Does your dictionary have anything under the terms "pedantic", "sophistry", "absolutism"?
There are terms that are often presented in absolute terms, but never are absolute in reality. They can't exist in a pure form. So if you hold to such a literal interpretation, you essentially make the term useless with regards to anything existing in this world. Banning literal monopolies is like banning actual, living unicorns. By taking a literal, asperger's-esque, view of the term monopoly, you essentially give any and all monopolies a free pass.
Excepting some rare or contrived circumstances, no one can ever have a literal dictionary definition monopoly. Take, for example, steel. Even if you owned all the iron in the world, the moment you sold your first bit of steel, technically you no longer have a monopoly, since there's one tiny bit of steel that someone else can sell.
On the other hand, the non-literal interpretation of these words is very useful indeed. Something that can't be defined precisely or objectively can still exist and is still important to consider. MS isn't a monopoly in the impossible, literal sense. But it was (and to a reasonable extent, still is) a monopoly.
"MS Office isn't special other than it got critical mass at the time when computers were themselves gaining critical mass. It could have happened just as easily to WordPerfect, Lotus, or (had it existed at the time) OpenOffice."
Wrong. WordPerfect owned the word processing world. Lotus only had 123 spreadsheet until much later. Several challengers moved against WP. Microsoft won only because WP failed to embrace Windows 3.1 at the key moment.
If I'm wrong, then so are you as you seem to be just saying same thing in a different way. Your "key time" is my "at the time", and I said Office got critical mass and you just stated why it got critical mass.
That's not much of a refutation. Quite the contrary, in fact...
Oracle could stop caring about OpenOffice tomorrow, and the community would simply pick up and continue development on it, business as usual. Nice try, though.
There is nothing "simple" about taking up a project on this scale.
He didn't mean the process is simple, but that that's all it takes. If Oracle drops OpenOffice, someone else will pick up the project, simple or not. People do non-simple things every day.
It is this attitude that can make it a little hard to take the geek seriously.
Not really. If he said that someone else would just write their own free office suite from scratch, you'd have a point. Geeks get this wrong all the time (product X sucks, I could write something better in my sleep). But to continue an orphaned project? This happens all the time. Some worthy projects do die in the process, often being resurrected later, but sometimes not. However, something as important as OpenOffice would not possibly be left to die. In fact, the instant news hit the wire that Oracle has abandoned OpenOffice[*], there would be a large number of projects started to pick up where they left off.
Microsoft sees Word as one component of an integrated office system that scales "almost effortlessly" from the home user to enterprise solutions on the grandest of scales.
Client - Server - The Web - each has its place.
This solves so many problems for the office manager that I don't think the geek really understands what he competing against.
Rubbish. OpenOffice is just as scaleable and integrated as a suite as MS Office is. MS Office isn't special other than it got critical mass at the time when computers were themselves gaining critical mass. It could have happened just as easily to WordPerfect, Lotus, or (had it existed at the time) OpenOffice.
[*] This is a rather silly notion to begin with. OpenOffice is far to valuable a property for Oracle to just drop it. They might sell it, or spin it off, but they aren't just going to issue a press release one day saying they've suspended all work on the product and just leave a CVS server running to satisfy the LGPL.
I know it's popular to hate on Word around here, but if you know what you're doing, it's not all that bad. I used Word to write my master's thesis, and by consistently using styles, along with Zotero, cross-referenced fields, and bookmarks, it came out very nice looking. If I had been in a different field, I'm sure that LaTeX would have made more sense, but if I sent anything but Word to my instructors asking for comments, their heads would have exploded.
Nothing you've stated is Word-specific. Word is just an example of a document creation tool, and it's not even the best one.
Word "needing to die", isn't about the program itself so much as ubiquity of the format. In those exceptionally rare cases where you need to submit something in.doc format (how many theses does the average person write? how many journal submissions? how many anythings where.doc is required?), Word is no different from needing some other niche program, like Matlab or Autocad or Illustrator. No other niche product has such broad influence as Word does.
