At home, I have a massively upgraded Beige G3 (450MHz G4 upgrade), two 9600's (circa 1996?) and a bondi blue G3 iMac from, I believe, 2001. These Macs are like Volvos. They just keep on going. Though I've had some quirky problems with the Beige. Had to replace the ROM. I'll admit that. It's currently running the latest OS (as of yesterday) just fine.
Heh, yes - Aluminum is so cheap now - that when electricity prices spike, aluminum smelters shut down, and use their furnaces to generate power to sell on the grid instead.
On the other hand, look at how much MS paid to Apple for their under-the-table settlement of the lawsuit over Quicktime patent violations. It was rumored to be in the $400-$500 Million range.
Microsoft's business barely hiccupped, for one quarter. And that was like 5 years ago.
That's true. Microsoft is essentially the poster-child of violating others patents. They've been sued numerous numerous times, and seem to always emerge unscathed. Come to think of it - they've been so successful at ripping off other companies, $521 Million really IS relatively unscathed.
"Some people will call this a great victory for Open Source. I don't. I think it's a travesty, but that's my opinion and mine alone"
I agree. Does that mean you get to sue me for $521 Million?
I'm not against patents in general. I just think that we need stricter guidelines for keeping the scope narrow. And, when ruling on patents, judges should keep in mind the whole basis of patents as documented in Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution: ". . to promote the useful arts and sciences. .." If the award of patent does not promote the useful arts and sciences, then it needs to be revoked.
Unix command line tools, security, and file-system layout, plus, USEFUL software. I have 10+ years of legacy mac software that I can't run on Linux (or Windows), but I CAN run on OS X. There's a lot of other things to like, and definately some things to NOT like. But those are what I like best.
"Most of all pertinent to the above review what is your favorite OS X tool?"
The Preferences Panel. Configuring an OS X system is largely a no-brainer, very few hassles. Compared to other Unix-based OSes.
Over my long and illustrious career as a support rep, I've made a few observations. Are they valid for all cases throughout the industry? Perhaps. I make some generalizations which may or may not be accurate:
Back in the OLD days, when I was working for a small startup software company, PRE dotcom, support reps who were talented generally were not programmers, but often you'd run into reps who had a wide skillset, and they were like magic. Some learned out of the position, to become field consultants, or programmers. Some were content to be the Hero - the firefighter. I was one of those.
As my career progressed, I found myself flying to customer sites to troubleshoot issues that could not be easily done remotely. This was great for building long-term relationships with customers, and would garner less adversarial incidents, more cooperation, and enhanced sales. It truly worked like that. But the more time I spent on the road, the less technical I became. Without working directly with the product, and doing more "install and configuration work" instead of troubleshooting, I became dumb. I begged to be put back on the phones. I still travelled for a while though, because it was absolutely a crucial part of the equation of support at that level. Another thing we did right was, we shared proprietary information with the customer. We were honest and straightforward about bugs, and we fixed them.
As my company matured, and was bought, and sold, and merged, my support team went from 6 people, to over 1000. Corporate politicking meant that the officers tried to reduce the role of the Jack of All Trades type engineer. Everybody had to have a well-defined job. Support reps could not travel. Field reps travelled all the time, billed their time, and worked for the Sales department. Bugs were an embarrassment. Bugfix releases were non existant, we had to bundle bugfixes with paid upgrades. REAL information was to be kept at a minimum. So were numbers of REAL talented support reps. They were phased out or replaced with large numbers of low-paid phone monkeys.
The end result was - customers now would get thier calls answered quickly. But until they finally got to talk to that experienced backline guy, the problem would usually not get resolved. Unless it was one of the very common issues in the knowledgbase (which were the issues that got addressed in the updates) - and those were the issues the customers could have looked up on the web. Field reps, because they spent so little time focussing on any single product, and so little time in the lab, they generally had the same level of expertise that a customer who spent a half hour browsing the manual could get. Often this was the extent of their training anyway!
