There's more to an OS than stability and power. If you want a rock-solid server, Linux is a good choice. But the Mac OS is still way ahead of the alternatives in consistency, intuitiveness, and seamless integration. Only on a Mac can you plug in a peripheral with a reasonable expectation of it working right without fooling around with configuration files. So if you want to get work done with minimal hassle, the Mac OS is still the best choice in many areas.
Besides, many of the Linux boxes were probably Macs running LinuxPPC, and Mac OS X will make the Mac far more stable and powerful, making it a competitive server OS.
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I just responded to a very similar post above, but I want to address this...
/.ers want to believe that Linux is the One True OS for ever purpose, but the fact is that 90% of the population would be scared to death of reformatting their hard drive or using a command-line interface, to say nothing of recompiling their kernal!
The revisionist, content-free pronouncements from MS corporate spokespersons and Mr. Gates further support the fact that his software wouldn't be able to compete in a fair market, and that the only reason MS is in the position it is, is the stranglehold the licenses have on the OEM's. That is not competition, nor is it innovation.
In fact, as I am sure you are aware, this stranglehold is weakening, and the DOJ had nothing to do with it. I think to a large extent, the reason MS has maintained its market share in recent years is leftover credibility from pre-Linux days, and the advantage Windoze still has in the non-geek market. I know that many
They have the authority granted by Congress under various anti-trust acts. Microsoft is not a person, so has no natural rights.
Microsoft may have no rights in and of itself, but it has rights derived from the rights of its shareholders.
One of the laws in question has to do with leveraging a virtual monopoly in one area (like desktop OSs) into another area (like browsers).
Anti-trust is an arbitrary and unjust mess of a law. It is written in a way that is so vague and far-reaching, that one can go after just about anyone with a large market share. Microsoft has only about 90% of the OS market, and anyone who wants to is free to switch to Linux, or to buy a Mac, a Sun machine, etc. Any idiot can download and install Netscape in a matter of hours.
Microsoft voluntarily signed an agreement (consent decree) some years ago that they would not engage in certain practises, so that the DOJ would drop proceedings against them at that time. The DOJ (among others) now feel that MS has reneged on that agreement (violated the consent decree).
There was nothing voluntary about it. Microsoft faced the prospect of years of court battles over a law that as I just said is arbitrary, vague, and overreaching. Microsoft should certainly live up to its committments, but I question whether they should have been put in the position in which they signed it in the first place.
That is not the point. Hitler's thugs killed people. Gate's programmers write bad software. Writing bad software is not anything like killing people.
It seems to me that he is simply a very successful software developer, and the anti-trust suit is a combination of envy from companies who can't compete (like Netscape) and self-serving politicians. If Linux is a better OS, it doesn't need any help from the Do(in)J to win.
I know this is flame bait, but...
What right does the DOJ have to dictate the way Microsoft does business?
That is ridiculous. Hitler was a brutal thug. Bill Gates is a software CEO.
He may make crappy software, but that does not make him equivalent to Hitler.
'Nuf said.
On the other hand, it makes a kick-ass second computer, because it has built in 10/100 Base-T ethernet. Hook it up with a crossover cable, and set it copying overnight, and use the more traditional ports of the older machine to attach a zip, Jaz, Superdisk, or whatever. This saves the added expense of a floppy drive, scsi, ADB, and serial ports, which you don't need if you have another ethernet-enabled computer. Remember also that pretty much everything it comes with on its hard drive is on the included CD's.
It is certainly true that the Mac OS will cripple an otherwise speedy machine, but my impression is that with LinuxPPC, it screams. Remember that it is a RISC chip, and is a fundamentally superior architecture to x86.
Remember also that Mac OS X, due by the end of the year, will be built on a real Unix kernal, and will feature premptive multitasking and protected memory. So once it is out, the iMac will easily outperform a similarly priced PC.
Apple makes its money from hardware, but there is a serious danger for them: If they were to completely open-source their OS, someone could port it to the PC, and then people would have no particular reason to buy a Mac. So I don't think they can afford to completely release the source.
Because Darwin is not OS X. It is just the low-level unix stuff, not the GUI and other high-level pieces.
Monopoly means 100% market share. M$ only has about 95%, and Intel has a lot less than that. Neither is a "monopoly."
As I see it, the SEC simply wants more things to regulate, so they make up an excuse to regulate a new business model. I don't think they are the least bit concerned about anyone's privacy.
I am amazed that a lot of you are actually supporting this. If the SN's bother you, you have several choices: buy a PII, buy a clone, buy a Mac, boycott, etc. All Arizona is doing is taking away from users and manufacturers the right to choose what products they are goiing to buy and sell. It is a horrendous violation of Intel's right to make any damn chip it wants.
