I didn't need to. Or did you think the original post was about reverse-engineering under Windows? I suppose it could be read that way, but it seems clear to me.
You claimed that Microsoft changes the file format so it can sell more copies of Office. Now, since Office is only sold on Windows and Macintosh, only users of those platforms are potential customers. So how does changing the file format increase their bottom line among other platforms? It doesn't.
If you are claiming that they do it to prevent reverse-engineering, fine. But that's a different claim than saying they do it to sell more copies of Office.
He was advocating that the government step in and *mandate* that all standards that are used be open.
wrong. the poster was advocating that intermachine protocols be open and standardized.
Is there an echo? I thought that's what I just said.
If you're saying you like open standards but don't think the government should be involved, then I agree wholeheartedly. But the original poster went further than this and said that if necessary the government should require that protocols be open.
You can't have it both ways. Either the government mandates open standards or companies are free to have closed standards. Which is it?
You never called me poopy-pants, but you repeatedly say things like "people of your ilk," "people like you," "no reasonable person," "no thinking person," etc, implying that I am a member of a group of unreasonable, unthinking, and uninformed people. The fact that in this case I'm making a similar argument to a certain group of people does not mean I share all of their views. And the fact that I disagree with you does not make me stupid, uninformed, twisted, or evil.
binarybits' version of history : Microsoft created the PC.
Microsoft was largely responsible for making the PC a relatively open system. They could have chosen to liscense DOS and later Windows to just one linsencee, or a few as Apple did. They chose instead to liscence it to all comers.
Oh, the FCC can't "yank your license" if you say something they don't like. First of all, someone has to complain, and second, the speech must fall under a very small set of specific rules; for example, espousing the murder of an individual.
Sure there are rules. And they can be changed by unelected bureaucrats to fit the goals of whoever happens to be in charge. And even if they can't yank your liscence on the spot, they can certainly deny you renewal of your liscence, which has the same effect.
no thinking person can read the story, and the post, and not understand what the comment meant. you are taking it entirely out of context, and literally pissing on all the people who use RFC to insure all our computers can talk together.
Does the government require anyone to adhere to RFC's? No, I didn't think so. So my defending the system we have right now is pissing on that system? You are proposing that at least some companies be required by law to publish the protocols used in their products. Now that means that there is going to have to be a law written, that that law is going to be enforced by a government agency, and that a punishment will be imposed on those who don't obey that agency. You have not made it clear which protocols will be subject to this regulation, so I can't comment on specifically how it will work, but that nonetheless seems to be what you are proposing.
The important questions of who you would subject to this legislation, how it would be enforced, and what the punishments would be for non-compliance have not been addressed, so there isn't much more to say.
Either the government will regulate protocols, or it won't. If it won't then your previous suggestion that Microsoft be forced to open up its protocols contradicts this. If it will, then you need to be more specific.
Anyway, I'm probably not going to continue this thread, because you clearly don't consider me and "my ilk" intelligent enough to take seriously. Let me know when you're interested in having a serious discussion rather than heaping scorn on those who disagree with you.
Just from a raw word-count, it appears that about two-thirds of your post is spent calling me names. I don't care too much about being called names but I think it says something about your ability to discuss issues in mature manner. The fact that I disagree with you does not make me stupid, ignorant, uninformed, in the pay of corporations, or evil. This is what we call an ad hominim attack and is universally recognized to be a debating fallacy.
You say you want to force open standards. The means you want to make it *illegal* to write any code that uses a closed protocol. How far do you want that to go? If I write an application that I just use in-house, will the government break down my door and tell me to publish a spec? How about if I give it away for free on the internet? Will the Feds force me to take down my FTP server until I publish specs? How about if it's shareware? Or if I'm a small startup, will it force me to stop selling my product until I've documented every protocol my products uses?
Clearly it would be ridiculous to require every standard to be open. Publishing a spec (and sticking to it) costs time and money. Forcing every trivial app that does networking to do so would impose millions of dollars in unneeded costs. Filling out the necessary paperwork to prove that you've got an open standard would be even worse.
So assuming that you don't really want every standard to be forced open, then what criteria will you use? If history is any guide, such a law would be used to harrass competitors and keep out new entrants, just as the FDA does not for pharmacueticals. There would be an increasingly complex bureaucracy that you'd have to go through to prove that your protocol was sufficiently open. Eventually, getting this approval would consume much of the resources of small startups, to the point where many of them would be unable to compete. Don't believe me? Look at the pharmacuetical industry, which is dominated by a handful of big firms and spends most of its resources getting FDA approval for its products.
Your attempt to equate standards exclusively with the government is absurd. The computer industry is full of standards that were created with no help from the government-- Unix, FireWire, USB, SCSI, IDE, ADB, etc. All of these are open or semi-open. And if you don't think open standards can exist in a free market, how do you explain the success of TCP/IP and the failure of more closed networking protocols? Yes, TCP/IP was created by the government, but no one was forced to use it.
The fact is that in the long run the free market encourages open standards and common protocols. No government intervention is necessary. Corporations who refuse to abide by the standards process lose respect in the eyes of geeks, who take their business elsewhere. This largely explains the success of companies like IBM and Sun who are freindly to open systems. Microsoft has been losing market share in the server space precisely because sysadmins like open standards and will go out of their way to avoid products that don't have them.
And please cut the condescending "I'm smarter than you are" crap. You have an opinion. You think your opinion is right. Fine, so tell us why your opinion is right. Use arguments and persuasion, not insults. "If you weren't such an ignoramous you'd understand" is not an argument, and it won't convince anyone older than 12 years old.
The previous poster was not simply advocating standards. He was advocating that the government step in and *mandate* that all standards that are used be open. In other words, he wanted to *ban* closed standards.
The current hodge-podge of open and closed standard we have today works pretty well. The issue is not whether standards are good or bad, nor whether good things can come out of government. The issue is whether in the long run government do a better job of promoting open systems and common standards. I don't think they will. Free markets have plenty of mechanisms to encourage open standards, and they're going to work much better than government mandates in getting people to use them.
If Netscape had invented HTML, or Apple could patent the very idea of a GUI?
Well, Netscape practically invented HTML. No, they didn't invent the concept, but they added so many non-standard tags that what is now accepted as HTML is largely a result of Netscape's design choices. Had HTML not existed, I think it's all but certain that some company would have invented it.
Another example is ICQ. It's newness from a technological standpoint is dubious, but it's clearly a useful innovation that adds new functionality to the net. The ICQ protocol has been backwards-engineered and half a dozen ICQ clones have been written. The same would have happened had Netscape invented HTML.
As for Apple patenting the GUI, that's an example of patent law run amock, not a problem with corporations or capitalism per se. Our patent system needs a lot of work, but that's a separate issue from whether we can get along without government research.
Sun could learn a lot from them with regards to Java.
That's true, but it's still a pretty open system. The spec for Java is freely available, and anyone who wants to could write his own version from scratch. GPL fanatics might not like it, but I don't see that Sun's shenanigans do much damage to Java's usefullness. Java's still a damn useful innovation that was invented pretty much for free by Sun. That's cheaper than any government research ever done.:)
When they ported Office to MacOS, they either did a really sloppy job of porting it or they made sure it had far inferior performance compared to the native (Intel) version.
You've got it backwards. Most of the apps that make up the Office package started on the Mac before Windows even existed and were ported to Windows later. They are still largely separate products-- Office 98 (which is the Mac version) has features Office 97 (the PC version) doesn't.
Could it be that Microsoft is up to their old tricks again? You know, the embrace, extend, extinguish business model?
Considering that they've been writing for the Mac for 15 years, this is hardly a sinister development. And the decision to keep a Mac version was a huge boost for the platform-- in fact it may very well have saved the platform at a point where market share was dwindling and several major developers were on the verge of bailing.
Funny, these are all governments. That's not a coincidence. It's also not a coincidence that government regulation of the airwaves and cable has lead to restricted freedom of speech and less diversity than would otherwise exist. If you say something on the air that the FCC doesn't like, they can yank your liscence.
