In my opinion, case senssitivity allows for more readable code if using long variable or method names.
Preserving case in the source code (which is just a text file) and being sensitive to case in the the compiler are two wholly separate matters. There's no reason you can't have both.
I too think that case-sensitivity is overrated. It only came about because back in the early days of Unix they didn't have the spare CPU cycles to do case-insensitive string comparison all the time (Unix had to support mixed case in text because ones of its earliest uses was typesetting) so they made a virtue out of a necessity.
If so, then to drive an oil tanker from Kuwait to Badhdad is costing $800,000!! I guess these must be the prices that Haliburton etc. are charging.
I'd guess that is the cost for actually getting the fuel there - including escorting it with armoured vehicles, patrolling above with helicopter gunships, etc etc, salaries for the bureaucrats keeping track of it, cost of labour at both ends for loading and unloading, etc etc etc.
Fighting a modern war is not cheap, and the winner is almost always the one that can throw the most money at it.
64 bit gave higher precision for use on CAD workstations. Anyone who every used a Sun workstation for it's intended purpose would know this.
Oh yes, 64-bit has been not a luxury by a necessity in many industries for a decade now, anything that involves heavy number crunching - CAD, CAE, CFD, other forms of simulation, Monte Carlo runs in finance, physics models...
A while ago OSNews reviewed, IIRC, a new Sun workstation. The conclusion? It's crap because it's too hard to change the resolution or the colour scheme. Not one test they did was even remotely related to what a workstation is used for, they didn't even try compiling anything, let alone doing some MATLAB or solid modelling.
You can pretty much ignore any OSNews review of anything, in fact I've no idea why a discussion site (i.e./.) even links to another discussion site as a story!
When you say "Sparc 5" most people assume you mean "SparcStation 5"
To the average OSNews reader (and indeed to Eugenia herself) a late-90s Ultra 5 is an ancient computer. Such people would have absolutely no use for a SPARCStation, since (if you read any of her OS reviews) the only thing they're interested in is eye candy.
Me, I have a old NeXT Color Turbo, that's a 33 Mhz 68040, 32M RAM box running a BSD derivative, that is still as useful a machine as it ever was - the real business of programming, editing text files, hasn't changed much in 30-odd years. Only the kids who judge a box by what window manager or web browser it's running think any different.
The thing these kids don't understand is that back in the day, kit was built to last. Old SPARCStation 5's are dead reliable, and if you want a DNS, mail, a web server, a CVS server, whatever, they're perfect for the task. And you can get a lot done with a box like a 10 or a 20, they'll happily support 20 users running terminals, editors, compilers, etc etc. Only thing that's slow is their frame buffers. Buy a modern PC and it's useless in 3 years, it was never made to last.
the secretaries will have a very limited portfolio of applications. They just need things like email, web, word processing, and a spreadsheet
Add an X server to that list and you've got a suitable desktop for a developer too. The desktop system processor can handle all the local GUI intensive stuff like spreadsheets, a central server can handle compiling.
Problem is, your average developer is too addicted to his winamp, icq, etc etc...
Sun recently sent me a CD with their Java Desktop on it, which for anyone who doesn't know, is a slickly-packaged Linux distro with a very user friendly interface, Sun's excellent StarOffice suite, Mozilla, etc etc. I've been having a play with it (I use StarOffice on Windows anyway) and I'm quite impressed. It's all nicely integrated with a mostly consistent look and feel, for the end user there's no messing around, anyone who's familiar with Windows and MS Office could pick this up in a day and be productive. As an old-skool Unix user, I'd personally prefer a NeXTSTEP or IRIX desktop, but as a normal Windows user, JDS is impressive.
That's the way to do Linux on the desktop - it has to be as near as possible seamless. Someone who knows what they're doing has to sit down and make it all work. Bundling together a package here and a package there as Red hat does just isn't going to cut it. If the objective is to actually get Linux on the desktop, then OSDN should throw its lot in with Sun. But it looks like this "initiative" is just bandwagoneering.
Doubleclick is attempting to evade the pop-up blockers? See, this is something that's always boggled my mind. People are using popup blockers because they don't want to receive popups.