That's because Word was not always so niche (at least, among computer users, which was, admittedly, somewhat niche at the time, albeit a fairly large one, but still nowhere near as universal as today). If you created a document in the '90s and even early '00s, you almost certainly intended for it to be printed at some point. In the office, at home, at school. Additionally, you generally weren't always the sole editor of a document, it was meant to be passed around (usually on floppy!, but also often on a file server or via email). That meant that not only did you need Word, but the people you interacted with needed it as well (and vice versa). MS Word reached this critical mass, pretty much locking out all other formats from such ubiquitous use.
Fast forward to today, where most communication is via email and IM, where printouts are less common and therefore formatting is less important. PDF, html, email and IM have all pushed.doc into a niche. Where it still remains outside of that niche is from the people who are used to Word and didn't get the memo on saving to PDF, or the people who got Word with their computer, and are at most vaguely aware that doc/docx files are the things they created with Word and send them around via email thinking they just show up on the other end or something.
The first type really needs to change their ways, the second type barely know what they are doing (so it's hard to blame them too much). Fortunately for both, pretty much every graphical text editor can read.doc (and increasingly,.docx) files, but this is a sub-optimal way to interact with such files and for these uses, Word files really should die. Use it as a document creation tool if you want, but send it in another format, similar to how you won't normally send around a.psd file, but first convert to.jpg (except when sending to other Photoshop users, which is a niche in the realm of computer image viewing).
With that argument, PDFs would be the thing to die, not MS Word.
No, you've got that ass-backward. The brilliance of PDF is that you have the equivalent of a print-out without actually having to print something out. As we move away from printing everything, PDF is more useful, not less.
The reasoning here is that if I send you a print out, it's more or less set in stone. You can mark all over it if you want, but for the most part (except for forms, which PDF excels at as well), people just use them as is, and the idea from the creator of the document is to provide some form of final product. With a Word file, you get an i-beam mouse pointer and a flashing cursor. You can very easily accidentally modify a Word file. But even if you don't, with Word files, your interface is always that of a document creation mode, not a document reading mode, except when you print it, or have it outputted to a PDF.
PDF is replacing the printer. PDF is the consumption, Word is just one possible (but not longer critical) too of creation.
I remember when people claimed Kmart had a monopoly (1970s-80s).
Where's that monopoly now?
WTF, I'm saying Wal-Mart isn't a monopoly, jackass. They engage in monopolistic practices, but not sufficiently enough to actually be a monopoly. As for what people said in the '70s, BFD, it has no bearing on the matter at hand.
Point - No monopoly lasts forever
True, in the long run, all monopolies fail. But in the long run, we're all dead. Waiting for the market to correct things is like saying a 20 year prison sentence is OK, since eventually you'll be released.
Perhaps circa 2020, the WM managers will get careless, raise prices, and along will come Target or Kresge or somebody else to be the new retail leader.
In the meantime, let Wal-Mart negatively impact the market unnecessarily (assuming they are a monopoly, which they are not, but that's what you're suggesting)?
So, to recap your position, criminal activity is OK since eventually it will stop.
That's not how monopolies work. If Wal-Mart had an *actual* monopoly, they *could* raise their prices because no one else would be there to undercut them.
In your analogy, it would be like the villain throwing a dead hero back his sword.
However, while Wal-Mart isn't a monopoly per se, it does have some monopolistic attributes which, while probably not illegal, are at least a bit concerning from the consumer's point of view. Wal-Mart is sufficiently large to make demands of suppliers, such as the movies and CDs are (or at least, were, I haven't looked into it recently) edited from their original versions and were no labeled as such. If you're opposed to RFID (personally, I'm not terribly concerned by them, but some are), Wal-Mart is instrumental in getting them into products. Similar happened with the bar code. Wal-Mart demanded all products have a bar code, and thus they became standard everywhere.
Finally, they bully their suppliers to such an extent that they often have to provide products at a price lower than they can afford or not be carried at all. While this generally means lower prices for the consumer, it forces manufacturers to cut costs and cut corners, often by lowering the quality of their products and shipping jobs overseas (e.g., to China). To me, this is the worst thing Wal-Mart does, and is the most invisible. We get products cheaper today by sending our jobs overseas, which sends wealth from the US to China, not to bolster the US economy, but to bolster Wal-Mart's profits. I'm not against profits at all, but there comes a point where someone's right to seek profit causes too much damage to the rest of us to be allowed.