Re:more closed systems?? (Score:3) by small_dick (small_dick@threeinches.FAKE_ADDRESS.org) on Friday June 16, @10:53PM EST (#97) (User Info) geez...i can't believe you slept through BOTH your history classes and your philosophy classes...
anyway, when you control the medium, you control the content. that's history. soviet union, china, nazi germany...in fact, that's why we have laws (strong laws) controling who controls how mauch bandwidth, particularly in radio and tv.
it makes it much easier for people/companies to compete when you have standards. that is, someone can't take over networking by coming up with some oddball networking standard
People come up with oddball standards and try to take over with them all the time. It never works. Why? Because closed standards stifle innovation and in the long run it smothers the market for whatever you were trying to sell in the first place. Ironically, Microsoft is a good example of this. The reason that the PC beat the Mac is primarily that the PC was an open, commodity-based hardware system while Apple tried to keep their platform closed. Despite clear technical advantages, most people chose the PC for its lower costs, wider range of options, and better competitive environment.
Similarly, Microsoft's beating of OS/2 was largely because they were much more aggressive in getting just about anybody to develop for them. They published a standard (Windows) and went out and aggressively promoted that standard. IBM kept their platform relatively expensive to developers, and they lost.
I'm taking about between machines -- a natural place for standards. they are often placed in this position.
So standards are good. So what? That tells us nothing about whether government regulations help to develop open standards or simply entrench whatever happens to meet the government's favor. There is a long, long history of government regulations stifling innovation.
And if you think Bill Gates has an unfair advantage now, wait until you see how much leverage $50 billion worth of lobbyists can give him. Do you really think a government body overseeing common standards would be unaffected by industry pressure? How do you know this industry body won't declare the Win32 API's as the only legitimate OS API and make us all write to that?
The rest of your post is a string of irrelevant ad homs and weak "philosophical" ramblings. I'm not going to waste my time responding to it.
If Apple does their job right, there will be only one user interface. Users will be unable to tell which API each app is working. What there will be is 3 API's, meaning developers will see three different interfaces. But the user shouldn't have to know anything about them.
one of which is Carbon and provides legacy compatibility for all the thousands of MacOS apps out there now.
Not so. Off-the-shelf Mac software that exists now will not run in Carbon. You are thinking of Classic, which is the compatibility box. Carbon is a stripped down subset of the current Mac OS API's that provide a gentle migration path to the new OS. But it does require rewriting some code and it does require a recompile.
This is the API MS is using; their code won't take advantage of any of the two newer APIs in the OS.
If they are using Carbon for this realease (and odds are they are) then it will have access to new OS features. This was the whole point of Carbon-- to strip out those functions that prevented apps being reentrant, multi-threadable, memory-protected, etc. Apple is planning on providing API's to access most if not all new OS features through Carbon.
There is only one other API (not counting Java), and that's Coacoa. Coacoa is a Next-derived, object-oriented API designed for new apps.
I don't think you've got the relationship between carbon, aqua, and apps quite right. Carbon is a comprehensive set of API's designed to ease the transition for existing Mac apps. Carbon apps are fully buzzword-compliant and get all the benefits of the modern OS internals-- preemptive multitasking, modern memory management, SMP thread support, etc.
Aqua is just Apple's name for the look and feel of its GUI. It is not an API. Apps don't write to Aqua. They write to Carbon, and then Carbon causes your app to look Aqua-ish.
Carbon is also not the only available API. There are three major API's. (4 if you count Java) Carbon is one of them. The second is Classic, which is pretty much the existing Mac OS running inside protected memory. It will allow execution of existing Mac OS binaries. The third API is Coacoa, which is the brand new, NeXT derived, object oriented API designed for new apps. It is built around ObjC and is said to allow rapid development and highly abstract code.
So no one ports anything to Aqua. They port to Carbon and Coacoa. Aqua is just how they look when they've done this.
Office will use the higher-level API's extensively, because this is a Macintosh application, and it therefore needs to make use of Mac GUI routines, Apple Events, aqua, etc. I don't think it's possible to make an "all darwin" app for the Mac that follows the rules for the same reason you can't (easily) make a Linux GUI app without making calls to X.
The upshot is that porting Office to Mac OS X will do little if any good in efforts to port Office to other unices. The fact that it has a similar core does you no good if your code makes most of its calls to higher-level API's that are not supported on other platforms. You'd have to implement Carbon and Aqua on top of Darwin before you'd have any chance of running Office on it.
There are two ways to get research done: let a monopolistic behemoth bribe some academicians to work for them, so that the corporation can patent their ideas. Bell Labs, Microsoft Research, IBM. This is very expensive, because first you pay for the research when you buy their products, then you really pay for their research when you buy the exorbitantly priced patented product. The other way to get research done is to pay a smart kid to go to grad school. This is how all but a handful of the major advances in CS have been accomplished, and why they were all public domain until the patent-craze started a few years ago. (The other reason most advances are public domain is that patented ideas are quickly superceded by public ones.)
I don't see such a stark dichotomy. A lot of really cool technologies have been invented by corporations. A lot have also been invented by government researchers.
It's hard to know what the world would be like without those government researchers because the government sticks it's thumb in every pie, so it's not surprising that it comes up with a few plums. The fact that with enough money the government can invent things doesn't prove that the private sector couldn't have done the same.
I find it hard to believe that TCP/IP or its equivalent wouldn't exist now without the government. It might have taken a few more years for the technology to become available to make it profitable, but it's not that hard of a problem, and there's plenty of profit in it. You're dead wrong about nothing significant coming out of corporations. I believe that Unix, ethernet, GUI's, most modern programming languages, firewire, USB, IDE, SCSI, and probably dozens of other innovations have come out of the private sector. Many of these were developed almost entirely by private corporations, and most of them are open standards today. The simple fact is that competitive forces give an advantage to companies that use open standards rather than closed ones. Observe the Linux bandwagon. I'd also argue that's why the largely inferior PC platform beat out the Mac in the marketplace: it ran on commodity hardware and didn't have a single monolithic company stifling innovation as with Apple.
As for patents, that's an issue of bad patent law and special-interest pandering by the government, not a problem with the free market. And even if the internet had been patented in 1970, it would be in the public domain in 1984 (I think) and so it would be an open standard for the use of anyone today. The same is true of many other innovations: their inventors get monopoly profits on them for a few years, and then they pass into the public domain where they benefit the public at large. It may very well be that patents should be for shorter time periods, but that's again a problem with government policy rather than capitalism per se.
In addition, corporations tend to take interesting technologies and make them useful. Arpanet might have been cool tech, but it wasn't useful to the masses until the Netscapes and Microsofts of the world that made it readily available to the masses.
As for the space program improving specific products, I see this as simply a reflection of the enourmous amounts of money spent rather than on any intrinsic superiority of government financing. Had the government not spent that money the private sector may very well have invented things that were just as good if not better than the things NASA invented. Or maybe it wouldn't have been, but the fact that good things came from NASA programs doesn't prove that that was the best use for the money.
The hole is the idea that it is possible for a company to get a coercive monopoly in a free market, i.e. that a company can keep a high market share in the long run without keeping its customers happy. It's never happened, and there's a strong argument to be made that it never will. The specific economic reasons would take a complete post on their own.
The Cato institute makes the case against "predatory pricing" laws here. Similar arguments can be made concerning other aspects of Microsoft's actions, such as "tying" and "price gouging" as Microsoft is accused of doing.
The idea that a company can be so big that no competitor can topple it is just flat out wrong. As long as they don't have help from the government in keeping their monopoly, Microsoft can only keep competitors at bay by continuing to meet their customers' needs. In short, antitrust laws are unnecessary and should be repealed.
But we all know that luck and trechery beat out hard work and skill any day of the year. It isn't hard at all to see where Microsoft was unbelievably lucky (MS-DOS), and the trecherous part is what antitrust seeks to stop.
Sure, Microsoft got lucky. So what? They will get unlucky in the future. The key point is that Microsoft saw the opportunity and siezed it. You can't say that Microsoft's current dominance of the industry is due soley to stupidity on IBM's part 20 years ago. Microsoft has had several worthy competitors over the years, notably Apple and IBM (with OS/2.) It is hardly "luck" that allowed them to come out on top.