Maybe they are - or maybe they're customers of an ISP that blocks them, or maybe their corporate sysadmin blocks them. Those are the people they're targetting, those that might not even know they're (mostly) protected by blocking. That's also why spammers try to evade spam filters. They're not after the geek who installs his own spam filter, they're after ISP customers and corporate desktop users.
you will have to rely on reghacks, and stopping and starting services,
Oh please. On Windows it's a "reghack", on Linux it's editing/etc/whatever.conf (which is probably a different format from everything else in/etc, at least the Registry is more-or-less consistent). On Windows it's stopping and starting services, on Linux it's kill -HUP pid.
The Microsoft way is no less inelegant that the Linux way, yet still you fault them for it. By all means bash MS if you have a valid complaint, but that niggling over irrelevant details just shows you're out to bash them whatever they do.
it's just a rebranded version of MSN Messenger. Same shit, different wrapping
The "standalone client" uses the MSN interface with a custom backend to handle the crypto, logging, etc. The real RM is a pane in a trading workstation.
The SAGE/SANS/BigAdmin survey done for 2002 says that 15.3% of thier respondants were unemployed for at least a week during the year
OK, but that's a fairly meaningless number. I was technically unemployed for a week in 2001, but that was only the gap between leaving one job and starting the next. Unemployed needs to be more tightly defined as "no job at present and no next job in sight". Unemployed for over a month would be a better measure, as it's rarer to go that long between jobs unless something has gone wrong.
With so many students it's hard for teachers (especially in subjects outside of technology) to 1) have heard about OpenSource technology 2) have the time install OpenSource projects.
My professors had a very simply policy. You were welcome to use whatever tools you liked to complete an assignment. However, if when you handed it in it didn't open or compile (as applicable) on the professor's machine (which was setup in a documented way) it counted as a fail.
A student saying "but it works on my computer at home" is the high-tech equivalent of "my dog ate my homework".
Just look at what Iraq war did to American economy.
Economists call this the "broken window fallacy". If you have to repair damaged things, it gives a short term economic boost - but that's all money spent now that should be invested for the future. If it wasn't a fallacy, any country could simply build a city, blow it up, rebuild it, etc etc until it became wealthy from all that economic activity.
Divide this by the population, about 50 million, gives you about 20000GBP for each man, woman and child. Of course, that's a little rough, but 3000 is miles off, unless you believe you are paying 85% in tax
I said welfare spending, not government spending. That's why your figures are so off.
Another problem is that, by requiring payments, private schools necessarily only enroll students whose parents take an active interest in their education.
Actually, that's not generally true; typically students at private schools are enrolled there as boarders because their rich parents want to be rid of them until they're adults and hopefully have something interesting to say. Maybe that's different outside the UK.
The rich often pay less a percentage of their incomes than the poor or middle class, when you factor in all taxes, especially sales taxes.
"The rich" is a canard. The multi-millionaires are a tiny, tiny fraction of the population. You are "rich" as far as the tax system is concerned - i.e. a higher-rate taxpayer - with a salary of around GBP 30,000 (that's roughly USD 50,000). You can be one of "those who can afford to pay more" as far as the government is concerned, yet be unable to buy an apartment anywhere near London.
I know that with an iPod you can't purchase an MP3 and install it...oh, you can? But where can I actually purchase an MP3? Oh, I can't because all the files on the *other* services are WMA files...I see...
I didn't say I believed it, I said that MS apparently did. That was obviously too subtle for the morons that downmodded me.
Sure you get competition in the services but if you have no job, you pretty much die (no food, no healthcare, etc).
Umm, that's what your GBP 3000/year would cover. As I say, for an average family that's GBP 12000 (almost USD 20000) per year. Certainly that's enough to live on.
If however you are productively employed, your GBP 3000/year should be enough to stop you complaining about the welfare state. Understand now?
IIRC, the Chinese aren't generally keen on dairy products... poor Mr Li picked the wrong state to move to. That would explain why the smell of fried cheese was not a pleasant one for him. Personally, I love fondue.
GBP 3,000 is much smaller than the average income in the UK, which was GBP 23,607 in 2002, somewhat above the GBP 3,000 you quote.
Let's say 2 adults, 2 children that's GBP 12,000. The figure of approx GBP 23,000 you quote is before income tax, national insurance, council tax and all the other various taxes levied by various parts of the government. They can easily eat up half of your income.
Surely, that depends whether you are unemployed, sick, disabled, mentally ill or living in poor accommodation, doesn't it?
As I say, perhaps we would all be better off if everyone got their GBP 3000 without wasting money on all the bureaucracy in the middle. Remember that's not GBP 3000/household but per person, including children.