But does Wine on Linux have the same vulnerabilities as Windows itself, and which version of Windows is it "emulating" these vulnerabilities from? I'm sure there's a lot of malware code out there that may work well on particular versions of Windows, or instances of Windows without a particular hotfix/service pack, but this sounds like each of the 1M Wine instances will be pretty much the same...
WINE is open source, so they can patch it to be just as vulnerable as Windows is.
Yes, the notions of "progress" and "improvement" take a twisted turn when you take on the task of emulating Windows in Linux...
What about Norton Antivirus? Specifically they should run a second experiment with a simulation of 1 million systems running Norton Antivirus, and compare the results of the first test to see which has the greatest adverse effect...
So far, he seems to have responded appropriately, which shows good character, actually.
*good* character would have been not doing it in the first place. he's only responding because he got caught, not because he feels he was wrong.
That's absurd. What he did is something that he can't possibly have thought would not be caught. He knew going into it he'd be caught. What he didn't realize is the backlash this would provoke.
He's admitted his mistake and corrected the problem. You don't have to forgive him, but this mythical notion of "character" being presented as some innate, unchangeable, inviolable attribute is silly.
By the way you're presenting "character", not a single person on the planet has "good character", rendering the term all but meaningless.
You're kidding us right? Look up the definition of the word "error" and compare it with the definitions of the words "willful", "deliberate" and "intent".
If you could be so kind as to do so yourself before asking others to, you could save us all a lot of trouble. *None* of those words are the antonym of error, nor do they exclude something from being an error.
You're confusing error with accidental or inadvertent. He didn't inadvertently start whitelisting ads, but it was an error for him to have done so, and he has since admitted his error.
For example, your post was deliberate, willful, and written with intent, but it's also erroneous.
As any decent psychologist will tell you that character is inborn and cannot be changed or "worked on".
If by "decent", you simply mean, "holds your archaic worldview", I suppose...
The notion that people's character is set in stone at birth is laughably absurd.
The character of the author of NoScript is that of the authors of
1) adware (redirecting to his ad-laden website with each meaningless update and preventing you from blocking these ads)
2) spyware/malware (changing configuration without the user's consent).
How about:
3) people who make mistakes.
The real "test of character" isn't whether he made a mistake, but what he does about it afterwards. So far, he seems to have responded appropriately, which shows good character, actually.
So? 99% of the people who buy cars use the steering wheel that comes with the car. Of course an aftermarket exists for steering wheels, but you don't see the car dealership presenting you with a long list of possible steering wheels for your car purchase when you buy it. And somehow nobody has any problem with this.
That should be your clue right there that your car analogy is flawed in some deeply fundamental way.
No one is complaining about steering wheels the same way no one is complaining about Notepad, or chkdsk.
Browsers, on the other hand, are seen as unique products. And what's worse (and is generally considered to be the thing that pushes the Windows+IE bundling over the edge) is that MS is using one monopoly position (Windows) to push another product (IE). Further, IE is widely considered to be inferior to the competition.
* ATT, Verizon using the court system to increase profits = bad * SCO using the court system to increase profits = bad * Opera using the court system to increase profits = good
The first two are anti-competitive. The third is not. So, pretty much, yeah.
More accurate "T,FTFY" version:
* ATT, Verizon using the court system to stifle competition = bad * SCO using the court system to stifle competition = bad * Opera using the court system to promote competition = good
but if I had to choose between MS and the government controlling things, I wouldn't choose the government.
Fortunately, that's not the choice being presented. The government isn't controlling things. They're just getting MS to agree to let the user choose a browser.
Irrespective for any individual's hatred of MS, this decision reeks.
Why? Letting users choose a browser is a bad thing? It's worse than just pushing one browser on them?
Mod parent up. it's Microsoft's monopoly and use of OEM licensing to force vendors to sell machines with windows on them which the EU should be addressing.
20 years too late. The damage is already done, MS already has an OS monopoly. 14 years ago they started using that monopoly to push their browser. At least now, there are still competing browsers. The are only two even remotely competitive OS's, one of which isn't available for PC's, and the other isn't terribly user-friendly (even compared against Windows Vista).