As for "treachery," my take on things is a little different. I don't think it should be illegal for Microsoft to use its success in one area to promote a product in another. Windows gives Microsoft an advantage in the marketplace, but it's not an insurmountable advantage. And if they use that dominance to push crappy products, they will eventually lose their position.
So "everybody" does not know that Microsoft's position is due to "luck and treachery." Yes, Microsoft has done some sleazy things, and yes, they are a fierce competitor. But they also give customers what they want, and they do it better than any of the competitors. They have innovated aggressively, adding new features, cutting costs, and improving their customers' experiences. They also used some aggressive business tactics, but all the aggressive business tactics in the world won't keep you customers if you don't meet their needs.
There is another type that I can think of: those people whose jobs depend on Microsoft products. Given that you don't know what the difference between NT server and NT workstation is (and thus how that relates to IIS), that you don't know how and why Direct3D got so popular, and that you don't know how much Internet Explorer costs, I think you are uninformed.
Fine, so enlighten me. The fact that I work primarily with the products of Microsoft's competitors makes my opinion irrelevant? This issue is fundamentally about economics, not technology.
And for the record, my job doesn't depend on Microsoft products either. I do most of my work on Unix, and pretty much the only apps I run on NT boxen are xterms and web browsers.
If you accept that there can be some anticompetitve actions taken by companies which are excusable
I reject the concept of "Anticompetitive actions." The only anticompetitive actions are those that involve coercion. And only the government is allowed to coerce and get away with it. Therefore, only the government can engage in anti-competitive actions without violating (non-antitrust) laws.
Companies only like "free markets" as long as they can enter the market freely to make money. Otherwise, they hate free markets. They would much rather be the sole producer of any given product. Then they wouldn't have to work so hard to make money. Companies would much rather sell us their excrement (literally!) than have to work hard to make good products. Competition ensures hard work and innovation, and companies can not be expected to play fair to ensure that competition exists.
Only with government help can a company permanently eliminate all competitors. As long as there are no government-imposed barriers to entry, a company must continue to satisfy its customers or they will go elsewhere.
Even without antitrust law, Microsoft is far from invincible. If they were to stop improving their products, Unix-based machines would eat into NT's market share, and Mac OS would take desktop market share. And if Microsoft stopped developing their product, it is likely that startups like Be or Red Hat would be able to gain a toehold. Once an alternative OS for the desktop has a sizable market share, it'll be all but impossible to eradicate it. Hell, Be is still being developed despite the fact that almost no one uses it. And Linux will continue to be developed no matter what happens in the marketplace. Even the mighty Microsoft must keep up with competitors to avoid losing their market dominance.
If you ask almost any moderately intelligent and well-informed member of the public what the difference between NT server and NT workstation is
Not a hell of a lot from a technical standpoint. Server is more expensive and is required to run the industrial-strength versions of Microsoft server products. I don't know what the exact technical differences are, but the core code is the same.
how and why Direct3D became so popular
Here I have no idea. I avoid Microsoft products, so I've never used Direct3D.
how much Internet Explorer *really* costs
$0. If you are implying that you pay for it through Windows, that might be true for those who choose to use Windows. Those of us who use Macs get it absolutely free. Even still, Windows costs about the same today as it did before IE was released so it can't be much.
I think that it is impossible to support Microsoft if you are concerned about the future of computing and computer science as science, regardless of your intelligence or how well-informed you are.
This is the kind of smug self-assuredness that annoys me about the typical slashdot crowd. There are a goodly number of intelligent, well informed individuals who support Microsoft's right to change their product however they want, and sell it to whomever they want on whatever terms they choose to set. I'm one of them.
I support Microsoft primarily for economic and political reasons. The theory surrounding antitrust is full of holes, and this country would be better off without antitrust laws at all. Antitrust as currently written is vague, overly broad, and basically makes every corporation with a large market share in violation of the law. This makes any successful company a target of potential lawsuits, which envious competitors use to beat in the courtroom those who they couldn't beat in the marketplace.
It is no accident that Sun, Netscape, and Oracle-- three of Microsoft's biggest competitors-- are actively supporting this case. I think this is a clear case of competitors using antitrust law as a club against more able competitors.
Has Microsoft done some sleazy things? Yes. Have they done some things that doeserve punishment? Possibly. Should they be punished for having a large market share and using that to promote their other products? Absolutely not.
I can certainly understand that intelligent people can disagree with me. I am extremely annoyed, however, that the reverse is not true. There is a near-universal assumption that anyone who opposes the dominant anti-Microsoft view is either woefully misinformed or in the pay of the Evil Empire.
For the record, I've never paid Microsoft a penny for its products, own no Microsoft stock, and have never been paid by them. I simply believe in the value of free markets and the right of producers to keep the fruits of their labors. I believe this right is being massively violated in this case.
Apple did a whole lot more than stick a "$500 GUI" on top of standard BSD. There's a lot more to an OS than its kernel. Apple has not only written a complete, polished GUI, but has written dozens of other features into their OS. Just off the top of my head:
OS-level XML parsing, and support for XML-based config files in all apps. Along with this goes their NeXT-derived bundles model, which allows large apps to appear as a single file to users, and will eventually allow for a single bundle to be targeted at multiple languages and multiple platforms.
A brand-new graphics model that goes beyond bit-mapped graphics toward vector based, devise independent graphics. This has a lot of advantages. In addition to making things look gorgeous and making developers' lives easier, it will simplify the writing of printer drivers and ensure true WYSIWYG accross all applications thanks to the common PDF-based graphics format.
A complete suite of graphical control panels and configuration tools that will allow semi-newbies to configure their machines the way the current Mac OS does. (and current Unices for the most part don't do this)
A brand new set of API's for writing device drivers that I've heard has a lot of innovations not present on other platforms.
Classic, which allows existing Mac OS apps to run in OS X without modification
Carbon, which allows an easy migration path for developers from the existing API to the new.
Coacoa, the NeXT-derived object-oriented, rapid-development API designed for new apps.
First-class Java 2 support
I suspect there are dozens of additional features that I haven't been able to think up, and there are undoubtedly additional features that have not yet been announced. Now, you want to tell me that all of the above features are part of porting the code from x86?
Sheesh. Maybe you should learn about a product before you complain about it.
Except that the Supreme Court is a lot more neutral (or conservative, depending on your perspective) than Judge Jackson, and so are going to be far more likely to give Microsoft's arguments a serious hearing. I've read that the appeals court has consistently slapped Jackson down, so if it goes to them it's not likely to stand. I don't know what the Supreme Court's exact leanings are.
It was clear from the start that Judge Jackson was out to get Microsoft, so they've been planning for the appeal for most of the trial. All those high-paid lawyers have got to be good for something, so you can bet they're not going to raise the white flag anytime soon.
Except that the case for free markets isn't based solely on the theoretical writings of Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, or anyone else. There's a large and growing body of both empirical and theoretical evidence that in most cases markets work and regulations don't.
The telecom industry is one of the most over-regulated industries around, so its problems can hardly be called failures of the market.
I agree that the current laws make the current situation more complex. But my point is that the problem is the laws that give AT&T and others monopolies in the first place. That doesn't absolve AT&T of wrongdoing, but I also don't think AT&T is the main problem. The same problems would exist if another company were in the same position.
These two monopolies continue to exist because AT&T has consistently played games with the legislation (in the courts, you see).
In other words, the monopolies are created by the government. And therefore the solution is to repeal those laws that created those monopolies.
They open up their end, they can break into the local cable markets, and the regulation can go away because there'll be no need for it.
Except that that's never what happens. The courts and regulators are a lousy replacement for market forces. If AT&T played nice, there might be a couple of firms in a given market instead of one, but that still severely limits consumer choice. This is why I don't care about the specifics of the law as it exists now. I object to the fact that there exists laws that determine who is allowed to provide telecom services. I think anyone who meets certain simple requirement should be allowed to string wires to the houses of willing customers, and they should be free to send whatever data they want on them.