However, if a mentally ill person were to attack you in the street, you'd consider a welfare system quite desirable. If you were mugged or burgled, you might wonder if it would have been a good idea for the state to provide a safety net for that person before they turned to crime.
Are you trying to suggest that poverty automatically leads to crime? That seems rather a shaky assertion to me.
Do you think that there might be even the slightest chance that there is a direct economic link between the quality of life in a given country and the degree of welfare support provided to the citizens of that country?
Perhaps you would care to explain how paying people not to engage in productive economic activity results in the creation of a productive economy?
About the only way to do that would be to argue that welfare keeps the non-productive out of the way of the productive, but still, there are more cost effective ways to do that then paying them to sit around watching daytime TV and smoking cigarettes all day. I believe the Americans call it "workfare".
So how do we account for poor people who would consume vastly more and help stimulate the economy in all sorts of ways if only they had a little more cash floating around?
The level of welfare spending in the UK at the moment is such that you could just give every man, woman and child in the country GBP 3000 (USD 5400 approx) every year, no questions asked. That works out as very nearly the current average household income! There is a vast amount of cash floating around, but it's not being spent on creating value.
And economy is a system. If for every GBP 1 spent and every hour of work on average, goods and services worth GBP 1.01 are created, the economy can be sustained (I think it is actually somewhere between 1.02 and 1.03 by the official figures). In some sectors of the economy, it's higher, in some its lower. In some, it's below GBP 1... in other words, value is destroyed by activity in those sectors. If it dips below GBP 1 in the entire economy, we're in a lot of trouble. The difference between the money that goes into the welfare budget and comes out suggests that this is not a good use of money!
It would even be preferable to the current system if the entire government department responsible was simply abolished, all its bureaucrats fired, and the money paid directly to each citizen by the treasury.
Large amounts of government spending can do wonders for the economy, if citizens are willing to make the sacrifices (i. e. pay the taxes).
Only if you can make the assumption that an individual in his or her capacity as a government official is a near-perfect economic decision maker, yet that same individual in the capacity of a private citizen is nearly entirely incompetent to make economic decisions. Otherwise, there's no basis for not leaving the money in the hands of the taxpayers and letting them spend it how they please.
Governments are nearly always massively inefficient. After all, they have no incentive to improve. A company that is profligate with its resources will quickly go bankrupt, a government merely has to ratchet the taxes up a little higher. Now you say "if the citizens are willing" but that's very elastic: a citizen prepared to pay say 30% of income in taxes for the "greater good" might well feel very differently if the government decided it wanted 60% or 90%*. But the government is fully incentivized to increase taxes, not to spend the money better.
We see a similar problem in the UK at the moment. There is a lot of fuss over private (fee-paying) versus State (taxpayer-funded) schools - the quality of the former so outstrips the latter that the government is even artificially making university admissions harder for the privately-educated (rather than improving its own schools). But it turns out, if you do the accounting, that State schools actually cost the same or more per student than a private school! The money is just soaked up in government inefficiency. The same is true for the NHS, where the present government has managed to increase the number of medical staff by 15% and the number of managers by 45%.
The way to economic prosperity is to cut both taxes and governemnt spending, so those that earned the money directly control how its spent. This has worked in every economy that has tried it.
And private industry is unlikely to go into space anytime soon--it's not profitable.
I'm sure the same was said of expeditions to explore the world's oceans.
* This is not unheard of - in 1979 in the UK the top rate of income tax was 83%, with an extra 15% charge if the money was from investments rather than salary. That's a total of 98% tax! No wonder that economy collapsed in the "Winter of Discontent" and a new service-based economy emerged!
Microsoft keeps using that word... I do not think it means what they think it means.
He means that with a Microsoft OS you can choose where to buy your processor, where to buy your motherboard, your video card, etc, etc. With Apple, there is just the one vendor since Apple killed off the cloners, and if you want to use the hardware, you pay whatever Apple wants to charge for it.
Microsoft obviously believes that iPod users are locked into iTMS, and proposes a n alternative where their OS would run on a variety of hardware devices, each of which would be able to access a variety of music vendors services.
Slashdot Mirror
In my opinion, case senssitivity allows for more readable code if using long variable or method names .
Preserving case in the source code (which is just a text file) and being sensitive to case in the the compiler are two wholly separate matters. There's no reason you can't have both.