He's using the RMS definition of free, which... *checks news headlines* this week has more restrictions than it did last week.
RMS has been extremely clear and consistent on the definition of "Free Software". In fact, the GPL is only at version 3, and has been around for 20 years!
I disagree. Many or even most Windows users aren't smart enough to know that another browser exists or even that it is possible for another browser to run on their computer, after all - how can you explore the internet without internet explorer?
At one time, that applied to Xerox, Band-Aid, Rollerblades, and GM/Ford/Chrysler too. What changed? Why can't Opera sell their browser the same way that, say, Canon sells photocopiers?
I'm not saying it's not a challenge, but it's obviously possible and Opera isn't even trying. They just sued.
All of your examples are things that people go out and buy, so they are choosing one over the other. Few people are choosing a browser because their computer comes with one already. They're not getting to the point where Opera (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc.) is even an option.
At least with all of your examples, the alternative brands have a chance. It's absolutely absurd to think that IE is so good that it really deserves an 80+% market share. IE 8 is pretty good, but really, if it wasn't bundled with Windows, it would have a 40% market share, tops.
Why? Its a perfectly reasonable solution for a/. type who has a second computer to look up the FTP address and can't be arsed to mess about with a USB stick. I've certainly used CLI tools to download and install software... usually wget on Linux, though, not FTP.
Are you saying the typical "/. type" wouldn't think to just fire up IE to download Firefox?
Slashdot Mirror
Not according to my dictionary...
Does your dictionary have anything under the terms "pedantic", "sophistry", "absolutism"?
There are terms that are often presented in absolute terms, but never are absolute in reality. They can't exist in a pure form. So if you hold to such a literal interpretation, you essentially make the term useless with regards to anything existing in this world. Banning literal monopolies is like banning actual, living unicorns. By taking a literal, asperger's-esque, view of the term monopoly, you essentially give any and all monopolies a free pass.
Excepting some rare or contrived circumstances, no one can ever have a literal dictionary definition monopoly. Take, for example, steel. Even if you owned all the iron in the world, the moment you sold your first bit of steel, technically you no longer have a monopoly, since there's one tiny bit of steel that someone else can sell.
On the other hand, the non-literal interpretation of these words is very useful indeed. Something that can't be defined precisely or objectively can still exist and is still important to consider. MS isn't a monopoly in the impossible, literal sense. But it was (and to a reasonable extent, still is) a monopoly.
"MS Office isn't special other than it got critical mass at the time when computers were themselves gaining critical mass. It could have happened just as easily to WordPerfect, Lotus, or (had it existed at the time) OpenOffice."
Wrong. WordPerfect owned the word processing world. Lotus only had 123 spreadsheet until much later. Several challengers moved against WP. Microsoft won only because WP failed to embrace Windows 3.1 at the key moment.
If I'm wrong, then so are you as you seem to be just saying same thing in a different way. Your "key time" is my "at the time", and I said Office got critical mass and you just stated why it got critical mass.
That's not much of a refutation. Quite the contrary, in fact...
Oracle could stop caring about OpenOffice tomorrow, and the community would simply pick up and continue development on it, business as usual. Nice try, though.
There is nothing "simple" about taking up a project on this scale.
He didn't mean the process is simple, but that that's all it takes. If Oracle drops OpenOffice, someone else will pick up the project, simple or not. People do non-simple things every day.
It is this attitude that can make it a little hard to take the geek seriously.
Not really. If he said that someone else would just write their own free office suite from scratch, you'd have a point. Geeks get this wrong all the time (product X sucks, I could write something better in my sleep). But to continue an orphaned project? This happens all the time. Some worthy projects do die in the process, often being resurrected later, but sometimes not. However, something as important as OpenOffice would not possibly be left to die. In fact, the instant news hit the wire that Oracle has abandoned OpenOffice[*], there would be a large number of projects started to pick up where they left off.
Microsoft sees Word as one component of an integrated office system that scales "almost effortlessly" from the home user to enterprise solutions on the grandest of scales.
Client - Server - The Web - each has its place.
This solves so many problems for the office manager that I don't think the geek really understands what he competing against.