More government regulation moves us in the opposite direction. It might manage to shift the monopolies around, and it might even give consumers some limited choices. But it's not a substitute for a free market in telecom services.
I don't have any connection to AT&T. This kind of ad hom is not appropriate in a serious discussion. You clearly are "questioning my motives," or you wouldn't have brought it up.
I consider AT&T neither an aggressor nor a victim. They're simply working to make money like anyone else. I'm more interested in the broader point, which is that the reason the industry is monopolized in the first place is that the government made it that way. AT&T lobbied to have it that way early in the twenties, to avoid competition from upstart competitors. As a result, we haven't had a truly free market in local service since them.
In light of that, I'm neither defending AT&T nor attacking local telcos. I'm attacking the regulatory regime that gave both the local monopolies and AT&T the power they have in the first place. My point is that as long as the industry remains monopolized by law, no amount of regulation is going to bring back effective competition. It is precisely your "existing regulations" that I'm objecting to. I don't really care about the specific legalisms surrounding this particular issue, because I don't consider them too important. Without a free market in telco service, service is going to suck. Limiting how much of the market a particular company can have will not improve customer service or save consumers money.
I don't know why they aren't, but they don't seem to be. As far as I know, you have only one choice in Minnesota-- US West. I suspect that's the result of regulation, since I can't think of any other reason why they they wouldn't be trying to expand into neighboring markets. I suppose it's possible that some of them are colluding to keep prices up, but that in itself is a function of the fact that they know no new competitors can enter the market.
The municipalities would continue doing things the same way without some sort of prodding from the Feds. These big companies buy and sell congressmen every day, you think they don't have local reps in their pocket?
Well, sure, this isn't going to be easy. But I think the first step is to recognize that that's the problem. If the system is so corrupt that we can't get genuine deregulation, then further regulation is only going to get perverted by the same forces.
What is needed I think is a citizen action group aimed specifically at repealing laws that restrict competition in telecom services. Only concerted citizen pressure will work, I think.
The problem with groups like the "stop AT&T" organization is that they seem to misunderstand the problem. I don't really care if AT&T has 20% or 40% of the cable market, since in each local market there is only one choice. I'd be perfectly happy with a market in which AT&T owns the majority of outlets if most local markets had an alternative. It's the fact that local alternatives are prohibited by law that makes AT&T such a threat. Regulating AT&T's holdings will only allow someone else to monopolize some of those outlets, which is hardly an improvement.
So what did the breakup of AT&T do good for, if we allow all of the parts to merge back together?
Um, I don't think that Media One was ever part of Ma Bell. The regional Bells are still separate.
Besides, the problem with AT&T was always that they were a government-granted monopoly. This has not changed, they have just been split up into a bunch of regional monopolies. What needs to happen is for the local telcos (and cable) to be deregulated and a uniform system developed whereby several firms can lay fiber to any given price. This competition will improve service and lower prices.
As long as the government discourages or prohibits competition as it does in cable and local telephone service, service will always suck and prices will always be high. We need free markets and competition.
I don't know about the situation in Britain, but I know in most US cities the cable monopolies are granted by local governments. You have to ask the city's permission to install cable lines, and once one company has been given that permission, it's awfully hard for a second one to compete.
As is usually the case, this monopoly is caused by the government. What is needed is a more open system of granting permission to string cables through the ground.
On a Mac, the same thing can be accomplished with a control-click. This takes less than a second, since you typically have one hand on the keyboard and the control key is right in the corner. More importantly, Mac apps keep all relevant menu options in the menu bar, so you would click on Network Neighborhood, go to the menu bar, and select "properties." Yes, it takes a tad longer, but it also is less obscure and more consistent. And this "properties" trick is hardly the most obvious or intuitive place to put configurations options in the first place. Control panels are better IMHO.
That means you do not get (EVER) the right to pollute that water or consume it simply because it crosses your property boundaries.
This is why I suggested fishing rights rather than simple ownership of the water. In order to pollute a river, you'd need to get the permission of the holders of all fishing rights downstream of you. Since this would be quite expensive, it would discourage pollution.
The air over your land is not yours. It knows NO boundaries. You do not get to pollute it since that crap drifts downwind into MY airspace. You don't own the air.
You seem to have not read my proposal. I didn't say we'd own the air over our land property. I suggested a system of pollution credits which would entitle one to pollute a certain amount of a certain pollutant. The total amount of these credits would be decided ahead of time by Congress. This would lead to less pollution than we have now at a much lower cost to the economy.
You do not own wildlife. They exist entirely independently of you and require more than your peice of property in order to survive...and survival is their natural right and OUR necessity.
This depends on how big a piece of property I have. No, my 1-acre plot won't be able to support much wildlife, but private conservation groups, for-profit parks, loggers, and other landowners will own bigger chunks of wilderness and will be quite capable of caring for wildlife. And if that's not sufficient to maintain the wildlife population (I think it will be) a much better strategy than the endangered species act would be to pay a fixed bounty for every animal you have living on your land. This makes caring for animals economical.
If every bit of wilderness or openspace or habitat were privately owned, all that land WOULD be subdivided into lots and sold for cash for the sake of condos and office buildings, etc.
Nonesense. This completely flies in the face of what really happens. Residential use is a small proportion of even private land use today. This would continue to be true under private management. In fact, it is government that is short-sighted and private landowners that tend to think about long-term consequences. This is because government officials get elected for 2 or 4-year terms, and bureoucrats are essentially impossible to fire. That means if government allows resources to be squandered as it has done repeatedly, no one is punished for it. On the other hand, private owners of land see a drop in their land value if they treat it wastefully. Therefore, people have a strong incentive to use their land wisely.
Nay, your proposal presupposes that people are rational when, by and large they are NOT.
Actually it doesn't. It presumes only that they are self-interested. Indeed, it is the current government-run regime that has lead to over-grazing of pastures, excessive clear-cutting, high costs to the economy, and other problems. My plan assumes only that people value the long-term value of their property. If they don't, the will lose their shirts and be forced to sell their land to another landowner. The market will punish waste and encourage conservation.
The whole point of the free market is to provide good incentives for people to use resources wisely. This is clearly true in economic issues, and it is no less true in environmental ones. The government has had a lousy record of environmental protection, and no wonder-- they are more interested in the next election than in the long-term health of the plantt. They are therefore happy to allow corporations to cause damage to the environment in exchange for campaign donations. Private owners, on the other hand, have to worry about the resale value of their land. This means that it would be stupid for them to dump garbage on it, clear-cut it, over-graze it, or otherwise lower its value. So land gets protected.
It's amazing the outpouring of ignorance that appears whenever economics and free markets are discussed.
The problem with the capitalism we had 50 years ago was that it didn't create property rights in environmental resources. Companies were allowed to pollute the air and water, to use government land for clear-cutting and over-grazing, and generally had no incentive to protect environmental resources.
The solution is simple. First, publicly held lands not required for the operations of government should be sold to private owners. Second, property rights in lakes and rivers need to be established. One way to do this would be to grant separate fishing rights and recreational rights to rivers and lakes, while leaving people free to travel on those waterways. Thirdly, laws granting the government immunity for its environmental misdeeds need to be repealed. Much of the environmental problems in this country were created by government. For example, many military bases have been polluted extensively.
As for air pollution, I propose the following: the government should auction off vouchers giving the bearer the right to pollute a fixed amount of a given pollutant each year. These vouchers would be transferable. The amount of these vouchers could be set initially at the amount of pollution occuring currently.
Anyone who didn't have a voucher would be required to either get one or stop polluting altogether. The result would be a vibrant market polluting credits, and the cost of these credits would drop over time as companies found ways of producing without pollution. As the price dropped, these vouchers could be bought back by the government or private conservation groups. The result would be less pollution than we have now at far lower cost to the economy. The EPA could be eliminated entirely.
Capitalism is all about efficient allocation of resources. So is environmentalism. The problem is not a fundamental conflict between the two, but a poor implementation of property rights in environmental resources, thereby leading to those resources being poorly allocated. A truly free market in environmental resources will lead to these being used more efficiently and at far lower cost, benefiting both the environment and the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't need to. Or did you think the original post was about reverse-engineering under Windows? I suppose it could be read that way, but it seems clear to me.