I too think that case-sensitivity is overrated. It only came about because back in the early days of Unix they didn't have the spare CPU cycles to do case-insensitive string comparison all the time (Unix had to support mixed case in text because ones of its earliest uses was typesetting) so they made a virtue out of a necessity.
If so, then to drive an oil tanker from Kuwait to Badhdad is costing $800,000!! I guess these must be the prices that Haliburton etc. are charging.
I'd guess that is the cost for actually getting the fuel there - including escorting it with armoured vehicles, patrolling above with helicopter gunships, etc etc, salaries for the bureaucrats keeping track of it, cost of labour at both ends for loading and unloading, etc etc etc.
Fighting a modern war is not cheap, and the winner is almost always the one that can throw the most money at it.
64 bit gave higher precision for use on CAD workstations. Anyone who every used a Sun workstation for it's intended purpose would know this.
/.) even links to another discussion site as a story!
Oh yes, 64-bit has been not a luxury by a necessity in many industries for a decade now, anything that involves heavy number crunching - CAD, CAE, CFD, other forms of simulation, Monte Carlo runs in finance, physics models...
A while ago OSNews reviewed, IIRC, a new Sun workstation. The conclusion? It's crap because it's too hard to change the resolution or the colour scheme. Not one test they did was even remotely related to what a workstation is used for, they didn't even try compiling anything, let alone doing some MATLAB or solid modelling.
You can pretty much ignore any OSNews review of anything, in fact I've no idea why a discussion site (i.e.
When you say "Sparc 5" most people assume you mean "SparcStation 5"
To the average OSNews reader (and indeed to Eugenia herself) a late-90s Ultra 5 is an ancient computer. Such people would have absolutely no use for a SPARCStation, since (if you read any of her OS reviews) the only thing they're interested in is eye candy.
Me, I have a old NeXT Color Turbo, that's a 33 Mhz 68040, 32M RAM box running a BSD derivative, that is still as useful a machine as it ever was - the real business of programming, editing text files, hasn't changed much in 30-odd years. Only the kids who judge a box by what window manager or web browser it's running think any different.
The thing these kids don't understand is that back in the day, kit was built to last. Old SPARCStation 5's are dead reliable, and if you want a DNS, mail, a web server, a CVS server, whatever, they're perfect for the task. And you can get a lot done with a box like a 10 or a 20, they'll happily support 20 users running terminals, editors, compilers, etc etc. Only thing that's slow is their frame buffers. Buy a modern PC and it's useless in 3 years, it was never made to last.
the secretaries will have a very limited portfolio of applications. They just need things like email, web, word processing, and a spreadsheet
Add an X server to that list and you've got a suitable desktop for a developer too. The desktop system processor can handle all the local GUI intensive stuff like spreadsheets, a central server can handle compiling.
Problem is, your average developer is too addicted to his winamp, icq, etc etc...
Sun recently sent me a CD with their Java Desktop on it, which for anyone who doesn't know, is a slickly-packaged Linux distro with a very user friendly interface, Sun's excellent StarOffice suite, Mozilla, etc etc. I've been having a play with it (I use StarOffice on Windows anyway) and I'm quite impressed. It's all nicely integrated with a mostly consistent look and feel, for the end user there's no messing around, anyone who's familiar with Windows and MS Office could pick this up in a day and be productive. As an old-skool Unix user, I'd personally prefer a NeXTSTEP or IRIX desktop, but as a normal Windows user, JDS is impressive.
That's the way to do Linux on the desktop - it has to be as near as possible seamless. Someone who knows what they're doing has to sit down and make it all work. Bundling together a package here and a package there as Red hat does just isn't going to cut it. If the objective is to actually get Linux on the desktop, then OSDN should throw its lot in with Sun. But it looks like this "initiative" is just bandwagoneering.
Doubleclick is attempting to evade the pop-up blockers? See, this is something that's always boggled my mind. People are using popup blockers because they don't want to receive popups.
Maybe they are - or maybe they're customers of an ISP that blocks them, or maybe their corporate sysadmin blocks them. Those are the people they're targetting, those that might not even know they're (mostly) protected by blocking. That's also why spammers try to evade spam filters. They're not after the geek who installs his own spam filter, they're after ISP customers and corporate desktop users.
No-one, as far as I am aware, would have a problem with mikerowe.com But if you read the Register article it says The kid took the piss, now he's learning that in the real world, actions have consequences.
you will have to rely on reghacks, and stopping and starting services,
/etc/whatever.conf (which is probably a different format from everything else in /etc, at least the Registry is more-or-less consistent). On Windows it's stopping and starting services, on Linux it's kill -HUP pid.