Rubbish. OpenOffice is just as scaleable and integrated as a suite as MS Office is. MS Office isn't special other than it got critical mass at the time when computers were themselves gaining critical mass. It could have happened just as easily to WordPerfect, Lotus, or (had it existed at the time) OpenOffice.
[*] This is a rather silly notion to begin with. OpenOffice is far to valuable a property for Oracle to just drop it. They might sell it, or spin it off, but they aren't just going to issue a press release one day saying they've suspended all work on the product and just leave a CVS server running to satisfy the LGPL.
I know it's popular to hate on Word around here, but if you know what you're doing, it's not all that bad. I used Word to write my master's thesis, and by consistently using styles, along with Zotero, cross-referenced fields, and bookmarks, it came out very nice looking. If I had been in a different field, I'm sure that LaTeX would have made more sense, but if I sent anything but Word to my instructors asking for comments, their heads would have exploded.
Nothing you've stated is Word-specific. Word is just an example of a document creation tool, and it's not even the best one.
Word "needing to die", isn't about the program itself so much as ubiquity of the format. In those exceptionally rare cases where you need to submit something in .doc format (how many theses does the average person write? how many journal submissions? how many anythings where .doc is required?), Word is no different from needing some other niche program, like Matlab or Autocad or Illustrator. No other niche product has such broad influence as Word does.
That's because Word was not always so niche (at least, among computer users, which was, admittedly, somewhat niche at the time, albeit a fairly large one, but still nowhere near as universal as today). If you created a document in the '90s and even early '00s, you almost certainly intended for it to be printed at some point. In the office, at home, at school. Additionally, you generally weren't always the sole editor of a document, it was meant to be passed around (usually on floppy!, but also often on a file server or via email). That meant that not only did you need Word, but the people you interacted with needed it as well (and vice versa). MS Word reached this critical mass, pretty much locking out all other formats from such ubiquitous use.
Fast forward to today, where most communication is via email and IM, where printouts are less common and therefore formatting is less important. PDF, html, email and IM have all pushed .doc into a niche. Where it still remains outside of that niche is from the people who are used to Word and didn't get the memo on saving to PDF, or the people who got Word with their computer, and are at most vaguely aware that doc/docx files are the things they created with Word and send them around via email thinking they just show up on the other end or something.
The first type really needs to change their ways, the second type barely know what they are doing (so it's hard to blame them too much). Fortunately for both, pretty much every graphical text editor can read .doc (and increasingly, .docx) files, but this is a sub-optimal way to interact with such files and for these uses, Word files really should die. Use it as a document creation tool if you want, but send it in another format, similar to how you won't normally send around a .psd file, but first convert to .jpg (except when sending to other Photoshop users, which is a niche in the realm of computer image viewing).
With that argument, PDFs would be the thing to die, not MS Word.
No, you've got that ass-backward. The brilliance of PDF is that you have the equivalent of a print-out without actually having to print something out. As we move away from printing everything, PDF is more useful, not less.
The reasoning here is that if I send you a print out, it's more or less set in stone. You can mark all over it if you want, but for the most part (except for forms, which PDF excels at as well), people just use them as is, and the idea from the creator of the document is to provide some form of final product. With a Word file, you get an i-beam mouse pointer and a flashing cursor. You can very easily accidentally modify a Word file. But even if you don't, with Word files, your interface is always that of a document creation mode, not a document reading mode, except when you print it, or have it outputted to a PDF.
PDF is replacing the printer. PDF is the consumption, Word is just one possible (but not longer critical) too of creation.
So what happens when I do Command Key + R --> iexplore.exe ?
If you're using the command key, what'll probably happen is your page will reload...
This sure is a big hit on the Linux for Pedophiles distro.
What part of "insert itself between the Windows calls and TrueCrypt" did you miss?
Maybe that's what he calls Windows?
I remember when people claimed Kmart had a monopoly (1970s-80s).
Where's that monopoly now?
WTF, I'm saying Wal-Mart isn't a monopoly, jackass. They engage in monopolistic practices, but not sufficiently enough to actually be a monopoly. As for what people said in the '70s, BFD, it has no bearing on the matter at hand.
Point - No monopoly lasts forever
True, in the long run, all monopolies fail. But in the long run, we're all dead. Waiting for the market to correct things is like saying a 20 year prison sentence is OK, since eventually you'll be released.