You claimed that Microsoft changes the file format so it can sell more copies of Office. Now, since Office is only sold on Windows and Macintosh, only users of those platforms are potential customers. So how does changing the file format increase their bottom line among other platforms? It doesn't.
If you are claiming that they do it to prevent reverse-engineering, fine. But that's a different claim than saying they do it to sell more copies of Office.
He was advocating that the government step in and *mandate* that all standards that are used be open.
wrong. the poster was advocating that intermachine protocols be open and standardized.
Is there an echo? I thought that's what I just said.
If you're saying you like open standards but don't think the government should be involved, then I agree wholeheartedly. But the original poster went further than this and said that if necessary the government should require that protocols be open.
You can't have it both ways. Either the government mandates open standards or companies are free to have closed standards. Which is it?
where did i call you a name?
You never called me poopy-pants, but you repeatedly say things like "people of your ilk," "people like you," "no reasonable person," "no thinking person," etc, implying that I am a member of a group of unreasonable, unthinking, and uninformed people. The fact that in this case I'm making a similar argument to a certain group of people does not mean I share all of their views. And the fact that I disagree with you does not make me stupid, uninformed, twisted, or evil.
binarybits' version of history : Microsoft created the PC.
Microsoft was largely responsible for making the PC a relatively open system. They could have chosen to liscense DOS and later Windows to just one linsencee, or a few as Apple did. They chose instead to liscence it to all comers.
Oh, the FCC can't "yank your license" if you say something they don't like. First of all, someone has to complain, and second, the speech must fall under a very small set of specific rules; for example, espousing the murder of an individual.
Sure there are rules. And they can be changed by unelected bureaucrats to fit the goals of whoever happens to be in charge. And even if they can't yank your liscence on the spot, they can certainly deny you renewal of your liscence, which has the same effect.
no thinking person can read the story, and the post, and not understand what the comment meant. you are taking it entirely out of context, and literally pissing on all the people who use RFC to insure all our computers can talk together.
Does the government require anyone to adhere to RFC's? No, I didn't think so. So my defending the system we have right now is pissing on that system? You are proposing that at least some companies be required by law to publish the protocols used in their products. Now that means that there is going to have to be a law written, that that law is going to be enforced by a government agency, and that a punishment will be imposed on those who don't obey that agency. You have not made it clear which protocols will be subject to this regulation, so I can't comment on specifically how it will work, but that nonetheless seems to be what you are proposing.
The important questions of who you would subject to this legislation, how it would be enforced, and what the punishments would be for non-compliance have not been addressed, so there isn't much more to say.
Either the government will regulate protocols, or it won't. If it won't then your previous suggestion that Microsoft be forced to open up its protocols contradicts this. If it will, then you need to be more specific.
Anyway, I'm probably not going to continue this thread, because you clearly don't consider me and "my ilk" intelligent enough to take seriously. Let me know when you're interested in having a serious discussion rather than heaping scorn on those who disagree with you.
Just from a raw word-count, it appears that about two-thirds of your post is spent calling me names. I don't care too much about being called names but I think it says something about your ability to discuss issues in mature manner. The fact that I disagree with you does not make me stupid, ignorant, uninformed, in the pay of corporations, or evil. This is what we call an ad hominim attack and is universally recognized to be a debating fallacy.
You say you want to force open standards. The means you want to make it *illegal* to write any code that uses a closed protocol. How far do you want that to go? If I write an application that I just use in-house, will the government break down my door and tell me to publish a spec? How about if I give it away for free on the internet? Will the Feds force me to take down my FTP server until I publish specs? How about if it's shareware? Or if I'm a small startup, will it force me to stop selling my product until I've documented every protocol my products uses?
Clearly it would be ridiculous to require every standard to be open. Publishing a spec (and sticking to it) costs time and money. Forcing every trivial app that does networking to do so would impose millions of dollars in unneeded costs. Filling out the necessary paperwork to prove that you've got an open standard would be even worse.
So assuming that you don't really want every standard to be forced open, then what criteria will you use? If history is any guide, such a law would be used to harrass competitors and keep out new entrants, just as the FDA does not for pharmacueticals. There would be an increasingly complex bureaucracy that you'd have to go through to prove that your protocol was sufficiently open. Eventually, getting this approval would consume much of the resources of small startups, to the point where many of them would be unable to compete. Don't believe me? Look at the pharmacuetical industry, which is dominated by a handful of big firms and spends most of its resources getting FDA approval for its products.
Your attempt to equate standards exclusively with the government is absurd. The computer industry is full of standards that were created with no help from the government-- Unix, FireWire, USB, SCSI, IDE, ADB, etc. All of these are open or semi-open. And if you don't think open standards can exist in a free market, how do you explain the success of TCP/IP and the failure of more closed networking protocols? Yes, TCP/IP was created by the government, but no one was forced to use it.
The fact is that in the long run the free market encourages open standards and common protocols. No government intervention is necessary. Corporations who refuse to abide by the standards process lose respect in the eyes of geeks, who take their business elsewhere. This largely explains the success of companies like IBM and Sun who are freindly to open systems. Microsoft has been losing market share in the server space precisely because sysadmins like open standards and will go out of their way to avoid products that don't have them.
And please cut the condescending "I'm smarter than you are" crap. You have an opinion. You think your opinion is right. Fine, so tell us why your opinion is right. Use arguments and persuasion, not insults. "If you weren't such an ignoramous you'd understand" is not an argument, and it won't convince anyone older than 12 years old.
The previous poster was not simply advocating standards. He was advocating that the government step in and *mandate* that all standards that are used be open. In other words, he wanted to *ban* closed standards.
The current hodge-podge of open and closed standard we have today works pretty well. The issue is not whether standards are good or bad, nor whether good things can come out of government. The issue is whether in the long run government do a better job of promoting open systems and common standards. I don't think they will. Free markets have plenty of mechanisms to encourage open standards, and they're going to work much better than government mandates in getting people to use them.
If Netscape had invented HTML, or Apple could patent the very idea of a GUI?
:)
Well, Netscape practically invented HTML. No, they didn't invent the concept, but they added so many non-standard tags that what is now accepted as HTML is largely a result of Netscape's design choices. Had HTML not existed, I think it's all but certain that some company would have invented it.
Another example is ICQ. It's newness from a technological standpoint is dubious, but it's clearly a useful innovation that adds new functionality to the net. The ICQ protocol has been backwards-engineered and half a dozen ICQ clones have been written. The same would have happened had Netscape invented HTML.
As for Apple patenting the GUI, that's an example of patent law run amock, not a problem with corporations or capitalism per se. Our patent system needs a lot of work, but that's a separate issue from whether we can get along without government research.
Sun could learn a lot from them with regards to Java.
That's true, but it's still a pretty open system. The spec for Java is freely available, and anyone who wants to could write his own version from scratch. GPL fanatics might not like it, but I don't see that Sun's shenanigans do much damage to Java's usefullness. Java's still a damn useful innovation that was invented pretty much for free by Sun. That's cheaper than any government research ever done.
When they ported Office to MacOS, they either did a really sloppy job of porting it or they made sure it had far inferior performance compared to the native (Intel) version.
You've got it backwards. Most of the apps that make up the Office package started on the Mac before Windows even existed and were ported to Windows later. They are still largely separate products-- Office 98 (which is the Mac version) has features Office 97 (the PC version) doesn't.
Could it be that Microsoft is up to their old tricks again? You know, the embrace, extend, extinguish business model?
Considering that they've been writing for the Mac for 15 years, this is hardly a sinister development. And the decision to keep a Mac version was a huge boost for the platform-- in fact it may very well have saved the platform at a point where market share was dwindling and several major developers were on the verge of bailing.
soviet union, china, nazi germany
Funny, these are all governments. That's not a coincidence. It's also not a coincidence that government regulation of the airwaves and cable has lead to restricted freedom of speech and less diversity than would otherwise exist. If you say something on the air that the FCC doesn't like, they can yank your liscence.