Oh please. On Windows it's a "reghack", on Linux it's editing
The Microsoft way is no less inelegant that the Linux way, yet still you fault them for it. By all means bash MS if you have a valid complaint, but that niggling over irrelevant details just shows you're out to bash them whatever they do.
the fool with the Star Wars car, or the fool who Slashdots him?
Uhh, the fool who thought of the Slashdot PT Cruiser, or the fool who drives it?
it's just a rebranded version of MSN Messenger. Same shit, different wrapping
The "standalone client" uses the MSN interface with a custom backend to handle the crypto, logging, etc. The real RM is a pane in a trading workstation.
Reuters Messaging. Specifically designed for the corporate user, with encryption, logging, resilience, etc etc.
The SAGE/SANS/BigAdmin survey done for 2002 says that 15.3% of thier respondants were unemployed for at least a week during the year
OK, but that's a fairly meaningless number. I was technically unemployed for a week in 2001, but that was only the gap between leaving one job and starting the next. Unemployed needs to be more tightly defined as "no job at present and no next job in sight". Unemployed for over a month would be a better measure, as it's rarer to go that long between jobs unless something has gone wrong.
With so many students it's hard for teachers (especially in subjects outside of technology) to 1) have heard about OpenSource technology 2) have the time install OpenSource projects.
My professors had a very simply policy. You were welcome to use whatever tools you liked to complete an assignment. However, if when you handed it in it didn't open or compile (as applicable) on the professor's machine (which was setup in a documented way) it counted as a fail.
A student saying "but it works on my computer at home" is the high-tech equivalent of "my dog ate my homework".
Just look at what Iraq war did to American economy.
Economists call this the "broken window fallacy". If you have to repair damaged things, it gives a short term economic boost - but that's all money spent now that should be invested for the future. If it wasn't a fallacy, any country could simply build a city, blow it up, rebuild it, etc etc until it became wealthy from all that economic activity.
Divide this by the population, about 50 million, gives you about 20000GBP for each man, woman and child. Of course, that's a little rough, but 3000 is miles off, unless you believe you are paying 85% in tax
I said welfare spending, not government spending. That's why your figures are so off.
Another problem is that, by requiring payments, private schools necessarily only enroll students whose parents take an active interest in their education.
Actually, that's not generally true; typically students at private schools are enrolled there as boarders because their rich parents want to be rid of them until they're adults and hopefully have something interesting to say. Maybe that's different outside the UK.
The rich often pay less a percentage of their incomes than the poor or middle class, when you factor in all taxes, especially sales taxes.
"The rich" is a canard. The multi-millionaires are a tiny, tiny fraction of the population. You are "rich" as far as the tax system is concerned - i.e. a higher-rate taxpayer - with a salary of around GBP 30,000 (that's roughly USD 50,000). You can be one of "those who can afford to pay more" as far as the government is concerned, yet be unable to buy an apartment anywhere near London.
I know that with an iPod you can't purchase an MP3 and install it...oh, you can? But where can I actually purchase an MP3? Oh, I can't because all the files on the *other* services are WMA files...I see...
I didn't say I believed it, I said that MS apparently did. That was obviously too subtle for the morons that downmodded me.
Sure you get competition in the services but if you have no job, you pretty much die (no food, no healthcare, etc).
Umm, that's what your GBP 3000/year would cover. As I say, for an average family that's GBP 12000 (almost USD 20000) per year. Certainly that's enough to live on.
If however you are productively employed, your GBP 3000/year should be enough to stop you complaining about the welfare state. Understand now?
Don't tell that a Swiss!
IIRC, the Chinese aren't generally keen on dairy products... poor Mr Li picked the wrong state to move to. That would explain why the smell of fried cheese was not a pleasant one for him. Personally, I love fondue.
GBP 3,000 is much smaller than the average income in the UK, which was GBP 23,607 in 2002, somewhat above the GBP 3,000 you quote.
Let's say 2 adults, 2 children that's GBP 12,000. The figure of approx GBP 23,000 you quote is before income tax, national insurance, council tax and all the other various taxes levied by various parts of the government. They can easily eat up half of your income.
Surely, that depends whether you are unemployed, sick, disabled, mentally ill or living in poor accommodation, doesn't it?