Then there was the increasing attempt to charge for support in order to make support a profit center, not a cost center. In order to do this, they had to strictly measure performance, and built out this huge infrastructure to do so. The problem is, they had no clue what they were doing. They established quotas for phone reps which all but ensured that the customer would get a bad experience for their money. They built a new call tracking database, which was slow, buggy, and forced users to jump through hoops to record the necessary information. It was designed not to be a tool for techs to track calls and issues, but rather a tool to measure their performance and document their work. It was a liability, not an asset. In the end, though, even if most of use percieved the decline in customer service from our organization, the management managed to produce astounding numbers. I guess they must have attended the Enron school of business process.
I found my job increasingly becoming the focus of customer criticism. They weren't criticising ME, they were criticising the whole process. I was ending up with a huge stack of other people's messes to clean up. I was the one who cleaned up the messes our incompetent field reps made. I was the one who so
Security costs money. Even internal security. Economic Theory classifies this kind of business expense as "Economic Friction". Improving the efficiency of a business is removing friction from the works. So of course, the idea profit-generation does not include things like security, worker safety, minimum wages, etc. Of course, this is all following an IDEAL. Unfortunately, many business people can't tell the difference between the theory they learned at MBA school, and real-world practice.
So they do stuff like, hire morons, felons, and such, for minimum wage, for airline security, and the end result is; 9/11, and the government's response should have been to improve airline security. But instead, they gave the airlines millions of taxpayer dollars to help bear the costs of loss of business. Then thousands of american jobs were lost when the airlines laid them off.
Or they do stuff like establish massive ecommerce web presence, with dozens of high-end servers running an unsecure OS, because it's cheaper, MUCH cheaper, and put their customers personal data at risk, because they know that the customers can't understand such complex issues, and it won't be a factor affecting their business decisions. And ultimately, it's the customers who pay when their identity is stolen.
The root of the problem is that we train our engineers to design and build safe planes or computer systems. But we don't train our business people to be smart enough to implement them in safe ways. And there's no incentive for them to do so, because they always get the government bailout, and consequences are always passed on to the public.
yeah, but from your original investment, plus time spent, $500 in 4 days sucks ass. Assume we're talking 8-hour days. That's $15/hr. Not bad earnings for playing a game. But are you going to support a family? Is that income level sustainable? How soon until repetitively milking the game engine for $ becomes un-fun?
No - it's for scrolling horizontally in the insanely designed Visual Basic code window, crowded with worthless Object Browsers, Properties viewer, project browser, immediate and watch windows, and toolbars, leaving little room for looking at your actual CODE.
I remember in 1998, on a trip to Novell in Provo, representing a software vendor that had partnered with Novell, I was shown a Power Mac 9600, running an alpha version of Netware for PowerPC. Oh, the spine-tingling exitement!
But it never happened. The guy I talked to said it was killed when two things happened: Microsoft killed NT-PPC, and Bill Walker, at Motorola, switched their own corporate network from Star Max (PPC) to Dell. Talk about not eating your own dog food!
But the thought of an XServe running Novell Linux for PPC, and NDS gives me sweaty palms. . .
People have been paying for online content for many years now. It's called Lexus-Nexus, it's an online law database, and lawyers pay big money for access to this research information. All freely and publicly available. So basically, they're paying for the convenience.
Don't forget the newsfeeds stock traders pay upwards of $1000/month for.
If the information has real value and someone can use it to generate revenue - people will pay for it. Will people pay to read online news or comics or look at pr0n? Or even listen to music? No. I think that the last 5-7 years have shown this.
*BSD. I don't understand what all this hemming and hawing about Linux is all about. There's another free OS out there that's just as good if not better.
Ever since Netware 4.x, Novell's primary PRODUCT has been NDS. The OS, file sharing, printer sharing, were all window dressing on the real Killer-App feature of any good NOS; robust Directory Services.