Perhaps circa 2020, the WM managers will get careless, raise prices, and along will come Target or Kresge or somebody else to be the new retail leader.
In the meantime, let Wal-Mart negatively impact the market unnecessarily (assuming they are a monopoly, which they are not, but that's what you're suggesting)?
So, to recap your position, criminal activity is OK since eventually it will stop.
To state that much shorter, "Wal-Mart is as much a monopoly as Microsoft is."
Not really. MS had over 90% of the market at one point. I doubt that's true for Wal-Mart.
Additionally, MS has much more control over the sources of their products (including distribution once it leaves their warehouses).
Wal-Mart is somewhat close to MS-level monopoly when viewed from a long distance, but up close, they are very different beasts.
That's not how monopolies work. If Wal-Mart had an *actual* monopoly, they *could* raise their prices because no one else would be there to undercut them.
In your analogy, it would be like the villain throwing a dead hero back his sword.
However, while Wal-Mart isn't a monopoly per se, it does have some monopolistic attributes which, while probably not illegal, are at least a bit concerning from the consumer's point of view. Wal-Mart is sufficiently large to make demands of suppliers, such as the movies and CDs are (or at least, were, I haven't looked into it recently) edited from their original versions and were no labeled as such. If you're opposed to RFID (personally, I'm not terribly concerned by them, but some are), Wal-Mart is instrumental in getting them into products. Similar happened with the bar code. Wal-Mart demanded all products have a bar code, and thus they became standard everywhere.
Finally, they bully their suppliers to such an extent that they often have to provide products at a price lower than they can afford or not be carried at all. While this generally means lower prices for the consumer, it forces manufacturers to cut costs and cut corners, often by lowering the quality of their products and shipping jobs overseas (e.g., to China). To me, this is the worst thing Wal-Mart does, and is the most invisible. We get products cheaper today by sending our jobs overseas, which sends wealth from the US to China, not to bolster the US economy, but to bolster Wal-Mart's profits. I'm not against profits at all, but there comes a point where someone's right to seek profit causes too much damage to the rest of us to be allowed.
... when this entity become sentient.
Sentience implies some minimal level of rationality. They're emulating the *Internet*, so I really wouldn't worry.
But does Wine on Linux have the same vulnerabilities as Windows itself, and which version of Windows is it "emulating" these vulnerabilities from?
I'm sure there's a lot of malware code out there that may work well on particular versions of Windows, or instances of Windows without a particular hotfix/service pack, but this sounds like each of the 1M Wine instances will be pretty much the same...
WINE is open source, so they can patch it to be just as vulnerable as Windows is.
Yes, the notions of "progress" and "improvement" take a twisted turn when you take on the task of emulating Windows in Linux...
What about Norton Antivirus? Specifically they should run a second experiment with a simulation of 1 million systems running Norton Antivirus, and compare the results of the first test to see which has the greatest adverse effect...
So far, he seems to have responded appropriately, which shows good character, actually.
*good* character would have been not doing it in the first place. he's only responding because he got caught, not because he feels he was wrong.
That's absurd. What he did is something that he can't possibly have thought would not be caught. He knew going into it he'd be caught. What he didn't realize is the backlash this would provoke.
He's admitted his mistake and corrected the problem. You don't have to forgive him, but this mythical notion of "character" being presented as some innate, unchangeable, inviolable attribute is silly.
By the way you're presenting "character", not a single person on the planet has "good character", rendering the term all but meaningless.
He admitted his error
You're kidding us right? Look up the definition of the word "error" and compare it with the definitions of the words "willful", "deliberate" and "intent".
If you could be so kind as to do so yourself before asking others to, you could save us all a lot of trouble. *None* of those words are the antonym of error, nor do they exclude something from being an error.
You're confusing error with accidental or inadvertent. He didn't inadvertently start whitelisting ads, but it was an error for him to have done so, and he has since admitted his error.
For example, your post was deliberate, willful, and written with intent, but it's also erroneous.
As any decent psychologist will tell you that character is inborn and cannot be changed or "worked on".
If by "decent", you simply mean, "holds your archaic worldview", I suppose...