As I say, perhaps we would all be better off if everyone got their GBP 3000 without wasting money on all the bureaucracy in the middle. Remember that's not GBP 3000/household but per person, including children.
However, if a mentally ill person were to attack you in the street, you'd consider a welfare system quite desirable. If you were mugged or burgled, you might wonder if it would have been a good idea for the state to provide a safety net for that person before they turned to crime.
Are you trying to suggest that poverty automatically leads to crime? That seems rather a shaky assertion to me.
Do you think that there might be even the slightest chance that there is a direct economic link between the quality of life in a given country and the degree of welfare support provided to the citizens of that country?
Perhaps you would care to explain how paying people not to engage in productive economic activity results in the creation of a productive economy?
About the only way to do that would be to argue that welfare keeps the non-productive out of the way of the productive, but still, there are more cost effective ways to do that then paying them to sit around watching daytime TV and smoking cigarettes all day. I believe the Americans call it "workfare".
So how do we account for poor people who would consume vastly more and help stimulate the economy in all sorts of ways if only they had a little more cash floating around?
The level of welfare spending in the UK at the moment is such that you could just give every man, woman and child in the country GBP 3000 (USD 5400 approx) every year, no questions asked. That works out as very nearly the current average household income! There is a vast amount of cash floating around, but it's not being spent on creating value.
And economy is a system. If for every GBP 1 spent and every hour of work on average, goods and services worth GBP 1.01 are created, the economy can be sustained (I think it is actually somewhere between 1.02 and 1.03 by the official figures). In some sectors of the economy, it's higher, in some its lower. In some, it's below GBP 1... in other words, value is destroyed by activity in those sectors. If it dips below GBP 1 in the entire economy, we're in a lot of trouble. The difference between the money that goes into the welfare budget and comes out suggests that this is not a good use of money!
It would even be preferable to the current system if the entire government department responsible was simply abolished, all its bureaucrats fired, and the money paid directly to each citizen by the treasury.
You might wonder, but after helping several aerospace engineering students (AKA rocket scientists) through their ONE Java course, I certainly don'
:-)
They were probably as confused as you were, since all serious engineering code is written in FORTRAN or MATLAB
Large amounts of government spending can do wonders for the economy, if citizens are willing to make the sacrifices (i. e. pay the taxes).
Only if you can make the assumption that an individual in his or her capacity as a government official is a near-perfect economic decision maker, yet that same individual in the capacity of a private citizen is nearly entirely incompetent to make economic decisions. Otherwise, there's no basis for not leaving the money in the hands of the taxpayers and letting them spend it how they please.
Governments are nearly always massively inefficient. After all, they have no incentive to improve. A company that is profligate with its resources will quickly go bankrupt, a government merely has to ratchet the taxes up a little higher. Now you say "if the citizens are willing" but that's very elastic: a citizen prepared to pay say 30% of income in taxes for the "greater good" might well feel very differently if the government decided it wanted 60% or 90%*. But the government is fully incentivized to increase taxes, not to spend the money better.
We see a similar problem in the UK at the moment. There is a lot of fuss over private (fee-paying) versus State (taxpayer-funded) schools - the quality of the former so outstrips the latter that the government is even artificially making university admissions harder for the privately-educated (rather than improving its own schools). But it turns out, if you do the accounting, that State schools actually cost the same or more per student than a private school! The money is just soaked up in government inefficiency. The same is true for the NHS, where the present government has managed to increase the number of medical staff by 15% and the number of managers by 45%.
The way to economic prosperity is to cut both taxes and governemnt spending, so those that earned the money directly control how its spent. This has worked in every economy that has tried it.
And private industry is unlikely to go into space anytime soon--it's not profitable.
I'm sure the same was said of expeditions to explore the world's oceans.
* This is not unheard of - in 1979 in the UK the top rate of income tax was 83%, with an extra 15% charge if the money was from investments rather than salary. That's a total of 98% tax! No wonder that economy collapsed in the "Winter of Discontent" and a new service-based economy emerged!
Microsoft keeps using that word... I do not think it means what they think it means.
He means that with a Microsoft OS you can choose where to buy your processor, where to buy your motherboard, your video card, etc, etc. With Apple, there is just the one vendor since Apple killed off the cloners, and if you want to use the hardware, you pay whatever Apple wants to charge for it.
Microsoft obviously believes that iPod users are locked into iTMS, and proposes a n alternative where their OS would run on a variety of hardware devices, each of which would be able to access a variety of music vendors services.