When they ported NDS to Windows, and then to other platforms - it became obvious that the OS under NDS was irrelevant, and more of a liability than an asset (because of the redundant learning curve).
That said - I really liked Netware as an OS. For one reason only: ctrl-alt-leftshift-rightshift. The debugger - built right into the OS. Available any time you needed it. Unlike NT, where in order to figure out what Microsoft's loopy MFC code is doing, you had to install Visual Studio onto a machine, assuming you have the disk space, and memory requirements, and assuming that doesn't totally alter the mix of dlls on the system and thus the behavior. For debugging, Microsoft's operating systems totally SUCK ASS.
"A free market still needs the police. Part of maintaining civil order is preventing murder and coersion."
Yeah, but where do you draw the line at "coersion"?
I'm white, and I'm descended from slaves. My great great grandfather came to the US as an "indentured servant" - in exchange for his passage to America, he agreed to work in a copper mine in Michigan for two years. However, the town was very isolated, and the copper mining company owned all the housing, and all the stores in the town. They inflated prices so that workers would get deep into debt, and would never be able to finish their contracts. Workers were not allowed, by local police, to leave town without their debts paid. 200 miles of barren UP Michigan territory to the nearest town, on foot - there was no escape.
At the time, these practices were all legal.
Eventually, my ancestor was able to escape with outside help. But these practices were later banned and outlawed in the US. A straight, free-market economist would say that my ancestor was simply foolish to enter into a bargain when he didn't have complete information on the situation, but other than that, there's nothing wrong - it was straight business, shrewd negotiation.
But we all agree that there needs to be a line drawn somewhere between shady deals and legitimate business. Where Anarcho-Capitalists and "liberals" disagree on, is exactly where that line should be drawn.
It's my view that this line needs to be drawn, in the United States - a bit further to the left. The dictating clauses are in the Preamble to the US Constitution. ". . . in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE (emphasis mine), and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves (ie. American citizens!) and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution. . . "
"perfect union" is purely subjective - because there's no such thing as perfect. It's an ideal. In a democracy though, it's implied that you want to meet the majority's definition of "perfect". Most Americans are pretty content at working hard, being duly rewarded for that work, and being a member of the middle class. I know *I* am.
But drawing the regulatory lines farther over to the right, does not benefit the majority of Americans. It consolidates economic power in the hands of a very few.
The root of "justice" is to ensure equal treatment and opportunity for ALL Americans. Monopolies and perpetual patents erect barriers against opportunity for all, and preserve it for a privileged few.
"domestic tranquility" also follows from the promotion of a strong middle class. The extreme divisions resulting from right-wing policies of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush dynasties have, and will continue to decimate the American middle-class. The resulting polarization will cause further extremism, unrest, and God-forbid, an eventual communist revolution. Keeping the masses fat and happy is the best guarantee of political stability, and "domestic tranquility".
"provide for the common defense" does not mean spending 6+% of the GDP so that a few corporations who have interests overseas can maintain a pool of cheap exploitable third world labor and resources. "provide for the common defense" means that, when 4 airliners are hijacked on the same morning, and a major building is destroyed, you scramble air force jets immediately to shoot down the rest before more damage is done.
"promote the general welfare" speaks for itself. "general" is a pretty difficult word to twist.
"secure the blessings of liberty" - Liberty is essential. Sacrificing liberty for security, or any other item of illusory comfort - subjects one to eventual tyranny. Corporate handouts are a sacrifice of liberty. Patents of any kind, are a sacrifice of liberty, in a limited form, they're a necessary evil. In their current abused form - they're tyranny of the many for the profit of a few.
" Left to regular market forces, Microsoft's days are truly numbered"
That's my whole point. It's NOT left to regular market forces, because such forces are insignificant next to the power of the Force of congressional lobbyists and unregulated soft money. (or haven't you paid attention to the last 100 years of US History?).