Re:more closed systems?? (Score:3)
by small_dick (small_dick@threeinches.FAKE_ADDRESS.org) on Friday June 16, @10:53PM EST (#97)
(User Info)
geez...i can't believe you slept through BOTH your history classes and your philosophy classes...
anyway, when you control the medium, you control the content. that's history. soviet union, china, nazi germany...in fact, that's why we have laws (strong laws) controling who controls how mauch bandwidth, particularly in radio and tv.
it makes it much easier for people/companies to compete when you have standards. that is, someone can't take over networking by coming up with some oddball networking standard
People come up with oddball standards and try to take over with them all the time. It never works. Why? Because closed standards stifle innovation and in the long run it smothers the market for whatever you were trying to sell in the first place. Ironically, Microsoft is a good example of this. The reason that the PC beat the Mac is primarily that the PC was an open, commodity-based hardware system while Apple tried to keep their platform closed. Despite clear technical advantages, most people chose the PC for its lower costs, wider range of options, and better competitive environment.
Similarly, Microsoft's beating of OS/2 was largely because they were much more aggressive in getting just about anybody to develop for them. They published a standard (Windows) and went out and aggressively promoted that standard. IBM kept their platform relatively expensive to developers, and they lost.
I'm taking about between machines -- a natural place for standards. they are often placed in this position.
So standards are good. So what? That tells us nothing about whether government regulations help to develop open standards or simply entrench whatever happens to meet the government's favor. There is a long, long history of government regulations stifling innovation.
And if you think Bill Gates has an unfair advantage now, wait until you see how much leverage $50 billion worth of lobbyists can give him. Do you really think a government body overseeing common standards would be unaffected by industry pressure? How do you know this industry body won't declare the Win32 API's as the only legitimate OS API and make us all write to that?
The rest of your post is a string of irrelevant ad homs and weak "philosophical" ramblings. I'm not going to waste my time responding to it.
MacOS X has three user interfaces
If Apple does their job right, there will be only one user interface. Users will be unable to tell which API each app is working. What there will be is 3 API's, meaning developers will see three different interfaces. But the user shouldn't have to know anything about them.
one of which is Carbon and provides legacy compatibility for all the thousands of MacOS apps out there now.
Not so. Off-the-shelf Mac software that exists now will not run in Carbon. You are thinking of Classic, which is the compatibility box. Carbon is a stripped down subset of the current Mac OS API's that provide a gentle migration path to the new OS. But it does require rewriting some code and it does require a recompile.
This is the API MS is using; their code won't take advantage of any of the two newer APIs in the OS.
If they are using Carbon for this realease (and odds are they are) then it will have access to new OS features. This was the whole point of Carbon-- to strip out those functions that prevented apps being reentrant, multi-threadable, memory-protected, etc. Apple is planning on providing API's to access most if not all new OS features through Carbon.
There is only one other API (not counting Java), and that's Coacoa. Coacoa is a Next-derived, object-oriented API designed for new apps.
I don't think you've got the relationship between carbon, aqua, and apps quite right. Carbon is a comprehensive set of API's designed to ease the transition for existing Mac apps. Carbon apps are fully buzzword-compliant and get all the benefits of the modern OS internals-- preemptive multitasking, modern memory management, SMP thread support, etc.
Aqua is just Apple's name for the look and feel of its GUI. It is not an API. Apps don't write to Aqua. They write to Carbon, and then Carbon causes your app to look Aqua-ish.
Carbon is also not the only available API. There are three major API's. (4 if you count Java) Carbon is one of them. The second is Classic, which is pretty much the existing Mac OS running inside protected memory. It will allow execution of existing Mac OS binaries. The third API is Coacoa, which is the brand new, NeXT derived, object oriented API designed for new apps. It is built around ObjC and is said to allow rapid development and highly abstract code.
So no one ports anything to Aqua. They port to Carbon and Coacoa. Aqua is just how they look when they've done this.
Office will use the higher-level API's extensively, because this is a Macintosh application, and it therefore needs to make use of Mac GUI routines, Apple Events, aqua, etc. I don't think it's possible to make an "all darwin" app for the Mac that follows the rules for the same reason you can't (easily) make a Linux GUI app without making calls to X.
The upshot is that porting Office to Mac OS X will do little if any good in efforts to port Office to other unices. The fact that it has a similar core does you no good if your code makes most of its calls to higher-level API's that are not supported on other platforms. You'd have to implement Carbon and Aqua on top of Darwin before you'd have any chance of running Office on it.
There are two ways to get research done: let a monopolistic behemoth bribe some academicians to work for them, so that the corporation can patent their ideas. Bell Labs, Microsoft Research, IBM. This is very expensive, because first you pay for the research when you buy their products, then you really pay for their research when you buy the exorbitantly priced patented product. The other way to get research done is to pay a smart kid to go to grad school. This is how all but a handful of the major advances in CS have been accomplished, and why they were all public domain until the patent-craze started a few years ago. (The other reason most advances are public domain is that patented ideas are quickly superceded by public ones.)
I don't see such a stark dichotomy. A lot of really cool technologies have been invented by corporations. A lot have also been invented by government researchers.
It's hard to know what the world would be like without those government researchers because the government sticks it's thumb in every pie, so it's not surprising that it comes up with a few plums. The fact that with enough money the government can invent things doesn't prove that the private sector couldn't have done the same.
I find it hard to believe that TCP/IP or its equivalent wouldn't exist now without the government. It might have taken a few more years for the technology to become available to make it profitable, but it's not that hard of a problem, and there's plenty of profit in it. You're dead wrong about nothing significant coming out of corporations. I believe that Unix, ethernet, GUI's, most modern programming languages, firewire, USB, IDE, SCSI, and probably dozens of other innovations have come out of the private sector. Many of these were developed almost entirely by private corporations, and most of them are open standards today. The simple fact is that competitive forces give an advantage to companies that use open standards rather than closed ones. Observe the Linux bandwagon. I'd also argue that's why the largely inferior PC platform beat out the Mac in the marketplace: it ran on commodity hardware and didn't have a single monolithic company stifling innovation as with Apple.
As for patents, that's an issue of bad patent law and special-interest pandering by the government, not a problem with the free market. And even if the internet had been patented in 1970, it would be in the public domain in 1984 (I think) and so it would be an open standard for the use of anyone today. The same is true of many other innovations: their inventors get monopoly profits on them for a few years, and then they pass into the public domain where they benefit the public at large. It may very well be that patents should be for shorter time periods, but that's again a problem with government policy rather than capitalism per se.
In addition, corporations tend to take interesting technologies and make them useful. Arpanet might have been cool tech, but it wasn't useful to the masses until the Netscapes and Microsofts of the world that made it readily available to the masses.
As for the space program improving specific products, I see this as simply a reflection of the enourmous amounts of money spent rather than on any intrinsic superiority of government financing. Had the government not spent that money the private sector may very well have invented things that were just as good if not better than the things NASA invented. Or maybe it wouldn't have been, but the fact that good things came from NASA programs doesn't prove that that was the best use for the money.
What are the "holes" in antitrust theory?
The hole is the idea that it is possible for a company to get a coercive monopoly in a free market, i.e. that a company can keep a high market share in the long run without keeping its customers happy. It's never happened, and there's a strong argument to be made that it never will. The specific economic reasons would take a complete post on their own.
The Cato institute makes the case against "predatory pricing" laws here. Similar arguments can be made concerning other aspects of Microsoft's actions, such as "tying" and "price gouging" as Microsoft is accused of doing.
The idea that a company can be so big that no competitor can topple it is just flat out wrong. As long as they don't have help from the government in keeping their monopoly, Microsoft can only keep competitors at bay by continuing to meet their customers' needs. In short, antitrust laws are unnecessary and should be repealed.
But we all know that luck and trechery beat out hard work and skill any day of the year. It isn't hard at all to see where Microsoft was unbelievably lucky (MS-DOS), and the trecherous part is what antitrust seeks to stop.