The notion that people's character is set in stone at birth is laughably absurd.
The character of the author of NoScript is that of the authors of
1) adware (redirecting to his ad-laden website with each meaningless update and preventing you from blocking these ads)
2) spyware/malware (changing configuration without the user's consent).
How about:
3) people who make mistakes.
The real "test of character" isn't whether he made a mistake, but what he does about it afterwards. So far, he seems to have responded appropriately, which shows good character, actually.
So? 99% of the people who buy cars use the steering wheel that comes with the car. Of course an aftermarket exists for steering wheels, but you don't see the car dealership presenting you with a long list of possible steering wheels for your car purchase when you buy it. And somehow nobody has any problem with this.
That should be your clue right there that your car analogy is flawed in some deeply fundamental way.
No one is complaining about steering wheels the same way no one is complaining about Notepad, or chkdsk.
Browsers, on the other hand, are seen as unique products. And what's worse (and is generally considered to be the thing that pushes the Windows+IE bundling over the edge) is that MS is using one monopoly position (Windows) to push another product (IE). Further, IE is widely considered to be inferior to the competition.
Your car analogy has none of that.
So to stop a DDoS attack on a server, they remove any and all access to that server?
How else would you do it?
The same logic behind the USA PATRIOT Act as a response to the threat to our freedom.
In order to save the village, we had to destroy it...
In order to stop the DDoS, we had to deny service to the site!
Just to clarify:
* ATT, Verizon using the court system to increase profits = bad
* SCO using the court system to increase profits = bad
* Opera using the court system to increase profits = good
The first two are anti-competitive. The third is not. So, pretty much, yeah.
More accurate "T,FTFY" version:
* ATT, Verizon using the court system to stifle competition = bad
* SCO using the court system to stifle competition = bad
* Opera using the court system to promote competition = good
but if I had to choose between MS and the government controlling things, I wouldn't choose the government.
Fortunately, that's not the choice being presented. The government isn't controlling things. They're just getting MS to agree to let the user choose a browser.
Irrespective for any individual's hatred of MS, this decision reeks.
Why? Letting users choose a browser is a bad thing? It's worse than just pushing one browser on them?
Mod parent up. it's Microsoft's monopoly and use of OEM licensing to force vendors to sell machines with windows on them which the EU should be addressing.
20 years too late. The damage is already done, MS already has an OS monopoly. 14 years ago they started using that monopoly to push their browser. At least now, there are still competing browsers. The are only two even remotely competitive OS's, one of which isn't available for PC's, and the other isn't terribly user-friendly (even compared against Windows Vista).
He's using the RMS definition of free, which... *checks news headlines* this week has more restrictions than it did last week.
RMS has been extremely clear and consistent on the definition of "Free Software". In fact, the GPL is only at version 3, and has been around for 20 years!
I disagree. Many or even most Windows users aren't smart enough to know that another browser exists or even that it is possible for another browser to run on their computer, after all - how can you explore the internet without internet explorer?
At one time, that applied to Xerox, Band-Aid, Rollerblades, and GM/Ford/Chrysler too. What changed? Why can't Opera sell their browser the same way that, say, Canon sells photocopiers?
I'm not saying it's not a challenge, but it's obviously possible and Opera isn't even trying. They just sued.
All of your examples are things that people go out and buy, so they are choosing one over the other. Few people are choosing a browser because their computer comes with one already. They're not getting to the point where Opera (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc.) is even an option.
At least with all of your examples, the alternative brands have a chance. It's absolutely absurd to think that IE is so good that it really deserves an 80+% market share. IE 8 is pretty good, but really, if it wasn't bundled with Windows, it would have a 40% market share, tops.
Why? Its a perfectly reasonable solution for a /. type who has a second computer to look up the FTP address and can't be arsed to mess about with a USB stick. I've certainly used CLI tools to download and install software... usually wget on Linux, though, not FTP.
Are you saying the typical "/. type" wouldn't think to just fire up IE to download Firefox?
Not that I'm saying you're wrong...
or . . .
step 1: download virtualbox
step 2: download an iso of your favourite [debian based] distro ...
I'm pretty sure step one is cut a hole in a box. As for step two, well, you're totally doing it wrong...