".....how can they compete with Linux, which is Free, etc......"
Easy. They get Linux declared illegal, they leverage their monopoly to prevent PC manufacturers from shipping competing products, etc. - or haven't you paid attention to the last 20 years of Computing History?)
"Regulation serves to preserve the status quo rather then truly accomplish the good intentions that went into the regulations.. .."
No - regulations fail, for the same reason deregulated markets fail. Power corrupts. Absolutely.
". . My intuition is that the free market, when mostly left alone, does work, and that the federal government's intrusion does more long-term harm than good. .."
I'm sure the MAFIA would agree with you. They'd LOVE it if the government deregulated busting kneecaps and mixing cement.
" High oil prices would lead to faster adoption of alternative energy. . . "
No. SUSTAINED high oil prices would lead to that. OPEC learned that in the 1970's. So they're cyclicly generating shortages and SPIKING prices, taking advantage of the phat profits, and then dropping prices back down to a level the market can bear - without generating enough of an incentive for adoption of alternative energy. Who gets hurt in price spikes (real or manufactured)? Ask Grey Davis.
Microsoft is not an abberation. It's the natural evolution of any Corporation in a regulation-free environment.
Just like OPEC. Just like the RIAA (not technically a monopoly, but effectively one). Just like DeBeers.
All industries will consolidate into monopolies if left unchecked. And since politicians keep accepting checks - we'll continue to see more and more consolidation.
Slashdot Mirror
At home, I have a massively upgraded Beige G3 (450MHz G4 upgrade), two 9600's (circa 1996?) and a bondi blue G3 iMac from, I believe, 2001. These Macs are like Volvos. They just keep on going. Though I've had some quirky problems with the Beige. Had to replace the ROM. I'll admit that. It's currently running the latest OS (as of yesterday) just fine.
I sure wish Apple had shipped the G5 before I got laid off.
Heh, yes - Aluminum is so cheap now - that when electricity prices spike, aluminum smelters shut down, and use their furnaces to generate power to sell on the grid instead.
My wife was actually more happy when I put a leather collar around her neck, than a stone on her finger.
Maybe you and I define "hot chick" differently.
On the other hand, look at how much MS paid to Apple for their under-the-table settlement of the lawsuit over Quicktime patent violations. It was rumored to be in the $400-$500 Million range.
Microsoft's business barely hiccupped, for one quarter. And that was like 5 years ago.
This is essentially "mice nuts".
That's true.
Microsoft is essentially the poster-child of violating others patents. They've been sued numerous numerous times, and seem to always emerge unscathed. Come to think of it - they've been so successful at ripping off other companies, $521 Million really IS relatively unscathed.
"Some people will call this a great victory for Open Source. I don't. I think it's a travesty, but that's my opinion and mine alone"
." If the award of patent does not promote the useful arts and sciences, then it needs to be revoked.
I agree. Does that mean you get to sue me for $521 Million?
I'm not against patents in general. I just think that we need stricter guidelines for keeping the scope narrow.
And, when ruling on patents, judges should keep in mind the whole basis of patents as documented in Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution: ". . to promote the useful arts and sciences. .
"How many here us OSX everyday?" /me raises hand
"What are the things that you like about OSX?"
Unix command line tools, security, and file-system layout, plus, USEFUL software. I have 10+ years of legacy mac software that I can't run on Linux (or Windows), but I CAN run on OS X.
There's a lot of other things to like, and definately some things to NOT like. But those are what I like best.
"Most of all pertinent to the above review what is your favorite OS X tool?"
The Preferences Panel. Configuring an OS X system is largely a no-brainer, very few hassles. Compared to other Unix-based OSes.
I keep watching it because every episode, I hope for a quick shot of Amy naked.