I'm not sure that this is necessarily a bad thing, and it certainly is not something the government should be involved in. The fact is that every time Microsoft pumps up its earnings to improve its staock price, its stock proce is going to take a hit the next quarter when he stock price is low. It may not be an ideal situation, but I don't know if fraud is the right word for it.
Look at it this way: Who is hurt by it? Certainly the stockholders aren't hurt: their stock price is ultimately going to be the same, only this way there is less volatility. The only person I could see benfitting undfairly from this is insider traders, who have the real profit numbers and use them to make a profit on the stock market.
In any event, this is something that can be handled within Microsoft. If shareholders really don't like it, they can get Bill fired. I suspect, however, that they are happy with the job he's doing, cooked books or no.
I still don't see why the college kid has an unfair advantage, or what should be done about it. It may be true that college kids are willing to work for less money, but it seems to me that that simply means that the older worker is overpaid. Now I can sypathize with him, and I'm sure his family is important, but his company pays him because he does valuable work, not because he has a family to support. So although it is certainly tragic when the older worker is laid off, it would be equally unfair to force the college kid not to enter the field, or to subsidize him, or just about any other remedy I can think of.
.edu address & get in the real world, your perspective will change."
About going back to school, there are lots of options besides going back to a full-time, four year college. There are night classes, there are self-taught programs, there are web sites, tutorials, textbooks, and so forth. And probably the best way to keep your skills up to date is to make sure that you are doing something that is new and interesting. That way you are learning new skills and getting payed for it.
I guess my point is that life has problems, but the world is not coming to an end, and our families are not all about to starve. Making living takes more than showing up for work 8 hours a day. It means making sure that you are earning your paycheck, and that therefore your employer will not want to lay you off. If that includes putting in an extra few hours to learn new skills or changing jobs to keep your skills fresh, so be it. How you manage to support yourself and your family is and should be your responsibility. No one else should be forced to do it for you.
About the poor worker, I am maybe a bit naive about how hard it is to move up in the world. But I have barely more than a high school deploma, and I can already get a job for $8/hour without too much trouble. For a single person working 60 hours a week, that is $25k/year, which is plenty to support oneself on. So you can easily save $1000 over the course of a year or two.
Obviously, once you have a family, $25k is not so much money, but even then you often have both parents working, in which case you can still save some. And a couple who has trouble making ends meet should maybe work on getting a better job before having kids. Obviously that doesn't happen sometimes, but still, I think it is true that many poor people have the opportunity to improve their conditions if they work at it.
As for using skills once one has them, it is certainly true that no one is going to get a high-paying IT job on the strength of having read a Java book, but, for example, they can set up a web site to show off their skills, and/or get a simple data-entry job or something. The point is that with a little perseverence one can get a job in the IT field without a 4-year degree.
"Once you loose that
I realize that it might. I hope it doesn't.
Most of that 4% is what is called "structural unemployment:" people who are between jobs, seasonal employment, people who just graduated, etc. If you look at the number of people who are looking for jobs and actually can't find them, that number is much lower.
Leftists have been saying this crap since the Industrial Revolution. They have always told us that workers are "alienated" from their jobs, that we are pawns of the "super-rich," that corporations are "inhuman" and so forth.
This article is the result of a monolithic view of the American workplace, what Drew Carey calls the "Shiity Jobs" phenomenon. There's all this nostalgia for the fifties, when `everyone had 9-5 jobs pushing papers from the right side of their desks to the left.
It is particularily ludicrous to bemoan early retirement as some kind of inhumane punishment. If a corporation lays you off, you are free to seek another job. If you cannot get one, perhaps you should go back to school, and develop your skills. Companies in today's economy cannot afford to pass up skilled workers, no matter what their skills. This gives skilled workers an enourmous amount of freedom.
Even the poor can move up in the world faster than they ever could before. For 1000 bucks, one can buy a computer and some books, and learn Java, html, or whatever, and get a job doing IT stuff. Never before has knowledge been so cheap and readily accessable.
Lucas did an excellent job of killing off all the bad guys in last movie: Vader, the emporer, Jabba, even Bobba Fett is dead.
He would have to make up an entirely new story line, which would be rather anticlimatic.
No one ever said the Mac OS was a good server OS. There's more to an OS than stability and power. If you want a rock-solid server, Linux is a good choice. But the Mac OS is still way ahead of the alternatives in consistency, intuitiveness, and seamless integration. Only on a Mac can you plug in a peripheral with a reasonable expectation of it working right without fooling around with configuration files. So if you want to get work done with minimal hassle, the Mac OS is still the best choice in many areas.
Besides, many of the Linux boxes were probably Macs running LinuxPPC, and Mac OS X will make the Mac far more stable and powerful, making it a competitive server OS.