Sure, Microsoft got lucky. So what? They will get unlucky in the future. The key point is that Microsoft saw the opportunity and siezed it. You can't say that Microsoft's current dominance of the industry is due soley to stupidity on IBM's part 20 years ago. Microsoft has had several worthy competitors over the years, notably Apple and IBM (with OS/2.) It is hardly "luck" that allowed them to come out on top.
As for "treachery," my take on things is a little different. I don't think it should be illegal for Microsoft to use its success in one area to promote a product in another. Windows gives Microsoft an advantage in the marketplace, but it's not an insurmountable advantage. And if they use that dominance to push crappy products, they will eventually lose their position.
So "everybody" does not know that Microsoft's position is due to "luck and treachery." Yes, Microsoft has done some sleazy things, and yes, they are a fierce competitor. But they also give customers what they want, and they do it better than any of the competitors. They have innovated aggressively, adding new features, cutting costs, and improving their customers' experiences. They also used some aggressive business tactics, but all the aggressive business tactics in the world won't keep you customers if you don't meet their needs.
There is another type that I can think of: those people whose jobs depend on Microsoft products. Given that you don't know what the difference between NT server and NT workstation is (and thus how that relates to IIS), that you don't know how and why Direct3D got so popular, and that you don't know how much Internet Explorer costs, I think you are uninformed.
Fine, so enlighten me. The fact that I work primarily with the products of Microsoft's competitors makes my opinion irrelevant? This issue is fundamentally about economics, not technology.
And for the record, my job doesn't depend on Microsoft products either. I do most of my work on Unix, and pretty much the only apps I run on NT boxen are xterms and web browsers.
If you accept that there can be some anticompetitve actions taken by companies which are excusable
I reject the concept of "Anticompetitive actions." The only anticompetitive actions are those that involve coercion. And only the government is allowed to coerce and get away with it. Therefore, only the government can engage in anti-competitive actions without violating (non-antitrust) laws.
Companies only like "free markets" as long as they can enter the market freely to make money. Otherwise, they hate free markets. They would much rather be the sole producer of any given product. Then they wouldn't have to work so hard to make money. Companies would much rather sell us their excrement (literally!) than have to work hard to make good products. Competition ensures hard work and innovation, and companies can not be expected to play fair to ensure that competition exists.
Only with government help can a company permanently eliminate all competitors. As long as there are no government-imposed barriers to entry, a company must continue to satisfy its customers or they will go elsewhere.
Even without antitrust law, Microsoft is far from invincible. If they were to stop improving their products, Unix-based machines would eat into NT's market share, and Mac OS would take desktop market share. And if Microsoft stopped developing their product, it is likely that startups like Be or Red Hat would be able to gain a toehold. Once an alternative OS for the desktop has a sizable market share, it'll be all but impossible to eradicate it. Hell, Be is still being developed despite the fact that almost no one uses it. And Linux will continue to be developed no matter what happens in the marketplace. Even the mighty Microsoft must keep up with competitors to avoid losing their market dominance.
If you ask almost any moderately intelligent and well-informed member of the public what the difference between NT server and NT workstation is
Not a hell of a lot from a technical standpoint. Server is more expensive and is required to run the industrial-strength versions of Microsoft server products. I don't know what the exact technical differences are, but the core code is the same.
how and why Direct3D became so popular
Here I have no idea. I avoid Microsoft products, so I've never used Direct3D.
how much Internet Explorer *really* costs
$0. If you are implying that you pay for it through Windows, that might be true for those who choose to use Windows. Those of us who use Macs get it absolutely free. Even still, Windows costs about the same today as it did before IE was released so it can't be much.
I think that it is impossible to support Microsoft if you are concerned about the future of computing and computer science as science, regardless of your intelligence or how well-informed you are.
This is the kind of smug self-assuredness that annoys me about the typical slashdot crowd. There are a goodly number of intelligent, well informed individuals who support Microsoft's right to change their product however they want, and sell it to whomever they want on whatever terms they choose to set. I'm one of them.
I support Microsoft primarily for economic and political reasons. The theory surrounding antitrust is full of holes, and this country would be better off without antitrust laws at all. Antitrust as currently written is vague, overly broad, and basically makes every corporation with a large market share in violation of the law. This makes any successful company a target of potential lawsuits, which envious competitors use to beat in the courtroom those who they couldn't beat in the marketplace.
It is no accident that Sun, Netscape, and Oracle-- three of Microsoft's biggest competitors-- are actively supporting this case. I think this is a clear case of competitors using antitrust law as a club against more able competitors.
Has Microsoft done some sleazy things? Yes. Have they done some things that doeserve punishment? Possibly. Should they be punished for having a large market share and using that to promote their other products? Absolutely not.
I can certainly understand that intelligent people can disagree with me. I am extremely annoyed, however, that the reverse is not true. There is a near-universal assumption that anyone who opposes the dominant anti-Microsoft view is either woefully misinformed or in the pay of the Evil Empire.
For the record, I've never paid Microsoft a penny for its products, own no Microsoft stock, and have never been paid by them. I simply believe in the value of free markets and the right of producers to keep the fruits of their labors. I believe this right is being massively violated in this case.
OS-level XML parsing, and support for XML-based config files in all apps. Along with this goes their NeXT-derived bundles model, which allows large apps to appear as a single file to users, and will eventually allow for a single bundle to be targeted at multiple languages and multiple platforms.
A brand-new graphics model that goes beyond bit-mapped graphics toward vector based, devise independent graphics. This has a lot of advantages. In addition to making things look gorgeous and making developers' lives easier, it will simplify the writing of printer drivers and ensure true WYSIWYG accross all applications thanks to the common PDF-based graphics format.
A complete suite of graphical control panels and configuration tools that will allow semi-newbies to configure their machines the way the current Mac OS does. (and current Unices for the most part don't do this)
A brand new set of API's for writing device drivers that I've heard has a lot of innovations not present on other platforms.
Classic, which allows existing Mac OS apps to run in OS X without modification
Carbon, which allows an easy migration path for developers from the existing API to the new.
Coacoa, the NeXT-derived object-oriented, rapid-development API designed for new apps.
First-class Java 2 support
I suspect there are dozens of additional features that I haven't been able to think up, and there are undoubtedly additional features that have not yet been announced. Now, you want to tell me that all of the above features are part of porting the code from x86?
Sheesh. Maybe you should learn about a product before you complain about it.
Except that the Supreme Court is a lot more neutral (or conservative, depending on your perspective) than Judge Jackson, and so are going to be far more likely to give Microsoft's arguments a serious hearing. I've read that the appeals court has consistently slapped Jackson down, so if it goes to them it's not likely to stand. I don't know what the Supreme Court's exact leanings are.
It was clear from the start that Judge Jackson was out to get Microsoft, so they've been planning for the appeal for most of the trial. All those high-paid lawyers have got to be good for something, so you can bet they're not going to raise the white flag anytime soon.
So goes the purist argument for free markets.
Except that the case for free markets isn't based solely on the theoretical writings of Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, or anyone else. There's a large and growing body of both empirical and theoretical evidence that in most cases markets work and regulations don't.
The telecom industry is one of the most over-regulated industries around, so its problems can hardly be called failures of the market.
I agree that the current laws make the current situation more complex. But my point is that the problem is the laws that give AT&T and others monopolies in the first place. That doesn't absolve AT&T of wrongdoing, but I also don't think AT&T is the main problem. The same problems would exist if another company were in the same position.
These two monopolies continue to exist because AT&T has consistently played games with the legislation (in the courts, you see).
In other words, the monopolies are created by the government. And therefore the solution is to repeal those laws that created those monopolies.
They open up their end, they can break into the local cable markets, and the regulation can go away because there'll be no need for it.
Except that that's never what happens. The courts and regulators are a lousy replacement for market forces. If AT&T played nice, there might be a couple of firms in a given market instead of one, but that still severely limits consumer choice. This is why I don't care about the specifics of the law as it exists now. I object to the fact that there exists laws that determine who is allowed to provide telecom services. I think anyone who meets certain simple requirement should be allowed to string wires to the houses of willing customers, and they should be free to send whatever data they want on them.