Imagine if Intel did it that way;
Pentum
Itanum
Over my long and illustrious career as a support rep, I've made a few observations. Are they valid for all cases throughout the industry? Perhaps. I make some generalizations which may or may not be accurate:
Back in the OLD days, when I was working for a small startup software company, PRE dotcom, support reps who were talented generally were not programmers, but often you'd run into reps who had a wide skillset, and they were like magic. Some learned out of the position, to become field consultants, or programmers. Some were content to be the Hero - the firefighter. I was one of those.
As my career progressed, I found myself flying to customer sites to troubleshoot issues that could not be easily done remotely. This was great for building long-term relationships with customers, and would garner less adversarial incidents, more cooperation, and enhanced sales. It truly worked like that. But the more time I spent on the road, the less technical I became. Without working directly with the product, and doing more "install and configuration work" instead of troubleshooting, I became dumb. I begged to be put back on the phones. I still travelled for a while though, because it was absolutely a crucial part of the equation of support at that level.
Another thing we did right was, we shared proprietary information with the customer. We were honest and straightforward about bugs, and we fixed them.
As my company matured, and was bought, and sold, and merged, my support team went from 6 people, to over 1000. Corporate politicking meant that the officers tried to reduce the role of the Jack of All Trades type engineer. Everybody had to have a well-defined job. Support reps could not travel. Field reps travelled all the time, billed their time, and worked for the Sales department. Bugs were an embarrassment. Bugfix releases were non existant, we had to bundle bugfixes with paid upgrades. REAL information was to be kept at a minimum. So were numbers of REAL talented support reps. They were phased out or replaced with large numbers of low-paid phone monkeys.
The end result was - customers now would get thier calls answered quickly. But until they finally got to talk to that experienced backline guy, the problem would usually not get resolved. Unless it was one of the very common issues in the knowledgbase (which were the issues that got addressed in the updates) - and those were the issues the customers could have looked up on the web. Field reps, because they spent so little time focussing on any single product, and so little time in the lab, they generally had the same level of expertise that a customer who spent a half hour browsing the manual could get. Often this was the extent of their training anyway!
Then there was the increasing attempt to charge for support in order to make support a profit center, not a cost center. In order to do this, they had to strictly measure performance, and built out this huge infrastructure to do so. The problem is, they had no clue what they were doing. They established quotas for phone reps which all but ensured that the customer would get a bad experience for their money. They built a new call tracking database, which was slow, buggy, and forced users to jump through hoops to record the necessary information. It was designed not to be a tool for techs to track calls and issues, but rather a tool to measure their performance and document their work. It was a liability, not an asset. In the end, though, even if most of use percieved the decline in customer service from our organization, the management managed to produce astounding numbers. I guess they must have attended the Enron school of business process.
I found my job increasingly becoming the focus of customer criticism. They weren't criticising ME, they were criticising the whole process. I was ending up with a huge stack of other people's messes to clean up. I was the one who cleaned up the messes our incompetent field reps made. I was the one who so
Of course!
Security costs money. Even internal security. Economic Theory classifies this kind of business expense as "Economic Friction". Improving the efficiency of a business is removing friction from the works. So of course, the idea profit-generation does not include things like security, worker safety, minimum wages, etc. Of course, this is all following an IDEAL. Unfortunately, many business people can't tell the difference between the theory they learned at MBA school, and real-world practice.
So they do stuff like, hire morons, felons, and such, for minimum wage, for airline security, and the end result is; 9/11, and the government's response should have been to improve airline security. But instead, they gave the airlines millions of taxpayer dollars to help bear the costs of loss of business. Then thousands of american jobs were lost when the airlines laid them off.
Or they do stuff like establish massive ecommerce web presence, with dozens of high-end servers running an unsecure OS, because it's cheaper, MUCH cheaper, and put their customers personal data at risk, because they know that the customers can't understand such complex issues, and it won't be a factor affecting their business decisions. And ultimately, it's the customers who pay when their identity is stolen.
The root of the problem is that we train our engineers to design and build safe planes or computer systems. But we don't train our business people to be smart enough to implement them in safe ways. And there's no incentive for them to do so, because they always get the government bailout, and consequences are always passed on to the public.
yeah, but from your original investment, plus time spent, $500 in 4 days sucks ass. Assume we're talking 8-hour days. That's $15/hr. Not bad earnings for playing a game. But are you going to support a family? Is that income level sustainable? How soon until repetitively milking the game engine for $ becomes un-fun?
No - it's for scrolling horizontally in the insanely designed Visual Basic code window, crowded with worthless Object Browsers, Properties viewer, project browser, immediate and watch windows, and toolbars, leaving little room for looking at your actual CODE.
What I'm worried about is how Longhorn might just bust SAMBA, whether it's Novell's implementation or SAMBA in general, into itsy bitsy pieces.
heh, yeah.
I remember in 1998, on a trip to Novell in Provo, representing a software vendor that had partnered with Novell, I was shown a Power Mac 9600, running an alpha version of Netware for PowerPC. Oh, the spine-tingling exitement!
But it never happened. The guy I talked to said it was killed when two things happened: Microsoft killed NT-PPC, and Bill Walker, at Motorola, switched their own corporate network from Star Max (PPC) to Dell. Talk about not eating your own dog food!
But the thought of an XServe running Novell Linux for PPC, and NDS gives me sweaty palms. . .
People have been paying for online content for many years now. It's called Lexus-Nexus, it's an online law database, and lawyers pay big money for access to this research information. All freely and publicly available. So basically, they're paying for the convenience.
Don't forget the newsfeeds stock traders pay upwards of $1000/month for.
If the information has real value and someone can use it to generate revenue - people will pay for it.
Will people pay to read online news or comics or look at pr0n? Or even listen to music? No. I think that the last 5-7 years have shown this.
*BSD. I don't understand what all this hemming and hawing about Linux is all about. There's another free OS out there that's just as good if not better.
Ever since Netware 4.x, Novell's primary PRODUCT has been NDS. The OS, file sharing, printer sharing, were all window dressing on the real Killer-App feature of any good NOS; robust Directory Services.
When they ported NDS to Windows, and then to other platforms - it became obvious that the OS under NDS was irrelevant, and more of a liability than an asset (because of the redundant learning curve).
That said - I really liked Netware as an OS. For one reason only: ctrl-alt-leftshift-rightshift. The debugger - built right into the OS. Available any time you needed it. Unlike NT, where in order to figure out what Microsoft's loopy MFC code is doing, you had to install Visual Studio onto a machine, assuming you have the disk space, and memory requirements, and assuming that doesn't totally alter the mix of dlls on the system and thus the behavior. For debugging, Microsoft's operating systems totally SUCK ASS.
"A free market still needs the police. Part of maintaining civil order is preventing murder and coersion."
Yeah, but where do you draw the line at "coersion"?
I'm white, and I'm descended from slaves. My great great grandfather came to the US as an "indentured servant" - in exchange for his passage to America, he agreed to work in a copper mine in Michigan for two years.
However, the town was very isolated, and the copper mining company owned all the housing, and all the stores in the town. They inflated prices so that workers would get deep into debt, and would never be able to finish their contracts. Workers were not allowed, by local police, to leave town without their debts paid. 200 miles of barren UP Michigan territory to the nearest town, on foot - there was no escape.
At the time, these practices were all legal.
Eventually, my ancestor was able to escape with outside help. But these practices were later banned and outlawed in the US. A straight, free-market economist would say that my ancestor was simply foolish to enter into a bargain when he didn't have complete information on the situation, but other than that, there's nothing wrong - it was straight business, shrewd negotiation.
But we all agree that there needs to be a line drawn somewhere between shady deals and legitimate business. Where Anarcho-Capitalists and "liberals" disagree on, is exactly where that line should be drawn.