More government regulation moves us in the opposite direction. It might manage to shift the monopolies around, and it might even give consumers some limited choices. But it's not a substitute for a free market in telecom services.
I don't know if you work for AT&T or what
I don't have any connection to AT&T. This kind of ad hom is not appropriate in a serious discussion. You clearly are "questioning my motives," or you wouldn't have brought it up.
I consider AT&T neither an aggressor nor a victim. They're simply working to make money like anyone else. I'm more interested in the broader point, which is that the reason the industry is monopolized in the first place is that the government made it that way. AT&T lobbied to have it that way early in the twenties, to avoid competition from upstart competitors. As a result, we haven't had a truly free market in local service since them.
In light of that, I'm neither defending AT&T nor attacking local telcos. I'm attacking the regulatory regime that gave both the local monopolies and AT&T the power they have in the first place. My point is that as long as the industry remains monopolized by law, no amount of regulation is going to bring back effective competition. It is precisely your "existing regulations" that I'm objecting to. I don't really care about the specific legalisms surrounding this particular issue, because I don't consider them too important. Without a free market in telco service, service is going to suck. Limiting how much of the market a particular company can have will not improve customer service or save consumers money.
I don't know why they aren't, but they don't seem to be. As far as I know, you have only one choice in Minnesota-- US West. I suspect that's the result of regulation, since I can't think of any other reason why they they wouldn't be trying to expand into neighboring markets. I suppose it's possible that some of them are colluding to keep prices up, but that in itself is a function of the fact that they know no new competitors can enter the market.
The municipalities would continue doing things the same way without some sort of prodding from the Feds. These big companies buy and sell congressmen every day, you think they don't have local reps in their pocket?
Well, sure, this isn't going to be easy. But I think the first step is to recognize that that's the problem. If the system is so corrupt that we can't get genuine deregulation, then further regulation is only going to get perverted by the same forces.
What is needed I think is a citizen action group aimed specifically at repealing laws that restrict competition in telecom services. Only concerted citizen pressure will work, I think.
The problem with groups like the "stop AT&T" organization is that they seem to misunderstand the problem. I don't really care if AT&T has 20% or 40% of the cable market, since in each local market there is only one choice. I'd be perfectly happy with a market in which AT&T owns the majority of outlets if most local markets had an alternative. It's the fact that local alternatives are prohibited by law that makes AT&T such a threat. Regulating AT&T's holdings will only allow someone else to monopolize some of those outlets, which is hardly an improvement.
So what did the breakup of AT&T do good for, if we allow all of the parts to merge back together?
Um, I don't think that Media One was ever part of Ma Bell. The regional Bells are still separate.
Besides, the problem with AT&T was always that they were a government-granted monopoly. This has not changed, they have just been split up into a bunch of regional monopolies. What needs to happen is for the local telcos (and cable) to be deregulated and a uniform system developed whereby several firms can lay fiber to any given price. This competition will improve service and lower prices.
As long as the government discourages or prohibits competition as it does in cable and local telephone service, service will always suck and prices will always be high. We need free markets and competition.
I don't know about the situation in Britain, but I know in most US cities the cable monopolies are granted by local governments. You have to ask the city's permission to install cable lines, and once one company has been given that permission, it's awfully hard for a second one to compete.
As is usually the case, this monopoly is caused by the government. What is needed is a more open system of granting permission to string cables through the ground.
On a Mac, the same thing can be accomplished with a control-click. This takes less than a second, since you typically have one hand on the keyboard and the control key is right in the corner. More importantly, Mac apps keep all relevant menu options in the menu bar, so you would click on Network Neighborhood, go to the menu bar, and select "properties." Yes, it takes a tad longer, but it also is less obscure and more consistent. And this "properties" trick is hardly the most obvious or intuitive place to put configurations options in the first place. Control panels are better IMHO.
That means you do not get (EVER) the right to pollute that water or consume it simply because it crosses your property boundaries.
This is why I suggested fishing rights rather than simple ownership of the water. In order to pollute a river, you'd need to get the permission of the holders of all fishing rights downstream of you. Since this would be quite expensive, it would discourage pollution.
The air over your land is not yours. It knows NO boundaries. You do not get to pollute it since that crap drifts downwind into MY airspace. You don't own the air.
You seem to have not read my proposal. I didn't say we'd own the air over our land property. I suggested a system of pollution credits which would entitle one to pollute a certain amount of a certain pollutant. The total amount of these credits would be decided ahead of time by Congress. This would lead to less pollution than we have now at a much lower cost to the economy.
You do not own wildlife. They exist entirely independently of you and require more than your peice of property in order to survive...and survival is their natural right and OUR necessity.
This depends on how big a piece of property I have. No, my 1-acre plot won't be able to support much wildlife, but private conservation groups, for-profit parks, loggers, and other landowners will own bigger chunks of wilderness and will be quite capable of caring for wildlife. And if that's not sufficient to maintain the wildlife population (I think it will be) a much better strategy than the endangered species act would be to pay a fixed bounty for every animal you have living on your land. This makes caring for animals economical.
If every bit of wilderness or openspace or habitat were privately owned, all that land WOULD be subdivided into lots and sold for cash for the sake of condos and office buildings, etc.
Nonesense. This completely flies in the face of what really happens. Residential use is a small proportion of even private land use today. This would continue to be true under private management. In fact, it is government that is short-sighted and private landowners that tend to think about long-term consequences. This is because government officials get elected for 2 or 4-year terms, and bureoucrats are essentially impossible to fire. That means if government allows resources to be squandered as it has done repeatedly, no one is punished for it. On the other hand, private owners of land see a drop in their land value if they treat it wastefully. Therefore, people have a strong incentive to use their land wisely.
Nay, your proposal presupposes that people are rational when, by and large they are NOT.
Actually it doesn't. It presumes only that they are self-interested. Indeed, it is the current government-run regime that has lead to over-grazing of pastures, excessive clear-cutting, high costs to the economy, and other problems. My plan assumes only that people value the long-term value of their property. If they don't, the will lose their shirts and be forced to sell their land to another landowner. The market will punish waste and encourage conservation.
The whole point of the free market is to provide good incentives for people to use resources wisely. This is clearly true in economic issues, and it is no less true in environmental ones. The government has had a lousy record of environmental protection, and no wonder-- they are more interested in the next election than in the long-term health of the plantt. They are therefore happy to allow corporations to cause damage to the environment in exchange for campaign donations. Private owners, on the other hand, have to worry about the resale value of their land. This means that it would be stupid for them to dump garbage on it, clear-cut it, over-graze it, or otherwise lower its value. So land gets protected.
It's amazing the outpouring of ignorance that appears whenever economics and free markets are discussed.
The problem with the capitalism we had 50 years ago was that it didn't create property rights in environmental resources. Companies were allowed to pollute the air and water, to use government land for clear-cutting and over-grazing, and generally had no incentive to protect environmental resources.
The solution is simple. First, publicly held lands not required for the operations of government should be sold to private owners. Second, property rights in lakes and rivers need to be established. One way to do this would be to grant separate fishing rights and recreational rights to rivers and lakes, while leaving people free to travel on those waterways. Thirdly, laws granting the government immunity for its environmental misdeeds need to be repealed. Much of the environmental problems in this country were created by government. For example, many military bases have been polluted extensively.
As for air pollution, I propose the following: the government should auction off vouchers giving the bearer the right to pollute a fixed amount of a given pollutant each year. These vouchers would be transferable. The amount of these vouchers could be set initially at the amount of pollution occuring currently.
Anyone who didn't have a voucher would be required to either get one or stop polluting altogether. The result would be a vibrant market polluting credits, and the cost of these credits would drop over time as companies found ways of producing without pollution. As the price dropped, these vouchers could be bought back by the government or private conservation groups. The result would be less pollution than we have now at far lower cost to the economy. The EPA could be eliminated entirely.
Capitalism is all about efficient allocation of resources. So is environmentalism. The problem is not a fundamental conflict between the two, but a poor implementation of property rights in environmental resources, thereby leading to those resources being poorly allocated. A truly free market in environmental resources will lead to these being used more efficiently and at far lower cost, benefiting both the environment and the economy.