It's my view that this line needs to be drawn, in the United States - a bit further to the left. The dictating clauses are in the Preamble to the US Constitution. ". . . in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE (emphasis mine), and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves (ie. American citizens!) and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution. . . "
"perfect union" is purely subjective - because there's no such thing as perfect. It's an ideal. In a democracy though, it's implied that you want to meet the majority's definition of "perfect". Most Americans are pretty content at working hard, being duly rewarded for that work, and being a member of the middle class. I know *I* am.
But drawing the regulatory lines farther over to the right, does not benefit the majority of Americans. It consolidates economic power in the hands of a very few.
The root of "justice" is to ensure equal treatment and opportunity for ALL Americans. Monopolies and perpetual patents erect barriers against opportunity for all, and preserve it for a privileged few.
"domestic tranquility" also follows from the promotion of a strong middle class. The extreme divisions resulting from right-wing policies of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush dynasties have, and will continue to decimate the American middle-class. The resulting polarization will cause further extremism, unrest, and God-forbid, an eventual communist revolution. Keeping the masses fat and happy is the best guarantee of political stability, and "domestic tranquility".
"provide for the common defense" does not mean spending 6+% of the GDP so that a few corporations who have interests overseas can maintain a pool of cheap exploitable third world labor and resources. "provide for the common defense" means that, when 4 airliners are hijacked on the same morning, and a major building is destroyed, you scramble air force jets immediately to shoot down the rest before more damage is done.
"promote the general welfare" speaks for itself. "general" is a pretty difficult word to twist.
"secure the blessings of liberty" - Liberty is essential. Sacrificing liberty for security, or any other item of illusory comfort - subjects one to eventual tyranny. Corporate handouts are a sacrifice of liberty. Patents of any kind, are a sacrifice of liberty, in a limited form, they're a necessary evil. In their current abused form - they're tyranny of the many for the profit of a few.
" Left to regular market forces, Microsoft's days are truly numbered"
."
."
That's my whole point. It's NOT left to regular market forces, because such forces are insignificant next to the power of the Force of congressional lobbyists and unregulated soft money. (or haven't you paid attention to the last 100 years of US History?).
".....how can they compete with Linux, which is Free, etc......"
Easy. They get Linux declared illegal, they leverage their monopoly to prevent PC manufacturers from shipping competing products, etc. - or haven't you paid attention to the last 20 years of Computing History?)
"Regulation serves to preserve the status quo rather then truly accomplish the good intentions that went into the regulations.. .
No - regulations fail, for the same reason deregulated markets fail. Power corrupts. Absolutely.
". . My intuition is that the free market, when mostly left alone, does work, and that the federal government's intrusion does more long-term harm than good. .
I'm sure the MAFIA would agree with you. They'd LOVE it if the government deregulated busting kneecaps and mixing cement.
" High oil prices would lead to faster adoption of alternative energy. . . "
No. SUSTAINED high oil prices would lead to that. OPEC learned that in the 1970's. So they're cyclicly generating shortages and SPIKING prices, taking advantage of the phat profits, and then dropping prices back down to a level the market can bear - without generating enough of an incentive for adoption of alternative energy. Who gets hurt in price spikes (real or manufactured)? Ask Grey Davis.
"SCO's FUD campaign didn't survive five minutes in the German legal system, "
probably the same reason why Germany has 10% unemployment.
IMNSHO - the ONLY thing holding back Quicktime on the Windows platform is NAGWARE!!!!
.
The only thing holding back Quicktime on Linux is. .
um. . . Steve? you listening?
Obviously marketshare is not imporant.
Microsoft is not an abberation. It's the natural evolution of any Corporation in a regulation-free environment.
Just like OPEC.
Just like the RIAA (not technically a monopoly, but effectively one).
Just like DeBeers.
All industries will consolidate into monopolies if left unchecked. And since politicians keep accepting checks - we'll continue to see more and more consolidation.
nope, never. Was SELMA hot? (imagine the pr0n. . . )